Rabbis for whose human rights?

the latest I read the pregnant woman was in her 9th month
the baby was by all measures a fully capable to live person

when some time ago corporate wisdom had it that it would be a great idea to have departments combat eachother on who could grab this or that chunk of administraton, whenever it hit us I’d always immediately put aside all squabbles I might have had at the time within “my” department, so did all other colleagues who had a sense of reality and felt a moral obligation to protect the work places of the endangered ones amongst us i.e. we aimed at competing as one united group with one united goal.

Were there members of the department who’d flirt with the other side? who’d thought this presented a great occasion to highlight their grievances?
of course there were
were they the people I’d ever relied on for anything or trusted with anything once quiet had returned?
Of course not.

The footage which was shown on the news here tonight of those poor children calling for their mother at her funeral today was just heart breaking.

I wonder if the writer of the RHR press release watched it.

Itsik
It is similar to the way the Nazis were

lets hope they never reach the level of orderly professional efficiency my ancestors did.

Reb
wouldn’t it have been courteous to call this blog by its proper name?

Shavua Tov. You simply don’t get it. You got a hold of an email whose primary intent was to recruit volunteers which we needed that night to do the work that RHR had to do that night in the area that we have the ability to influence – to protect Palestinians who were being attacked. I wrote those lines after revenge activities had actually started, and in a concrete way we had to get the volunteers we needed. It wasn’t theoretical. While, of course we believe that murder is worse than uprooting trees or “only” harassing an innocent family, my job as the director of an Israeli rabbinic human rights organization whose mandate is the behavior of my fellow Jews and Israelis, is to make sure that we live up to our Jewish values. I am not a polemicist whose job is to determine through what I write who is worse and who is better. If we thought that the Israeli government and/or security forces would be violating the right to life of settlers by not doing everything possible to protect them and to find the murderers, then there might be a need from a human rights point of view to demand further action by our government. The fact is, however, we all know that that will be done. If it isn’t, there will be plenty of Jews and plenty of rabbis who will call the government on that. Sadly however, it is not nearly as obvious that our government and our army will do what is necessary to protect Palestinians. I have had senior officers say to me “We are the ISRAELI Defence Forces. Therefore, I will protect Palestinians if I am forced to, but I don’t really see that as my job.” Finally, I should add that I have to young children at home and bombs have gone off not far from my home. As somebody whose family is as much or more on the line as any Israeli, I not only share your moral outrage at murder, but terror is a very personal threat.

Every human being, and certainly every Jew, must strive to be God’s partner in making this world as close to the world God ordained for us as is humanly possible. There is no moral equivocation whatsoever. We had to issue an email in order to do our job. Would it have been better not to mention the murders at all, so as not to be suspected of making a comparison? Or, are you saying that we shouldn’t have done our job and let Palestinians go unprotected because they were being attacked as a reaction to murders which were morally worse? By the way, this world would be a much better place if everybody who seems to be concerned only about Jews would do 1/100th of what RHR does for our fellow Jews. I never encountered this blog before and don’t want to prejudge. However, I ask the question what those who are so indignant over the email have done for poor and unemplyed Israelis in Hadera, where we also work. The problem of course, is that it is much harder to score propaganda points against Arabs by coming to the defense of poor and unemployed Israelis, and one might even have to face the fact that it is the Israeli government that has caused some of their problems. Perhaps I am unfairly judging, but perhaps that just makes the issue less attractive to some of the writers/readers of this blog.

“We had to issue an email in order to do our job. ”

It sounds as if you consider yourselves to be a kind of do-gooding bodyguard force – protecting people. If the intention to harm is serious you are putting volunteers into extreme physical danger. A telephone call to the border police or the relevant authorities informing them of threats to a particular family might be less dramatic but it would certainly be more effective.

You aren’t rabbis for human rights, you’re useful idiots for the PA and hamas.

Amen.

Will Ascherman have the effect of reducing overall violence, or increasing it?

Rabbi
from far away I keep reading and hearing that the Palestinian Security Forces are by now doing a splendid job (I am not being ironic).

If that is so, how come there is still a need for a civilian body-guard? To draw media attention for whatever purposes. If yes, you should be grateful to CiFWatch for having published you, if you are not you should get yourself another PR-agent. Now your brand and/or your google hits have grown your access to money will increase.

