Next: to the territories known, somewhat inaccurately, as the Holy Land, where the State of Israel now appears to be engaged in a personal war against Yasser Arafat.

As always in this conflict, political and religious extremism is fanning the flames on both sides. ON the Israeli side, there’s the hard-line political right wing, whose main religious support comes from Jews who are usually described as the ‘ultra-Orthodox’.

And so it might come as a surprise to find that there’s one group of ‘ultra-Orthodox’ who are politically quite unorthodox. They’re called Neturei Karta, which means ‘Guardians of the City’. They’re fiercely anti-Zionist, and they’re calling for the unconditional return of the Holy Land to its indigenous inhabitants, the Palestinians.

When the first Zionists came to the Holy Land in the early 1900s, they were met by a community of Jews who’d been living in Palestine for decades, but who saw themselves as guests of the local Arabs, rather than settlers. Over against the statist political aspirations of the Zionists, this group embraced a diaspora theology, and they understood exile as a divinely ordained condition for the Jewish people. As the Zionist movement took root in the land, these dissenters styled themselves ‘Guardians of the City’, or Neturei Karta, and to this day they inhabit a sector of Jerusalem where they refuse to have any dealings, either political or economic, with the surrounding State of Israel.

Neturei Karta has also grown into a worldwide movement, and Rabbi Yisroel Weiss is their spokesman in New York. And so on a day when Ariel Sharon is offering exile to Chairman Arafat, Rabbi Weiss is speaking to David Rutledge.

Yisroel Weiss: Jews were sent into exile; this is clearly accepted in the books of the prophets, Jeremiah and so forth, that God gave the land to the Children of Israel, gave them the land of Israel, and he said, ‘Listen, this is a Holy Land, this is my land, and I’m giving it to you with the stipulation that you must serve me properly and be a holy nation, and if you sin I will send you into exile’. And then it’s clearly stated in the Talmud, that the Jews were told by God that ‘I will take you back’, God himself will take the Jewish people back, ‘and till that time do not try to leave exile, do not try to fight the nations, you have to be a loyal citizen in every country and be a fine Jew, an example of a proper human being.’ So we never tried to leave this exile. Till Zionism came and they just didn’t accept it, this whole belief was strange to them, you know they said ‘the people are suffering and the only way out is to take the matter into our own hands’. So we feel that Zionism and what is happening there, even when we try different peace movements, they try it this way and that way, it cannot be successful. At the beginning of the Oslo discussions, we said to them, when everybody thought that everything was working out so well, we said ‘You will see that you will not be successful, it cannot be successful, because it’s against God’. Now, when we say that we are hoping to go back to Palestine eventually, it’s not with the same ideology as the Zionists. Our belief is that we are waiting for the end of exile, which means when all nations together will serve God peacefully; we will not go with the military against any other country. It means that God will reveal himself and all nations together will serve God peacefully. That’s what we hope for with the end of exile, which is in total contrast to Zionism, which is that you have to fight the Arab people.

David Rutledge: You quite rightly point out that Zionism began as a secular movement, but as we know, after the Second World War, unprecedented numbers of observant Jews embraced the Zionist cause, and it became a religious movement because of the experience of the Holocaust. And since then the argument has been that, you know, Jewish people have been kicked from one end of Europe to the other for hundreds of years, and really, it’s time for the Jews to have a State with borders within which they can defend themselves. Now, I know you don’t agree with that argument, but do you have any sympathy with that argument, given the experience of the Jewish people during the 20th century?

Yisroel Weiss: Yes the point that you are making;

this is the Zionist way of actually entrapping the Jewish communities to follow their movement. After World War II they turned to the Jews who till that time they really couldn’t make any inroads – Zionists could not make any inroads in the Jewish community – but after World War II, they turned to them and they said, ‘You see what happens when you try to follow the rabbinical authorities, look what happened’, and many people were confused, they were leaderless, and that is how the Zionists were able to actually grow as a religious movement. But our argument, which is basically the Torah argument and has been the rabbinical authorities’ argument throughout the world even to today, that that’s not true. You can make your own religion but you cannot call it Judaism, you should not say it’s the State of Israel, or the representative of Judaism or Jewish people, because the idea that you could take matters into your own hands by making your own State, that is false. If God wants us to suffer – God forbid – we will suffer again, and if he doesn’t want us to suffer, then all the king’s horses and all the king’s men cannot do anything against it. That is the basic Jewish belief. So in other words the State of Israel cannot help us.
God commands human beings to be compassionate and not to steal and not to cause pain to other people, and all these actions that emanate from Zionism, the taking of land, the subjugating of people, the oppression of people and so forth and so on, what goes on there constantly, cannot be done in the name of Judaism, it’s just the antithesis of what Judaism is all about. We are a nation of compassion, we are told that just as God is compassionate, we have to emulate God, and that is what is required of a Jew, so how they could they call themselves the State of Israel and yet do all the atrocities and all the actions that they are doing?

