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Red Rag Weekly Column
Gideon Spiro

Red Rag Weekly Column, 12 September 2010

Violent religions

The American pastor, Terry Jones, who has received international publicity following his proposal to burn Korans on 11 September, the anniversary of the terror attack on the Twin Towers in New York, nearly succeeded in setting the world on fire. At the last minute he announced that he would not hold the ceremonial bonfire, because his objective of revealing the violent side of Islam had been realized.

There is no doubt that there are dark and violent corners in Islam. But what this pastor forgot to tell us was that violence and intolerance exist in all religions, and he is the best example; for book-burning is an expression of violence and hate.

Violence and religious hatred are an inseparable part of most religions, if not all of them. It is true of Judaism, it is true of Christianity in both its Catholic and Protestant branches, it is true of Hinduism, of Buddhism, and as we have seen, Islam has not escaped the syndrome either. There are violent episodes in the histories of all of them, not only in the distant past, but also in our own times.

There is no need to go all the way to the USA, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iran or India. All this evil exists close to home, just outside the door. Not only in Islam and Christianity, but in Judaism as well. Nor is there any need to delve into the history of the Book of Joshua in order to discover the cruel and extremist side of Judaism. The ugly and murderous face of Judaism has been visible to us for 43 years now, since the beginning of the Occupation and especially since the beginning of the invasion of the Occupied Territories by settlers. We do not need Pastor Terry Jones to burn Korans. We have our own home-grown Israeli extremist settlers who burn mosques and Korans. The Israel Security Agency (Shin Bet) and the police, who are sometimes excessively efficient when they are dealing with Palestinians, have stood by helplessly like beggars at the gate more than once when they were called upon to track down those who set fire to mosques and Korans.

It must be pointed out that it is not just the settlers. The official secular State of Israel, which issues formal protests every time a Jewish cemetery is desecrated anywhere in the world, desecrates all that is sacred to Muslims – from cemeteries that have been converted into real estate for Jews to mosques that have been turned into restaurants and cafeterias. Against this background it is no wonder that the extremist settlers take it a few steps further.

The Israeli religious establishment is today one of the engines driving religious war in the Middle East. Not only Shas and its rabbis, headed by their leader Rabbi Ovadia Yosef who prayed for the deaths of Palestinians and their leaders in one of his recent homilies; the Chief Rabbi, Shlomo Amar, whose position is analogous to that of the chief justice of the Supreme Court, also issued a halachic ruling that permits settlers to build in the Occupied Territories even on holidays, regardless of the religious prohibition of work. To say nothing of the rabbis of the settlements, each one more extreme than the other, who receive salaries from the government of Israel. They are like matches that repeatedly ignite flames of slaughter, hatred and racism.

It is no coincidence that the army too is becoming more and more religious. The chief military rabbi is a settler, as was his predecessor, who saw the Gaza War as a religious commandment (Heb. mitzvah).

Binyamin Ze’ev Herzl, the founder of the Zionist movement, is considered the originator of the vision of the Jewish state. His picture is displayed in the main hall of the Knesset. But when it comes to his view on the proper place of religion in the state that he envisioned, according to which religion would be separated from the state and the rabbis’ authority would be restricted to the synagogues, the vision has been forsaken.

I can already anticipate those who disagree with me, asking, “what about Hamas and Hezbollah?” Regarding the religious fundamentalism they espouse, I do not have a single good word to say about those organizations. But naturally I must focus on the religious extremism of the state in which I am a citizen – to say nothing of the fact that Israel’s extremism feeds extremism in the surrounding area.

There are beautiful, humane and peace-loving sides to every religion, but they are the minority and do not set the agenda.

The attempt to eliminate religious extremism by force has met with failure. The number of fatalities from the American invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan higher by multiples of ten than the number killed on 9/11. And the results? Not only has religious extremism not been defeated, it has become stronger. Not only among Muslims. There is no magic bullet, but in the long run it seems to me that what I wrote the day after the Twin Towers catastrophe is still valid: religious extremism is fed, mainly but not exclusively, by ignorance and poverty. A more just distribution of the world’s wealth, accompanied by gradual democratization in the countries where democracy has not taken root, will lead to a slow and continuous retreat of fundamentalism.

Auschwitz as a recruiting tool for the IDF

There is currently a project in the Israeli army to send all officers from the rank of captain and up on a tour of the death camps, first and foremost among them Auschwitz. Every year the army sends 3,600 officers on tours. The project has been given the pretentious name “witnesses in uniform. (Heb. edim be-madim)” (Haaretz, 3 September 2010)

The project started as a means of convincing reluctant officers to sign on for career service. [1] A battalion commander in the armoured corps is quoted in the article as saying “when I want an officer to stay on for career service and he is hesitant, I send him to “witnesses in uniform” and usually he comes back and signs.”

