Supreme Court: No such thing as 'Israeliness'
Israel's Supreme Court has ruled that there is
no such things as 'Israeliness' and that Jews have to be so designated on their identity cards.
Professor Uzzi Ornan, a
longtime proponent of separation of religion and state, and journalist
Uri Avnery, recently spearheaded an appeal seeking to reverse a lower
court's ruling that denied their request to be listed as members of the
Israeli nation in the government's population registry. The Supreme
Court disagreed with the lower court's claim that this matter was not
justiciable, but it nevertheless upheld the decision, saying that the
plaintiffs had failed to demonstrate the existence of an Israeli nation.
It added that this debate should be held and resolved outside the court
as part of the country's political discourse.
Ornan is the founder of "I am Israeli," a
nonprofit organization created several years ago whose members claim
they are part of an Israeli nation. In 2000, Ornan asked the Israeli
Interior Ministry to list him as a member of the Israeli nation under
the rubric "ethnicity" in government-issued identity cards. Until
recently this section denoted the bearers' ethnic group, for example
Jewish, Arab, Druze or Circassian, but in light of various legal
challenges (the most recent one led by Ornan in 2003), identity cards no
longer make explicit reference to ethnicity (that section comprises
only asterisks).
The government's population registry still
includes that indicator for internal use and in some occasions it may be
officially stated, but not on personal documentation.
Ornan and his friends can't escape it. They're Jews. Deal with it.
I've discussed 'Israeliness' several times - see
here,
here and
here.
Labels: Israeliness, Supreme Court
Israel's first political assassination
Israel's first political assassination was not the murder of Yitzchak Rabin in 1995, nor was it the murder of British Count Bernadot by the Irgun in the 1940's. Israel's first political assassination was 89 years ago yesterday - June 30, 1924 - and it was carried out by the Hagana, the force that eventually became the IDF. The victim was a Dutch poet, journalist and legal scholar named Jacob Israel de Haan, and he was murdered because
he was an anti-Zionist.
Let's go to the videotape.
Initially, de Haan was involved with Zionist circles in his new home. He
helped establish the Jerusalem Law Classes in 1919, where he lectured,
worked as a correspondent for a Dutch newspaper, and continued writing
poetry. Soon, he met and found a kindred spirit in Rabbi Yosef Chaim
Sonnenfeld, the founder of the ultra-Orthodox, anti-Zionist Edah Haredit
community, and became his political spokesman. He also is said to have
taken an interest in the young boys of Jerusalem, both Jewish and Arab.
Within a short time, de Haan became critical of the secular nature of
the Zionist movement and of its relationship with the Orthodox
community. He also became convinced that it was on a collision course
with the indigenous Arab population of the land.
In
1922, the same year that Jacob de Haan defended Agudath Israel, the
Haredi political movement, in a legal trial over its refusal to pay a
new excise tax levied by Zionist authorities on matzot before Passover,
he also met with Lord Northcliffe, founder of the Daily Mail newspaper
in London, when the latter visited the region. He shared his
anti-Zionist views with Northcliffe and those views were reported back
in the United Kingdom. Soon, de Haan was offered work as a correspondent
for the tabloid Daily Express. De Haan also met with Hashemite leader
Hussein bin Ali, the King of Hejaz, to discuss the establishment of a
Palestinian state.
By
now, de Haan had become a liability to the Zionist movement, and
especially dangerous because of the platform he now had for spreading
his views in London, where critical decisions about Palestine were
made. In Jerusalem, he became persona non grata among Zionists,
including his law students. One anecdote has him walking with a Dutch
visitor, who observed that as people passed them into the street, they
were spitting on the sidewalk. The visitor thought this was a sign of
disrespect, to which de Haan responded, according to Dutch historian
Ludy Giebels: “"Oh no, they spit on the street out of respect for you,
your presence. Otherwise they would have spit in my face."
Early
on the morning of June 30, 1924, as he left the synagogue in Shaare
Zedek hospital, on Jaffa Road, de Haan was shot three times. He died
immediately.
The
British authorities offered a reward for information that would lead to
his killer, but no one was ever tried for the crime. The killing was
thought to have been ordered by the Haganah, but it was only in the
1980s that two Israeli journalists, Shlomo Nakdimon and Shaul Mayzlish,
received an admission of guilt from Israeli businessman Avraham Tehomi,
who was then living in Hong Kong.
Tehomi
told the journalists that he had been acting on orders of the Haganah,
specifically of Yitzhak Ben-Zvi, an officer in the militia and a
political activist, later the second president of the State of Israel:
"I have done what the Haganah decided had to be done. And nothing was
done without the order of Yitzhak Ben-Zvi ... I have no regrets because he [de Haan] wanted to destroy our whole idea of Zionism."
