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1 COR 15:23-JESUS THE FIRST FRUITS-CHRISTIANS RAPTURED TO JESUS-FIRST FRUITS OF THE SPIRIT-23 But every man in his own order: Christ the firstfruits; afterward they that are Christ’s at his coming.ROMANS 8:23 And not only they, but ourselves also, which have the firstfruits of the Spirit, even we ourselves groan within ourselves, waiting for the adoption, to wit, the redemption of our body.(THE PRE-TRIB RAPTURE)
Oldest complete New Testament to go on display at British Museum-‘Egypt: Faith after the pharaohs’ to exhibit holy texts penned on the Nile from three monotheistic religions-By Ilan Ben Zion August 27, 2015, 8:35 pm 6-the times of israel
The oldest complete version of the New Testament will go on display at London’s British Museum in October as part of an exhibit on the monotheistic religions in Egypt.The Codex Sinaiticus is a 4th century CE handwritten parchment manuscript containing the Septuagint and New Testament in Greek. Throughout the text are thousands of annotations and corrections, added from the codex’s drafting in the 4th century to as late as the 12th century, scholars say.The manuscript itself is scattered between four different institutions, the British Library, the Leipzig University Library, the National Library of Russia in Saint Petersburg, and the Saint Catherine’s Monastery in Egypt, where it remained until the 19th century.The codex, the museum said, will be presented as part of the “Egypt: Faith after the pharaohs” exhibit, opening in October 2015 in order “to emphasize the readers and users of scripture” in the land of the Nile in ancient times. It will be presented alongside the Gaster Bible, a 9th-century Torah from Egypt featuring one of the oldest Hebrew illuminated texts — also on loan from the British Library — and a Quran from Oxford University’s Bodleian Library. Among the other Jewish artifacts included in the exhibit are fragments of documents from the Cairo Geniza containing Hebrew, Judeo-Arabic, Aramaic and Arabic texts detailing Jewish life in Cairo during the Middle Ages.Since the British Library bought it from Soviet Russia in 1933, the manuscript has only been loaned out once, in 1990, to the British Museum (when the two institutions shared the same building.“It is quite phenomenal [that] they are able to lend it to us,” Elisabeth O’Connell, an assistant keeper at the British Museum, told The Guardian. “We are absolutely thrilled.”The British Museum said on its website that the exhibit will “show how Christian, Islamic and Jewish communities reinterpreted the pharaonic past of Egypt and interacted with one another” over 1,200 years.
Analysis-The blood of summer and our collective sins of omission-Israel’s government and army are responsible for the murderous attack in Duma, and Israel’s Haredi rabbinic leadership for the murder at the Jerusalem Gay Pride Parade. Here’s why By Haviv Rettig Gur August 27, 2015, 4:50 pm 58-the times of israel
Each year, Israel’s education system celebrates the Hebrew calendar by turning that year’s name, written in the ancient way with letters standing in for numerical values, into an acronym for a blessing for that year. Since each fall-to-spring academic year more or less corresponds to the Hebrew calendar year, the academic year is officially numbered, and thus named, with these Hebrew acrostics.Last week, the Education Ministry announced the acrostic blessing for the coming 5756 (or the letters taf-shin-ayin-vav) new year. It was a strangely unwieldy phrase, squeezing six Hebrew words into the four-letter acronym, and an unexpectedly heartrending one: “May it be a year of mutual and personal responsibility” (Hebrew: Teheh Shnat Arvut Hadadit Ve’ahrayut Ishit).This week, just days before the start of the new school year, Education Minister Naftali Bennett unveiled the pedagogic focus for the coming year.“In a country like ours, tolerance is not a luxury; it is a precondition for our existence,” he said in a statement. “This year, one student will not be returning to school. She was murdered because she marched to identify with her friends at the [Jerusalem Gay] Pride Parade. We can’t just move on from that. Disagreeing with each other is allowed and even encouraged. But to raise a hand – never.”That quote opened an announcement from the ministry that hundreds of thousands of Israeli schoolchildren would spend their first week of classes “discussing violence and how to prevent racism in our society.”Bennett’s decision to devote the first week to the subject, the statement explained, “comes in the context of the terrible violent incidents of the past summer, including the murder of a year-and-a-half-old Palestinian infant, Ali Saad Dawabsha, may his memory be blessed, and the murder of the young woman Shira Banki, may her memory be blessed.”The violence “makes us responsible as educators who sanctify ethics, love of humanity and liberty to act in every way we can to prevent the spread of this spirit of hate and destruction,” ministry director general Michal Cohen wrote in a memo to school principals.“The education system is responsible for acting to correct these social sicknesses and instill our sacred values – the defense of human dignity and liberty, morality and justice, love of humanity and mutual responsibility.”Two children were murdered because of intolerance, the country’s top education officials have proclaimed in the weeks since those killings. And so tolerance would be the focus of the coming school year.-Crimes of hate-The July 31 murders in Duma and at the gay pride march were not ordinary homicides. They were moral arguments: Yishai Schlissel’s moral obsession with overly happy gays and the “price tag” movement’s fleet-footed moral flanking maneuver in punishing Israel by allegedly burning Palestinians. Two simultaneous climaxes of Jewish extremism, two moments of Jewish spiritual pathology that were seen by many Israelis, from far-left to far-right, not as criminal aberrations but as signals of a possibly grim future.The perpetrators were not swept away by emotion, nor insane; their acts were conscious and full of meaning-It is no exaggeration to say that the Jewishness of the criminals (based on the current state of evidence), coupled with the fact that the crimes were ostensibly committed in Judaism’s name, shattered the Israeli public debate. It led to Israel’s president, a right-wing politician who believes Orthodox Judaism is the only authentic expression of Judaism and has long opposed a Palestinian state in the West Bank, to fret aloud about the crimes and rising bigotry among “my own people.” Politicians from left and right joined together to pay respects to the Dawabsha family. Haredi politicians and spokespeople went on television to proclaim that violence against gays is a moral failing greater than the presumed failings of the gays themselves.And the education system rushed to do its part. To those who would plunge a knife into a teenage girl’s back in God’s name, or who would set a sleeping family’s home on fire in the middle of the night, the traditional Jewish response is obvious enough, and marked the general Israeli public outpouring after those attacks: rejecting the darkness of prejudice and increasing the light of tolerance.Yet in an important sense, Israel’s politicians and educators, in their genuine horror at the acts, misunderstand them. They call them crimes of “hate” and set about denouncing the emotion. Yet the emotional label in “hate crime” ironically hides the term’s true meaning: that the perpetrators were not swept away by emotion, nor insane, that their acts were conscious and full of meaning.Israelis’ responses to that violent July day have largely failed to answer the question that has so deeply troubled the Israeli psyche since, a question that isn’t new, but that the killing of children has made impossible to ignore: Who sets a family’s home on fire in the middle of the night? What sorts of thoughts go through such a person’s head, and who put those thoughts there? And what sort of person launches himself on innocent teenagers, slashing frantically with a knife until, in the few seconds it takes for police to wrestle him to the ground, seven lie bleeding in the streets of Jerusalem? Where do such expressions of extremism come from, and how do we as a