Congratulations – well done ;-(

Dear Rabbis,

I’m afraid your reputation goes before you on this issue. You have a rather inglorious history of co-operating with organisations which do not have the real interests of the Israeli people at heart and making statements which do nothing to further Israel’s long-term security.

Not to mention the fact that you apparently see no ill in accepting funding from an organisation which also funds many bodies intent upon the destruction of Israel as the only sovereign Jewish state.

http://www.ngo-monitor.org/article/rabbis_for_human_rights

Like so many other so-called ‘human rights’ organisations operating in this region it often seems to many of us that your concern for human rights is far from universal and hinges upon your politics.

Maybe in these days of introspection before Yom Kippur it would be worth giving some thought to the fact that the nation of Israel is currently under very serious threat, not only militarily but also through the delegitimisation and dehumanisation to which, sadly, organisations such as your own often contribute.

Maybe some reflection could also be given to the fact that as community leaders for the Jewish people, your first task should be to comfort them in these difficult times.

Yes, we all have a responsibility to preserve Jewish values, but those values will not be of any worth or significance whatsoever if Israel is further undermined both by destructive forces from without and within.

As is said in my profession – better that one’s patient be alive and suffering from infection that sterile and dead.

Israelinurse
the way I got to know NIF at Yaacov’s blog was that their goal is to teach Israelis’ democracy
that made me wonder why their isn’t an NEF to teach Europeans democracy
or an NAF to teach Americans democracy

reading the news I find that both have issues which could profit a lot from some nudging towards improvement

Is there no money donated for that or would the donations be so meagre that the salary to be made by a job with them wouldn’t be worth getting up for in the morning?

As the Rabbis get financed by NIF maybe they’d care to bring up the issue with their sponsor – after all enlarging one’s human rights embrace is always laudable.

Long post:

Rabbis perhaps you are both typical of the naive genre which assumes that what you write or say will automatically be understood in the way in which you mean it. Given that we live in an age of instant communication, perhaps now you will see how wrong you are not to provide any context to what you wrote.

Like Israelinurse, I know of the reputation of your organisation. I have found out much about it and given that this (at least) tactless message came from people who espouses those views, and you gave no other context, this left those of us who read it and disagreed with it very little option but to voice the opinions we did.

That being the case, your saying, “..While, of course we believe that murder is worse than uprooting trees or “only” harassing an innocent family, my job as the director of an Israeli rabbinic human rights organization whose mandate is the behavior of my fellow Jews and Israelis, is to make sure that we live up to our Jewish values…”

Now, I thought that turning the other cheek was a Christian value. And the strength of reaction here must show you that your looking to the requirements of your jobs has shown you to be leaving your realism and humanity aside. I simply don’t care what your jobs require of you!

As for the rest, I am very inclined to agree with peterthehungarian. It’s all very well for you to spout piously as you do, but when the chips are down to whom will you turn for protection, the PA (which still incites Jew-hatred in its newspapers and schools) or the IDF?

I wonder whether either of you have heard of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs? It was formulated by Abraham Harold Maslow – a Jew – (April 1, 1908 – June 8, 1970) who was an American psychologist. He is noted for this conceptualization of a “hierarchy of human needs”, and is considered the founder of humanistic psychology.

The hierarchy is conceptualised diagrammatically as a triangle, apex upwards and can be found at http://liberta.co.za/images/blog/maslows_hierarchy_of_needs.png

You will see that at the base of triangle are the basic human needs and drives, without which no-one can live at all. These are common to all of us.

Only when these have been met, can we focus on meeting those in the next level up, which includes safety etc.

Once those have been met we can look to making relationships which are based on the successful attainment of components of the other two levels, and once the relationship need has been met, we become more self-confident, feel less endangered or beset by worries, and we can turn our energies towards the society in which we live and making that better. I believe that you would both find yourselves at that level for most of the time.

We become what Maslow called self-actualised when we get to the highest level, which includes focusing on moral issues, dealing with our prejudices, etc, as is shown in the diagram only when the components of all the other levels are in place for us, and since life has a nasty habit of throwing up tragedies and crises with which we must deal, we can rarely stay there for long.

