Rhetorical Violence and Religious Extremism:A Deadly Combination

The murder of Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin was, it now seems clear, the result of carefully planned efforts by Israel’s far-right religious extremists to bring an end to the Middle East peace process.

The leader and several members of the shadowy Eyal organization have been arrested. The group hid enough arms in the attic of the confessed assassin’s house "to make any terror group proud," officials said. Police Minster Moshe Shahal declared that, "We believe there was a conspiracy between a group of persons who had the infrastructure and prepared their aims quite carefully."

Mr. Shahal reported, in addition, that the assassin was the leader of a band of young religious nationalists who was influenced by militant rabbis who effectively issued a death warrant for Mr. Rabin by invoking the "pursuer’s decree" of Jewish religious law. The law holds that a Jew is morally obligated to kill someone who poses a mortal danger to him.

The Israeli police believe that Mr. Amir and his colleagues acted on the basis of a religious decree declaring Mr. Rabin a mortal enemy of the Jewish people who must be killed.

"These are true believers," said Ehud Sprinzak, a professor at Hebrew University and a leading Israeli expert on the radical right. "They believe it was God, not so much the Israeli Army, but the hand of God that gave them back these lands in 1967. It was God sending a message that he was ready to redeem them. They have built a world of Torah, with Yeshivas, school, a religious lifestyle. Now this is committing a huge religious sin, a sin against God. . . . This will be a very, very dramatic crisis. This could involve several important rabbis, very revered authorities."

Must Be Killed

Professor Sprinzak recalled that this fall, after speaking on the radio, he got a call from a student at the Tomb of Joseph yeshiva in Nablus who said "the situation is worse than you thought." Rabbis at his yeshiva were saying the Prime Minister must be killed, the student said.

Mr. Amir’s motives, Police Minister Shahal said, "drew on Halachic rulings made by rabbis who decreed that the ‘pursuer’s decree’ has effect on Rabin." Halachic rulings are oral interpretations of religious law. And Rabbi Yoel Ben Nun, a founder of the settlers movement, charged that other rabbis had sanctioned the killings and threatened to expose the rabbis involved unless they resign their religious posts. He warned that "there are people still calling certain people pursuers, invoking the law of pursuer about Shimon Peres," the Acting Prime Minister.

Professor SSprinzak also suggested another religious concept, that of a "moiser," meaning a Jew who surrenders other Jews to the Gentiles. The Halachic rule there, he said "is that the person who commits this crime should be killed."

The larger responsibility for Mr. Rabin’s assassination, however, may be shared by an increasingly visible set of extremist groups in Israel, and their like-minded friends and allies in the United States. This violent act shows us exactly where the combination of religious extremism and rhetorical violence can lead. The killing did not take place in a vacuum.

In the days before the assassination, opponents of the peace process portrayed Prime Minister Rabin as a "traitor." Posters were displayed at rallies showing him dressed as a Nazi SS trooper. In July, fifteen fundamentalist rabbis called on Israeli soldiers to refuse to obey orders connected with the evacuation of West Bank military installations as part of Stage 2 of the peace process.

Calls for Death

In a report published one week before Rabin’s murder, The Jerusalem Report printed a story about calls for Rabin’s death by some on the religious right: "Yitzhak Rabin does not have long to live. The angels have their orders. Suffering and death await the prime minister, or so say the kabbalists who have cursed him with the pulsa denura — Aramaic for ‘lashes of fire’ — for his ‘heretical’ policies. ‘He’s inciting against Judaism,’ says the Jerusalem rabbi who . . . read out the most terrifying of curses in the tradition of Jewish mysticism — opposite Rabin’s residence on the eve of Yom Kippur: ‘And on him, Yitzhak, son of Rosa, known as Rabin,’ the Aramaic text states, ‘we have permission . . . to demand from the angels of destruction that they take a sword to this wicked man . . . to kill him . . . for handing over the Land of Israel to our enemies, the sons of Ishmael.’"

