#yeshayahu leibowitz

[religiousdiscourse]

Brawer, Naftali (2008). A Brief Guide to Judaism. London: Robinson, p.48

In the words of the Israeli teacher Yeshayahu Leibowitz, man's path to God is an infinite path with an unattainable end. He believes that carrying out the mitzvot (Jewish religious obligations) will not bring you closer to God, but that the virtue in carrying out mitzvot never the less lays in striving and attempting to do so.

[sopherzzzz]

"Leibowitz did not believe in the Messianic Age as traditionally understood: "the profound religious meaning of the messianic idea consists in presenting a goal and a purpose towards which one must strive eternally. The Messiah is essentially he who always will come, he is the eternal future. The Messiah who comes, the Messiah of the present, is inevitably the false Messiah." He viewed the expectations of a literal Messianic Age as blurring the line between "religious faith aimed at the service of God and psychological yearnings for the satisfaction of human aspirations."

-from Yeshayahu Leibowitz's wikipedia page

[anaxerneas]

The idea of ethical mitzvoth, however, now becomes an oxymoron for Leibowitz. An act is either religious or ethical. Even “You shall love your neighbor as yourself,” is to be regarded as a mitzvah, not as an ethical precept. The key phrase in the verse containing this commandment for Leibowitz is that which follows immediately to end the verse: “I am God.” It is a duty towards one’s neighbor that is based on man’s position before God, not his position before his fellow man.

The question that arises, however, is whether in the case of ethically motivated acts that coincide with mitzvoth, a Jew ought to have instead performed the act for religious reasons – a position that would not leave much room for a religious person to perform an ethical action. Indeed, it would seem that if one wishes to perform the mitzvah of, for example, “loving one’s neighbor,” one ought not to be acting based on ethical motives. As such, it is not clear what becomes of the legitimacy of the ethical realm for a religious Jew, since every ethically motivated act constitutes a missed opportunity for the worship of God. Each act ought to be religiously rather than ethically motivated, even when the mere act itself would be the same. While it is not as if one who is ethically motivated can sincerely transform that ethical motivation into a religious one, it seems as if becoming the type of person who naturally acts religiously in such cases would have to be the ultimate aim for Leibowitz. This would not deny all value to ethically motivated acts, but it certainly seems to problematize those that coincide with specific mitzvoth for Jews qua Jews. Though happily the demands of the two realms often coincided, Leibowitz’s picture, it seems, leads to the problematic conclusion that ultimately a Jew ought not to be ethical, but instead religious.

Daniel Rynhold, Yeshayahu Leibowitz

I don't think Leibowitz's dichotomy between the ethical and the religious can do justice to the command not to oppress the foreigner, with its appeal to empathy ("for you were strangers in the land of Egypt"). And even the not-so merciful commands to blot out the memory of Amalek or other Canaanite tribes feel the need to remind the Israelites the violence they faced from those groups.

[bremont]

(via (338) ליבוביץ' ואגסי: שיחות בפילוסופיה של המדע - חלק א' - YouTube)

An intellectual portrait of the late Professor Yeshayahu Leibowitz: an outspoken and often controversial critic of Israeli politics. He coined the term ‘Judeo-Nazi’ 🤔☠️✝️🕎during the 1982 Lebanon War to describe Israel’s military mentality. The film covers Leibowitz’s opinions and views on history, Judaism, ethics, religion, and politics. Authors Amos Oz, A.B. Yehoshua, and journalist B. Michael are among the film’s participants. A ViewPOINT Productions and HOS (Dutch television) production Broadcast: The Netherlands, Australia, Israel The film won a special commendation at the 1991 ‘European Non-Fiction Films Competition – Prix D’Europa ‪@brunnerb‬

[cavalierzee]

Israeli Soldiers: We Will Erase and Destroy Gaza

Israeli soldiers holding signs that together read:

“We are the soldiers of the Jewish people’s army from right and left. We won’t take off our uniforms until we erase and destroy Gaza.”

In Israel, genocide is mainstream.

By Yeshayahu Leibowitz

[eclipse-strider]

Chase the Jews out of every country so they flee to Israel, and then vilify them for living in Israel.

