c. 1996 Religion News Service

JERUSALEM _ As the United States and Great Britain move to restrict or even ban handgun ownership, Israel is moving in the opposite direction and critics here fear the new trend could lead to more violence in a society already deeply divided by social, political and religious conflict.

Oddly enough, it is a cleric _ Rabbi Eli Suissa, a member of the religious Shas party and Israel’s new interior minister _ who is leading the battle to loosen Israel’s tight regulations on gun ownership in this security conscious society.

Suissa, who has wide policy-setting powers, dropped a political bombshell recently when he announced plans to open up private handgun ownership to much larger sections of Israeli society _ including youthful soldiers in army battle units and all reserve officers in the military, police and prison service.

Given Israel’s policy of nearly universal army conscription, the new regulations could dramatically increase the number of legal handguns available to Israel’s civilian population, critics say, although no one knows by exactly how much.

Until now, the high visibility of weapons on Israeli streets _ from pistol-packing settlers to fatigue-clad army reservists _ has not reflected real gun ownership rates.

Currently, there is only one legal, privately owned handgun for every 20 Israelis, according to interior ministry statistics. By comparison, gun control advocates in the United States say there is one gun for virtually every man, woman and child.

Great Britain has moved in the opposite direction. On Monday (Nov. 18), Parliament passed one of the most restrictive gun control measures in the world, aimed at taking some 80 percent of legally owned handguns out of circulation.

In Israel over the past five years, private handgun ownership has been limited to Israelis holding senior military ranks, employees in professions requiring weapons for self-protection and residents of security-sensitive settlements.

The lower rates of gun ownership are reflected in far lower violent crime statistics. Israeli homicide rates are one-tenth of those in the United States for male victims, and one-sixth the U.S. rate for women, according to World Health Organization statistics. And despite the fears of political terror, even children feel free to walk the streets at night in major city centers.

Still, watershed events _ as Baruch Goldstein’s 1994 massacre of Muslims at prayer in the West Bank town of Hebron and Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin’s assassination in 1995 by a religious extremist who carried a licensed handgun _ have sensitized Israeli society to the growing potential here for violence.

The arsenal of personal weapons readily available to West Bank settlers has likewise become a worrisome security issue as Israel’s government weighs controversial political steps such as an army withdrawal from Hebron.

Within Israeli society, gun-related crime is growing steadily. Between 1990 and 1995, the per capita rate of armed robberies increased by about 30 percent, according to Israeli police statistics.

Heightened reporting of child abuse, domestic violence and teen-age assaults have also changed self-perceptions among many Israelis who believed that despite the Israeli penchant for argument and dispute, their society was immune from many Western social ills.”We in Israel have a Superman complex. We have a self-image of being pacifistic and non-violent,”says Jeremy Milgrom, co-director of Rabbis for Human Rights, an Israeli-based rabbinical group.”What we’re learning is that we are not immune. We have wife-beating and drug use and our record on violence, even in history, hasn’t always been exemplary.” Ironically, Suissa’s recent announcement to liberalize weapons regulations coincided with the one-year anniversary of Rabin’s assassination _ a national trauma that initially triggered a tightening of gun control regulations.

Yet few of Rabin’s senior political associates or family members have spoken out here on the gun control issue with the kind of emotion that Sen. Edward M. Kennedy (D-Mass.), brother of the assassinated President John F. Kennedy, for instance, has deployed in the U.S. Senate.

And in a country where every political move seems to have a religious angle, gun control has received almost no scrutiny among religious leaders _ including those within the interior minister’s own Shas party.”There is no religious connection to this issue,”says Tzvi Ya’acovson, a spokesman for Shas, a party of ultra-orthodox Jews of Middle Eastern origins. Shas leaders spoke out during Israel’s recent election campaign against the”erosion”of traditional Jewish values by Western music and trends.