Acts of violence by religious zealots in Israel have been increasing. In September, Jewish settlers stormed a Palestinian girls school in Hebron, beat its headmistress and injured at least four pupils who took part in a street protest. A municipal spokesman said, "The school is about 20 yards from a Jewish settlement. Some settlers attacked the school and tried to get rid of the Palestinian flag on it. They attacked the headmistress, and even the little girls there, with bottles and pipes." In another incident in September, five armed men in Israeli army uniforms, some of them masked, terrorized Halhoul, an Arab village on the West Bank, forcing their way into private houses and interrogating the Palestinians they met. They shot one young man to death as his father watched, bound at the hands and helpless to intercede. Responsibility for the killing was claimed by Eyal, a spinoff of the late Meir Kahane’s Kach movement — the same group which is implicated in the Rabin assassination.

Among the most traumatic acts of violence was the February 1994 massacre of 29 Palestinians at the Tomb of the Patriarchs in Hebron. Baruch Goldstein, a physician and ultra-right Israeli settler, gunned them down as they worshipped.

Goldstein, a militant Zionist from New York, had been a member of the Jewish Defense League, founded by the late Meir Kahane, who urged his followers to emigrate to Israel and called for the removal of all Arabs from the West Bank. After the violent mass murder at Hebron, Goldstein was viewed as a hero by many of the Israeli settlers. At his funeral, Rabbi Yaacov Perrin declared that "1 million Arabs are not worth a Jewish fingernail." Shmuel Hacohen, a teacher in a Jerusalem college, said: "Baruch Goldstein was the greatest Jew alive, not in one way but in every way . . . There are no innocent Arabs here . . . He was no crazy . . . Killing isn’t nice, but sometimes it is necessary."

Traitor to Israel

Ehud Sprinzak says that, "These are the people who see Rabin as a traitor to the land of Israel, to its people and to God. His perceived crime dates back to the covenant made between Abraham and God to create greater Israel, which will in turn pave the way for the Messiah and the redemption of mankind." This view is shared by some Christian fundamentalists who have embraced the settler movement, leading to such unlikely alliances as that between Menachem Begin and the Rev. Jerry Falwell.

In the eyes of these religious fundamentalists, Rabin committed the ultimate act of betrayal when he signed the latest agreement in the peace process ceding control of much of the West Bank of the Jordan River — what the Bible calls the lands of Judea and Samaria — to the Palestinians, and thus also ceding any imminent prospect of creating greater Israel. The ultra-right believes that Israel’s conquest of the West Bank and Jerusalem during the 1967 Middle East War was a sign of God. All of the current movements grow out of this belief. The assassin, Yigal Amir, told authorities that God had ordered him to kill Rabin.

The intolerance of Israel’s religious fundamentalists has been growing for many years. Both the Israeli Government and leaders in the American Jewish community have repeatedly downplayed the dangers of such movements. Recalling a visit to Israel in 1980, Washington Post columnist Richard Cohen writes: "Back in 1980, Rabbi Moshe Levenger, a major force in the Israel settlements movement, led me through the market at Hebron, wading through Arabs with a contempt and disdain that I found both repulsive and downright scary. Levenger acted as if God has ensured his safety; I, however, had not gotten such a message. Levenger is an important figure for a number of reasons. In the first place, the settlement he and his wife, Miriam, established in Hebron was clearly illegal. The government moved to protect it anyway, and ultimately, provided it with utilities. Second, Levenger was later convicted of killing an unarmed Arab in a burst of anger — and served no more than 10 weeks in jail. In other words, Levenger has been the personification of the Israel Government’s refusal to come to grips with its extremists. Some politicians admire them; others merely want their votes."

