[Avodah] Permissiibility of lying by Gush Katif refugees to receive greater compensation

[Moshe Feldman]

http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/756831.html
<<Is it permissible for Gush Katif evacuees to cheat the Disengagement
Administration (SELA) to increase the compensation that they receive? A
halakhic ruling published by one Gush Katif rabbi indicates that the answer
is unequivocally affirmative. "It is permissible for displaced individuals
to cheat clerks of the SELA authority or at least mislead them in order to
extract what is rightfully theirs," writes Rabbi Ya'akov Epstein of the
Torah and Land Institute, an evacuee of the Atzmona settlement in Gush
Katif. However, he qualifies this statement, "as long as the act is not
discovered and does not cause desecration of God's name." 

It is not entirely understandable how Epstein intended to prevent such
desecration, hilhul hashem, when he himself instead of passing on the ruling
by word of mouth published it in the Tzomet Institute's annual halakhic
journal Tehumin, a well-known publication in the religious Jewish world. The
ruling was even published under the perspicuous title "Deceptive Declaration
for the Purpose of Receiving Compensation." Apparently Rabbi Epstein took
the matter of hilhul hashem into his own hands. 

Ultra-Orthodox Jews who seek to deceive the state may rely on relatively
simple halakhic justification. They maintain that the rule of dina
demalchuta dina, the authority of the law of the land, which requires Jews
to obey civil law, is inapplicable in Israel, as opposed to the Diaspora. 

According to this logic, one is not required to obey the laws of the heretic
Jewish State. 

But the problem of Rabbi Epstein, a member of the national-religious camp,
is far more complex. He explicitly declares, "In the State of Israel,
despite the fact that a clerk is lying, working in opposition to orders, or
even accepting bribes, it is forbidden to deceive him," because "the capital
does not belong to the clerk." Moreover, he explains, "The State cannot
conduct itself in this fashion and if we permit this, even in extreme cases,
the affliction will spread to all government institutions and the entire
state will begin to be conducted by means of payoff and bribery." 

The case of Gush Katif is exceptional, he maintains, because "all matters
pertaining to compensation of displaced individuals are distorted. They are
not issues of dina demalchuta [the law of the land] but hamasnuta demalchuta
[the theft of the land]." He explains that even if one accepts the
assumption that it is permissible for a nation to evacuate residents, "it is
obligated to build them a bloc of settlement identical to that which
preceded the displacement." The nation, he writes "chose to first crush and
demolish Gush Katif, to grab everything from the residents and then to offer
them partial compensation." It failed to provide compensation for
destruction of community life, emotional trauma or loss of livelihood. 

Not everyone believes that Epstein's halakhic argument rests on a good
basis. 

Yoske Ahituv, of the religious kibbutz movement's yeshiva, wrote a response
to Epstein's ruling, published in the movement's house organ, Amudim. "This
'halakhic' conclusion is scandalous, as far as I am concerned," he writes,
"and unfounded from a number of points of view." He particularly questions
the relatively insignificant halakhic source that Epstein relies on to
support his conclusions. Ahituv also takes issue with "the damage to image
generated by Rabbi Epstein's article, which taints all those displaced from
Gush Katif and even causes potential financial damage resulting from
excessive strictness on the part of SELA administration clerks who suspect
those who seek compensation of fraud." According to him, Epstein's position
is "non-instructive and patently immoral." He demands that Rabbi Epstein
retract these statements and that the Tzomet Institute renounce the content
of the article it published.>>