It sounds like a tale fabricated in the studios of Hollywood, but it’s true. A small group of people around the world are working determinedly to erase the Jewish identity of the state of Israel. Over the course of three days, I encountered their cancerous spirit everywhere.
1
For decades, Mina Fenton has been fighting to protect the holiness of Jerusalem, and at the age of 81, she shows no signs of slowing down. For years, she served on the Jerusalem City Council, representing the National Religious Party. Former head of the Emunah branch office in Jerusalem, she resigned from the well-known women’s movement in 2014 upon discovering that it had accepted a five-million shekel donation from the International Fellowship of Christian and Jews.
In addition to her distrust of evangelist support for Jewish causes, she has been a leader in protests against missionary activity in Israel and against gay parades in the Holy City. A strident opponent of the Women of the Wall movement, she was arrested at the Kotel three months ago on Rosh Chodesh Elul.
She had brought a photographer to record the monthly leftist provocations. The young woman photographer was arrested, and Mrs. Fenton hurried to the police station in the Western Wall Plaza, demanding her release. A policewoman grabbed Mrs. Fenton’s arm forcibly and led her down the corridor. Protesting the painful grip, Mrs. Fenton pulled her arm away, for which she was charged with resisting arrest and harming a police officer.
The 81-year-old lady was only released six hours later when a battery of rabbis and city officials intervened in her behalf.
Last Friday morning, she was back at the Kotel for Rosh Chodesh Kislev, and I had a chance to speak with her after her monthly shouting battle with the “Women of the Wall.”
“I have been coming to the Kotel on Rosh Chodesh for 35 years,” she told me. “Everything was wonderful until a group of very aggressive women belonging to the Reform Movement showed up and started to create a disorder. Their goal is not to pray, but to challenge the foundations of Torah.
“For decades, I fought to promote women’s rights in all spheres of life in Jerusalem, but these people aren’t real feminists. They are provocateurs seeking to weaken the Jewish fabric of the state, political activists heavily funded by liberal leftists groups like the New Israel Fund.
“They call themselves the ‘Liberators of the Kotel.’ They arrive early in the morning, move the chairs away from the Wall, and set up in a circle around a table with a Sefer Torah, adorned with tefillin and tallitot, some with kippot, others with nothing on their heads, shouting out prayers from their Reform booklets, some with small microphones on chains around their necks to magnify their singing, even though all kinds of loudspeakers are prohibited at the Wall.”
I asked her why the police don’t interfere. She replied, “The police are afraid of them. The rabbi of the Kotel is afraid of them. Anyone who opposes them is labeled a primitive witchdoctor and a foe of democracy. Of course they have the backing of the Israeli Supreme Court which is just as reform and treif as they are, and influenced by the intellectual poison of all of the liberal, progressive movements from America and Europe as well.
“In my opinion, all of the foreign funds supporting the BDS boycotts, and the homosexual and liberal movements in Israel, are behind the plot to topple Netanyahu. Anyone who stands up for the religious parties and for Eretz Yisrael is their target.”
2
On Friday afternoon, my wife and I drove to Ashkelon to spend Shabbat with her aging parents. Sometime about midnight, after everyone had retired to bed, the Red Alert incoming missile siren sounded loudly over the neighborhood. My wife jumped up and quickly opened the back door leading to the bomb shelter. I hurried to check on her parents, but before I reached their bedroom at the other side of the house, an explosion sounded in the distance – a rocket had fallen far away in an open field.
The next morning, on the way to shul, my father-in-law and I passed the house of the former director of Israel’s Secret Service, Avi Dichter, now deputy minister of defense. During the years of his Shin Bet service, he didn’t leave the house on Shabbat, but now he was walking leisurely with his small grandson along a path where a missile from Gaza had exploded a year before.
“Did you get any sleep last night?” I asked him.
“The situation is under control,” he replied, without explanation.
“What about the lynch against Bibi? Is that under control too?” I asked. “Surveys indicate that the Likud could lose a lot of votes.”
He answered guardedly, as if he were still in charge of the Shabak. “For the time being, nothing has changed. Let’s hope that sweet things will come out from the bitter.”