Wall Street Journal columnist Albert R. Hunt wrote of a visit he made to Israel eight years ago. At that time, he interviewed a rabbi who headed a small right-wing religious party that was part of the Likud Party’s government coalition. Hunt’s colleague, Karen Elliot House, asked the rabbi what was the central issue facing Israel. His reply: "Teddy Kollek and movies on the Sabbath." Hunt writes that, "I started to chuckle but stopped when he launched into an incredibly vitriolic tirade against secular Israeli political leaders . . . When I heard that Prime Minister Rabin had been assassinated, I thought of that rabbi and his hateful venom."

Religious Fanaticism

In Israel, there are many who believe that such religious fanaticism has been tolerated for much too long. Ze’ev Chafets, a columnist for The Jerusalem Report, says that what is needed is "cutting off public funds to schools and youth organizations that indoctrinate children in anti-democratic ideals; strictly enforcing the laws against inciting violence, court-martialing soldiers who refuse to carry out orders to remove settlers . . . cracking down on the illegal Jewish terrorist organizations . . . It also means that voters must let politicians of both parties know that they will be severely punished at the polls if they make common cause, overtly or covertly, with the fanatics. Israel must take a long step along the road from tribal solidarity to modern nationhood."

Amos Oz, Israel’s most celebrated writer, refers to his country’s extremists as "Hezbollah in a skullcap." He says that Rabin’s death has made him realize that "the real battle in the Middle East is no longer between Arabs and Jews but between fanatics of both faiths and the rest of the people in the Middle East who want to find some reasonable compromise." He states that, "Compromise is synonymous with life itself" and that "the opposite of compromise is not integrity but suicide and death."

Some of the most violent and extreme Jewish figures in Israel emigrated from the U.S. Among these, of course, are Meir Kahane and Baruch Goldstein. And in the U.S. there are many who welcomed Mr. Rabin’s murder. In Brooklyn, more than a hundred followers of Meir Kahane gathered together. "I consider his assassination to be divine justice and divine retribution," said Nekamah Cohen, who described himself as a "religious-militant Zionist." Cohen declared: "There is a law that if a fellow Jew hands over or is about to hand over a Jewish community to a non-Jewish enemy or a non-Jewish government, such as under the Roman Empire, then that Jew is considered a traitor who should be handed over unto death."

Or consider Rabbi Avraham Hecht, chief rabbi of Congregation Sh’are Zion in Brooklyn and president of the Rabbinical Alliance of America, a national organization of 540 Orthodox rabbis. Rabbi Hecht, on June 19, said that, "According to Jewish law, any one person — you can apply it to who you want — any one person who willfully, consciously, intentionally hands over human bodies or human property or the human wealth of the Jewish people to an alien people is guilty of the sin for which the penalty is death. And, according to Maimonides — you can quote me — it says very clearly, if a man kills him, he has done a good deed."

Death Threats

Since the peace process began, Israeli consul general in New York Colette Avital has received death threats from Jewish extremists. Israel’s ambassador to the U.S. was pelted with eggs at a New York synagogue. Cabinet member Shulamit Aloni was punched in the stomach while standing at the lectern at the New York Salute to Israel Parade — by one of the parade’s organizers. Two unexploded bombs were found outside the offices of Americans for Peace Now, a group which supports the peace process, in Manhattan. Mike Guzofsky, head of Kahane Chai’s U.S. branch, has boasted that "directly or indirectly, we receive millions of dollars every year."

When she was asked by Charles Gibson of ABC’s "Good Morning America" whether she blamed the opposition party, the Likud, for fostering what she described as a "political climate: in Israel which contributed to her husband’s murder, Leah Rabin responded: "Yes. Surely I blame, surely I blame them. If you ever heard their speeches at the Knesset, you would understand what I mean. They were very, very violent in their expressions. ‘We are selling the country down the drain.’ ‘There’ll be no Israel after this peace agreement.’"

Asked, "Does this country come together now for peace, or do you think the divisions worsen?" Mrs. Rabin replied: "Not together, not together, but the balance between the supporters of peace and those who oppose it will change . . . The silent majority was too silent, and it’s going to be very loud now. So if I have any consolation, any resource of strength and thinking that this wasn’t just another meaningless tragedy for us . . . it wasn’t meaningless in that today the silent majority will stop being silent. People express their regrets: ‘Where were we? Why did we leave you alone in the battle for peace? Why didn’t we get out to the streets to support you?’ And this is going to change now, I believe."

