A Kosher-Stamp on Murder 

Two shocking manifestos were published this week. Both call for comment.

September 15, 2004
by Uri Avnery


One of them declares that dismantling the settlements in the Gaza Strip is a "crime against humanity." It does not mention that they were set up on the land reserves of a million Palestinians crowded in the tiny strip, and rob them of their scarce water. Their removal, it says, is an "expression of tyranny, evil and arbitrariness." Officers and soldiers are called upon not to take part in this "ethnic cleansing."

This manifesto is signed by the father and brother of Binyamin Netanyahu, as well as Meir Har-Zion, the favorite pupil of Ariel Sharon, who became famous in the 1950s for slitting the throats of several innocent Bedouins with his own hands in revenge for the killing of his sister. Two former directors general of the prime minister's office also signed. Most of the signatories are not religious.

The second manifesto declares that the Halakha (Jewish religious law) commands the killing of innocent Palestinian civilians if this helps to save Jews. It is signed by the heads of the "Arrangement Yeshivot," the West Bank settlement rabbis and other religious leaders. They were later joined by one of the two chief rabbis (the Sephardic one).

I was not unduly upset by the first manifesto. People of this kind can be found all over the world. In other countries they are called fascists (but, because of the Holocaust, we do not like to use this term in our country). What unites them is a primitive, atavistic morality that says that "we" are a superior race, God's chosen people, a master race, etc., while "they" are inferior races, untermenschen. We may do to them whatever we please, with a clear conscience; they are not allowed to do to us anything at all. (In the manifesto, the settlers are requested not to bodily harm "their own people" – leaving them free to harm all others.)

In the course of the 20th century, such people have wrought destruction on many nations, including their own. But healthy nations overcame them in the end. I hope that we shall manage to do the same.

The second manifesto is far more dangerous. A religious doctrine that calls for the killing of civilians in the name of God is very serious. Such a decree signed by the rabbis of the "Arrangement Yeshivot" is tenfold worse.

In order to understand this, one has to know that these Yeshivot are in fact military units. They constitute a unique phenomenon in the Israeli army: whole units formed on an ideological-political basis, obeying their own leaders.

When David Ben-Gurion created the Israeli army (officially called the Israel Defense Forces, or IDF) in the middle of the 1948 war, he was determined to eliminate all its political groupings. So he disbanded the Palmakh, the legendary elite force that was based on the kibbutzim and tended to the left.

The present setup was created, officially, in order to enable students of Yeshivot (Jewish religious seminaries) to serve in the army without interrupting their studies. In practice, they constitute a militia of the extreme-right wing, especially the settlers. While serving in the army, the Yeshiva students are nominally under the army chain of command, but in practice they are also subject to their rabbis, whose position is reminiscent of the political commissars of the Red Army.

If the orders of the officers and the directives of the rabbis ever conflict, the great majority of the soldier-students will undoubtedly obey the rabbis. And in any case, a great number of the officers themselves now wear kippas, attesting to their belonging to the religious camp.

The chiefs of the religious-nationalistic wing, and especially the settlers, have for years now been engaged in a systematic effort to capture the army from the inside. In the first decades of the IDF, kibbutz members had a decisive influence on the army command, but nowadays the settlers and other religious-nationalist people are taking over. They fill the lower and middle ranks of the officer corps. This development, together with the deepening occupation, has completely changed the face of the IDF. It's a different army now.

The manifesto of the Yeshivot chiefs, calling for the killing of Palestinian civilians, exposes this situation. Since not one single head of an Arrangement Yeshiva has spoken out against it, we have to assume that they are unanimous on this.

On the face of it, it is just an expert opinion. With the hypocrisy typical for the chiefs of this camp, they say that this is not, God forbid, an operational directive, but only an innocent effort of the rabbis to explain to the leaders of the nation what the Halakha says about this subject.

That is, of course, a tongue-in-cheek explanation. The Arrangement Yeshivot soldiers are daily engaged in situations where they have to decide whether to shoot civilians or not. It is quite clear that the "opinion" of their rabbis will determine their behavior. It is a sentence of death for many people.

Even today, Palestinian civilians are killed every day. Only a small fraction of the incidents are reported in the media. An old handicapped man was recently buried under the ruins of his home by an army bulldozer that demolished it so quickly that his family had no chance of getting him to safety. Only yesterday a 9-year-old boy was killed while sleeping at his home by shrapnel from a missile fired by a helicopter at an adjacent building. Almost every day, boys of all ages are killed while throwing stones at tanks and soldiers (whose bulletproof vests and helmets mean they are in no danger).

