Three dozen top Israeli rabbis threw their support this week behind a religious ruling barring Jews from selling or renting homes to non-Jews — an indication of growing radicalism within the rabbinical community at a time of mounting friction between Israeli Arabs and Jews.
The action by the clerics — who are chief rabbis in some of Israel’s largest cities and influential among the devout — quickly fueled charges of racism. The ruling also was likely to widen the schism between secular and religious Jews.
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu immediately blasted the ruling, saying it was inconsistent with democratic values.
“How would we feel if someone said not to sell apartments to Jews?” the Jerusalem Post quoted Netanyahu as saying. “We would protest, and we do protest when it is said among our neighbors. It is forbidden that such things are said about Jews or Arabs.”
The religious opinion first became a focus of controversy last year when the chief rabbi of Safed — a town in northern Israel that has a large concentration of devout Jews — urged that it be applied specifically to Arabs.
Nitai Morgenstern, an aide to Safed’s chief rabbi, Shmuel Eliahu, said the town has “a problem of a lot of people renting and selling to Arabs, and that destroys the city’s social fabric.”
Recently, a group of ultra-Orthodox Jews asked other chief rabbis to express their support for the ruling to prove it has widespread backing, Morgenstern said. Thirty-seven rabbis signed it.
Mordechai Nagari, chief rabbi of Maaleh Adumim, a large West Bank settlement outside Jerusalem, defended the letter. “The rabbinical ruling is that you cannot sell houses to gentiles, and its purpose is to protect the Jewish identity of the state of Israel,” he told AP Television News.
Morgenstern said he understood how this attitude could cause friction with the Arab minority, which accounts for one-fifth of Israel’s population of 7.6 million.“But people have to see the other side,” he said.
Safed resident Amit Cohen said he and other residents led the campaign to win rabbis’ support because clerics are “simply fed up with the fact that rabbis have to fear issuing or discussing religious rulings. Rabbis are afraid to rule on the basis of what is written because they are afraid of the reaction from the media and the government.”
Meanwhile, two U.S. Jewish groups, the Anti-Defamation League and the New Israel Fund, praised Netanyahu for his denunciation of the ruling.
“It is outrageous and unacceptable that rabbis across Israel are promoting blatant discrimination against non-Jews,” the ADL said.
The NIF called on Netanyahu to set in motion the suspension of the municipal rabbis from their posts.
Israelis have increasingly been questioning the loyalty of Arab citizens. Israel’s ultranationalist foreign minister, Avigdor Lieberman, led his Yisrael Beitenu Party to large gains in last year’s parliamentary elections by playing on the perceived disloyalty of Israel’s Arabs.
Lieberman and other lawmakers have proposed a series of bills seen as discriminating against Israeli Arabs, including one that would allow small communities to exclude them.
Salah Mohsen, spokesman of Adalah, an advocacy group for Arabs in Israel, said the rabbis’ action was “not surprising” and blamed Yisrael Beiteinu, which wants to redraw Israel’s borders to exclude large Arab communities.
Rabbi David Rosen, the interfaith adviser to Israel’s chief rabbinate, described the rabbis’ action as “disturbing” but said he did not think that the majority of the country’s rabbis would agree and called it a product of the lingering conflict between Israelis and Palestinians.
“The rabbinate as a whole isn’t xenophobic or hostile to Arabs,” Rosen said. “As long as the conflict goes on here, it’s logical to assume that the attitudes of all sides will harden, which is deeply regrettable.”
Associated Press writers Diaa Hadid and Daniel Estrin contributed to this report from Jerusalem.