Dirar and Veronika Abu Seesi's 'orphaned' children (AP/Adel Hana)

I had a long, heartbreaking conversation this morning with Dirar Abu Seesi’s brother, Yousef, who just returned to his home in Holland from a three week stay in Ukraine.  He called his visit there “one of the worst three weeks of my life.”

Yousef had traveled to that country for a reunion with his brother, who he hadn’t seen in 15 years.  In fact, when Dirar was kidnapped, he was on his way by train to meet Yousef at the Kiev airport for their meeting.  Instead of a happy reunion, he spent three weeks running from pillar to post inside the Ukrainian intelligence and police apparatus seeking word of his brother, only to be frustrated at every turn.

The entire Abu Seesi family is heartbroken.  Veronika, Dirar’s wife, remains in her native Ukraine.  Her six children are in Gaza where they are being taken care of by Dirar’s sister Suzanne.  Imagine yourself a wife separated from your children with your husband disappeared into the Israeli gulag.  Yousef half-marvels, half-weeps at the innocence (or naiveté)  of Veronika who he says “remains convinced that she will be reunited with her husband soon in Gaza.

The brother told me he had to tell his own father, who lives in Jordan, that his son had been kidnapped and was in an Israeli prison.  The man, who hadn’t seen his son in twelve years cried for an entire day.

Yousef is convinced (and Yossi Melman covertly confirmed this in his story in yesterday’s Haaretz) that the Ukrainian intelligence services collaborated in his brother’s disappearance.  In this YouTube video he confirms this.  When he and Veronika made the rounds of the various intelligence and police agencies they were given a complete runaround.  It reminded me of a Kafka novel.

The secret police were definitely in on the whole thing.  Sitting in the office of a police general, Yousef half jokingly told him he felt like HE could be kidnapped, to which the commander said point-blank: “You definitely could be.”  Imagine.  Perhaps it’s even worse than Israel (at least for Palestinians).  But truly the Ukrainian secret police & Israeli secret police deserve each other.  A match made in heaven—or hell, as the case may be.

The authorities gave them nothing but the runaround sending them to different offices, none of which helped them.  They even visited one senior intelligence official who promised to help, giving them his phone number.  They returned for an appointment to see him and waited two hours.  He never showed up.  The entire time the other intelligence agency employees peered at them through a window.  Other times they would call the official and no one would know who he was.  Yousef joked that perhaps HE was kidnapped too.  Authorities repeatedly told them not to go public and that if they kept quiet the authorities would find Dirar for them.  They even gave them a date, saying they would bring him back on March 9^th.  It was all a ploy so that they could ensure the Mossad rendered him to Israel before the world could wake up to his plight.

The Abu Seesis sent a letter to the Ukrainian prime minister, who is due in Israel for a visit next week, asking his help.  I told Yousef that Veronika should hold a press conference in front of the prime minister’s office and demand he intercede for her with the Israelis.

Israeli government officials, seemingly not hindered by the government gag order which supposedly prohibits the media from using domestic sources to report this story, are bruiting about the notion that Abu Seesi is a senior weapons “engineer” for Hamas, somehow being trained by Iran to develop an indigenous Gaza weapons industry that would be free of reliance on imported weaponry from the outside.

What makes no sense about this theory is why such an arms maker would be applying for Ukrainian citizenship.  Does Israeli intelligence see him as a replacement for Mahmoud al-Mabouh roving the world from his Ukrainian base in order to procure arms deals for Hamas?

A new AP report takes us back to a theory that echoes somewhat my own earlier one that Israel’s secret police were targeting the power plant when they kidnapped its deputy chief engineer:

While the reasons for Mr. Abu Sisi’s detention were unclear, it was widely assumed in Gaza that it was somehow linked to his position at the power plant and the successful efforts of Hamas to reduce the station’s dependency on industrial diesel fuel imported from Israel.

In January, the Hamas authorities said that they had managed to adjust the station’s turbines to run on regular diesel fuel, which is smuggled into Gaza from Egypt, saying that Israel was not letting in sufficient amounts of fuel. Mr. Abu Sisi left Gaza twice last year, for a work conference in Egypt and to perform a pilgrimage to Mecca, according to his relatives.

If this theory is correct, it would mean that those who maintain Israel’s stranglehold around Gaza would be in such a fit of pique at the prospect that Gaza’s power plant might be able to return to full function by liberating itself from reliance on Israeli fuel sources that they’d be willing to engage in major violations of international law merely in order to punish the mastermind of such self-reliance.  It seems far-fetched.  But I’ve never to underestimate the pettiness of the Israeli military-intelligence juggernaut.  The Wall Street Journal echoes this theory in its own reporting.