It is impossible to know how many, if any, of these civilians – men, women, old people and children – are killed by Arrangement Yeshivot soldiers, or soldiers commanded by kippa-wearing officers. Nobody can be accused without incriminating evidence. But it is clear that the interpretation of the Halakha by the rabbis has now put a kosher-stamp on such acts. It puts an end to any pretense of the "pure arms" myth. It negates not only the prohibition of murder, but also the shame for such acts.

The only religious voice raised against this appalling document was that of a small and courageous group called Rabbis for Human Rights, which opposes the dirty messianic current that has submerged almost the whole religious camp in Israel. Their statement discloses that the Yeshiva heads have intentionally falsified the Talmud passages "quoted" by them. The actual text forbids a Jew to kill innocents even to save his own life. After all, God created all human beings "in his own image" (Genesis 1:27).

Unfortunately, this statement will have no impact whatsoever on the IDF's religious militias, and even less on the settlers, who now set the tone in the army.

Many of the most heinous crimes in human history were committed in the name of religion. The Book of Joshua says that God commanded the Children of Israel to commit a general ethnic cleansing in the land of Canaan. The crusaders carried out horrible massacres in this country (and against the Jews on the way here) while shouting "Deus le volt!" (God wills it). Three years ago today, Osama bin Laden sent his people to kill thousands in the New York Twin Towers in the name of Allah.

May God protect us from those who would speak in His name.

Israel tallies up compensation claims by Iraq's Jews

By Michael R. Fischbach*

Daily Star (Beirut) - Saturday 4th September 2004

On May 6, 2003, the same day that Paul Bremer replaced Jay Garner as head of the US Office for Reconstruction and Humanitarian Assistance (ORHA) in Iraq, 16 American soldiers from the US Army's Mobile Exploration Team Alpha, along with personnel from ORHA and the Iraqi National Congress (INC), descended into the flooded basement of the bombed-out Iraqi Department of General Intelligence in Baghdad. Although the army team's job was to search for Iraqi weapons of mass destruction, that day they were seeking something quite different.

A former Iraqi intelligence official had tipped off the INC a few days earlier that an ancient copy of the Jewish Talmud lay deep within the General Intelligence headquarters. The INC then told the Americans, who decided that finding such a valuable cultural relic merited the diversion of the army search team from its normal task. Although the troops did not uncover the Talmud, they did discover something else: thousands of manuscripts, documents and books, some of them hundreds of years old, dealing with Iraq's ancient and once thriving Jewish community, which is now virtually extinct. What the troops had found were the archives of the General Intelligence's Israel-Palestine and Jewish Sections.

It appears that many of the manuscripts, Torah scrolls and books were confiscated from synagogues and libraries after the mass exodus of the Iraqi Jewish community in 1950-51. Most went to Israel. With the permission of the interim Iraqi Culture Ministry, the Coalition Provisional Authority had the water-damaged documents shipped to Texas, whereupon they were freeze dried and sent to the US National Archives and Records Administration in Washington for restoration and preservation. Archives officials are presently seeking between $1.5 million to $3 million in donations to further the restoration work. The final disposition of the documents remains an open question.

The Americans also discovered documents in the General Intelligence headquarters basement relating to Jewish property in and around Baghdad, property that had been sequestered by the Iraqi government beginning in 1951, during the mass emigration. The Israeli government has long campaigned to have the value of Jewish property abandoned in the Arab world deducted from any compensation the Israelis may one day pay to Palestinian refugees for the property they abandoned in Israel in 1948. Indeed, Israeli Diaspora Affairs Minister Natan Sharansky asked the Americans in 2003 to look for anything relating to Iraq's Jewish community after conquering the country.

After the property records were discovered in Baghdad, the State Department in late May 2004 passed along to Sharansky 800 black-and-white photocopies of the Arabic-language documents. After translation, they will be turned over to the Israeli Justice Ministry, whose director-general, Aharon Abramovitz, co-chairs the Israeli government's Compensation Committee for Jews Who Left Arab States. The Justice Ministry maintains an archive of 12,000 files dealing with property claims of Jewish immigrants from Arab countries and Iran. The unit responsible for this archive was first established in 1969, disbanded in the early 1990s, and recently revived.

