Voice of the Jewish News: Take note, Mr Ben-Gvir, this is what REAL Jewish power looks like
This week's editorial reflects on the Chief Rabbi's unprecedented trip to the UAE and what it can teach idealogues in the Knesset about real influence and leadership.
The Chief Rabbi of the United Hebrew Congregations of the Commonwealth, touching down in the United Arab Emirates, is a moment for the history books. It took 318 years for the office-holder of one of religious Jewry’s most eminent roles to visit an Arab state in an official capacity. It was worth the wait.
A peace between peoples needs cementing and visits like this help to do so. Yet Ephraim Mirvis was right too when he said it “needs to trickle down”. The Abraham Accords were the unlocking of the door. Visits like this week’s equate to the opening of it. Now we need people to walk through.
They’re starting to. It will happen. For it needs to be “a warm peace”, as Mirvis rightly said. Alas, some oft-cited instances of ‘peace’ in the Middle East can principally and primarily by paper-based, signed sometimes to facilitate arm exports. A stiff breeze would blow them over.
But judging by the warmth with which Chief Rabbi Mirvis was greeted in the heart of Arabia, this peace – between Jew and Arab, begun with the Abraham Accords – has all the potential to be as toasty as a hot water bottle on a cold winter’s night. One fly in the ointment may be who now fills one in every nine seats in the Israeli parliament.
The Jewish Power Party is ironically named. There is there is no ‘power’ in exclusivity, in othering, in hate and division, in scapegoating, in targeting a people for who they are, not what they do.
The ominously (and ironically) named Jewish Power Party is led by people who wear their hatred of Arabs with pride; ‘ironic’ because any Gulf Arab will tell you what Jews have long known but lately seem to have forgotten: that there is no ‘power’ in exclusivity, in othering, in hate and division, in scapegoating, in targeting a people for who they are, not what they do.
On the contrary, there is power in extending a hand, establishing connections, building bridges. These are bridges that Israel’s Jewish Power party, led by Itamar Ben-Gvir, hopes to blow up.
As the Chief Rabbi can attest, the handshakes are warm – for now. It only takes a few ideological thugs to chill the air.
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