Iran Has Proved Itself Untrustworthy. Now What?

Reuters recently reported that the Islamic Republic attempted in January to purchase a large amount of equipment for the enrichment of uranium—equipment prohibited to it by the terms of the 2013 interim nuclear deal. What does this say about the regime’s future conduct? Michael Makovsky and William Kristol write:

[G]iven this evidence of very recent Iranian behavior, how likely is it that [a final] deal will strengthen the forces of moderation in Iran, [as the White House repeatedly insists it will]? In fact, achieving a deal that amounts to a huge series of concessions by the West and that allows Iran to leave its nuclear infrastructure in place—a deal that legitimizes Iran as a nuclear threshold state—will have the opposite effect. It will leave the regime in Iran strengthened and emboldened. After all, to say nothing of other considerations, if there’s a deal, the regime will, thanks to the unfreezing of sanctioned assets, quickly receive a “signing bonus” of $30-50 billion . . . an immediate cash infusion equivalent to more than ten percent of Iran’s GDP.

Indeed, when pressed, even the Obama administration acknowledges that enriching the Islamic Republic of Iran may only accelerate its mischief-making.

Read more at Weekly Standard

More about: Barack Obama, Iran, Iran nuclear program, Politics & Current Affairs, U.S. Foreign policy

 

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