FORBEAR OR FIGHT? By Shulamit Aloni

Are people infuriated by injustice not allowed to show their anger? Are protest meetings and demonstrations not the right thing? Are we not allowed to call a racist “Racist” without the curators of courtesy and the teachers of tolerance labeling us intolerant, troublemakers, lawbreakers, disrupters of “Jewish solidarity”  and “destroyers of Jewish unity”?

Our national culture teaches us, and of course our religious one too, that man was created in the image of God, “Male and female He created them and He blessed them and on the day He created them He called their name “Adam” [In Hebrew ‘adam’ includes both male and female, just as ‘man’ can do in English]. The story continues, as later Sages embroidered on it, that God deliberately created ‘man’ as two individuals, and not a multitude of many skin colours, peoples, and languages, in order to teach us that we are all descended from the one first couple, so that no one can say ‘my ancestry is better than yours’.     Our culture also says, and it has passed this on to Christianity and Islam too, that man knows how to tell good from evil and was in fact expelled from the Garden of Eden for the very reason that Elohim feared that if the man and woman also ate from the Tree of Life they would take on even more God-like powers. The reason for the expulsion is stated quite clearly: “And the Lord God said, Behold, the man is become like one of us, knowing good and evil: and now, what if he put forth his hand and take also of the Tree of Life and eating live for ever.” An echo of this we find in the wonderful poetry of Psalm 8 “You have made him [man] only a little less than divine”.   This biblical period tenet became with time and under the hand of the philosophers a fundamental postulate first of the Enlightenment (which took its autonomy from organized religion in the 17th century) and then of modern democracy. Every human being, by the very fact of their humanity, is born free and with equal rights with every other, whatever their ancestry, race, faith or sex, and of course, knowing how to tell good from evil, they are responsible for their acts and may not claim that, being free-born, they are free to choose evil without bearing responsibility for their choice. TOLERANCE FOR EVIL I felt this introductory statement to be necessary because good people are demanding that I show tolerance for evil instead of demanding that I get up and fight it and I cannot understand why.   In a recent edition of Ma’ariv, Prof. Asa Kasher reports the findings of some of the latest population surveys. To the question, “Is it justified to use threats against political leaders to prevent them giving back territory?” more than 200,000 Jews answered ‘Yes’. “Is it right to seek physical confrontation with the [Israeli] security forces?” — more than 400,000 answered ‘Yes’. “Is it right to use firearms to against political leaders in the process of giving back territory” — over 90,000 answered ‘Yes’ and that is four years after Rabin was assassinated. For this I am supposed to display tolerance?   When, a few days before the Rabin murder, Mr. Adir Zik broadcast on Channel 7 as follows: “Rabin is a traitor, the sentence for traitors is death or life imprisonment. So, my friends, what do you say about Rabin now?” good-hearted people at once got up and preached tolerance and understanding for the settlers’ mood and defended the pirate radio channel against threats of closure. They collected money and paid for press advertisements and wrote articles calling for tolerance. A few days later they were lamenting bitterly over an assassinated prime minister.   In today’s Israel we have displays of racism, displays of hatred for the other and for anyone ‘different’, we have rape and murder, a trade in women for prostitution, we have exploitation, oppression, and the disgusting enslavement of foreign labourers, a drug trade, theft, armed robbery, milking the public treasury by legal trickery, and totally shameless extortion. What is a citizen who is supposed to know good from evil and right from wrong supposed to do?         What do we say to the man in the street who knows that the perpetrators of these evils also know good from evil but are not prepared to take responsibility for their acts? Just how is he supposed to respond? Show patience, wait for those charged with law enforcement to do their duty, and in the meantime stay polite and calm, go along with the general consensus in favor of conciliation and love his fellow man, love his (Jewish) people and homeland, maintain unity and pray for better things? Have we not shown the bastards ‘on our side’ enough tolerance? What indeed does ‘a policy of tolerance’ require of us?  ARE WE ALLOWED TO CALL A RACIST “RACIST” Are people infuriated by injustice not allowed to show their anger? Are protest meetings and demonstrations not the right thing? Are we not allowed to call a racist “Racist” without the curators of courtesy and the teachers of tolerance labeling us intolerant, troublemakers, lawbreakers, disrupters of “Jewish solidarity” and “destroyers of Jewish unity”?   Shouldn’t the call be for decent behavior rather than for tolerance? Doesn’t a precept on the lines of Hillel the Elder’s “Do not to others what you would hate done to you” require more positive action from us? Am I allowed to show rage and shout out against wrongs only when I myself or my sex or my ‘people’ have been wronged, but when ‘my people’ wrong others who are not ‘my people’ — Beduin, Palestinians, foreign labourers, the poor and downtrodden — I would be better advised, even right, to show tolerance. After all, intervening in such things is liable to disrupt the harmony of “the group” and the group is very important, for man is a social animal and needs the solidarity of his own kind. So is it best to turn a blind eye? Display tolerance and hope that calm will be restored if we keep quiet? Tolerance is a wonderful virtue among people who enjoy a common civilization and code of behavior; between people who know what decency is and what respect for the other, all ‘other’s, means. But where there are forces in society who see themselves as superior to others, people who are certain that they have no equals, people who hear voices and know that God is on their side in whatever perversion they pursue, people who are authentically “wicked” as the Bible uses the word, then evil and good and right and criminal must be called what they are — and loudly and clearly.       The bully boys, the fat cats, the  plutocrats and all of these wrapped together are also part of our national culture — and of our religious culture too, of course! Did Israel’s prophets preach tolerance? No, they preached right-dealing and the eradication of evil from our midst.