Jerusalem: A City Divided, and Indivisible

Marking Jerusalem Day (celebrated on Sunday), Matti Friedman reflects on the current state of Israel’s capital, and the relations between its Jewish and Arab residents:

[T]he rise of extremist ideology and violent armed movements throughout the region has ended any hope that Israel can safely cede control of part of [Jerusalem], which leaves Arab residents in a limbo that will soon be 50 years old. The contradictions of Israeli policy are apparent, like the expectation that Palestinians will abide by the law and avoid violence while authorities go about solidifying Jewish control. It is hard to see what outcome the government expects, for example, from the pressure cooker created in a place like the Shuafat refugee camp.

The contradictions of the Palestinian position are also apparent, though they are pointed out less often. Arab Jerusalemites want to reject Israel’s sovereignty but also want Israeli authorities to treat them fairly. They want elected officials to take their desires into account, but they won’t vote in elections. They declare themselves disempowered but refuse to wield the power that is legally available to them. It is possible to sympathize with their situation without ignoring their own role in the impasse.

In the absence of any clear policy on the part of Israel or the Palestinian leadership as to what East Jerusalemites should be encouraged to do, they do what they must to get by. The trend is not toward integration, exactly, because neither side wants that, but toward what might more accurately be termed mixing. This is going on in places like the commercial area at Mamilla, outside Jaffa Gate, frequented and staffed by Jews and Arabs, or the Malha shopping center, which actively encourages Palestinian clientele, and where it is now more common to see Palestinian salespeople. When my wife went to buy jeans at an American Eagle outlet a few months ago, the three young staffers there were Palestinians—a change in the human landscape of West Jerusalem.

Read more at Tablet

More about: East Jerusalem, Israel & Zionism, Israeli Arabs, Jerusalem, Palestinians

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