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    Streets of Hate: a journal entry on attacks in Hebron

    November 20th, 2006 | Posted in Journals, Hebron Region

    by aspiringnomad, November 20th

    His panic-stricken little face lights up when he receives the
    information that we’ll escort him home, sending him skipping merrily
    down the road on an errand to buy potatoes. This is the Palestinian
    Authority controlled area of Hebron, and as we cross through Tel Rumeida
    checkpoint to the other side in order to wait for the Palestinian boy’s
    return, we soon discover the source of his fear.

    We are confronted by around 100 ultra-orthodox Jews, who are gathered in
    Hebron to mark ‘Hebron day’, one of whom shouts “You know that Jesus is
    gay?”. None of us really react to this arbitrary taunt, however it does
    serve to focus the crowd’s attentions squarely on our small group of
    human rights workers. Another shouts “What are you doing here?”

    “Tourists” I reply, believing this to be the safest response under the
    circumstances. The crowd then begins chanting in Hebrew “We killed
    Jesus, we’ll kill you too!” — we are quickly designated the ‘other’. The
    mob mentality takes on an oppressive and ugly turn; now almost a single
    entity justifying almost any excess as long as it is directed towards
    the ‘other’. The crowd edges forward “You love Palestinians” one of them
    shouts, spitting in a human rights worker’s face.

    The first stone had been cast: saliva rains down on us and people jump
    above one another to be able to deliver their contempt. We are shoved
    and kicked repeatedly, and even though it is apparent that events are
    spiraling dangerously out of control, the soldiers who are standing just
    a few feet behind us at the checkpoint choose to look on impotently as
    the attacks intensify.

    A man lunges from the crowd, smashing Tove, a 19 year old Swedish girl
    across the face with a bottle. She immediately collapses to the ground
    clutching her bloodied face in horrified terror. At this point the
    soldiers come forward and motion at the settlers, in a “ok… that’s
    enough guys…” motion, amid clapping, cheering and chanting from the
    crowd.

    As Tove lay on the hard concrete floor, blood oozing from her wounds the
    crowd re-groups, fed by curiosity and growing in energy “We killed
    Jesus, we’ll kill you too!” I now felt a growing sense of apprehension
    as awareness dawned of the mob’s evil intent and the soldiers’
    unwillingness to intervene in any meaningful way.

    A religiously dressed Orthodox Jew then adds insult to injury by posing
    with a thumbs-up gesture over Tove’s bloodied face. The sight of this
    was so obnoxiously contemptuous I never gave the guy the satisfaction he
    sadistically craved by taking his picture. The decision as to whether I
    should have taken that picture has been discussed over and over by
    people I know, though I feel the impact of sharing that disgusting image
    I have etched in my mind, can serve no purpose other than that of
    breeding hatred.

    The police arrived and an American girl who witnessed the event was
    taken into a police van and asked to identify who had attacked our
    group. Meanwhile the remaining police were telling me and another
    Englishman that if we didn’t move away from the scene we would be
    arrested as we were blocking the street. We remained.

    A Jewish settler medic came to the scene about 15 minutes after the
    attack and immediately began asking us why we were in Hebron, telling us
    pointedly we had no right to be there. He refused to help Tove as she
    lay bleeding in the street .

    Eventually Tove was helped onto a stretcher by some soldiers, amid jeers
    and clapping from the crowd. We escorted the stretcher through the
    jeering crowd to a military vehicle in which Tove and a close friend
    were transported to the hospital in Jerusalem.

    As I walked back down the street I witnessed the police open the door of
    a van and release one of the attackers. Upon seeing this the crowd then
    began jubilantly celebrating his release. We were later told by the
    police that they had not even taken the names of those who were
    identified as having attacked us, and that one of the main assailants
    had simply told the police that he was due at the airport in two hours
    to fly back to France.

    Two Englishmen and I then spent another half an hour or so escorting
    Palestinian women and children from the checkpoint to their homes. In
    doing so it is our aim to protect the Palestinians in such situations by
    deflecting the attention and hate away from them.

