This month, Israel’s new education minister Rabbi Rafi Peretz came out as a fan of “gay conversion therapy,” a technique that “tries to change someone’s sexual orientation through psychological and spiritual means and even electroshocks.”
In an Israeli television interview, Peretz stressed his faith in the abominable practice, and even suggested that he had personally done his part to push potential converts in that direction.
Peretz, a former helicopter pilot in the Israeli air force and head of a yeshiva in the Gaza Strip prior to the so-called Israeli disengagement of 2005, served as the army’s chief rabbi from 2010 to 2016 and has twelve children. This year, he became leader of the Jewish Home party as well as the Union of Right-Wing Parties (if ever there was a more endearing union!). In the run-up to Israel’s general election this April, prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu enthusiastically nurtured the bond between Jewish Home and other even more whack-job circles, seeking to boost his own chances of forming a majority government.
In the aftermath of the gay conversion therapy spectacle, however, Netanyahu has felt the need to reprimand Peretz for “unacceptable” comments that don’t reflect the government’s position. Of course, it is still entirely acceptable for Israel to shoot Palestinian children in the head and bomb hospitals. Indeed, while the torrent of criticism presently directed at Peretz is certainly well-deserved, the credentials of many of his critics are — as with Netanyahu — less than impeccable.
The Times of Israel catalogues some key soundbites from the uproar, such as Labor leader Amir Peretz’s contention that the education minister’s remarks were “neither humane nor Jewish” — a sentiment that is, on its own terms, entirely accurate, yet tragically silly within the context of Israeli brutality and Amir Peretz’s own history.
This particular Peretz served as Israeli defense minister during the 2006 war on Lebanon that killed some 1,200 people, the vast majority of them civilians, in thirty-four days. Following Israel’s attack on the south Lebanese village of Qana — which even the New York Times described as an event “the survivors will remember . . . as the day their children died” — Amir Peretz appeared before the Knesset to express his “regret [at] the outcome”: “We will not hesitate to investigate this incident [that] claimed so many lives, in order to learn how to prevent loss of life in the future. We are not doing this to make a good impression on anyone. We are doing it for ourselves, for our own moral conscience.”
Clearly, the Israeli moral conscience hadn’t evolved much since Israel’s military attack on the very same village in 1996, which obliterated 106 refugees sheltering at a United Nations compound — half of them children. READ MORE AT JACOBIN.