An alternate theory crossed my mind: Israel has continuously come up short in its efforts to liberate Gilad Shalit, the IDF soldier captured four years ago by Gaza militants.  Israeli  intelligence services may intend this as a message to Hamas that they can and will go to the ends of the earth to kidnap figures who play critical roles in keeping whatever remains of the enclave’s infrastructure running.  That would make the crime one of vengeance and warning intended for Hamas’ leadership, as if to say: our reach is wide; the idea that anyone anywhere can protect you is laughable.  When you are in a foreign country we will get its authorities to collaborate in apprehending you; and you will disappear into the maw of our security system only to be heard from again when we wish.  If it’s true, it’s a chilling message.  And one that merits the fierce determination of the international human rights community to combat it.

Joseph in the pit, Dirar in the Gulag (David Colyn)

This brings to mind perhaps the earliest Jewish act of extraordinary rendition: when Joseph’s brothers grew jealous of him they sold him into Egyptian slavery.  When the brothers told their father, Jacob, of the fictitious death of Joseph, the man wept just as Dirar’s father did.

Joseph, who had meanwhile become the second most powerful figure under Pharaoh, got his comeuppance when the brothers turned to Egypt during a famine in Canaan, seeking food.  Joseph, recognizing his brothers as his supplicants, arranges for a ruse and kidnaps Jacob’s most precious remaining son, Benjamin.  Joseph wishes to punish his brothers both for their earlier treatment of him, and by forcing them to contemplate having to tell their aged patriarch for a second time that they had allowed one of his sons to perish.

To me, Dirar Abu Seesi isn’t that dissimilar from Joseph sold into slavery or Benjamin kidnapped.  Extraordinary rendition, whether in the age of the Bible or 21st century is foul and cruel and wreaks heartbreak on all it touches.  It may yet wreak such havoc on those who thought it was a cracker jack idea to kidnap the Gaza engineer and throw him into the Israeli gulag.

Here is some eye-opening video of the protest outside Rabbi Arik Ascherman’s Jerusalem home by extremist settlers from the Shiloh settlement. They protested against Ascherman’s planned Tu B’Shvat tree planting ceremony (today) at a Palestinian village whose orchards have been destroyed by the Shiloh settlers. I blogged about the protest two days ago.

It’s remarkable that when Ascherman offered the settler a sacred text which he planned to use in his prayer reading, the man crumpled it and threw it to the ground. Given that God’s name could likely have been printed on the page (albeit a photocopy) I found the act to be revealing of the fact that religious convictions of settlers are often trumped by political ones.  In Jewish tradition, the name of God printed on a page lends a text sacred status and it should be treated with veneration.

Among the statements made by the settlers were this one broadcast on a bullhorn to all residents of the neighborhood:

A man lives here who destroys the Jewish people, causes damage [to it] and cooperates with the enemy.

Interesting that if Ascherman were to go to Shiloh and say the same things he’d likely be met with a hail of bullets.  In Jerusalem, they’ve given a legal permit by the police to smear Acherman in public.

Later, another settler, arguing with a peace activist, says:

settler: When God told Joshua to conquer the land, the whole entire land was ours without buying it.
activist: You want to conquer the whole entire land? Just like Joshua?
settler: Yeah. That’s what it says in the Bible. You can’t argue with that. The Bible says that we have to conquer the land, so we believe the whole, entire land is ours.

Not the brightest bulb in the bunch, but you can imagine when this dimwittedness is backed by an AK-47, that mindless fervor mixed with firepower is a potent force when confronting unarmed Palestinians trying to protect their orchards.

Editorial in Orthodox 'family magazine' advocating death camps for Palestinians

Back in the days of the Shoah, one of the slogans of the Jew haters was: “Jews to the Ovens.” Now, it causes me anguish to say, we have Israeli Orthodox rabbis saying the same about the Palestinians.

Thanks to Cicero for pointing me to a shocking passage in an Israeli Orthodox “family magazine,” Fountains of Salvation, which suggests that Israel will create death camps for Palestinians in order to wipe them out like Amalek.  The article attacks Israeli rabbis who dispute the letter recently circulated from pro-settler extremist rabbis which urged that no Israeli Jew rent apartments or homes to Israeli Palestinians.  It chided them for being “politically correct” and refusing to do their jobs and educate the populace in the true path of Torah (which is presumably to hate Palestinians).

The last paragraph (page 4 of the original) though is the whopper:

It will be interesting to see whether they leave the assembly of the Amalekites [Palestinians] in extermination camps to others, or whether they will declare that wiping out Amalek is no longer [historically] relevant.  Only time will tell…

A few words of explanation.  There is a Biblical command for Jews to wipe out Amalek because of the viciousness with which that people attacked Israelites.  Essentially, this is a Jewish call to commit genocide against Amalek.  We should note that the Bible records such Jewish campaigns against other tribes as well (Moabites, Jebusites) and no doubt others did the same to their enemies.

