Once Again, Palestinian Leaders Have Chosen the Wrong Allies

In inciting his constituents to violence over imagined desecrations of the al-Aqsa mosque, Mahmoud Abbas has allied his nominally secular Fatah party with radical Islam. By doing so, Amotz Asa-El notes, Abbas joins a long line of Palestinian leaders who have backed the losing (and morally bankrupt) side of every global conflict: from Amin Haj al-Husseini’s alliance with the Hitler, to Yasir Arafat’s alliances first with the Soviets and later with Saddam Hussein. Abbas’s current policy demonstrates equally poor timing:

Islamism has [now] overplayed its hand. The sense of insecurity, grief, and wrath that has befallen Paris after its trademark glee and light were disrupted by gunfire and commando raids has traveled far and wide. From Paris, London, and Washington to Canberra, Beijing, and Moscow, Islamism’s preachers and followers now loom as the most immediate, potent, and ubiquitous threat to world peace. . . .

Historians will wonder whether Mahmoud Abbas led or joined this fall’s psychosis surrounding Jerusalem’s holy places. There will be no debating his basking in the fires of religious war that Islamism’s local agitators had worked hard to spark. Who the original agitators were has been clear all along. They were the Islamic Movement’s northern branch [an Israel-based offshoot of the Muslim Brotherhood] and its leader, Raed Salah. What was not clear was that the [Israeli] government’s outlawing this week of the northern branch would pass unopposed by a dumbfounded West. . . .

For Abbas, it is too late. He has now arrived where Arafat did when he positioned himself as Soviet imperialism’s trusted stooge, Saddam Hussein’s last friend, and [the African tyrant] Idi Amin’s best man. It is not too late for Abbas’s potential successors. If they can’t bring themselves to confront the Islamists in their midst on moral grounds, they should at least consider the public-relations fiasco and political dead end where their current leaders’ Islamist misadventure inevitably leads.

Read more at Jerusalem Post

More about: Islamism, Israel & Zionism, Mahmoud Abbas, Palestinians, Soviet Union, Yasir Arafat

 

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