Although Neturei Karta are considered very much a fringe group even among Haredim today, the influence of the de Haan assassination continues. More
here.
Labels: David Ben Gurion, Haredim, IDF, Israeliness, Neturei Karta, Rav Yosef Chaim Sonnenfeld
The Haredi draft controversy is just another round in a very old battle
34 years ago, when I was a
bochur (unmarried man) in a religious Zionist yeshiva, Golda Meir passed away. As is often the case when someone of her political stature passes away, Meir's funeral was delayed for foreign dignitaries to arrive. Our
rebbe (rabbi), who shall remain nameless, got up in front of our
shiur (class) the next morning, and gave us a lesson in Zionist history that I have never forgotten.
"It's good for her to suffer," he told us. "She deserves to suffer," he emphasized. "And suffer she will because the hardest time for a person's soul is the time between death and burial," he assured us.
The group of 25-30 boys, mostly from religious Zionist homes in the US and UK, looked at him in shock. "Rabbi," we asked, "how can you say such things about Golda, who is a folk hero among Jews abroad?"
He then proceeded to tell us why 'Golda' deserved to suffer. 'Golda' had been in charge of youth immigration in the 1950's. It was she who was personally responsible for the 'reeducation' of so many Jews of Sephardic extraction to become 'Hebrews' and 'Israelis' rather than Jews. For that, he told us, she deserved to suffer.
(As an aside, please allow me to add, as I told my
rebbe when he came to visit me during my father's
shiva, that I learned another lesson from that particular morning's harangue: When someone dies, if you are concerned for them, you should try to bury them as soon as possible. Both of my parents passed away in the early hours of Friday mornings seven years apart. Both funerals took place on Friday afternoons, despite the fact that my parents are buried in the US where it is rare to have a funeral so quickly).
I am about to link to an article that I consider important to understanding the current controversy about drafting Haredim. It is very long (and most of the commenters on the original article obviously did not read the entire article). But it teaches important context about why many Haredim don't serve in the army and the real goals behind the drive to draft them. I am going to quote a small part of the article, and urge you to
read the whole thing. I will add more at the end, so don't just click through from here
(Hat Tip:
Aryeh Z).
The secular/political Zionist dream was to create – along with a Jewish
homeland – a completely new definition of the Jew and the Jewish People;
a Jewishness that unambiguously excluded the concept of a covenantal
people loyal to the Torah and the commandments. In other words, the
Judaism that had sustained the Nation of Israel for the previous 3,400
years was to be discarded and replaced with a modernistic amalgamation
of nationalism, socialism, enlightened western culture, and ethnic
Jewish identity.
...
This obsession with creating a “new Jew” even trumped the basic
values of Jewish brotherhood, the imperative that all Jews are
responsible for one another, and that nothing takes precedence over saving lives. David Ben-Gurion shockingly wrote the following in 1938, one month after Kristellnacht:
“If I knew it was possible to save all [Jewish] children of
Germany by their transfer to England and only half of them by
transferring them to Eretz-Yisrael, I would choose the latter—-because
we are faced not only with the accounting of these [Jewish] children but
also with the historical accounting of the Jewish People.”
...
It is against this backdrop that the conflict arose over mandatory
army service. Under no circumstances was the orthodox community prepared
to put their young sons – during the most impressionable years of their
lives (18-21 years of age) – in the hands of a government that looked
at their way of life with disdain, contempt, and outright hatred; a
government that was even prepared to murder other Jews to achieve their
goals.
David Ben-Gurion realized that any attempt to force the issue would
result, literally, in civil war. The government reluctantly amended the
draft law to exclude orthodox men who were learning full time in
Yeshivot (rabbinical seminaries). However, none of these men would be
permitted to work legally unless they did Army service. This act of
spiteful cruelty was a typical outgrowth of the unbridled arrogance of
Ben-Gurion and his ilk. The message to the Hareidi community was the
following:
If you don’t do it our way, we will strip you of your
basic human dignity; that is to say, the ability to work and support
oneself and one’s family. If you want to live your way of life you will
be forced to live on either government handouts or charity.
In other words, the Hareidim effectively became 2nd
class citizens in the new State of Israel. After forcing the Hareidi
community into this situation and forbidding them to work unless they
toed the secular-Zionist line, they then accused them of being
“parasites” because they didn’t work!
The “parasite” canard along with the accusation that the Hareidim
refuse to “share the burden” of serving in the army, has been used as a
stick with which to beat the Hareidi community since the founding of the
State of Israel. It has also been effectively used by secular
ideologues to demonize Hareidim among non-observant Israelis. Imagine
how different it would have been if instead of doing everything in his
power to marginalize the Hareidi community Ben-Gurion had held out his
hand in brotherly love and said the following:
“We are brothers, the sons of one man” (Gen. 42:13) All of us are
here because we are Jews. We all love the land of Israel and we all
agree that a Jew must serve the needs of the Jewish people. Our sons
will serve by joining the army, your sons will serve by keeping alive
our moral and spiritual legacy by studying Torah. After both complete
their years of service they are free to work and become productive
members of our society.