David Rutledge: One thing that interests me is that Neturei Karta’s opposition to the State of Israel doesn’t amount to a self-imposed exile from the land, there’s a strong Neturei Karta community active within Israel. Can you tell me about that?

Yisroel Weiss: The Jewish people have existed for thousands of years, and interestingly enough, we’ve existed amongst the Arab nations, amongst the Moslem nations, in fact we have coexisted on a tremendously good level in fact, they were very good hosts, the Arab nations all throughout the world were very good hosts to the Jewish people. We’ve lived together wonderfully.

David Rutledge: Better than the European nations, historically?

Yisroel Weiss: Yes, yes, one hundred per cent, and not only that, history attests to the fact that before, I would say, around the 1920s, the Jewish people lived tremendously peacefully together with the Arab neighbours. They’d babysit each other’s children, and Arab people talk about this conflict, how we lived together, we respected each other, the Arab people went to the rabbi for blessings, and so forth and so on, they coexisted with no trouble whatsoever. So the idea that Muslim people have a certain animosity to Jewish people and they can’t live together, this is ridiculous, it’s just a farce. When you have a fact in front of you called Zionism, and this just developed around 100 years ago, all of a sudden there’s this tremendous animosity, so you put two and two together and you realise Zionism is the problem.

David Rutledge: So what sort of relationship, though – I’m interested in the way that Neturei Karta members actually live in Israel, what sort of relationship does Neturei Karta have with the State? I mean is there any sort of political engagement, or are we talking about a community within the State that has nothing to do with the State?

Yisroel Weiss: That’s exactly the position that we take and we have taken. Since like I say, the beginning of the Zionist State, the Jewish people rally together and make demonstrations, and try to fight as best they could against the Zionist State, and they would be constantly beaten, brutally beaten, and they would be arrested and they would be stood in front of a judge, they would say, ‘I do not recognise you as a judge’, and this is the stance: they would not pay taxes, they would not take anything from the government, no government subsidies, and it’s tremendously hard for the Jewish people there who are the anti-Zionists, to be able to exist because you know, to live in a country and not to have anything to do with the government is a very tremendous, big hardship.

David Rutledge: So is your message principally a message for Israelis, or does Neturei Karta also have something to say to the Palestinian people?

Yisroel Weiss: Oh, definitely. Our message is to the Jews and to the non-Jews. Our message to the Jews is: Remember that you are turning away from God and you’re incurring God’s wrath. And to the non-Jewish people, the Arab people, we keep on saying to them: Remember that we are not your enemies, and we tell them that You should not hate a Jew; do not become an anti-Semite, do not equate Zionism with Judaism, and remember that the Jewish people have no fight with you. And our idea is, that there will eventually become truly a Palestinian land where we can live together with the Palestinians as we have for thousands of years.

David Rutledge: And since the present intifada began, there have been voices within Israel calling for not just ‘death to the Palestinians’ but also ‘death to the Israeli peace activists’, and to anyone who sets themselves against the Zionist cause. And I would imagine that this is a dangerous time to be a member of Neturei Karta in Israel.

Yisroel Weiss: Let me tell you that since the days that we’ve stood up against Zionism it has been dangerous. These people are not God-fearing people. The threat of Zionism towards the Jewish community has been around since its inception. Maybe the threat is slightly less today, because of the Internet and the media coverage that usually were blacked out by the main media. Especially in New York; a few weeks ago we had a demonstration, and the police counted 20,000 in Manhattan – and not one paper covered it. In Iran, they covered it, mind you, and then it was covered in Israel because Iran kept on saying how it had been blacked out, and they showed in Israel how in Iran it was being showed. But over here it hasn’t been shown. And we have footage of this, but you find that the main media just doesn’t want to cover it. But the internet and the outside media does cover it. So maybe today it’s slightly less dangerous for us to stand up, because of the fear that they’ll be uncovered for their actions. But it is definitely dangerous; we are always being threatened, but we feel it’s an obligation to God, to stand up and not let the name of Judaism be so profaned.
Stephen Crittenden: Rabbi Yisroel Weiss, New York spokesman for Neturei Karta International, talking with David Rutledge.Well that’s all in this week’s edition of The Religion Report. Thanks to producers David Rutledge and Charlie McCune. I’m Stephen Crittenden.

 

The Religion Report is broadcast Wednesday at 8.30am repeated at 8.30pm, on Radio National, the Australian Broadcasting Corporation's national radio network of ideas