One Sunday, two brothers, Hillel and Yagel Yaniv, young men with a bright future ahead of them were murdered while stuck in traffic in the Muslim village of Hawara in Israel. The locals celebrated their crime by singing, handing out candy and shooting off fireworks in the air.
“Every day, yes! – every single day – at least 20 Jewish cars get stoned while driving through Hawara,” Shmuel Sackett, the head of a tree-planting foundation, wrote.
1,600 Israeli Jewish families have to travel the road that goes through the village. Stoning cars, he clarified, means “throwing bricks and dropping cinder blocks from rooftops.”
“Imagine a young mother with 3 children in her car, driving home from the supermarket. As she is driving, a brick comes crashing through her windshield. The shock of what happened is enough to give her a heart attack! The children start screaming, there is broken glass everywhere, but she cannot stop for help… because she’s in the middle of Hawara with a mob just waiting to finish the job.”
That evening, some Jewish residents showed up to protest in Hawara. And some did more than protest. They set the junk cars in a nearby lot on fire. A few threw stones and smashed things. The terrorists claim that one of their own was killed in the rioting, but that is suspect.
The outrage that ensued was everything that had been entirely absent from the terrorist killings of 14 Israelis this year, including an American, Elan Ganeles, who was killed the next day.
Biden’s State Department spokesman Ned Price blasted what he falsely called, “the wide scale and indiscriminate violence by settlers against Palestinians civilians” and demanded that Israel “ensure full accountability and prosecute those responsible for the attacks in addition to compensation for the property.”
This comes as the Biden administration has not only failed to demand accountability from the Palestinian Authority, but continues to fund the terrorists killing Jews.
Nobody expected anything else from the Biden administration or the media. An optimist might have expected more from American Jews.
The Sabbath of that week was the one known as ‘Zachor’ or ‘Remember’ during which the biblical verses from (Deuteronomy 25:17-19) commemorating an attack on the freed Jewish slaves leaving Egypt are read. “Remember what Amalek did to you on the way, when you went out of Egypt, how he happened upon you on the way and cut off all the stragglers at your rear.”
In Judaism, those verses are so important that everyone must come to the synagogue to hear them. Long before the Holocaust, ‘Never Again’ was engraved with burning letters in the Bible. That reading was followed by the story of King Shaul who was removed from ruling over Israel because he had taken pity on the Amalekite king. The Prophet Samuel, an old man, takes up the sword and does what the king failed to do and executes him, stating bluntly, “As your sword bereaved women, so will your mother be bereaved among women.” (Samuel 1 15:33)
In one of the larger and wealthier Modern Orthodox synagogues in the Los Angeles area, the rabbi’s sermon was not on the subject of these politically incorrect readings even though they represent a unique religious obligation for which many of the congregants had come to the synagogue. Nor did the murder of Elan Ganeles, who had been part of the same Modern Orthodox movement, among the fourteen Jews murdered by terrorists just that year, come up.
Instead, like the rabbis of a number of other Modern Orthodox congregations, he denounced “vigilantes” and the way they had disgraced the Jewish people by taking the law into their own hands, and spoke at length of how terrible it was for Jews to fight back in such a manner.
Over the Purim week, I’ve heard stories of similar condemnations of ‘vigilantism’ delivered in mellifluous tones from the pulpits of prosperous synagogues resting in suburban enclaves.
That Sabbath was the gateway to the Jewish holiday of Purim which relates how the Jews gathered en masse and wreaked havoc on those who had plotted to exterminate them.
“And the Jews smote all their enemies with the stroke of the sword and with slaying and destruction,” Megilat Esther, the Scroll of Esther, relates. That’s more than a junk car lot fire.
The Los Angeles Jewish community recently panicked over shootings which wounded two men. Its synagogues are protected by extensive armed security. How would American Jews react if such shootings were an everyday occurrence, not an aberration? What might they be willing to do if they watched those around them be battered, shot and killed week after week?
