Nir Hasson :The last Jewish community holding out against Zionism
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haaretz.com
efense Minister Avigdor Lieberman paid a shivah call to the ultra-Orthodox Jerusalem
neighborhood of Mea She’arim last week. But while Lieberman was there,
several dozen members of the extremist Haredi group Edah Haredit started
gathering in protest. The minister’s bodyguards summoned the police,
who forcibly dispersed the protesters and allowed Lieberman to safely
leave the scene.
Hours later, police raided
the offices of an organization that provides legal, financial and social
assistance to yeshiva students who have gotten into trouble with the
military authorities, arresting six suspects. There, too, there were
violent confrontations between police officers and Edah Haredit members.
“When police arrived at the scene, dozens of ultra-Orthodox
[or Haredi] men gathered around the building, screamed at the police
and started to throw whatever they could get their hands on at them –
stones, objects, iron bars and eggs,” the police said in a statement.
From the other side, though,
what happened during Lieberman’s shivah call to Rabbi Avraham Elimelech
Firer looked totally different.
“There were maybe 20, 30
guys – I can promise you none of them have worked out in the last 20
years. If you’d brought fourth-graders, they could have gotten rid of
them,” according to Rabbi Mordechai Mintzberg of the Edah Haredit.
“Police came to rescue him?
Rescue him from what? No one here was in danger and no one had to rescue
anyone. He can threaten Hezbollah and Iran, but he can’t take someone
yelling, or a tomato? Then the police come with clubs, teargas and
grenades. So of course they throw things – that’s the minimal defense
there is here. They pounce on a population and then they portray it as
violent. What happened? Someone threw a water bottle? An egg? No one
here was in danger.”
In recent months, there have
been violent confrontations between policemen and Mea She’arim
residents almost daily. They are usually provoked by some police
activity, but sometimes because of Haredi demonstrations. The
demonstrators are not from the Haredi mainstream but the Edah Haredit
community, which is not large but whose families are drawn from the
Yishuv (the Jewish community in Ottoman Palestine and British Mandatory
Palestine) and the more radical Hasidic groups who constitute the most
conservative wing of the ultra-Orthodox community.
Members of Edah Haredit strongly oppose the Israeli state, Zionism and the Israel Defense Forces.
From their perspective, these clashes with the police are the peak of a
general attack on them – an attack they see as being aimed at
eliminating them as the last remaining Jewish force resisting Zionism,
after the mainstream Haredi community succumbed to the pressure.
“Over the past five years
there has been a serious attack [regarding] academia and education,”
says Mintzberg. “They are trying to assimilate us into Israeli society.
They want to break us, to make it so there’s no longer a concept of a
non-Israeli Jew.”
Mintzberg is considered a
“blueblood” among Haredi zealots. He is a great-grandson on both sides
of Rabbi Amram Blau, the founder of the extremist Neturei Karta sect,
which believes Jews must not have their own state until the Messiah
comes. He is 44 and lives in the heart of Mea She’arim; he has 11
children, two of whom were recently arrested during anti-draft
demonstrations. “We very much encourage this at home,” he says with a
smile.
“We’re people of the Old
Yishuv who have been here for generations, and our ideology is
isolationism,” he adds. “There is the reality and there is Zionism, but
we have to separate ourselves.”
‘It drives them crazy’
Two aspects of this
isolationism are boycotting elections and refusing to take money from
the government for their educational institutions.
The division between the
Edah Haredit and general Haredi community has indeed widened in recent
years. The feeling within the former is not just that the ultra-Orthodox
public has defected to the other side, but that its politicians and
media are spearheading the attacks against them.
“They bought off the Haredi
public to bring them into Israeli society,” says Mintzberg. “It started
with education, from textbooks. They got into the [educational] content –
something that once, from a Haredi perspective, was a mortal sin. Now
it passes quietly. People who in the past were killed for these things
now go like sheep to the slaughter, it’s unbelievable. They bought their
silence with massive budgets for the yeshivas. We put a mirror in front
of them, because we are coming from the same place, and it drives them
crazy.”
Indeed, it is hard to find much sympathy for the Edah Haredit in the ultra-Orthodox media or on Haredi websites.
Mintzberg categorically
rejects the claim that the Edah Haredit has earned its fanatical and
violent reputation by attacking soldiers in Jerusalem and women in Beit
Shemesh who don’t dress modestly enough for its taste. “No soldier has
been hit. That hasn’t happened yet,” he says. “Show me a single
indictment of someone who was arrested for hitting a soldier. Show me
one picture.”
At the same time, he defends
the right of the community’s members to yell at soldiers who pass
through Mea She’arim. “It’s true, they are received with catcalls and
contempt,” he admits. “If someone who lives here would leave religion
and set up a stand to sell pork, it would be less serious than
[becoming] a soldier. Because any [ultra-Orthodox] soldier who walks
through here is a liar. He is conveying that you can be Haredi in the
army, and he is trying to sell you that story.
