[Peace-discuss] Jewish Peace News

[David Green]

As has been widely reported, a gunman in Jerusalem opened fire at the Mercaz Harav yeshiva yesterday, killing 8 students (most of them children) and wounding at least 9. At a time like this, there are two different sets responsibilities to the victims: one is to mourn the brutal deaths of these boys and young men. At the same time, we need to work to prevent this sort of thing from happening again, which requires us to understand the context in which this act of terrorism occurred. Failing to understand this atrocity within the overall context of the occupation reinforces the right-wing line that Palestinian violence is motivated simply by anti-Semitism, blood hatred, or Biblical feuds. 

Although the gunman’s specific motives are unclear, this killing comes at a moment that the New York Times somewhat delicately describes as a time of “tension”. Israel’s latest attack on Gaza has left over 130 Palestinians dead, half of them civilians. Just yesterday, a 20 day-old infant was buried after being shot in the head by Israeli soldiers. Another contextualizing factor is the nature of the yeshiva where the attack took place, a key institution in the militant settlers’ movement, which has been stealing land from Palestinians in the occupied territories for decades, believing God intended the land for Jews. 

These horrific killings are utterly unjustifiable, and Hamas’ praise for the operation is both contemptible and chilling. It is important not to let this sort illegitimate act of terrorist violence obscure the legitimate and urgent grievances of the Palestinian people under occupation and in exile. It is vital to keep this in mind, because whatever the specific motivations of the gunman might have been, terrorist violence like this is almost always a symptom of Israel’s expansionist policies and is unlikely to end until the occupation is over. 

Below are the following pieces: 

1) A contextualization by Ali Abunimah 

2) An explanation about the nature of the yeshiva from Ha’aretz 

3) An article reporting the condemnation of the killings by the Organization of the Islamic Conference 

4) A statement by the Coalition Against the Gaza Siege 

Judith Norman 

A DEFEATED POLICY, NOT A DEFEATED PEOPLE 

By Ali Abunimah, The Electronic Intifada, 7 March 2008 http://electronicin tifada.net/ v2/article9381. shtml 

Compared with the international silence that surrounded Israel's recent massacres of Palestinian civilians in the Occupied Gaza Strip, condemnation and condolences for the victims of the shooting attack that killed eight students at the Mercaz HaRav Yeshiva in Jerusalem has been swift. 

"I have just spoken with [Israeli] Prime Minister [Ehud] Olmert to extend my deepest condolences to the victims, their families, and to the people of Israel," US President George W. Bush said. UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon added his "condemnation" and "condolences, " as did EU High Representative Javier Solana. 

The day before the Jerusalem attack, Amira Abu 'Aser was buried in Gaza. She had lived just 20 days on this earth before being shot in the head by Israeli occupation forces who attacked the house of friends she and her family were visiting. Needless to say, she had not been firing rockets at Sderot when she was killed. One of the house's inhabitants was found the next day, shot dead and his head crushed by an army jeep, an apparent victim of an extrajudicial murder by Israeli forces. (http://electronicin tifada.net/ v2/article9375. shtml) 

But confirming their status in the eyes of the "international community" as less than complete human beings, neither Amira's killing, nor any of the dozens of Palestinian civilian victims of Israel's onslaught in Gaza have merited condemnation or condolences. 

The fallacy that lies behind the differential concern for the lives of innocent Israelis and Palestinians is that the massacre in Jerusalem and the massacres in Gaza can be separated. Israeli deaths are "terrorism," while Palestinian deaths are merely an unfortunate consequence of the fight against "terrorism." But the two are intricately linked, and what happened in Jerusalem is a direct consequence of what Israel has been doing to the Palestinians for decades. 

Let me be clear that the killing of civilians, Israeli or Palestinian, is wrong, repugnant, and cannot bring this one-hundred- year war caused by the Zionist colonization of Palestine to an end. There will be an Israeli propaganda effort -- as always -- to present Palestinian violence as being simply motivated by hatred, and divorced from the context of brutal occupation that Palestinians live under. What greater proof could you need than an attack on religious students, devoting their life to the study of the Torah? 

We cannot expect much analysis in the media of why the Mercaz HaRav yeshiva might have been chosen as a target. Was it mere coincidence that the school, named for Rabbi Abraham Isaac Kook, and led after his death by his son Rabbi Zvi Yehuda Kook, is the ideological cradle of the militant, Jewish supremacist settler movement Gush Emunim? 

Unlike other sects in Israel which sought exemption of their students from military service, Gush Emunim encouraged its followers to join the army and become the armed wing of religious nationalist Zionism. Gush Emunim settlers, many of them, like Moshe Levinger, graduates of Mercaz HaRav, founded the most extreme and racist settlements in the Occupied West Bank, including the notorious colonies in and near Hebron whose inhabitants have made life miserable for Palestinians in the city and forced many of them out of their homes. It is the militant settlers of Gush Emunim who still honor Baruch Goldstein who murdered 29 Palestinians in Hebron in February 1994. It is in Hebron that the Gush Emunim settlers spray "Arabs to the gas chambers" on Palestinian houses.