For some time, Prime Minister Rabin had been concerned by the vocal enemies of the peace process in the American Jewish community, as well as with the hesitation of the majority of American Jews who supported the peace process to speak out.

In an interview with the Israeli newspaper Davar in July, Rabin criticized a "very limited group of rabbis" from the U.S. He declared: "I hear strange appeals by a small group of rabbis from the U.S. for whom perhaps the name ayatollahs is more fitting than rabbis." Just hours after he signed the peace agreement with Yasir Arafat in September, 1995, Rabin met with leaders of American Jewish groups and sternly warned that lobbying against the peace process could cause a serious rift in Israel’s relations with the Jewish community in the U.S. Discussing those American Jews who had organized to oppose the peace agreement, Rabin declared that, "Never before have we witnessed an attempt by U.S. Jews to pressure Congress against the policies of a legitimate, democratically elected government."

Discredit Peace Process

Those in America who seek to discredit the peace process, states Abba Eban, former Israeli Foreign Minister, are poor friends. He states: "Some Jewish groups have lent hospitable ears to an insolent Israeli lobby that seeks to prevent the conclusion of a peace treaty between Syria and Israel . . . The consequences of the positions and advocacies (of these groups) . . . would be to derail the most far-reaching and internationally supported peace process ever conceived by Israeli and Arab representatives. The Middle East would be restored to the era of rigorous occupations, repressions and revolts . . . These are anti-Israeli positions in terms of consequences."

The fact that so many on Israel’s radical and violence-prone fringe have origins in the U.S. — and receive continued support from the U.S. — should be of concern to all Americans. After Baruch Goldstein’s murder of 29 Palestinians, Prime Minister Rabin referred to the American-born Goldstein and many of his allies as "a foreign implant." While Americans account for only a tiny fraction of Israel’s five million people, barely one per cent, The New York Times reports that, "On the right, American accents are unmistakable, not only at the Kahane-inspired fringes but also among more moderate settlers in the territories. According to some estimates, 15 percent of the roughly 130,000 settlers are originally from the U.S., many of them people who went straight from New York to the West Bank and who have at best a tenuous connection to mainstream Israel."

Writing in The Los Angeles Times, Yossi Melman, an Israeli journalist, notes that, "Dr. Baruch Goldstein was no exception . . . He was preceded by Elliot Goodman and Craig Latner. In April, 1982, Goodman of Tenafly, N.J. stormed into the El Omar mosque on Temple Mount in Jerusalem and fired into a Palestinian crowd. Miraculously, ‘only’ two worshipers were killed and 11 wounded. Two years later, Latner and three colleagues, all from Jewish neighborhoods in New York, opened fire on a bus carrying Palestinian workers near the same city. Five were injured . . . Successive Israeli governments, including the present one, regarded these incidents as isolated, refusing to admit they were products of a larger psychological environment — the Jewish settlers’ movement that had nourished Palestinian hatred. The Israeli government is now paying the price of this accommodating attitude toward Jewish extremism."

Many of those involved in the most brutal acts of violence in Israel have received an Orthodox religious education and have acted out of religious motives. Rabbi Shlomo Sternberg of Cambridge, Mass. noted that, " . . . these atrocities . . . were not committed by nonreligious national extremists . . . Baruch Goldstein received his education from within the ‘modern orthodox’ community and so did many of his associates . . . From all accounts, Dr. Goldstein was a paragon of self-sacrifice and devotion to others . . . It is hard to believe that such a person could become a mass murderer . . . It must take years of training. Dr. Goldstein was a model student at the Yeshiva of Flatbush, Yeshiva University and Einstein Medical School. I have yet to hear public statements of contrition from the leaders of these educational institutions."

