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With Israel Shahak's
Death, A Prophetic Voice Is Stilled
A Special Report on Israel and Judaism
By Allan C. Brownfeld
The death of Israel Shahak in July [2001] has taken
from us a genuinely prophetic Jewish voice, one which ardently advocated
democracy and human rights, and rejected the ethno-centrism which has come to
dominate both the state of Israel and much of organized Judaism—not only in
Israel but in the U.S. and other Western countries as well.
This writer first met Israel Shahak on a
visit to Jerusalem in 1973. We kept in contact ever since, meeting when he
visited the United States. He wrote a number of very thoughtful articles for Issues,
a journal which I edit.
In many ways, Shahak was a victim of history
who tried to learn from his own experience and apply what he learned to
others. A Holocaust survivor, he preferred to emphasize his opposition to
racism and oppression in any form and in any country.
After being liberated from the Bergen-Belsen
concentration camp in 1945, Shahak and his mother emigrated to British Mandate
Palestine. He went on to have a distinguished career as a professor of
chemistry at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, and was repeatedly voted as
the most admired teacher by students.
Following the 1967 war, Shahak became a
leading member of the Israeli League for Human and Civil Rights and was
elected chairman in 1970. He devoted the rest of his life to opposing
Israel’s inhumane treatment inflicted upon its Arab citizens and upon
Palestinians in occupied territories.
While American newspapers, both Jewish and
general, completely ignored the death of Israel Shahak, a July 6 obituary in The
Guardian of London by Elfi Pallis notes that, “Shortly after the 1967
six-day war, he [Shahak] concluded from observation that Israel was not yet a
democracy; it was treating the newly occupied Palestinians with shocking
brutality. For the next three decades, he spent all his spare time on attempts
to change this. He contributed to various small … papers, but when this
proved to have little impact, he decided to alert journalists, academics and
human rights campaigners abroad. From his small, bare West Jerusalem flat
poured forth reports with titles such as ‘Torture in Israel,’ and
‘Collective Punishment in the West Bank.’ Based exclusively on mainstream
Israeli sources, all were painstakingly translated into English.
Shahak never let up, he never became blasŽ.
“World coverage gradually improved, but
Shahak never let up, he never became blasŽ. Watching him read out a small
news item about an Israeli farmer who had set his dogs on a group of
Palestinian children was to see a man in almost physical distress. Shahak came
to believe that these human rights incidents stemmed from Israel’s religious
interpretation of Jewish history, which led it to ignore centuries of Arab
life in the country, and to disregard non-Jewish rights. Confiscation, every
schoolchild was told, was ‘the redemption of the land’ from those who did
not belong there. To Shahak, this was straightforward racism, damaging both
sides.”
Israel Shahak’s vision can perhaps best be
found in his books, Jewish History, Jewish
Religion (Pluto Press, 1994) and Jewish Fundamentalism in Israel
(Pluto Press, 1994) written with Norton Mezvinsky. (See Mezvinsky’s
remembrance of Israel Shahak in the Aug./Sept. issue of the Washington
Report, p. 11.)
In Jewish
History, Jewish Religion, Shahak points out that while Islamic
fundamentalism is vilified in the West, Jewish fundamentalism goes largely
ignored. He argues that classical Judaism is used to justify Israeli policies
which he views as xenophobic and similar in nature to the anti-Semitism
suffered by Jews in other times and places. Nowhere can this be seen more
clearly, in his view, than in Jewish attitudes to the non-Jewish peoples of
Israel and the Middle East.
Shahak draws on the Talmud and rabbinical
laws, and points to the fact that today’s extremism finds its sources in
classical texts which, if they are not properly understood, will lead to
religious warfare, harmful to men and women of all religious beliefs.
This book, Shahak wrote, “is, in a way, a
continuation of my political activities as an Israeli Jew. Those activities
began in 1965-66 with a protest which caused a considerable scandal at that
time: I had personally witnessed an ultra-religious Jew refuse to allow his
phone to be used on the Sabbath in order to call an ambulance for a non-Jew,
who happened to have collapsed in his Jerusalem neighborhood. Instead of
simply publishing the incident in the press, I asked for a meeting with the
members of the Rabbinical Court of Jerusalem, which is composed of rabbis
nominated by the State of Israel. I asked them whether such behavior was
consistent with their interpretation of the Jewish religion. They answered
that the Jew in question had behaved correctly, indeed piously, and backed
their statement by referring to a passage in an authoritative compendium of
Talmudic laws, written in this country. I reported the incident in the main
Hebrew daily, Ha’aretz, whose publication of the story caused a media
scandal.”
