Rabbi Shmuel Eliyahu, the Chief Rabbi of Tsfat and a member of the Chief Rabbinate Council, on Sunday, compared the initial response of the IDF Spokesperson to the double murder in Huwara (Father and Son from Ashdod Murdered in Huwara Terror Attack) to the kind of response Jews in Eretz Israel once expected from the British Mandatory government to the rampant Arab murders.
Rabbi Eliyahu reacted to two announcements by the IDF Spokesperson, which the IDF has since deleted: “In one he is asking what are Jews doing in Huwara, and in the other he is warning that God forbid, Jews must not avenge the spilled blood.”
“This is the problem of the IDF spokesman?” Rabbi Eliyahu asked (see the video below). “What are you, the British army? Riots by Arabs against Jews were also a hundred years ago.
Rabbi Eliyahu continued: “They say about the Rav Kook that, following riots, he would not shake hands with the officers of the British army, and he told them: The blood of the murdered is on your hands, you did not act to stop it, you must take action so that this does not happen, if you know there will be a murder, why are you sitting quietly?”
“We are not in the era of British rule, and the IDF is not the British army,” he went on. “We expect the IDF to act like a Jewish army. ‘I shall pursue my enemies and overtake them; I will not turn back until I destroyed them (Psalms 18:38).’ Not understand them, not contain them and not anything else. We expect the IDF to take action.”
Last Tuesday, Rabbi Eliyahu posted on his Facebook page an angry statement headlined: “You have lost my trust.”
He was responding to the despicable behavior of the security apparatus in hounding a Jewish shepherd who killed an Arab attacker in self-defense after the shepherd had been hit in the head with a boulder, landing him in the ICU.
“I call on the members of the Jewish Department of the Shin Bet and say: I have lost my trust in you. As far as I am concerned, you are not working to investigate the truth. You just want to show everyone that you are right.”
Rabbi Eliyahu added: “How is it acceptable to take a person with a head injury from intensive care at the hospital, and subject him to a Shin Bet investigation under torture? In the end, they will tell everyone that he also confessed to Rabin’s murder…”
“If you want to earn back our trust, you will have to work hard on it,” he concluded. “In the meantime, all your messages are not reliable in our eyes. All your arrests are false arrests. All the confessions you will extract from the mouths of the accused are confessions that were extracted illegally.”
