Will Jordan Hold Fast Against IS?

Jordan, Israel’s neighbor and important strategic ally, is a member of the U.S.-led anti-IS coalition and provides crucial tactical and strategic support. But there is a great deal of sympathy for IS in Jordan, and domestic pressures could combine with economic woes and the destabilizing influx of Syrian refugees to change King Abdullah’s course. David Schenker writes:

According to a poll published last month by the Center for Strategic Studies at the University of Jordan, only 62 percent of Jordanians consider IS—and a mere 31 percent the Syria-based al-Qaeda affiliate Nusra Front—to be terrorist organizations. Even more stunning, just 44 percent of Jordanians surveyed say that al-Qaeda is a terrorist group. Given these sentiments, it’s not surprising that many Jordanians oppose their military’s participation in the campaign targeting IS and Nusra Front.

In fact, objections to a Jordanian role in the anti-IS alliance emerged before the state signed up. In the beginning of September, 21 members of Jordan’s parliament sent a memo to its speaker rejecting the Kingdom’s participation. “This war is not our war,” the representatives wrote.

Read more at New Republic

More about: Al Qaeda, ISIS, Israeli Security, Jordan, Nusra Front

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