society tackle them? Sins of omission-“Our hands did not shed this blood,” tweeted Benny Rabinovich, editor of the influential ultra-Orthodox newspaper Yated Ne’eman and a prominent spokesman for the community, after Schlissel’s attack.It was a dense tweet, of the sort that sparse, vowel-less Hebrew is uniquely equipped to produce. It went on: “Not one single Haredi media outlet spoke about the parade; not a word. This wasn’t a crime of hatred. This was a crime of sickness. This wasn’t a Haredi. This wasn’t a human being. This was a predatory animal.”Rabinovich’s defense of his community was delivered to a Twitter following of Israel’s media and political elites. And he is largely correct. Haredi media did not incite against the gay pride march; it scrupulously ignored it. The reason offers a window into the culture and sensibilities of the Israeli Haredi community.Jewish law takes a skeptical view of the human capacity to overcome appetite, and so builds meticulous structures of ritual and normative expectations intended to channel and contain these desires, and ultimately to grant their bearer the power to choose how and when to succumb to them. Observant Jews are not lying, either to themselves or to others, when they sometimes describe their exacting lifestyles as “liberating.” Haredi thought, rooted in the mainstream view of much of Jewish tradition, sees homosexuality as yet another human “appetite” among many, to be managed in the way Jewish law manages other human desires, sinful or otherwise – through ritually reinforced discipline.Armed with this ancient and nuanced theory of human behavior, Haredi rabbis’ response to the past two decades of growing gay acceptance in mainstream Israeli society has been unexpectedly measured and calculating. Haredi leaders concluded long ago that they gained nothing by fighting a culture war on the issue. Even when the pride parade arrived in Jerusalem, the rabbis’ almost unanimous orders were explicit, and deeply rooted in their view of sin and human frailty.Let the secular blasphemers blaspheme in peace, the rabbis said. Let’s not risk bringing their ideas — their appetites — into our camp by going to war against them. Merely discovering the existence of gays and their self-proclaimed “pride” would constitute a tantalizing “obstacle” to Haredi youths’ moral fortitude, said the rabbis. The best way to avoid sin, they said, is to simply avoid it. Keep the camp clean and the debaucheries of the misdirected seculars — even the contemplation of those debaucheries risks their realization — well outside its walls.Haredi media did not ignore the pride parade out of discomfort or disgust, but because they were under direct orders from their spiritual masters to do so.Then came Schlissel’s crime. Suddenly the untouchable, unutterable thing could not be avoided. A murder was carried out in the name of Haredi Judaism, in the name of the holy Torah. Suddenly the gay pride parade was the top story in all major Haredi media.Kikar Hashabat, perhaps the most popular Hebrew-language Haredi website, exemplified the cultural agonies generated by the stabbing. “Thou shalt not murder,” read the bold-face overline above the homepage news article of the murder, offering an unequivocal, even Biblical affirmation of the crime’s moral horror. But beneath the overline, beginning in the very headline where the news reporting actually began, the text palpably writhed and equivocated. The attack, the headline explained, took place at what it called, in quotes, the “Abomination Parade.”That name may sound like unambiguous rejection of the parade to outsiders, but in the bounds of Haredi discourse it actually represents a slight softening, a moral rejection of the parade nevertheless tinged with a fretful attempt to avoid any hint of incitement. The march could not be called a “pride parade” without accepting the parade’s premise, and so editors fell back on the unassailable cultural bedrock of using a term the Torah itself uses for male gay relations. To clarify, if only to themselves, that they were engaged in this sleight of moral categories, they put the term in quotes.Haredi leaders have expressed real horror at Schlissel’s most obvious crime against the march’s participants, but were more circumspect in their statements to non-Haredi media about the two horrors Schlissel committed against his own community: the “desecration of God’s name” in his assertion that his act represented the moral code of the Torah, and the forced penetration — one Haredi observer actually called it a “rape” — of the defensive walls that surround the Haredi public debate, transforming the gay pride parade, steadfastly ignored by Jerusalem’s Haredim (at least in public) for a generation, into the most important issue on the community’s agenda.So Rabinovich was right that Schlissel’s crime represents no more than a single man’s “blind zealotry, hatred and pitilessness,” in the words of the district court that convicted Schlissel the last time he stabbed marchers at Jerusalem pride parade, in 2005. “Our hands did not shed this blood,” insisted Rabinovich, by which he meant, “We did not incite to this.” And they didn’t. How could they, standing studiously silent across the battlements of the culture war? Yet that very silence articulates as eloquently as any screed Haredi society’s abhorrence of even participating in the debate over homosexuality. If, as most Westerners are coming to believe, homosexual orientation is biologically driven, then it constitutes a question and a challenge to Jewish law and thought that won’t be made to disappear through obstinate silence. If humanity did in fact come into existence with more porous innate sexual and gender boundaries than is believed in normative Haredi sensibilities, that constitutes a question – not an answer, not ipso facto a rewriting of Jewish law, but undeniably a question – that can only be ignored at the cost of suffering and ostracism.Silence is not incitement, but it is an abrogation of responsibility, the creation of a social space in which revulsion and malice go unchallenged. Schlissel’s murder is a rarity in Haredi society, but less extreme violence and abuse against gays, shaming and rejection, the resort to prostitution, overpowering guilt even to the point of suicide — these are not absent from the Haredi encounter with homosexuality, no matter how studiously they are ignored by the Haredi spiritual leadership.Jewish penitence liturgy teaches that there are two kinds of sins, “sins of commission” carried out through specific actions and “sins of omission” committed passively, by failing to do something. Schlissel’s crime against the gay pride marchers does not represent Israel’s Haredi community. Rather, it is his crime against his own community that lays bare its responsibility, its sin of omission rooted in premeditated choice, for not challenging the malice that ultimately drove his blade, and that drives countless lesser indignities and suffering both within and outside the community.‘My own people’-In a similar vein, Ali Saad Dawabsha was not killed by settlers or the IDF, even if the security services prove the prevailing assumption – drawn from Shin Bet intelligence and forensic evidence, such as the Hebrew graffiti at the scene of the Duma firebombing – that the killers are extremist nationalist Jews.Most settlers, after all, live beyond the Green Line only because it is the only place where they can afford to buy a home. And the overwhelming majority of the remaining minority of settlers who live in the West Bank for ideological reasons are openly and profoundly horrified at the sort of violence that led to the death of little Ali and his father.Thus, it was Dani Dayan, a resident of the West Bank and former head of the country’s main settlement advocacy group, who was among the first to visit the Dawabsha family in the hospital. He went with Zionist Union leaders Isaac Herzog and Tzipi Livni, “in order to emphasize that on this issue there is no right and left, no Tel Aviv and Judea and Samaria,” he explained.Indeed, the most bitter denunciations of the crime seemed to come from the most pro-settlement politicians: President Rivlin, Knesset Speaker Yuli Edelstein and Education Minister Bennett all said the killings were not merely “criminal” or “bad,” but were a warning that Israeli society was not immune from the sorts of disastrous social and moral failings Israelis see on the other side of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.