Haredi-Supreme Court Showdown

The following is what I posted on World of Judaica Jewish News.

Also see the post right below this one, Israel Supreme Court v Haredim - I'm with the Haredim for a more editorialized version.

World of Judaica Jewish News exclusive: In what is turning out to be one of the biggest challenges to Supreme Court authority in Israel’s history, tens of thousands of Haredim, Ultra Orthodox Jews, are planning to take to the streets in Israel and cities in the Diaspora in an effort to show massive support for the parents of schoolchildren in Emanuel, Israel.

Yesterday, June 15, the Israeli Supreme court handed down its ruling that all parents of Beis Yaakov schoolchildren in Emanuel who refuse to implement the court’s previous ruling that education tracks separating Ashkenazi and Sephardi students must be unified, will serve a two week jail sentence. The parents, and particularly the mothers—many of which are pregnant and/or nursing—have refused to give in to the court’s demands, and have said that they would rather go to jail.

Supporters of the Supreme Court’s ruling claim that the separation between Ashkenazi and Sephardi students is racist and ethnically based and therefore illegal. The defendants claim that it is religiously based, and that even if it were ethnically based and illegal, the court has no authority to put them in prison, but only to take away government funding for the school. At the end of the hearing, the crowd broke into chants of Shema Yisrael, and Utzu Etza VeTufar ki Emanu-el, meaning, “All evil decrees will vanish, for God is with us,” being a pun on their Samaria town, Emanuel.

One of the representatives of the parents was quoted as saying, “All red lines have been crossed. There is no going back now. We will march with our head held high to prison. We will don holiday attire befitting those who merit sanctifying the Name of God in throngs. We are not against the State,” he added, “but it is no secret that we are more attentive to the Torah ruling than to the opinion of judges, as honorable as they are.”

As the parents quickly scramble for foster families to take care of their children while carrying out their sentence, tens of thousands of Haredim from Jerusalem, Bnei Brak, and Ashdod are expected to march with and escort them to prison in a massive show of force against the High Court.

The ruling comes just one day after the court forbade the guaranteeing of stipends for fulltime Yeshiva students, a ruling that has already riled the Haredi community. Haredim from outside Israel are also planning on rallying in New York and Montreal in support of Emanuel parents, and even many non Haredim in the Religious Zionist sector are preparing to march with them in a show of support against the High Court.

The High Court has been under attack in recent months, its President Dorit Beinisch even being the victim of a shoe throwing attack four months ago.

The Israeli Supreme Court is the only court in the Western world that essentially elects itself, its own judges deciding who gets to fill in vacancies on the bench. This method of selection has greatly angered those population sectors in Israel who do not feel their values are being represented in the court, and feel that under the current system, the chances that they ever will be are slim to none.

Israel Supreme Court v Haredim - I'm with the Haredim

Another crack in the dam. Bagatz, Israel's Supreme Court, is fighting hard. Like a baby with a temper tantrum yelling and screaming on the floor because she's not getting her daily chocolate. She's not used to someone challenging her dictatorial power. But tomorrow will see the biggest challenge to their authority in the history of the State of Israel.

The story goes like this, and it ain't pretty. There's a school not far from where I live in a place called Emanuel in Samaria. It is a Haredi town. They have a school there. The school has separate tracks for Ashkenazim and Sephardim, the Ashkenazi parents for whatever reason not wanting their kids to learn with Sephardi children. Fine. Admittedly, this is elitist, racist, and I personally wouldn't send my kids to such a school. I also don't support public funding of such a school. In fact, I don't support public funding for any school. They should all be private businesses, the best ones attracting the students and the bad ones going out of business.

Instead of taking everyone's money to publicly fund education worth crap, the government should drastically lower taxes and provide education vouchers for every citizen to send their kids wherever they want to. So even though I don't support racist schools, I certainly support anyone's right to run a privately funded racist school if they so choose to, and I support any parent's right to send their kids to a racist school if they want to.

The High Court gave an ultimatum to the Ashkenazi parents yesterday. The ultimatum was not either you unite the tracks or you lose your funding. No, no. The ultimatum, as dictatorships often demand, was either unite the tracks, or go to jail. They chose jail. And God bless them.

Tomorrow there will be a massive demonstration against the Israeli High Court by Haredim across the country and even in New York and Montreal. Tens of thousands will march with them to prison. And I wish I had the time to march with them.

