Jeffrey Goldberg enables extremists by denial of Israel's theocracy

Reviewing the Israeli historian Gershom Gorenberg’s new book, The Unmaking of Israel, in last week’s New York Times, the Atlantic columnist and author Jeffrey Goldberg took care to get his apology in early for the mild criticism he was about to make of the Israeli settler movement, beginning by saying:

Let me list, at the outset, the many things that the diminutive but disproportionately interesting state of Israel is not [...] Israel is not a fascist state, nor is it a theocracy nor, for that matter, is it a fascist theocracy.

Leave to one side the redundancy of those last nine words, and put off for another day the question of Israeli fascism, which is in any case not an easy term to define. What is most inadmissible about this sentence is the way it denies the perennial and impermeable divide within Israeli society about the religious character of the state, and by extension undermines the millions of secular Israelis who have to fight every day – not always with much success – to repel the swelling tides of the ultra-Orthodox right wing. As Goldberg knows well, having lived in Israel himself, the suggestion that the Israeli legem terrae is free from religious interference might assuage the anxieties of Zionists in America, but it would meet with ridicule from Israeli Jews – to say nothing, of course, about Israeli Arabs.

The briefest glance at the headlines of Haaretz, Israel’s best-known Anglophone newspaper, suffices to make the point. ‘New rabbinical courts will lead to oppression of women’, read an editorial this week, condemning a move to reduce women’s rights in the country’s powerful religious courts (the mere existence of which provokes some curiosity, does it not?). ‘Fighting to make Israel into a military theocracy’ went another one earlier in the month, explaining how “the hesder yeshivas, which combine army service with Torah study, were making a concerted effort – in conjunction with the IDF rabbinate – to create a theocratic military culture”. Just substitute the words ‘Torah’ and ‘IDF rabbinate’ with ‘Qur’an’ and ‘Ayatollahs’, and try to imagine Goldberg coolly assuring New York liberals that this was a secular state of affairs. A similar editorial in June, ‘Israel needs to keep religion out of the army’, lamented that Israel was “turning from a secular country into a theocracy in which the rabbis set the rules”. 

Lengthy indeed would be the task of listing all the ways in which this phenomenon is occurring. I shall restrict myself, therefore, to just three examples of what are unequivocally theocratic characteristics of the Israeli state. 

Firstly, there are separate courts for religious and secular matters. Arbiters in the battei din, or religious courts, are rabbis, and the law applied is the halakha, or Jewish law, derived from the Torah and the Talmud. This is no different in principle from the situation in Saudi Arabia, which also divides jurisdiction between civil and religious courts, the latter of which uphold the shari’a, or Islamic law, derived from the Qur’an and the Hadith. (If Goldberg believes the Kingdom to be a secular country, I’m not aware of his having said so.) In Israel, the battei din are invested with substantial power, including total control over marriage – as in Saudi, there is no civil marriage in Israel, meaning that non-believing citizens must travel abroad to tie the knot – and divorce. In addition, there exist in Israel de facto supplementary religious courts, such as the Takana, which handles crimes committed by the clergy and, not unlike the Vatican, tends to prefer to keep things ‘within the family’ where possible. As the Haaretz columnist Gideon Levy put it:

A high school teacher at a secular school who sexually assaults his students would be turned over to the police. A rabbi at a yeshiva [religious school] suspected of the same thing would be turned over to Takana. Perish any connection between them, but the criminal underworld also has its own judicial system with the means to investigate and punish. In that respect, there is no difference between the underworld and Takana.

Secondly, the laws concerning immigration are explicitly religious in both letter and spirit. The text of the amended ‘Law of Return 5730-1970’ defines a “Jew” as “a person who was born of a Jewish mother or has become converted to Judaism and who is not a member of another religion”, and grants any such person the automatic right to citizenship. This definition, as the great Israeli polymath Israel Shahak noted in his seminal Jewish History, Jewish Religion, comes directly from the halakha, being:

[T]he Talmudic definition of ‘who is a Jew’, a definition followed by Jewish Orthodoxy. The Talmud and post-Talmudic rabbinic law also recognise the conversion of a non-Jew to Judaism (as well as the purchase of a non-Jewish slave by a Jew followed by a different kind of conversion) as a method of becoming Jewish, provided that the conversion is performed by authorised rabbis in a proper manner. This ‘proper manner’ entails, for females, their inspection by three rabbis while naked in a ‘bath of purification’, a ritual which, although notorious to all readers of the Hebrew press, is not often mentioned by the English media in spite of its undoubted interest for certain readers.¹