Put Israel under constant threat of annihilation, making mandatory conscription a necessity, and then use that as an excuse to declare that “there are no civilians in Israel,” that the entire population is guilty, their lives and human rights forfeit, for being “complicit” in their own survival.

[no-passaran]

This is award-winning Israeli philosopher, public intellectual and polymath, Prof. Yeshayahu Leibowitz. He was appearing on the Israeli TV show Popolitika, back in 1992. Leibowitz argues with pundit Tommy Lapid, the father of Yair Lapid, former Israeli Prime Minister.

Yeshayahu Leibowitz argues that Israel is not a democracy after its 1967 occupation of the West Bank and that there are circles in Israeli society that possess a Judeo-Nazi mentality.

Transcription of the video's English subtitles under the cut.

Link to the tweet / Link to the video on IG.

It's interesting to hear the end of this clip. The other man is arguing that until Israel is burning Arabs (Palestinians), Leibowitz's comparison has no base. Leibowitz's answer is that, after the concentration camps (which Israel has used to jail Palestinians in for decades), burning them is the "prophecy". That is: after the dehumanization, ghettification, ethnic separation, and apartheid that Israel puts Palestinians through, the next step is genocide, and it can be seen before it happens because we know what leads to it. In the tweet above, journalist Samira Mohyeddin remembers this "prophecy" now that Israel is, indeed, burning Palestinians alive to kill them.

But it made me think of something else, too. The man arguing with Prof. Leibowitz says that this isn't the case because Israelis don't "burn millions of Arabs just for fun". And, again, this is another place where the "prophecy" has been fulfilled:

Israeli extremist groups linked to the government's party take families (including children) to boat tours to watch Gaza getting bombed and cheer on the deaths and suffering of Palestinians. To extremist Israelis, Palestinian death is fun.

I'm aware it isn't new, we've seen news like this for years, like this one from 2014:

But it goes to show how Professor Leibowitz was right. Regardless of wether you agree or not with his word choice or semantics, genocide is where all these decades of occupation, dehumanization, and apartheid were headed to.

Transcription.

Interviewer: In this situation where you get an award from the government that you referred to as the government of a Judeo-Nazi state. When you get The Israel Prize from that state, do you still think as you said here before, that this state is not a democracy?

Leibowitz: these are two different things. The first, since you raised that issue then I'm forced to respond to it even though I never found the need to respond on the matter, as if I said that the state is a Nazi state.

Interviewer: Judeo-Nazi.

Leibowitz: I used the term Judeo-Nazi to describe a certain MENTALITY which exists among certain circles. A Judeo-Nazi mentality indeed exists within certain circles.

Lapid: Would you go back on this statement for a better atmosphere while receiving the prize?

Leibowitz: the Judeo-Nazi mentality within certain circles is alive and well.

Lapid: Jews who burn millions of Arabs just for fun? Right, professor Leibowitz?! Certain circles whose wish is to establish concentration camps and burn Arabs in a crematorium...

Leibowitz: I do know that the State of Israel holds many thousands of Arabs in concentration camps.

Lapid: And once in a while places them in gas chambers and burns them?!

Leibowitz: I know that the State of Israel holds many thousands of Arabs in concentration camps!

Lapid: and then burns them...?! And places them in gas chambers... Professor Leibowitz?!

Leibowitz: I spoke very clearly! I know that the State of Israel holds many thousands of Arabs in concentration camps.

Lapid: And then burns them?! And puts them in gas chambers!

Leibowitz: That is your prophecy! That is YOUR future prophecy!

[anaxerneas]

Yet these formal academic appointments formed but one side of his work, and far from the most public, for in addition Leibowitz taught Jewish thought, whether in an academic context, in small study groups, or on television and radio, with a number of these broadcasts and study-group notes having since been published.

