"It has nothing to do with the Temple Mount!,” Gerlitzky told his supportive fellow Chabad emissaries. “It has nothing to do with their economic situation and has nothing to with what you hear in the media in Israel or outside Israel. It is has to do with one thing only and that is – the Israeli leadership vacillates, they do not believe and are not confident themselves that Jews are the rightful owners of all of Eretz Yisroel [the biblical Land of Israel] and therefore the Arabs exploit this weakness as an opportunity to pressure more and squeeze out incessant concessions."
Above: The late Chabad-Lubavitch Rebbe Rabbi Menachem Mendel Schneerson
News Analysis: Thousands Of Chabad-Lubavitch Emissaries Cheer Against The Peace Process
Shmarya Rosenberg • FailedMessiah.com
It was a Potemkin Village filled with large untrimmed beards and big black fedoras.
Earlier this week at the annual international convention of Chabad-Lubavitch emissaries in Brooklyn, Rabbi Joseph Gerlitzky, Chabad’s chief emissary in Tel Aviv, attacked the two-state solution and blamed the peace process attempting to achieve a two-state solution for the recent wave of Palestinian terrorism, Arutz Sheva reported.
Gerlitzky also heads of the Rabbinical Congress for Peace, a Chabad front group – named in the Stalinist fashion in same way that dictators in Third World hellholes are called “president” – that was formed years ago to fight against the peace process.
Speaking in front of approximately 4,325 Chabad emissaries, Gerlitzky lashed out.
“We are all here united and larger in number than the representatives in the UN who voted for the two-state solution to divide Israel. While they represent different countries we represent the Lubavitcher Rebbe, the one and only leader of our generation who vehemently opposed such a scheme," Gerlitzky claimed, even though a slew of right-wing Zionist Orthodox rabbis and politicians also opposed a two-state solution.
"Therefore,” Gerlitzky continued, “we hereby declare in the name of all the shluchim [Chabad-Lubavitch emissaries] that the UN Resolution is null and void and there never, ever will be a Palestinian state alongside Israel and every inch of Eretz Yisroel [the land of Israel] will remain under control of its rightful owner - Am Yisroel [the people of Israel].”
The emissaries reportedly responded with immediate loud applause. declared to resounding applause.
Gerlitzky also said that every Palestinian teen who is shot trying to stab a Jew died due to the false hope of a two-state solution.
Gerlitzky also cited Shulkhan Aruch Orach Chaim Chapter 329 as halakhic support for his opposition to a two-state solution. That claim was first made by the late Chabad-Lubavitch rebbe Rabbi Menachem Mendel Schneerson in the 1970s during the Camp David Peace process that led to peace with Egypt. At the time, no major non-Chabad rabbis – other than one, the extremist Rabbi Meir Kahane, who supported Jewish terrorism against Palestinians and others he deemed to be enemies of the Jewish people – agreed with that claim.
The actual text of the Shulkan Arukh refers to a band of unknown people approaching a Jewish settlement of Shabbat. The band’s intentions are unknown, and the Shulkan Arukh rules that Jews should arm themselves and ride out to meet them even though doing so is violates Shabbat law. Even if the non-Jews claim to only want to take straw and stubble – i.e., relatively meaningless or minor things – Shabbat should be violated and the non-Jews confronted and stopped, because otherwise the small desolate area of land they occupy inside the country could be used as a base to conquer the the rest of the Land of Israel.
Most senior rabbis outside of right-wing Zionist Orthodox and Chabad circles held then (and still hold now) that specific law does not apply to negotiated peace deals and the like and does not apply to the peace process.
“From time to time we meet with experts on the Middle East, professors and senior military officials to discuss with them the security situation,” Gerlitzky continued. “They always tell us that the reason an Arab gets up in the morning and decides to stab Jews or spends millions of dollars to buy missiles is because they feel that the entire world believes that they deserve a state of their own and Israel must provide them with more territory for this.Therefore they feel that more terror and stabbings will pressure and precipitate Israel to give more and more. In the words of military officials: 'every Israeli declaration that under certain conditions we will be prepared to concede - this in itself is a tailwind to terror.’”
Gerlitzky provided no source for that claim and did not name the purported “military officials” who supposedly said it. The most current opinion of Israel’s Internal Security Service (better known as the Shabak or the Shin Bet) is that persistent discrimination against Palestinians by Israel and the indignity of having to deal with checkpoints and other intrusive security measures that come with occupation, combined with the government’s insincerity with regard to making peace and Palestinian political and religious leader’s claims that Israel wants to take over the Temple Mount, is what fueled the current wave of Palestinian terror attacks.
But Gerlitzky, who cited no sources, claims to know better.
"It has nothing to do with the Temple Mount!,” Gerlitzky told his supportive fellow Chabad emissaries. “It has nothing to do with their economic situation and has nothing to with what you hear in the media in Israel or outside Israel. It is has to do with one thing only and that is – the Israeli leadership vacillates, they do not believe and are not confident themselves that Jews are the rightful owners of all of Eretz Yisroel [the biblical Land of Israel] and therefore the Arabs exploit this weakness as an opportunity to pressure more and squeeze out incessant concessions."
Gerlitzky, again echoing statements made by his dead rebbe, argued the real solution to the violence hatred is to remove all hope from the Palestinians.
“The moment it will be clear in no uncertain terms that the Palestinians will never have a state of their own under any conditions and Israel will never give up an inch of its land - the pressure will cease. When the world will realize that we are dealing here with cold blooded murderers that any concession we make will turn into a springboard that will enable them to overrun the whole country as the Shulkhan Arukh rules, once they see they will never ever get what they want this will eliminate the root cause of the problem,” Gerlitzky insisted.
Gerlitzky said that he and other Chabad rabbis met with Martin Indyk, a former senior US State Department official and President Barack Obama’s former Middle East envoy.
"After telling [Indyk] what Jewish Law states he yelled at us: 'you people need to have your minds switched' and nearly chased us out of his office," Gerlitzky said. “At a later date we met with the French Ambassador to Israel and after listening to what we have to say he said, 'look, we tried everything but it didn’t work. Maybe you are right and time has come to try the Torah way and the Halakha [Orthodox Jewish law], maybe it will succeed.”
It is unclear whether Gerlitzky, who has had many truth issues in the past, is telling the truth now about that meeting with the French ambassador.
Gerlitzky’s falsely named ‘peace’ group was formed in order to demonstrate that the majority of rabbis oppose the Oslo Accords and any other two-state solution. To achieve this, Gerlitzky signed up hundreds of Chabad rabbis, many of whom lacked the qualifications to pass the Chief Rabbinate’s smicha exams. The were rabbis only because Chabad and a small number of willing non-Chabad rabbinic accomplices lowered the ordination standards enough so that almost any Chabad yeshiva student could be ordained. Those rabbis were then added to Gerlitzky’s group, giving it the appearance of importance and weight that it did not really have – and that it still lacks today.