Menachem Begin on Brit Hakana’im and Administrative Detention

Did Menachem Begin Call Israeli Laws Nazi Laws?

By  Tzvi Yaakovson  –  

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.

Continue reading…

From Yated Ne’eman, here.

The Evil Man Hamodia Idolized Is Finally Dead

Charles Krauthammer: The Ultimate Armchair Warrior

By Martin Sieff
Strategic Culture

July 2, 2018

Charles Krauthammer, the eminent US media pundit died in June 2018 at the age of 68, reportedly of cancer of the small intestine.

Krauthammer was the loudest and leading public voice of the neoconservative movement in the United States. He was a lifelong warmonger and proud of it. Needless to say he never donned the uniform of his country when he had the chance and made sure his son never went to serve in the conflicts he so tirelessly demanded either.

Krauthammer championed the relentless and unending expansion of NATO into Eastern Europe and the efforts to recruit countries across Eurasia into the Atlantic Alliance. He demanded the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq, and the toppling of previously stable governments in Ukraine and Libya. He urged the toppling of the government of Syria, demanding the policies that have so far killed at least 600,000 people and unleashed more than 5 million refugees. He demanded the 1998 bombing of Serbia. He sneered at the very idea of international law.

Krauthammer applauded the toppling of established governments including democratically elected ones across Europe, Asia, Africa, Latin America and the Middle East in the name of human rights. He relentlessly advocated the invasion of Iraq in 2003 and the ludicrous attempt to set up a US-designed, Shiite-dominated so-called democracy there. He sneered at and denied in the face of all the evidence the formidable anti-American popular rebellion in Iraq that started in May 2003. For months afterward, Krauthammer claimed there was nothing to worry about. Later, he claimed that General David Petraeus had brought lasting peace to Iraq with his “Surge” Strategy.

Krauthammer hated and sought to destroy every attempt to bring a lasting peace between Israel and the Palestinians. He championed the Free Trade policies that gutted the US industrial base and brought poverty and despair to hundreds of millions of Americans. He fanatically opposed the Six-Plus-One nuclear agreement with Iran.

None of his “solutions” worked. He was oblivious to all consequences in the real world. He never changed. He was incapable of learning anything or ever admitting he had been wrong. He had practiced as a psychiatrist, but no one in the public domain was more in need of sustained therapy himself.

In his last message on June 8, Krauthammer wrote, “I believe that the pursuit of truth and right ideas through honest debate and rigorous argument is a noble undertaking.” It was another lie. No one did more to suppress free, balanced and open debate in the US media over four decades. He poured endless hatred and ridicule on everyone who disagreed with him. He was never even an independent voice. Every public position he took was carefully decided and coordinated in advance by the exceptionally close knit coterie of neoconservatives for whom he was the voice.

He appeared endlessly on Fox News and numerous other US media outlets. But no one was ever allowed to seriously criticize him or challenge his assertions in any of those forums. He applauded the passing of the 2001 Patriot Act with its outrageous extension of the already huge power of the US security services and Deep State.

While still in his mid-20s, Krauthammer suffered a bizarre accident that ironically left him immune from criticism for the rest of his life. He shattered his spine diving into a swimming pool which had far too little water in it, leaving him a quadriplegic for life.

He certainly showed an indomitable will and ingenuity in maintaining a full career. However, this personal catastrophe had two other crucial effects never publicly acknowledged: It left him immune to the kind of virulent ad hominem personal abuse and contempt he freely showered on everyone else. He claimed to live in defiance of his physical affliction: Another lie. Any vitriol he poured on others was indulgently permitted. No legitimate criticism was allowed against him.

Second, as a cripple, Krauthammer was incapable of actually ever visiting Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, Libya, Ukraine or the American heartland where the policies he demanded inflicted so much suffering. He did not want to know any such inconvenient facts. He did not just suffer from paradigm blindness all his life, he embraced it.

Although a successful psychiatric resident, he was extraordinarily arrogant and narcissistic and treated most people outside his family and closest colleagues with withering contempt. An informal poll carried out among Washington Post op-ed page editors in the 1990s overwhelmingly chose him as the most obnoxious and hated columnist they had to deal with. (Liberal columnist Richard Cohen easily was voted the most popular and the nicest guy.)

Krauthammer was abysmally ignorant of economics, business, practicalities of government, diplomacy, global history, war and strategy. He had never studied or practiced any of them. This ignorance generated the boundless confidence that was the secret of his success.

