325 members of the academic community in Israel signed the attached letter, demanding to suspend the Chief Rabbi of Safed from his position, after racist attacks on Arab Students in Safed College.
November 14, 2010
To:
The Prime Minister of Israel The Education Minister
The Attorney General
Re: The Wave of Racism and Your Silence
Now is not the time for silence. For some time now, we Israelis have been treading a dangerous path, and have now reached the edge of the abyss—beyond which it is hard to imagine anything but disastrous consequences. It turns out that the antibodies that we thought we had within the polity (the historical product of Jewish experience; the result of our encounter with Kahanism; and so forth) are weaker than the anti-liberal and anti-democratic forces—both religious and secular—which are ideologically motivated and uncompromising. These forces have broken out of many restraints—because, among other reasons, they have been invited to join the governmental coalition itself.
In such a situation, it is the special obligation of the Prime Minister to signal, sharply, the red lines of democracy that must not be crossed. This has not happened. Instead of establishing limits, what the people have gotten from the Government is silence, and this is taken as weakness, at times, even as an implied endorsement.
The most recent manifestation of this is the wave of racism directed at, among others, the Arab students of Safed. This wave is directed by no other than the Chief Rabbi of the city—its official religious authority. With great vehemence, the city Rabbi pronounces from every podium his ‘halakhic’ ruling that prohibits the sale or rental of apartments to Arabs in the city, and he libels these students as harassers of innocent young Jewish women. No authority asked him to stop, and he did not restrain himself, even after an Arab student apartment was attacked by young Jews and one of the attackers used firearms.
It is hard to overestimate the feelings of loneliness, vulnerability and humiliation experienced by the Arab students of Safed. For years they grew accustomed to the fact that ethnocentric considerations take priority, and the institutions of higher education are almost exclusively located in the heart of Jewish populations, but now their suffering is growing and they are forced to confront the real possibility that these cities will be turned into places ‘cleansed’ of Arabs.
We cannot abandon these students in this struggle, which is also a struggle over the very nature of Israeli society. They need the protection of Israeli society, in all its sectors, and the protection of the State—but this protection is slow to come.
We, members of the academic community, demand that you raise your voices, that you demarcate clear red lines against racism, and that you act to have the Chief Rabbi of Safed suspended from his position. We ask you, the Attorney General, to open an investigation of the Chief Rabbi in the context of his harsh pronouncements of recent years and ask of you, the Prime Minister and the Minister of Education, to publicly defend the students in Safed College against these racist attacks.
For further details:
Dr. Ilan Saban (Haifa University) ++927-503808516
Raja Zaatry (Hirak Center) ++927 -544663857