The world has long stopped reacting to the “shock and awe” that Israel routinely inflicts on its conscience on a daily basis. But even from Israeli standards, this one should take the cake. Rabbi Shmuel Eliyahu, the chief rabbi of Safad, has urged the Zionist state to exact a “horrible revenge” on Palestinian children for the recent attack on a Jewish seminary by hanging them from treetops. In an article widely quoted by Jerusalem Post and Haaretz, Eliyahu writes: “We have to take horrible revenge for the terrorist attack at Merkaz Harav Yeshiva. A state that really respects the lives of its citizens would have hanged the 10 sons of the terrorist on a tree 50-meter tall, so that others would see it and be afraid.”
These words dripping with cold malevolence would have been dismissed as the rant of a rabid loose cannon if the source had not been so highly placed in the Israeli establishment. Rabbi Eliyahu is not your regulation Zionist freak dreaming of driving all Arabs and Palestinians into the Mediterranean. He does not represent a lunatic fringe but speaks for the Israeli establishment.
And in doing so, the rabbi offers a peek into the mindset of his kind, revealing how far removed from reason and reality the Israelis are. As Mossawa Center, an Arab human rights group, has emphasized, this is nothing but pure, old-fashioned racism. If this is how prominent religious leaders and intellectuals in Israel think, then what hope the Arabs and Palestinians can ever have of finding a so-called “peaceful and pragmatic” solution to the Arab-Israel conflict?
The attack on the Jewish seminary in Jerusalem last month was unfortunate and unacceptable. And the Arabs, including the Palestinian leadership, have condemned it as such. Even when they knew that Merkaz Harav Yeshiva has reportedly been involved in promoting the kind of extremism that Rabbi Eliyahu represents. However, incidents like these cannot be seen in isolation. Before rushing to hang the Arab children, Rabbi Eliyahu and Israeli leaders who think like him would do well to pause and ponder what is driving young men like Alaa Abu Dheim to extreme measures like these.
This is no defense of the Jerusalem attack. But Rabbi Eliyahu and Israel, with all its might, cannot prevent desperate actions such as this, if they do not try to understand the factors that lead to such desperation in the first place. We have been here before. But it ultimately boils down to the Israeli occupation and the endless persecution of the Palestinians. But then this “worn-out argument” has never cut any ice with our Israelis, has it? On the other hand, ignoring these “realities on the ground,” as President George Bush would put it, is not going to get rid of them either.
If Israel is indeed serious about peace with the Palestinians and the larger Arab world, it has to address the real issue at the heart of this conflict. And that is the occupation of Arab lands. There are no shortcuts to peace. And hanging Arabs in no solution.