Orthodox Literalism

The educational institutions of the modern Orthodox community in Israel and the U.S., states Rabbi Sternberg, "have drifted over the years into a form of literalism, fundamentalism and obscurantism in their religious program. Combined with an excellent secular education, this tends to lead to a rebellion against religion at one end and absolute mental compartmentalization at the other, with attendant zealotry and extremism . . . One of the great lessons of the Bible is that morality transcends religion and that God himself can be called to task, as when our father Abraham remonstrated with God in the story of Sodom and Gomorrah. It is precisely this lesson that cannot be grasped by the fundamentalists and literalists."

Ze’ev Chafets of The Jerusalem Report has urged American Jewish leaders to conduct "a thorough examination of what is being taught and what messages are being implicitly conveyed at American Jewish schools that receive community money; making certain that Kahanist ‘charities’ do not get a U.S. tax exemption; refusing donations from wealthy Kahane supporters, and fully cooperating with Israeli authorities in screening out potentially dangerous immigrants . . . Baruch Goldstein was an Israeli murderer, but he was also an American Jewish tragedy."

Gershom Gorenberg, writing in The Jerusalem Report, sharply criticized Israeli rabbis "and other racists who claimed the mantle of Torah." He reports that, "Then-chief rabbi Mordechai Eliahy was among the prominent rabbis who eulogized Kahane in 1990 . . . In Israel and abroad, many Orthodox rabbis have treated murderous hatred toward non-Jews as a minor doctrinal difference . . . rather than as heresy. That acceptance allowed such hatred to grow like a malignancy . . .The choice for religious Jews today is between the cult of conquest and Judaism."

In recent days, militant Jewish groups in the U.S. have launched an all out attack against Prime Minister Rabin and his government for its movement toward peace. A group calling itself "Pro Israel" placed a full page advertisement in The New York Times (Feb. 9, 1994) declaring, among other things, that "Rabin and his associates." as the ad referred to the Israeli government, are "embarked on a campaign of mass deception." This "deception" is, the ad states, "aimed at selling a plan to Israelis, world Jewry and others that could mean disaster for the Jewish state." The Rabin government, because of its peace efforts, was described as "a government of national suicide."

Broader Spectrum

Those signing this ad were hardly obscure religious extremists, but represented a far broader spectrum of opinion. Among them was Sam Schachter, President of American Friends of Likud, Rabbi Aaron Soloveichik, Dean of Yeshivas Brisk of Chicago, and Professor Jerold S. Auerbach of Wellesley College.

Discussing the rhetoric of this ad, Leonard Fein, writing in The Forward, declared: "It is one thing to think that Prime Minister Rabin is inadequately sensitive to Israel’s security requirements; it is quite another to assert that ‘Rabin and his associates’ are ‘embarked on a campaign of mass deception.’ That is what the ad claims and this is more than offensive language. It lays the groundwork for a post-peace revanchism that can be as destabilizing to the region as Islamic Fundamentalism. A campaign of mass deception: Then we are being stabbed in the back, and anything goes. That is not merely a provocation; it is an incitement."

Establishment Jewish leaders and organizations have failed to make clear their opposition to bigotry and racism on the fringes of the Jewish community. After Meir Kahane’s death, a number of Jewish establishment figures saw fit to attend his funeral. Among them was Seymour Reich, then president of the Conference of Presidents of Major Jewish Organizations and Abraham Foxman of the Anti-Defamation League of B’nai B’rith. The rabbi who conducted the service, Moses Tendler, a prominent figure in the Orthodox world, referred to Kahane as "a tsaddik" or saint, and "a giant." Rabbi Tendler declared that God "spoke to Rabbi Kahane clearly."