But aside from these activities and his being editor in chief of several volumes of the Encyclopedia Hebraica, it was for his political interventions that Leibowitz would gain most notoriety on the Israeli public scene, whether in his criticism of the religious parties as the “kept mistress” (Judaism, 115) of the Israeli government, his argument as early as 1968 that Israel should withdraw from the newly-occupied West Bank and Gaza strip, or his public call for conscientious objectors from the time of the Lebanon war of 1982 and subsequently in the Palestinian territories. Leibowitz’s ability to stir up public controversy was in evidence as late as 1993, the year before he died, in a speech to the Israel Council for Israeli-Palestinian Peace, where he reiterated his call on soldiers to refuse to serve in the Territories, using, not for the first time, highly provocative language comparing special units of the Israeli army to the SS. The speech followed the announcement that he was to receive the Israel prize – the country’s most prestigious civilian award – in recognition of his life’s work, a move that precipitated an appeal to the Supreme Court, and a threat to boycott the ceremony by Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin. Leibowitz, however, saved everyone further embarrassment by declining the award.

Daniel Rynhold, Yeshayahu Leibowitz

[lepartiprisdeschoses]

I couldn't remember if I had posted that track and looked it up on here out of curiosity (it is a cool word too!), but that was a really bad idea.

Everything is axiological before it's political, to counter a popular slogan. I think that's one way to make sense of some of this. Even if politics becomes inevitable at some point in considering human relationships, that's not the same as saying they're necessarily political from the very beginning!

[solidarishkeyt]

The well-known writer Amos Oz recently conducted interviews with adherents of a variety of different ideologies and political beliefs in Israel and the occupied territories. Most dramatic of these was an unnamed Israeli nationalist in a moshav, here called “C,” who expressed overt contempt for any attempt to introduce concepts of universal humanism into Zionism. Oz presented the thoughts of C mainly in the form of a monologue in the newspaper Davar on December 17, 1982. Excerpts from the interview appear below: […]

“Yes. Judeo-Nazis. [Yeshayahu] Leibowitz is right. And why not? Listen to me: a people that gave itself to be slaughtered and destroyed, a people that let soap be made of its children and lamp shades from the skin of its women is a worse criminal than its murderers. Worse than the Nazis. To live in a world of wolves without a fist, without teeth and without nails is a worse crime than to murder. The fact is that the grandchildren of Himmler, Heidrich and Eichmann live very well and are getting fat. They are even using this occasion to moralize to us. The grandchildren of the great Rabbis of East Europe and of all the humane and pacifist Jews who philosophized so well in Prague and Berlin will not moralize to anyone. They are no longer here. And they shall never be here.”

Amos Oz, “‘Better a Living Judeo-Nazi Than a Dead Saint,’” Journal of Palestine Studies 12, no. 3 (Spring 1983): 202, 205.

[curiositasmundi]

[...]

È opaca la denominazione dello Stato, definito ebraico pur essendo abitato per oltre il 25 per cento da non ebrei (arabo-palestinesi musulmani e cristiani, cristiani non arabi, drusi, beduini, ecc.). È opaca la formula che descrive Israele come “unica democrazia in Medio Oriente”, perché la democrazia non si concilia con l’occupazione coloniale o l’assedio dei palestinesi. È opaca la forza militare di Israele, che dagli anni 60 dispone di un armamento atomico senza mai ammetterlo. Secondo il giornalista Seymour Hersh, Tel Aviv ha già minacciato una volta l’uso dell’atomica, nella Guerra del Kippur del 1973 (The Samson Option, 1991).

Ma più opaca di tutte le politiche è l’esistenza di una lobby sionista estremamente danarosa e attiva – soprattutto in Usa e Regno Unito – che fin dalla nascita dello Stato di Israele sostiene le sue politiche di colonizzazione, e che oggi appoggia l’ennesimo tentativo di svuotare la Palestina dei suoi abitanti. Si dice che Netanyahu sta spianando Gaza e attaccando anche la Cisgiordania solo per restare al potere, senza un piano per il futuro. Quasi un anno è passato dalla strage perpetrata da Hamas il 7 ottobre, e una rettifica si impone. È vero che Netanyahu teme di perdere il potere, ma un piano ce l’ha: la pulizia etnica in Palestina.

