Haaretz: Jews are sacred and Palestinians are aggressors. Eulogy reflects settler mentality and Israeli government

The Israeli newspaper Haaretz published an article highlighting the mentality of Israeli settlers in Palestine, which he believes reflects the way the public and government think in Israel.

Avi Garfinkel argued that a eulogy delivered by Rabbi Eliezer Melamed at the funeral of two brother settlers killed in an operation carried out by a Palestinian militant in the West Bank town of Huwwara on February 26 should be read by anyone who wants to look closely at what he described as "contemporary Israel" to understand where it comes from and where it is heading.

He noted the eulogy for the eulogy as the weekly Makor Rishon, linked to religious Zionism and the far-right, published on its cover page contrary to the usual, and its executive director, Doron Penhorn, stated that "the rabbi's eulogy should be taught in schools."

The executive director of the Hebrew-language newspaper is right that the eulogy deserves to be taught to school students: "It is a model text, not only because it is well written and moving, but also because it is an excellent example of the way the settlers think, which has also become the way the Israeli public and the Israeli government certainly think."

"Jewish dead are sacred"

In his eulogy, Rabbi Melamed said that "every Jew who is killed simply because he is a Jew is holy," meaning that he believes that the only reason for the attacks carried out by Palestinians against Israelis is an incomprehensible hatred of Jews, which has nothing to do with the actions or behavior of the Jews, or with the feeling that the Jews have wronged them.

Garfinkel highlights that Rabbi Melamed's speech portrays Jews as victims while Palestinians as aggressors: "In the Melamed world, there is no dispossession and expulsion of people, no violence against innocent Palestinians, no damage to their property, no humiliation to them."

He cannot view attacks by Palestinians as revenge for what the Jews have done to them, just as the Jews have avenged the deaths of the two Jewish brothers killed in Huwara.

According to Rabbi Melamed, such acts are motivated by sheer anti-Semitism, and Jews are killed solely because of their Jewish religion. Garfinkel cautions that this argument fails to explain why Palestinians do not kill Jews elsewhere in the world other than Palestine.

The article criticizes the rabbi's assertion that every Jew killed because of his Jewishness is considered sacred, as the generalization means that even murderers, rapists, thieves and other sinners rise to the status of saints only because of the circumstances in which they died, regardless of the evil they committed in their lives.

Melamed extended the status of holiness to all settlers, saying, "If this is what is said about every Jew, then surely it should be said about the settlers who live on the front line of settlement in Judea and Samaria (the West Bank)," according to the Haaretz article.

The settlers are a blessing to the Arabs!

The article touched on the idea of Jewish superiority that dominates Jewish extremists in Israel, pointing out the need to understand that the sense of superiority of these religious Jews is authentic, even if it seems absurd in some situations, and gave the example of Rabbi Melamed's eulogy for the slain settlers when he said, "We did not return to our country to expel the Arabs from their homes, but to bring goodness and blessing to the world. Arabs can also benefit from this," he claimed.

At the end of the eulogy, entitled "We Die and Occupy the Temple Mount," the author said that Rabbi Melamed repeated outdated clichés that settlers would continue to build the land and turn the desert into fertile land, ignoring the fact that almost all construction on the land is carried out by Arabs and other non-Jewish workers.

Garfinkel concluded that what matters now is what is happening in the realm of truth and not the world of lies, "the reality we live in and from which many settlers seem to be disturbingly disconnected," stressing that what Israelis need now is not to occupy the Temple Mount, but to descend from it as quickly as possible.