How Will the Settlement Issue Be Settled?

Contrary to what you might hear from the U.S. government or read in the New York Times, Prime Minister Netanyahu has enforced a “quiet freeze” on settlement construction outside the major settlement blocs and Jerusalem. Nonetheless, write Elliott Abrams and Uri Sadot, the Jewish population in these areas has been growing steadily over the past several years, most likely due to the growth of families already living there. If this trend continues, it will have important policy implications (free registration required):

Even at current population-growth rates, the idea of over 100,000 Israelis living outside the major settlement blocs may render the Clinton parameters for a peace agreement increasingly irrelevant. The idea of evacuating every Israeli living [in such places] will seem increasingly unrealistic. The United States may be forced to move, then, from insisting on their removal to challenging the Palestinian insistence that every single one of them leave. The old idea that Palestine must be totally free of Jews has always been morally offensive; with every passing year it also becomes more and more impractical. It could gradually be replaced with the understanding that a certain number of Jews will remain as resident aliens if a Palestinian state is ever to be established.

With 1.7 million Arabs living as full citizens in Israel, the idea of tens of thousands of Jews living in Palestine should not seem beyond consideration. Security arrangements for Israelis who voluntarily choose to live in a Palestinian state rather than move back to Israel would be immensely complicated, and in many eyes impossible. But the same can be said about any plan that would force tens of thousands of them to leave their homes.

With no Palestinian state likely for the foreseeable future, much more attention should be dedicated to real life on the ground today: Hamas’s activities in Gaza, the performance of the Palestinian Authority and its institutions, the lack of democratic institutions and free elections, current security arrangements, and measures to help the West Bank economy, for example. The sole focus on getting back to the negotiating table is at odds with reality in the Middle East.

Read more at Foreign Affairs

More about: Israel & Zionism, Palestinian statehood, Settlements, US-Israel relations, West Bank

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