Rabbi Calls Out Leftist Writer

by Rabbi Shmully Hecht, IsraelNationalNews.com

Gideon Levy has reached a new low in his unrelenting campaign to prove to the world how humanistic he is by slandering the Jewish State. Levy may see himself as the leading proponent of the sad fantasy that the more one attacks Israel and those who safeguard its preservation, the sooner those who hate the miraculous homeland of the Jews will realize that we are a people who deserve safety, security and sovereignty.

In fact, while the Levy’s of the world fool themselves, those who hate Israel and pray for its dismantling are only too happy to hear in minute detail what a monstrous creation Israel is and by extension how guilty the Jewish people are for existing and refusing to commit suicide.

This time around, Levy compares the proposed mandatory tour of Israeli students to Hebron to Holocaust trips which are designed, as he sees it in twisted logic, to champion Jews above all others and to deny the history of non-Jews.

Levy fears that Israeli students will return from Hebron “shocked and nationalist,” and he is certainly right if by shocked he means profoundly impressed with the length and continuity of Jewish “occupation” of the Holy Land, and nationalist in the sense of wanting to preserve this legacy which is unrivaled in time and passion.

In fact there are similarities between the two locations, though one a place of birth and the other of death, namely that besides being unique sites, Hebron and Aushwitz were also the locations of simple Jewish life as long as Jews were able to live in them unmolested by hatred and murdered outright.

Hebron is not only historic it was a place of every-day Jewish life for thousands of years, continuing even after the destruction of the Second Temple, as was the town called by Jews “Oshpitsin” that was the site of a camp 90% of whose victims were adherents to the Hebrew faith. So, in fact, a trip organized by Jews for young Jews to historic Jewish sites is really not so much an act of aggression but of self-preservation.

What Levy rudely chides as a “safari” of students visiting under the necessary watch of the IDF is nothing more or less than the youth of a people visiting the home of their spiritual ancestors. As for scoffing at the resting place of the Patriarch Abraham, the father of Monotheism needs no defense from Gideon Levy.

Levy might consider, however, that without Abraham there would be no Jewish people to which he was born and from whom he has been nourished, no State of Israel to protect his free speech, and no Ha’aretz newspaper in which to lambast his own people to the delight of their sworn enemies.

The “occupied Tomb of the Patriarchs,” as Levy describes it, is indeed occupied by the Jewish people; the descendants and heirs of its original inhabitants.

A recent letter from several hundred American rabbis to radio host Glenn Beck, rebukes him for comments about holocaust survivor George Soros. It is true that we should never judge Jewish collaborators who were attempting to survive their own murder by the Nazis.

That said, perhaps another similarity between the death camps of Europe and Hebron, since Levy is so eager to find one, is that in both places we find the kapo who sides with those who would destroy the Jews.

Only Levy knows the motives of his heart and mind, but given the ease and seeming joy with which he attacks the symbols of Jewish sovereignty, he should not be taken as a defender of Israel or the Jewish People, by anybody. Perhaps the opposite…

Rabbi Shmully Hecht is the co-founder and rabbinical adviser of Eliezer, the Jewish Society at Yale University.