It is possible that the Mercaz HaRav gunman did not know or care about any of this, that any target he could identify as Israeli would have satisfied his desire to exact revenge. 

In 2002, Israeli army chief Moshe Yaalon declared that "the Palestinians must be made to understand in the deepest recesses of their consciousness that they are a defeated people." This would be achieved by the massive and constant application of force until they got the message. The same philosophy was elaborated in 2004 by Professor Arnon Soffer, one of the architects, with former Israeli prime minister Ariel Sharon, of the 2005 Gaza "disengagement. " 

Soffer, an avid supporter of turning Gaza into a hermetically- sealed pen for unwanted Palestinians, explained that if Palestinians fire a single rocket over the fence into Israel, "we will fire 10 in response. And women and children will be killed, and houses will be destroyed. After the fifth such incident, Palestinian mothers won't allow their husbands to shoot Qassams [rockets], because they will know what's waiting for them." 

Soffer predicted that in a few years' time, "when 2.5 million people live in a closed-off Gaza, it's going to be a human catastrophe. Those people will become even bigger animals than they are today, with the aid of an insane fundamentalist Islam." With Palestinians closed in, "The pressure at the border will be awful," Soffer predicted. "It's going to be a terrible war. So, if we want to remain alive, we will have to kill and kill and kill. All day, every day." 

To be fair, Soffer did display a human side: "The only thing that concerns me is how to ensure that the boys and men who are going to have to do the killing will be able to return home to their families and be normal human beings" ("It's the demography, stupid," The Jerusalem Post, 21 May 2004). 

For decades Israel has been exercizing with ever-escalating brutality this deliberate strategy to crush through force and starvation a civilian population in rebellion against colonial rule. To Israel's vexation, the Palestinians are not playing their part. After sixty years of expulsions, massacres, assassinations of their leaders, colonization, torture, and mass imprisonment, the Palestinians have utterly failed to understand that they are a "defeated people." 

The vast majority of Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank endure unprecedented oppression by the Israeli army and settlers without resorting to violence in response, but they maintain an inextinguishable determination to endure until they regain their rights. If the methods the Palestinian resistance has sometimes used are reprehensible, they have also been typical for anti-colonial resistance movements throughout time, as William Polk shows in his book Violent Politics: A History of Insurgency, Terrorism and Guerilla War from the American Revolution to Iraq, and Robert Pape demonstrated through his study of suicide bombing in Dying to Win. 

Is it not time for the rest of the world to step in and force Israel at last to understand the same thing, so that the senseless bloodshed can finally stop and all the people of the country -- Israelis and Palestinians -- can begin to imagine a future other than an endless parade of funerals? 

-- Co-founder of The Electronic Intifada, Ali Abunimah is author of One Country: A Bold Proposal to End the Israeli-Palestinian Impasse (Metropolitan Books, 2006). 

------------ --------- 

Mercaz Harav - the flagship of national-religious yeshivas 
By Yair Sheleg 
Ha’aretz 
07/03/2008 
http://www.haaretz. com/hasen/ spages/961727. html 

The Mercaz Harav rabbinic college is the most prominent yeshiva in the religious Zionist world. It trained the movement's leading rabbis as well as many yeshiva heads, city rabbis, and teachers in religious colleges and high schools. The school was central in shaping the evolution of religious Zionism. 

As the flagship of national-religious yeshivas, the religious right is bound to attribute greater symbolic meaning to a terrorist attack here than anywhere else. 

Founded in 1924 by Rabbi Abraham Isaac Kook, then chief Ashkenazi rabbi during the British Mandate, it is seen as the first yeshiva to be Zionist in spirit. 

Rabbi Kook called it "the central world yeshiva," wishing to set it as a model for a new yeshiva concept, integrating traditional Talmud studies with Jewish philosophy, Bible and even Jewish history, geography and literature. The last three subjects were never actually taught there. 

After its founder's death in 1935 it was named Mercaz Harav after him, and became synonymous with Rabbi Kook's teachings. 

In its first decades the college had few students and at times it was not clear whether it would survive. The turning point came in the '50s, when graduates of Bnei Akiva religious schools and high-school yeshivas seeking higher religious education flocked to Mercaz Harav, the only Zionist yeshiva. 

The prominent Beni Akiva rabbi Moshe Zvi Neria, a student of Rabbi Kook's, encouraged students to go to Mercaz Harav, which was headed from 1952 by Rabbi Abraham Kook's son, Rabbi Zvi Yehuda Kook, until his death in 1982. 