“I heard a rumor that foreign funds are backing the putsch.”
“I don’t know about that.”
That sounded like a very politically correct answer. I mean, if the former head of Israel’s Intelligence Service didn’t know – who would?
3
That evening back in Jerusalem, outside the Prime Minister’s residence, the demonstration supporting Bibi drew only a few hundred Likudniks, mainly because it hadn’t been widely publicized. I asked the organizer of the rally, Yaacov Sternberg, who also organized the large, pro-Bibi demonstration in Tel Aviv the week before, why was it important to back Netanyahu.
“First, because he is the best person there is right now to be prime minister,” he said. “While we don’t agree with all of his policies, especially with his resistance to further settlement building, he is a guardian of Eretz Yisrael. If the Left rises to power, they are going to slice up Judea and Samaria like a watermelon….
“Secondly, the people of Israel cannot stand idly by while the courts and judicial system trample democracy and manipulate the law to achieve their leftist agendas.
“When I asked a Likud Knesset member why he didn’t come to the rally in Tel Aviv, he answered – off the record – that the police and prosecution already have a KGB-like list of political targets on the Right with crimes they may or not have committed in case they need to create a scandal around them, just like they’ve done with Bibi.
“Thirdly,” the Yesha activist, continued, “as Rabbi Tzvi Tau has warned, the same way that the liberal Jewish funds in America and the European Union have supported the rise of the Reform and gay movements in Israel, and have worked their nefarious, anti-Jewish ways into the IDF and our school system, we have to expose and uproot their influence in the hallways and courtrooms of our justice system as well.
“Not satisfied with their gradual and discreet process of infiltrating and polluting Israel’s cultural institutions and society, they decided to eliminate Bibi.”
“How do they do it?” I asked.
“Talk to Rabbi Reuven Fierman,” he replied.
4
Still at the rally, I spotted Meir Indor, the Director of the Terror Victims Association. Earlier in the week, after the Israel Center for Democracy published a survey amongst IDF soldiers regarding “purity of arms,” I decided to write an article about the controversial subject.
The main findings were that 50 percent of Israel’s soldiers believe that the stringent open-fire regulations imposed on them impair their ability to respond properly to terrorist threats; 50 percent feel that Tzahal will not back them if they are brought to court for acting contrary to the rules; a similar percentage said that in the past they refrained from taking necessary actions that might entangle them in legal problems; and over 50 percent believed that Elor Azaria should never have been brought to trial for killing a terrorist while he lay on the ground after stabbing an Israeli soldier.
During the week, I contacted two former high-ranking rabbis in the army for their reaction. One declined, not wanting to involve himself in the sensitive issue, and the other never answered my e-mail and phone message.
In addition to representing families victimized by terror, and speaking out strongly on behalf of soldiers handcuffed by what he terms “leftist law,” Meir Indor himself served as a commander of an anti-terror unit in Gaza, so I decided to ask him about the results of the survey.
“The reason that only 50 percent of the soldiers, and not all of them, complained about the paralyzing restrictions they face before firing at a terrorist is because of the brainwashing IDF soldiers receive in the lectures and seminars they are forced to attend, given by pro-Palestinian leftist professors, and retired leftist generals, and leftist mothers, and sponsored by liberal European and Jewish American policy-shaping groups.”
5
Sunday morning, I received a phone call from Neriah Zaroge who wanted to express his gratitude to The Jewish Press for publishing a series of articles about his arrest and incarceration for not obeying a draconian military order to distance himself from his tiny hilltop outpost in the Shomron, even though no charges were filed against him.
He was released from detention at the end of last week and allowed to return to his home with the stipulation that someone accompany him wherever he goes. Only that now, after he chained himself to the floor of an attic in Yitzhar to highlight his struggle for the right of Jews to live wherever they please in the Land of Israel, he has been officially charged for resisting arrest and faces a future trial.
“What led the Shabak and the police to declare you an enemy of the State in the first place?” I asked him.
