Crossing boundaries

Even if the children of foreign workers are not deported in the end, the sword of deportation hanging over their heads is still a painful image reflecting the face of the State of Israel.

The ministers of this country are seriously deliberating the dangers posed to the Jewish people, the dangers of mixing, the influence of non-Jews on the Jews of the land - when even the nationalists, the pragmatists and the demographers should be delighted to receive such a loyal addition, comprised of people longing to serve in the army, to work and to contribute to the only country they know.

The state funds the education of more than half of all the Jewish first-graders who attend religious and ultra-Orthodox schools. In teaching the assertion of Rabbi Yehuda Halevi - that goyim occupy the lowest rung of all things natural, and Jews belong to the highest - these schools treat this dictum as self-evident.

Protests recently broke out regarding the ethnic segregation in the education of immigrants from Ethiopia - but of course this system observes the segregation of boys from girls, and instills a qualitatively different perception of the secular and the religious. It also insists there is a sharp hierarchical difference between Jews and non-Jews.

When Israeli children grow up they discover that a woman can be exempt from military service simply by being defined as religious, as opposed to non-religious; that the title of "religious student" can make years of mandatory service go away; and that Israeli law does not allow a Jewish man and a non-Jewish woman to marry.

The portrait of the current Israeli reality is not unconnected with the ability to nominate a man like Avichai Rontzki as chief rabbi of the Israel Defense Forces, who ruled that a paramedic must not treat an Arab non-Jew on Shabbat unless he is ordered to do so - in which case he must try to have the order reversed. These views, which resulted in Rontzki's zealous emissaries delivering sermons to IDF troops during the last round of fighting, cannot be separated from the bleak picture, that can be seen through any undistorted mirror, of what those soldiers did where they had been sent. The other side does not have people defined as "Jewish people."

This week Israel is marking the anniversary of the assassination of its prime minister and minister of defense, Yitzhak Rabin. Far from being a pacifist universalist, he nonetheless maintained the vision of a national-democratic state aspiring to a normal existence. To many, Rabin was not murdered a "Jew." Many years before his murder, he had been redefined as "a mixed multitude" - meaning an Amalekite who is merely pretending to be Jewish, belonging to those who infiltrated the ranks of the Israelites on their way to the promised land, the main culprits causing pure Jews to stray off the righteous path.

Unfortunately, the racist mentality that has led many to join the messianic revolution threatening to sweep over Israel continues to show its animosity toward "foreigners." This mentality, which manifested itself in the murder of the prime minister, is continuing to recruit souls on the hills for which Rabin had fought.

This process, which replaces the current democratic-national state (with all of its contradictions and problems) with a borderless entity whose essence is ethno-religious, is not only a moral catastrophe that contradicts the Zionist vision in its entirety. Israel did not withstand all of its enemies since the great rebellion as an ethnic-religious entity. As a borderless, stateless entity Israel will not withstand the growing strategic threat against it. Thus not only the desire for peace for which Rabin was killed will die out, but also the proud dream of Hebrew safety to which Rabin dedicated his life.