Those who have issued protests include a handful of feminists, liberal politicians and commentators who argue that Israel is imitating the worst elements in American culture by enshrining the”right to bear arms”as a principle superseding the ancient Jewish concern with the”pikuch nefesh”or preservation of life.”Suissa represents a religious party which has objected, often justifiably, to the aspiration to transform Israel into a sort of `B-grade’ America,”observed Gershom Gorenberg, opinion page editor of the English-language Jerusalem Report and an observant Jew.”So why does he want to imitate the bitter American romance with self-defense?” Gorenberg and other critics respond that a growing Israeli gun lobby has stepped up pressure on politicians to liberalize gun regulations at a time when last year’s string of suicide bomb attacks deep inside Israel _ and the recent violent clashes between Israelis and West Bank Palestinians _ have increased Israeli jitters about personal security.

But guns can do little to curb suicide bomb attacks of the kind that have been seen in Israel recently, argues left-wing Knesset member Avraham Poraz, who has filed a Supreme Court suit against the present government for deciding to relax gun control regulations _ a suit that has frozen implementation of the new policy until January’s court date.”It’s clear that personal weapons don’t help much in self-defense,”says Poraz.”The keeping of weapons is a macho issue. People like to be seen wearing a gun.” Gun ownership in Israel, as elsewhere, has been largely the domain of men. Though women serve in the Israeli military, few have the combat experience or officer’s training that would make them eligible under the new rules for gun ownership.

Thus, the new policy will mean more men have guns to use against their wives, according to representatives of the Israel Women’s Lobby, who appeared Tuesday (Nov. 19) before a Knesset committee to protest the new regulations.

Rachel Ben Ziman, an attorney for the Israel Women’s Lobby, notes that there are an estimated 150,000 women in Israel’s population of 5.5 million who suffer from domestic violence every year and increasing gun ownership will put more of those battered women at risk.

Na’amat, another Israeli women’s organization, reports that 30 percent of the women who have been killed in domestic disputes over the past five years have been killed with a gun.”I meet many women who say they are victims of daily terror from their husbands,”observes Ofra Freidman, director of Na’amat.”The husband sleeps with a gun under his pillow and the wife doesn’t know if she is going to wake up the next morning.” Others fear that guns, should they be more widely available, will add ammunition to Israel’s already tension-wracked society, where heated argument seems to accompany almost every daily routine, from finding a parking place to debates over how much control religious authorities have over everyday life.”You walk in the streets of China, a country of 200 million people, and everyone seems relaxed. Here, everyone is nervous, on edge. You don’t have to be a genius to understand the danger of adding more weapons in a society where there are already deep disputes between so many groups,”says Labor Party member Ra’anan Cohen.

Milgrom, of Rabbis for Human Rights, laments the fact that even liberal Israeli clerics, many of them American-born rabbis, have not chosen to speak out more on the gun issue _ or other Western social ills now perplexing Israeli society.

This is despite the fact that U.S.-based religious groups such as Judaism’s Reform Movement and the National Council of Churches have been active in lobbying to stiffen gun control legislation.”It’s a shame that in the liberal rabbinical establishment in Israel, more attention is given to issues like the validity of Reform and Conservative conversions to Judaism than on life and death issues like gun control,”says Milgrom.

One of the few religious leaders to have protested a liberalization in gun control regulations is a West Bank settler, Rabbi Benny Alon, a member of Knesset with the ultra-nationalist Moledet Party.

Speaking before Tuesday’s Knesset committee, Alon observed that the one time he tried to fire a gun at a New York shooting gallery he missed by an enormous margin _ and most Israeli handgun owners would probably perform similarly, notwithstanding their military training.”In Jewish sources there are two attitudes towards weapons,”observes Alon.”The prophet Isaiah says `Beat your swords into plowshares,’ while the Psalm says `Your sword is your glory.’ “But the majority of the sages sided with Isaiah _ who says in effect that weapons are a bad thing and will disappear in the ideal time. As a result Jewish law dictates that we try to limit the number of weapons to as few as possible.”

MJP END FLETCHER