Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, November 26, 1995 TAG: 9511290021
SECTION: HORIZON PAGE: F-1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: CHARLES W. HOLMES COX NEWS SERVICE
DATELINE: JERUSALEM LENGTH: Long
Sadly, the answer was affirmative for the confessed gunman who murdered Rabin, and among several rabbis who issued a mystical curse on the prime minister a month before his assassination.
Like religious fundamentalists elsewhere, the Jewish fringe in Israel has rewritten God's leading commandment. In their uncompromising world, thou shalt kill.
In the wake of Rabin's murder, Israel is re-examining how to cope with a subculture of religious fanatics who believe their interpretation of God's law supersedes any rule made by man.
The assassination also underscored the deepening divide in Israeli society between secular and religious Jews and the implications for Israel's future.
``Hopefully after this tragedy the country will stop and think, to what extent does this division threaten our existence?'' said Menachem Friedman, a prominent sociologist and expert on ultra-Orthodox Judaism.
Israel has always had a delicate task balancing its dual role as democracy and theocracy. It was founded in 1948 as a Jewish state. Since then, secular and religious Jews have not stopped debating what that means.
Halacha, or Jewish law, dictates much of the nation's civil law - deciding who can immigrate, be married, be buried. But the very essence of Israel's political system is secular, with a parliamentary government that directs foreign and domestic policy.
``It cannot be a Jewish state if it is not a democratic state,'' said Yossi Beilin, a liberal government minister and chief architect of the peace agreement with the Palestinians.
``But for those who say, `We got a message from God. He told us this and nothing else.' Here our debate ends. We can do nothing and say nothing but to prevent them from doing bad things.''
A religious Jew and native Israeli, confessed assassin Yigal Amir, 25, told a magistrate that he acted alone ``but maybe with God'' in gunning down Rabin on Nov. 4. Police suspect he was part of an organized group, and six other religious Jews in their 20s have been arrested.
For believers in ``Eretz Yisrael'' - the Greater Israel granted to Jews by God in Biblical times - the promised land means not only the nation's borders, but the Palestinian territory of the West Bank occupied since the 1967 war.
That conviction, in part, fueled the Israeli settlement movement that has placed 130,000 Jewish residents among 1.2 million Arabs in the West Bank, what religious Jews call by the Biblical names Judea and Samaria. Many of the settlers are Jews who immigrated from the United States.
Taking that fervent belief and applying centuries-old Talmudic law, a small group of rabbis placed on Rabin ``din rodef'' - or ``the judgment of the pursuer'' - for his peace deal that gave up West Bank land to Palestinian self-rule.
It meant that Rabin was primed to spill the blood of other Jews by giving up control of the West Bank to Arabs. Therefore, the ruling, issued on the eve of Yom Kippur in early October, entitled a righteous Jew to kill Rabin as a duty to God.
To many Jewish scholars such theoretical debate in yeshiva halls or a rabbi's chambers is purely a theological drill, applying ancient codes to modern-day problems and discussing the relevance - like Christian scholars debating whether the rite of exorcism is archaic.
For others, it is deadly serious. And police are investigating whether rabbis who issued the edict may have encouraged Amir, who was an ardent student at Bar Ilan University's Institute for Advanced Torah Studies, near Tel Aviv.
Rabbi Yoel Ben Nun, a founder of the settlers' movement, has accused the rabbis of ``indirect responsibility'' in Rabin's assassination. Ben Nun, meanwhile, is under police protection from death threats he has received.
The vast portion of settlers and right-wingers opposed to Rabin's policy confined their actions to peaceful public demonstrations and increasingly angry rhetoric.
But the shared belief among the violent and the passive is that land and nation are inseparable and sacred.
Only last summer, a group of influential rabbis issued a religious ruling that Israeli soldiers must not obey orders to evacuate Jewish settlements or military bases in the West Bank.
``In their view, the conflict over the land is not just a conflict over a piece of real estate,'' said Ehud Sprinzak, a specialist on the religious right. Rather, he said, it is ``a conflict over the very being and spirit of the nation.''
Acting Prime Minister Shimon Peres has vowed he will encourage a new, temperate discourse between the right and left. The outpouring of grief after Rabin's death from secular and religious Israelis, from both ends of the ideological spectrum, was an encouraging sign of unity, Friedman said.
Yet the attempt to crack down on the far-right has raised concerns that in their zest to suppress Jewish extremism the authorities also are curbing democratic rights and personal liberties such as freedom of speech and religion.
Israel's attorney general has ordered Israeli media not to quote inciters, while right-wing groups claim the authorities are engaged in a ``witch hunt,'' faulting anyone who criticized Rabin's peace policies as a potential co-conspirator of Amir.
Recriminations have stirred coarse words and actions in a nation still reeling from Rabin's murder.
Recently, vandals spray-painted on the offices of the nation's chief rabbi the message: ``Rabbis murder and the rabbinate is silent.''
The following day, police arrested two ultra-Orthodox seminary students for desecrating Rabin's grave at the Mount Herzl military cemetery by spitting and attempting to urinate on it. A judge called their actions tantamount to ``undermining the foundations of the state.''
The secular government and the religious right seldom clashed when the right-wing Likud government was in power from 1977 to 1992. When Rabin's Labor government won elections in 1992, and accelerated the peace process, the divisions in Israeli society deepened.
In a nation of nearly 5 million Jews, the fanatics represent a reckless fringe, but nonetheless a dangerous one.
Many right-wing Israelis and Jewish settlers in the West Bank continue to visit the tomb of Baruch Goldstein, an American-born Jewish settler whom they regard as a hero. Goldstein gunned down 29 Muslims at prayer in Hebron's Tomb of the Patriarchs in February 1994.
Searching Amir's room after the assassination, police found a biography of Goldstein called ``Baruch HaGever'' - ``Baruch, The Man'' - a book that portrays him in valorous tones.
Likewise, at a gathering in Jerusalem of Kahanists - Jewish extremists who follow the teachings of the late Rabbi Meir Kahane, the anti-Arab leader who spawned the outlawed groups Kach, Kahane Chai and Eyal - it was Amir who was being commended.
``A person could understand Amir,'' Benjamin Kahane, the rabbi's son, told the gathering. ``He didn't do it for his own benefit. He did it because he saw Jews getting killed'' as a result of the peace process.
by CNB