In his biography of Kahane, False Prophet, Robert Friedman showed that Kahane had called for "liquidation" not only of Arabs, but also of Jews with whom he disagreed. He pointed out that Kahane raised as much as $500,000 a year from American supporters. In his book, he reports that, "Parlor meetings arranged by Emanuel Rackman, the rabbi of the prestigious Fifth Avenue Synagogue and now dean of Bar Ilan University in Israel, earned Kahane up to $50,000 for an afternoon talk." Bar Ilan University is a center of extremist thinking and one of its students, Yigal Amir, acted on these teachings when he murdered Yitzhak Rabin. Robert Friedman lamented that Meir Kahane was not as "marginal" a figure as many Jewish leaders said he was.

Hooligan and Racist

Rabbi Jacob Neusner, professor of religious studies at the University of South Florida, declared that, "Rabbi Meir Kahane was not only a political hooligan but a racist. To his theology only one word applies: heresy. Rabbi Kahane was not a good Jew; he was a bad Jew . . . The Torah teaches that all of us are ‘in our — God’s — image, after our likeness.’ Rabbi Kahane preaches heresy, since in the name of ‘Judaism’ he would have denied elementary rights of domicile and property to the Arab population of Palestine, not to mention life itself. The Torah . . . teaches that God prefers the victim to the murderer, the persecuted to the persecutor. So Rabbi Kahane systematically misrepresented the Torah."

When Baruch Goldstein murdered 29 Palestinians, it was said that he was a "lone gunman" and Jewish leaders both in Israel and the U.S. tended to downplay the danger of extremism in their midst. Now, in the case of Yigal Amir and those who were involved in the murder of Yitzhak Rabin, such a case can no longer be made. In a report about Amir, The Washington Post (Nov. 12, 1995) headlined its story, "Israel’s Mainstream Brings Forth A Killer." Authors Barton Gellman and Laura Blumenfeld, writing from Ramat Gan, note that, "The 25-year-old assassin . . . is neither a freak nor a misfit. He is something more disturbing to many Israelis: a young man of discipline and multiple gifts who thrived in the nation’s mainstream and believed he was serving it by murdering its elected leader. His decision to kill reflected — perhaps as much as it distorted — the values he acquired in a journey through Israel’s diverse establishments and some of their storied elites."

Amir attended Krem D’Yavne yeshiva, a religious Zionist center that combines Torah study and army service. He did infantry training, then army service in Lebanon and Gaza with the Golani Brigade. In an interview with the Israeli newspaper Maariv, Boaz Nagar, a fellow Orthodox soldier, recalled that, "Yigal never compromised. He always arrived first at synagogue and never fell asleep during services. When it came to religious matters, he was a pain, stubborn as an ass. He wouldn’t let us breathe." He treated Palestinians in a brutal manner, recalls Nagar: "In Golani, we all hit Arabs. I was guilty too. But Yigal was something extraordinary. On a routine search in Jabalya (a Gaza refugee camp), Yigal sprang into action with a capital A. He hit them in the mouth, he shoved them around and destroyed their property. He enjoyed taunting them, just for the fun of it." After a year and a half in the Golani Brigade, Amir returned to the yeshiva.

Extremism Fueled by Teachers

At the yeshiva, his extremism seems to have been fueled by his teachers. Rabbi Mordechai Greenberg, the head of the yeshiva, explained that, "For 2,000 years, we waited to return to Israel. And the minute it seems to come true, the dream breaks. We thought we were on the way to redemption, but it seemed we were going the other way. Yigal was thinking what we all were thinking. But he took it a step further."

Amir and other extremists listened regularly to Adir Zik, a popular broadcaster on the settlers’ pirate radio Channel 7. On one broadcast, Zik read from the definition of traitor in the dictionary: it is someone, he said, "who acts against his friends, against his people, against his country, or aids the enemy. So what do you guys have to say about Rabin?" Turning to Israel’s criminal law, Zik read from the penalty for treason. "His sentence," Zik said, "and listen closely ladies and gentlemen, is death or life imprisonment."

