Israel’s Channel 13 aired recordings (the Jerusalem Post has a highly truncated version of the story) of two senior rabbis at the Orthodox military preparatory academy in the settlement of Eli, as they taught their students lessons on race, the Holocaust, and the evils of “secular pluralism.”
Rabbi Eliezer Kashtiel lectured his students:
“Yes, we’re racists. We believe in racism. There are races in the world and there are genetic traits inherent in nations. This demands that we think how to help them. There are differences among races.”
A student challenged him, asking “Who appointed you to decide who is who [which nations are best]?” Kashtiel answered: “[Because] I can see that my achievements are more impressive than his.”
The rabbi added:
It’s best to be a servant of a Jew. They are happy to be servants [of Jews]. There are nations around us with genetic defects. The Arab wants to be under Occupation because they have a genetic defect. They don’t know how to run a state. They don’t know how to do anything. Look at how they act.
Another teacher, Rabbi Giora Radler, addressed his students during a lesson:
The Holocaust was not due to the fact that they killed Jews. That wasn’t the Holocaust. All of the excuses claiming that it was based on ideology or that it was systematic, this is ridiculous. Because this was based on ideology, to a certain extent, makes it more moral than if you murdered people for no reason.
Humanism, all the secular culture [saying] that we believe in Man [above God], that’s the Holocaust. The Holocaust is really being a pluralist, to believe in Man, that’s what’s called a Holocaust.
When asked what was his definition of the Holocaust, he replied:
“The Holy One Blessed Be He has been shouting for years that the Diaspora was doomed. But people paid Him no attention. That was their illness that had to be healed by the Holocaust.”
Later in the class, he added:
The logic of the Germans was the right one for them. Hitler said that a certain group within the population was a calamitous race for mankind. Because of it [this race], mankind will be destroyed. They [the race] are bad for humanity and therefore they must be eliminated. Does this ideology sound logical to you? Very bad?
A student answered: “This doesn’t sound ethical.” Radler replied: “Wasn’t Moses cruel and evil like Hitler? The student responded: “No.” The rabbi said: “Why not? There is one thing in the world that is truly evil and that is to be a hypocrite. Does it make a difference to you if they killed you now with a knife the way they did to Agag [the Amalekite king brutally murdered by the prophet Samuel] or if they kill you in a gas chamber?”
Later Radler added:
Let’s begin by asking the question: was Hitler right or not? He is the most correct person there is. He was definitely right in every word he said. His ideology was correct. There is a male world which fights, which deals with honor and the brotherhood of soldiers. And there is the soft, ethical feminine world which turns the other cheek. We believe that such [secular Diaspora] Jews carry on this [feminine] heritage, making them the real enemy. He [Hitler] is 100% correct, aside from the face that he was on the wrong side.”
A note of explanation is in order: these views are common among a certain sector of the Israeli Orthodox population. They may not believe that Hitler was right. But many believe that the Holocaust was a punishment for Diaspora Jews, who were largely secular and refused both to become observant Jews and to abandon the Diaspora and make aliya to Israel. Hence their punishment was, in some perverse way, just.
Further, there is a clearly racist element in this type of Orthodoxy which believes that Jews are a superior race to all non-Jews and especially to Palestinians, who are largely Muslim and Christian. This in turn justifies the brutal methods employed by IDF divisions composed largely of such yeshiva students, armed now not with Bibles, but with lethal weapons.
Your first reaction to this lunacy may be to dismiss it as the anti-Semitic ramblings of a few insane holy men. But you’d be wrong for a number of reasons. First, because these views are prevalent among a substantial portion of Israeli Jews, especially among the Orthodox and the radical far-right. Further, these sectors of society are dominant in Israeli politics. So the views are far more visible and influential than you might think. There are many MKs and ministers who essentially believe these ideas, though they may tone down their statements for public consumption.