Rabbis throughout the ages have allegorized the reference to Amalek to connote any sworn enemy of the Jewish people from Hitler to Barack Obama (yes, prominent American Orthodox Jews wrote such garbage before the last election).  But this is the first time I’ve ever read any Orthodox publication calling for committing genocide against Palestinians.

As Cicero pointed out to me, the articulation of this passage doesn’t only refer to Palestinians (though most likely this was specifically who the writer had in mind given the context).  It can refer to any enemy of the Jewish people including you or me.

Now a word on who is behind this publication: it is the cream of the crop of the radical right-wing Israeli Orthodox rabbinate.  It was founded by the former chief rabbi of Safed, whose son currently holds that position and who circulated the letter I refer to above.  Another is the chief rabbi of Ramat Gan and finally Rabbi Avinar, suspected of sexually abusing a troubled woman who approached him for spiritual advice.  Each of them holds paid government sinecures, allowing them to spew hate on the dime of the Israeli taxpayer.

This raises the important question: why does the U.S. government allow tax-deductible contributions to Israeli charities like Chabad given their propagation of such genocidal rhetoric?

Cicero first learned about the Chabad article from Udi Aloni’s Ynet column, which pointed it out.  He points out that it has been his custom in criticizing Israelis who support the Occupation to attack the liberal elite which is characterized by the slogan “shooting and crying.”  Instead, he says he now will have to pay closer attention to the radical Orthodox who “shoot and laugh.”  Aloni imagines the young Orthodox boy reading this publication in his synagogue where it’s distributed, who conjures to himself with a smile on his face the picture of Palestinians standing behind barbed wire in such a camp.  This is the legacy these rabbis are bequeathing to their young followers.

Finally, since I know people of all ideological stripes may read into this story what they wish, I want to make clear that this is not Judaism.  These wicked men may be Jews and rabbis, but they don’t represent normative Judaism any more than Osama bin Laden represents normative Islam.  Do not make the mistake of conflating this idiocy with all of Israel or all of Judaism.  Yes, these men are dangerous, they are hateful, and they must be challenged.  But there is another face of Judaism and another face of Israel (though that is becoming increasingly difficult to see I concede).

A West Bank regional development council has produced a slick promo for settlement tourism which earnestly flogs the Occupation brand.  The film, Harvest Time, is being screened regularly at a new $1-million visitor center established at the Psagot Winery.  The plot involves a ragingly successful Israeli businessman, Yonatan, sent by his boss to London to close a big deal.  Instead of doing as he was told, he receives a call informing him that his father was wounded [presumably in a terror attack] and is in the hospital requiring a major operation.  This will prevent dad from leading the wine harvest at the family vineyard.  This news turns Yonatan away from affairs of the world and toward affairs of family and the heart…that is, his deep attachment to the family winery.  He can’t possibly let it go under.

Bolstering his fidelity to family is a Biblical fantasia interlude, in which characters from the Bible come to life as shepherds walking the hills of Judea once more.  What can trump the call to fidelity to one’s family, one’s people and one’s land?  Nothing.

Here’s the narration that acccompanies the Bibilical fantasy:

Look around you.  Every hill is part of history.  Every stone has a story.

A Biblical shepherd dressed in ancient headress and with flock quotes Jeremiah to Yonatan telling him he must return to this land.  As the sky darkens and ominous music swells on the soundtrack, Yonatan confusedly turns as if seeking his fate.  In the next scene, Yonatan has visions of an ancient Israelite battle as flaming arrows hurtle toward him.

The narrator continues as if speaking to the hero:

You’ll see, someday the children of Israel will return to these lands [piano music swells and camera pans on Israeli flag fluttering over a settlement panorama, and then shows toddlers, wearing kippah naturally, playing at a playground].

This is where you grew up. This is part of what you are, of who you are. We are here. [Don't look for it] anywhere [else]. And you, where are YOU going?

It’s impressive in a slick, sleazy sort of way.  It presents the settlements in the sort of romantic way they were envisioned just after the 1967 war: as elements of a quest for Jewish history and identity; as part of a fulfillment of the Zionist dream.  What the film omits of course is all the horrendous history between 1967-2010: the theft, killings, religious hatred.  The whole bloody mess.  I can’t think of an Israeli film (or any film really) I’ve seen in a long time that is as ahistorical and fraudulent as this one.  If Im Tirzu had it in them (they don’t) to create a slick promotional video, this is what they would make.

The winery owner spoke about his agenda in creating the work:

The film deals with questions of identity and is an attempt to connect our visitors with the history of this place as the navel of the land of the Jews.  We want people watching the film to understand that we are not ranting people murmuring prayers all day.  But rather people more or less like them who work for their living.