“My own people” committed this crime, said Rivlin. “Every society has extremist fringes, but today we have to ask: What is it in the public atmosphere [in Israel] which allows extremism and extremists to walk in confidence, in broad daylight? What is it that has enabled these weeds to threaten the safety of the entire garden of flowers?”And he insisted: “We will not be zealots. We will not be bullies. We will not become an anarchy.”It is not an accident that the politicians who most oppose the two-state solution utter such words. The Duma killing has brought into sharp relief in the heart of Israel’s far-right a growing divide between that camp’s democrats and (for want of a better term) its violent mystics. One-staters such as Rivlin, Edelstein and Bennett wish to deny the Palestinians national rights west of the Jordan River — and for that very reason are all the more committed, as a matter of principle, to ensuring that Palestinians who become Israelis enjoy full civic rights and civil and social equality.Their views on this point are a matter of public record: they believe in democracy, in its self-healing powers against political decay, in its pivotal role in Israel’s prosperity and strength – and thus, with the sorts of enemies and challenges Israel faces, in its vital part in Israel’s very survival. Their support for democracy and tolerance is no ideological luxury for the likes of Bennett or Rivlin, no politically correct lip service. They face down the more extreme elements of the religious right in its defense constantly and publicly, in large part because they believe that Israeli annexation of the West Bank, which they advocate, is only attainable by meeting the demands of democracy: the responsibility to ensure equality for Arabs and other minorities, and to foster a culture of tolerance in the Jewish majority.Alongside this group stands a small, scattered but strident band of activists steeped in the nationalist-religious mysticism of the settler movement, but which has drawn radical conclusions about recent Israeli history that are not shared by most West Bank settlers. Israel’s 2005 Gaza withdrawal, they believe, came about because Israel’s political elite was cowed by Palestinian terrorism into weak-kneed flight. This is an analysis that suggests the Israeli state, for all its vaunted security apparatuses, is politically weak and highly susceptible to pressure.The result of this interpretation was the formation, already in its nascent form as early as 2006 but with increasing organizational and operational sophistication from 2008-9 onward, of the “price tag” movement, a group of no more than a few hundred activists and their supporters who set about exacting a “price” for any action by the Israeli state deemed counter to the interests of the West Bank settlement project.The attack in Duma, which carries all the hallmarks of the ‘price tag’ movement, was different from most such attacks only in severity, not in intent-It was consciously framed as a counterweight to the pressure of Palestinian terrorism, so it is not surprising that it sought to learn and in some ways emulate the organization and strategic logic of Palestinian terror groups. The targets were determined by the activists’ unflattering assessment of the state’s points of weakness: since the state ostensibly cared so much for Palestinian rights, Palestinian property would be vandalized and civilians beaten; since it paid so much heed to the reports and lawsuits of left-wing advocacy groups, leftists would be struck; even the army itself, so deeply identified with the state’s power and sovereignty, became a target.The attack in Duma, which carries all the hallmarks of the “price tag” movement, was different from most such attacks only in severity, not in intent or operational technique.Yet results matter. In Duma a baby burned to death, and the fallout is shaking the Israeli settler right to its core. The essential ideal of Jewish sovereignty over the entirety of the land remains intact for the broader movement, but Rivlin, Edelstein and Bennett, together with prominent rabbis and educators, called Israeli society to task after the killing, and questioned the moral underpinnings of the aggressive discourse that has developed on the pro-settlement right.But this outpouring of self-critical hand-wringing, with its lionizing of democracy and tolerance, its new school curriculum and palpable fear for the future of Jewish-Arab relations, actually sidesteps the real roots of the Duma attack, the sin of omission of the Israeli state, and of the right-wing politicians who have led it for much of the past two decades, without which Duma, and all the long record of anti-Palestinian violence that culminated in that attack, would not have been possible.-See no evil-The West Bank is occupied. That’s not a determination of a UN fact-finding commission or campus boycott activist; it is Israeli law. In purely legal terms, international law recognizes and permits the legal institution of military occupation over territory captured in war as an inevitable part of war itself, which is not illegal. The relevant conventions even specify the occupier’s rights and responsibilities, as well as those of the occupied.But under these rules, articulated for example in the Geneva Conventions of 1949, such military rule must also be “provisional” – that is, temporary, pending a political solution.Fully 48 years after capturing the West Bank, Israel is still unable to decide what it wants to do with it. With the exception of East Jerusalem, it has not annexed the territory, and for complex and intertwined reasons of national defense, political convenience, narratives of national identity, and more, it has not withdrawn.Many of the consequences of this indecision are well-known. The most obvious: the Palestinians living in the West Bank are neither Israeli citizens nor the citizens of their own independent state. They live in a limbo of national belonging and self-determination. They are not masters of their collective fate.But there is another consequence of the occupation, less visible but no less calamitous. A West Bank that is neither annexed nor surrendered is a West Bank with no clear source for sovereignty and law.As those who encounter the more radical fringes of the settlement movement know well, the West Bank is a region of rampant lawlessness. Israeli military rule in the territory has not only failed to stem “price tag” attacks against Palestinians, it failed to prevent Jewish attacks even against the army’s own installations. But its failures extend beyond preventing violence. It has yet to institute a competent zoning and planning system to replace the decrepit and unreliable pre-1967 land registrar of the Jordanian occupation, or to effectively regulate the illegal construction, Jewish and Arab alike, that inevitably results from such unreliable institutions.The army understands one part of its mission in the West Bank perfectly – protect Israel, disrupt threats to Israelis emanating from the territory, and use the area to secure the country’s eastern frontier. But it does not really know how to carry out the other half of its mandate – administer the territory’s civilian life until a political solution is found that ends the military occupation. It can fight terror; 48 years in, it still struggles and largely fails to police civilians.This weakness is one reason Israel agreed to the establishment of a Palestinian Authority, originally intended as an effort to allow Palestinians to govern their own civilians – for most supporters of the Oslo peace process, as the prelude to a fully sovereign Palestinian state – rather than forcing the army to continue to misgovern them.The cause of the army’s unimpressive record at ruling over civilians is not lack of competence, but lack of democracy. The IDF’s priorities will always, inevitably and naturally, be driven by its innate interests as an organization. And that means it will always concern itself with defending and serving Israelis in the West Bank, and not Palestinians. This is true not simply because most senior commanders are Jews and most Israelis in the