Bagatz is losing their authority simply because they do not represent the nation. As I've stated before on this blog, they literally elect themselves. Supreme Court justices choose who gets to be on their own court. It's ludicrous. They are the only Western High Court that runs this way. This obviously cannot go on forever, because they don't represent the nation, and they have been breaking the social contract for decades.

When the Supreme Court got rid of internal elections in the Likud in order to prevent Moshe Feiglin from gaining power in the party, they signed their own death warrant. (NO, NOT LITERALLY. I DO NOT ADVOCATE KILLING JUDGES.) The truth is, they signed it either way, because if they had allowed elections, Feiglin would have eventually won and changed the law to force judges to be elected and confirmed by representatives of the nation rather than themselves. We cannot have a Supreme Court that does not represent the nation. They have no legitimacy because of this and it's their own fault, and they must be overthrown. No, not by violence - by nonviolent civil disobedience - by a peaceful march to prison. A march to prison of pregnant and nursing mothers, of struggling fathers, accompanied by their children who will now have to be in foster care for the duration of their parents' sentences.

Send them to jail. You won't break them. And what's going to happen after their two week sentence and they still refuse to obey you? What then? Hopefully, there will be a catharsis where the country will finally understand that these dictators are not all powerful and the floodgates will open, and finally, the judicial selection law will be changed.

חזק ואמץ, and may this lead to a real change in how our High Court operates, and may we, the Jewish nation, finally be able to install a court that believes in a Jewish State rather than in a Western State of All its Citizens.

A Different Take on Helen Thomas

On this blog you'll find perspectives you wouldn't find on most others. This goes for the last post on the Gaza Flotilla Farce and will continue to the Helen Thomas Debacle. Farce, debacle, you always have to pick interesting words for these sorts of things. Otherwise, people don't think you did well on you SAT's and the sky falls. Luckily, the sky doesn't weigh anything, so you end up fine either way. It's just the nature of things.

To quote Dennis Miller, there is one positive thing we can say about Helen Thomas, and that is, she did not sleep her way to the top. The daughter of Lebanese immigrants, she's been at the top of the White House Press Corp since the Eisenhower administration in the 1950's. This sounds like an excruciatingly boring career, being that nobody ever says anything of any consequence during a White House press conference.

Anyway, Thomas was recently asked if she had any comments on Israel. She said sure. She said that the Jews should get the hell out of Palestine and go back to where they came from, which is Germany, Poland, those types of places.

I'm sure you've seen the video by now. I have a recurring problem of not posting these things fast enough.



We must understand why she said this, rather than simply be angry with her and demand her firing. We don't have the luxury to simply start yelling like the ADL and call for blood. It's too juvenile. It has to click why she said what she said, and the answer that she simply hates Jews is not enough.

Beyond all the decrepit imagery of what she said and the genocidal undertones of it, she said one thing that the Israeli government, at least, can agree with. "It's not their land," she said. And she's right. At least we don't act like it is.

Why should anyone accept the fact that Jews want to go back to some plot of real estate in the Middle East just because their great great grandparents used to live there thousands of years ago? So what?

People like Helen Thomas don't hate Jews intrinsically. They just hate when they try to act like non-Jews, and insofar as that's true, people like Helen Thomas are very helpful. They simply can't stand that Jews are still around today at all if they don't really do anything qualitatively special, and why they claim to be the chosen people if they're simply trying to be like everyone else. What Helen Thomas means when she says "Get the hell out of Palestine," is "If you want to be like everyone else, don't pretend you have any special rights to someone else's land." And, essentially, she's right.

Here's my response to you, Helen Thomas.

Helen, my dear,

I sincerely thank you for your comments concerning the Jews going back to Poland and Germany. Even though your comments are offensive and smack of supporting the Holocaust, in some strange way I agree with you. In their current state of mind, the Jews don't understand that they actually have not a right, but a Divine obligation towards their God-given land, which you call Palestine, and they think that they simply have a right to be there because their grandparents lived there a long time ago. That being so, they won't claim ownership of the land, and they'll whine to the world something about historical rights. You can even see that claim at the end of this video that ended your career. It's pathetic, I know I know. Until they understand that the land is only theirs and that they have a job to do in it assigned to them by God, then you have a point.

But what you don't understand is that this weakness, this dilly-dallying, this resorting to historical arguments and doing anything they can to keep God out of the picture, it is only temporary. Thanks to people like you, the pressure will keep building on them to the point that they will understand that they have absolutely no one to turn to but their God who did indeed choose them 3,000 years ago. And once you put the Jewish people under enough pressure, they will turn around, as they have always done throughout their history.

