“#JSIL”: The Latest Obscene Israel Analogy

We’ve had Israel as apartheid South Africa, Israel as Nazi Germany, and now there’s “#JSIL”: Israel as the “Jewish State in the Levant.” And this campaign has a particularly pernicious edge to it, as Ben Cohen writes:

Just this week, Deutsche Welle, the taxpayer-funded German broadcaster, published an article on its website that cast American Jews volunteering for the IDF in the same light as Muslims from Europe and elsewhere joining the Islamic State terrorists.

If we, rightly, seek to criminalize those among our Muslim citizens who join the Islamic State onslaughts, we open ourselves up to the contention that foreign Jews fighting with the IDF should be treated in the same manner. Certainly, Israel’s enemies and their anti-Semitic cohorts will argue that such individuals are war criminals—and what the Deutsche Welle piece demonstrates is how easily this clumsy, morally illiterate argument can penetrate the mainstream.

Read more at JNS

More about: Anti-Semitism, Anti-Zionism, Idiocy, ISIS, Lawfare, Max Blumenthal

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