Shulamit
Aloni, a longtime left-wing Israeli minister and Parliament member who
was an early champion of civil liberties, challenger of religious
hegemony and outspoken opponent of Israel’s occupation of the Palestinian territories, died Friday at her home in Kfar Shmaryahu, a Tel Aviv suburb. She was 86. One of her sons, Nimrod, said she had not been seriously ill, “just very old.”
In 2008, at age 80, she published “Israel: Democracy or Ethnocracy?” a
harsh assessment of her homeland. She wrote on the cover, “The state is
returning to the ghetto, to Orthodox Judaism, and the rule of the
fundamentalist rabbinate is becoming more profound.”
Reuven Rivlin, a Parliament member from the conservative Likud Party,
described Mrs. Aloni on Friday as “the last politician in her generation
who said what she thought.” But her outspokenness also made for
problems. In 1992, Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin rebuked her for questioning the
biblical version of Creation and speaking in the same breath of the
Hebrew matriarch Rachel and the prostitute Rahav. The next year, after
Mrs. Aloni’s challenging of religious political leaders provoked a
coalition crisis, Rabin demoted her from education minister to minister
of communications and science and technology.
After Baruch Goldstein massacred 29 Muslims at the Tomb of the
Patriarchs in 1994, she was among the first to call for the expulsion of
hundreds of Jewish settlers from the West Bank city of Hebron. She also
said that high school trips to Holocaust sites were turning Israeli
youths into xenophobes, and she incited outrage by holding official
meetings abroad in nonkosher restaurants.
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