Sorry for a second diary on Israel/Palestine today, but this shocked me.
I happened to be reading Rabbi Asherman's beautiful and moving exposition on the relative significance of the Temple Mount and the sabbath and animal sacrifice within Judaism. It is well worth reading in full. Then this story ran across my Twitter feed:
A right-wing Jewish extremist threw stones at and attempted to stab president of Rabbis for Human Rights, Arik Asherman, following an olive harvest coordinated with the Israeli army on Friday. Nobody was significantly injured in the incident.
Rabbi Asherman and a group of Israeli and international activists arrived to accompany Palestinian farmers to their privately owned olive orchard, located near the illegal Israeli outpost of Gideonim, which is an offshoot of the Itamar settlement.
There is video of the incident and it's being
widely covered, including by
Haaretz. Asherman was trying to put out a fire started by the masked man (presumed to be a settler).
A police spokesperson responded to the attack on Friday by blaming the incident on a provocation by “left-wing activists and anarchists.” She said officers were searching the area for the suspect.
Which is, of course, completely bass-ackwards.
The former chief rabbi of the IDF Avichai Rontzki runs a yeshiva in the Itamar settlement. Rontzki's contract was not renewed after revelations that he and other rabbis were delivering incendiary sermons and distributing literature during Operation Cast Lead which included statements like the following:
[There is] a biblical ban on surrendering a single millimeter of it [the Land of Israel] to gentiles, though all sorts of impure distortions and foolishness of autonomy, enclaves and other national weaknesses. We will not abandon it to the hands of another nation, not a finger, not a nail of it.
In a Times of Israel article earlier this week, Rabbi Arik Ascherman noted that many of the heated clashes on the Temple Mount started when the Israeli government changed its policy two years ago and began to
permit Temple Mount activists to visit the al-Aqsa plaza, often with armed security.
This tussle between liberal and hardline religious leaders in Israel is happening as the Knesset considers a bill that would require Israeli judges to apply Jewish religious laws.
Meanwhile, the former commander of the IDF in the West Bank said earlier this week:
“Some of the motivation of the Palestinians to carry out terror attacks is due to the violence of right-wing elements in the West Bank,” the director of the IDF operations directorate, Maj. Gen. Nitzan Alon, said in testimony at a trial about incitement on the Hakol Hayehudi (The Jewish Voice) website.
Well duh.