82 Moshe Zemer
Kahane’s simplistic and satanic doctrines, were based on a halakhic and ideological infrastructure built up over the decades by leading rabbis. This platform continues to provide the settlers with theological backing in their confrontations with Arabs and with successive Israeli governments.
As long ago as 1953, when a retaliatory raid on the village of Kibya® resulted in the deaths of some fifty Arab civilians— men, women, and children—Rabbi Shaul Yisraeli, a member of the Chief Rabbinate council, justified the deed:“The children’s death’ is considered to be a punishment from Heaven, a situation in which children are certainly punished for the sins of their parents.” Some twenty years later this view was seconded by Rabbi Shimon Weiser, who proclaimed:“although in peacetime it is forbidden to kill non-Jews ,... in wartime it is a mitzvah to kill them.” The chief chaplain of the Central Command of the Israel Defense Forces , Rabbi Lt. Col. Avraham Avidan published a pamphlet that declared:“In wartime, when Israeli forces are attacking the enemy, they may and in fact are required by halakhah to kill even good civilians, that is, civilians who seem to be good. This was the case about which the Sages said,‘the best among non-Jews —kill!"”
Around the same time Rabbi Yaakov Ariel , today the chief rabbi of Ramat Gan , published an article that enumerated the options he would allow the Arabs of the Land of Israel: they could convert, accept the status of resident aliens, or decide“of their own free will” to emigrate to another country.
Rabbi Zvi Yehuda Kook , the spiritual mentor of Gush Emu nim , the movement of right-wing settlers maintained that today the commandment to occupy and settle the Land of the Israel has the same status as the most serious of the negative prohibitions, namely, those against bloodshed, idolatry, and incest: one must allow oneself to be killed rather than transgress them.
Exhortations of this sort by eminent rabbis, expounded in the ostensible name of halakhah and Torah , constitute the ideo logical basis of Gush Emunim . They are liable to have an influ-| ence on every right-wing Torah -observant Jew , as we saw in the settlers’ reactions to the Hebron massacre.
But halakhah is pluralistic and provides the settlers with every possibility to turn their backs on those who preach hatred. For example, they might heed Rabbi Abraham Isaac Kook ’s humane ruling concerning Arabs :“We should say that the Mus