Over time the Education Corps converted the project into a flagship, and the officers who go on the tours undergo a preparatory course. Among other things they discuss the issue of how a nation turns murderous.

They do not learn the lesson learned by Pinchas (Felix) Rosen, the first Justice Minister of the State of Israel, who said upon the end of the Second World War: “the most important thing that we must learn from fascism and Nazism is that this danger can affect any people, even our own.” (From Ruth Bondy’s book Felix – Pinchas Rosen and His Time - Zemorah-Bitan publishing, 1990). There are officers who ask questions, such as: what are the limits of obedience? And the lecturers reassure the officers that Israel is not Nazi Germany, this is the army of a democratic state.

Not exactly. True, Israel is not yet Nazi Germany, thank God. If it were, this column could not be published (but let us not forget Pinchas Rosen’s warning that we are not immune). As far as the Israeli army in the Occupied Territories is concerned, there is no democracy. There it is the terror army of a terror state, and we would definitely do well to come to terms with the question of how the state of a people that was a victim of persecution and oppression turned into a state that for decades has been ruling over another people by cruel means of oppression. And a no less troubling question: why does the collaboration with evil, racism and oppression encompass most of the people? Maybe not like in Germany, but not far from it.

What do the officers of the Israeli army have to learn in a visit to the camps, especially the officers who are responsible for the system of oppression in the Occupied Territories and the mass detention camps where many innocents are jailed? What “testimony in uniform” can they bring with them when they go to the Valley of Slaughter? It would be better for the Israeli army to cancel this project as long as its main purpose is to channel criminal actions in the Occupied Territories. The officers are not going to Poland with clean hands. There is nothing more cynical than using the Holocaust to burnish the crimes of the Occupation.

Blood of no account

General Yoav Galant, the head of the IDF Southern Command, will be Israel’s next chief of staff. The minister of defence recommended him, the government approved him and he will start his duties at the beginning of 2011. Galant was the senior commander who directly presided over the Gaza War, also known by its code-name, “Cast Lead.” It was not a war in the usual sense, since the Hamas fighters avoided any confrontation with the invading army. It was a military invasion that converted Gaza into a shooting gallery on which Israel poured a rain of super-modern ordnance, hellfire was launched from the air, land and sea, including chemical weapons (white phosphorus) on a civilian population. In Israeli terms, Yoav Galant has a lot of blood on his hands. Blood of women, children and old people.

But since it was Palestinian blood, he will not be put on trial for war crimes but rewarded and promoted to the highest military office in Israel. Some people in Israel are considering appealing to the High Court of Justice against the Galant’s nomination, but it is a foregone conclusion that the Supreme Court will approve the nomination.

One way to oppose the nomination is to lodge complaints to the justice systems in all countries where the law permits universal jurisdiction for war crimes. Galant should know that the crimes of the Gaza War will haunt him and he will be unable to travel freely in the world. Somebody will put handcuffs on him.

”They strayed into the line of fire”

Two farmers were killed when soldiers of the Israeli army opened fire towards the town of Beit Hanoun a few days ago. Ibrahim Abdallah Abu Saeed, 91, and his grandson Hossam Khaled Abu Saeed, 17.

In the statements that the IDF Spokesman issues to the press, Israeli shooting towards the Strip is always against “terrorists.” So how did it happen that two civilians were killed? The IDF Spokesman has a ready answer to that: “They strayed into the line of fire.” What a refined formulation, nearly literary. Its purpose is to absolve the shooters of responsibility. Those who don’t want to get shot should not stray into the line of fire. How did 91-year-old Ibrahim Saeed and his 17-year-old grandson “stray into the line of fire”? Now imagine to yourselves that a Hamas rocket hits a kindergarten, there are fatalities, and a Hamas spokesman issues press release that states that “the children strayed into the line of fire.”

Hamas has the excuse that its weapons are primitive and cannot be aimed at precise targets. The Israeli army has no such excuse. Every tank that fires a shell aims by means of a computer. It is precision fire. In other words, the grandfather and his grandson were killed because the Israeli tank fired at them. Yoav Galant should know that he is still the head of the Southern Command, and as such is the direct commander of the shooters and so he bears responsibility for this unnecessary shooting as well.

Translated from Hebrew for Occupation Magazine by George Malent

Translator’s note

1. I.e., conscript soldiers who had become officers during their period of compulsory military service.
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