Note: you can see a transcript of this talk by clicking the “Transcript” button at the bottom right of the page.
Note: you can see a transcript of this talk by clicking the “Transcript” button at the bottom right of the page.
Thank you so much for that kind introduction, and good evening to everyone. It's great to see so many people here, including lots from Edinburgh and Leicester, but many other congregations and indeed other countries as well.
I'll try not to take up too much time because I think it's important that we have time for questions and discussion with our two fantastic speakers and I'd like to thank both Dror and Basel for really powerful presentations and the concluding note of your talk just now, Basel, about the fact that you've never taken part in a democratic election, you've never had the opportunity in your life strikes very hard to all our hearts I'm sure.
This discussion tonight is taking place against a very, very dark background, I'm sorry to say. And as Dror referred to in the beginning of his presentation, the recent Israeli elections have created a new reality, a new prospect for Israel and Palestine. And if things weren't bad enough already, before this, we are now living in a very strange and very, very scary new reality even today, news has been coming out about coalition agreements between Netanyahu who has been busy destroying peace agreements ever since he first became Israel's Prime Minister in the wake of Yitzhak Rabin's assassination, and the leaders of some of the parties which have had success in the recent elections. And I didn't know really the name of Avi Maoz (leader of the Noam Party) until just now. But it's a name to strike fear into many hearts, let alone Itamar Ben-Gvir, who has been charged so many times with hate speech and hate crimes against Israeli Arabs and against Palestinians. And of course Bezalel Smotrich.
These people if they do gain power in Israel, as sadly seems more and more likely, by the day, will be bringing us into a very frightening future in which Israel will effectively be ruled by Jewish Ayatollahs who want to impose a very strict, bigoted and ultra nationalistic vision of Judaism upon Israel and indeed, upon the whole Jewish world. It's hard to overstate just how scary the prospects for the immediate future in Israel and Palestine are. So I'm sorry to say that, but it's the unvarnished truth.
And I just want to begin by invoking the names of two boys that have died in recent days. We saw the attacks in Jerusalem last week, which led to the death of Aryeh Schupak, a 15 year old Jewish Canadian boy who was killed in an attack. But just days before that, there was the death of Ahmed Shehada , a 16 year old Palestinian boy also killed in an attack this time shootings by Israeli forces in Nablus. These two boys who have died so needlessly in recent days, just seem to symbolise the ongoing cycle of violence and death and injustice, and ever increasing hatred and estrangement between Israeli Jews, Israeli Arabs, Palestinians, and the recent political developments, the recent election only seems likely to make that estrangement and that hatred worse and worse.
I want to give a sort of rabbinic perspective, so I'm not going to comment further on the politics as such, because that's been covered so brilliantly by Dror and Basel. I do want to remember a wonderful experience and a moving and troubling experience from 2012, when I along with a number of other members of Sukkot Shalom in Edinburgh, and a few other people, went on a human rights trip to Israel and the West Bank, which was organised brilliantly by Maurice Naftalin. So I give lots and lots of credit to Maurice for that trip, which was extraordinarily enlightening and educational for all of us.
On one of the days of that trip, we visited many different places both within Israel and in the West Bank in the occupied territories with different human rights groups. But the one I want to mention right now was Rabbis for Human Rights, which at that time, was led by Rabbi Arik Asherman, who has since moved on and he now heads another organisation called Torat Tzedek, the teaching of righteousness. But he was an extraordinarily visionary and courageous rabbinic leader for human rights. And on this particular day, he took us in a minibus, down to the south Hebron hills to visit Susiya, among other places—a small cave village of the sort that Basel referred to so beautifully—traditional cave dwelling villages.
But where we visited them was not their traditional village, they'd been driven out of their village by the sorts of Israeli settlement settlement expansion that we've heard about, and also the imposition of these so called firing ranges by the Israeli military and government, which are used as an excuse for driving people out of their ancestral homes out of their villages. And so they had to move out of the village of Susiya and create, as it were, a new Susiya in nearby caves. And we visited this makeshift village and spoke to one of the elders in the village and learned a little bit, just a tiny glimpse into the difficulties of their lives; lives which were never particularly prosperous, certainly not lavish. Lives which have been made so much more difficult by this repeated process of displacement, of persecution of confiscation of land.
