Editing Israel Shahak (section)

=== 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}}