West Bank are also Jews. Even Druze and Bedouin officers are more focused on protecting Israelis than on fulfilling the second half of the military’s mandate. The reason is more basic: Israelis vote. Israelis have access to authorities beyond and above the military hierarchy. If the IDF fails Israelis, generals face the wrath of elected politicians who are their bosses. In Israel’s democracy, the military ultimately answers to the people, and it knows it.But it does not answer to – and therefore isn’t innately primed to notice – people who don’t partake in that civic power, who are not Israeli citizens and therefore not, at the end of the day, the source of the army’s authority and legitimacy. As an institution, before any narrow factors of policy or ideology even enter the equation, the army is simply not equipped psychologically to act as the de facto permanent framework for managing West Bank civilian life.The ‘price tag’ problem is not the failure of a particular commander or politician, but of a system that does not have, built-in, an overriding interest in the welfare of those under its rule-The unimpeded growth of the price tag movement drives home a startlingly simple lesson that should have been obvious to Israelis: institutions, like people, are guided by their view of their own interests. This is an idea that lies at the heart of democracy.If the army that governs the West Bank (outside Palestinian Authority areas, and sometimes also inside them) isn’t answerable to Palestinians as it is to Israelis, it is all but inevitable that it will fail to notice their suffering and fail to act to end it until that suffering becomes a liability to the army’s own political masters.This is inevitable not only in the extreme situation of a military occupation; it is a universal truth of all human institutions. The lack of democracy in the West Bank makes even democratically rooted Israeli institutions there susceptible to the corrosion that necessarily flows from the lack of institutional accountability.For 48 years, a strong Israeli democracy has coexisted with this nondemocratic occupation. A state security apparatus – the IDF, Shin Bet, police, even courts and prosecutors – that knows its place with Israelis, and works tirelessly in their defense, has not rushed to protect Palestinians, has not cracked down seriously on Israeli terrorists’ violence against them, even as it expertly infiltrated and crushed the vastly larger and better trained Palestinian terror organizations who threaten Israelis.At the end of the day, the “price tag” problem is not the failure of a particular commander or politician, but of a system that does not have, built-in, an overriding interest in the welfare of those under its rule.-Jumping the Green Line-In the wake of the Duma attack, the security cabinet, led by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and with the full-throated support of Bennett and others to his right, moved swiftly earlier this month to extend to Israelis one of the defining institutions of the West Bank’s nondemocratic military rule of Palestinians – indefinite detention without trial of terror suspects.The Shin Bet asked for the measure on operational grounds. It was a valuable tool in its arsenal for, in the organization’s own words, “shattering the infrastructure” of the price tag movement. After Duma, Jewish terrorism is now a meaningful presence in the defense establishment’s psyche, an “infrastructure” that can be “shattered” rather than a handful of young ne’er-do-wells who can be ignored. It is no accident that this change had to happen in the minds of politicians before it could take place in the institutional cultures of the security services.It was not a decision taken lightly, but neither was it hesitant.Each detention requires the approval of the attorney general and can be appealed to the High Court of Justice. Yet these legal constraints were not prominent in the ministers’ public statements about the decision.Jewish terrorists, Bennett said openly after the vote, are no different than “their brothers” – by which he meant Islamist Palestinian terrorists who murdered Jews. Justice Minister Ayelet Shaked, also of Bennett’s far-right Jewish Home party, even opined in the days that followed the decision that any death penalty for terrorism – the idea of executing terror convicts was recently raised by far-right politicians, but lacks a majority even within the right – must also be applied to Jewish terrorists.These were revealing statements. The political impulse driving the cabinet’s decision was not rooted in operational or legal-constitutional considerations, but in the desire for repentance through disassociation. In effect, the Israeli right wielded against the price tag movement’s adherents the most powerful tool in its arsenal – not merely distancing itself from their acts, but excluding them from Jewish national solidarity itself, which for most Israeli Jews is reified in nothing quite so viscerally as Israel’s democracy. These are Jews, “my own people,” who have made themselves strangers to us by their actions, undeserving of our loyalty, undeserving of our democracy and mutual responsibility one for another.And so it stripped them of democratic protections, made them “no better” than Palestinian terrorists. The exclusion, more than the removal of legal protections, was the deepest part of the act.Any military occupation carries with it innate injustices and the danger of democratic decay-And in doing so, in dramatically and with great purpose moving individuals from one side of the ledger to the other, the cabinet acknowledged the imbalance between democratic Israel and the nondemocratic West Bank – and that the divide may be a porous one. Detention without trial has now jumped the Green Line. The legal vacuum of the occupation, a temporary lacuna now nearing the end of its fifth decade, has sent a tentative tentacle into democratic Israel’s sovereign citizen body – in order to protect that citizen body from the failures of the very same occupation.As with Haredi society and Schlissel, in its very rejection of Duma the Israeli state has shown that it is in an important sense responsible for it – not because of its actions, but because of its inaction.None of this is an argument that Israel is wrong in its debate with the Palestinians over who is at fault for the continued occupation. Whether the Palestinians are unwilling or unable to compromise, or Israeli politics unable to restrain its annexationist wing, are irrelevant to the point being made here: that any military occupation carries with it innate injustices and the danger of democratic decay. An Israel that took seriously the legal and democratic lacuna of the West Bank would not have been as blasé about the growing presence of radical Jewish terrorists attacking Palestinians there-It may be too much to expect a resolution to the occupation anytime soon; the experience of Gaza suggests a West Bank withdrawal may not be the panacea so many foreign observers earnestly insist it would be. But even if Israel were completely and unequivocally right in the political debate, and the legal framework of the occupation remains a necessity for the time being, that does not absolve Israel of the sin of omission that led to Duma. As Israel waits for a resolution to the occupation, pulled between the many competing impulses in its politics (and the Palestinians’) over the future of the West Bank, it has allowed itself to engage in an open-ended nondemocratic policy without giving serious thought to the consequences of such a regime for the Palestinians, and for itself.An Israel that took seriously the legal and democratic lacuna of the West Bank would not have been as blasé about the growing presence of radical Jewish terrorists attacking Palestinians there, and would not have found itself – as it has in only a few rare instances in the past, each time in dealing with Jewish terrorists in the lawless West Bank – extending the rules of military occupation into the bounds of Israeli democracy.Israel’s acquiescence to lawlessness is a choice. The deafening Haredi silence over homosexuality is likewise a choice. Neither community incited or wanted the crimes committed in their name, but both failed, through conscious choice, to challenge the criminals and their ideas.
