Israel threatened by the specter of theocracy

The challenge to the court by ultranationalist rabbis, but influential minority, raised the specter of theocracy in Israel, where religion has never been separated from the state.

Some 2,000 people gathered Monday night to the Supreme Court in Jerusalem to the call of the faithful and the Rabbis Yaakov Yosef Dov Lior on suspicion of incitement "to violence and racism."

The rabbi of Safed (north) Shmuel Eliahu, a supporter of housing discrimination against non-Jews, told the AFP will argue that "the laws of the Torah are above the law" civil.

"I came because I am shocked that they stopped our rabbis," said Daniel Dannon, yeshiva student of 19, about their brief arrest for refusing to answer a police summons.

But he assured dissociate, as many participants, the controversial theological treatise in which the two rabbis have given their imprimatur, the "Torah of the King", which justifies the execution of innocent non-Jews, including children, in case of war.

Both accuse the religious of justice "will stifle the voice of the Torah" by refusing to express opinions based on the rabbinic tradition.

Opposite, the secular camp is alarmed by the rise of "a new current in Judaism who wants the death of the rule of law", as Monday's tabloid Maariv.

The newspaper said Israel has "become the only country in the world where religious figures are above the law and where the police have no right to question them."

Similarly, the opposition leader Tzipi Livni blasted "a group that does not recognize the authority of judges and will be replaced by that of the rabbis."

The founder of Zionism Theodor Herzl excluded in his book "The Jewish State" (1896) that the future state is a theocracy.

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu himself has denounced the Council of Ministers the attitude of the rabbis.

But Mr. Netanyahu, leader of the Likud (right), merely observed that "no one in Israel was above the law" while members of his party felt the unwelcome summons.

Nationalist rabbis have a few thousand supporters, mostly settlers from the occupied West Bank, but have the active support of the extreme right and support more reserved ultra-Orthodox camp.

National-religious settlers have increased in recent weeks threats or attacks, against officers and law enforcement officials they accuse of slow colonization.

The ultra-Orthodox camp, less radical, concerned that these arrests do not create a precedent that would punish rabbinical opinion on behalf of the fight against racism.

However, the father of Rabbi Yaakov Yosef, the spiritual leader of the Sephardic ultra-Orthodox party Shas, Rabbi Ovadia Yosef, has roundly disowned his son, who was arrested Sunday morning for a brief interrogation.

"Why does this idiot does not respond to a summons from the police?," Fumed Rabbi Ovadia Yosef, according to media reports.

The previous week, Rabbi Dov Lior, spiritual leader of the Kiryat Arba and the Jewish community of Hebron (West Bank), was briefly detained for the same reason.

It was launched in 1995 the worst curses against Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin at the time, which earned him to be suspected of having influenced his assassin Yigal Amir.

"Then he would have had to stop Rabbi Lior," said the mass-circulation daily Yediot Aharonot, which was sure that the two rabbis will not be prosecuted, even if the judiciary wants to save face.