Haaretz - Recent remarks by Israeli officials have been so racist, that even the Likud-affiliated youth movement in Australia sent out a letter in protest
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What's left of Israel's good name, will not survive this government.
Day by day, public officials disgrace themselves and their country, doing their high-decibel best to prove the contentions of Israel's worst enemies. Fascism? Start with a look at the past year's legislative agenda. Ethnic cleansing? Count the Palestinians stripped of their residency rights, a quarter million in all. Apartheid? Look under: Compensation for five illegal settler houses. Or under: Occupation forever. Zionism is Racism? The very public statements of two legislators in Benjamin Netanyahu's Likud – both of them entrusted with fostering Israel's image here and abroad – terming African refugees and migrants as a whole, a "cancer" and a "plague."
So stridently racist have the comments of some legislators become, that in Australia, Betar, the right-wing youth movement that is blood of the blood of the Likud, have taken the extraordinary step of writing an open letter in protest.
They direct their letter to Likud MK Danny Danon, who not only chairs the Knesset Aliyah, Immigrant Absorption and Diaspora Affairs Committee as well as the World Likud organization, but was in younger days, chairman of World Betar.
“Recently we have seen a number of attacks on African migrants living in Israel” the open letter begins. “Regardless of their status in the country, these attacks have come as a shock and an embarrassment to us as Jews. However, your words in regard to the “national plague” (that is commonly referred to as African migrants) have greatly upset us as Betarim.”
Citing the writings of the founder of Betar and of the pre-state political party that would eventually evolve into the Likud, the letter states that when Ze’ev Jabotinsky wrote “in the beginning, God created men,” he was referring “to mankind as a whole, to our shared origins and our shared humanity.”
“These people fleeing conflict from Africa, who have chosen Israel because they know it is a moral and free country, are just as human as us. In fact, in their present state, they are unmistakably similar to us as Jews. We have always been refugees; our ancestors have been refugees since the destruction of the first Temple up to our grandparents, who fled a climax of persecution around the world.”
The letter holds up as a role model the first Likud prime minister, Menachem Begin, who, soon after his election in 1977, authorized citizenship for scores of Vietnamese boat people saved by Israeli sailors and brought to Israel. Begin compared their plight to that of Jewish refugees seeking haven during the Holocaust.
“Israel desperately needs to develop policy to deal with this crisis and to deal with it humanely. We reiterate that we are not seeking to dictate policy from outside of Israel. However, as Jews and Betarim we do expect for the political establishment in Israel to act decently and to approach this issue humanely, without prejudice and to acknowledge the responsibilities that Israel has towards refugees as a signatory to both the UN Refugee Convention (1951) and Protocol (1967).”
The closing paragraph is one that Israel should study and take to heart, if only for its tone, one of outrage and shock.
“To deport people to persecution and danger is not the act of a Jewish State. Jews have been persecuted for thousands of years and their state should not be one that has a hand in leading others to suffer the same fate.”
The letter ends with a line all of us should take to heart, if we want to see anything survive of the good remaining in this country. It is taken from Jabotinsky’s lyrics for the anthem of the Betar movement:
“Ki Sheket Hu Refesh” - Because Silence Is A Mire.
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Haaretz - The notion that we are a race is destructive. If the Jews are a race, then Zionism is racism. If the Jews are a race, then parents who don’t want their children to intermarry are racists.
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The geneticist, Harry Ostrer, in his latest book, Legacy: A Genetic History of the Jewish People, is very keen to present all of the genetic evidence that apparently demonstrates that we, the Jewish People, are a race. I’m not coming from a place of liberal discomfort with geneticists looking at our differences. Yes, there are Ashkenazi genes, Sephardi genes, Levitical genes, and so on. And, yes, looking at these genetics commonalities can be tremendously beneficial to our understanding of medicine and more. But, we, as a people, are not defined by our genes. We are not a race.