The Israeli government has not been alone in discussing compensation for Jewish property taken over in Iraq. This was just the latest example of the interest in such property that arose in 2003, soon after Iraq's defeat. Iraqi Jewish exiles in the US began discussing lawsuits. Groups like the World Jewish Congress raised the issue with the US Congress and the British Parliament. Another organization, Justice for Jews from Arab Countries, issued a lengthy report entitled "Jewish Refugees from Arab Countries: The Case for Rights and Redress" in June 2003.

The publicity and lobbying worked: The US House of Representatives held hearings on Jewish emigrants from the Arab world in June 2003, and later passed a resolution of support for these emigrants in October. In March 2004, both the House and the Senate adopted a joint resolution calling on the US government to raise the issue whenever it brings up the Palestinian refugee question in diplomatic discussions.

Beyond talk, there even has been one specific success in the campaign to compensate former Iraqi Jews. In April 2004, French insurance giant AXA agreed to pay $130,000 to three Israelis who had bought policies decades ago when they were living in Iraq, and added that four others were eligible for payment. AXA's interest in this issue actually predates the invasion of Iraq. The firm agreed in late 2002 to look into old insurance policies taken out by Jews in the Arab world, and in October 2003 the Israeli Justice Ministry published in the Israeli press information from its files regarding approximately 200 cases of Iraqi Jewish insurance policies that were never paid out.

Nor has all the talk of Jewish property compensation been restricted to Israel and Western countries. Discussion of Jews and property has also surfaced within Iraq itself. In late December 2003, a source within the Iraqi Governing Council told the Jerusalem Post that the council was considering restitution of Jewish property seized as of 1951. Rumors of "foreign Jews," presumably former Iraqi citizens, seeking to buy land in Iraq, were rife. The exiled Iraqi Shiite cleric Ayatollah Qazim al-Husayni al-Hairi issued a fatwa from Qom, Iran, as a result. The decree sanctions death for any Jew seeking to buy land in Iraq.

Jewish property claims have also emerged elsewhere in the Arab world. Perhaps as part of Libya's attempts to emerge from its pariah status, Seif al-Islam Gadhafi, the son of Libyan leader Moammar Gadhafi, stated in March 2004 that the Libyan government would pay compensation for property seized from Jewish emigrants after 1948.

Turning over captured documents on Jewish property was not the first example of American sympathy with Israeli and Jewish interests in Iraq. In July 2003, the Jewish Agency, in coordination with the Israeli prime minister's office and other international Jewish organizations, was allowed to fly six, mainly elderly Jews from Baghdad to Israel. Despite their attempts to stop the illegal export of objects stolen from Iraqi museums, the Americans one month later handed over to Israeli authorities in Jordan the helmet of an Israeli aviator shot down over Iraq in June 1967 that they had taken from a Baghdad military museum. This past March, Secretary of State Colin Powell assured a delegation from the World Jewish Congress that he would work for restoring citizenship to Iraqi Jewish emigrants who were denationalized, as well as for property compensation.

Such attention on compensation could also heighten global attention on compensation and-or restitution of the property abandoned by Palestinian refugees in 1948 and later confiscated by Israel. So, too, might Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon's decision earlier this year that Israel would compensate any Jewish settlers evacuated from settlements in the West Bank and Gaza. Where might this money come from? Sharon's disengagement plan calls for an international body to take possession of the buildings left behind in evacuated Jewish settlements, and determine their value for potential compensation payments to Israel.

Whether all this attention on Jewish and Palestinian property abandoned under duress long ago will lead to concrete action, however, remains to be seen.
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*Michael R. Fischbach is a professor of history at Randolph-Macon College in Virginia, and a consultant on refugee property issues. His book, "Records of Dispossession: Palestinian Refugee Property and the Arab-Israeli Conflict," will soon be reprinted in the Middle East by the American University of Cairo Press. He wrote this commentary for THE DAILY STAR

Iraqi Documents on Israel Surface on a Cultural Hunt

New York Times - 7th May 2003

BAGHDAD, Iraq - What began today as a hunt for an ancient Jewish text at
secret police headquarters here wound up unearthing a trove of Iraqi
intelligence documents and maps relating to Israel as well as offers of
sales of uranium and other nuclear material to Iraq.