    It was getting dark but the streets were still busy. We escorted one
    group of three boys, the oldest of whom was 9 or 10. We were followed
    closely along the street by a dozen or so Orthodox Jews who hissed and
    berated the Palestinian boys in Arabic with obscenities I am grateful of
    not understanding. “You like protecting the animals?”, they taunted us
    in English — “Nazis!”.

    We reached some steps and turned off the main street and began to climb,
    the little boys nervously glancing back to see if we would be pursued. A
    couple of hundred metres further on the older boy made it clear they
    were OK to continue alone now. I asked the oldest boy if they were sure,
    he forced a smile and shrugged his soldiers in defiance as if to say “no
    problem this stuff happens every day”. He seemed so strong, but as I put
    my hand on his shoulder and looked into his teary eyes they gave out
    another message and I saw pain and fear.

    I wanted to tell him that the world wasn’t really like this. But for him
    and the people of Tel Rumeida it is.

    Earlier in the day at least five Palestinians, including a 3-year old
    child, were injured by Jewish settlers, who rampaged through Tel Rumeida
    hurling stones and bottles at local residents. Palestinian
    schoolchildren on their way home were also attacked. The Israeli
    “Defense” Force, which was intensively deployed in the area, did not
    intervene to stop the settlers.

    -----------------------

    "We killed Jesus, we'll kill you too!"

    Right: Tove Johansson after being attacked in Hebron, Palestine (ISM
    Hebron photo).

    The events described below occurred less than a month ago. Below is an
    excerpt from "Swedish human rights worker viciously attacked by Jewish
    extremists in Hebron" followed by some background from Jewish sources on
    Jewish attitudes toward Jesus and Christianity.

    A 19-year old Swedish human rights worker had her cheekbone broken by a
    Jewish extremist in Hebron today. Earlier the same day at least five
    Palestinians, including a 3-year-old child, were injured by the
    settler-supporting extremists, who rampaged through Tel Rumeida hurling
    stones and bottles at local residents. Palestinian schoolchildren on
    their way home were also attacked. The Israeli army, which was
    intensively deployed in the area, did not intervene to stop the attacks.

    Tove Johansson from Stockholm walked through the Tel Rumeida checkpoint
    with a small group of human rights workers (HRWs) to accompany
    Palestinian schoolchildren to their homes. They were confronted by about
    100 Jewish extremists in small groups. They started chanting in Hebrew
    "We killed Jesus, we'll kill you too!" — a refrain the settlers had been
    repeating to internationals in Tel Rumeida all day.

    After about thirty seconds of waiting, a small group of very aggressive
    male Jewish extremists surrounded the international volunteers and began
    spitting at them, so much so that the internationals described it as
    "like rain." Then men from the back of the crowd began jumping up and
    spitting, while others from the back and side of the crowd kicked the
    volunteers.

    The soldiers, who were standing at the checkpoint just a few feet behind
    the HRWs, looked on as they were being attacked.

    As evidenced by the response of one of the members of a Christian e-mail
    group I belong to, many non-Jews are hypersensitive to reporting the
    anti-Christian utterings of Jews. My correspondent expressed concern
    that the title of this blog post is "inflammatory and could be taken as
    anti-Semitic."

    Of course, "it's inflammatory." The Jews who said it knew exactly what
    they were doing--the reference to "killing Jesus" is no accident. As for
    being "taken as anti-Semitic," well this verges on mind-boggling. I
    mean, a nonviolent activist gets viciously assaulted while her Jewish
    attackers chant "We killed Jesus, we'll kill you too!" and people are
    worried about seeming anti-Jewish?! Reporting this attack accurately is
    simply not anti-Jewish. Period. Stop. Some people have been so
    brainwashed that they are blind to the common, imperfect humanity that
    Jews share with the rest of us.