This neglects the fact that the overwhelming majority of settlers do not work the land like Yonatan supposedly does, but rather commute to the same type of job that Yonatan does in Tel Aviv or Jerusalem.  The settlements are not a agricultural idyll resonating of the Biblical era.  They are rather extended suburbs of Israel’s major cities.  Nothing more, nothing less.

The lead actor in this nonsense is Liron Levo (Kippur by Amos Gitai, 9/11, Munich) about whose politics I know very little.  But you can see from the following disingenuousness that he’s a bit dense (and deliberately so) about what exactly the settlement enterprise is and how it impacts Israel as a nation:

Levo sees no political message in the film whatsoever.  ”I am an actor.  And when someone shows me a good script and provides interesting people to work with, I go for it.  And so it was in this situation.  From my perspective the plot could take place in the settlements, Shiloh or Gaza.  The main thing was to create a wonderful film and give viewers something to think about.  For me personally, there isn’t a single work about politics.  And I don’t exploit anything I create to make a political statement.

“Also, I don’t see this as a promotional film for a region.  From my perspective, they should screen it everywhere in the world.  My goal is to provoke dialogue and thought, as have other films I’ve done.  I’m an actor, not a politician.”

The only person who should be doing more thinking about this film is Levo himself as he seems not to understand that he’s pimping the settlement brand.

We have an Israeli company called Compugraphic to thank for this drivel.  I don’t see them bragging yet about this on their client list, but I do see other old friends like Elbit, PAKAR, and Rafael, some of Israel’s chief armaments companies.

Thanks to Dena Shunra for translation of the script.

The N.Y. Times offers some intriguing theories and reporting on the Stuxnet worm affair.  Among the tantalizing issues it raises is that the name “Myrtus” (Latin for “myrtle”) has been discovered in the malware’s computer code and may indeed have been the overall name of the project.  Also, one of the code modules was named for Guava, the fruit genus in which the myrtle tree is found.

Those who know their Biblical Hebrew will recall that Queen Esther’s Hebrew name is Hadassah, and that hadas is the myrtle tree.  As John Markoff and David Sanger note in their story, the Book of Esther recounts a preemptive strike by Persian Jews against the rulers of the kingdom who sought to exterminate the country’s Jewish community.  If Israel’s cyber warfare community created this cyber weapon, clearly they would see their efforts in precisely the same vein using computer warfare to preëmpt an Iranian nuclear weapon, which many Israeli leaders have called a method to exterminate not just Israeli, but world Jewry.

The Times story concedes that all this may be a very sophisticated red herring designed to intrigue the world into presuming Israeli involvement.  Along these lines, it’s worth noting that Israelis claiming an affiliation (which I strongly doubt) with that country’s intelligence services offered me what they claimed was the code name of the upcoming attack on Iran: Cyrus the Great.  Again, an intriguing red herring.  But possibly one that Israeli intelligence would like spread around the internet by someone like me as a form of anti-Iran psyops.

The Times story also raises once again, as I have done, the distinct possibility that the IDF cyberwarfare Unit 8200 would be expected to have created this monster if the job was done by Israel.  In an interview with the authors, Haaretz’s respected security correspondent, Yossi Melman, now seems to have adjusted his views and believes that Israel was involved.

Over a year ago, Reuters published a story which clairvoyantly outlined Stuxnet, the Israeli strategy that might’ve created it, and even speculated on the means of delivering the worm which turned out to be prescient:

…Cyberwarfare…is seen by independent experts as the likely new vanguard of Israel’s efforts to foil the nuclear ambitions of its arch-foe Iran.  The appeal of cyber attacks was boosted, Israeli sources say, by the limited feasibility of conventional air strikes on the distant and fortified Iranian atomic facilities, and by US reluctance to countenance another open war in the Middle East.“We came to the conclusion that, for our purposes, a key Iranian vulnerability is in its on-line information,” said one recently retired Israeli security cabinet member, using a generic term for digital networks. “We have acted accordingly.”

Cyberwarfare teams nestle deep within Israel’s spy agencies, which have rich experience in traditional sabotage techniques and are cloaked in official secrecy and censorship. They can draw on the know-how of Israeli commercial firms that are among the world’s hi-tech leaders and whose staff are often veterans of élite military intelligence computer units.

“To judge by my interaction with Israeli experts in various international forums, Israel can definitely be assumed to have advanced cyber-attack capabilities,” said Scott Borg, director of the US Cyber Consequences Unit, which advises various Washington agencies on cyber security.

Technolytics Institute, an American consultancy, last year rated Israel the sixth-biggest “cyber warfare threat,” after China, Russia, Iran, France and “extremist/terrorist groups.”