Oldest complete New Testament to go on display at British Museum-‘Egypt: Faith after the pharaohs’ to exhibit holy texts penned on the Nile from three monotheistic religions-By Ilan Ben Zion August 27, 2015, 8:35 pm 6-the times of israel
The oldest complete version of the New Testament will go on display at London’s British Museum in October as part of an exhibit on the monotheistic religions in Egypt.The Codex Sinaiticus is a 4th century CE handwritten parchment manuscript containing the Septuagint and New Testament in Greek. Throughout the text are thousands of annotations and corrections, added from the codex’s drafting in the 4th century to as late as the 12th century, scholars say.The manuscript itself is scattered between four different institutions, the British Library, the Leipzig University Library, the National Library of Russia in Saint Petersburg, and the Saint Catherine’s Monastery in Egypt, where it remained until the 19th century.The codex, the museum said, will be presented as part of the “Egypt: Faith after the pharaohs” exhibit, opening in October 2015 in order “to emphasize the readers and users of scripture” in the land of the Nile in ancient times. It will be presented alongside the Gaster Bible, a 9th-century Torah from Egypt featuring one of the oldest Hebrew illuminated texts — also on loan from the British Library — and a Quran from Oxford University’s Bodleian Library. Among the other Jewish artifacts included in the exhibit are fragments of documents from the Cairo Geniza containing Hebrew, Judeo-Arabic, Aramaic and Arabic texts detailing Jewish life in Cairo during the Middle Ages.Since the British Library bought it from Soviet Russia in 1933, the manuscript has only been loaned out once, in 1990, to the British Museum (when the two institutions shared the same building.“It is quite phenomenal [that] they are able to lend it to us,” Elisabeth O’Connell, an assistant keeper at the British Museum, told The Guardian. “We are absolutely thrilled.”The British Museum said on its website that the exhibit will “show how Christian, Islamic and Jewish communities reinterpreted the pharaonic past of Egypt and interacted with one another” over 1,200 years.
Analysis-The blood of summer and our collective sins of omission-Israel’s government and army are responsible for the murderous attack in Duma, and Israel’s Haredi rabbinic leadership for the murder at the Jerusalem Gay Pride Parade. Here’s why By Haviv Rettig Gur August 27, 2015, 4:50 pm 58-the times of israel
Each year, Israel’s education system celebrates the Hebrew calendar by turning that year’s name, written in the ancient way with letters standing in for numerical values, into an acronym for a blessing for that year. Since each fall-to-spring academic year more or less corresponds to the Hebrew calendar year, the academic year is officially numbered, and thus named, with these Hebrew acrostics.Last week, the Education Ministry announced the acrostic blessing for the coming 5756 (or the letters taf-shin-ayin-vav) new year. It was a strangely unwieldy phrase, squeezing six Hebrew words into the four-letter acronym, and an unexpectedly heartrending one: “May it be a year of mutual and personal responsibility” (Hebrew: Teheh Shnat Arvut Hadadit Ve’ahrayut Ishit).This week, just days before the start of the new school year, Education Minister Naftali Bennett unveiled the pedagogic focus for the coming year.“In a country like ours, tolerance is not a luxury; it is a precondition for our existence,” he said in a statement. “This year, one student will not be returning to school. She was murdered because she marched to identify with her friends at the [Jerusalem Gay] Pride Parade. We can’t just move on from that. Disagreeing with each other is allowed and even encouraged. But to raise a hand – never.”That quote opened an announcement from the ministry that hundreds of thousands of Israeli schoolchildren would spend their first week of classes “discussing violence and how to prevent racism in our society.”Bennett’s decision to devote the first week to the subject, the statement explained, “comes in the context of the terrible violent incidents of the past summer, including the murder of a year-and-a-half-old Palestinian infant, Ali Saad Dawabsha, may his memory be blessed, and the murder of the young woman Shira Banki, may her memory be blessed.”The violence “makes us responsible as educators who sanctify ethics, love of humanity and liberty to act in every way we can to prevent the spread of this spirit of hate and destruction,” ministry director general Michal Cohen wrote in a memo to school principals.“The education system is responsible for acting to correct these social sicknesses and instill our sacred values – the defense of human dignity and liberty, morality and justice, love of humanity and mutual responsibility.”Two children were murdered because of intolerance, the country’s top education officials have proclaimed in the weeks since those killings. And so tolerance would be the focus of the coming school year.-Crimes of hate-The July 31 murders in Duma and at the gay pride march were not ordinary homicides. They were moral arguments: Yishai Schlissel’s moral obsession with overly happy gays and the “price tag” movement’s fleet-footed moral flanking maneuver in punishing Israel by allegedly burning Palestinians. Two simultaneous climaxes of Jewish extremism, two moments of Jewish spiritual pathology that were seen by many Israelis, from far-left to far-right, not as criminal aberrations but as signals of a possibly grim future.The perpetrators were not swept away by emotion, nor insane; their acts were conscious and full of meaning-It is no exaggeration to say that the Jewishness of the criminals (based on the current state of evidence), coupled with the fact that the crimes were ostensibly committed in Judaism’s name, shattered the Israeli public debate. It led to Israel’s president, a right-wing politician who believes Orthodox Judaism is the only authentic expression of Judaism and has long opposed a Palestinian state in the West Bank, to fret aloud about the crimes and rising bigotry among “my own people.” Politicians from left and right joined together to pay respects to the Dawabsha family. Haredi politicians and spokespeople went on television to proclaim that violence against gays is a moral failing greater than the presumed failings of the gays themselves.And the education system rushed to do its part. To those who would plunge a knife into a teenage girl’s back in God’s name, or who would set a sleeping family’s home on fire in the middle of the night, the traditional Jewish response is obvious enough, and marked the general Israeli public outpouring after those attacks: rejecting the darkness of prejudice and increasing the light of tolerance.Yet in an important sense, Israel’s politicians and educators, in their genuine horror at the acts, misunderstand them. They call them crimes of “hate” and set about denouncing the emotion. Yet the emotional label in “hate crime” ironically hides the term’s true meaning: that the perpetrators were not swept away by emotion, nor insane, that their acts were conscious and full of meaning.Israelis’ responses to that violent July day have largely failed to answer the question that has so deeply troubled the Israeli psyche since, a question that isn’t new, but that the killing of children has made impossible to ignore: Who sets a family’s home on fire in the middle of the night? What sorts of thoughts go through such a person’s head, and who put those thoughts there? And what sort of person launches himself on innocent teenagers, slashing frantically with a knife until, in the few seconds it takes for police to wrestle him to the ground, seven lie bleeding in the streets of Jerusalem? Where do such expressions of extremism come from, and how do we as a society tackle them? Sins of omission-“Our hands did not shed this blood,” tweeted Benny Rabinovich, editor of the influential ultra-Orthodox newspaper Yated Ne’eman and a prominent spokesman for the community, after Schlissel’s attack.It was a dense tweet, of the sort that sparse, vowel-less Hebrew is uniquely equipped to produce. It went on: “Not one