Don't be fooled by our current weakness. Soon, we will take our place as the moral leaders of the world. I hope and pray that you will be alive to see that day. In the meantime, I say to you this:

Bring it on.

Sincerely,

Rafi Farber

The Gaza Flotilla: Why the Blockade?

Originally Posted at the World of Judaica

For Moshe Feiglin's must read on the flotilla fiasco, see his article here.

There is a war going on. It is fierce. But the battle is not on Facebook, it is not on YouTube, and it's not even on the Gaza coast. Obama is not involved, Turkey is not involved, nor is Iran involved. The war is between the Jews and themselves. The Jews want to be like everyone else. But then the Jews want to be uniquely Jewish.

The Jews want to be world leaders. But the Jews want to go unnoticed and be left alone. 

The Jews want to connect with their God. But the Jews aren't even sure if they even believe in their God.

Meanwhile, as this battle rages on between the Jews and themselves, some mosquito rides a boat into Gaza. The mosquito bites. The Jews swat at it, and everyone goes ape.

The hasbara, or PR battle looks grim. It seems like there’s no way we can win, no way to convince anybody that we were acting in self defense, no way to show that they started it, no way to come out of this situation with the upper hand. The truth is, there is one way we can win this fight and come out on top, but it will require one heck of a paradigm shift that the current Israeli leadership is not willing to execute. Neither are the people of Israel ready for such a shift, but I present it here as the only option Israel will eventually have no choice but to turn to when things get really, really tight.

The truth of the matter is that those Turks, or whoever the heck they were, had every right to sail to Gaza. They had every right to arm themselves, and they had every right to fight the IDF. Why? Because the Jews, in a fit of confusion about who they are, decided it would be a good idea to kick themselves out of Gaza five years ago and declare to everyone that Gaza is not part of Israel. Instead of having a mosquito bite her foot, she decided to simply amputate the foot and hobble around on a stump, expecting people not to challenge her or try to push over her stumbling, lame body. They had every right to fight our soldiers because our soldiers are blockading a limb that they themselves amputated five years ago.

Look people - hack off your own foot, and expect to get a serious, life threatening infection. Don't blame the bacteria. They're just doing their job.

But enough of the grim reality. How do we win this fight? Despite what was just written, it is very winnable. First, we must understand the other side. In order to do that, we must first ask ourselves a simple question. Why are we blockading Gaza? Why not just let the ships in? People  answer weapons, rockets, whatnots. But if that’s true, why not blockade Lebanon? Well, we could, but we retreated from there 10 years ago. I mean, we could prevent Hizballah from rearming with weapons we definitely will have to deal with whenever the Third Lebanon War breaks out, and we all know it will sooner or later.

The answer is simple. We’re not blockading Lebanon because Lebanon is a sovereign state, it is not our territory, and we are not currently at war with it. Then why blockade Gaza? It isn’t our territory either, it’s pretty much a sovereign state with a Hamas government. They haven't shot many rockets since Cast Lead. So what if they are dedicated to our destruction? That means we have to blockade them? And Lebanon and Syria aren't dedicated to our destruction? Give me a break.

And now we can understand the other side. The other side understands that Gaza is not our territory. What the other side doesn’t like is that we are blockading a territory that is not ours. How do you think the world would respond if we suddenly blockaded Lebanon because we don’t want them to have weapons? Just because our soldiers responded in self defense does not mean that they suddenly have a right to mess with someone else's land.

The self defense argument is irrelevant, even if true, and of course it is. American Jews - I know you're doing your best with Facebook and YouTube and Twitter and all that, but you're wasting your time, you're barking up the wrong tree. You're propellers. No offense. You're on my side, but you're broadcasting the wrong message. We have to face it. We're the bad guys. Self defense doesn't change that. 

The only relevant question is to whom does Gaza belong? If it belongs to Hamas, then let them do what they want with it. If they fire at you, fire back and conquer until the other side surrenders unconditionally. But doing that of course will not win the hasbara fight, nor alleviate the political situation. You can’t conquer a land that isn’t yours for long. The allies left Europe shortly after World War II because Europe is not American land.  

The only thing that will win the PR fight and will solve the political situation is simply declaring that the Gaza Strip is an inseparable part of Israel, rebuilding Gush Katif and settling it one thousandfold, and paying the Arabs there to leave using the military budget we are currently spending on rocket-proofing the entire Southwestern Negev like a bunch of idiots building a hospital under a hole in a highway bridge.