I would imagine that most realistic Israelis, including those who live in the West Bank, spend more than a little of their time at Level 2 – because it is a distinctly unsafe place for Jews to live – and Israel is never allowed to forget for one moment that she is surrounded by people who want to destroy her and her people.

However, Israelis are singular in that they can also attain the other levels, particularly contribution to the greater good of society in terms of advances in medical and other research, in spite of being in mortal danger.

My point is that only if the components of safety level are assured and predictable can Israel as a whole afford to concentrate on the human rights of the people who wish to kill them. If you spend most of your time at the levels above that, then I would venture to suggest that you are in denial about the dangers you face and perhaps hoping to wish them away by appeasing the perpetrators.

The Palestinians in the West Bank are not starving, but nor do they feel safe because they are perpetually cranked up by the paranoia of their leaders against the presence of Jews. A common feature of paranoia is projection – the mapping onto others of behaviours and motives one feels oneself. The Palestinians in the West Bank cannot trust Jews and are at the mercy of unscrupulous leaders who mess with their heads, as well as being slaves to the hate-filled dictats of their religion. The immature instinct is to eradicate the source of those feelings and they often behave accordingly.

Their violent behaviour born of paranoid and distorted reasoning about Jews’ intentions (think along the lines of “getting their retaliation in first”) sets up violence since most Jews will defend themselves vigorously. The Palestinians then will resort to their usual orgy of self-pity and people like you believe that they have been wronged rather than have done the wronging and should bear the consequences.

The Palestinians in the West Bank are higher in the Maslow Triangle than their challenged brethren in Gaza, (some of whom may not even have reached the base level) but, because their leaders and religion predispose them to paranoia about Jews’ intentions they can rarely get beyond the second level, and they are discouraged from feeling safe and from trusting their own judgement to reality-test the nature of the alleged threats they might face. Therefore all threats are perceived to be life threatening and they react accordingly.

My point is that I haven’t seen enough from your organisation to trust that you are being realistic in stance you adopt towards them. It needs to be shown to be more nuanced and reality-based on the context in which you are all living.

You have both missed a heaven-sent opportunity to provide the developmentally-needed/corrective “fix” to Palestinian violent acting out by not excusing it (thereby rewarding it, because your appeasing behaviour is taken as weakness and licence to perpetrate more outrages).

And you may well yet reap what you sowed unless you wake up soon.

RHR received the Speaker of the Knesset’s Prize for our contributions to Israeli society. Defendng Palestinian human rights is not at the expense of Israeli human rights. This is not a zero sum game. The Israeli security situation is not worse because we chose to protect Palestinians. If anything, the opposite is true, althugh I will never convince most of you of that. However, suffice it to say that bombs have gone off not far from my house and our rabbis, their children and grandchildren serve in the IDF. I of course recognize that people who think very differently than we do can say the same, but with all do respect I will do what I think best protects my children and my fellow Israelis. Those who asked why we need to protect Palestinians when that is the job of the Israeli security forces should know that on the particular night in question we didn’t send volunteers to where settlers were surrounding a house of innocents because the police and army did their job. In the case of the trees, it was RHR who alerted the security forces. We of course try first and foremost to get the security forces to do their job. In this case, they argued with us that there was nothing, but in the morning the woman who had been afraid to leave her house at night discovered some 17 trees destroyed. In other cases, sadly, the security forces do not do their job. I myself have been personally attacked attacked by settlers because I was standing between them and the Palestinians they were trying to attack, as security forces watched and did nothing. In my work I have on many occassions been proud of the actions of our security forces and in other instances appreciated that they have been caught between a rock and a hard place. However, I have also been personal witness to all to many cases where our security forces, with no extenuating circumstances, acted in ways that neither honored our Torah nor God. And yes, they could have acted differently without in any way endangering the security of Jews. In these cases, we are often successful in going to their commanders and getting the commanders to put things right. In other cases we need to go to court. We can be proud of the fact that Israel is a democracy and that our courts at least in some instances put things right. As an Israeli, Zionist, Jew and a Rabbi, is no pleasure in dealing with the worst aspects of the society that I love and the people that I love. However, when things are happening that you would not want to believe possible in the country you love, whether in the OT or in Hadera, you must decide whether you stick your head in the sand, dissasociate or use the pain that you are feeling to spur you forward to do some Tikun Olam. We in RHR chose the third path.