The Talmudic World View
In the end, Shahak reported, “Neither the
Israeli, nor the diaspora, rabbinical authorities ever reversed their ruling
that Jews should not violate the Sabbath in order to save the life of a
Gentile… It became apparent to me, as, drawing on knowledge acquired in my
youth, I began to study the Talmudic laws governing the relations between Jews
and non-Jews, that neither Zionism, including its seemingly secular part, nor
Israeli politics since the inception of the State of Israel, nor particularly
the policies of the Jewish supporters of Israel in the diaspora, could be
understood unless the deeper influence of those laws, and the world view which
they both create and express is taken into account.”
The Hatanya—the fundamental book of
the Habbad movement, which is one of the most important branches of
Hasidism—declares that all non-Jews are totally Satanic creatures
“in whom there is nothing absolutely good.” Even a non-Jewish embryo is
said to be qualitatively different from a Jewish one. The very existence of a
non-Jew is “inessential,” whereas all of creation was created solely for
the sake of the Jews.
Shahak points out that a widespread
misunderstanding about Orthodox Judaism is that it is a “biblical
religion,” that the Old Testament has in Judaism the same central place and
legal authority that the Bible has for Protestants and even Roman Catholics.
He notes that, “…the interpretation is rigidly fixed—but by the Talmud
rather than by the Bible itself. Many, perhaps most, biblical verses
prescribing religious acts and obligations are understood by classical Judaism
and by present-day Orthodoxy in a sense which is quite distinct from, or even
contrary to, their literal meaning as understood by Christians or other
readers of the Old Testament, who see only the plain text.”
In the Decalogue itself, the Eighth
Commandment, “Thou Shalt not steal” (Exodus 20:15) is taken to be a
prohibition against “stealing” (that is, kidnapping) a Jewish person.
“The reason,” Shahak writes, “is that according to the Talmud all acts
forbidden by the Decalogue are capital offenses. Stealing property is not a
capital offense (while the kidnapping of Gentiles by Jews is allowed by
Talmudic law)—hence the interpretation.”
In numerous cases, Shahak shows, general
terms such as “thy fellow,” “stranger,” or even “man” are taken to
have an exclusivist and chauvinistic meaning. The famous verse “Thou shalt
love thy fellow as thyself” (Leviticus 19:18) is understood by classical
(and present-day Orthodox) Judaism “as an injunction to love one’s fellow
Jew, not any fellow human. Similarly, the verse ‘neither shalt thou stand
against the blood of thy fellow’ (Leviticus 19:16) is supposed to mean that
one must not stand idly by when the life (‘blood’) of a fellow Jew is in
danger; but a Jew … is in general forbidden to save the life of a Gentile,
because ‘he is not thy fellow.’”
The differentiation in appropriate treatment
for Jews and non-Jews to be found in Talmudic commentaries is, Shahak shows,
not simply an academic question. Instead, it relates to current Israeli
government practices which are justified by reference to religious law.
A book published by the Central Region
Command of the Israeli army, whose area includes the West Bank, contains the
following declaration by the command’s chief chaplain:
“When our forces
come across civilians during a war or in hot pursuit or in a raid, so long as
there is no certainty that those civilians are incapable of harming our
forces, then according to Halakah [Jewish law] they may and even should be
killed…. Under no circumstances should an Arab be trusted, even if he makes
an impression of being civilized…. In war, when our forces storm the enemy,
they are allowed and even enjoined by the Halakah to kill even good
civilians….”
Many contemporary Israeli policies refer to
Talmudic rules. Thus, Shahak declares, “The Halakah forbids Jews to sell
immovable property—fields and houses—in the Land of Israel to Gentiles. It
is therefore clear that—exactly as the leaders and sympathizers of Gush
Emunim say—the whole question of how the Palestinians ought to be treated
is, according to the Halakah, simply a question of Jewish power; if Jews have
sufficient power then it is their religious duty to expel the Palestinians….