single Haredi media outlet spoke about the parade; not a word. This wasn’t a crime of hatred. This was a crime of sickness. This wasn’t a Haredi. This wasn’t a human being. This was a predatory animal.”Rabinovich’s defense of his community was delivered to a Twitter following of Israel’s media and political elites. And he is largely correct. Haredi media did not incite against the gay pride march; it scrupulously ignored it. The reason offers a window into the culture and sensibilities of the Israeli Haredi community.Jewish law takes a skeptical view of the human capacity to overcome appetite, and so builds meticulous structures of ritual and normative expectations intended to channel and contain these desires, and ultimately to grant their bearer the power to choose how and when to succumb to them. Observant Jews are not lying, either to themselves or to others, when they sometimes describe their exacting lifestyles as “liberating.” Haredi thought, rooted in the mainstream view of much of Jewish tradition, sees homosexuality as yet another human “appetite” among many, to be managed in the way Jewish law manages other human desires, sinful or otherwise – through ritually reinforced discipline.Armed with this ancient and nuanced theory of human behavior, Haredi rabbis’ response to the past two decades of growing gay acceptance in mainstream Israeli society has been unexpectedly measured and calculating. Haredi leaders concluded long ago that they gained nothing by fighting a culture war on the issue. Even when the pride parade arrived in Jerusalem, the rabbis’ almost unanimous orders were explicit, and deeply rooted in their view of sin and human frailty.Let the secular blasphemers blaspheme in peace, the rabbis said. Let’s not risk bringing their ideas — their appetites — into our camp by going to war against them. Merely discovering the existence of gays and their self-proclaimed “pride” would constitute a tantalizing “obstacle” to Haredi youths’ moral fortitude, said the rabbis. The best way to avoid sin, they said, is to simply avoid it. Keep the camp clean and the debaucheries of the misdirected seculars — even the contemplation of those debaucheries risks their realization — well outside its walls.Haredi media did not ignore the pride parade out of discomfort or disgust, but because they were under direct orders from their spiritual masters to do so.Then came Schlissel’s crime. Suddenly the untouchable, unutterable thing could not be avoided. A murder was carried out in the name of Haredi Judaism, in the name of the holy Torah. Suddenly the gay pride parade was the top story in all major Haredi media.Kikar Hashabat, perhaps the most popular Hebrew-language Haredi website, exemplified the cultural agonies generated by the stabbing. “Thou shalt not murder,” read the bold-face overline above the homepage news article of the murder, offering an unequivocal, even Biblical affirmation of the crime’s moral horror. But beneath the overline, beginning in the very headline where the news reporting actually began, the text palpably writhed and equivocated. The attack, the headline explained, took place at what it called, in quotes, the “Abomination Parade.”That name may sound like unambiguous rejection of the parade to outsiders, but in the bounds of Haredi discourse it actually represents a slight softening, a moral rejection of the parade nevertheless tinged with a fretful attempt to avoid any hint of incitement. The march could not be called a “pride parade” without accepting the parade’s premise, and so editors fell back on the unassailable cultural bedrock of using a term the Torah itself uses for male gay relations. To clarify, if only to themselves, that they were engaged in this sleight of moral categories, they put the term in quotes.Haredi leaders have expressed real horror at Schlissel’s most obvious crime against the march’s participants, but were more circumspect in their statements to non-Haredi media about the two horrors Schlissel committed against his own community: the “desecration of God’s name” in his assertion that his act represented the moral code of the Torah, and the forced penetration — one Haredi observer actually called it a “rape” — of the defensive walls that surround the Haredi public debate, transforming the gay pride parade, steadfastly ignored by Jerusalem’s Haredim (at least in public) for a generation, into the most important issue on the community’s agenda.So Rabinovich was right that Schlissel’s crime represents no more than a single man’s “blind zealotry, hatred and pitilessness,” in the words of the district court that convicted Schlissel the last time he stabbed marchers at Jerusalem pride parade, in 2005. “Our hands did not shed this blood,” insisted Rabinovich, by which he meant, “We did not incite to this.” And they didn’t. How could they, standing studiously silent across the battlements of the culture war? Yet that very silence articulates as eloquently as any screed Haredi society’s abhorrence of even participating in the debate over homosexuality. If, as most Westerners are coming to believe, homosexual orientation is biologically driven, then it constitutes a question and a challenge to Jewish law and thought that won’t be made to disappear through obstinate silence. If humanity did in fact come into existence with more porous innate sexual and gender boundaries than is believed in normative Haredi sensibilities, that constitutes a question – not an answer, not ipso facto a rewriting of Jewish law, but undeniably a question – that can only be ignored at the cost of suffering and ostracism.Silence is not incitement, but it is an abrogation of responsibility, the creation of a social space in which revulsion and malice go unchallenged. Schlissel’s murder is a rarity in Haredi society, but less extreme violence and abuse against gays, shaming and rejection, the resort to prostitution, overpowering guilt even to the point of suicide — these are not absent from the Haredi encounter with homosexuality, no matter how studiously they are ignored by the Haredi spiritual leadership.Jewish penitence liturgy teaches that there are two kinds of sins, “sins of commission” carried out through specific actions and “sins of omission” committed passively, by failing to do something. Schlissel’s crime against the gay pride marchers does not represent Israel’s Haredi community. Rather, it is his crime against his own community that lays bare its responsibility, its sin of omission rooted in premeditated choice, for not challenging the malice that ultimately drove his blade, and that drives countless lesser indignities and suffering both within and outside the community.‘My own people’-In a similar vein, Ali Saad Dawabsha was not killed by settlers or the IDF, even if the security services prove the prevailing assumption – drawn from Shin Bet intelligence and forensic evidence, such as the Hebrew graffiti at the scene of the Duma firebombing – that the killers are extremist nationalist Jews.Most settlers, after all, live beyond the Green Line only because it is the only place where they can afford to buy a home. And the overwhelming majority of the remaining minority of settlers who live in the West Bank for ideological reasons are openly and profoundly horrified at the sort of violence that led to the death of little Ali and his father.Thus, it was Dani Dayan, a resident of the West Bank and former head of the country’s main settlement advocacy group, who was among the first to visit the Dawabsha family in the hospital. He went with Zionist Union leaders Isaac Herzog and Tzipi Livni, “in order to emphasize that on this issue there is no right and left, no Tel Aviv and Judea and Samaria,” he explained.Indeed, the most bitter denunciations of the crime seemed to come from the most pro-settlement politicians: President Rivlin, Knesset Speaker Yuli Edelstein and Education Minister Bennett all said the killings were not merely “criminal” or “bad,” but were a warning that Israeli society was not immune from the sorts of disastrous social and moral failings Israelis see on the other side of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.