Download With Israel Shahak`s Death, A Prophetic Voice Is Stilled

With Israel Shahak’s Death, A Prophetic Voice Is Stilled
By Allan C. Brownfeld*
WASHINGTON REPORT ON MIDDLE EAST AFFAIRS, October 2001
The death of Israel Shahak in July has taken from us a genuinely prophetic Jewish voice, one
which ardently advocated democracy and human rights, and rejected the ethno-centrism which
has come to dominate both the state of Israel and much of organized Judaism—not only in Israel
but in the U.S. and other Western countries as well.
This writer first met Israel Shahak on a visit to Jerusalem in 1973. We kept in contact ever
since, meeting when he visited the United States. He wrote a number of very thoughtful articles
for Issues, a journal which I edit.
In many ways, Shahak was a victim of history who tried to learn from his own experience and
apply what he learned to others. A Holocaust survivor, he preferred to emphasize his opposition
to racism and oppression in any form and in any country.
After being liberated from the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp in 1945, Shahak and his
mother emigrated to British Mandate Palestine. He went on to have a distinguished career as a
professor of chemistry at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, and was repeatedly voted as the
most admired teacher by students.
Following the 1967 war, Shahak became a leading member of the Israeli League for Human and
Civil Rights and was elected chairman in 1970. He devoted the rest of his life to opposing
Israel’s inhumane treatment inflicted upon its Arab citizens and upon Palestinians in occupied
territories.
While American newspapers, both Jewish and general, completely ignored the death of Israel
Shahak, a July 6 obituary in The Guardian of London by Elfi Pallis notes that, “Shortly after the
1967 six-day war, he [Shahak] concluded from observation that Israel was not yet a democracy;
it was treating the newly occupied Palestinians with shocking brutality. For the next three
decades, he spent all his spare time on attempts to change this. He contributed to various
small…papers, but when this proved to have little impact, he decided to alert journalists,
academics and human rights campaigners abroad. From his small, bare West Jerusalem flat
poured forth reports with titles such as ‘Torture in Israel,’ and ‘Collective Punishment in the West
Bank.’ Based exclusively on mainstream Israeli sources, all were painstakingly translated into
English.
Shahak never let up, he never became blasé.
“World coverage gradually improved, but Shahak never let up, he never became blasé. Watching
him read out a small news item about an Israeli farmer who had set his dogs on a group of
Palestinian children was to see a man in almost physical distress. Shahak came to believe that
these human rights incidents stemmed from Israel’s religious interpretation of Jewish history,
which led it to ignore centuries of Arab life in the country, and to disregard non-Jewish rights.
Confiscation, every schoolchild was told, was ‘the redemption of the land’ from those who did
not belong there. To Shahak, this was straightforward racism, damaging both sides.”
Israel Shahak’s vision can perhaps best be found in his books, Jewish History, Jewish Religion
(Pluto Press, 1994) and Jewish Fundamentalism in Israel (Pluto Press, 1994) written with Norton
Mezvinsky. (See Mezvinsky’s remembrance of Israel Shahak in the Aug./Sept. issue of the
Washington Report, p. 11.)
In Jewish History, Jewish Religion, Shahak points out that while Islamic fundamentalism is
vilified in the West, Jewish fundamentalism goes largely ignored. He argues that classical
Judaism is used to justify Israeli policies which he views as xenophobic and similar in nature to
the anti-Semitism suffered by Jews in other times and places. Nowhere can this be seen more
clearly, in his view, than in Jewish attitudes to the non-Jewish peoples of Israel and the Middle
East.
Shahak draws on the Talmud and rabbinical laws, and points to the fact that today’s extremism
finds its sources in classical texts which, if they are not properly understood, will lead to
religious warfare, harmful to men and women of all religious beliefs.
This book, Shahak wrote, “is, in a way, a continuation of my political activities as an Israeli Jew.
Those activities began in 1965-66 with a protest which caused a considerable scandal at that
time: I had personally witnessed an ultra-religious Jew refuse to allow his phone to be used on
Allen C. Brownfeld, p. 1
the Sabbath in order to call an ambulance for a non-Jew, who happened to have collapsed in his
Jerusalem neighborhood. Instead of simply publishing the incident in the press, I asked for a
meeting with the members of the Rabbinical Court of Jerusalem, which is composed of rabbis
nominated by the State of Israel. I asked them whether such behavior was consistent with their
interpretation of the Jewish religion. They answered that the Jew in question had behaved
correctly, indeed piously, and backed their statement by referring to a passage in an
authoritative compendium of Talmudic laws, written in this country. I reported the incident in
the main Hebrew daily, Ha’aretz, whose publication of the story caused a media scandal.”
