An Eve of Destruction Parable on the Boycott Movement

In his column in this week's Shabbat B'Shabbato Torah portion sheet, MK Zevulon Orlev comes up with a Talmudic comparison in criticising the calls for boycott emanating from academic and entertainment source against either Israel of the areas of Judea and Samaria.

He recalls the Talmudic recounting of the damage done by the radical anti-Roman group, HaBiryonim, against the more moderate forces when the former burnt the food stores:

The biryoni were then in the city. The Rabbis said to them: Let us go out and make peace with them [the Romans]. They would not let them, but on the contrary said, Let us go out and fight them. The Rabbis said: You will not succeed. They then rose up and burnt the stores of wheat and barley so that a famine ensued.

The Biryonim, it is suggested, were so named from the Hebrew term for either 'palace' or 'capital' and perhaps they were the guards. They were Zealots.


Orlev indicates that this period of Jewish history has been severely treated by left-wing Zionists and yet they themselves have adopted not only a discourse of internal dissension but acts that recall the weakening of Jewish ability to face an external threat - as if they have learnt nothing from their own thumping on the table.
 
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