As Terror Sweeps Israel, the White House Is Silent

Although responsibility for the current wave of vicious attacks on Jewish civilians in Israel lies squarely with Palestinian leaders, writes Jonathan Tobin, the Obama administration can fairly be said to have fanned the flames:

[A]s the toll of casualties rises, the reaction from the U.S. government . . . is cool, detached indifference. . . . President Obama has demonstrated over the past seven years that no matter what the Palestinians do to sink hopes for peace or provoke a response from the Israelis, he will blame Netanyahu. If Abbas thinks he will gain some advantage from refusing to negotiate with Israel and promoting violence, it is because Obama has signaled that he approves of more pressure being put on the Netanyahu government. When, as it did this past spring, the State Department announces that it is “reassessing” its stance in defense of Israel at the UN, can it really surprise anyone when the Palestinians seek to test how far they can go in pushing the envelope on violence?

Moreover, although the supposedly “hardline” Netanyahu government is being blasted by both the left and right inside Israel for what is seen as a passive approach to the crisis, Abbas is also counting on a fiercely critical international response to any measures that Israel uses to quell the violence. . . .

[T]he more the U.S. equivocates about this wave of Palestinian terror, the less reason Palestinian terror groups will have to rein in their members or the population that they have whipped into a state of mass insanity rooted in religious hatred. More U.S. statements that see the deaths of terror victims and those of the terrorists as morally equivalent will only encourage more such fatalities.

Read more at Commentary

More about: Barack Obama, Israel & Zionism, Mahmoud Abbas, Palestinian terror, State Department, US-Israel relations

 

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