“My own people” committed this crime, said Rivlin. “Every society has extremist fringes, but today we have to ask: What is it in the public atmosphere [in Israel] which allows extremism and extremists to walk in confidence, in broad daylight? What is it that has enabled these weeds to threaten the safety of the entire garden of flowers?”And he insisted: “We will not be zealots. We will not be bullies. We will not become an anarchy.”It is not an accident that the politicians who most oppose the two-state solution utter such words. The Duma killing has brought into sharp relief in the heart of Israel’s far-right a growing divide between that camp’s democrats and (for want of a better term) its violent mystics. One-staters such as Rivlin, Edelstein and Bennett wish to deny the Palestinians national rights west of the Jordan River — and for that very reason are all the more committed, as a matter of principle, to ensuring that Palestinians who become Israelis enjoy full civic rights and civil and social equality.Their views on this point are a matter of public record: they believe in democracy, in its self-healing powers against political decay, in its pivotal role in Israel’s prosperity and strength – and thus, with the sorts of enemies and challenges Israel faces, in its vital part in Israel’s very survival. Their support for democracy and tolerance is no ideological luxury for the likes of Bennett or Rivlin, no politically correct lip service. They face down the more extreme elements of the religious right in its defense constantly and publicly, in large part because they believe that Israeli annexation of the West Bank, which they advocate, is only attainable by meeting the demands of democracy: the responsibility to ensure equality for Arabs and other minorities, and to foster a culture of tolerance in the Jewish majority.Alongside this group stands a small, scattered but strident band of activists steeped in the nationalist-religious mysticism of the settler movement, but which has drawn radical conclusions about recent Israeli history that are not shared by most West Bank settlers. Israel’s 2005 Gaza withdrawal, they believe, came about because Israel’s political elite was cowed by Palestinian terrorism into weak-kneed flight. This is an analysis that suggests the Israeli state, for all its vaunted security apparatuses, is politically weak and highly susceptible to pressure.The result of this interpretation was the formation, already in its nascent form as early as 2006 but with increasing organizational and operational sophistication from 2008-9 onward, of the “price tag” movement, a group of no more than a few hundred activists and their supporters who set about exacting a “price” for any action by the Israeli state deemed counter to the interests of the West Bank settlement project.The attack in Duma, which carries all the hallmarks of the ‘price tag’ movement, was different from most such attacks only in severity, not in intent-It was consciously framed as a counterweight to the pressure of Palestinian terrorism, so it is not surprising that it sought to learn and in some ways emulate the organization and strategic logic of Palestinian terror groups. The targets were determined by the activists’ unflattering assessment of the state’s points of weakness: since the state ostensibly cared so much for Palestinian rights, Palestinian property would be vandalized and civilians beaten; since it paid so much heed to the reports and lawsuits of left-wing advocacy groups, leftists would be struck; even the army itself, so deeply identified with the state’s power and sovereignty, became a target.The attack in Duma, which carries all the hallmarks of the “price tag” movement, was different from most such attacks only in severity, not in intent or operational technique.Yet results matter. In Duma a baby burned to death, and the fallout is shaking the Israeli settler right to its core. The essential ideal of Jewish sovereignty over the entirety of the land remains intact for the broader movement, but Rivlin, Edelstein and Bennett, together with prominent rabbis and educators, called Israeli society to task after the killing, and questioned the moral underpinnings of the aggressive discourse that has developed on the pro-settlement right.But this outpouring of self-critical hand-wringing, with its lionizing of democracy and tolerance, its new school curriculum and palpable fear for the future of Jewish-Arab relations, actually sidesteps the real roots of the Duma attack, the sin of omission of the Israeli state, and of the right-wing politicians who have led it for much of the past two decades, without which Duma, and all the long record of anti-Palestinian violence that culminated in that attack, would not have been possible.-See no evil-The West Bank is occupied. That’s not a determination of a UN fact-finding commission or campus boycott activist; it is Israeli law. In purely legal terms, international law recognizes and permits the legal institution of military occupation over territory captured in war as an inevitable part of war itself, which is not illegal. The relevant conventions even specify the occupier’s rights and responsibilities, as well as those of the occupied.But under these rules, articulated for example in the Geneva Conventions of 1949, such military rule must also be “provisional” – that is, temporary, pending a political solution.Fully 48 years after capturing the West Bank, Israel is still unable to decide what it wants to do with it. With the exception of East Jerusalem, it has not annexed the territory, and for complex and intertwined reasons of national defense, political convenience, narratives of national identity, and more, it has not withdrawn.Many of the consequences of this indecision are well-known. The most obvious: the Palestinians living in the West Bank are neither Israeli citizens nor the citizens of their own independent state. They live in a limbo of national belonging and self-determination. They are not masters of their collective fate.But there is another consequence of the occupation, less visible but no less calamitous. A West Bank that is neither annexed nor surrendered is a West Bank with no clear source for sovereignty and law.As those who encounter the more radical fringes of the settlement movement know well, the West Bank is a region of rampant lawlessness. Israeli military rule in the territory has not only failed to stem “price tag” attacks against Palestinians, it failed to prevent Jewish attacks even against the army’s own installations. But its failures extend beyond preventing violence. It has yet to institute a competent zoning and planning system to replace the decrepit and unreliable pre-1967 land registrar of the Jordanian occupation, or to effectively regulate the illegal construction, Jewish and Arab alike, that inevitably results from such unreliable institutions.The army understands one part of its mission in the West Bank perfectly – protect Israel, disrupt threats to Israelis emanating from the territory, and use the area to secure the country’s eastern frontier. But it does not really know how to carry out the other half of its mandate – administer the territory’s civilian life until a political solution is found that ends the military occupation. It can fight terror; 48 years in, it still struggles and largely fails to police civilians.This weakness is one reason Israel agreed to the establishment of a Palestinian Authority, originally intended as an effort to allow Palestinians to govern their own civilians – for most supporters of the Oslo peace process, as the prelude to a fully sovereign Palestinian state – rather than forcing the army to continue to misgovern them.The cause of the army’s unimpressive record at ruling over civilians is not lack of competence, but lack of democracy. The IDF’s priorities will always, inevitably and naturally, be driven by its innate interests as an organization. And that means it will always concern itself with defending and serving Israelis in the West Bank, and not Palestinians. This is true not simply because most senior commanders are Jews and most Israelis in the West Bank are also Jews. Even Druze and Bedouin officers are more focused on protecting Israelis than on fulfilling the