Four Realms Beneath the Jews: Talking Animals, Dumb Animals, Vegetables and Minerals *
Jonathan Cook in Nazareth
Redress
Israel’s racist rabbis: wave of edicts urge “Hate the gentile”
Jonathan Cook views the vile racism disseminated by prominent Israeli rabbis, from edicts prohibiting the renting of homes to gentiles, to justifications for murdering Palestinian babies, to utterances defining non-Jews as talking animals and equating them with donkeys whose sole purpose is to serve Jews.
Jews must not rent homes to “gentiles”. That was the religious decree issued this week by at least 50 of Israel’s leading rabbis, many of them employed by the state as municipal religious leaders. Jews should first warn, then “ostracize” fellow Jews who fail to heed the directive, the rabbis declared.
The decree is the latest in a wave of racist pronouncements from some of Israel’s most influential rabbis.
In October, Shmuel Eliyahu, the chief rabbi of Safed, delivered a ruling, signed by 17 other rabbis in the city, telling Jewish residents not to sell or rent property to members of the country’s Palestinian Arab minority, who make up a fifth of the population.
“Goyim [non-Jews – gentiles] were born only to serve us… Imagine that your donkey would die, you’d lose your income. [The donkey] is your servant… That’s why he [the gentile] gets a long life, to work well for the Jew.” - Rabbi Ovadia Yosef, spiritual leader of Shas, part of Natanyahu’s [...] coalition |
His followers turned words into deeds by attacking Arab students in the city and threatening to burn down the homes of Jewish landlords renting to the students.
Similar edicts have recently been backed by dozens of rabbis in Tel Aviv and nearby Bnei Brak, a suburb of 150,000 mostly ultra-Orthodox Jews. They have threatened to “expose” any Jews who rent to “foreigners” – in this case, a reference to migrant workers and African refugees who are crowded into neglected neighbourhoods in the centre of the country.
After many weeks of silence on these declarations, Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu was finally forced to issue a condemnation yesterday, describing the rabbis’ call as undemocratic and contradicting the bible, which, he said, called for Jews to “love the stranger”.
Nonetheless, racism in Israel is increasingly enjoying high-level sanction among the most influential sectors of the religious establishment.