Rabbi Michael Lerner at Tikkun/NSP <magazine@tikkun.

org>\
You can read this online at http://www.huffingtonpost.com/rabbi-michaellerner/netanyahu-have-you-no-sha_b_8391496.html Please feel free to
circulate this on your social media, post on your website, and share it with
everyone!
Netanyahu: Have You No Shame?
By Rabbi Michael Lerner Oct. 26, 2015
Israels Prime Minister attributing the Holocaust to Palestinian influence over
Hitler is a Blood Libel level lie.
In the Middle Ages, some Christians claimed that Jews were kidnapping
Christian children and using their blood to make Passover Matzah (which in
Jewish law would make the Jewish kidnapper a murderer, deserving the death
penalty, and the Matzah itself unkosher, because Jews are forbidden to eat
blood). This blood libel lie has been repeated by anti-Semites and sometimes is
accompanied in bookstores with a book called The Elders of Zion, who
purportedly met and planned to rule the world. This sort of hate literature is
still disseminated in some Muslim countries.
Now, the Prime Minister of Israel has launched his own blood libel lie. In a
speech to an international group of Zionist leaders attending the 37th
International Zionist Congress, Benjamin Netanyahu claimed that Hitler was
intending to only banish Jews from Europe, until he met with the anti-Semitic
Palestinian al-Husseini, the Mufti of Jerusalem who convinced him to murder
all the Jews.
As Israeli Policy Forums policy director Michael Koplow explains, Netanyahu
brought up al-Husseinis well-known connection to the Nazis and vocal support of
Hitler in warning about the dangers of Palestinian incitement regarding Israels
alleged efforts to alter the status quo on the Temple Mount. His connection
between these two seemingly disparate threads was that al-Husseini had
instigated riots in the 1920s by accusing the Jews of wanting to destroy alAqsa, and he later met with Hitler in 1941 and in Netanyahus telling
convinced Hitler to exterminate European Jewry rather than expel them. So the
implication is that false warnings about Jews trying to take over al-Aqsa, or to
even just change the Temple Mount status quo, lead to attempts to exterminate
Jews, including the Holocaust.

The truth is that Hitler had already launched genocidal plans before meeting
with the Mufti, though the Mufti may well have wished for a genocide of the
Jews. Hitlers intense hatred of Jews was already articulated in his Mein Kampf,
and already had manifested in throwing Jews out of virtually every profession
and university, requiring Jews to wear a yellow star, and attacking and force
closing of Jewish businesses, culminating in Kristallnacht in November 1938.
Yet the historical distortion here, far from being a sudden oops, is part of the
larger picture of hatred toward Palestinians that Netanyahu has been promoting
throughout his political life. He repeatedly blames the Palestinian Authority for
any act of violence by any Palestinian and never informs the Israeli public of the
close cooperation that the P.A. has provided the Israeli security forces for the
past ten years in exposing any group of Palestinians that the Palestinian security
forces have reason to believe are planning terrorist attacks. He never mentions
the way Prime Minister Abbas has sought to quell anti-Israel demonstrations for
fear that they might lead to violence. He consistently paints the Palestinian
people as violent anti-Semites. He never points out that Israel has relied on the
Palestinian security forces to repress any Palestinians who seek to challenge the
Occupation, and now he tries to foster the perception in Israel that the
Palestinian people are the current embodiment of the Nazis who wish to
eliminate the Jewish people through yet another Holocaust. Little surprise that
today (October 26, 2015), the New York Times reported that the Palestinian
Authority is seeking to reduce its security cooperation with the IDF after a
month in which those Palestinian forces in the West Bank have been beating
anti-Israel demonstrators and rock-throwers while Israel has arrested over 500
Palestinians..
Of course, its important to remind ourselves that many in the IDF do not wish
to be occupiers, that many settlers are not murderers or haters, and that many
who live in Israel have no real knowledge or understanding of what their
Occupation actually means in the daily lives of Palestinians. Yet to the extent
that they vote for candidates who support the governments of Israel that have
made the Occupation persist for the past 48 years, they all have moral
responsibility for the outrageous deeds that are perpetrated or permitted by
the IDF and by the most extremist settlers.
It is nothing new to note that hatred of the Other almost always leads to
racism, and racism to various acts of violence. We at Tikkun Magazine and the