How different it could have been indeed.
The one fact that the author, Rabbi Moshe Averick, left out is that the Chazon Ish (Rabbi Avraham Yeshayahu Karelitz), who made the deal with Ben Gurion over the Haredi draft 60 years or so ago, offered to send all the yeshiva boys to the army if the army would not have women. Since the goal was and is, as Rabbi Averick states, to create a 'new kind of Jew,' Ben Gurion turned him down.
As many of you know (because some of you have even met me there), I attend a weekly Torah class in Jerusalem. The rabbi who gives the class once told us that he met a man who knew someone who had asked David Ben Gurion why he allowed a religious education system to be created in the new state at all. Ben Gurion responded that he figured that within a generation, all attachment to traditional Judaism would die out anyway, so why fight with them. On this, as on many other matters, Ben Gurion was clearly wrong.
Read the whole thing.
Labels: Chazon Ish, David Ben Gurion, Haredim, IDF, Israeliness, Naftali Bennett, Rav Yosef Chaim Sonnenfeld
20% of Israeli Math PhD's move abroad
JPost reports that 20% of Israeli PhD's in Mathematics are
leaving the country and moving abroad.
Twenty percent of those who received PhDs in math from Israeli higher learning
institutions from 1985 to 2005 had been living abroad for at least three years
as of 2011, according to a survey released this week by the Central Bureau of
Statistics.
The number of graduates from Israeli academia had steadily
increased from 21,000 in 1985 to 106,000 in 2005. The study focused on the
360,000 Israelis who obtained academic degrees during that 20-year
period.
As of 2011, 4.9 percent of them had been living outside of Israel
for three or more years. The percentage of those who left the country is even
higher among those with PhDs – 10.5%. The percentage of those with medical
degrees who left the country as of last year stands at 7.2%.
In 2011,
6.7% of those with medical degrees or PhDs in math and engineering returned to
Israel.
Among those with bachelor’s degrees, 4.8% of them sought
employment abroad as did 4.2% of those with master’s degrees.
The data
also showed that the percentage of PhDs in scientific fields and in engineering
who lived abroad for over three years is close to four times higher than that of
PhDs in social sciences, and most of those graduated from universities not
colleges.
What the survey doesn't ask is why. There's one small hint.
Out of the seven Israeli universities, the Weizmann Institute
of Science has the most graduates – 17.8% – going abroad, and Bar-Ilan
University the least – 2.9%.
It's not surprising that fewer Bar Ilan students leave because Bar Ilan includes as
part of its mission,
The University aims to forge closer links between Torah and universal
studies, "to blend tradition with modern technologies and scholarship,
and teach the compelling ethics of Jewish heritage to all... to
synthesize the ancient and modern, the sacred and the material, the
spiritual and the scientific."
As you might imagine, that means that Bar Ilan has a reputation for having a higher percentage of religious Jewish students than is the case at other Israeli universities. And it shows.
Israel suffers from one of the highest tax burdens in the world. The Left would have us believe that's because of the 'settlers' and the ultra-Orthodox. But it's neither of the above. There are still a myriad of inefficiencies built into the Israeli economy from the early days of the state that raise prices, stifle competition, and give a sense of entitlement that leads to higher taxes just to keep the country running. Here are a few examples:
Dairy products, fruit and vegetables are still solely marketed by a conglomerate owned by the Kibbutzim.
Everyone gets a monthly child subsidy that's equal regardless of your income. It depends only on the number of children you have.
Most imports are structured in a manner that lines someone's pockets and costs everyone else money. For example, there is one exclusive importer for each automobile make. That's because getting an import license here is almost impossible.
This is the only country in the world where the banks make the majority of their profits from fees paid by ordinary consumers (you and me).
While the level of medical care to which the average citizen has access is astoundingly good, a doctor can make tens of times more money by moving abroad. That tradeoff would actually be fair if you assume that the doctor has to make less money for many years because he gets a heavily subsidized education (university tuition here runs about $2500 per year, and if you maintain over a 90 average, you generally don't pay after the first year). But this isn't a closed market, and nothing stops a doctor from getting an education here and then taking it abroad to practice more profitably.
The cost of living here is simply higher, and if your decision to stay or leave is purely a function of economics, you are likely to leave if you have the opportunity to move abroad (The article specifically mentions American immigrants - who keep their US citizenship - moving back to the US. Given what I have just told you, is anyone really surprised?).
What's the answer? The answer is a stronger education in Jewish values. '
Israeliness' is not going to motivate anyone to stay here.
Labels: Israeli economy, Israeliness, Judaism
