Israelis bemoan the alleged rise of the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt, ignoring their own local variety While Israelis pay plenty of attention to the fear of the rise of the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt, they steadfastly ignore the rise of the Jewish brotherhood in their own country. The motto of the MB is “Islam is the solution”: faced with the failure of modernity in the Arab world, they want to step back into an imagined past of a pure Islamic rule – Sunni Islamism, of course. This interpretation of Islamic history has little relation to Islamic rule as it was…

Orthodox rabbis long for the day when they’ll wipe out Amalekites, and two more notes Rabbis for Death Camps: One of the popular genres of media generally unfamiliar to the Israeli secular public is that of synagogue pamphlets. There are quite a few of them, and they are distributed on Fridays to thousands of synagogue. Almost every sect has its own pamphlet, mostly of rather inferior quality. One of the most successful ones is “Ma’yanei Ha’yeshua’” (“Fonts of Salvation”), which is well-made and recently expanded to 16 pages, instead of the usual four. It is published by the Ma’yanei Ha’yeshua’…

The shortlist of 972's people of the year 2010, chosen by the site's bloggers Anat Kamm, former IDF soldier accused of leaking top secret documents to Haaretz reporter Uri Blau One day this March, my girlfriend went for a routine job interview. When she returned she had a story to tell: “You'll never believe how come that job is vacant,” she said, “The girl who used to do it is under secret house arrest for exposing classified military documents.” It was precisely like this, by way of rumor, that the story of Anat Kamm spread. Rumor was the only possible…

By Shalom Boguslavsky Over the past decade or so, the religious Zionists and the ultra-Orthodox have joined forces to push for an Arab-free greater land of Israel. The racist ideas of the late Rabbi Meir Kahane, once considered marginal, have gained new power as they are expressed by important ultra-Orthodox rabbis with wide authority in religious matters. With this authority comes a dangerous new fundamentalism that is gaining increasing political power in Israel. In the early 1950s, soon after Israel declared its independence, a group of ultra-Orthodox Jews, a segment whose recognition of the secular state of Israel and its…

Rabbis signing the public letter are state employees; so far, not one of them was prosecuted or fired The Israeli media is reporting this morning that some 50 rabbis have signed a declaration calling for Jews not to let Arabs hire apartments in their communities. The Rabbis expressed support for Rabbi Shmuel Eliyahu of Safed, who was the first to issue such ruling. The rabbis' declaration states that anyone renting his apartment to an Arab is doing harm – both in the eyes of god and for his fellow men. The Rabbis state that it is not allowed to have…

"Knock on any door in this street and ask who would be willing to rent an apartment to Arabs and I'll bet you no one will," says an Arab student from Safed By Daniel OZ In the public park adjacent to the Zefat (Safed) Academic College, all the stone seats and wooden benches are adorned with black marker writings such as "no sitting for dogs, pigs and Arabs", "life is beautiful without Arabs" and "death to the Arabs! Who doesn't agree?". The question is rhetorical, of course, leaving little room for doubt. Its author is confident that everyone in Safed…