Was the Rabbi speaking for himself?

By Omar Radwan

Rabbi Ovadia Yosef, the Spiritual Leader of Shas, an Israeli Sephardic ultra-Orthodox party, delivered a sermon at the weekend in which he prayed for the death of Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas and for the suffering of the Palestinian people, saying, “Abu Mazen [Abbas] and all these evil people should perish from this earth. God should strike them and these Palestinians, evil haters of Israel, with a plague.”  This is not the first time that Rabbi Yosef has made remarks of this nature.  He has previously referred to Arabs generally as “vipers” and called for genocide against them, “It is forbidden to be merciful to them.  You must send missiles to them and annihilate them. They are evil and damnable.”  While one could easily dismiss Rabbi Yosef as an unhinged extremist, he is far from a marginal figure in Israel.  Shas is a major political party in Israel, holding 11 out of 120 seats in the Knesset. It is a member of Israel’s governing coalition and its official leader, Eli Yishai, who has defended Yosef’s racist statements in the past, is the current Interior Minister and also a Deputy Prime Minister.

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Yosef’s tirade coincides with the start of direct peace talks between Israel and the Palestinian Authority.  The fact that they come from the spiritual leader of one of the parties in the Israeli government and that they address him directly should tell President Abbas something about the futility of the negotiations he has embarked upon.  Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu distanced himself from Yosef’s remarks but did not offer a condemnation or an apology. The remarks came as a huge embarrassment to the US government, which is sponsoring the negotiations and a State Department spokesman condemned them, saying that they were “not only deeply offensive, but incitement such as this hurts the cause of peace.”  However, neither Britain, nor the EU, nor the Quartet has made any statement about the matter.  Moreover, one would have expected Tony Blair, in his capacity as the Quartet’s envoy to the Middle East, to condemn Rabbi Yosef but he has remained silent.  It is very unlikely that the United States would have even responded to Yosef had his remarks not come at such an inopportune time.

The attitude of the international community to Ovadia Yosef’s inflammatory remarks is in sharp contrast to its treatment of Muslim spiritual leaders.  One is reminded of the furore which happened in Britain when Sheikh Yusuf al-Qaradawi visited in 2004.  The press carried out a witch hunt, publishing inflammatory articles about his alleged support for terrorists and his supposed advocacy of the death penalty for homosexuals.  However, these articles largely consisted of fabrications and distortions.  Qaradawi’s real crime, apparently, was his support of the Palestinians’ right to defend themselves in the face of a vicious Israeli onslaught which took place following the breakdown of the Camp David negotiations in 2000. Because of the hysterical attacks by the British media on Qaradawi, he was banned from re-entering Britain in 2008.  Many other Muslim leaders have been treated in the same way; falsely accused of supporting terrorism if they speak out for the rights of persecuted Muslims.

On the other hand the international community has by and large ignored the genocidal pronouncements of Israeli rabbis.  Rabbi Ovadia Yosef’s pronouncements are unfortunately, far from unique.  The late Sephardi Chief Rabbi of Israel, Mordechai Eliyahu, wrote a letter in 2007 to the then Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert informing him that there was no moral prohibition against the killing of civilians during a military assault on Gaza, and that all were guilty of allowing rockets to fall on Israel. Eliyahu also said that the tsunami which struck Asia in 2004 was a pre-emptive punishment from God for the support that Asian nations gave to Israel’s 2005 disengagement from Gaza.  His son, Rabbi Shmuel Eliyahu, called for the children of Palestinian fighters to be “hung from trees” and, inspired by his father said, “If they don’t stop [firing rockets] after we kill 100, then we must kill a thousand.  And if they do not stop after 1,000 then we must kill 10,000.  If they still don’t stop we must kill 100,000, even a million.  Whatever it takes to make them stop.”  Such pronouncements no doubt influenced Israel’s unprecedentedly brutal conduct in the Gaza War of 2008-2009.  Rabbis played a key role in inciting soldiers against the Palestinians.  The Chief Rabbi of the Israeli army, Brigadier General Avichai Rontzki, told soldiers that any of them who show mercy to the enemy will be damned.

The international community’s position today is indefensible.  The pronouncements of Muslim leaders have regularly been distorted by the media and by governments to justify their persecution and to give the impression that they support terrorism.  In contrast, the likes of Ovadia Yosef can get away with their genocidal statements.  These statements have actually been responsible for the deaths of innocent people during the war in Gaza and threaten to derail the peace process which the international community professes such strong support for.  It is high time that the international community began to seriously confront the genocidal racism prevalent at so many levels in Israeli society.

The views expressed in this article belong to the author and do not necessarily reflect the editorial policy of Middle East Monitor.