Maimonides
declares; ‘When the Jews are more powerful than the Gentiles we are
forbidden to let an idolater among us; even a temporary or itinerant trader
shall not be allowed to pass through our land.’”
Jewish Fundamentalism
In the book Jewish Fundamentalism in
Israel, Shahak and co-author Norton Mezvinsky lament the dramatic growth
in recent years of Jewish fundamentalism which has manifested itself in
opposition to the peace process and played a role in the assassination of
Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin and the murder of 29 Muslims at prayer by the
American-born fundamentalist, Baruch Goldstein.
They cite, for example, Rabbi Yitzhak
Ginsburgh, who wrote a chapter of a book in praise of Goldstein and what he
did. An immigrant to Israel from the U.S., Ginsburgh speaks freely of Jews’
genetic-based spiritual superiority over non-Jews:
“If you saw two people
drowning, a Jew and a non-Jew, the Torah says you save the Jewish life
first…. Something is special about Jewish DNA…. If a Jew needs a liver, can
you take the liver of an innocent non-Jew passing by to save him? The Torah
probably would permit that. Jewish life has an infinite value.”
Shahak and Mezvinsky point out that,
“Changing the words ‘Jewish’ to ‘German’ or ‘Aryan’ and
‘non-Jewish’ to ‘Jewish’ turns the Ginsburgh position into the
doctrine that made Auschwitz possible in the past. To a considerable extent
the German Nazi success depended upon that ideology and upon its implication
of being widely known early. Disregarding even on a limited scale the
potential effects of messianic … and other ideologies could prove to be
calamitous….The similarities between the Jewish political messianic trend
and German Nazism are glaring. The Gentiles are for the messianists what the
Jews were for the Nazis. The hatred of Western culture with its rational and
democratic elements is common to both movements…. The ideology … is both
eschatological and messianic…. It assumes the imminent coming of the Messiah
and asserts that the Jews, aided by God, will thereafter triumph over the
non-Jews and rule them forever.”
It troubled Israel Shahak that the lesson
many Jews learned from the Nazi period was to embrace ethno-centric
nationalism—just what had created such tragedy in Europe—and to reject the
older prophetic Jewish tradition of universalism. He was particularly dismayed
with the organized Jewish community in the U.S. and other Western countries,
which promoted ideas of religious freedom and ethnic diversity in their own
countries, but embraced Israel’s rejection of these same values.
It was Shahak’s view that bigotry was
morally objectionable regardless of who the perpetrator is and who the victim.
He declared: “Any form of racism, discrimination and xenophobia becomes more
potent and politically influential if it is taken for granted by the society
which indulges in it.” For Jews, he believed, “The support of democracy
and human rights is … meaningless or even harmful and deceitful when it does
not begin with self-critique and with support of human rights when they are
violated by one’s own group. Any support of human rights for non-Jews whose
rights are being violated by the ‘Jewish state’ is as deceitful as the
support of human rights by a Stalinist….”
In an article about his childhood for The
New York Review of Books, Shahak recalled listening to some Polish workmen
talking during the Nazi occupation. Discussing the situation, one young man
defended the Germans by pointing out that they were ridding Poland of the
Jews, only to be rebuked by an older laborer, “So are they not also human
beings?” It is a phrase that Shahak never forgot.
During his life, Israel Shahak was rebuked,
spat upon and threatened with death for his defense of human rights. How long
will it take before he is recognized as a genuine Jewish prophetic voice in an
era when such voices were difficult to find? After all, as the Bible tells us;
“A prophet is not without honor, save in his own country, and in his own
house” (Matthew 13:57).
Israel Shahak may be unlamented in his own
country today, but future generations may well look back to his example, much
as contemporary Germans do to figures such as Dietrich Bonhoeffer, the
Lutheran pastor who opposed Nazism and was executed for his part in the plot
to assassinate Hitler.
Israel Shahak understood all too well the
violations of human rights and the human spirit all around him. He insisted on
telling that truth to his fellow countrymen and to the world, upholding a
Jewish tradition far older than that established in 1948.
Allan C. Brownfeld is a syndicated
columnist and associate editor of the Lincoln
Review, a journal published by the Lincoln Institute for Research and
Education, and editor of Issues, the quarterly journal of the American
Council for Judaism.
Source: http://www.wrmea.com/archives/october01/0110071.html
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