The three rabbis recently spoke at a conference of the extreme right at the city of Ramleh. The conference's explicit aim: discussing "the proper attitude towards the Arab minority, from the Jewish religious point of view."

Rabbi Lior, from the Kiryat Arba settlement, said that "it had been a mistake not to use the 1967 Six Day War in order to complete emptying the country of its foreign [i.e., Arab] inhabitants" and that this "mistake" should be rectified by an intensive government program aimed at "resettling" the Palestinians in the Arab countries.

Rabbi Zalman Melamed, from Beit El settlement, said that the Biblical scriptures regarding "The strangers among you", whom Jews are specifically enjoined to treat with respect and tolerance, are "not operative" in our times. Rather, nowadays the very presence of Arabs and other "Goyim" (non-Jews) in the country should not be tolerated at all. Claiming to base himself on the Rambam (Maimonides), the great medieval Jewish sage, Rabbi Melamed said: "They should not even be allowed to pass through the country, due to their possible negative influence, certainly not to reside in it."

Rabbi Yisrael Samet, of Hagar'in Ha'Torani, a nationalist-religious grouping based in Ramleh, said that "The most important task for religious people living in mixed cities is not to confront Arab violence, which does not always exist. Rather, the most important task is to prevent Jewish and Arab children who live in the same neighborhood from playing with each other".

"If there ever was a clear and obvious case necessitating application of the Law Against Racist Incitement, enacted more than a decade ago, it is this" writes Gush Shalom to Attorney-General Mazuz, remarking that Rabbis Lior and Melamed are well-known and highly respected among te West Bank settlers, and that their words might well influence some settlers to acts of violence against Palestinians, and that Rabbi Samet has deliberately chosen to come to reside in the city of Ramleh at the head a militant and well-organized religious-nationalist group, with the unconcealed intention of exacerbating tensions between its Jewish and Arab populations and disrupting any chance for coexistence between the two communities.

The Gush Shalom letter also requested the attorney-general to include in the investigation the Komemiut ("National Uprightness) Movement, a component of the National Union Party in the Knesset - which organized the Ramleh gathering where the three rabbis spoke.

Contact: Adam Keller, Gush Shalom spokesperson adam@gush-shalom.org