The foundations for the religious settlements in the West Bank were forged in Mercaz Harav, whose student Hanan Porat set out to restore the Jewish settlement in Gush Etzion immediately after the Six-Day War. The founders of Gush Emunim, a religious political movement that encouraged Jewish settlement of land they believe God promised the Jews, came from Mercaz Harav after the Yom Kippur War. 

Rabbi Kook encouraged his students to go out and fight for the settlements in the West Bank. He himself took active part in these struggles. 

Rabbi Kook was very strict about modest clothes for women and the separation of men and women. 

After his death in 1982, his successor Rabbi Avraham Shapira, who also served as chief rabbi, clashed with Kook's favorite student Rabbi Zvi Tau. Tau's people said that Shapira, who came from an ultra-Orthodox background, was wiping out the college's unique theological character and turning it into another run-of-the-mill yeshiva. 

The clash led to an official split in 1997, after Shapira introduced to the yeshiva a teachers' training institute, which Tau and his people saw as an "idol in the temple." 

Tau and his people left and established the Har Mor rabbinic college, which became quite powerful and dominant. Last year, after Shapira's death, his son Rabbi Yaakov Shapira succeeded him as yeshiva head. 

The yeshiva's well-known graduates include Rabbi Haim Druckman, Rabbi Dov Lior, Rabbi Yaakov Ariel, Rabbi Zfania Drori, Rabbi Moshe Levinger, Rabbi Shlomo Aviner, Rabbi Yoel Bin-Noon and Rabbi Hanan Porat. Other graduates include the Irgun's first commander David Raziel and Maariv newspaper founder Azriel Carlebach. 

Today, the yeshiva has about 500 students, including 200 students in the yeshiva's kollel (post-graduate division). 

------------ -- 

http://www.africasi a.com/services/ news/newsitem. php?area= mideast&item= 080307161534. 2n3583ya. php 

07/03/2008 16:15 JEDDAH, Saudi Arabia, March 7 (AFP) Islamic organisation condemns Jerusalem attack 

The Islamic world's biggest political bloc on Friday condemned the killing of eight Israeli teenagers in a Jerusalem religious school, saying it abhorred "violence and terror." 

In a rare reaction to an anti-Israeli attack, the 57-member Organisation of the Islamic Conference expressed "grave concern over, and condemned the recent killings of students in the west Jerusalem," a statement released here said. 

OIC Secretary General Ekmeleddin Ihsanoglu also "reiterated the position of the OIC against any act of violence and terror anywhere in the world," the statement added. 

The OIC includes Iran, which is steadfastly hostile to Israel. 

But Ihsanoglu said he hoped "that this condemnation of the OIC would open up the eyes of those who remained silent during the violence directed against innocent civilians, including children of Palestine." 

"This vicious cycle of killing must be stopped," the statement said. 

He urged "all parties concerned to act with calm and restraint in the face of this tragic event." 

Eight students, most aged 15 and 16, were shot dead late Thursday at the Merkaz Harav Yeshiva, a theological school in predominantly Jewish west Jerusalem. Another nine were wounded. 

The gunman, a Palestinian from east Jerusalem, was shot dead by police. 

-------- 

The Coalition Against the Gaza Siege 
Press Release, March 7, 2008 

Bloodshed does not compensate for bloodshed-Ceasefire Now! 

The Coalition Against the Gaza Siege calls for an immediate end to the killing and violence, on both sides of the conflict. Bloodshed does not compensate for bloodshed, and revenge is no solution. 

Any attack on, wounding or killing of unarmed civilians - as happened in the attack on the Merkaz HaRav Yeshiva as during the IDF attacks and bombings of Gaza and in the shooting of missiles at Sderot, Ashkelon and the Western Negev - must end forthwith. 

It is the civilians on both sides who are exposed to harm and who pay the full price for the manoeuvres of the political and military leaderships. 

We call upon the leaderships, of both sides, including all organizations and parties, to cease all violence immediately. 

We call upon the international community and the world public opinion to firmly demand an end to the mutual killing and bloodshed. 

In order to achieve that, we call for a full and mutual ceasefire, as a first step negotiating an end to the occupation and an end to the conflict between the two peoples, to a full peace which is the only hope for our future. 

Contact: Adi Dagan 0508-575730, Adam Keller 0506-709603, Angela Godfrey 054-7366393, Yaakov Manor 050-5733276 

............ ......... ......... ......... ......... ......... ....... 
-------- 
Jewish Peace News editors: 
Joel Beinin 
Racheli Gai 
Rela Mazali 
Sarah Anne Minkin 
Judith Norman 
Lincoln Shlensky 
Alistair Welchman 
------- 


       
---------------------------------
Looking for last minute shopping deals?  Find them fast with Yahoo! Search.
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://lists.chambana.net/mailman/archive/peace-discuss/attachments/20080310/aabcee31/attachment-0001.htm