“The Shabak and police have their own, not always legal, means of gathering information. In addition, there are leftist human-rights groups in Israel like B’tselem and Peace Now which encourage Arabs to complain about settlements and hilltop outposts like ours. Very often, they show up with Arab shepherds from villages nearby, and with photographers and people from Europe and America who sponsor their activity, claiming that the Jewish settlers are grazing their sheep on their land or encroaching on their orchards.
“Screaming dramatically, the Arabs point to goat droppings on the ground, claiming that the turds come from their animals, proving their ownership of the area. The visitors from America and Europe excitedly photograph the evidence, and we get dragged off to court.”
6
It seemed like everyone I met spoke about some anamorphous international plot to denude the State of Israel of its land and holy Torah. So I took the advice of Yaacov Sternberg and called one of my old neighbors, a new immigrant from Russia who had become an ardent baal teshuva, Rabbi Reuven Fierman.
In Kishinev, he had earned a Master’s degree in Art and Theater. In addition to teaching Jewish Studies at several Torah institutions, he holds a PhD in Sociology and Education from Tel Aviv University and lectures widely on a broad range of subjects.
“Instead of leading Jews to gas chambers, a new sterile and outwardly humanitarian form of anti-Semitism is spreading throughout Israeli society to strip Israelis of their Jewish Identity,” Rabbi Fierman told me. “The methodology is carefully formulated, disguised in pluralist terminology, and disseminated quietly away from media attention.
“The strategy of these tie-and-jacket, anti-Israel organizations and philanthropic funds is to infuse people in decision-making places with leftist and liberal ideologies, by offering Israeli journalists free trips abroad, and by arranging high-paying fees for Israeli professors and people in the justice system to lecture in symposiums around the world. In other words, they buy society’s influencers and groom them to hold the proper enlightened attitudes.”
I asked him to give me a concrete example. He replied:
“The self-proclaimed goal of the U.S.-based Wexner Foundation is to ‘change the world.’ The stated purpose of the Wexner Israel Fellowship is ‘to provide Israel’s next generation of public leaders with superlative training in public management and leadership development, thus enhancing the quality of democracy and the institutional vitality of Israel’s public sector.’ Hundreds of public officials from Israel have gone through the Fellowship’s training program, an in-depth curriculum of pluralistic lectures and personal counseling designed to gradually strip Israel of its Jewish character.
“Program participants must agree to continue in their job positions in Israel for a period of three years. Although they are never told to spread the doctrines they learn, the hint is firmly planted in their brains. High-ranking army commanders, government Ministers and Knesset members, educators, and judges of the Supreme Court have graduated from the training course….
There are even training courses for Israeli rabbis focused on questions of religion and state, offering a generous monthly stipend of several thousand shekels that many financially-strapped rabbis find hard to turn down.
Make no mistake, a great many participants in these indoctrination programs are unwise to their true nature. The course planners and instructors give over the information and chosen values is a very subtle manner, never openly disclosing the true goal of the training.”
I asked him if he was every approached by one of these groups.
“Yes,” he replied, “ the Van Leer Institute made me an offer to undergo a series of lectures on pluralism, along with the bait of an attractive stipend. Sensing my hesitation, they supplied me with the names of rabbis who had previously participated in the program. I phoned a few of them who I knew to ask them about their experience. ‘No problem,” they said. “All you have to do is sit and listen to a line-up of doctors and professors, and take home the money!”
I declined the Van Leer Institute offer. Having grown up in Russia, I know the power of secret indoctrination. … Given the right circumstances, an expert manipulator can alter the stripes of a tiger.”
I asked him where Netanyahu fits in all this. He replied:
“Bibi is a master manipulator himself. A political magician. They can’t topple him through brainwashing tricks. What’s the solution? Topple him through the courts. The French did it with Dreyfus. The Soviets were masters of the game. The Americans caught on quickly. The liberals there are playing the same game with Trump. It turns out that the Israel Attorney General, police investigators, and prosecution, are all pawns who have been influenced by this secular, pluralistic, anti-Torah epidemic.
“It is obvious to me that a very dangerous and foreign secret society is at work in Israel endeavoring to bring about a judicial putsch against a Prime Minister who refuses to sell out Eretz Yisrael and betray the supporters of the Torah. That’s why, in my opinion, we have to stick with Bibi.”