“Where have they yelled at
soldiers? On Jaffa Road? On a military base? No. Here in Mea She’arim,”
Mintzberg continues. “I pay a price for living here; I pay tens of
thousands of shekels for an apartment; I pay for it in my lifestyle. I
give up things because I want this, I want this product. I oppose the
essence of what is called the State of Israel. I oppose the concept of
the army. I don’t agree with their wars and operations; they are
fighting against me. Look at the struggles within the army, how the
women walk around and how they dress. Here, 90 percent of the people
can’t even imagine that there are questions like that in the world.”
Surrender to Israeliness
According to Mintzberg, in
the overwhelming majority of cases, the soldiers attacked weren’t
innocently passing through the neighborhood. “Ninety percent of the
cases aren’t soldiers who are going to their homes; it’s a provocation,
or to boast ‘I went through the Haredi neighborhood.’ If you [a
non-Haredi Jew] would come here in uniform, it would pass quietly; no
one would have the least bit of resentment toward you. But the minute
you’re Haredi, it’s a different story.”
He ticks off the changes in
the ultra-Orthodox community that he considers a surrender to
Israeliness: volunteering for rescue organizations like Zaka and
Hatzalah; the attitude toward Israeli holidays; the Haredi media’s
attitude toward the IDF, and more. “They are undergoing an Israeli
revolution,” says Mintzberg.
Nevertheless, he is
convinced that when it comes to serving in the Israeli army, most of the
ultra-Orthodox public still sees an inherent contradiction between
being drafted and being Haredi. He perceives the battle against the Edah
Haredit as an effort to distinguish between it and the general Haredi
community, and to portray it as a radical, violent group. That way, the
rest of the Haredi community looks like a reasonable public that is
getting more connected to Israeli society. This blurs the fact that most
of them continue to oppose the draft as well, he notes.
“Someone had an interest in
bringing up the army, as if to say here’s an extremist group that’s
fighting against the army. But it’s not true – everyone is still against
the army, despite all the temptations,” says Mintzberg. “There’s an
interest in turning us into extremists. That way they can come at us
with all their might and also divide us. Who wants to be linked to
extremists?”
The struggle between the
police and the Edah Haredit came to a head over the force’s alleged
actions in Mea She’arim. These include sending “bait” – a detective
wearing an army uniform – into the neighborhood. If he encounters a
violent response, undercover cops then swoop in and start making
arrests. According to Mintzberg, the attacks by locals start when the
detective is recognized as a provocateur; the violence generally erupts
when the arrests begin, he adds.
In recent months, there have
been a number of people injured on both sides and several dozen
arrests. Some of the suspects have been charged with assaulting
policemen.
In addition, the police have
started conducting arrest campaigns using methods previously used in
East Jerusalem: Raiding homes late at night to either arrest active
members of organizations that fight the draft, or as chaperones to
military policemen who have come to arrest deserters.
The community has developed
ways to cope with these operations. They use a system that sends
telephone messages and manage, at any hour and sometimes within minutes,
to organize hundreds of demonstrators to try and disrupt the police
operation. One group focuses on obstructing the “drafters” – Haredi
activists who work to get young men to enlist. Another provides legal,
financial and even spiritual help to those who’ve gotten into trouble
with the army and been arrested, while a third holds protest and
propaganda vigils near the draft offices.
Mintzberg cautions people
not to feel sorry for the Edah Haredit. “We’ve succeeded in getting
through the past 200 years in the same fashion; it’s unparalleled
courage, progress and modernity,” he says. “And it’s not that we’re
preserving something that’s dying, folkloristic, from a museum – it’s
something alive and dynamic. No one here feels that this is primitive.
Everything here is vital, vigorous, liberal, educated and enlightened.
When people here picked up an academic text, it was like taking them
back to the Stone Age. It was boring.”
When asked whether Zionism
hasn’t triumphed, he rejects the question. “What triumph? What’s
changed? Do you think we prayed for 2,000 years for Bibi [Prime Minister
Benjamin] Netanyahu to be our savior? For these soldiers we prayed? For
this government?”
Referring to the comment by
religious-Zionist spiritual leader Rabbi Zvi Yehuda Kook that the State
of Israel is the base for God’s Throne of Glory, Mintzberg says, “There
is no throne and no glory.”
He continues: “Zionism is
exile among Jews, and that’s the worst type of exile. [Theodor] Herzl
saw a solution to the Jewish problem, but we don’t have a problem – we
are Jews, and Zionism is a total failure.
“Once they would yell
‘anti-Semitism, anti-Semitism, anti-Semitism.’ But today they’re yelling
the same thing. What difference does it make if you’re yelling it from
the Ukrainian Steppe or from the shores of the Middle East?” he asks.
Zionism did have one
success, he concedes: capturing the minds of the Jews; here it has had
99 percent success. “That’s why I think Zionism isn’t here to be a
solution, it’s here for one thing: to destroy authentic Judaism,” he
says. “There’s a saying from our sages that a live baby is better than a
dead Og [the Amorite king of Bashan and biblical-era warrior]. A baby
can resist; he’ll start to scream and move his arms and legs. So long as
we are fighting, repeating, resisting, there’ll be war. And as long as
there’s war, we have hope.”
Nir Hasson
Haaretz Corresponde
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