    In any case, virtually any position taken against Israel or organized
    Jewry can, and often is, "taken as anti-Semitic." So what? Get over it.
    However, if you actually do hate Jews qua Jews then you should quit the
    movement until you've worked through your issues.

    I'm with Norman Finkelstein on this. Here's what he says in Beyond
    Chutzpah: On the Misuse of Anti-Semitism and the Abuse of History:

    As already noted, Jewish elites in the United States have enjoyed
    enormous prosperity. From this combination of economic and political
    power has sprung, unsurprisingly, a mindset of Jewish superiority.
    Wrapping themselves in the mantle of The Holocaust ["an ideological
    representation of the (actual) Nazi holocaust"], these Jewish elites
    pretend—and, in their own solipsistic universe, perhaps imagine
    themselves—to be victims, dismissing any and all criticism as
    manifestations of "anti-Semitism." And, from this lethal brew of
    formidable power, chauvinistic arrogance, feigned (or imagined)
    victimhood, and Holocaust-immunity to criticism has sprung a terrifying
    recklessness and ruthlessness on the part of American Jewish elites.
    Alongside Israel, they are the main fomenters of anti-Semitism in the
    world today.

    Okay, I promised some background on Jewish attitudes toward Jesus and
    Christianity. This is to provide some religious and historical context
    for the "100 Jewish extremists ... chanting in Hebrew 'We killed Jesus,
    we'll kill you too!' — a refrain the settlers had been repeating to
    internationals in Tel Rumeida all day." Here it comes.

    In the fall of 2003, while controversy about Mel Gibson's The Passion
    raged, the author of Understanding Jewish History and National Director
    of the American Jewish Committee's (AJC) Contemporary Jewish Life
    Department weighed-in with a piece entitled "Jesus in the Talmud." Steve
    Bayme's article soon became a source of controversy itself and was
    quickly pulled from the AJC's web site.

    Reporting on the matter in The Jewish Week, Eric J. Greenberg writes:

    He [Bayme] contends that Jewish interfaith representatives are not being
    honest in dialogue if they ignore the explicit Talmudic references to
    Jesus.

    His article was posted on the AJCommittee's Web site last week, then
    removed after a Jewish Week reporter's inquiry.

    Ken Bandler, a spokesman for the AJCommittee, said the article was taken
    down to "avoid confusion" over whether it represented the organization's
    official position. AJCommittee officials now refer to the article as "an
    internal document."

    ...

    But Bayme was unswayed. Citing the continuing controversy over Gibson's
    "The Passion," which has reignited concern over Christianity's ancient
    charge against Jews as "Christ killers," he wrote that it is also
    important "that Jews confront their own tradition and ask how Jewish
    sources treated the Jesus narrative."

    So, just what did Bayme write that was so controversial? Here are a
    couple of excerpts:

    ... the account of the Gospels, and its associations with anti-Semitism,
    needs to be honestly confronted, including the question of the
    relationship of church teachings to acts of violence against Jews. Yet
    it is also important that Jews confront their own tradition and ask how
    Jewish sources treated the Jesus narrative. Pointedly, Jews did not
    argue that crucifixion was a Roman punishment and therefore no Jewish
    court could have advocated it. Consider, by contrast, the following text
    from the Talmud:

    On the eve of Passover Jesus was hanged. For forty days before the
    execution took place, a herald went forth and cried, "He is going forth
    to be stoned because he has practiced sorcery and enticed Israel to
    apostasy. Anyone who can say anything in his favor let him come forward
    and plead on his behalf." But since nothing was brought forward in his
    favor, he was hanged on the eve of Passover. Ulla retorted: Do you
    suppose he was one for whom a defense could be made? Was he not a mesith
    (enticer), concerning whom Scripture says, "Neither shall thou spare nor
    shall thou conceal him?" With Jesus, however, it was different, for he
    was connected with the government. (Sanhedrin 43a)

    This text, long censored in editions of the Talmud, is concerned
    primarily with due process in capital crimes. Standard process requires
    that punishment be delayed for forty days in order to allow extenuating
    evidence to be presented. However, in extreme cases, such as seducing
    Israel into apostasy, this requirement is waived. The case of Jesus,
    according to the Talmud, constituted an exception to this rule. Although
    one who enticed Israel into apostasy is considered an extreme case, the
    Jews at the time waited forty days because of the close ties of Jesus to
    the Roman authorities. However, once the forty days elapsed without the
    presentation of favorable or extenuating comment about him, they
    proceeded to kill him on the eve of Passover.

