'God is against Gaza pull-out'

2005-03-09 15:52

Jerusalem - God will strike dead "the evil one" who moves Israelis from the Gaza Strip, an influential rabbi and politician said, without referring directly to Prime Minister Ariel Sharon.

The comments by Rabbi Ovadia Yosef, spiritual leader of the ultra-Orthodox Shas Party, caused an uproar on Wednesday, and several legislators demanded he be investigated for incitement.

In a speech on Tuesday, Yosef railed against Sharon's plan to evacuate all Jewish settlements in Gaza and four in the West Bank this summer. The former chief rabbi said the plan would uproot third-generation settlers from their homes and land.

"How cruel is this evil one who does such things," Yosef said in an apparent reference to Sharon. "The Holy One wants us all to return to the Torah, and then he will strike him with one blow and he will die. He will sleep and never wake up," Yosef said.

No stranger to controversy

Shas legislators on Wednesday tried to play down the remarks, saying the rabbi was referring to the plan and not to the prime minister.

"The rabbi was speaking against the disengagement, the rabbi has criticism against the prime minister, but you cannot say the rabbi called for harming the prime minister," Shas lawmaker Shlomo Benizri told Israel Radio.

But others slammed Yosef. "He hates Israel, hates the Arabs, incites and calls on heaven to strike down the prime minister, it is unbelievable," Ronny Brizon, a lawmaker from the anti-clerical Shinui Party, told the radio.

Sharon has been courting Shas in recent weeks, hoping the party would join his coalition and shore up support for the 2005 state budget, which he has to pass by the end of March. For now, Sharon does not have a parliamentary majority for the budget. If he fails to get the budget passed, his government would fall.

However, it is widely expected that Shinui and Arab opposition parties would drop their opposition to the budget at the last minute to rescue the Sharon government and make sure the Gaza withdrawal goes ahead.

A number of prominent rabbis, including Yosef, have issued religious rulings against the plan, with some even calling on soldiers to refuse to participate in the evacuation.

Yosef is no stranger to controversy. In the past, he has called on the Israeli army to "joyfully" annihilate Arabs with rockets. He also caused a huge uproar among Jews when he stated that the six million Jews who perished in the Nazi Holocaust died because they were reincarnations of sinners in previous generations.

- AP