Asked to speculate about how Israel might target Iran, Borg said malware — a commonly used abbreviation for “malicious software” — could be inserted to corrupt, commandeer or crash the controls of sensitive sites like uranium enrichment plants.Such attacks could be immediate, he said. Or they might be latent, with the malware loitering unseen and awaiting an external trigger, or pre-set to strike automatically when the infected facility reaches a more critical level of activity.

As Iran’s nuclear assets would probably be isolated from outside computers, hackers would be unable to access them directly, Borg said. Israeli agents would have to conceal the malware in software used by the Iranians or discreetly plant it on portable hardware brought in, unknowingly, by technicians.

“A contaminated USB stick would be enough,” Borg said.

Now, we can say that either Borg was involved in creating or delivering Stuxnet or else he was prescient.  I choose to believe the latter.  It’s also worth noting that Borg understood Israel’s motivation to do this right around the time Stuxnet was created (it’s first appearance was in 2009, around the time this article was written).  Further, it’s simply astonishing that if an American cybersecurity expert knew in 2009 an infected USB stick could damage Iran’s nuclear plants that no Iranian thought about this and did anything to prevent it.  I would think there might be a few heads rolling in the security offices of Natanz and Bushehr.

An Israeli cyber warfare specialist employed by the Israeli military industry who Markoff and Sanger interview disputes Israel’s involvement.  Frankly, if Israel was involved either this individual or his colleagues, protegés or mentors may’ve played a role in the project, so we have to discount the reliability of his testimony.

The Israeli expert also makes a claim that is disputed by Iranian experts themselves about the behavior of the virus:

Shai Blitzblau, the technical director and head of the computer warfare laboratory at Maglan, an Israeli company specializing in information security, said he was “convinced that Israel had nothing to do with Stuxnet.”

“We did a complete simulation of it and we sliced the code to its deepest level,” he said. “We have studied its protocols and functionality. Our two main suspects for this are high-level industrial espionage against Siemens and a kind of academic experiment.”

Mr. Blitzblau noted that the worm hit India, Indonesia and Russia before it hit Iran, though the worm has been found disproportionately in Iranian computers. He also noted that the Stuxnet worm has no code that reports back the results of the infection it creates. Presumably, a good intelligence agency would like to trace its work.

This strikes me as sophisticated disinformation.  Can any reasonably serious person believe that a project involving scores of programmers working in teams over at least six months aiming to infect Iranian industrial command and control systems was merely “an academic experiment?”  As far as the claim of industrial espionage against Siemens, that too lacks credibility since the worm appears to be benign outside Iran and there are no known cases of real damage outside that country.  Various sources inside Iran have acknowledged such damage (though there are other voices there who dispute this) and we know of apparent sabotaging of Natanz’s centrifuge arrays.

Further, Iranian sources also dispute another claim by Blitzblau, that Stuxnet doesn’t report back its results:

The director of the Information Technology Council of the Industries and Mines Ministry has announced that the IP addresses of 30,000 industrial computer systems infected by this malware have been detected, the Mehr New Agency reported on Saturday.

“An electronic war has been launched against Iran,” Mahmoud Liaii added.

“This computer worm is designed to transfer data about production lines from our industrial plants to (locations) outside of the country,” he said.

Also, in the realm of Israeli disinformation, NGO Monitor’s Gerald Steinberg replied, in an e-mail thread that included me that his view is that Vladimir Putin did it!  Yes, I kid you not!

In a rational policy analysis, in which there are no good options, the “least bad” option becomes the policy of choice. If this is indeed a cyberattack undertaken by a government body (Putin’s Russia is also a logical candidate), designed to damage the Iranian nuclear weapons development program, and if this strategy was selected following a careful assessment in which the military as well as other options were deemed to be less likely to achieve core objectives at lower costs (including options expected to have ineffective results — sanctions), and if the side-effects, to the degree that they could be anticipated, including “blow back”, were considered in this assessment, then perhaps this is the “least bad option”, given all the factors and available options.

I almost gagged when I read that.  Russia??  What is the guy smokin’?  First, a Russian contractor is building Bushehr.  Why would Putin want to sabotage the work of his own country’s contractor?  Why would he wish to impede the development of a project to which his country and government have devoted incredible amounts of effort, energy, and national pride?  The entire notion beggars belief and sounds to me like Mossad disinformation. The only question is whether Steinberg says these things because he truly believes them or because Meir Dagan wants him to say them.

Yes, it is true that the infection wormed its way into Iran through an infected USB stick from that same Russian contractor.  But this would mean that either the contractor or someone in the Russian intelligence community deliberately infected Iran’s nuclear facilities and did so in a way that was traceable back to it.  This is something the actual creator of Stuxnet would NEVER have done unless he was very stupid.  And whoever created Stuxnet was NOT stupid.

“You shall not oppress the stranger [immigrant] because you know the soul of the stranger for you yourselves were immigrants in the land of Egypt” (Exodus 23:9)  [translation, R.S.]

