The despicable incident that took place several days ago near the walls of Jerusalem's Old City shamefully passed under Israeli radar: A Jewish man, running at speed, forcefully shoved a French Catholic nun, about 50 years old, in the back as she was just walking down the street.
The nun was slammed hard to the ground and began bleeding. Seconds later, the man returned to "finish" the job and kicked the nun while she was lying on the stone pavement. A passerby who intervened and moved the attacker away from the nun was also beaten.
Sadly, this assault is not an isolated incident. It joins dozens of incidents over the past two years in which Christians in Jerusalem have been targeted on religious and racist grounds. They are allegedly carried out in the name of Judaism, but they have absolutely nothing to do with Judaism.
When incidents like this happen in Israel or abroad and Jews, usually visibly ultra-Orthodox, are the ones attacked, we rightly raise an outcry and define them as "antisemitic" and as "racially motivated terrorism." That is the case in Stamford Hill in London, in Williamsburg in Brooklyn, New York, and in Antwerp, Belgium.
In Israel, by contrast, similar incidents, even if they are on a far smaller scale and carried out only by a small handful of people, take place in the capital and elsewhere in the country and are met with horrifying media silence.
Almost no response
Among our rabbis, too, the overwhelming majority of them, and among our politicians, also the overwhelming majority, the attack on the nun in Jerusalem, which received wide coverage in many foreign media outlets and blackened our image in public, passed almost without response.
This was not only a vile act and an assault on a cleric and on a person created in the image of God. It was also a public desecration of God's name and of Judaism. Such an incident also plays into the hands of our enemies, direct and indirect, who challenge our sovereignty and our right to govern Jerusalem. It weakens our claim to freedom of religion in Jerusalem. It even weakens the just demand of Jews who seek to visit and pray on the Temple Mount without harassment and acts of violence.
For some reason, those attackers believe they are sanctifying God's name, or "settling accounts over Christianity's many sins against us throughout the generations." Is there no chief rabbi, city rabbi or neighborhood rabbi whose voice will be heard publicly, who will set them straight, denounce them, call for them to be cast out from our midst, and explain that historical reckonings of this kind are not the business of individuals, but belong in theological dialogue between religious leaders?
The story of the attack on the nun and other incidents like it must transcend political camps, Right and Left, religious and secular. It is foreign to us as Jews. We must make it not only illegitimate, but utterly repugnant. Such incidents have no connection whatsoever to even the fiercest struggle against terrorism, nor to collective punishment of an environment that supports terrorism. This is religious racism, pure and simple, which we Jews have suffered from and continue to suffer from across generations.
It is unclear how, when this happens among us, there is no one, from the prime minister to the local leader, who will protest and cry out. The minimum now required is to invite the assaulted nun and senior clergy members to the office of the mayor of Jerusalem, apologize on behalf of us all, and above all ensure that there are no more such cases, not even a few, not even by a handful.