“After the brutal murder, candies and sweets were handed out, cake was distributed, and people were singing. When did all this stop?” Sackett wrote of what happened in the Muslim village after the riot. “Since that day, not one rock has been thrown at Jewish cars.”
The ethical question of when people may take the law into their hands is a difficult one. Violence should never be an easy answer, but when things get bad enough, it can be inescapable. And those who live privileged lives of comfort and security could at least try to envision what life is like for those under the gun.
American Jews, even those in the Modern Orthodox community, remain crippled by liberal niceties, by the conviction that violence is something only the ‘bad guys’ commit.
“How can such a thing happen? How could it come to this, that Jewish young men should ransack and burn homes and cars?” Rabbi Moshe Hauer, the Executive Vice President of the Orthodox Union, deplored.
After constant terrorism, it’s more of a wonder that so few go out and do such things.
But on a Purim long ago, Jewish young men did far worse in Shushan. And King Shaul was deposed by the word of G-d not because he went too far, but didn’t go far enough.
Mindlessly deploring violence, regardless of the circumstances, is not a Jewish value.
The Torah warns against needless violence, but it also commands it if the situation calls for it. Some Modern Orthodox Jews have so absorbed liberal pieties that they are shocked and horrified by violence and have lost touch with Jewish values. They agonized over the video of some of the rioters praying ‘Maariv’ as if there were an innate contradiction with reciting ‘Aleinu’: derived from the prayer recited by Joshua when entering to conquer the land of Israel.
It’s understandable for people who live comfortable lives to deplore violence and ugliness, but there’s something deeply troubling when there’s more moral outrage directed at Jews burning junk cars in the village of their killers than at the killers. That isn’t morality speaking, it’s shame.
Modern Orthodox Jews who fall into the trap of holding Israeli Jews to one standard and their Arab Muslim attackers to a much lower one are duplicating the infamous Israel double standard. Under such double standards, survival becomes all but impossible. If the targets of terrorism are chained down by liberal pieties with everything expected of them and nothing of their enemies, that’s not morality, it’s a suicide pact. And there’s nothing Jewish about a suicide pact. either.
The ugly reality is that violence works. Building a society that transcends violence requires the cooperation of both sides. Without such cooperation, civilization doesn’t exist, neither does law and order. Israeli law, or that of any country, is completely inadequate to such a problem. The Israeli military or security service going in to occasionally arrest a few terrorists is a band-aid.
In a tribal society, tribal violence is a natural resort. Last fall, the Druze, a Muslim minority group in Israel, threatened to storm an Arab Muslim city after terrorists kidnapped one of their own from the hospital and tried to hold him hostage. Druze men brandished rifles and warned that if the body wasn’t returned to the family, they would take it. The Hawara rioters played by those rules. Unless a new Israeli government can cut a better deal than tribal violence, that may be the reality. Governments exist, among other things, to protect people from violence. If they show that they are unwilling and unable to systemically do so, they leave their people no other choice.
And American Jews would do better to understand than to sanctimoniously condescend.
Jews, even pro-Israel Jews, all too often embody Robert Frost’s line, “a liberal is a man too broadminded to take his own side in a quarrel.” Those who condemned the protesters, while offering hardly a thought for their killers, boasted that they “been accused of being blindly pro-Israel” in the past, but now they had disproven it. There is nothing shameful about being “blindly pro-America”, “pro-Israel” or “pro-civilization” when faced with a struggle to the death. It’s a liberal fallacy to think that objectivity is the way to confront the moral issues that arise when trying to survive.
American liberal Jews have all too easily forgotten what life and death struggles look like. They panic when they see Jews fighting back and condemn even the mildest reactions with far more outrage than they do the terrorists who are murdering them. That perhaps is why ‘Zachor’ or ‘Remember’ had to be a divine mandate. Most peoples would not need to be ordered to remember to strike back, but Jews are uncomfortable with such things and easily forget.