The Talmudic World View
In the end, Shahak reported, “Neither the Israeli, nor the diaspora, rabbinical authorities ever
reversed their ruling that Jews should not violate the Sabbath in order to save the life of a
Gentile…It became apparent to me, as, drawing on knowledge acquired in my youth, I began to
study the Talmudic laws governing the relations between Jews and non-Jews, that neither
Zionism, including its seemingly secular part, nor Israeli politics since the inception of the State
of Israel, nor particularly the policies of the Jewish supporters of Israel in the diaspora, could be
understood unless the deeper influence of those laws, and the world view which they both create
and express is taken into account.”
The Hatanya—the fundamental book of the Habbad movement, which is one of the most
important branches of Hasidism—declares that all non-Jews are totally Satanic creatures “in
whom there is nothing absolutely good.” Even a non-Jewish embryo is said to be qualitatively
different from a Jewish one. The very existence of a non-Jew is “inessential,” whereas all of
creation was created solely for the sake of the Jews.
Shahak points out that a widespread misunderstanding about Orthodox Judaism is that it is a
“biblical religion,” that the Old Testament has in Judaism the same central place and legal
authority that the Bible has for Protestants and even Roman Catholics. He notes that, “…the
interpretation is rigidly fixed—but by the Talmud rather than by the Bible itself. Many, perhaps
most, biblical verses prescribing religious acts and obligations are understood by classical
Judaism and by present-day Orthodoxy in a sense which is quite distinct from, or even contrary
to, their literal meaning as understood by Christians or other readers of the Old Testament, who
see only the plain text.”
In the Decalogue itself, the Eighth Commandment, “Thou Shalt not steal” (Exodus 20:15) is
taken to be a prohibition against “stealing” (that is, kidnapping) a Jewish person. “The reason,”
Shahak writes, “is that according to the Talmud all acts forbidden by the Decalogue are capital
offenses. Stealing property is not a capital offense (while the kidnapping of Gentiles by Jews is
allowed by Talmudic law)—hence the interpretation.”
In numerous cases, Shahak shows, general terms such as “thy fellow,” “stranger,” or even
“man” are taken to have an exclusivist and chauvinistic meaning. The famous verse “Thou shalt
love thy fellow as thyself” (Leviticus 19:18) is understood by classical (and present-day
Orthodox) Judaism “as an injunction to love one’s fellow Jew, not any fellow human. Similarly,
the verse ‘neither shalt thou stand against the blood of thy fellow’ (Leviticus 19:16) is supposed
to mean that one must not stand idly by when the life (‘blood’) of a fellow Jew is in danger; but
a Jew…is in general forbidden to save the life of a Gentile, because ‘he is not thy fellow.’”
The differentiation in appropriate treatment for Jews and non-Jews to be found in Talmudic
commentaries is, Shahak shows, not simply an academic question. Instead, it relates to current
Israeli government practices which are justified by reference to religious law.
A book published by the Central Region Command of the Israeli army, whose area includes the
West Bank, contains the following declaration by the command’s chief chaplain: “When our
forces come across civilians during a war or in hot pursuit or in a raid, so long as there is no
certainty that those civilians are incapable of harming our forces, then according to Halakah
[Jewish law] they may and even should be killed….Under no circumstances should an Arab be
trusted, even if he makes an impression of being civilized….In war, when our forces storm the
enemy, they are allowed and even enjoined by the Halakah to kill even good civilians….”
Many contemporary Israeli policies refer to Talmudic rules. Thus, Shahak declares, “The Halakah
forbids Jews to sell immovable property—fields and houses—in the Land of Israel to Gentiles. It
is therefore clear that—exactly as the leaders and sympathizers of Gush Emunim say—the whole
question of how the Palestinians ought to be treated is, according to the Halakah, simply a
question of Jewish power; if Jews have sufficient power then it is their religious duty to expel the
Palestinians….Maimonides declares; ‘When the Jews are more powerful than the Gentiles we are
Allen C. Brownfeld, p. 2
forbidden to let an idolater among us; even a temporary or itinerant trader shall not be allowed
to pass through our land.’”
