The irony of a Haredi paper’s ‘Please don’t kill us’ plea
What an ultra-Orthodox columnist’s strange Arabic plea reveals about Israeli-Palestinian violence
A curious sight greeted the
readers of the ultra-Orthodox newspaper Mishpacha on Thursday: a message
printed by the editors in Arabic.
“Don’t
be startled,” deputy editor Aryeh Erlich wrote in Hebrew beneath the
Arabic script. “No Islamic hacker has taken over the newspaper’s
computers. The strange text that opens this column is not an act of
malice, or a misprint. You can relax. You hold in your hands the
Mishpacha newspaper, which publishes in Hebrew and will continue to do
so. This is simply an appeal to our cousins who live by the sword,
rooted in the hope (a frail one, to be sure) that this magazine may find
its way to some influential Arab. Here is a translation of our
admittedly slightly bizarre appeal.”
The translation of the Arabic appeal follows:
“We, the Haredi public, have no interest in going up to the Temple Mount
at this time. We vehemently oppose doing so. Even more: Jewish law
severely proscribes such an act — on penalty of spiritual
excommunication. Therefore you will never see Haredim ascending the
mount, with the exception of one single family, acting on its own, which
is condemned for the practice. So even if you have in your hand solid
information about an Israeli desire to change the status quo at the Dome
of the Rock — which is not true, as far as we know — this has nothing
to do with the Haredi public. So please, stop murdering us.”
There is much to unpack in this strange
editorial. For one thing, it sparkles with irony. It mocks its own
“slightly bizarre” premise that printing such an appeal in Arabic might
have an effect.
And despite the pretense that it is begging
Palestinians to spare Haredi lives, it is not actually respectful of
Palestinians, calling them “our cousins who live by the sword,” both
stereotyping them as violent and painting them with a cultural
vocabulary reminiscent of the Biblical Esau or the czarist Cossaks.
The final juxtaposition of politeness (“so
please”) and morbid supplication (“stop murdering us”) ties together all
of the odd appeal’s disparate elements, bringing the underlying irony
to the fever pitch of sarcasm.
And yet, interviewed on Army Radio Thursday
morning, Erlich explained that there was a very real problem he was
trying to address.
“In their propaganda, the Islamists show [a Jew] in religious garb as seeking to build the Third Temple,” he explained.
Asked who “us” was in his request to “stop murdering us,” he said, “’us’ is anyone with a religious appearance.”
Israeli
police stand guard at the entrance to the Al-Aqsa compound on the
Temple Mount in Jerusalem’s Old City Thursday, Oct. 8, 2015. (AP
Photo/Mahmoud Illean)
The response on Thursday morning was immediate
and indignant. Erlich was accused by some of urging Palestinian
terrorists to attack non-Haredi Jews.
Yossi Elituv, Mishpacha’s editor and Erlich’s
boss, both defended and distanced himself from the column on Twitter.
“Aryeh Erlich tried in his way to emphasize the lie in the Palestinian
cry of ‘Temple Mount,’ when in practice they murder any Jew, regardless
of their view [on visiting the mount].”
Erlich “tried,” Elituv noted, “but I’m not sure he succeeded.”
The column “requires an unambiguous
clarification,” Elituv continued. “There are no ‘Haredim,’ there are
only ‘Jews.’ Islamic hatred does not distinguish between Jews of all
types – Haredim, knit-kippa wearers and secularists.”
But Erlich himself, speaking in his own
defense Thursday, pointed to a deeper impulse for what he now calls the
“gimmick” that opens his column.
“The wearers of kippot have become the symbols
of the current jihad,” he said. “The Islamic Movement tries to paint
the struggle as a religious war and calls for violence against those
with a religious appearance.”
That sense of special endangerment rooted in
their religiously identifying garb lies at the root of his strange
column, he explained.
And he’s right. The Haredi sense that they are
more threatened by the terror than secular Israelis is very real, and
it is rooted in one of the most interesting and least acknowledged facts
of this violence: that it is surprisingly hard to tell Jews and
Palestinians apart.
That is, when they are stripped of context and
religious identifiers, when they meet in plain, Western garb on the
street or in the workplace, the supposedly “Western” Jew is often
darker-skinned than the “Eastern” Arab. Half of Israel’s Jews, after
all, come from the Arab and Muslim world, while Palestinian Arabs are
likewise a people of many skin tones, from dark Bedouin in the south to
blue-eyed Christians in the north.
This challenge of physical similarity has been a recurring theme in the violence of the past month.
On the Jewish side, the dark skin of the
Beersheba central bus station attacker, who was a Negev Bedouin, likely
contributed to the mistaken assault by a Jewish mob on an innocent
Eritrean asylum seeker at the scene. Similarly, a Jew in the northern
town of Kiryat Ata stabbed an Arab man outside an Ikea furniture store –
only to discover his victim was a Yemenite Jew.
On the Palestinian side, the problem of
distinguishing Jew from Arab drives the basic behavior of the
terrorists, who have taken care to direct their attacks at discernibly
Jewish victims – either striking at uniformed members of the security
services or at those whose religion-specific clothing leaves no doubt
about their Jewishness.
Some Israeli commentators have taken this
telling peculiarity of this ethnic clash even further, noting that the
terrorists often strike the very Jews who support the cause they claim
to be fighting for.
“A terrorist’s life is hard,” television anchor Linoy Bar Geffen wrote on Facebook in response to Erlich’s column.
“What does he want, after all? To arrive at
the center of town with a sharpened blade and liquidate a few Jews. But
in the moment before the blade finds its place, he has to start with the
selection: that brownish fellow – maybe he isn’t even a Jew? That
elderly religious man – maybe he only looks like a Bennett supporter but
is actually a leftist whose death will make The Shadow happy? That wrapped woman – maybe she’s Haredi and opposes changing the status quo and ascending the Temple Mount?”
happy? That wrapped woman – maybe she’s Haredi and opposes changing the status quo and ascending the Temple Mount?”
Erlich’s critics are wrong. He did not
seriously call for terrorists to refocus their efforts on non-Haredi
Jews. The evidence for that is as straightforward as one might hope: the
Arabic text he printed at the top of his editorial is fake. Or, rather,
it is the Google Translate translation of his appeal, which was only
actually published in Hebrew.
The Arabic is, as one Arabic reader informed
Erlich on Twitter Thursday morning, “atrocious.” It is not meant to
convince any Palestinian would-be attacker; it is not really meant to be
read at all.
Yet it conveyed a tension that is all too real
in this conflict. It is not merely foreigners who cannot always tell
the difference between “Middle Easterners”; Arabs and Jews in this land
often struggle to tell each other apart. This fact pervades the
fighting, and gently, persistently points to the tragic irony in its
continuation.