    Three themes emanate from this passage. First, the charges against Jesus
    relate to seduction of Israel into apostasy and the practice of sorcery.
    According to the Gospels, the charges against Jesus concerned his
    self-proclamation as a messiah. The Talmud seems to prefer the more
    specific charges of practicing sorcery and leading Israel into false
    beliefs. One twentieth-century historian, Morton Smith of Columbia
    University, argued on the basis of recently discovered "hidden Gospels"
    that the historical Jesus indeed was a first-century sorcerer (Jesus the
    Magician, HarperCollins, 1978). In the eyes of the Talmudic rabbis, the
    practice of sorcery and false prophecy constituted capital crimes
    specifically proscribed in Deuteronomy 18: 10-12 and 13: 2-6.

    Second, the Talmud is here offering a subtle commentary upon Jesus'
    political connections. The Gospels portray the Roman governor Pontius
    Pilate as going to great lengths to spare Jesus (Mark 15: 6-15).
    Although this passage may well have been written to appease the Roman
    authorities and blame the Jews, the Talmudic passage points in the same
    direction: The Jews waited forty days, in a departure from the usual
    practice, only because Jesus was close to the ruling authorities.

    Lastly, the passage suggests rabbinic willingness to take responsibility
    for the execution of Jesus. No effort is made to pin his death upon the
    Romans. In all likelihood, the passage in question emanates from
    fourth-century Babylon, then the center of Talmudic scholarship, and
    beyond the reach of both Rome and Christianity. Although several hundred
    years had elapsed since the lifetime of Jesus, and therefore this is not
    at all a contemporary source, the Talmudic passage indicates rabbinic
    willingness to acknowledge, at least in principle, that in a Jewish
    court and in a Jewish land, a real-life Jesus would indeed have been
    executed.

    ...

    What, then, are the implications of this reading of Jesus through the
    eyes of rabbinic sources? First, we do require honesty on both sides in
    confronting history. Jewish apologetics that "we could not have done it"
    because of Roman sovereignty ring hollow when one examines the Talmudic
    account. However, the significance of Vatican II, conversely, should by
    no means be minimized. The Church went on record as abandoning the
    teaching of contempt in favor of historicizing the accounts of the
    Gospels and removing their applicability to Jews of later generations. A
    mature Jewish-Christian relationship presupposes the ability of both
    sides to face up to history, acknowledge errors that have been
    committed, and build a social contract in which each side can both
    critique as well as assign value to its religious counterpart.

    In 2004, David Klinghoffer, a columnist for Jewish Forward and author of
    The Discovery of God: Abraham and the Birth of Monotheism wrote a piece
    similar to Bayme's for the Los Angeles Times entitled "Gibson's view of
    'Passion' supported by Jewish texts." Here are two excerpts:

    Mel Gibson's movie about the death of Jesus, "The Passion of the
    Christ," has created an angry standoff between the filmmaker and Jewish
    critics who charge him with anti-Semitism. The controversy will continue
    to affect relations between Christians and Jews unless some way to cool
    it can be found. One possible cooling agent is an honest look at how
    ancient Jewish sources portrayed the Crucifixion.

    According to people who have seen a rough cut, Gibson's film depicts the
    death of Christ as occurring at the hands of the Romans but at the
    instigation of Jewish leaders, the priests of the Jerusalem Temple. The
    Anti-Defamation League charges that this recklessly stirs anti-Jewish
    hatred and demands that the film be edited to eliminate any suggestion
    of Jewish deicide.

