The
Hilltop Youth:
The Hilltop
youth who
acted violently in Kfar Darom and in settlements in West Bank of Sa Nor
and
Homesh look like devout Jews as the media insists on calling them. They
do not
talk or act as devout Jews and in fact they are not; they are
fundamentalist
ideologues. Orthodox and traditional religion (whether Judaism,
Christianity or
Islam) accept certain rules and rituals as God given. Ideologues create
their
own rules; they may use Holy Books to justify their action, but they
are simply
rationalizing for their own idiosyncratic behavior.
They use using ideology to transgress the normal laws of any society,
religious
or otherwise to act violently. Fundamentalist ideology sees the world
in terms
of black and white. Even this does not require them to act violently.
Those of
us who have read of the Jews in the
Fundamentalism is not the problem; zealotry and violence is.
Violent Fundamentalists whether youngsters or adults no longer accept
religious
and civilized limits on behavior and engage in a state of collective
ecstasy,
during which they act in extreme ways.
According to Dr. Miriam Billig, a sociologist at the Academic College
of Judea
and Samaria, notes while these fundamentalists may be passionate they
are in
fact less emotionally attached than the settlers in Gaza who suffered
through
the evacuation of their own homes. (Haaretz, Aug. 22). According to a
poll 59%
of the settlers are having emotional problems (not surprisingly) as a
result of
being evacuated from
While their Rabbis including former Ashkenazi Chief Rabbi Avraham
Shapira and
former Sephardi Chief Rabbi Mordechai Eliyahu did not advocating
violence they
called on soldiers to refuse to carry out their orders to evacuate
settlers
from the Gaza Strip. Shapira stated Woe be unto a soldier or policeman
and woe
be unto his soul if they take part in this atrocity. To the settlers
they said
they must do everything in their power to prevent soldiers or policemen
from
destroying or removing their property from their homes, and warned that
whoever
hands over lands to non-Jews will not have clean hands not in this
world and
not in the next." Another Rabbi (Yisrael Rosen of Alon Shvut) stated it
this way: "We are currently at the
height of a `civil war' - not between policemen and soldiers and the
evacuees,
but the height of a bitter and difficult national culture war over the
face of
the nation, a war between faith-based nationalism and the religion of
liberal
democracy, a war between eternal values and ... short-term coalitions."
These Rabbis
positions on
the issue of relinquishing territory represents an unbending choice of
the Land
of Israel over the Jewish state, and their demand that soldiers who
would be
their followers refuse their commanders' orders presents the Orthodox
Jewish
soldiers with an untenable dilemma. The soldiers with very few
exceptions did
not follow these Rabbis; other Rabbis rejected the idea of refusal as
ordained
by Jewish law or theology. In fact we must recognize that the majority
of
Rabbis opposed the extremists’ but not all. Rabbi Shalom Wolpe said
after the
disengagement "There are families which have truly gone through a
holocaust, and - heaven forbid - another Holocaust may now befall the
people of
The fundamentalists thinking has been called a ‘cosmic war’ disease;
these
believers are fighting a Holy War. One of its premises is
apocalyptic
thinking, a very ancient disease. Among its symptom are panic,
terrifying
nightmares and dreamlike magical thinking. God will miraculously save
us. (This
kind of thinking is of course against Jewish theology.)These diseased
persons believe
they are the Holy Elected Ones and will survive. But who chooses the
Holy
Elected ones? Are they not remarkably narcissistic? Can Holy Elected
ones be
false prophets? Were Dr. Goldstein who murdered 29 Arabs, Yigal Amir
who
murdered Yitzhak Rabin, Eden Natan Zada and Asher Weissgan who each
murdered
four Arabs all wearing Kippot (skullcaps) - devout Jews chosen to be
Holy
Elected One? As Moshe Feiglin one of the leaders of this movement
stated while
not advocating violence ‘To die or to conquer the hill’.
One of the root causes of fundamentalist behavior is feelings of
humiliation.
How can those blessed by God as His holy remnants not be understood by
all the
world? What they cannot understand is that Gods logic has no relation
to human
logic. Why did God let his favorite person in the world Job suffer and
his ten
children die? Why did God let Rabbi Akiva, one of his favorite Sages,
be
horribly tortured and martyred? We cannot know, but that is not
acceptable to
these fundamentalists; they insist on not only understanding Gods logic
but
that His be theirs.
Fundamentalists from all religions exhibit a similar mutant strand of a
religious disease, a virus which sometimes seems like a pandemic. In
Christianity this virus became anti-Semitism; in Islam they became
suicide
bombers. The reason different strains of fundamentalism seem so alike
is to
paraphrase Louis Claude de Saint- Martin they speak the same language
because
they come from the same country.