Dear Friends This post is about Yeshayahu Leibowitz. Who? No, I hadnt heard of him either. But he was perhaps Israels greatest intellectual. he had eight doctorates. At Hebrew University he taught everything from philosophy to quantum mechanics. In a 1968 essay he warned that the occupation would warp Jewish society beyond recognition and ultimately bring about the destruction of the state. A state ruling a hostile population would necessarily become a secret-police state. The corruption characteristic of every colonial regime would prevail in Israel. He likened Greater Israel to the apartheid states lording over indigenous blacks in southern Africa, warning that a culture of racism would consume Jewish society. This was 1968, remember. In 1991 he noted that in South Africa the population including the blacks were being given all the civil and, it would seem, political rights. That is happening throughout the world today in all the enlightened countries. But Israel is the only dictatorship that exists today in the enlightened world. When in 1991 a state commission led by former supreme Court chief justice Landau authorised Shin Bet to apply methods of torture to extract confessions from Palestinian detainees, Leibowitz declared, a Nazi-like mentality exists in our country...There are Judeo-Nazis... he shouted to his packed audience in Haifa as he was shouted down. Two years later, aged 90, he compared the Israeli armys elite Sayeret Makhtal unit to the Nazi SS. He had been nominated for the Israel Prize, the top civilian award, but was widely denounced as a traitor. He declined the prize and died a year later. What would he make of Israel today?
Posted on: Tue, 14 Oct 2014 10:58:07 +0000
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