Jottings 10: The rabbi who cried Allahu Akbar
[ by Charles Cameron — expect the unexpected ]
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I can’t claim to understand Hebrew or Arabic, but the late Rabbi Menachem Froman, a leading Gush Emunim settler rabbi, can clearly be heard shouting “Allahu Akbar” at 5.37 and then repeatedly at 5.42 and following.
What’s going on?
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I wrote a while back:
I am hoping to make Jottings a continuing series of brief posts, some serious and some light-hearted, that release the toxins of fascination and abhorrence from my system rapidly, ie without too much time spent in research. Jottings — hey, my degree was in Theology, Mother of the Sciences — derives from the English “jot” — and thence from the Greek iota and Hebrew yod, see Wikipedia on jots and tittles.
Today, I hope to post four more of them. This one’s the first.
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Rabbi Froman was visiting a mosque that had been desecrated the previous day by a group of his fellow settlers, who had scribbled the phrase “price tag” and some slurs against the Prophet on the walls, then set the mosque on fire.
Harvard Professor Noah Feldman, in a Bloomberg op-ed titled Is a Jew Meshuga for Wanting to Live in Palestine? explains:
If Israelis and Palestinians agree on one thing, it’s that more settlements in the West Bank will eventually make a two-state solution impossible. Rabbi Menachem Froman, who died on March 4 at age 68, thought differently.
Froman was a proud and early settler, a founder of the hard-line Gush Emunim (“Bloc of the Faithful”), theologically committed to permanent Jewish settlement in what he considered historical Judea and Samaria. But Froman also fully accepted the idea of a Palestinian state there — in which he and his fellow settlers would continue to live as minority citizens.
Crazy, you say — as did just about everyone else in Israel, to say nothing of other settlers. Froman played up the appearance of madness by appearing in Palestinian villages in his prayer shawl, tefillin (phylacteries) and long white beard and blessing the people in Arabic and Hebrew. His acting and speaking like a biblical figure further underscored the impression that he was some sort of unrealistic prophet, whether utopian or dystopian resting in the eye of the beholder.
But why, really, is it impossible to imagine that religiously committed Jews might live under Palestinian sovereignty as citizens in the way that some Palestinian Arabs live under Jewish sovereignty in Israel proper? Looking at the standard reasons carefully, instead of just assuming their truth, can provide us with a much-needed thought experiment about the viability of the two-state solution, which looks increasingly tenuous to its supporters and critics alike.
Food for whatever that thing is that hearts and minds do.
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Related readings:
Yair Rosenberg, To Save the Peace Process, Get Religion International Crisis Group, Leap of Faith: Israel’s National Religious and the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict Adam Garfinkle, If Kerry Wants To Make Peace in the Middle East, He Should Just Put God In Charge
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Allahu Akbar — God is Great. Not such an unexpected sentiment coming from a rabbi, after all?
February 18th, 2014 at 8:41 pm
“Allahu Akbar — God is Great. Not such an unexpected sentiment coming from a rabbi, after all?”
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I suppose, as a great man once said, you have to define “is”. “Is” we talking about the workspace or the culture that occupies the structure of the workspace?
February 19th, 2014 at 1:31 pm
Hi Larry:
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I see a form of cognitive dissonance — between an expectation of the settler rabbi and the reality of his use of an Arabic phrase often associated in “western” minds with acts of Salafi-jihadist violence — and its resolution via the literal meaning the the phrase, God is great.