Daily Archives: 3 October 2013

How to Kill Goyim and Influence People: Life and Loathing in Greater Israel

open quoteAs soon as I was inside the shop, a short, mild-mannered man greeted me in American-accented English. He was the owner, Michael Pomeranz, a former undercover narcotics agent and firefighter from New Jersey who had experienced a religious awakening and immigrated to Israel. When I inquired about the availability of a widely discussed book called Torat Ha’Melech, or the King’s Torah, a commotion immediately ensued.

“Are you sure you want it?” Pomeranz, asked me half-jokingly. A middle-aged coworker chortled from behind a shelf. “The Shabak [Israel’s internal security service] is going to want a word with you if you do,” he warned. When a few customers stopped browsing and began to stare in my direction, Pomeranz pointed to a security camera affixed to a wall. “See that?” he said. “It goes straight to the Shabak! [Shin Bet]”

Upon its publication in 2009, Torat Ha’Melech sparked a national uproar. The controversy began when the Israeli paper, Maariv, panned the book’s contents as “230 pages on the laws concerning the killing of non-Jews, a kind of guidebook for anyone who ponders the question of if and when it is permissible to take the life of a non-Jew.” The description was absolutely accurate.

According to the authors, Rabbi Yitzhak Shapira and Rabbi Yosef Elitzur, non-Jews are “uncompassionate by nature” and may have been killed in order to “curb their evil inclinations.” “If we kill a gentile who has violated one of the seven commandments [of Noah] . . . there is nothing wrong with the murder,” Shapira and Elitzur insisted. Citing Jewish law as his source (or at least a very selective interpretation of it) he declared, “There is justification for killing babies if it is clear that they will grow up to harm us, and in such a situation they may be harmed deliberately, and not only during combat with adults.”

Torat Ha’Melech was written as a guide for soldiers and army officers seeking rabbinical guidance on the rules of engagement. Drawing from a hodgepodge of rabbinical texts that seemed to support their genocidal views, Shapira and Elitzur urged a policy of ruthlessness toward non-Jews, insisting that the commandment against murder “refers only to a Jew who kills a Jew, and not to a Jew who kills a gentile, even if that gentile is one of the righteous among the nations.”close quote (Read more)