One assumes that Goldberg would be less than thrilled if Congress passed a law granting instant green cards for all Jewish converts to Christianity, and indeed Levy has argued that the Israeli legislation amounts not only to theocracy but to racism as well:

It's time to admit that this approach can only be called racist. Yes, that hackneyed term. That's what it is when it is the blood flowing through the veins that determines your status. If the grandson of a woman whose Judaism is doubtful has the right to automatic citizenship when he arrives here from the ends of the earth, and a non-Jewish soldier who chose to fight and live here runs into rabbinic obstacles, then this is not just judgment by religious law, but judgment by racist law. If the Arab native is an outcast, but a member of the "Tribe of Menasseh" from Burma is welcomed with full rights simply because a rabbi said he was Jewish, then this is a benighted theocracy.

Thirdly, and most gravely, as Goldberg no doubt recalls from his own stint in the IDF, the laws concerning military service are different for secular and religious Israelis. In their indispensable book, Jewish Fundamentalism in Israel, Shahak and Norton Mezvinsky draw attention to the frightening world of the hesder yeshivot, the religious corps, who serve not for three years, as do other soldiers, but for eighteen months, divided into three six-month periods, in between which they “leave the army for a six-month period of talmudic study in a yeshiva wherein the presumably negative influences of having met secular Jewish soldiers are supposedly countered”². As might be expected, the scheme of training religious fanatics in the use of state-of-the-art military equipment is not without its demerits. They elucidate:

Soldiers in Hesder Yeshivot units [...] distinguished themselves during the suppression of the Intifada; they were noted for their cruelty to Palestinians, which was from many perspectives much more severe than the Israeli army average [...] When the army commanding officers have wanted to inflict especially cruel punishment upon Palestinians or others, they have most often relied upon and used religious soldiers. In more ordinary companies, consisting of soldiers holding varying political views, some members might object to illegal cruelty and even inform media people of its use. In Hesder Yeshivot units the religious soldiers, who are anyway more cruel than most secular Jews, will not object to the orders.³

A perpetually baffling fact of American writing on Israel is how markedly it differs from its Israeli counterpart. The works of Israelis like Shahak and Levy are infused with everything the intellectual descendents of Thomas Jefferson should celebrate: unswerving commitment to reason, democracy and secularism, undergirded by a visceral contempt for injustice. Why then is their voice so persistently ignored? One of the things that has to happen in order for there to be peace in Israel is that, in the battle for the national identity, the secularists must win and the theocrats must lose (the same must happen, incidentally, on the eastern side of Jerusalem). By denying that such a battle is being waged in the first place, Goldberg only further isolates the secular camp and clears the path for the Liebermans and Lubavitchers. Let us hope that Israelis – and their sponsors in America – have more sense than to listen to him.

¹ Shahak, I., Jewish History, Jewish Religion (4^th edition, 2008), p. 5

² Shahak, I., and Mezvinsky, N., Jewish Fundamentalism in Israel (2^nd edition, 2004), p. 91

³ Ibid.

Who can defend Hizbullah now?

The year 1982 was not a very good one to be a Lebanese civilian. Their infrastructure annihilated by seven years of civil war, their puny national army overwhelmed by sectarian militias and tribal warlords, they began to find themselves once more the unwilling hosts of the latest round of the war between Israelis and Palestinians that formally began in 1948. In June, following the attempted assassination of the Israeli ambassador to the UK by the Palestinians, the Israelis officially invaded. By August, having pitilessly and more or less indiscriminately bombarded their way north through Tyre, across the Litani and then into Sidon, the Israelis (and their brazenly fascist Christian Phalangist allies) had encircled Beirut itself. A full scale humanitarian disaster looked (and was) imminent. Even worse, every dwelling to the south of the city that hadn’t already been eviscerated by the IAF was enveloped within a military occupation that with each passing day looked increasingly indistinguishable from the ones established on the West Bank and in Gaza. Despite Israel’s declared intention to stay ‘not one minute’ longer than ‘necessary’, reasonable people could be excused for supposing that this was an arrangement with the potential to become permanent. 