So, American Jews - I call upon you to protest the Israeli government who is responsible for us being the bad guys, and tell them that the Gaza Strip is Jewish land, and as such should be annexed and the Arabs paid to leave. Tell them to expel the Turkish ambassador and break all ties with Turkey. Otherwise, the Israeli government should stop telling Muslims they can't sail to their own land with whatever metal bats they want to bring for some good Muslim teething.

Understand that the world doesn’t care if you’re acting in self-defense. They care about whether you are a freedom fighter or a terrorist, and even terrorists have the right to self defense. The difference between a freedom fighter and a terrorist is simply this: A freedom fighter is fighting for his own land. A terrorist is fighting for somebody else’s.

Israel must declare to the world what her land is and fight for it with a sense of Jewish Justice fighting in the name of the God of Israel, not in the name of the God of Christian self defense. Until she does that, she is destined to lose not only the Hasbara fight, but the legitimacy of her own existence as the only Jewish State on the face of the globe.

Eventually, we will all understand that. In the meantime, the seas are going to get quite rough. Hold on to your oars and know that every bump we pass is a bump closer to when we will wake the heck up as a 3,000 year old nation and turn everything around.

I'll see you guys on the calm shores, and I anxiously anticipate smooth sailing with us at the head of the Armada of the world.

The Next Step for Feiglin and Manhigut Yehudit

I see almost everything from a pan-Jewish historical perspective. The vote that happened on Thursday is no different. Yesterday, the true meaning of the results suddenly occurred to me, and though the immediate consequences are dark, the overall depth of it will, hopefully, allow us all to look up with our heads held high in hope and anticipation.

If we take a big look at the history of the Jewish people, a victory in Thursday's vote would not have made any sense. What you had was a vote on a very murky proposal, confusing to everybody, and participating were only 2,100 people. The technical question was, should internal elections be postponed? Yes or no. What it really meant was, should elections be canceled forever? But what it really, truly meant was should Jerusalem be divided? Central Committee members didn't even recognize the reality of the second question, let alone the third. They had no idea that elections will never happen again now. All the more so did they have no idea that this had anything to do with Jerusalem. But even if they did, the Jewish people as a whole certainly did not. Most were probably not even aware that a vote even took place among some obscure committee that most people don't even know exists in the first place.


Let's say Feiglin won. That would have meant that a third of the committee, about 600 or so people, voted against postponing elections, for various reasons. Some because they hate Netanyahu for some personal issue. Some, because they want democracy in the Likud. Others because they don't want Netanyahu to go "left". They would have voted with Feiglin for every petty narrow political reason except for the real one: That we are the chosen people of God and must rise up and lead the world by moral example.

If Feiglin won, Jerusalem would have been saved, but the Likud Central Committee, and a fortiori the nation as a whole, wouldn't have realized what it was they almost lost. This would not have made any sense. We would have saved the nation from much hardship without anybody noticing how or why. The Jewish people would not have been required to take a good look at themselves in the eye and come to serious conclusions about their Jewish identity and where it must lead them. In a wide sense, national teshuva would not have taken place.

Nobody, not even a potential faith-based leader like Moshe Feiglin, can inspire this people to embark on national repentance. We can only do that ourselves - not as a "Likud Central Committee," or a third of it or whatever. Only as a nation can we do such a thing. In order for that to happen, we have to be aware of what we are, meaning we have to be aware of what we have, meaning we have to be aware of what we are about to lose.

Moshe Feiglin is not here to inspire national repentance. He is here, God-willing, to be the vessel the nation uses once it comes to its own conclusions about its destiny and repents on its own. We will come to that conclusion when we realize that there is no other choice, when it is literally do or die, when our holiest sites are about to be taken away from us and we feel an incredible sense of emptiness and suddenly remember that there was one man who predicted it all, last Thursday, April 29, 2010.

When we are on the verge of despair, closed on in all sides and illegitimate in the eyes of the entire world, we will then see the light. The Jewish people will realize that they have no other choice but to come to terms with their own national existence as a nation that dwells alone that must lead the world by example.

On that day, Netanyahu and the normalcy dream will fade away like tissue paper, and the Jewish Nation will seek a new leader. We will be there for them, to catch them, to hold them at the last minute before they fall, for we are the only alternative.

God willing it will happen soon, when Netanyahu makes his attempt and God willing his government falls. A new leader will have to be chosen for the Likud. And Moshe Feiglin will be there--not for the Likud Central Committee, or for a third of it, but for us all.