This verse recalls the migration of Jacob’s sons to Egypt during an ancient Israelite famine.  It invokes the history of oppression that Jews suffered there as economic migrants who ultimately escaped slavery at the hands of Pharaoh during the miraculous exodus orchestrated by Moses during the holiday we are about the celebrate, Passover.

Ruth and Naomi (Leonard Baskin)

The Bible calls on Jews to treat immigrants (the term ger in Hebrew, which is often translated as “stranger”) with respect no less than eight different times in at least four different books.  In addition, there is the deeply moving story of the Book of Ruth, whose entire plot revolves around an Israelite economic migrant, Naomi, who travels with her family to Moab to escape famine at home (not unlike current Israeli immigrants from Sudan, Ethiopia and Asia).  While in Moab, Naomi’s sons marry Moabite women, but when the sons and her husband die, she decides to return to Israel and urges Ruth, her daughter-in-law, to return to her Moabite family.  Ruth refuses with one of the most gracious, moving speeches to grace the entire Tanach:

“Entreat me not to leave you, or to turn back from following you; For wherever you go, I will go; And wherever you lodge, I will lodge; Your people shall be my people, and your God, my God. Where you die, I will die, and there will I be buried. The LORD do so to me, and more also, if anything but death parts you and me.” (Ruth 1:16-17)

In more recent history, we have the accounts of righteous Gentiles who gave Jews refuge during the Holocaust at great risk to themselves and their families.  Conversely, we have a darker history of those like the Roosevelt administration which turned Jews away from ports of refuge, as the St. Louis was shunned when it unsuccessfully attempted to deposit 900 Jewish refugees in the New World

This is not a general subject that is peripheral, but rather is at the heart of Judaism.  Without the tender mercy of strangers, we might have long ago ceased to exist as a people.  Therefore, we see ourselves as a generous people, one attuned to suffering and therefore bound to treat the stranger in our midst with kindness and respect.

So how else should a Jew react when they read disgusting incitement (for the full effect in the original Hebrew, read here) from none other than a member of the Israeli Knesset, Yaakov “Ketzeleh” Katz, who is also a prominent extremist settler leader.  Here Katz (whose nickname oddly invokes the Yiddish diminutive for “kitty-cat”) inveighs against the thousands of economic migrants pouring into Israel’s economy from dire African places like Sudan, Ethiopia and Somalia.  One linguistic note: the term “infiltrator” used here has a charged connotation in modern Hebrew, as it historically referred to Palestinian fighters who “infiltrated” Israel to engage in terror attacks:

The State of Israel is facing a hard problem: Between 1,000 and 2,000 persons infiltrate each month through the porous southern border…In an increasing arithmetic progression we will reach, in six or seven years, 75,000 or 100,000 African infiltrators, most of whom will live in Tel Aviv…

With a century of hard labor, Am Yisrael has built here a Jewish state. In ten years, these infiltrators could make it all go to waste. We are losing the state to insanity.

…Our committee has visited schools and kindergartens in Arad and we couldn’t believe our eyes: The city is slowly being taken over. The schools in Arad and Eilat are filling up with Eritrean and Sudanese children. Already, close to a tenth of the city’s inhabitants are Sudanese or Eritrean, Muslims and Christians.

We got used to thinking that we are defeating our enemies in battles and here they have surprised us from the rear. The rulers of Sudan and Eritrea, in collusion with the Egyptians are conquering Israel.

Note in this passage, echoes of the Nativist rants of yesteryear against the oncoming hordes and unwashed masses bearing hard down on our shores.  Note the language akin to that used to describe a plague of locusts or other form of vermin.  The racism is mind-boggling.  Also note that Katz, comfortably ensconced in his West Bank settlement home, is attempting to gin up hysterical fear among the wealthy denizens of Tel Aviv’s northern suburbs, which are akin to places like Evanston, Scarsdale, Beverly Hills and Napa Valley in the U.S.

…The infiltrators are penetrating Hatikva neighborhood, are flooding south Tel Aviv and every day they advance a few tens of meters towards Dizengoff on their way to Akirov and Ramat Aviv…As I see it, there is no choice but for the prime minister to declare martial law for everything regarding infiltrators.

In the following passage, Katz suggests establishing an entire city for migrants that would be a cross between a concentration camp and Hooverville:

…I have suggested…to start [constructing] a city that will be a decent distance from the border, where only there the infiltrators will be allowed to live. They will be employed in government projects for building the city itself [and] building the border fence [to prevent further immigration].

It may be that this kind of labor would take it’s toll on the infiltrators in a way that they will advise their relatives not to follow in their footsteps to Israel. They may even wish to pay again $2,500 per head to the corrupt guides who brought them here, this time in order to  return them to their home.