Indeed, in Drs. Israel Shahak and Norton Mezvinsky’s seminal 1999 book, Jewish Fundamentalism in Israel, they make the disquieting observation that during the invasion (codenamed, in all apparent seriousness, ‘Operation Peace for Galilee’), 

[T]he military rabbinate in Israel [...] exhorted all Israeli soldiers to follow in the footsteps of Joshua and to re-establish his divinely ordained conquest of the land of Israel. This exhortation of conquest included extermination of non-Jewish inhabitants. The military rabbinate published a map of Lebanon in which the names of Lebanese towns had been changed to the names of cities found in the Book of Joshua. Beirut, for example, was changed to Be’erot. The map designated Lebanon as land belonging to the ancient tribes of Israel, Asher and Naphtali. (New Edition, p. 64.)

This crass reminder of Lebanon’s inclusion within the biblical Eretz Yisrael was supplemented by citations such as Deuteronomy 11:24, in which the ancient Israelites are told by God that “Every place whereon the soles of your feet shall tread shall be yours: from the wilderness and Lebanon, from the river, the river Euphrates, even unto the uttermost sea shall your coast be”. Put simply, the military rabbinate was calling not just for occupation but for the total annexation of Lebanon into a Greater Israel. 

Not many people at the time were prepared to prevent this outcome – not, for instance, Arafat’s PLO, who had been offered a choice between exile and extermination, and opted for the former. Nor could the job be entrusted to the laughable UNIFIL ‘peacekeeping’ force, who had been failing to enforce a mandated Israeli withdrawal from the country since 1978. The humiliated Syrian army had neither the will nor the ability to seriously confront the forces that had so comprehensively demonstrated their superiority. And it certainly wasn’t going to be taken care of by the Americans, whose broken promise of protection to the Palestinians in Lebanon was to lead directly to the infamous rape and massacre of thousands of unarmed men, women and children at the Sabra and Chatila refugee camps.

Instead the task was left to a then-obscure affiliation of Shia militiamen, who journalists suddenly noticed fighting with unusually fearless disregard for their own lives. Not coincidentally - nor immediately explicably - journalists also noticed amongst their ranks hundreds of members of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard, who spoke warmly and candidly about ‘martyrdom’, and the splendours of its associated divine rewards (a theme that I suspect the reader may have heard before). More ominously (as we now know), they spoke of the importance above all of emulating the recent events in Tehran elsewhere across the region, and of indoctrinating the Lebanese in particular with Khomeini’s idiosyncratic brand of Islamic morality. Here, for example, is an Iranian revolutionary guard encountered by Robert Fisk in the eastern Lebanese town of Baalbek:

We want to guide and inform the people of Lebanon. Our only goal is to Islamicise the place and, as the Imam Khomeini says, we have to export the Islamic revolution to the world. So, like any other Muslims, we have come here with the aim of saving the deprived Palestinians and the deprived Lebanese. [My italics.] (Fisk, R., Pity the Nation, Third Edition, p. 470) 

The successful infiltration of this Iranian fanaticism into the existing Lebanese Shia Amal ranks marked the germination of the party we now know as Hizbullah. Galvanised by their self-proclaimed ‘love of martyrdom’, the Shiites embarked on an unprecedented campaign of attacks on Israeli military targets that pushed the IDF steadily further from Beirut until finally, in February 1985, they withdrew from the southernmost town of Tyre. To be sure, many of these attacks targeted civilians, such as the disgusting 1983 suicide bombing of the US Embassy, and fully deserve the description ‘terrorist’. But then, the Israelis also routinely targeted civilians – or, at any rate, were indifferent to the existence of civilians within their targets – and on a scale that Hizbullah couldn’t have matched in its wildest fantasies. As Christopher Hitchens – hardly a friend of Hizbullah – put it:

I hate and despise Hezbollah and Palestinian suicide-murderers, as they ought to be called, but they’d have to work day and night for years to equal the total of civilians killed in Lebanon alone, or by Sharon alone.

Yet however impressive the achievement, or desirable the outcome, it’s a moral imbecile who can convince himself of Hizbullah’s (entirely self-declared) status as a ‘resistance’ movement. The plain fact is that it is an aggressor movement – and of the most totalitarian and theocratic kind at that. 