Jewish Fundamentalism
In the book Jewish Fundamentalism in Israel, Shahak and co-author Norton Mezvinsky lament
the dramatic growth in recent years of Jewish fundamentalism which has manifested itself in
opposition to the peace process and played a role in the assassination of Prime Minister Yitzhak
Rabin and the murder of 29 Muslims at prayer by the American-born fundamentalist, Baruch
Goldstein.
They cite, for example, Rabbi Yitzhak Ginsburgh, who wrote a chapter of a book in praise of
Goldstein and what he did. An immigrant to Israel from the U.S., Ginsburgh speaks freely of
Jews’ genetic-based spiritual superiority over non-Jews; “If you saw two people drowning, a Jew
and a non-Jew, the Torah says you save the Jewish life first….Something is special about Jewish
DNA….If a Jew needs a liver, can you take the liver of an innocent non-Jew passing by to save
him? The Torah probably would permit that. Jewish life has an infinite value.”
Shahak and Mezvinsky point out that, “Changing the words ‘Jewish’ to ‘German’ or ‘Aryan’ and
‘non-Jewish’ to ‘Jewish’ turns the Ginsburgh position into the doctrine that made Auschwitz
possible in the past. To a considerable extent the German Nazi success depended upon that
ideology and upon its implication of being widely known early. Disregarding even on a limited
scale the potential effects of messianic…and other ideologies could prove to be calamitous….The
similarities between the Jewish political messianic trend and German Nazism are glaring. The
Gentiles are for the messianists what the Jews were for the Nazis. The hatred of Western culture
with its rational and democratic elements is common to both movements…. The ideology…is both
eschatological and messianic….It assumes the imminent coming of the Messiah and asserts that
the Jews, aided by God, will thereafter triumph over the non-Jews and rule them forever.”
It troubled Israel Shahak that the lesson many Jews learned from the Nazi period was to
embrace ethno-centric nationalism—just what had created such tragedy in Europe—and to reject
the older prophetic Jewish tradition of universalism. He was particularly dismayed with the
organized Jewish community in the U.S. and other Western countries, which promoted ideas of
religious freedom and ethnic diversity in their own countries, but embraced Israel’s rejection of
these same values.
It was Shahak’s view that bigotry was morally objectionable regardless of who the perpetrator is
and who the victim. He declared: “Any form of racism, discrimination and xenophobia becomes
more potent and politically influential if it is taken for granted by the society which indulges in
it.” For Jews, he believed, “The support of democracy and human rights is…meaningless or even
harmful and deceitful when it does not begin with self-critique and with support of human rights
when they are violated by one’s own group. Any support of human rights for non-Jews whose
rights are being violated by the ‘Jewish state’ is as deceitful as the support of human rights by a
Stalinist….”
In an article about his childhood for The New York Review of Books, Shahak recalled listening to
some Polish workmen talking during the Nazi occupation. Discussing the situation, one young
man defended the Germans by pointing out that they were ridding Poland of the Jews, only to be
rebuked by an older laborer, “So are they not also human beings?” It is a phrase that Shahak
never forgot.
During his life, Israel Shahak was rebuked, spat upon and threatened with death for his defense
of human rights. How long will it take before he is recognized as a genuine Jewish prophetic
voice in an era when such voices were difficult to find? After all, as the Bible tells us; “A prophet
is not without honor, save in his own country, and in his own house” (Matthew 13:57).
Israel Shahak may be unlamented in his own country today, but future generations may well
look back to his example, much as contemporary Germans do to figures such as Dietrich
Bonhoeffer, the Lutheran pastor who opposed Nazism and was executed for his part in the plot
to assassinate Hitler.
Israel Shahak understood all too well the violations of human rights and the human spirit all
around him. He insisted on telling that truth to his fellow countrymen and to the world,
upholding a Jewish tradition far older than that established in 1948.
*Allan C. Brownfeld is a syndicated columnist and associate editor of the LINCOLN REVIEW, a
journal published by the Lincoln Institute for Research and Education, and editor of ISSUES, the
quarterly journal of the American Council for Judaism.
Allen C. Brownfeld, p. 3