Last update - 04:36 12/04/2009
Gideon Levy / The dark religious side of Israel
By Gideon Levy, Haaretz Correspondent A few days after tens of thousands of Israelis raised their eyes to the heavens at dawn to honor "the return of the sun to the place it stood at creation," and millions of Israelis joyfully read out praise in the Passover Hagaddah for genocide - jihad by means of horrific plagues and drowning infants - it's time to admit it: We live in a religious country.
That's the case during this holiday, when in some places it's impossible to find leavened products, when the rabbinate seeks to install special computer programs at supermarkets to prevent the sale of leavened foods, when Chief Rabbi Yona Metzger asks Rabbi Yaakov Israel Ifergan to get his follower Nochi Dankner to install the program at his supermarkets, and when the cows of our country are on a leaven-free diet.
We must admit that this society has rather dark religious aspects. Foreigners landing in Israel might ask themselves what country they're in: Iran, Afghanistan or Saudi Arabia? In any case, it's not the liberal, secular and enlightened society it purports to be. Thieves' hands do not have to be hacked off or women's faces covered to be a religious country. Just as an occupying state, which controls 3.5 million people lacking basic civil rights, cannot call itself "the only democracy in the Middle East," so a country that has no bread for a week because of its religion cannot call itself secular and liberal. Actually, there has been increased openness in recent years. More entertainment venues and supermarkets are open on Saturday in some of our cities than ever before, like before the Heichal movie theater riots in Petah Tikva. The dead can finally be buried in a civil ceremony in exchange for a fistful of shekels. But that's not enough to be able to call ourselves a secular society. We must not delude ourselves: From the cradle to the grave, from marriage to divorce, almost everything is still religious.
In no other country are there streets without buses and tracks without trains on the Sabbath. No other airline but El Al sits idle one day a week. Cold platters on the Sabbath in hospitals and hotels are also something not seen elsewhere. Roads on pillars because of ancient burial sites - a kind of pagan ritual to those on the outside looking in - and the separation in certain buses of men and women are also unknown in democratic countries. Religion has never been separate from the state here; hand in hand they oversee our way of life.
http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/1077908.htmlReligion! How it dominates man's mind, how it humiliates and degrades his soul. God is everything, man is nothing, says religion. But out of that nothing God has created a kingdom so despotic, so tyrannical, so cruel, so terribly exacting that naught but gloom and tears and blood have ruled the world since gods began.
Emma Goldman (1910)
Anarchism: What It Really Stands For http://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/goldman/works/1910s/anarchism.htm