Occasion for reflection

Editorial

A truly heartening event took place Sunday in Victoria. An estimated 1,000 area residents came together, representing diverse faith and cultural groups, to express solidarity with the Jewish community and to condemn the antisemitic desecration of Emanu-El Jewish cemetery with graffiti at the end of last month.

A volunteer who helped repair the damage told the Times-Colonist newspaper that the attack had the opposite of the intended effect.

“Whoever did this, it backfired,” said Sid Fry.

The Jewish community in Victoria should feel more secure, confident and welcomed after the overwhelming public response to the attack. And the broader community in Victoria and southern Vancouver Island should feel proud and reassured. This is a community that looked at itself in the mirror and saw goodness, tolerance and openness.

Incidents like this provide occasions for a society to look at itself in the mirror and the finest of societies will take these opportunities. Israel is at such a moment today.

In the ultra-Orthodox neighborhood of Beit Shemesh, Charedi extremists berated a eight-year-old girl on her way to school, spitting on her for not meeting the levels of “modest” attire expected by men in the neighborhood. At a time when much of the world is turning attention to the prevention of bullying by children, Israel watches as adults – in the name of religion, no less – turn on a child. In the aftermath, groups of hyper-religious residents battled police.

The struggle over the role of religion in public life has been a challenge for the Jewish secular state since its birth. But this is an extreme case, in which Israel faces a fundamental choice over whether women should be reduced to inferior (or partly, or totally, invisible) citizens, erased from public life.

Israel must say no and, to their credit, reasonable religious, political and civic leaders have spoken forcefully. It may be that a line has finally been drawn in the sand demarcating the limit to which a majority of Israelis will accept the chipping away of the state’s secular nature.

Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu appointed a panel, headed by the attorney general, to deal with “exclusion offences.”

No sooner had that fire been addressed than a new and different form of exclusion became public. Residents in an area of the southern town of Kiryat Malachi, apparently, signed a “contract” to prevent Ethiopian-Israelis from buying or renting homes in the neighborhood. Shortly after the news became public, at least 18 vehicles in the area were spray-painted with hate graffiti targeting both Ethiopian-Israelis and Charedim.

And so is presented another opportunity to reflect and, hopefully, to unite in support of the just and right response.

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