Israel is a state and it may be a Jewish state but that does not make it a state based on the core values of Judaism. It, in fact, violates many of those core values.
VIOLATION OF CORE VALUE OF JUDAISM I
The
Government of Israel, its military, its civil authority and Jewish squatters
have, for close to half a century, regularly violated not only UN actions,
international civil and human rights and the Universal Declaration of Human
Rights but also many of the fundamental and core values of Judaism:
Israel
has violated one of the 10 Commandments, You Shall Not Steal, by transferring
Jewish Israelis into occupied territory, by stealing the land of Palestinians
in the West Bank, and by taking a myriad of actions aimed at making life so
miserable for Palestinians that they
VIOLATION OF CORE VALUE OF
JUDAISM II
Israel has violated Exodus 22:20-21 - You
shall not wrong a stranger or oppress him, for you were strangers in the land
of Egypt” by demolishing Palestinian homes and structures and by the building
of the wall.
VIOLATION OF CORE VALUES OF
JUDAISM III
Israel
has violated Deuteronomy 20:19 “When you besiege a city … you shall not
destroy its (fruit) trees .. for
you may eat from them, and you shall not cut them down”.
VIOLATION OF CORE VALUE OF JUDAISM IV
Israel
has violated Exodus 12:49 saying there shall be one law for the citizen and for
the stranger who dwells among you by meting out justice unfairly and more
harshly for Palestinians than for squatters, by
often arbitrarily restricting movement for Palestinians but not for
squatters, by creating separate and unequal legal systems including apartheid
roads in the West Bank, by grossly unequal distribution of water and also by
killing those “suspected” but not charged with crimes by assassination when
capital punishment is banned in Israel.
VIOLATION OF CORE VALUE OF
JUDAISM V
Israel
has violated Micah.6:8 “He has told you, O man, Only to do justice and to love
goodness, and to walk humbly with your God” by allowing the daily restrictions
on movement and by allowing limited access to water and electricity provided
amply to Jewish settlements.
VIOLATION OF CORE VALUE OF
JUDAISM VI
Israel has violated Isaiah 1:17,27 “Learn to
do well – seek justice, relieve the oppressed, judge the fatherless, plead for
the widow .. Zion shall be redeemed with justice, and they that return of her
with righteousness” by arbitrarily arresting over the years thousands of Palestinians and
holding them in administrative detention often for more than a year without
being charged or brought to trial for any crime.
VIOLATION OF CORE VALUE OF
JUDAISM VII
Israel has violated the basic definition of
Judaism “What is hateful unto you, do not do unto your neighbor” through its 48 year brutal
oppression and occupation of the West Bank and Gaza;
One
might wonder what Jewish people who attend Yom Kippur services at Temples and
Synagogues think when they read this Haftarah
called Acharey Mos which includes the following from Ezekiel XXII, 3-8
“O city that sheddest blood in the midst of thee, that thy
time may come and that makest idols unto thyself to defile thee. …therefore
have I made thee a reproach unto the nations, and a mocking to all the
countries. Those that are near and those
that are far from thee, shall mock thee, thou defiled of name and full of
tumult. Behold the princes of Israel, every one according to his might, have
been in thee to shed blood. In thee have they made light of father and
mother; in the midst of thee have they dealt by oppression with the stranger;
in thee have they wronged the fatherless and the widow… thou hast greedily
gained of thy neighbors by oppression, and hast forgotten Me, saith the Lord
God… And I will scatter thee among the nations, and disperse thee through the
countries; and I will consume thy filthiness out of three. And thou shalt be
profaned in thyself in the sight of the nations and thou shalt know that I am
the Lord.”
VIOLATION OF THE FUNDAMENTAL
VALUE OF JUDAISM
Taken
together the illegal, immoral, demonizing, dehumanizing, racist, humiliating
actions of the Government of Israel and those acting on its behalf can best be
summarized as a gross violation of perhaps the most fundamental value of
Judaism
Deuteronomy 16:20
“Justice, Justice shall you pursue, that thou may live and inherit the land
which the Lord has given you.
Here are excerpts from the extensive footnoted material to this section in
Pentateuch & Haftorahs, edited by J.H. Hertz, The Soncino Press, Second
Edition, 1980:
Justice is not the only ethical quality in God and
man, nor is it the highest quality; but it is the bases for all the others. Where there is no justice, no proper and practical
appreciation of the human rights of every human being as sons of the one and
only God of righteousness – there we have a negation of religion. The
oppressor, the man who tramples on others, and especially on those like the
orphan and the stranger who are too weak to defend themselves, is throughout
Scripture held forth as the enemy of God and man.
Nor is justice
limited to the relation between individuals.
It extends to the relation between group and group, and it asserts the
claims of the poor upon the rich, of the helpless upon them who possess the
means to help. And even as there is social justice, prescribing the duties of
class to class, so there is international justice, which demands respect for
the personality of each and every national group, and proclaims that no people
can of right be robbed of its national life or territory, its language or
spiritual heritage. The pure administration of justice is thus one of the
conditions of Israel’s existence as a nation. Our teachers, from the first of
them to the last, brand the perversion of the course of justice as the most
alarming sign of national decay.
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