Finally, some Jewish leaders in the U.S. may be awakening to the dangers of religious zealotry. They are also coming to understand the part they have played by their long silence as the forces of intolerance grew ever stronger. "We bear some responsibility for letting a handful of zealots spread that kind of hatred," said Martin Begun, president of New York’s Jewish Community Relations Council. "It’s time to delegitimize those on the extreme right who have been preaching hatred and violence."

Colette Avital, Israel’s Consul General in New York, said that the murder of Yitzhak Rabin should serve as a "wake up call to American Jews, especially those in New York." She states that, "Some of the extreme elements come from New York. Many people tend to think those are nuts and crazies. They say, ‘Let’s not pay too much attention to them; it increases their importance.’ But I feel that unless you recognize and deal with a problem, it can grow to larger proportions."

The link between militants in Israel and in New York cannot be underestimated, the Consul General suggested. She is troubled that most American Jews have tended to ignore the fanatic fringe. "There are Jewish newspapers that week after week had a campaign to portray the Israeli Government as Nazis. For two years, almost no American objected to it. I would tell people, ‘Something has to be done — this is indoctrination.’ But they would say, ‘Oh, almost nobody reads it.’" The paper had an impact, she added.

Delegitimize Extremists

Mrs. Avital called upon Orthodox rabbis to take action: "They have a duty to take to task the extreme elements of the movement. They are the only ones who have the stature. It is important to delegitimize these people, to totally isolate them, to say this does not represent Judaism."

As the peace process proceeded, and opposition became more extreme, the leaders of mainstream American Jewish organizations were largely silent. Thomas Friedman, author of the book From Beirut To Jerusalem, who served as The New York Times correspondent in both Lebanon and Israel, recently wrote that, "The reason that Mr. Rabin had nothing but contempt for most members of the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations, the reason he lambasted them on his last visit here, was because he knew that he was in a war for peace and these so-called American Jewish leaders had left him alone on the battlefield, because they did not have the courage to take a stand . . . For everything there is a season, and this is the season of choices. Yitzhak Rabin made his. How about you?"

The similarities between Jewish extremists who oppose the peace process and Islamic fundamentalists who share their goals are striking. Just as Muslin militants murdered Egyptian President Anwar Sadat for making peace, and just as Islamic terrorists are now trying through violence to end the peace process, so Jewish extremists are doing exactly the same thing. They are mirror images of one another. From prison, Sheik Omar Abdel Rahman, who was convicted for leading a fundamentalist Islamic plot to destroy landmarks in New York, hailed the murder of Yitzhak Rabin. He said: "The Muslims were not able to get him killed for what he did, due to strict security. Well, Allah had sent a Jew to do that."

Rabbi Arthur Hertzberg, a humanities professor at New York University, says that rabbis who called for Rabin’s murder are no better than bloody-minded mullahs. "What you are dealing with is the Jewish version of Khomenism," he says. "The overwhelming majority of American Jews support the peace process. But these maniacs are crazy. They are inquisitors. In the 14th and 15th centuries, the Spanish Inquisition burned the bodies of Jews and heretics in order to save their souls, and they did it in good conscience. This kind of fanaticism can permit the greatest swinishness in good conscience."

Problems Not Unique

Sadly, Israel’s problems are not unique. Religious extremists have been brutally slaughtering their opponents "in the name of God" from the beginning of time. In the Inquisition, the Crusades and a host of religious wars we have seen this in the Christian West. In India and Pakistan, Hindus and Moslems engage in such mutual hatred. In Ireland — in the Balkans — the dangerous combination of religion and nationalism has caused untold misery. The essence of the Zionist philosophy — which confuses a universal religion dedicated to God with nationalism committed to particular geographic boundaries — sows the seeds for the zealotry we now see in Israel and in some sectors of the American Jewish community.

The latest development should be a cautionary tale for Americans, and particularly for American Jews. Jewish organizations fight bigotry in all sectors of society — but within their own ranks. Rhetorical violence and religious extremism are a deadly combination — as the murder of Yitzhak Rabin shows us so clearly.