Zionism, Israeli Military Opposition Jewish Forces Intensify

Jews ensured Prime Minister David Cameron was unwelcomed at the Israeli Knesset last week. An ultra-cold shoulder was extended to Cameron by ultra-Orthodox and Palestinian legislators, with their common bond of being the state’s most oppressed communities. Cameron’s visit was the same day two controversial laws, Conscription Law and Governability Law, were approved after a prolonged legislative battle.

As Prime Minister Netanyahu welcomed guest of honour PM Cameron, ultra-Orthodox parliamentarians left the plenary session in protest. Palestinian Members of the Knesset refused to attend the event altogether. The protest followed months of heated protest over the Conscription Law, that spotlights contradictions between Zionism and Judaism., according to reporters Joshua Tartakovsky and Ronnie Barkans.

Joshua Tartakovsky is from an ultra-Orthodox family in Jerusalem; went to a Zionist-Haredi army unit, and is a graduate of Brown University and the London School of Economics. He’s an independent researcher and filmmaker. Ronnie Barkan is an Israeli human rights defender and conscientious objector. He co-founded the Boycott from Within, Israeli citizens and residents supporting the Palestinian call for Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS).

Protesters Declare Faithfulness To Torah Rather Than Military. 

Hundreds of thousands of ultra-Orthodox Jews (Haredim) of all denominations protested the proposed law for days in Jerusalem streets several days before their passage. In mass prayer, worshippers-protesters declared faithfulness to the Torah study rather than the military, Barkan and Tartakovsky reported.

Declaring “the State of Israel is fighting against the Kingdom of Heaven” they held signs stating that military draft is a spiritual suicide. The event was “nothing short of a battle cry against the very legitimacy of a state that encroaches upon their spiritual autonomy and poses a danger to their religious liberty,” Barkan and Tartakovsky reported.

Under the slogan “Equality in the Burden” both religious-Zionist Naftali Bennett and secular-Zionist Yair Lapid were elected and became the two largest coalition partners of a Haredi-free government. The campaign called for forced conscription of the ultra-Orthodox and garnered wide support from Israelis.

Unlike the purist Edah HaHaredit group, that prohibits members from voting and receiving funding from the Zionist state, Haredi rabbinical councils, that called for the mass protest, have their elected representatives at the Knesset; and walked out of the plenum. Netanyahu is an enemy to their religion, they said. The PM nevertheless told Cameron in his welcome speech, “David, welcome to the City of David and to the Jewish Knesset.”

The law enforces an incrementally growing annual quota of ultra-Orthodox students to be drafted, reaching 5,200 by 2017. Religious schools that would send their students to the military will receive financial incentives. If the goal is not met, a draft for all the ultra-Orthodox would be imposed and financial sanctions implemented. Ultra-Orthodox argue that sanctioning and criminalizing students of the Torah proves the State of Israel cannot possibly be regarded as being Jewish. The Law’s initiators, Lapid and Bennett, with Prime Minister Netanyahu, have been depicted in an animated film, physically abusing a Haredi Jew and placing him behind bars.

People of the book, not people of the rifle

The Haredim’s forced conscription of ultra-Orthodox into an army foreign to their culture is viewed as a Zionist attempt to destroy their millennia-old tradition of Jewish learning. The draft law has achieved the rare feat of uniting all non-Zionist religious streams of the Sephardic, Ashkenazi, Hassidic and Lithuanian communities, working together in an emergency action committee.

Over 150,000 people of all major ultra-Orthodox Jewish denominations protested in the U.S. last week, uniting Haredi groups and serving more radical voices, like the Mahara Satmar Rabbi, to gain dominance. While the initial call for protest referenced the word “Israel,” the Satmar Rabbi conditioned his support on omitting it and convinced all other Rabbis to re-sign an amended declaration removing all legitimacy of the Zionist state.

Religious Zionists see serving in the IDF as a holy obligation. The ultra-Orthodox, however, see living according to the Torah and serving God as the ultimate goal of Jewish life. The Haredi paper Hamodia referred to religious Zionists in terms unused before: “collaborators with Satan,” “deeply messianic” and “worshippers of the state.”

Religious nationalism, a contradiction in terms

Rabbi Haim Druckman, spiritual leader of Bennett’s nationalist Jewish Home party, instructed his students not to attend the massive gathering. “For the ultra-Orthodox, such a rabbi objecting to a gathering for prayer exposes the inherent flaw in religious Zionism whereby, to put it bluntly, the state is worshipped rather than the Almighty,” say Barkan and Tartakovsky.

In response, an op-ed in the Haredi newspaper Yated Ne’eman took the harsh and unusual step of publishing Rabbi Druckman’s name while omitting the title “Rabbi”. Ultra-Orthodox Knesset member Aryeh Deri referred to Jewish Home member Ayelet Shaked, chairwoman of the draft law committee, as a “traitor of Judaism,” “the Jewish Home and Ayelet Shaked did not [only] betray the Haredim, they have betrayed the Torah.”

“This unholy union of Zionism and religion is what mainstream Israeli society perceives as the Jewish identity. The ultra-Orthodox perspective is that Zionism is nothing short of an aberration of Judaism, insisting that Zionism goes against Judaism while claiming to speak on its behalf.”

“Religious nationalism is to religion what National Socialism is to socialism. National Socialism is not socialism but its opposite and likewise religious nationalism is not religion but its opposite.” –  the late Orthodox scholar Prof. Leibowitz, a proponent of separation between state and religion.  

