It doesn't matter if they're rabbis, qadis, or priests. As long as they're speaking in the name of God or as his representatives on earth, they become a powerful and influential force. That power of theirs – not all of them – sometimes leads to hate crimes. But someone who is harmed by a hate crime doesn't care whether the person who attacked them reads the Bible or the Quran, whether they were influenced by modern Hebrew or literary Arabic.
In this paper, op-ed writer Tal Gilad blamed the Left of hypocrisy about an Arab youth being stabbed in Jaffa. He argued that the Israeli Left kept quiet about how Arab Israeli society treats the LGBTQ community. As usual, it turned into a matter of Right vs. Left. Why? Because Gilad, like many on the Right, has a hard time with the fact that when it comes to women's rights, the LGBTQ community, women's rights and modesty, every religion is as shocking as the next.
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We are the chosen people, they say. What do we have in common with these primitive Arabs? They carry out "honor killings," but us? Heaven forbid. We merely exclude women/throw gay kids out of the house/have an education minister who sends LGBTQ youth to conversion therapy. We aren't animals, we're Jews.
The "mentality" Gilad talks of, "their" so-called mentality, is different. As is their "education" and "tradition." There, women sit at home, dress modestly, are second-class citizens. With us, on the other hand a woman's modesty is her honor, and there are no women in the ultra-Orthodox parties. That's something completely different.
Gilad also completely ignores any data that does not jive with his thesis: according to the Central Bureau of Statistics, 17% of college and university students in Israel are Arabs, and two-thirds of those are women. And those women are studying not only nursing or education, but also medicine and business management. This is a real revolution.
But the move toward integration into Israeli society runs up against the wall of the Israeli Right, which is afraid of the moment when the Arab citizens of Israel will no longer be a target for their hatred. So they continue to spout clichés about "lifestyle," which in reality changes all the time. It sticks to an image of Arabs that is convenient and serves its interests on election day.
No one is making blanket accusations against all religious Jews or all rabbis. Criticism lies at the heart of any discussion of hatred in the name of religion. Too many hate crimes are carried out in God's name, in the name of a sense of superiority that was supposedly acquired from a higher power. The people who murdered African Americans in the US were always good Christians, and the people who attack LGBTQ people are going after those who "desecrate" the will of God. Ironically, here in Israel, with all the religious zealots, it turns out that the haters from all religions share a common God.
