Published: 11 April 2023
Last updated: 5 March 2024
Founded to support Palestinian victims of settler violence, Tag Meir is now fighting systemic problems.
With their calls to erase a Palestinian town and demolish East Jerusalem houses during Ramadan, key Israeli ministers Bezalel Smotrich and Itamar Ben-Gvir have been stoking hatred and racism in Israel and the occupied West Bank.
But one Israeli NGO is battling this trend, fighting for a humanistic and compassionate form of Judaism and Israeliness.
“Judaism certainly isn’t about erasing villages,” Gadi Gvaryahu, head of the Tag Meir organisation, told demonstrators last Monday at a protest. “It says 36 times in the Bible that you should not mistreat the stranger.”
Tag Meir, founded in 2011 largely to reach out to Palestinian victims of settler and right-wing extremist violence, has assumed a higher profile these days, moving beyond its traditional focus on individual cases of Jewish and Arab terrorism and taking its moderate values to the streets.
Gvaryahu’s remarks came during a spirited demonstration against Ben-Gvir’s very service in the cabinet, in light of his past conviction of support for terrorism and signs that he has been a virulent racist, such as his past reverence for Baruch Goldstein, the settler who killed 29 Palestinians at mosque prayers in Hebron in 1994.
Across the street, inside Israel’s Supreme Court, Ben-Gvir would later argue in response to a Tag Meir petition seeking his removal from the post of Minister of National Security that he has changed his views.
“What a disgrace,” Gvaryahu said through a megaphone. “Imagine a European country appointing an antisemite as its national security minister, someone who displayed in his home a picture of someone who killed 29 Jews. The state of Israel would withdraw its ambassador. But here it’s business as usual.”
Most of the nearly one hundred demonstrators were not Tag Meir activists but rather from other streams in Israel’s protest movement against the Netanyahu government’s bid to weaken the judiciary and transform Israel into an authoritarian government.