    But Jewish tradition acknowledges that our leaders in first-century
    Palestine played a role in Jesus' execution. If Gibson is an
    anti-Semite, so is the Talmud and so is the greatest Jewish sage of the
    past 1,000 years, Maimonides.

    ...

    A relevant example comes from the Talmudic division known as Sanhedrin,
    which deals with procedures of the Jewish high court: "On the eve of
    Passover they hung Jesus of Nazareth. And the herald went out before him
    for 40 days (saying, `Jesus) goes forth to be stoned, because he has
    practiced magic, enticed and led astray Israel. Anyone who knows
    anything in his favor, let him come and declare concerning him.' And
    they found nothing in his favor."

    The passage indicates that Jesus' fate was entirely in the hands of the
    Jewish court. The last two of the three items on Jesus' rap sheet, that
    he "enticed and led astray" fellow Jews, are terms from Jewish biblical
    law for an individual who influenced others to serve false gods, a crime
    punishable by being stoned, then hung on a wooden gallows. In the
    Mishnah, the rabbinic work on which the Talmud is based, compiled about
    the year 200, Rabbi Eliezer explains that anyone who was stoned to death
    would then be hung by his hands from two pieces of wood shaped like a
    capital letter T -- in other words, a cross (Sanhedrin 6:4).

    These texts convey religious beliefs, not necessarily historical facts.
    The Talmud elsewhere agrees with the Gospel of John that Jews at the
    time of the Crucifixion did not have the power to carry out the death
    penalty. Also, other Talmudic passages place Jesus 100 years before or
    after his actual lifetime. Some Jewish apologists argue that these must
    therefore deal with a different Jesus of Nazareth. But this is not how
    the most authoritative rabbinic interpreters, medieval sages saw the
    matter.

    Maimonides, writing in 12th-century Egypt, made clear that the Talmud's
    Jesus is the one who founded Christianity. In his great summation of
    Jewish law and belief, the Mishneh Torah, he wrote of "Jesus of
    Nazareth, who imagined that he was the Messiah, but was put to death by
    the court." In his "Epistle to Yemen," he states that "Jesus of Nazareth
    ... interpreted the Torah and its precepts in such a fashion as to lead
    to their total annulment. The sages, of blessed memory, having become
    aware of his plans before his reputation spread among our people, meted
    out fitting punishment to him."

    Finally, there is "What happened to Jesus' haftarah?" Hananel Mack,
    lecturer in the Naftal-Yaffe Department of Talmud at Bar-Ilan
    University. In the Israeli daily, Ha'aretz, Mack writes about how Jewish
    hostility toward Jesus and Christianity has effected haftarah, the
    "custom of reading a chapter from the Prophets section of the Bible in
    public in the synagogue." The haftarah, according to Mack, is "an
    integral part of the Jewish liturgy on Sabbaths and holidays."

    Generally speaking, Jews excluded from the haftarot those verses on
    which Christians based the principles of their religious faith. Thus,
    all of the customs related to the haftarah readings omit the passage in
    Isaiah whose focus is the well-known verse, Behold, a virgin shall
    conceive, and bear a son" (7:14), because it is the foundation of the
    Christian belief in the concept of the Virgin Mary and the virgin birth
    of Jesus.

    ...

    The same principle is applied in the case of the "Christological"
    passages outside the Book of Isaiah. On the second day of Rosh Hashanah,
    the haftarah that is read is one of the most wonderful chapters in the
    Prophets Jeremiah 31. It stops at the famous words that have become part
    of the Jewish liturgy today: "Is Ephraim my dear son? Is he a pleasant
    child? For since I spake against him, I do earnestly remember him still:
    therefore my bowels are troubled for him; I will surely have mercy upon
    him, saith the Lord" (Jeremiah 31:20). It is no mere coincidence that
    the haftarah ends here and does not continue with the next few verses,
    to the promise that Jeremiah utters regarding the new covenant that God
    will draw up in the future with his people[--] one of the most commonly
    quoted passages in the New Testament.