Second, these are the teachers of the future soldiers and officers of the IDF. They are the boys who will be fighting Israel’s wars, guarding settlements, and monitoring checkpoints. They will bring the foul attitudes taught them by their teachers into combat, where they will make decisions about life and death for their Palestinian victims. The heartlessness they learned in their studies will make them more efficient killers of heathen Arabs.
Third, this “lesson” implicitly teaches that just as Hitler’s genocide was right “for the Germans,” an Israeli genocide against Palestinians would also be justified. Since Israelis (in this teaching) are the equivalent of the Jewish Master Race, anything or anyone that threatens them must be eradicated. Palestinians would certainly fit that bill.
It’s heartbreaking to admit that the term “Judeo-Nazi,” which Yeshayahu Leibowitz coined decades ago to portray such aberrant ideas is, if anything, more apt today than it was when he first uttered it.
In closing, this is not the equivalent of a lone gunman theory. These rabbis are not outliers. They are at the heart of the thinking of the most powerful elements of the Israeli religious and political establishment. If you wonder why Bibi Netanyahu can endorse European anti-Semites and break bread with brutal dictators, it is precisely because of the twisted logic offered by these rabbis. If you wonder why or how Israel can become a proto-fascist state, thriving on bile and hate, you have only to look at this perverted logic for your answer.
Finally, I’d ask anyone who wants to trot out their anti-Semitic canards to withhold them. This post was meant to show the moral perversion at the heart of certain form of Israeli and Orthodox triumphalism. Any generalizations about all-Jews-are-this-or-that, are absolutely treif and will be treated as so.
H/t to Iris Bar for alerting me to the story and David Sheen for transcribing the video and captioning it.
RE: “The logic of the Germans was the right one for them. Hitler said that a certain group within the population was a calamitous race for mankind. Because of it [this race], mankind will be destroyed. They [the race] are bad for humanity and therefore they must be eliminated… Let’s begin by asking the question: was Hitler right or not? He is the most correct person there is. He was definitely right in every word he said. His ideology was correct.” ~ Rabbi Giora Radler
MOSHE FEIGLIN:
SOURCE – https://www.richardsilverstein.com/2009/08/20/yaalon-looks-to-fascist-right-for-support-in-likud-leadership-struggle/
Yes this is the sad logic of Zionism. That Hitler was Right and in a sense Zionism always understood this which was why, from the very start, they expressed support for his ideas.On 21 June 1933 the Zionist Federation sent this memo to Hitler. Has anything changed since then?
May we therefore be permitted to present our views, which, in our opinion, make possible a solution in keeping with the principles of the new German State of National Awakening and which at the same time might signify for Jews a new ordering of the conditions of their existence … Zionism has no illusions about the difficulty of the Jewish condition, which consists above all in an abnormal occupational pattern and in the fault of an intellectual and moral posture not rooted in one’s own tradition …
… an answer to the Jewish question truly satisfying to the national state can be brought about only with the collaboration of the Jewish movement that aims at a social, cultural, and moral renewal of Jewry … a rebirth of national life, such as is occurring in German life through adhesion to Christian and national values, must also take place in the Jewish national group. For the Jew, too, origin, religion, community of fate and group consciousness must be of decisive significance in the shaping of his life …
On the foundation of the new state, which has established the principle of race, we wish so to fit our community into the total structure so that for us too, in the sphere assigned to us, fruitful activity for the Fatherland is possible … Our acknowledgement of Jewish nationality provides for a clear and sincere relationship to the German people and its national and racial realities. Precisely because we do not wish to falsify these fundamentals, because we, too, are against mixed marriage and are for maintaining the purity of the Jewish group …
… fidelity to their own kind and their own culture gives Jews the inner strength that prevents insult to the respect for the national sentiments and the imponderables of German nationality; and rootedness in one’s own spirituality protects the Jew from becoming the rootless critic of the national foundations of German essence. The national distancing which the state desires would thus be brought about easily as the result of an organic development.