A voice from heaven had thundered, “Remember!” while a thousand smaller voices still command, “Forget”.
And American Jews would do better to understand than to sanctimoniously condescend.
How do those who do understand make those who wont listen to anyone but extreme leftists understand? This problem will just have to unravel demographically.
Demographics is one solution, but for starters it’s important to tell the truth when few other voices are heard.
You know as well as I do that telling the truth doesn’t help if the audience is incapable of changing its world view. It’s like herding cats.
Telling the truth may not have immediate effect or utility, but it is still powerful.
I wish the Jews would simply deport or eliminate all who hate Jews and Israel from their land. Simple, but not easy.
The land is for Israel. The Temple Mount is for Israel. It should be controlled by Israeli Jews.
I couldn’t agree more and that applies to all countries dealing with Muslims, who are taught that might makes right. So might is all they understand and respect.
Like MIke Pence on his “Christian” soapbox slandering Donald Trump.
Put more traffic patrols on the roads and rework the traffic network to avoid dangerous areas. While these are in some sense just palliative measures and not complete solutions, like Iron Dome is, they are useful and can be done mostly below the radar of what the left and MSM can work up into big sensational stories. Although they try their hardest to do that.
It’s tricky to do that because of the geography and population density.. Israel has been building new roads for years and a bypass for Hawara was announced, but there are still plenty of choke points and every time Israel begins working on a bypass road, it’s described as an apartheid road, as an annexation highway for the occupation, etc…
Thanks Daniel. I was trying to think of another solution, the only thing that has come to mind so far is a convoy system (which they may have already). Ironically, the ancient, simple, and despised convoy system was eventually the most effective solution the British found to the U-Boat blockade in WW2, after initially rejecting it.
Before statehood, Israelis did rely on convoys. Some were attacked like the Hadassah medical convoy. In the truly dangerous areas, armored buses and vehicles in convoy-like groups are a norm.
Watching the disintegration of Jews in America reminds me of the movie Invasion of the Body Snatchers.
Jewish identity should be intense. I believe it consists of five essential ingredients all of which can only exist by existing together: Torah (in the Hebrew), God, Land, Nation and the Individual. The purpose of these five ingredients is to live a purposeful, moral and happy life.
That’s why living in the diaspora erodes the essence of Jewish identity.
You start to believe in Torah and God in theory, not in practice; and you scrap the Divine ethic for a porous, secular free-for-all. You’ve been displaced and live in a host country not your own and your worst fear is making aliyah. You are detached from your people. And as an individual, which is all you have left, you become a false prophet…….
With passively sanctimonious rabbis like Rabbi Moshe Hauer wringing their hands from their comfortable pulpits like those in in West L.A., over Israeli Jews committing “violence”, it is not surprising that American Jews are out of touch re: their own survival.
Meanwhile the anti-semitic wing of the Democrat party in congress routinely attacks Jews in both Israel and America, with nary a peep from the Republicans.
I guess the good rabbi has forgotten about the attacks against Jews by Palestinian ex-pats in West L.A. several years ago during the BLM/Antifa riots of 2020.
Great comment. Thanks.
Indeed, between the BLM attacks and the Muslim attacks on Jews, nothing seems to elicit nearly as much outrage as the ‘shande’ clause.
They haven’t thought far beyond what happens when the armed security isn’t doing it anymore.
BTW to clarify, I wasn’t suggesting that Rabbi Hauer is a rabbi in LA. I don’t know where he’s based. This was a ref to two different people. I should have been clearer.
Thanks for your response Daniel
To be clear I didn’t say Rabbi Hauer was from L.A. either. I said “like those in L.A.”
I should have been clearer as well.
The only ‘shande’ is Rabbis and Jewish intellectuals who seem to have problem with Jews defending themselves. The current wave of anti-semitism began with the Israeli victory in the Six Day War
That said….great article.
