A Violent Wake-Up Call for Jews NASSAU AND SUFFOLK Edition

• Published in: Newsday
• Main Author: By Henry Siegman. Henry Siegman is a fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations and former executive director of the American Jewish Congress
• Format: Newspaper Article
• Language: English
• Published: Long Island, N.Y Newsday LLC 21.11.1995
• Edition: Combined editions

This point is neither semantic nor theoretical but has serious consequences. The intense, religiously defined nationalism that fueled the fury of Yigal Amir, the confessed assassin, is normative in today's orthodox community. While the view that orthodox Jews were obliged to prevent [Yitzhak] Rabin from ceding any part of the Land of Israel to the Palestinians by killing him circulated among a fringe element only, Amir's conviction that Rabin was a traitor to his faith was hardly aberrational in the orthodox community. The notion that orthodoxy itself is implicated will be rejected, of course, by the orthodox community. But that they know on some level that this linkage is true is evident from the fact that even those most outspoken in condemning the assassination do not question the orthodox bona fides of either the rabbis offering its justification or the young men who committed it. The orthodox community accuses them of misapplying Jewish law, but not of no longer being orthodox Jews. If the same rabbis ruled Jewish law permits driving on the Sabbath or eating nonkosher food, they would be drummed out of the orthodox community. Most orthodox Jews embrace Jewish nationalism and the Jewish state as the essential foundation of their religious life. It is not only the holiness of the land but Jewish political sovereignty that is indispensable, in their view, to full religious observance and a complete Jewish identity. The Jewish claim to Israel is seen as biblical and absolute, and not subject to the normal give and take of the secular political process. To yield sovereignty over any part is to betray this religious patrimony and to deny Jewish destiny.