Boycotting the State, Saving Judaism

From the first days of the Zionist movement, it was strongly condemned by almost all traditional Rabbis in Palestine and the world. They prohibited any Jew from embracing Zionism, so Zionist ideology took hold almost exclusively among secular Jews, i.e. those of Jewish ethnicity, not religion.

While talks were under way concerning the future of Jerusalem, Rabbi Dushinsky, the leader of the 60,000 people strong Haredi community in the city, expressed opposition to the Zionist movement and its attempt to expropriate the holy city of Jerusalem. Religious Jews have not the slightest intention of subjugating the local Arab population, he stated. Even earlier, after the Balfour Declaration, Dr. Jacob Israel de Haan, acting on behalf of Rabbi Sonnenfeld, saw Arabs as natural allies against the Zionist project and met Arab leaders accompanied by the Rabbi, to protect their religious autonomy under Arab rule rather than accepting alien Zionist governance.

One day before slated to go to Britain to address British government, as leader of a delegation expressing staunch opposition to the Balfour Declaration, de Haan was assassinated outside Sha’are Zedek synagogue where he’d been praying. The assassins confessed to receiving orders from the top Zionist leaders, including Yitzhak Ben-Tzvi, who later became second president of the State of Israel. It is speculated that David Ben-Gurion was involved in the decisionmaking. According to Avraham Tehomi, one assassin, de Haan was marked for execution due to meeting with King Hussein and Emir Abdullah, who promised unlimited Jewish migration to Palestine in return for renouncing exclusive national ambitions. After the murder, the Zionist Jewish Agency limited Jewish immigration into Palestine by choosing to provide ‘certificates’ only for Zionist Jews, even during the Holocaust.

Most secular Israelis detest the Haredim, but rare solidarity have recently appeared from the almost negligible number of progressive Israelis, according to Barkan and Tartakovsky.The Democracy or Rebellion group claims a state denying equality and minority rights has no democratic virtue. It reaches out to the ultra-Orthodox community; has posted its message of solidarity on walls of Me’ah She’arim in Jerusalem; and is demonstrating their support in Tel-Aviv.

A whole new discourse is emerging within the Haredi community. Some call for political re-alignment with progressive parties, even elements on the radical left. Others call to boycott settlements and their produce. A growing number of rabbis call on Jews abroad to boycott and divest from Israel at large. One Hassidic has been planningto migrate en masse to the US, seeking political refuge with US senators helping them.

Neither Jewish Nor Democratic – So Boycott

During Cameron’s recent visit, Netanyahu’s speech focused on three points.

• The boycott is racist; 
• Jews have religious-nationalist rights to the land;
• Indigenous Palestinians hardly existed before the Zionist colonization of the land; and
• The Balfour Declaration validates Zionist exclusive rights over the land and that this is the will of Jews worldwide.  

Those claims are patently false, assert Barkan and Tartakovsky, who say a more rational and humane approach would be to:

• Propose ending criminal policies that have led to boycotts; 
• Insist on equality between Jews and non-Jews;
• Acknowledging the rights of all indigenous people; and
• Recognize that the Balfour Declaration states “nothing shall be done which may prejudice the civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine” and political assassination of de Haan by Zionists can hardly be regarded as a form of agreement between Jews and Zionists.

“Therefore, it would have been appropriate for the British Prime Minister to correct his colleague and explain that the Balfour Declaration, as unfair as it is, has never recognized the right to dispossess, expel or subjugate,” say Barkan and Tartakovsky. “The so-called “Jewish and democratic” state is neither Jewish nor democratic.

“Religiously speaking, Zionism is a secular movement that went as far as dehumanizing and mocking the religious Jews of Europe. Israel’s majority is secular rather than religious, while it can hardly be argued that the state’s oppressive policies are in agreement with Jewish values. As religion has been “nationalized”, hardships also exist for those practicing Jews who choose a different path from the state sanctioned form of Judaism.”

According to Barkan and Tartakovsky, Ethnically, most world Jewry prefers living abroad rather than in Israel. At the same time, Israeli figures show ethnic Jews are no longer the majority between the river and the sea, not even counting the many Palestinians in exile.

Paramount to Zionist’s Palestinian “project” is claiming the land is exclusively Jewish and all others, even its indigenous people, are alien and unwanted. It is no coincidence that Israel refuses having a constitution or acknowledging an Israeli nationality. That would mean its citizens are equals. Instead, the privileged group is defined as having a “Jewish” nationality while others may be “Arab,” “Druze” or “Circassian” – ” none of which are nationalities,” explain Barkan and Tartakovsky.” On this basis, discrimination has been codified into law.

The Israeli regime is an ethnocracy that practices the Crime of Apartheid, as defined by international law.”Israel is only ‘Jewish’ in the ethnic-supremacist sense, in the same way that South Africa was white. Consequently, the demand to recognize its Jewish character is just as questionable as legitimizing white supremacy in South Africa at the time,” the reporters say.

After many decades, new bonds between anti-Zionists – ultra-Orthodox, Palestinians, and progressives – are being forged, dispelling the myth of Zionism, and paving a new path in the Holy Land., according to Tartakovsky and Barkans, who urge:

“Let us walk that path.”

Sources: AlterNet, Tikkun.com

Photo Credit: Tikkun.com