second half of the military’s mandate. The reason is more basic: Israelis vote. Israelis have access to authorities beyond and above the military hierarchy. If the IDF fails Israelis, generals face the wrath of elected politicians who are their bosses. In Israel’s democracy, the military ultimately answers to the people, and it knows it.But it does not answer to – and therefore isn’t innately primed to notice – people who don’t partake in that civic power, who are not Israeli citizens and therefore not, at the end of the day, the source of the army’s authority and legitimacy. As an institution, before any narrow factors of policy or ideology even enter the equation, the army is simply not equipped psychologically to act as the de facto permanent framework for managing West Bank civilian life.The ‘price tag’ problem is not the failure of a particular commander or politician, but of a system that does not have, built-in, an overriding interest in the welfare of those under its rule-The unimpeded growth of the price tag movement drives home a startlingly simple lesson that should have been obvious to Israelis: institutions, like people, are guided by their view of their own interests. This is an idea that lies at the heart of democracy.If the army that governs the West Bank (outside Palestinian Authority areas, and sometimes also inside them) isn’t answerable to Palestinians as it is to Israelis, it is all but inevitable that it will fail to notice their suffering and fail to act to end it until that suffering becomes a liability to the army’s own political masters.This is inevitable not only in the extreme situation of a military occupation; it is a universal truth of all human institutions. The lack of democracy in the West Bank makes even democratically rooted Israeli institutions there susceptible to the corrosion that necessarily flows from the lack of institutional accountability.For 48 years, a strong Israeli democracy has coexisted with this nondemocratic occupation. A state security apparatus – the IDF, Shin Bet, police, even courts and prosecutors – that knows its place with Israelis, and works tirelessly in their defense, has not rushed to protect Palestinians, has not cracked down seriously on Israeli terrorists’ violence against them, even as it expertly infiltrated and crushed the vastly larger and better trained Palestinian terror organizations who threaten Israelis.At the end of the day, the “price tag” problem is not the failure of a particular commander or politician, but of a system that does not have, built-in, an overriding interest in the welfare of those under its rule.-Jumping the Green Line-In the wake of the Duma attack, the security cabinet, led by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and with the full-throated support of Bennett and others to his right, moved swiftly earlier this month to extend to Israelis one of the defining institutions of the West Bank’s nondemocratic military rule of Palestinians – indefinite detention without trial of terror suspects.The Shin Bet asked for the measure on operational grounds. It was a valuable tool in its arsenal for, in the organization’s own words, “shattering the infrastructure” of the price tag movement. After Duma, Jewish terrorism is now a meaningful presence in the defense establishment’s psyche, an “infrastructure” that can be “shattered” rather than a handful of young ne’er-do-wells who can be ignored. It is no accident that this change had to happen in the minds of politicians before it could take place in the institutional cultures of the security services.It was not a decision taken lightly, but neither was it hesitant.Each detention requires the approval of the attorney general and can be appealed to the High Court of Justice. Yet these legal constraints were not prominent in the ministers’ public statements about the decision.Jewish terrorists, Bennett said openly after the vote, are no different than “their brothers” – by which he meant Islamist Palestinian terrorists who murdered Jews. Justice Minister Ayelet Shaked, also of Bennett’s far-right Jewish Home party, even opined in the days that followed the decision that any death penalty for terrorism – the idea of executing terror convicts was recently raised by far-right politicians, but lacks a majority even within the right – must also be applied to Jewish terrorists.These were revealing statements. The political impulse driving the cabinet’s decision was not rooted in operational or legal-constitutional considerations, but in the desire for repentance through disassociation. In effect, the Israeli right wielded against the price tag movement’s adherents the most powerful tool in its arsenal – not merely distancing itself from their acts, but excluding them from Jewish national solidarity itself, which for most Israeli Jews is reified in nothing quite so viscerally as Israel’s democracy. These are Jews, “my own people,” who have made themselves strangers to us by their actions, undeserving of our loyalty, undeserving of our democracy and mutual responsibility one for another.And so it stripped them of democratic protections, made them “no better” than Palestinian terrorists. The exclusion, more than the removal of legal protections, was the deepest part of the act.Any military occupation carries with it innate injustices and the danger of democratic decay-And in doing so, in dramatically and with great purpose moving individuals from one side of the ledger to the other, the cabinet acknowledged the imbalance between democratic Israel and the nondemocratic West Bank – and that the divide may be a porous one. Detention without trial has now jumped the Green Line. The legal vacuum of the occupation, a temporary lacuna now nearing the end of its fifth decade, has sent a tentative tentacle into democratic Israel’s sovereign citizen body – in order to protect that citizen body from the failures of the very same occupation.As with Haredi society and Schlissel, in its very rejection of Duma the Israeli state has shown that it is in an important sense responsible for it – not because of its actions, but because of its inaction.None of this is an argument that Israel is wrong in its debate with the Palestinians over who is at fault for the continued occupation. Whether the Palestinians are unwilling or unable to compromise, or Israeli politics unable to restrain its annexationist wing, are irrelevant to the point being made here: that any military occupation carries with it innate injustices and the danger of democratic decay. An Israel that took seriously the legal and democratic lacuna of the West Bank would not have been as blasé about the growing presence of radical Jewish terrorists attacking Palestinians there-It may be too much to expect a resolution to the occupation anytime soon; the experience of Gaza suggests a West Bank withdrawal may not be the panacea so many foreign observers earnestly insist it would be. But even if Israel were completely and unequivocally right in the political debate, and the legal framework of the occupation remains a necessity for the time being, that does not absolve Israel of the sin of omission that led to Duma. As Israel waits for a resolution to the occupation, pulled between the many competing impulses in its politics (and the Palestinians’) over the future of the West Bank, it has allowed itself to engage in an open-ended nondemocratic policy without giving serious thought to the consequences of such a regime for the Palestinians, and for itself.An Israel that took seriously the legal and democratic lacuna of the West Bank would not have been as blasé about the growing presence of radical Jewish terrorists attacking Palestinians there, and would not have found itself – as it has in only a few rare instances in the past, each time in dealing with Jewish terrorists in the lawless West Bank – extending the rules of military occupation into the bounds of Israeli democracy.Israel’s acquiescence to lawlessness is a choice. The deafening Haredi silence over homosexuality is likewise a choice. Neither community incited or wanted the crimes committed in their name, but both failed, through conscious choice, to challenge the criminals and their ideas.
