Haim Drukman Dies: One of the pioneers of Israel’s settlement movement, Haim Drukman was a well-known rabbi. He was 90. Following Israel’s conquest of those lands in the 1967 Middle East war, Drukman was a crucial player in the religious Zionist movement in Israel and a strong supporter of Jewish colonies in the West Bank, the Gaza Strip, and the Sinai Peninsula.
The Hadassah Medical Center in Jerusalem, where he had treatment earlier this month, confirmed his death late on Sunday. It didn’t give a reason why. According to Israeli media, he passed away due to coronavirus complications.
He was a member of Israel’s parliament, the Knesset, for numerous terms with the predecessor of the current Religious Zionism party, a crucial ally of the prime minister-designate, Benjamin Netanyahu.
For a very long period, he served as the far-right religious nationalist lawmaker in Israel’s spiritual guide. With Drukman’s passing, Netanyahu said on Twitter, “a tremendous light of the love of Israel been extinguished.”
Drukman demanded the annexation of the occupied West Bank, home to some 2.5 million Palestinians living next to about 500,000 Jewish settlers under Israeli rule.
While most international community views Israeli settlements as illegitimate and a barrier to peace, the Palestinians envision this region, with the Gaza Strip and east Jerusalem, as a future independent state. Although most of the world is against Israeli settlements, Israeli officials generally favor them.
During Israel’s withdrawal from the Gaza Strip in 2005, he urged soldiers to defy orders to destroy settlements and said the same regarding Jewish settlements in the occupied West Bank.
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Drukman and his supporters believed that the state of Israel should be governed by Jewish religious law. In one of his final interviews, conducted last month, he told Israel Hayom that there was “absolutely no issue” with a state governed by Jewish religious law. It is your business what you do at home, but this is a Jewish state outside.
In 2012, Drukman received the Israel Prize, the nation’s highest civic accolade, in recognition of his lifetime accomplishments. On Monday, Drukman was buried near his homeland in southern Israel.
Thousands of people, including Netanyahu, President Isaac Herzog, and other dignitaries, attended his burial. Similarly, we can now see individuals looking for Haim Drukman Death.
Image Source: timesofisrael
Who Is Haim Drukman?
The birthplace of Haim Meir Drukman is Kuty, Poland (today in Ukraine). Milkah was the name of his mother. He fled to Mandate Palestine in 1944 by pretending to be the child of a different family after fleeing the Holocaust with his parents.
After World War II, he was reunited with his true parents. Drukman enlisted in the Israel Defense Forces in 1949 as a member of the Nahal brigade’s Bnei Akiva gar’in (pioneer group). He restored the 1948 Arab-Israeli War-damaged Tirat Tzvi and Sa’ad religious kibbutzim in this role.
Following his release, Drukman attended classes at the Petah Tikva Aliyah Institute and the Kfar Haroeh Bnei Akiva Yeshiva. He later changed schools and enrolled in the Mercaz HaRav yeshiva in Jerusalem, where Zvi Yehuda Kook was his teacher.
He joined Bnei Akiva’s National Directorate in 1952, and under Kook’s direction, he represented the group in the United States from 1955 to 1956.