Farmers: IDF has declared war on Israeli agriculture
Growers’ group slams Defense Ministry decision to adhere to ultra-Orthodox interpretation of the Sabbatical year
Mitch Ginsburg is the former Times of Israel military correspondent.
The Israeli army, in a precedent-setting decision, has decided to partially adhere to an ultra-Orthodox interpretation of the laws governing the upcoming agricultural sabbatical year, raising the ire of Israeli farmers.
“The Defense Ministry and the army have declared war on Israeli agriculture,” the Israel Farmers Union Chairman Meir Zur wrote Thursday in a statement.
The conflict revolves around the biblical prohibition against tilling the land and cultivating crops during the sabbatical year, which occurs every seven years.
The shmita year’s mandate to let the land lie fallow is relevant only to Jewish-owned tracts in Israel. Thus, it remained dormant for millennia until the dawn of Zionism and the rise of agriculture in the Holy Land.
In 1889, shortly after the first wave of Jewish immigration to Israel, Rabbi Isaac Elhanan Spektor of Kovno issued a heter mehira, a religious ruling allowing Jews in Israel to sell their land to a non-Jew for the duration of the sabbatical year, while retaining the right to work it and reap the fruits of the land.
That ruling was upheld by Israel’s first chief rabbi, Rabbi Abraham Isaac Kook, and has since been adopted by the State Rabbinate, but remains a source of contention between the Zionist and ultra-Orthodox camps in Israel.
Ultra-Orthodox leaders note that Rabbi Spektor of Kovno, in first authorizing the exemption, wrote, “It must be explicitly stated that this exemption is only for the year 5649 (1889) but not for future shmita years… Then further meditation will be necessary…”
At the time, Jews in Israel were in constant danger of starvation and disease.
Zionist leaders, both religious and secular, assert that while the ultra-Orthodox world unquestioningly embraces a 2,000-year-old ruling known as the prozbul, nullifying the laws of debt remittance during the sabbatical year — a commandment that is very relevant to the urban population — it frowns upon the agricultural exemption.
In 2007, the High Court of Justice forced a group of municipal rabbis to adhere to the State Rabbinate’s exemption and to provide certificates of kashrut to hotels and restaurants that served produce grown under the loophole.
The Israel Defense Forces, which upon inception almost did away with the laws of kashrut altogether, is in the process of expanding the ultra-Orthodox draft. This has required changes to the process of gender integration and to the stringency of kashrut certification, among other things.
The decision to import produce from abroad “is an unprecedented step in which the Defense Ministry and the IDF chose to go with the extremist [branches of the] ultra-Orthodox and not purchase heter mehira from farmers in Israel, as has been the case since the 19th century,” the Israel Farmers Union wrote.
Zur called the decision “cheap populism” and noted that a small fraction of the produce ordered by the Defense Ministry could be bought abroad for the several thousand ultra-Orthodox soldiers currently in uniform.
Avshalom Vilan, a former MK and the current secretary general of the Israel Farmers Union, said that amid great budgetary constraints the army would be “unnecessarily” spending tens of millions of shekels on fruit and vegetable imports.
The army responded to a request for comment in writing. “The population of the IDF is diverse, including over 5,000 ultra-Orthodox soldiers, who do not recognize the heter mehira [loophole] during the sabbatical year. In order to preserve the unity of the camp, and to allow the entire IDF population to eat in a single kitchen, and in order to reach the national goal of drafting the ultra-Orthodox into the IDF… the army rabbinate has decided to avoid procuring vegetables [grown under] the heter mehira for the first half of the sabbatical year, until the end of February 2015.”
During that period, the army explained, most of the produce would come from the southern Arava desert, an area apparently exempt from the commandment, and from stored crops. “Only in the event of scarcity will there be a limited purchase of non-Jewish or imported goods.”
From March 2015 onward, the army will buy vegetables grown under the heter mehira, the army said, and the ultra-Orthodox soldiers will be given catered meals on disposable plates, in addition to sealed packages of fresh, imported vegetables.
