Does Baruch Goldstein’s rabbi want violent settlers shot?

Larry Derfner By Larry Derfner December 14, 2011 | Edit

Wel-l-l…

Amazing headline in The Jerusalem Post today: “West Bank rabbis: Allow live fire at stone-throwers.” Mind you, the whole country is outraged today at the spectacle of that mob of settler youths attacking that army base in the West Bank, throwing stones, hitting a commander in the head, but now West Bank rabbis, of all people, are calling to shoot them? Sure looks that way:

“Anyone who faces a danger, including being pelted by stones or other dangers, must be allowed to open fire against attackers without having to worry about being tried or having their weapon confiscated,” read a letter from the rabbis to Prime Minister Netanyahu and Defense Minister Barak.

Who were these West Bank rabbis – moles from the Reform movement? Infiltrators from Rabbis for Human Rights? No, it was Dov Lior, for Chrissakes, who called Baruch Goldstein “holier than all the marytrs of the Holocaust”; and Nahum Rabinovitch, who said if that if soldiers come to evacuate settlements, the right response is to “scatter the area with roadside bombs like the Arabs do”; and Elyakim Levanon, who said rabbis will tell their Orthodox soldiers to walk out of army ceremonies where women are singing “even if they are faced with a firing squad outside and shot to death.”

Wow. These guys really went through some changes, didn’t they, if they now want Israeli soldiers to go ahead and shoot settlers who throw stones at them. Wonder what got into these holy men.

Oh, oh, excuse me; I just read over the Post story, and it seems they don’t want soldiers to shoot stone-throwing settlers, just stone-throwing Palestinians. Okay, the earth is back on its axis. The West Bank rabbis don’t want any harm whatsoever to come to their worshipful little boys; one day, they’re going to be the Israeli army commanders  themselves.

Larry Derfner

I was a columnist and feature writer for The Jerusalem Post, as well as the correspondent in Israel for the U.S. News and World Report, for many years. I wrote feature articles for the Sunday Times of London during the second intifada, and have been writing for American Jewish publications since 1990. Politically, I would describe myself as an ultra-liberal Zionist; as journalist Bradley Burston put it, I’m “probably as far left as a centrist can be.” I was born in New York, grew up in Los Angeles and moved to Israel in 1985.

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