Thus, a self-conscious Jewry here described, in whose name we speak, can find a place in the structure of the German state, because it is inwardly unembarrassed, free from the resentment which assimilated Jews must feel at the determination that they belong to Jewry, to the Jewish race and past. We believe in the possibility of an honest relationship of loyalty between a group-conscious Jewry and the German state …
For its practical aims, Zionism hopes to be able to win the collaboration even of a government fundamentally hostile to Jews, because in dealing with the Jewish question no sentimentalities are involved but a real problem whose solution interests all peoples, and at the present moment especially the German people.
The realisation of Zionism could only be hurt by resentment of Jews abroad against the German development. Boycott propaganda – such as is currently being carried on against Germany in many ways – is in essence un-Zionist, because Zionism wants not to do battle but to convince and to build … Our observations, presented herewith, rest on the conviction that, in solving the Jewish problem according to its own lights, the German Government will have full understanding for a candid and clear Jewish posture that harmonizes with the interests of the state
I AM GOBSMACKED. Is it then a stretch to connect the dots with Netanyahu basically exonerating Hitler, standing in his defense, saying he only perpetrated the Holocaust because the Mufti pressured him? And is this not basically an attempt, a wretched attempt, to lay the ground work for a “final solution” toward the Arabs?
It is such pure evil, but then again, the ongoing brainwashing of Israelis from the early days of school all the way to military service, children really just coming out of high school with no life experience, culminate with them being baptized in the setting and legacy of Masada, given guns and orders, sent to terrorize civilians…
I weep for the Jewish people, but even more so for our generation which is witness to the ongoing fascist ideology, embedded in this type of religious upbringing. The real enemy of the Israeli Jew, is an Israeli Jew promoting genocide in his name.
I’m sure there is even more to this, but how will you guys get out of this programmed fate, Richard?
Regards,
Andre
@jewsagainstzionismracism
I hope this response to ‘jewsagainstzionismracism’ isn’t off topic, and will be published.
The purpose of the collaboration between Zionists and Nazis was to rescue German Jews and to preserve a fraction of their property from being stolen by the Nazi regime.
This is not to defend the Transfer Agreement. It is legitimate to argue that negotiating with the Third Reich was a mistake, and that it would have been better to maintain the boycott. But German Jews snatched from the claws of Nazism could hardly have been expected to agree.
The Zionist movement undoubtedly saved tens of thousands of lives during the years before the Holocaust. According to Francis Nicosia, the Raul Hilberg Distinguished Professor of Holocaust Studies at the University of Vermont, ‘The approximately 80,000 German, Austrian, and Czech Jews who were able to immigrate legally and illegally to Palestine between 1933 and 1941 represent 80,000 potential victims of the Nazi genocide who were saved.’ (Nicosia, 2008: 288)
And BTW, there was so much opposition to the Ha’avara Agreement among Zionists, that some ‘collaborators’ , like Haim Arlosorov and Kastner, paid with their lives.
Today in Israel, anyone going about there daily affairs, in an office, cafe or on the street, is bound to meet a grandchild or a great-grandchild of the ‘Polish’ Jews brought to Israel as a result of the Ha’avara or Transfer Agreement.
This is almost unbelievable. Can it really be true??
This is meshugas, or I don’t understand what’s going on there in a Yeshiva 😲
In response do these atrocious sermons, Centrist lawmaker Yair Lapid wrote on Twitter:
This is not Judaism. These are not values. People who speak like this are not worthy of educating youths.
Lapid called for halting the state financing of the Yeshiva “until the racist rabbis are expelled”.
Additionally, Leftist Meretz leader Tamar Zandberg said:
The Eli academy should have been closed long ago, and whoever let the chauvinism, homophobia and all the rest of the hate which comes out of there to continue the madness, should not be surprised by the horrible expressions which came out of there today.
Zandberg said she applied to the education ministry to stop funding the academy.
Israeli-Palestinian lawmaker Ahmad Tibi wryly added: “In German it would have sounded more authentic”.
Further criticisms of these rogue Rabbis from mainstream Israel politicians will be forthcoming.
[Comment deleted: I do not publish anti Semitic garbage here.]
The first genetic problem is people who think like that man.