Editing Israel Shahak (section)

==Politics==
=== Public intellectual ===
In the late 1950s, as a citizen of Israel, Shahak became politically engaged on hearing a comment of [[David Ben-Gurion]] that, with the [[Suez War]] (29 October 1956 – 7 November 1956), the State of Israel was fighting to achieve "the kingdom of David and Solomon".{{sfn|Hitchens|2001}}
In the 1960s he joined the Israeli League Against Religious Coercion.{{sfn|Warschawski|2001}} In 1965, he began political activism against "Classical Judaism" and Zionism;{{sfn|Mezvinsky|2001}} and wrote a letter to ''[[Haaretz]]'' about having witnessed an Orthodox Jew "refusing to let his phone be used on the Sabbath to help a non-Jew who had collapsed nearby"; in Israel, Shahak's complaint began a long-running debate about the attitudes (religious and cultural) of [[Orthodox Judaism]] towards gentiles.{{sfn|Rickman|2009}}

In 1967, after the [[Six-Day War]] (5–10 June 1967), Shahak ended his membership to the League Against Religious Coercion, because they were "fake liberals" who used the principles of Liberalism to combat coercive religious influence in Israeli society — but did not apply such protections to the Israeli Palestinians living in the IDF-occupied [[West Bank]] and in the [[Gaza Strip]].{{sfn|Warschawski|2001}} In the event, Shahak joined the [[Israeli League for Human and Civil Rights]], and became its president in 1970.{{sfn|Adams|2001}} The League, composed of Jewish and Arab citizens of Israel, protested and publicized Israel's restrictive policies against Palestinians and provided legal aid to them. Some settlers in the West Bank city of [[Hebron]] so hated him that in 1971 they had their pick-up truck painted with "Dr. Shahak To The Gallows".{{sfn|Davis|1972|p=66}}

In 1969, Shahak and another member of the faculty of Hebrew University staged a sit-down protest against the Israeli government's policy of jailing politically active Palestinian students, by way of [[administrative detention]] authorised by state-of-emergency laws; likewise, Shahak supported the political efforts of Palestinian students to achieve equal rights, like those granted to Jewish Israelis, at Hebrew University.{{sfn|Mezvinsky|2001}} In 1970, Shahak established the Committee Against Administrative Detentions to formally oppose such legalised political repression.{{sfn|Warschawski|2001}}

To make public what he considered the anti-Arab and anti-Palestinian legalised discrimination, Shahak published English translations of Hebrew-language reportage about illegal and unjust actions of the Israeli government against the gentile citizens of Israel; Shahak's English reports were intended for the Jewish community of the U.S.{{sfn|Adams|2001}}{{sfn|Mezvinsky|2001}} The translated reports featured headlines such as "Torture in Israel," and "Collective Punishment in the West Bank", which Shahak sent to journalists, academics, and human rights activists, and so ensured that the mainstream population of the U.S. would be informed of the religious discrimination practised by the government of Israel.{{sfn|Rickman|2009}}

===Civil rights advocate===
As a [[Intellectual|public intellectual]], Shahak wrote about the Israeli government's actions against the non-Jewish citizens of the State of Israel, such as the suppression of freedom of speech and general political activity; land ordinances, living restrictions, and the confiscation of lands from non-Jews;  the destruction of houses; legally-sanctioned unequal pay and work restrictions; emergency-defence regulations allowing the summary arrest, detention, and torture of prisoners (civil and military); the collective punishment of communities; the assassinations of leaders (religious, political, academic); racial discrimination in access to education; and the deprivation of Israeli citizenship.{{sfn|Mezvinsky|2001}} Such political activities earned Shahak much hostility and death threats; after the [[1982 Lebanon War]] (June 1982 – June 1985), Shahak also reported Israeli abuses of the populations of Lebanon.{{sfn|Adams|2001}}

In effort to explain the behaviour of the State of Israel towards their Arab neighbours, Shahak proposed that the Israeli interpretation of Jewish history produced a society who disregard the human rights of the Arab peoples, within Israel and around Israel.{{sfn|Rickman|2009}} That Zionism was a "régime based on structural discrimination and racism".

In the book review of a [[festschrift]] in honour of [[Elmer Berger (rabbi)|Rabbi Elmer Berger]] ''Anti-Zionism: Analytical Reflections'' (1988), Sheldon Richman characterized Shahak's interpretation of Zionism as viewing it as an [[atavism|atavistic]] reaction against the European [[Age of Enlightenment|Enlightenment]]'s individualism that strove to revive the suffocating world of the [[Jewish ghettos in Europe|Jewish ghetto]]. The founders of the movement did not believe Jews could lead a normal existence in democratic societies. In this sense, for Shahak, Zionism can be thought of as "a mirror image of anti-Semitism," in that, in common with antisemites, Zionists considered Jews to be aliens who must be quarantined from the rest of the world, a viewpoint Shahak read as capitulating to European antisemitism. For Richman, Shahak's analysis shed light on the tragic consequences that followed upon the establishment of Israel, as Arabs were swept away to forge a state for Jews alone.{{sfn|Richman|1989}}

In letters published in the ''Ha'aretz'' and ''[[Kol Ha'ir]]'' newspapers, Shahak criticized the political hypocrisy demonstrated by the radical Left in their uncritical support of the Palestinian nationalist movements.{{sfn|Warschawski|2001}} In his obituary of Shahak, [[Christopher Hitchens]] said that Shahak's house was "a library of information about the human rights of the oppressed", and that:{{sfn|Hitchens|2001}}{{efn|Hitchens acknowledged a personal debt to Shahak, one of several people who "had to undergo considerable intellectual trial and evince notable courage, in order to break with the faith of their tribes", for having introduced him to the thinking of Spinoza.{{sfn|Hitchens|2011|p=285}}}}

<blockquote>The families of prisoners, the staff of closed and censored publications, the victims of eviction and confiscation — none were ever turned away. I have met influential "civil society" Palestinians alive today who were protected as students when Israel was a professor of chemistry at the Hebrew University; from him they learned never to generalize about Jews. And they respected him, not just for his consistent stand against discrimination, but also because — he never condescended to them. He detested nationalism and religion, and made no secret of his contempt for the grasping Arafat entourage. But, as he once put it to me, "I will now only meet with Palestinian spokesmen when we are out of the country. I have some severe criticisms to present to them. But I cannot do this while they are living under occupation, and I can 'visit' them as a privileged citizen."</blockquote>

Shahak was also active in protesting the public burning of Christian books such as occurred on 23 March 1980 when [[Yad L'Achim|''Yad Le-akhim'']], a religious organization that was at the time a beneficiary of subsidies from the [[Ministry of Religious Services|Ministry of Religion]], ceremonially incinerated hundreds of copies of the [[New Testament]] publicly in Jerusalem.{{sfn|Shahak|Mezvinsky|2004|p=23}}

===Author===
Among the books publish by Israel Shahak are ''Jewish Fundamentalism in Israel'' (1994), co-authored by [[Norton Mezvinsky]], ''Jewish History, Jewish Religion: The Weight of Three Thousand Years'' (1994), and ''Open Secrets: Israel's Nuclear and Foreign Policies'' (1997). In the introduction to the 2004 edition of ''Jewish Fundamentalism in Israel'', the historian Mezvinsky said, "We realize that, by criticizing Jewish fundamentalism, we are criticizing a part of the past that we love. We wish that members of every human grouping would criticize their own past, even before criticizing others."{{sfn|Shahak|Mezvinsky|2004|p=xxi}}