A race, whatever that notion really means, is certainly not something that can be joined. The Jewish people can be joined. We might have plenty of arguments among us as to what constitutes a valid conversion, but conversion is certainly possible. Ever since Abraham and Sarah’s legendary outreach program in which the residents of Charan were convinced to journey with them to Israel, almost every generation of the Jewish people has welcomed non-Jews into its midst. In fact, given any contemporary Jew, it is statistically inconceivable that there shouldn’t be a single convert anyway up their family tree. Admittedly, members of the tribe of Levi claim an unbroken patrilineal chain all the way back to Abraham; but there are bound to be converts on some of the maternal branches of their family tree. There is no such thing as a racially pure Jew. We are not a race.
The Oxford political philosopher, David Miller, has a fantastic study of Nationality, simply entitled “On Nationality.” He defines a nation in terms of five characteristics; none of these characteristics alone define a nation, but they are certainly jointly sufficient.
1) The members of a nation have to view each other as somehow connected, or even responsible for one another. The Jews have long expressed such feelings with their dictum that “Kol Yisrael areivim zeh ba-zeh; Every member of the Jewish people acts as surety for every other member.”
2) A nation has to view itself in terms of a collective history; as such, the nation will have a story, or a collection of competing stories, that it tells itself. For instance, “We were slaves in Egypt.”
3) A nation views itself as somehow active. Unlike a church, that might view itself as passively responding to the will of God, a nation views itself as a player in history. We certainly view ourselves as an active people; a people who overcome adversity; a people who made the Israeli desert bloom; a people who introduced monotheism to the world; a people who value education and contribute to the arts and sciences.
4) A nation is associated with a land that it aspires to rule over; even through our years of exile, we always yearned for our promised land.
5) A nation will have a distinct public culture, with subcultures too. And, of course, there is such a thing as a Jewish culture, often informed by religious Jewish texts, but not exclusively. We certainly have a religion (whether we believe in it and adhere to it, or not), but we are not a religion. Many of us might have similar genes, noses, and hair, but anyone can join us.
The notion that we are a race is destructive. If the Jews are a race, then Zionism is racism; the belief that our state should be there to serve a particular racial type. If the Jews are a race, then parents who don’t want their children to intermarry are racists, pure and simple.
Israeli society is in the middle of a long-running drama in which it is slowly coming to terms with the racism in its midst. Anti-black pogroms threaten to infect Tel Aviv and anti-Arab price-tags have seen mosques in flames. The Jewish people was given a mission to be a vehicle through which all of the nations of the earth would be blessed. The Jewish people were selected to be a light unto the nations. But, our thinking of ourselves in terms of racial categories is only set to inflame our latent xenophobia. It is little surprise, though it runs completely against the grain of our national reason d’etre, that the most recent peace index of the IDI has found a striking correlation between Jewish religiosity in Israel and the holding of racist beliefs.This has to be stamped out, and religious leaders from Rav Aaron Leibowitz, to Rabbi Yaakov Meidan are beginning to rise to this challenge.
The racism that I have witnessed among some religious Jews has been anything bus subtle. Among secular Jews, I have found a much more insidious form of racism, especially in the Diaspora. Do you want your children to have a decent Jewish education because you want them to be Jewishly literate? Is it that you want your sons and daughters to feel at home in the pages of the Talmud, qualified to view this fast changing world through the prism of Jewish tradition; qualified to play their unique role in bringing blessings to the entire world? Or, living in the Diaspora, do you send them to Jewish schools, first and foremost, because you do don’t really want your children fraternising with gentiles? Many of these schools won’t really equip their students with high-level Jewish literacy anyway.
Do you want your children to marry Jews because you want them to play their part in writing the continuing story of the Jewish people? Or, with very little pride in Judaism as a religion or a culture, do you want them to marry Jewish because you don’t want them to marry “goyish”? To think how far we have strayed from the right path, consider how hard is it for black converts to feel at home in a white Jewish community in the Diaspora or Israel. We will be a much greater light unto the nations when we finally realise that we are not a race.
Dr. Samuel Lebens studies at Yeshivat Har Etzion, holds a PhD in metaphysics and logic from the University of London, and is the chair of the Association for the Philosophy of Judaism.
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Where is Rhapsy ? ? ?
Rhapsy, come out of hiding
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