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Zionism And Jewish Ethics: An Interview With Yakov Rabkin

March 13, 2015 By Dr. Milena Rampoldi Leave a Comment

Milena Rampoldi: My organization, ProMosaik e.V., is of the opinion that there is an opposition between Jewish religious and ethical values and the State of Israel. How do you see this and which are the principal aspects of opposition between the Jewish ethics and the State of Israel, as it is at the moment?

Yakov Rabkin: In spite of its many new allies, Zionism is under enormous pressure from within as more Jews, in Israel and elsewhere, come to question the wisdom of maintaining a Zionist state that consecrates discrimination and fuels violence. Yet, Zionism’s original revolutionary intolerance does not allow this pressure to be relieved through strategic adjustments. It maintains Zionist orthodoxy at a time when Israeli society, the embodiment of Zionism, has long shed its revolutionary nature and embraced bourgeois values and consumerism. A hard core of devoted settlers, mostly drawn from the National Religious circles, retain some of the revolutionary zeal and the culture of self-sacrifice, even though they have also absorbed many of the bourgeois values they often strenuously decry.

Zionism was a revolution. Like any revolution, it produced counter-revolutionaries, Jews who opposed Zionism encompassed a whole gamut: from Rabbi S.R. Hirsch in Germany to Hasidim in Eastern Europe, and from Moroccan Jewish notables to American Reform Jews. The opposition to Zionism and to Israel’s treatment of Palestinians draws on basic Judaic principles of justice as well as on the prudence in issues related to Messiah and Redemption.

Filed Under: Civil Liberties, Foreign Affairs Tagged With: Canada, ethics, Israel, Judaism, Palestine, Zionism

Private Sadism Companies & The Torture Report

December 10, 2014 By David Isenberg 2 Comments

Although the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence study itself is noticeably reticent to call what the CIA did torture, mostly using the word in footnotes, and talking about laws against, and concerns about, torture it does say, in the foreword by Committee chairman Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-CA), that, “While the Office of Legal Counsel found otherwise between 2002 and 2007, it is my personal conclusion that, under any common meaning of the term, CIA detainees were tortured.”

People will be furiously debating the cons and pros — and yes, there are people, besides Dick Cheney and Fox News commentators who think torture is okay — of government sponsored torture.

But to focus just on the government misses the forest for the trees. Let’s give full credit where it is due. This was not just a public sector activity. This was a joint public-private sector initiative, done with the witting, if not altogether competent, participation of the private sector.

Filed Under: Foreign Affairs, National News Tagged With: Abu Ghraib, al-Qaida, army, Blackwater, CIA torture, contractors, Detention and Interrogation Program, Dianne Feinstein, Dick Cheney, ethics, extraordinary rendition, Homeland Security, Human Rights, intelligence, International Code of Conduct for Private Security Providers, International Stability Operations Association, James Risen, New York Times, Pay Any Price: Greed Power and Endless War, Private Security Companies, rendition, Senate Intelligence Committee, torture, torture report

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