But while we were heading towards Susiya, that Arik Asherman got a phone call alerting him that there was a house demolition taking place nearby. And I think it was in one of the collection of towns and villages, which come under the heading of Masafer Yatta, which is where Basel lives. And so we took a detour to this small town. This was no cave village, this was a proper, small town. And we arrived just after somebody's house had been demolished. This was a house that a Palestinian, whom we met there, had built on his land, but on his ancestral land, which rightfully belonged to him. But the Israelis had claimed that he built one of the walls a metre over a line that they had created, and therefore the house was illegal, and was liable, like, virtually all Palestinian homes in Area C that we've been hearing about to be demolished without notice.
People need to build homes, it's a basic human need to have a home for one's family, and people build homes, taking a gamble that the bureaucratic processes of the Israeli military government will, you know, might never quite get around to them. And they might be able to live in their home undisturbed for a period of time. And it's a sort of roulette game, whether on any given day, the bureaucratic processes will fall on your home, and you'll find the bulldozers turning up to literally push it down over your head.
And this is what had happened to this poor chap on that particular day. His house had been bulldozed and he was standing there. They'd managed to get some of the furniture out of the house, so he'd saved some sofas and some other furniture, but where to go, where to put it, where to find shelter for him and his family? And this is a heartbreaking situation facing Palestinians from day to day, as I needn't tell many of you and especially Basel, who has experienced it. This was just one of many moving and heartbreaking experiences that we had on that tour, but this was a sort of, so to speak an unexpected bonus that were actually there in the immediate aftermath of such a demolition and we saw… it wasn't so much the overtly emotional distress of the owner of the house, it was his weary resignation. This is just part of the miserable expectations of so many people under that sort of regime.
I want to turn now briefly before I finish to a religious concept. This is a law that we find in the Torah, which says לֹא תַסִּיג גְּבוּל רֵעֲךָ, you shall not remove the boundary marker of your neighbour. This is a law in the Torah saying that, when there is recognised legal boundaries to people's fields to people's land, it's a sin to remove that boundary marker to expand your field, your land at the expense of another. Later on in Deuteronomy, it says, אָרוּר מַסִּיג גְּבוּל רֵעֵהוּ—cursed is he who moves his neighbour's landmark.
Now, of course, many people from a traditional Jewish perspective might say, רֵעֲךָ, your neighbour, means your Jewish neighbour, your Israelite neighbour, and it doesn't apply to other people. But there's plenty of reason, not least for us as liberal Jews, to claim that רֵעֲךָ does include and should include everyone who can be considered your neighbour. When it says In Leviticus, love your neighbour as yourself, there are many interpretations that say it's not just your Jewish neighbour, it's your human neighbour. And it later says in that chapter, you shall love the stranger as yourself, your neighbour, who is not like you, not from the same origin, but also deserves the same practical consideration, the same rights.
We find the same principle in the book of Proverbs אַל־תַּסֵּג גְּבוּל עוֹלָם, do not move aside the landmark of old. Those landmarks which have historical precedent, and had been recognised for generations should not arbitrarily be moved. Hosea says the Princes of Judah are like those who remove the landmark, therefore I will pour out my wrath upon them like water. Our new princes of Judah, the Israeli military regime, the occupation regime are like those ancient princes of Judah who removed the landmark. And God says, I will pour out my wrath upon them, like water. We find this principle not only in Jewish sources. Plato, in his work The Laws, says there should be a code of laws termed agricultural. And the first law shall be stated thus, no one shall remove boundary marks of land, whether they be those of a neighbour who is a native citizen, or those of a foreigner.
This is a fundamental principle of human justice and ethics. We must not remove landmarks or we become the objects of God's wrath. That's, for me, one of the lessons we've learned from our presentations tonight
Thank you all.