Israel's Culture War Is Getting Ugly
By Daniel Gordis
Measured against a tempestuous U.S. election season and a failed Turkish coup, Israel (for a change) seems quiet and stable. Bolstered by coalition agreements with the religious right, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu seems politically secure. For now, at least, elections are not on the Israeli horizon and the borders are quiet.
Mostly out of international view, however, Israel is in the grips of a renewed battle between an increasingly hard-line, anti-Western and extremist rabbinate, arrayed against Israeli liberal society, the army and even American Jews. The long-simmering battle resurfaced this month when a rabbinic court rejected a woman’s conversion that had been overseen by the widely respected New York Orthodox Rabbi Haskel Lookstein. (Lookstein was the same rabbi who accepted and then declined an invitation to deliver the invocation at the Republican National Convention.)
Despite protests by many moderate personalities, including the long-time Jewish human rights activist Natan Sharansky, the religious courts refused to back down, highlighting their disregard for how foreign Jews and much of Israeli society perceive them.
Then the army announced the nomination of Colonel Eyal Karim for the position of Chief Rabbi of the Israeli Defense Forces. The choice quickly aroused widespread disgust, even among many in the religious community. Karim, it turned out, had referred to homosexuals as “sick.” He said that the reason women cannot give testimony in certain court cases is that they are “sentimental” by inclination. Karim had also intimated that soldiers could legitimately rape women during war and that wounded terrorists should be killed, a subject particularly sensitive in Israel due to the ongoing trial of Sergeant Elor Azaria, who is now being tried for shooting a neutralized terrorist in Hebron.
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http://www.bloomberg.com/view/articles/2016-07-26/israel-s-culture-war-is-getting-ugly
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