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September 10, 2009
BBC Newsnight Plumbs New Depths of Bigotry Toward Israel
I have just caught up with a quite disgusting item by Katya Adler, transmitted on Monday evening's Newsnight, on military rabbis in the Israel Defense Force. She presented as deeply shocking the fact that these rabbis are trained officers who carry arms and are now deployed in the front line of combat. Worse still, they actually seek to inspire and fortify Israeli soldiers by using the Jewish religion and the words of the Hebrew Bible! How shocking is that?! No mention of the fact that the British army has military chaplains who are also officers. True, they don’t bear arms – although some chaplains in Afghanistan are now saying they think that should change because it is too dangerous not to when on a battlefield that is far more lethal to them than any other on which they have served: the sole reason the IDF rabbis are armed.
But the really disgraceful element was Adler’s suggestion that that these rabbis were somehow the equivalent of Islamic jihadi fanatics who were transforming the mission of the IDF into “holy war.” Jewish religious belief, she implied, was the equivalent of the jihad. This appalling equation of course ignored the crucial difference between the jihad and the wars waged by the Israel Defense Force: that the jihad is aggressive and seeks to conquer, colonize, murder and enslave while the sole rationale for the IDF is to defend Israel against precisely such aggression.
Adler made this leap because to her, all orthodox Jewish religious observance is extreme, right-wing and aggressive; all settlers are orthodox and therefore extreme, right-wing and aggressive; thus all orthodox Jewish soldiers are settlers and therefore they are all extreme, right-wing and aggressive. Every aspect of that is tendentious, distorted, ignorant and bigoted.
The settlers believe the land was given to them by God, she charged. Well, they may well do so; but as Israel’s soldiers they are fighting to defend not the settlements but the State of Israel of which they are citizens and to which land they are fully and indisputably entitled under international law. Indeed, contrary to what she stated they are also entitled under international law to settle the disputed territories which are still the site of aggressive war waged against them; but that’s not in fact what they are in the IDF or were in Gaza during Operation Cast Lead to do.
You would never have known it from her report, but these religious soldiers were in Gaza not to conquer the Palestinians in accordance with their belief that Gaza was divinely given to them but to defend the State of Israel against rocket attack from Gaza – from where religious soldiers had actually been involved in the operation to remove the settlers in 2005. Maybe some of these rabbis had issued leaflets which really were politically extreme. So what? To suggest that this represents all of orthodox Judaism is like suggesting that preachers handing out leaflets proclaiming the end of days is nigh are representative of mainstream Christianity. Far worse, Adler made the doubly appalling suggestion that the IDF had singled out Gazan infants and other civilians for ill-treatment – and that they had been encouraged to do so by the tenets of Jewish religious belief. Neither element, of course, was true.
Her report thus went much further than the usual BBC boilerplate bigotry against Israel. This was open bigotry against Judaism itself. One of the most deeply offensive sections was the “aha!” moment where she pointed accusingly at soldiers visiting Masada who were wearing the ritual fringed garment worn by all orthodox Jewish men as if this was a sign of their moral perfidy. To be an orthodox Jew, she was in effect saying, was to be guilty of malevolent intent towards the Palestinians: to be aggressive and warlike and fanatical, characteristics they allegedly got from the Hebrew Bible.
True, she was not short of Israelis to say all this: to make the direct equation between religious orthodoxy in the IDF and “holy war.” But that is because Israel is a society which is deeply, even violently polarized between secular and religious. Quite unlike Britain, America or Europe there is simply no middle ground in Israel where people can be moderately religious and straddle the two worlds. You either belong to one side or the other; and each views the other as utterly dangerous and threatening. With no acknowledgement whatever of that crucial context for these Israelis’ remarks, Adler was able to use Israeli Jews to make her repellent case for her, that the IDF rabbis are as bad as the jihadis and that Jewish religious belief is beyond the moral pale.
The fact is that the religious/secular divide in Israel is so extreme that many young secular Israelis have no knowledge of the history of the nation they are all required to offer up their lives to defend. Because of the extreme hostility by secular Israelis towards religion, Israel's education system leaves many of them with scant idea – just like Katya Adler – that the people, the religion and the land are inseparable and bound together by the thousands of years of history of the Jewish people in the land. It is a history many of them only learn for the first time when they join the IDF, which has to make up the appalling deficiencies in their education by taking them to places like Masada to teach them precisely what it is they are defending.
The fact also is that the religious/secular divide in Israel is so extreme that one of the major grievances amongst secular Israelis is that religious Jews have traditionally managed to get out of army service. The fact that in recent years more and more religious Jews have been signing up to perform their patriotic duty in defending their country and its people against attack might occasion a degree of admiration. Instead, the BBC blames, smears and demonizes them – and through them, blames, smears and demonizes the religion of Judaism itself.
For shame.
FamilySecurityMatters.org Contributor Melanie Phillips is the author of the powerful and frightening Londonistan, and she blogs at The Spectator.
Reader Comments: Submit Your Comment (1)
the fact that this post has received no comments whatsoever until now inspires me to believe that no-one cares about your particular thoughts or arguments against katya's inspired and insightful reporting of the situation in israel and the occupied territories.
the fact is and i think i speak for most non-jewish and in fact, many jewish people who have even a modicum of interest towards this subject is that israel is perceived as the agressor and palestine the unwitting victim of israeli agression. one only has to look at military statistics to see the through the bs and media smokescreen perpetuated by the likes of yourself and the jewish-controlled media in america: 10 to 1 kill ratio of palestinians to israelis, 2nd largest groundstrike airforce capabilty (israel), no airforce defence capability (palestine, gaza), systematic strangulation of social and economic infrastructure of occupied territories by israeli military, depriving basic civil liberties and human rights towards un-armed people, etc etc. so before you levy accusations of bigotry against reporters doing their job, reporting the truth, consider your motivation for doing so please.
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