Network of Spiritual Progressives have strongly condemned the racism that

sometimes manifests in Hamas and some other corners of Islamic
fundamentalism. When they call for the destruction of The Jewish state their
discourse encourages an anti-Semitism that is not narrowly confined to anger at
the Occupation. But neither is the Jewish racism toward Palestinians merely an
expression of legitimate anxiety about whether a future Palestinian State would
be willing to live in peace with Israel. The hatred that is being reinforced by the
Netanyahu government aims to create the conditions for forcing Palestinians to
choose between giving up all hope of having an independent state living in peace
with Israel and settling for a few Palestinian municipalities on the West Bank,
thereby living as part of a Jewish state and without the full rights of citizens
(i.e. apartheid conditions) on the one hand, or being ethnically cleansed from all
of Israel, including the West Bank and Gaza.
So it was not a total surprise to witness on a video, a few days after
Netanyahus speech, a masked and knife-wielding Israeli settler attack Rabbi
Arik Ascherman, head of the Israeli Rabbis for Human Rights, as he attempted
to stop Israeli West Bank settlers from once again destroying Palestinian olive
trees, as they have done systematically for years on Palestinian-owned West
Bank lands. Ascherman has been one of the heroes of human rights in Israel, a
champion of the best in Judaism, often challenging his fellow rabbis to live up to
the ethical standards set by the Torah. A frequent author for Tikkun magazine,
Rabbi Ascherman has had the courage of his convictions and deserves the praise
of the entire American and Israeli Jewish community.
Dont hold your breath. To date, his heroism has been ignored both in the Jewish
and American mainstream media. Read and watch a video about it at
http://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/.premium-1.682019 and about the growing
hatred in Israel toward supporters of peace at
http://www.haaretz.com/opinion/.premium-1.682266
For those of us Jews who are still wedded to Torahs vision of our obligations
toward non-Jews, the clearly repeated injunctions can be summarized as this:
When you come into your land, do not oppress the stranger (the Other, in
Hebrew, hager), remember that you were strangers in the land of Egypt. The
Torah makes clear that if Jews do not live up the ethical demands of Torah, the
earth will literally vomit them out, and so Jewish theology has ascribed the
destruction of the 1st and 2nd Temple to our ethical failures in the past.

So when a group of Jewish fundamentalists called Atteret HaKohanim (who

explicitly believe that it is time to tear down the Al Asqa Mosque, rebuild the
ancient Temple, and begin animal sacrifices once again) were allowed by the
Israeli government to go to the Temple Mount on the Jewish holiday of Sukkot a
few weeks ago, it is no surprise that many Muslims reacted by thinking that the
Israeli government, which controls access to the Mount, intended to send a
signal to the Muslims that their stay on one of their holiest sites is in danger.
Some responded by throwing rocks at these extremists (a response I find
unacceptable), and then the Israeli government, rather than restraining the
Jewish fundamentalists, shut the Temple Mount to Islamic men under the age of
fifty. This is a pattern that happens over and over again, and led to the start of
the 2nd Intifada and to the current spontaneous acts of outrage at the
Occupation, this time by Palestinians living in Jerusalem.
While we deplore the murder of random Israeli citizens by their Palestinian
neighbors and the murder of (many more) random Palestinians by their Israeli
neighbors, and the arrest of hundreds of Palestinians with no right to trial by a
jury of their peers, we see all this as the inevitable working out of the logic of
Occupation and subordination. All the more reason to be outraged at
Netanyahus further stirring of hatred toward Palestinians with his blood libel.
It is not the viciously murderous Mufti of Jerusalem, long dead, who is the
target of Netanyahus hatred, but the entire Palestinian people whom he sees as
an extension of the Nazis.
Yes, there will come a day when Israelis look back on this period with shame and
outrage. Just as most Americans, now strong allies with the Vietnamese people,
know that the death of 58,000 Americans and three hundred thousand
Vietnamese during the Vietnam war was a tragic error, and that these people
were not really our enemies, so Israelis will mourn the deaths of Israelis and
Palestinians killed in this seemingly endless struggle. But we are not there yet,
and it is our obligation to counter all the hate-mongering by insisting on the
humanity of the Palestinian people when talking to the haters in the Jewish
world, just as we insist on the humanity of the Israeli people when talking to the
haters of Jews.
We also acknowledge the fundamental asymmetry in this situation. Unlike the
Vietnamese, the Palestinians have no military means of resisting the more
powerful force. Their individual acts of resistance are acts of the powerless. In
this situation, we in the West must do all we can to end Israels occupation of

Palestine and encourage a reconciliation of the heart between these two peoples
seemingly locked in endless conflict. In my book Embracing Israel/Palestine I
outline the path that such action can take. If you wish to be part of a movement
that opposes the Occupation, challenges the Obama Administration and the
Democrats to stop yielding to the right wing in the Jewish world but instead to
pressure Israel to end the Occupation and support U.N. resolutions condemning
Israeli human rights violations, yet refuses to demonize all Israelis and calls for
nonviolence, please join the Network of Spiritual Progressives at
www.spiritualprogressives.org/join.
Rabbi Michael Lerner is editor of Tikkun magazine which won the Best Magazine
of the Year Award from the mainstream medias Religion Newswriters
Association in 2014 and again in 2015. He is chair of the Network of Spiritual
Progressives and author of 11 books including two national best sellers: Jewish
Renewal: A Path to Healing and Transformation and The Left Hand of God:
Taking Back our Country from the Religious Right. His book Embracing
Israel/Palestine is available on Kindle form Amazon.com and in paperback
fromwww.tikkun.org/eip. He can be reached at rabbilerner.tikkun@gmail.com or
at 510 644 1200