Bar sinister
Ha`aretz, covering the eviction of some Jewish families from an illegal settlement in Hebron, quoted Gershon Bar-Kochba, one of the residents who tried to resist eviction. The name also appeared in this New York Times article from 1989: “Gershon Bar Kochba, a seminary student from Hebron, was suspected of leading a group who opened fire on Palestinians in Hebron…” And this article on the Hebron Jewish community’s Web site laments that Gershon Bar-Kochba had to post a 25,000-shekel1 bond in order to bail out a 14-year-old settler, while Arab suspects were routinely released on their own recognizance2.
OK, this guy appears to be something of a macher in Hebron. What astounds me is that he carries the name of the leader of the last Jewish revolt against the Roman Empire. That revolt was thoroughly crushed by the Romans, after which all the remaining Jews were exiled from Judea, the province was renamed “Syria Palestina”, many Jewish practices (such as Torah study and Shabbat) were prohibited, and many rabbis were martyred. What kind of yeshiva bocher treats a guy like this as a role model? Does he learn from some Bizzarro-Talmud in which it says that God destroyed our Temple and exiled us from our homeland because we were insufficiently ruthless to our enemies?
via ongoing
1 Approximately US$6,000.
2 The article presented this as one example of how the Israeli government was treating Jewish settlers in Hebron more harshly than the Arabs. I mentioned this to my wife, and she said, “Well, they should. God Himself does.” After all, she went on, the Moslems only have the seven Noachide commandments to observe, while we have 613…of course, we can’t observe all of them today…and one of the reason we can’t observe all of them today is the misguided zealotry of Jews like the original Bar-Kochba.
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Denial is not just where Moses got the frogs Gender and shopping
I’m not sure about one particular assumption. I’ve noticed Mr. Bar Kochba showing up in a couple of other places over the years (e.g. the hareidi protests against opening up roads near their neighborhoods to cars on Shabbat in the late 1990s), so I wonder if there’s actually a little cadre of similarly ill-informed bocherim out there, possibly all talmidim of one ill-informed rabbi. Given that the settlers and the hareidim don’t generally agree on much, it shouldn’t be too hard to figure out who that rav is if I’m right (although I don’t actually feel like researching this enough to graph it out).
“Illegal settlement”? This went through the courts, and they ruled that the ownership of that property was 100% glatt kosher l’mehadrin.
Governments don’t have the right to do whatever they want. This was one more case of the government deciding for political reasons to abrogate the rights of private citizens. I’m really surprised that you’re okay with that.
Scott: One of my teachers at Darchei Noam remarked that ever since Oslo, the charedi and dati-leumi communities have found more ideological common ground. (He noted in particular that some charedi rabbis, who had previously denied any legitimacy to the secular Zionist state, had gone through some rhetorical contortions to explain why their followers, nevertheless, should vote Likud.)
Lisa: According to this article, “The leases on the building expired and Hebron leaders requested to rent them. All requests were denied by the Israeli custodian for abandoned property, under whose auspices the buildings fell. Following the murder of 10-month old Shalhevet Pass in March, 2001, Hebron residents moved into these empty structures… They lived in these apartments for five years, during which time the issue revolved in the Israeli courts, in an effort to remove us from the buildings. A military appeals court recognized the community’s ownership of the land and recommended that the buildings be leased to the Jewish community, however this recommendation was rejected by the state Attorney General Eliyakim Rubenstein.”
In other words, the Hebron folks were squatting on land administered on the state and the state decided to evict them. There’s also the issue that military-occupied territory is not, almost by definition, a zone where civilians can move in wherever they please. I would have more sympathy for the evicted settlers if they had set up their squats in Haifa or East Jerusalem.