For some time no one is surprised how many of Tel Aviv’s residents are willing to sell Judea, Samaria and Jerusalem. But it is unbelievable for me to behold how it does not bother them that their own city is becoming Eritrean and Sudanese. A thought sneaks to my mind that this secular, liberal and elitist community has simply lost all will to live…Is this what they hoped for when they built their homes in Tel Aviv? That it will become an African city? What kind of person wants to sell himself and his home?  [translation: Eitan Issacson]

The Jewish people both within and outside Israel should know that when they continue supporting the Occupation, they are supporting racism like this.  Do we want to be judged and measured as a people by the hate of such hooligans?  Further, I challenge the settlers who define Judaism and Jewish values for us as they do here in the comment threads.  Theirs is not Judaism.  It is a perversion of Judaism.  Let’s call it Judea-ism, an idolatry based on worship of land over the spiritual values which our Biblical Prophets represented.  We do not need a Third Temple in order to be good Jews.  We do not need armed outposts in Hebron to maintain our covenant with God.  Let us take back our religion from such people.  They do not represent us, nor should they represent Israel.

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• Israel to build security barrier on border with Egypt (telegraph.co.uk)

It seems only too appropriate as we near Rosh Hashana tonight (Friday night) and contemplate the past and coming year, that we consider Leonard Cohen’s version of the U’Netaneh Tokef prayer which he calls, Who by Fire?  Considering last year’s war on Gaza and the possibility of an Israel-Iran conflagration this year, “fire” seems an entirely apt element for us to consider:

And who by fire, who by water,
Who in the sunshine, who in the night time,
Who by high ordeal, who by common trial,
Who in your merry merry month of May,
Who by very slow decay,
And who shall I say is calling?

And who in her lonely slip, who by barbiturate,
Who in these realms of love, who by something blunt,
And who by avalanche, who by powder,
Who for his greed, who for his hunger,
And who shall I say is calling?

And who by brave assent, who by accident,
Who in solitude, who in this mirror,
Who by his lady’s command, who by his own hand,
Who in mortal chains, who in power,
And who shall I say is calling

Thanks to Rabbi Brant Rosen for coming up with this brilliant video of Cohen performing the song live TV in 1989. The performance has an absolutely scorching solo by Sonny Rollins (alav ha-shalom) on sax which opens and closes the song (the closing solo is the real scorcher). This is righteous music, Jewish soul music.

Unless you are of a certain age, Story of Issac may be less well known to you. It is one of his earlier ones (it’s on Songs from a Room, which came out in 1969 during the height of the Vietnam war) and recounts the story of the Akedah as only Leonard Cohen can. Since we read the Akedah as the Torah reading for the second day of Rosh Hashana, I thought it appropriate to dig up the above video.

These are the critical lyrics sung with great passion and moral conviction:

You who build these altars now
To sacrifice these children,
You must not do it anymore.
A scheme is not a vision
And you never have been tempted
By a demon or a god.
You who stand above them now,
Your hatchets blunt and bloody,
You were not there before,
When I lay upon a mountain
And my fathers hand was trembling
With the beauty of the word.

And if you call me brother now,
Forgive me if I inquire,
Just according to whose plan?
When it all comes down to dust
I will kill you if I must,
I will help you if I can.
When it all comes down to dust
I will help you if I must,
I will kill you if I can.
And mercy on our uniform,
Man of peace or man of war,
The peacock spreads his fan.

When I was a UCLA grad student in the late 1970s and helping produce a campus Jewish culture festival, I approached Cohen’s manager as I thought he would be a perfect choice to do a concert for the festival. But then I heard he was actually a practicing Buddhist. At any rate, he was somewhere off living on a mountain in Greece at the time and the concert never happened.

Cohen has gotten himself into hot water by planning to perform at a concert in Israel in violation of the cultural boycott. He tried to make amends by offering a concert in Ramallah, but the Palestinians weren’t buying and it was cancelled. He decided to go ahead with the Israeli concert and donate the proceeds to Amnesty. But when Palestinians protested this move, that group backed out. So Cohen is in the unlikely position of wanting to support Israel-Palestine peace financially in order to soothe his guilty conscience. But no one will have his lucre.

Leonard Cohen has always been an artist who stood, sometimes awkwardly, sometimes gracefully, on the cusp of political consciousness and personal, spiritual (almost mystical) introspection. It is one of the most compelling aspects of his songwriting and persona. You can even hear this in the lyrics of Who by Fire and Story of Isaac, in which he comments knowingly and wryly on humanity’s moral failings.

But the problem with the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is that it is far too gross and in your face for the likes of Cohen. His medium is subtle, knowing lyrics and he is the coolest of the cool. Unfortunately, when two peoples war for as long as Israelis and Palestinians have–there is no longer any subtlety. It’s all death, all blood.

