This piece was reprinted by OpEd News with permission or license. It may not be reproduced in any form without permission or license from the source.
"We are the Jewish people. We came to this land by a miracle. God brought us back to this land and now we need to fight to expel the Gentiles who are interfering with our conquest of this holy land."
Extremist Israeli rabbis teach this ideology, and in 2003 Rabbi Saadya Grama's book, "Romemut Yisrael Ufarashat Hagalut (The Majesty of Israel and the Question of the Diaspora), argued that non-Jews are "completely evil" while Jews are genetically superior. Reform and conservative rabbis condemned it. Extremist orthodox ones endorsed it. Some more moderate ones also saying Grama advocates separating Jews from an intrinsically hostile anti-Semetic world. Rabbi Yosef Blau called the book "a call for a superior people to withdraw from the world and live in isolation while submitting to its enemies and placing trust in God."
Others in Israel teach the extremist notion that the ten commandments don't apply to non-Jews. So killing them in defending the homeland is acceptable, and according to Rabbi Dov Lior, chairman of the Jewish Rabbinic Council:
"There is no such thing as enemy civilians in war time. The law of our Torah is to have mercy on our soldiers and to save them....A thousand non-Jewish lives are not worth a Jew's fingernail."
Rabbi David Batsri called Arabs "a blight, a devil, a disaster....donkeys, and we have to ask ourselves why God didn't create them to walk on all fours. Well, the answer is that they are needed to build and clean." Extremist zealots want them for no other purpose in Jewish society.
In 2007, Israel's former chief rabbi, Mordechai Elyahu, called for the Israeli army to mass-murder Palestinians. In fanatical language he said:
"If they don't stop after we kill 100, then we must kill 1000. And if they don't stop after 1000, then we must kill 10,000. If they still don't stop we must kill 100,000. Even a million. Whatever it takes to make them stop."
In March 2009, Safed's chief rabbi Shmuel Eliyahu called for "state-sponsored revenge" to restore "Israel's deterrence....It's time to call the child by its name: Revenge, revenge, revenge. We mustn't forget. We have to take horrible revenge for the terrorist attack at Mercaz Harav yeshiva," referring to an earlier incident in which eight students died.
Next Page 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8
(Note: You can view every article as one long page if you sign up as an Advocate Member, or higher).