Should Israel Establish a Buffer Zone on Its Northern Border?

The Nusra Front, a branch of al-Qaeda, is on its way to controlling Syria’s border with Israel, and could be there to stay. Or, if Assad succeeds in overpowering Nusra, the area could fall to Hizballah and Iranian forces. How should Israel respond? One idea is to create a buffer zone—but it, too, raises difficulties:

Protecting such a zone, even if it does not serve as a launch pad for rebel operations against Damascus, might require more than just denying Bashar al-Assad’s air force. It might require neutralizing his missile capability. That would mean either taking out his missile batteries, or extending a defensive missile shield over the zone, or both.

In other words, the very act of creating the buffer zone could suck Israel into the Syrian civil war and might even introduce threats on the border that the zone was supposed to forestall.

Read more at Business Insider

More about: Al Qaeda, Golan Heights, Hizballah, Israeli Security, Syrian civil war

 

It’s Time for Haredi Jews to Become Part of Israel’s Story

Unless the Supreme Court grants an extension from a recent ruling, on Monday the Israeli government will be required to withhold state funds from all yeshivas whose students don’t enlist in the IDF. The issue of draft exemptions for Haredim was already becoming more contentious than ever last year; it grew even more urgent after the beginning of the war, as the army for the first time in decades found itself suffering from a manpower crunch. Yehoshua Pfeffer, a haredi rabbi and writer, argues that haredi opposition to army service has become entirely disconnected from its original rationale:

The old imperative of “those outside of full-time Torah study must go to the army” was all but forgotten. . . . The fact that we do not enlist, all of us, regardless of how deeply we might be immersed in the sea of Torah, brings the wrath of Israeli society upon us, gives a bad name to all of haredi society, and desecrates the Name of Heaven. It might still bring harsh decrees upon the yeshiva world. It is time for us to engage in damage limitation.

In Pfeffer’s analysis, today’s haredi leaders, by declaring that they will fight the draft tooth and nail, are violating the explicit teachings of the very rabbis who created and supported the exemptions. He finds the current attempts by haredi publications to justify the status quo not only unconvincing but insincere. At the heart of the matter, according to Pfeffer, is a lack of haredi identification with Israel as a whole, a lack of feeling that the Israeli story is also the haredi story:

Today, it is high time we changed our tune. The new response to the demand for enlistment needs to state, first and foremost to ourselves, that this is our story. On the one hand, it is crucial to maintain and even strengthen our isolation from secular values and culture. . . . On the other hand, this cultural isolationism must not create alienation from our shared story with our fellow brethren living in the Holy Land. Participation in the army is one crucial element of this belonging.

Read more at Tzarich Iyun

More about: Haredim, IDF, Israeli society