I don’t know how many of you are following the insane letter signed by a few city rabbis in Israel, telling their followers that it is forbidden to rent or sell apartments to Arabs in their respective cities.
Since I have never learned how to handle people with mental disturbances, I am not going to elaborate about these rabbis, but I do want to write about a group of rabbis who decided to oppose the letter.
One of them is Rabbi Haim Druckman who came up with this brilliant solution. The owner of the apartments should distinguish between “good Arabs” and “bad Arabs” when they want to rent or sell apartments to Arabs.
First, I would like to command Druckman, an active member of the right wing in Israel, for his acknowledgement of such thing as “good Arabs”.
But I must say that I am little bit confused. How do you decide who is a god Arab? Is there a breathalyzer where Arabs can inhale and exhale into to check their level of goodness? And what about an Arab who converted to Judaism but vote for a left wing party? Is he or she are Arabs? Good or bad?
What is even more confusing is tracing back the past of Rabbi Druckman. Not his recent past and his views about Arabs, but going all day way back to his childhood.
Druckman was born in Kuty, Poland, later occupied by the Russians. When the Nazis occupied the city, Druckman life were saved because he was hiding underneath his uncle’s house in the non-Jewish part of the city.
From a person with this past, a person who is a master of semantics trying to explain to us the bible, I would expect to understand the context of the words “good Arab”.
Like how similar it is to a certain speech in Poznan in October 4, 1943.