Cohen is not an artist who feels comfortable choosing sides. His outlook is far too diffuse for that. He doesn’t want to be pigeon-holed as being pro or anti-anything except humanity in general terms. Yes, this is frustrating for those fighting a political battle to the death. But Cohen chooses not to join the fight. He observes it as an artist.

In all this I’m trying to give my impression of what may be at work in his mind. I am not justifying or defending. But despite any criticism that may be leveled, it doesn’t lessen him, in my view, as a seminal performer who embodies a powerful Jewish ethos in his lyrics.

So to Leonard Cohen and all my readers: Shana tovah u’metukah. A good and sweet New Year and may the peacock spread his fan.

Rabbi Manis Friedman: the face of a Jewish genocidaire

Moment Magazine has done us a service by exposing the true face of Jewish terror.  And it is a the face of a Chabad rabbi.  To the question: “How Should Jews Treat Their Arab Neighbors,” Rabbi Manis Friedman of the Bais Chana Institute of Jewish Studies, St. Paul, MN. responds:

I don’t believe in western morality, i.e. don’t kill civilians or children, don’t destroy holy sites, don’t fight during holiday seasons, don’t bomb cemeteries, don’t shoot until they shoot first because it is immoral.

The only way to fight a moral war is the Jewish way: Destroy their holy sites. Kill men, women and children (and cattle).

The first Israeli prime minister who declares that he will follow the Old Testament will finally bring peace to the Middle East. First, the Arabs will stop using children as shields. Second, they will stop taking hostages knowing that we will not be intimidated. Third, with their holy sites destroyed, they will stop believing that G-d is on their side. Result: no civilian casualties, no children in the line of fire, no false sense of righteousness, in fact, no war.

Zero tolerance for stone throwing, for rockets, for kidnapping will mean that the state has achieved sovereignty. Living by Torah values will make us a light unto the nations who suffer defeat because of a disastrous morality of human invention.

Is it possible that there can be pure evil in Judaism?  It grieves me to say that yes, there can be.  At least in one sect of Judaism, which harbors and encourages such genocidal impulses and lunatic leaders.

What Rabbi Friedman is talking about is the Biblical injunction to wipe out Amalek, the tribe that betrayed the Children of Israel and attacked them as they left Egypt.  The only problem with Friedman’s claim that this is the “Jewish way” is that he has twisted the Biblical record.  Wiping out Amalek was not the “Jewish way.”  It was actually a command hardly, if ever, issued concerning any other Israelite neighbor.  In the Bible, Jews did not routinely wipe out entire tribes merely because they were hostile to Israel.

But leaving all this aside, even as we acknowledge a horrifying genocidal legacy from the Bible, this is an act that happened several thousand years ago.  There is absolutely no valid contemporary claim that Jews should engage in similar slaughter against any enemy including the Arabs.  The fact that a Chabad rabbi attempts to bamboozle fellow Jews into believing they have not only a right, but a duty to slaughter Arabs today is shameful.  This is a rabbi who should be put in herem by the entire Jewish community including his own sect.  The fact that he is a respected Chabad rabbi in a major U.S. city speaks volumes about what this movement is: an ardent supporter of the most extreme elements of the settler movement.  The next time you read of a settler pogrom on the West Bank, you have spiritual leaders like Friedman and Rabbi Dov Wolpe to thank.

And hey, if you’re a member of Club Kosher, you can join the holy rabbi at the Omni National Golf Resort and Spa in Arizona to hear him lecture on these and other uplifting subjects.  And do please send him drishat shalom from me, one of his admirers.

I mean get real, get a load of this guy’s bio:

He has appeared on CNN, A&E Reviews, PBS, and BBC Worldwide, and has been the subject of articles in the New York Times, Rolling Stone, Seventeen, Guideposts, Insight, Publisher’s Weekly and others.

Rabbi Friedman is a noted Biblical scholar, recognized for his sagacious grasp of Jewish mysticism.

…Rabbi Friedman is a professionally ranked member of the National Speakers Association. His speaking tours take him to every part of this country as well as Israel, England, The Netherlands, South Africa, Australia, Brazil, Venezuela, Peru, Canada, and Hong Kong.

I’m not surprised that he’s a hit among Chabad crowds in these places, but what excuse do these major media outlets have in giving this man a bully pulpit from which to spout his hate? And even if he spoke about other theological issues than Jewish-Arab relations, how can you justify putting him on the air to talk about anything after finding out his views about Arabs?

We already have Rabbis for Human Rights.  Why not Rabbis for Genocide?

And I do SO enjoy my right wing readers who take me to task when I write posts like this claiming that I’m engaging in lashon hara in excoriating Jewish scum like this. I can’t wait for the first comment to make that claim here. To that person, whoever you may be, perhaps you’ll explain how exposing and condemning a Jewish advocate of genocide is lashon hara.