In one huge room in the flooded basement of the building, American
soldiers from MET Alpha, the "mobile exploitation team" that has been
searching for nuclear, biological and chemical weapons in Iraq for the
past three months, found maps featuring terrorist strikes against Israel
dating to 1991. Another map of Israel highlighted what the Iraqis
thought were the locations at which their Scud missiles had struck in
the Persian Gulf war of 1991. The strikes were designated by
yellow-and-red paper flowers placed atop the pinpointed Israeli
neighborhoods.

Team members floated out of the room a perfect mock-up of the Knesset,
the Israeli Parliament, as well as mock-ups of downtown Jerusalem and
official Israeli buildings in very fine detail. They also collected a
satellite picture of Dimona, Israel's nuclear complex, and a female
mannequin dressed in an Israeli Air Force uniform, standing in front of
a list of Israeli officers' ranks and insignia.

Of even greater interest to MET Alpha was a "top secret" intelligence
memo found in a room on another floor. Written in Arabic and dated May
20, 2001, the memo from the Iraqi intelligence station chief in an
African country described an offer by a "holy warrior" to sell uranium
and other nuclear material. The bid was rejected, the memo states,
because of the United Nations "sanctions situation." But the station
chief wrote that the source was eager to provide similar help at a more
convenient time.

The discoveries, which American military officers called significant but
which did not by themselves offer documentary evidence of direct Iraqi
links to terror attacks on Israel, were the serendipitous byproduct of
one of the strangest missions ever conducted by MET Alpha.

The search began this morning when 16 soldiers from MET Alpha teamed up
with members of the Iraqi National Congress, a leading opposition group
headed by Ahmad Chalabi, to search for what an intelligence source had
described as one of the most ancient copies of the Talmud in existence,
dating from the seventh century. The Talmud is a book of oral law, with
rabbinical commentaries and interpretations.

A former senior official of the Mukhabarat, Saddam Hussein's secret
police, had told the opposition group a few days earlier that he had
hidden the ancient Jewish book in the basement of his headquarters. The
building had been badly damaged by coalition bombing, said the man, who
is now working for the Iraqi National Congress, but he was still willing
to take a group there to recover it. MET Alpha hesitated. Its mission
was hunting for proof of unconventional weapons in Iraq, not saving
cultural and religious treasures. But Col. Richard R. McPhee, its
commander, decided that the historic Talmud was too valuable to leave
behind.

Early this morning, a seven-vehicle convoy pulled out of the Iraqi
Hunting Club, a former Baathist retreat that is now the headquarters for
the Iraqi National Congress. Accompanied by members of the Office of
Reconstruction and Humanitarian Assistance, MET Alpha's chaplain, who
has a strong interest in religious texts, and a reporter, the group
arrived at Mukhabarat headquarters only to find the section of the
building in which the precious document was said to be stored under four
feet of murky, fetid water. Dead animals floated on the surface. The
stairwell down to the muck was littered with shards of glass, pieces of
smashed walls and other bombing debris.

Temporarily daunted by the overpowering stench, MET Alpha's leader,
Chief Warrant Officer Richard L. Gonzales, and two other MET Alpha
soldiers eventually collected themselves and plunged into the mire in
search of the holy text as the team chaplain shook his head in
disbelief.

What they found instead of the precious book was what the former Iraqi
intelligence official said was the operations center of the Mukhabarat's
Israel-Palestine department. Two Iraqi National Congress members joined
the soldiers in the water as they inched their way by flashlight through
the 50-foot hallway to the rooms where they happened upon the
intelligence documents.

Slogging down the dank hallway, the soldiers reached a room where they
found hundreds of books floating in the foul water. There they rescued
three bundles of older Jewish books, including a Babylonian Talmud from
Vilna, accounting books of the Jewish community of Baghdad between 1949
and 1953 and dozens of more modern scholarly books mostly in Arabic and
Hebrew - "Generals of Israel," by Moshe Ben-Shaul; David Ben-Gurion's
"Memoirs"; and "Semites and Anti-Semites," by the Princeton scholar
Bernard Lewis.

But no seventh-century Talmud.

In the end, MET Alpha collected and turned over one large truckload of
intelligence documents to the Defense Intelligence Agency for analysis.
As for the missing Talmud, Mr. Gonzales said his team believed that it
might still be at the bottom of the Mukhabarat's flooded basement. That
view was reinforced by the recovery of a wooden box with Hebrew writing,
which the former Iraqi intelligence officer said might have contained
the priceless artifact.