Commentary on contemporary Issues from a Torah Perspective

The Consummate Hypocrite

by Yonasan Rosenblum

One of the many charming aspects of life in Israel that never ceases to amaze is the alacrity with which the self-styled defenders of civil liberties move to suppress speakers of whom they do not approve. Typical was the reaction to a recent column by Yisrael Eichler in a chareidi periodical charging that many of the stereotypes used by the Nazis against Jews have been translated into Hebrew and employed to delegitimize the charedi public. Yossi Sarid and Anat Maor of Meretz immediately demanded that the Attorney General prosecute him for his words. MK Ophir Pines (Labor) filed a police complaint against Eichler and urged that he be barred from journalism and the media.

Even with their move into yuppiedom, the Israeli Left seems unable to shake their Bolshevik roots. For them, all is permitted; for their opponents nothing.

"Eichler is not a Jew. No Jew in the world would tar a fellow Jew with the label of Nazi," Sarid solemnly assured us.

Really, Yossi?

When David Ben-Gurion wrote to Haim Guri in 1963, "Begin is clearly a Hitler type, [who would] rule as Hitler ruled Germany," did he cease to be a Jew?

When Professor Yeshaya Leibowitz labelled Israeli soldiers in the territories Judeo-Nazis, did Yossi Sarid howl with anguish? Did he lead those protesting the subsequent award of the Israel Prize to Leibowitz?

When Haim Cohn, former justice of the High Court, charged at an international legal conference that "the Nazi's Nurenburg racial principles have become the law of the State of Israel," did Sarid scream for his scalp?

When General (Res.) Shlomo Gazit said in a public speech that the knitted kippot on the heads of IDF soldiers remind him of the Iron Cross worn by Nazi soldiers, did Sarid protest and call for his prosecution?

When Meretz founder Shulamit Aloni described the charedi population "suck[ing] from the same sinister passions which nurtured the Nazis," did Sarid demand that she resign from the party?

Could it be that what enraged Sarid about Eichler's remarks was not so much the metaphors he chose as it was his long peyos and the use of those metaphors to defend a populace that Sarid despises?

And if the great champion of "free speech" and "artistic expression," is so selective about which speech and speakers should be prosecuted, has he not provided one more example of a process of delegitimization of charedim in this country not unlike that waged against Jews in Germany from 1933 on?

Interviewed by Yediot Acharonot in the wake of Eichler's accusations, Professor Moshe Zimmerman of Hebrew University's German History department admitted that Eichler's charges were well-founded and that "many of the images of haredim found in the secular press are drawn from classical anti-Semitic sources, including the Nazis."

Fantasies of violence against charedim abound. Not just anonymous wall-posters in Kfar Saba proclaiming, ``Exterminate the charedim at birth,'' in response to the opening of a religious kindergarten, but articles in the mainstream media by Israel's leading journalists and academics.

"We have to storm Mea Shearim with machine guns and mow them down,'' recommends left-wing darling Uri Avneri." "I would take all those weird people from Shas, Aguda, and Degel HaTorah and tie all their beards together and light a match," says Popolitika's Amnon Denker. Yonatan Gefen announces his willingness to cast the first stone in the intifada against charedim, and Professor Uzi Arnon tells a Kol Ha'ir interviewer, "Haredim should be suspended on an electric pole."

Yossi Sarid regularly hurls the term "inciter" like a thunderbolt at his enemies, lectures us that words kill, and accuses the entire Right of complicity in the murder of Yitzchak Rabin. Surely, then, he forcefully decried these examples of respected public figures savoring the thought of waging war on charedim. Perhaps, but we must not have heard the news that day.

Charedim are dehumanized every day, portrayed as an undifferentiated mass of black. In Goebbel's propaganda films images of chasidim dissolved into images of running rats, and today, in Israel, charedim are once again portrayed as subhuman beasts, breeding like insects. They are "black ants," "humming locusts," "crass baboons," "backward barbarians," "forces of darkness."

Once Jews were accused of killing Christian children and drinking their blood. And today "blood-sucker" is a favored term for charedim. In place of body-snatchers, Yoel Marcus accuses them of being "soul-snatchers" and Gideon Samet calls the ba'al teshuva movement the "most disgusting phenomenon of our time."

Hitler explained to the Hungarian leader Admiral Horthy that the Jews had to be destroyed because they are like viruses that spread contagious diseases and destroy the body's immunological system. And Kol Ha'ir solemnly interviews an "expert on contagious diseases" to explain how charedim spread and threaten all around them. "Parasite" has become used so frequently in connection to charedim that the two terms have become virtually synonymous.

Some have even found in the charedim retrospective understanding for the Nazis. "When I see the charedim surrounded by their large families, I understand the Nazis," wrote sculptor Yigal Tumarkin -- a statement that did not prevent him from being honored subsequently by Yad Vashem. And Tommy Lapid sees the charedim as having usurped the traditional Jewish role of "taking advantage of the gentile, trading in his blood and laughing at him," only this time with the secular public in the role of the gentile. One wonders whether he also sees the secular public in the traditional gentile role of "avenger" of these outrages.

If Sarid and company had not been so eager to seize upon Eichler's column as an opportunity to score more points against a prominent charedi spokesman, they might have seen it for what it was: a desperate plea to take note of the direction we are headed and how far we have already gone. But that would have required taking a long look in some North Tel Aviv mirrors.

This article appeared in Yonasan Rosenblum's column in the Jerusalem Post.

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