A Scriptural Key to Israeli Conduct

by Nathan Jones

An Israeli-born friend visits my Washington, DC office twice a year as she and her American husband, a retired university professor, travel between their summer home in New England and winter quarters in Florida. Not long ago she opened the conversation by announcing, “I think I’m becoming anti-Semitic.”

“A self-hater,” I corrected her. “Your former compatriots and their American apologists only call non-Jewish critics of Israel ‘anti-Semitic.’ Because you’re Jewish, in the Zionist lexicon you can only aspire to the title of ‘self-hating Jew.’"

“I’m not kidding,” she said. “I was raised in a secular Israeli home and I’ve just learned from a book by one of my countrymen, Dr. Israel Shahak, called Jewish History, Jewish Religion things I never knew about Judaism, and that I don’t think my parents knew either.”

“If most Jews don’t know about these ‘things,’ then they can’t be a very important part of Judaism,” I replied.

“The point is that I think they are a very important part of Judaism for some Israelis,” she said. “In fact, things that made no sense at all to me about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict do make sense now that I’ve read the book. You write a lot about the problem, but until you read this book you really won’t understand it.”

“To me it’s a political problem with a political solution,” I said. “If we get bogged down in conflicting versions of divine real estate deeds, there never will be an end to it.”

“There will be no end to it until all the would-be ‘honest brokers’ like you understand where at least some of the Israelis are coming from,” she responded. “Read the book!”

I had a very hard time finding it, although it has been published in several languages, including Hebrew. The only English-language edition was published by Pluto Press in Britain in 1994 and, so far as I can tell, is not available in a single American bookstore.* Yet Dr. Shahak, a Holocaust survivor and retired professor of chemistry at Hebrew University, is a prominent and highly respected writer.

This week I thought of the book, which takes only two or three hours to read, when I read two news items from Israel. Although both were widely reported, they seem so bizarre that most readers will reject them as not making sense or having been “taken out of context.”

In fact, they are very much within the context of Dr. Shahak’s book. He maintains that a medieval strain of Judaism, which still guides the lives of many Orthodox Israelis, sternly prohibits the killing of a Jew, but sees no harm and may actually count it a blessing to inconvenience, injure, or even kill a non-Jew.

In any other country “Cherry” would be called a death squad.

If this is true, it appears the U.S. government has tied its Middle East policy to some Israeli leaders as evil in their motivations as the German Nazi leaders, whose innumerable crimes against European Jews and others are too well known to need reiteration, or the current Bosnian Serb regime, which started systematically slaughtering its Bosnian Muslim neighbors five years ago.

The first news item concerns a Nov. 13 Israeli Supreme Court decision granting the Shin Bet, Israel’s internal security service, the right to use “heightened physical pressure” when interrogating Palestinian prisoners suspected of planning terrorist attacks. This, of course, is just a slight upgrading of the long-standing Israeli order permitting “mild physical coercion” to be used against any Palestinian prisoner at any time, and regardless of whether criminal charges have been levied. That order assures Israeli prosecutors that they can start each trial of a Palestinian with a confession by the defendant, and that they can generate an endless supply of new Palestinian defendants by simply torturing detainees until they name someone—anyone—for the Israeli police to go out and arrest.

How bogus confessions and accusations improve Israeli security doesn’t seem to concern the general Israeli public for one simple reason. The same law that permits “mild physical coercion” against any accused Muslim or Christian prohibits such coercion against Jews.

But what about the new law that permits “heightened physical pressure,” to torture information out of a Palestinian to head off a possible attack in which others might be killed? Well, in that case the law against torture of Jews still applies. In short, extreme measures that are contrary to international law are justified under Israeli law to thwart a life-threatening attack by Muslims or Christians, but not a life-threatening attack by Jews. It would seem unbelievable if I hadn’t read Dr. Shahak’s book.

Holding Life Cheap

The second item concerns the Nov. 16 conviction by an Israeli military court of four Israeli soldiers for killing an 18-year-old West Bank Palestinian passerby at a roadblock. The soldiers were members of the elite “Cherry” unit, which uses covert tactics to ambush, and kill, what they call Palestinian terrorists. The unit’s activities have been reported many times before in the Israeli press.

In one case, disguised as Arabs, Cherry unit soldiers attended a soccer game, surrounded one of the players on their list and, after they had knocked him to the ground, shot him dead before the spectators. In another case they loitered outside the door of a house until someone knocked and was admitted. Then, before the door could be closed, they rushed inside, guns blazing, killing or wounding the occupants. In other cases they have walked up to parked cars and, wordlessly, shot the occupants to death. No search warrant, no statement of charges, no arrest. Just killings of those they suspected were “terrorists,” and anyone who happened to be with them. In any other country “Cherry” would be called a death squad. In the Israel Defense Forces it is “an elite unit.”

In the current case, the convicted soldiers had set up a nighttime roadblock, beckoned a stopped driver to come forward, flashed a truck-mounted searchlight in his eyes when he did, and then fired a burst of machine gun fire through his windshield. Miraculously the driver, Bilal Amli, lived to testify, but his 18-year-old companion in the front seat, Iyad Mahmoud Badran, was killed. Neither of the automobile’s occupants was suspected of anything. They just happened to be there.

For the death of Mr. Badran, the 1,251st Palestinian killed by Israeli soldiers since December 1987 according to the Washington Post’s Jerusalem correspondent, the four death squad members were sentenced to pay one agora, which is a nonexistent coin worth one hundredth of a shekel, which means it is worth about a third of a U.S. cent.

The sentence seemed inexplicable to Palestinian and Israeli human rights workers alike. “It means the [Israeli] government wants to show how much a Palestinian person’s life is worth,” ventured Bassam Eid, founder of the Palestinian Human Rights Monitoring Group.

“The sentence is so ridiculous I don’t know what to say,” commented Shirly Eran of the Israeli B’tselem human rights watchdog group. “If they are not guilty, they should be found not guilty. And if they are guilty, why are they fined an agora?”

The answer, I fear, is in Dr. Shahak’s book.

*Although the book is not listed in its catalog because of limited supplies, Jewish History, Jewish Religion can be ordered from the AET Book Club at $15.95.