About a month ago, I was walking along the perimeter of the Knesset during an ordinary sitting, when I suddenly froze in my tracks. Ayman Oudeh, the chairman of the Joint Arab List, was speaking at the Knesset podium, and he had made an impossible statement. Actually, he had cited a quote that could not possibly be accurate.
It was a Wednesday afternoon at the beginning of Teves and January. The topic under discussion was the UN Security Council resolution concerning Yerushalayim. It didn’t seem likely that anything of note could be said in the course of the discussion. Yaakov Margi of the Shas party delivered an address that was entirely predictable, and Ayman Oudeh then went to the podium. The content of his speech should have been equally predictable – but it wasn’t.
Oudeh decided to speak about a different topic, which is also not unusual for the Knesset. “Mr. Speaker and my colleague, Yaakov Margi,” he began. “Mohammed Khaled Ibrahim – has anyone heard that name? Mohammed Khaled Ibrahim is a twenty-year-old young man from the village of Kabul, a citizen of the State of Israel. He was arrested last year on May 11, and was placed in administrative detention. But I understand why you have never heard his name: He is an Arab. Even though he is a citizen of the State of Israel, you have never heard his name.
“What is administrative detention?” Oudeh continued. “It is when a person is not brought to court and doesn’t know what he has done wrong. His parents don’t know what he has done wrong, and even we do not know what the charges against him are, but he has been in jail for six months already.”
All of that was predictable and even boring. These are routine matters. The right-wing activists who are known as the “hilltop youth” suffer from the same phenomenon; they can be placed in “administrative detention” without anyone explaining the reason, and without being given the right to consult with a lawyer. This has been the law since the state was first founded. Dr. Anat Barko (who wrote her doctoral thesis on the subject of Palestinian women committing suicide bombings) interjected, “It is a groundless arrest.”
Oudeh then hinted at the bombshell he was preparing to drop. He had simply been waiting for the interjection. “You say that the arrest is groundless,” he said. “Let us listen to the words of your famous leader, Menachem Begin, according to the Knesset protocols from May 21, 1951. I would never have had the audacity to say this, but these were his words, spoken in this very Knesset, about the law of administrative detention. ‘There are laws that are tyrannical, there are laws that are unethical, and there are Nazi laws.’ Menachem Begin himself said that this law is ‘tyrannical,’ ‘unethical,’ and a ‘Nazi law.’ This illegal imprisonment and administrative order is an act of audacity, and according to the legendary leader of the Cherut party – which is known as the Likud in its current incarnation – you have no right to do it.”
I listened as Oudeh spoke, and I could not believe that he was telling the truth. I was certain that the quote had been falsified. It was unthinkable that Menachem Begin could have uttered the word “Nazi” while referring to a law of the State of Israel. After all, it was Begin himself who organized massive protests against the acceptance of reparations from Germany. The horrors of the Holocaust were ingrained in his consciousness; how could he have said such a thing?
It seemed to me that the members of the Knesset were not listening, or perhaps they simply didn’t grasp the significance of Oudeh’s words. Yehuda Glick of the Likud party called out, “Would you say the same thing if a Jew was detained?”
“I am against any administrative detention,” Oudeh replied, “whether it is an Arab or a Jew.”
None of the few people present in the plenum challenged the veracity of the quote from Menachem Begin. No one demanded a clarification about the circumstances in which he had said those words – if he had actually said them at all.
Though it was clear to me that the quote was false, I made my way to the archives where the protocols of every Knesset sitting are kept. When I found the transcript in question, I received a double shock. First, I discovered that the quote came from a discussion in the Knesset about us – the chareidim. Menachem Begin was speaking about chareidim who had been placed in administrative detention. This took place at the very beginning of the history of the state, three years after its founding, and concerned an underground group known as the Brit HaKanoim. That episode led to another scandal, when it was revealed that the chareidi detainees at the Jalmi detention camp had been abused and tortured. Most of the speakers in the Knesset on that occasion attacked Moshe Sharett, the deputy prime minister at the time, for supporting their arrest. Menachem Begin, the leader of Etzel and head of the opposition, was undoubtedly the most outspoken of them all.
My second surprise came from Begin’s words themselves. Whoever it was who found the quote that Oudeh cited in the Knesset could have added many more choice excerpts of his speech on that day. Evidently, Oudeh’s researcher was too lazy to look further, or perhaps he did not imagine that anything more caustic could have been said. Nevertheless, I read Begin’s entire address, and I found that he attacked the law of administrative detention, and the arrests of yeshiva bochurim, with no less virulence than Oudeh himself displayed in the Knesset.
•••
First, a little background. The Brit HaKanoim was a group of young Yerushalmi chareidim who were outraged at the scourge of public chillul Shabbos and the sale of nonkosher food in the holy city. They were not like the kanoim of Mea Shearim with whom we are familiar today; rather, they were bochurim from respected families who were part of mainstream chareidi society. In later years, one of those bochurim, Shlomo Lorintz, became a member of the Knesset from Agudas Yisroel. Another, Rav Mordechai Eliyahu, went on to become the chief rabbi of Israel. That should give you an idea of who the group’s members were….
They called themselves an “underground,” and according to police investigators and the Shin Bet, the group had about 35 members. They were active from 1949 through 1951, and they employed tactics that drew the criticism of the gedolim, although it was clear that their intentions were noble. The bochurim claimed that they had the backing of Rav Tzvi Pesach Frank, the rov of Yerushalayim. They began their work by sending threatening letters to the owners of stores that sold treif meat, and to the managers of taxi companies that operated on Shabbos. In January 1951, they torched about 15 cars that had been seen driving in the vicinity of Geulah on Shabbos, and they also set fire to a butcher shop.
From Yated Ne’eman, here.
