The Iran Deal Is Unenforceable

Supporters of the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Agreement (JCPOA) claim that it includes provisions to “snap back” sanctions immediately in the event of Iranian cheating. To Hillel Fradkin and Lewis Libby, the agreement’s fine print renders snapback a delusion:

[T]he Joint Plan grants Iran and its friends grounds to exclude from snapback sanctions long-term sales of Iranian oil and gas, or virtually any non-nuclear items that Iran wishes. It’s a hole in the agreement through which Iran and its future business partners will shove twenty years of, for example, oil tankers. Future U.S. presidents will lose any meaningful economic leverage. . . .

Yes, sanctions snap back in this scenario, but around a huge, multi-million dollar hole. Not surprisingly, Iran has already leaped at this loophole. . . . [Furthermore, those] companies and countries that benefit from such long-term contracts may stand beside [an Iran caught cheating]. . . .

With UN sanctions in interpretive knots, America’s only meaningful tool would be unilateral sanctions. . . . But would we really sanction Chinese or Russian (or French) entities for buying oil that left Iran under long-term contracts the JCPOA apparently exempted from UN sanctions? . . .

So, as the JCPOA commences, Iran will have roughly $100 billion transferred into its coffers; sanctions-free, it will earn more; and it will have long-term contracts worth multi-millions in years to come, even if it breaches the JCPOA. With such assets, no economic coercion will remain viable.

Read more at Weekly Standard

More about: Barack Obama, Iran nuclear program, Iran sanctions, 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