On This Day

Learn about the history of the Palestinian struggle for freedom, equality and justice by exploring major events in the history of their oppression on this day of the year.

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6 March

Mercaz HaRavPALESTINIAN RETALIATION FOR GAZA MASSACRE & RESPONSE
On this day in 2008, a Palestinian killed eight Israeli students in an extremist settler-movement training centre, in retaliation for Israel’s massacre of over a hundred Gazans, mostly civilians. Seminary students chanted “Death to the Arabs” at the gates of their seat of learning. For Gideon Levy, Mercaz Ha Rav produced “the vilest movement in Zionist history”, the murderous settler group ‘Gush Emunim’, a group known for racist ideology and violent attacks against Palestinians.

الانتقام الفلسطيني من مذبحة غزة والرد المضاد

6 مارس

في مثل هذا اليوم من عام 2008 ، قتل فلسطيني ثمانية طلاب إسرائيليين في مركز تدريب لحركة المستوطنين المتطرفة ، ردًا على المذبحة الإسرائيلية التي راح ضحيتها أكثر من مائة من سكان غزة ، معظمهم من المدنيين. وهتف طلاب الحوزة "الموت للعرب" على أبواب مقر تعليمهم. وحسب رأي جدعون ليفي ، فقد أنتج مركاز هراف "أسوأ حركة في التاريخ الصهيوني" ، وهي جماعة المستوطنين القتلة "غوش إيمونيم" ، هذه المجموعة معروفة بالإيديولوجية العنصرية والهجمات الارهابية العنيفة ضد الفلسطينيين. 

 The Mercaz HaRav yeshiva is based on contempt for all Gentiles, not only Arabs. This yeshiva was founded by Rabbi A.Y. Kook, and later led by his son, T.Y. Kook. The manner in which young minds are shaped at this Yeshiva can be guessed from one of A.Y.'s spiritual pronouncements, that “The difference between a Jewish soul and souls of non-Jews – all of them in all different levels – is greater and deeper than the difference between a human soul and the souls of cattle." Kook's classification of Palestinians as non-human allows the graduates of Mercaz HaRav to ignore those commandments that forbid stealing, murder and coveting. Since non-Jews are similar to another species in the Kooks’ world-view, the very notion of human rights governing the relations between Jews and others is naturally repugnant to his followers.

One product of Mercaz HaRav, Rabbi Moshe Levinger, founded the colonies of ultras in Hebron. He  was such a vicious psychopath towards Palestinians that he was even found guilty of killing a Palestinian by an Israeli court. For the murder he served three months in detention. Netanyahu and Israeli President Rivlin eulogised Levinger at his 2015 funeral in the area of the Ibrahimi Mosque where one of Levinger's followers carried out a massacre of 29 Muslim worshippers 21 years earlier.

A left-wing US website asked readers to

Suppose a group of Ku Klux Klan and other white supremacists had their own “church” that was really a center for justifying and organizing murderous attacks on African Americans. Suppose an African-American person, tired of lynchings, tortures, beatings and humiliation of his people, came into this church with guns blazing. Would there be any doubt that this was a reaction to racism, and not hatred of Christians? Wouldn’t it be clear who were the oppressed and who were the oppressors?

...Armed to the teeth with the latest U.S. high-tech weapons, two weeks ago Israel invaded Gaza by land and air killing 126 people, half of them civilians, including 24 children, with 13 of the children toddlers or infants.

Ala Abu Dhaim, a Palestinian worker from the Jebel Mukaber Uof East Jerusalem, “was transfixed by the bloodshed in Gaza,” according to his sister. On March 6, Abu Dhaim, a driver who sometimes made deliveries to the Mercaz Harav yeshiva in Jerusalem, entered that compound and sprayed the young male students with gunfire, killing eight, and then was killed himself.

While silent at the Palestinian deaths, the U.S. press was aghast at the “sacrilege” of shooting down “innocent religious students”. All sympathy was with the yeshiva student families. The New York Times carried extra photos of the funeral on its website.

Ala Abu Dhaim was labeled an anti-Semitic villain, as were other individuals and any organizations that praised his heroism. The Israeli government used his actions to justify its genocidal assaults on Palestinians in Gaza, claiming a need to “protect” its people.

But Mercaz Harav was no ordinary yeshiva. Its students’ reaction to the attack was to chant, “Death to Arabs!” Rabbi David Shalem, director of the Institute of Talmud Studies at the school, called for the Ehud Olmert government to attack Palestinians “everywhere, in Gaza, and the north and inside.” He issued a thinly veiled call for the extermination of Palestinians by referring to them as present-day Amalekites, who were “indigenous nomads who attacked the Israelites on their flight from Egypt and were annihilated by King David.” (New York Times, March 7)