One way to see this is to consider the many and various policies of Hizbullah that would appear to have very little at all to do with ‘resisting’ Israel. My favourite example is their continuing effort to intimidate shop owners - invariably in the poorer parts of the country - into closing down alcohol stores, but any Lebanese could think of one for themselves without a moment’s pause. In Fisk’s monumental Pity the Nation, widely held to be the finest personal account of the 1975-90 wars in the English language, he finds the Islamicisation in full force as early as 1983:

[T]he reticent and bearded young men [...] closed off the streets of [Baalbek] for the Ashoura ceremonies commemorating the death of Hussein, grandson of the Prophet. Many Lebanese girls in Baalbek had been compelled to wear the chador and revolutionary guards walked the streets with rifles in their hands [...] [and] in one street a 35-foot mural of Iranian women shrouded in black robes urged Lebanese women to remember their modesty. (p. 469.)

What exactly is this ‘resisting’, other than the prevailing culture of pluralism and individual liberty for which the Lebanese had always been justly renowned? 

Another way is to consider the party’s open alliances with the ostentatiously murderous regimes in Iran and Syria. As well as exemplifying its embracing of, as opposed to its resistance to aggression, these egregious allegiances make an utter mockery of Hizbullah’s claims to represent ‘pan-Arab’ interests. In October 2010, while the blood was still drying on the streets of Tehran, Hizbullah's Secretary General Hassan Nasrallah welcomed Ahmadinejad to Lebanon as a “great and dear guest”, urging the crowd to “testify that the Iranian Islamic Republic is one of the greatest guarantees for an end to wars” and concluding that “[the Iranian] republic in its leadership, people and government is a grace from God".

And now in 2011 Nasrallah has managed to surpass this despicable combination of demagogy and despot-worship. Only last month, at exactly the first moment in modern history when Arabs truly are uniting as one against their common enemies of autocracy and corruption, Nasrallah chose instead to tighten the screws of repression; to stand by the Assad crime family and to insult the memories of the more than 1,100 Syrian dead by daring to suggest that “the majority of the Syrian people still support this regime and [believe] in President Assad’s ability to introduce reform”, and otherwise dutifully echoing the party propaganda:

We, in Lebanon and especially in Hezbollah, are highly grateful to Syria, its leadership, its President Hafiz Assad and President Bashar Assad.

[T]he Syrian leadership is convinced with its people [of] the need to implement reform, [fight] corruption and [open] new horizons in the Syrian political life.  We believe – I personally believe and this is not built on analysis but rather on direct discussions and declarations - that Syrian President Bashar Assad believes and is serious and determined about reform. I even know more. I know that he is ready to take very great reform steps but with serenity, care and responsibility.

In Syria the regime is not closed. On the contrary he is saying I am ready and I believe in reform and I am serious and I want to carry them.

Moreover, it ought to go without saying that no organisation that defines itself by any one, single religion could ever be said to represent ‘pan-Arab’ interests (it’s precisely for this reason that the old pan-Arab parties of the ‘50s and ‘60s were supposed to be staunchly secularist). In Lebanon alone, I can think off the top of my head of nine distinct indigenous faiths*, and I wouldn’t be surprised if the true figure were double that. And when that organisation not only defines itself by one faith, but actively partakes in the slaughter of rival faiths – as Hizbullah has been caught doing against Sunnis in Iraq – its claim to pan-Arabism becomes more ridiculous still.  

And this is the crucial point that needs to be made every time Hizbullah is mentioned in the same breath as ‘resistance’: above all else, Hizbullah is – as its very name gives away, for Christ’s sake – a religious fundamentalist party, whose interest in combating Israelis is entirely secondary to its primary ambition, which is – just like the messianic settlers on the West Bank, and their Christian Zionist sponsors in the USA – to run society in accordance with its particular holy texts and tenets. In the case of Hizbullah, this plan necessitates acting as the local chapter or subsidiary of the broader Twelver Shiite theocracy in Tehran. Not only the Lebanese, but the Palestinians too deserve better than this baneful and benighted barbarism. 

* Including, by the way, Judaism. On a recent trip to Beirut I went to see the Maghed Avraham synagogue in the Wadi Abu Jamil district, practically touching the Parliament building, its Star of David and Hebrew lettering newly restored after heavy shellfire in the war. Any guess as to which army was responsible for the damage? It was, of course, the IDF, which raises some interesting questions - does it not? - about their repeated claims to hit 'terrorists only', and to do so with 'pinpoint accuracy' at that.