Superb article which elicits, at least in me, justified outrage and contempt for those Jews (and others like them) who point accusatory fingers at Israelis who resort to attempts at self-defense, surrounded as.they are by an implacably hostile enemy who are hellbent on driving all of them – men, women, and children – into the sea. The primary basis for this hatred can be found in the foundational texts of Islam – Qur’an, hadith, and Sira. The chattering liberal fools who hold Israelis to an impossibly high standard, holding court and passing judgment from faraway America are, overwhelmingly, wholly unaware of any.of this; nor do they have any inkling as to how profound an influence Islam has on these Muslim hordes.
American Jews are comfortable and liberal, and they’re often liberal to the degree that they’re comfortable. They’d rather cling to their upper middle class comforts whle clutching their pearls as those who actually live lives of risk for a higher cause than being able to vacation four times a year while enjoying their McMansion the rest of it.
Add to that the undeniable fact that they have absolutely no idea why Israelis live in Israel. They never did understand. And they never will. I suspect that many Israelis, like me, really can’t be bothered trying to explain Israel anymore. They are simply not wired to absorb our reality. I tried, with family members. They don’t get it.
It would be ever so “tragic’” if an IED detonated during a raucous Palestinian murder celebration replete with dancing, cheering, singing and candy giving.
Lefty Jew
Bad for America
Bad for Israel
Bad for the World
I am Jewish, btw
Liberal Jews are always outraged at the The Charedim for their expression of devotion to Torah and their Jewish Identity. They defy the niceties of upper class professional life in America.
The Golden Rule,like Nature, is morally neutral.Really,the riot,or pogrom,in Hawara,was reprehensible,and should be condemned by Jew and non-Jew, alike. Of course,we don’t expect dyed-in-the-wool Zionists or the likes of ISIS,or other Fundamentalist Islamists/Militants.eg Muslim Brotherhood,to condemn such terror activities against their “victimizers”,respectively.
Now,the Golden Rule may help prevent Sins of hatred,etc,and there are definitions of Crimes Against Humanity,and War Crimes that all parties can understand,if not acknowledge,and obey.There is a role for our Churches,and clerics,as well as the UN,and NGOs,in calling out such sins,crimes,and injustices.There is even a role for EPM,here.
We are obligated to acknowledge the role played by State actors,here,and that would include Apartheid Israel and fundamentalist ruled Gaza and to acknowledge their crimes and sins of Occupation,Colonialism,and Terrorism,respectively. Just sayin’..
Your. comment displays abysmal ignorance – particularly of the precepts of Islam, and the demographic, legal, historical, and political situation on the ground in Israel and the disputed territories. There is no Golden Rule in Islam, for example; non-Muslims are held in contempt and are adjudged enemies to be subjugated or even killed, regardless of their nonbelligerence. Hamas is no more fundamentalist than the PA; both groups view a state governed by Jews on lands once overrun and held for centuries under Muslim rule as an offense to Allah, no matter how tiny such a state may be. Israel is not an “Occupier” – at least 95 per cent of Arab Muslims not actually Israeli citizens living in the disputed territories are governed by the Palestinian Authority, not Israel. And how is Israel apartheid? Within Israel itself, both Jews and Arabs are subject to the same laws. Arabs are in the Israeli government. (See one of Hugh Fitzgerald’s many articles, published here, for more.) Outside of Israel proper, security measures have had to be implemented to protect Israelis from attacks from hostile Muslims living under the jurisdiction of the Abbas regime. Did you actually even read the article about which you’ve posted a comment?
As one would say in Hebrew, “Tochal chara”.
RIP May your memory be for blessing for the ones you left behind.
Daniel, another brilliant and well-written essay. Do you believe Rabbi Meir Kahana, BDE, was right?
Am Yisrael Chai, despite 4,000 years of brutal anti-Semitism and Democrats.
hopefully the rabbi quoted wont be saying the same thing when they start building ovens .