Krauthammer was never a reporter. He was physically incapable of visiting any country to see things himself and he was manifestly uninterested in anything that ordinary people anywhere had to say. He knew that he and his friends had all the answers. Nothing else was needed. He was convinced he was one of Plato‘s philosopher-kings, the inner elite that should guide the human race for its own good.

In his very last public statement, he said, “I leave this life with no regrets.”

It was an unintentionally revealing admission: Charles Krauthammer led his own country down the road to waste, endless suffering, unending wars, misery, drug addiction epidemics and economic ruin and helped put the whole world on a helter-skelter slide towards nuclear Armageddon.

But he had no regrets.

From Lewrockwell.com, here.

Trick Me Twice, Shame on Me – Do Our Teachers Engage in Pious Lies?

Darkei Moshe Y.D. 116:5:

כתב הרב ר’ דוד אבודרהם (שער התקופות עמ’ שיא) מצאתי כתוב שיש ליזהר בכל תקופה שלא לשתות מים בשעת התקופה משום סכנה שלא יתנזק ויתנפח והטעם כי טפה דם נופלת בין תקופה לתקופה למים אבל החכם בן עזרא כתב שאלו חכמי קיראו”ן לרב האי למה נוהגין ישראל שבמערב להשמר שלא ישתו מים בשעת התקופה והשיב כי ניחוש בעלמא הוא בעבור שהוא תחלת השנה או רביעית ולא ירצו לשתות מים שימצאו בחגם על כן יאכלו כל מיני מתוקין להיות שנתם מתוקה ואני אומר מתוקה שנת העובד הש”י הבוטח בו לבדו והנה היודעים תקופת האמת לא אמרו כי תזיק בו אכילה או שתיה ודבר ניפוח שיחות הזקינות ויש מהגאונים שאמרו כי לא נחש ביעקב אלא הקדמונים אמרו אלו הדברים להפחיד בני האדם שייראו מאת השם יתברך ולא יוסיפו הרשעים לרשוע וישובו כדי שיצילם הש”י מד’ תקופות השנה.

Perhaps this is premature; I didn’t see Rabbi Ibn Ezra’s quote within (exactly who is piously lying so easily?). But even later Poskim don’t seem bothered by the sevara he mentions, as quoted. I bet Marc Shapiro, author of the excellent “Changing the Immutable” mentions this one somewhere in his articles.

One mustn’t educate with lies!

The Limits of Jewish Civil Obedience

Rabbi Yosef Shlomo Kahaneman made the central distinction right from the start of the state

Here is his timeless instruction, quoted in Nachlas Hashem 54# p. 5:

ביום העצמאות הראשון, שנת תש”ט, דיבר קצרות בפני התלמידים בישיבת פוניבז’ אודות המדינה החדשה. ‘זוהי מלוכה עברית’ אמר, ‘אבל המושלים בה מתנהגים כמו המלך אחאב בתקופת הנביאים. נלחמים בקדשי ישראל, מעבירים את ילדי העולים החדשים על הדת, מחוקקים פה חוקי אָוֶן. אי לזאת עלינו להתנהג כדניאל וחבריו בשעתם וכך נאמר אליהם: ‘במסים ובארנוניות אַתּ ְ מלך עלינו, אבל לדבר הזה שאתה אומר לנו [להשתחוות לצלם] אַתּ ְ וחד כלב שווין עלינן כחדא‘ (מפי תלמידו הגאון רבי יעקב אדלשטיין זצוק”ל. הרב מפוניבז’, ח”ג עמוד וד- קנ”ג. וראה עוד שם ח”ג עמ’ נ-קמ”ט בענין הממשלה החילונית וההתמודדות עמה – בקטע המתחיל ‘רבינו הכריז בפומבי את דעתו, כי קוֹ ם תקום פה מלוכה של יהודים, אשר תתקיים ותחזיק מעמד עד ביאת המשיח… זו תהיה אמנם בתחילתה ממשלה חילונית, נאמר כעין מלכות של אחאב, אבל היה תהיה!… עלינו להיערך בהתאם לעובדה זו…’. עיי”ש שהאריך בעמודים הבאים).

If you want to rob us, fine (although it’s harder to keep the Torah when you’re poor). But if you suggest we violate Hashem’s laws in the slightest? We pay about as much attention to the state of Israel as we do a dog (at least that is how it should be).