La lobby sionista ha istituzioni secolari negli Stati Uniti e Gran Bretagna e filiali ovunque. Influenza i giornali e li monitora, finanzia i politici amici. Denuncia regolarmente l’antisemitismo in aumento, mescolando antisemitismo vero e opposizione alle guerre di Israele. Nei Paesi europei operano vari gruppi di pressione tra cui l’Ong Elnet (European Leadership Network).

È chiamata a volte lobby ebraica, ma con l’ebraismo non ha niente a che vedere. Ha a che vedere con il sionismo, che è una corrente politica dell’ebraismo e che dopo molti conflitti interni ha finito col pervertire la religione. È nata nella seconda metà dell’800 e culminata nei testi e negli atti fondatori di Theodor Herzl e Chaim Weizmann. Per il sionismo politico, l’ebraismo non è una religione ma una nazione, uno Stato militarizzato, edificato in Palestina con uno slogan che falsificando la realtà era per forza bellicoso: la Palestina era “una terra senza popolo per un popolo senza terra”, data da Dio agli ebrei per sempre. Secondo il filosofo Yeshayahu Leibowitz, che intervistai nel 1991, Israele era preda di un “nazionalismo tendenzialmente fascista”. Non stupisce che Netanyahu e i suoi ministri razzisti si alleino oggi alle estreme destre in Europa e Usa.

Non tutti gli ebrei approvarono la ridefinizione della propria religione come nazione e Stato. In parte perché consapevoli che la Palestina non era disabitata, in parte perché la lealtà assoluta allo Stato israeliano imposta dalla corrente sionista esponeva gli ebrei della diaspora a sospetti di doppia lealtà.

Indispensabile per capire questa fusione tra religione e Stato militarizzato è l’ultimo libro di Ilan Pappe (Lobbying for Zionism on Both Sides of the Atlantic, 2024). Lo storico racconta, proseguendo lo studio di John Mearsheimer e Stephen Walt sulla lobby (2007), la nascita del sionismo nella seconda metà dell’800, e cita fra gli iniziatori le sette messianiche evangelicali negli Stati Uniti. Sono loro che con più zelo promossero e motivarono il movimento sionista. L’idea-guida del sionismo millenarista è che Israele ha un diritto divino a catturare l’intera Palestina. Se il piano si realizza, giungerà o tornerà il Messia. Questo univa nell’800 sionisti ebrei e cristiani. C’era tuttavia un tranello insidioso: per i sionisti cristiani, il Messia arriva a condizione che gli ebrei alla fine si convertano in massa al cristianesimo.

Il sionismo colonizzatore è oggi in difficoltà. “Non in mio nome”, è scritto sugli striscioni degli ebrei che manifestano contro la nuova Nakba (“Catastrofe”, in arabo) che il governo Netanyahu infligge a Gaza come nel 1948. E che infligge in Cisgiordania dal 28 agosto.

Ciononostante i governi occidentali accettano l’equiparazione fra antisemitismo e antisionismo, per timore delle denigrazioni e manipolazioni della lobby. Quasi tutti hanno fatto propria la “definizione operativa” dell’antisemitismo adottata nel 2016 dall’International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (cosiddetta Definizione IRHA, legalmente non vincolante). Tra gli esempi indicati, l’antisionismo e le critiche di Israele. Il governo Conte-2 si è allineato nel gennaio 2020.

Difficile in queste condizioni monitorare e combattere l’antisemitismo. L’unica cosa certa è che la politica di Israele non solo svuota la Palestina e crea nuove generazioni di resistenti più che mai agguerriti, non solo rende vano l’appello ai “due popoli due Stati”, ma mette in pericolo gli ebrei in tutto il mondo. Nel lungo termine può condurre Israele stesso al collasso.

[momo33me]

In 1968 Yeshayahu Leibowitz a leading/respected Israeli intellectual wrote that Israel lacked the means or desire to constrain the states expansionist impulse; without limits imposed by outside powers. He went onto say that after conquering the West Bank, Gaza, the Golan Heights, and the Sinai Israel had become a state that was similar to the Apartheid states in Southern Africa. In 1970 he wrote that the occupation would result in Israel establishing concentration camps...!

[mithliya]

noam chomsky and yeshayahu leibowitz predicted this level of dehumanisation many years ago.