Did Putin Declare Victory in Syria?

Russia announced on Monday that it is withdrawing its forces from Syria. Whether or not it actually does so, Michael Weiss argues, Vladimir Putin most likely believes he has accomplished his major military aim—ensuring that Bashar al-Assad remains in power—and may be ready to reduce, if not end, military operations in the country:

[Putin] may well be winding down a short intervention because he’s accomplished exactly what he set out to do, and the next move is sending his foreign minister, Sergei Lavrov, to do what he does best: run circles around John Kerry in Switzerland. . . .

Russia isn’t skedaddling from the Levant [completely]; it will, [according to an official press release], “maintain an aviation support center in Syria in order to monitor compliance with the ceasefire,” and of course retain its longstanding and reportedly refurbished naval resupply base at Tartus. Translation: it can still bomb as needed or desired. . . .

The war has . . . caused substantial damage, but not to terrorists. Civilians have borne the brunt of the devastation; 600 of them were killed and 120,000 of them scattered internally or externally . . . during a [single] late-October offensive designed to shore up the Assad regime’s weakening frontline positions and regain lost ground. . . .

Also pulverized during the last half-year have been the barracks, weapons depots, and soldiers of the Free Syrian Army, including 31 factions that have been fitfully armed and supported by the CIA. . . . The same cannot be said for Islamic State, the putative enemy of Moscow. It’s been struck only between 10 to 20 percent of the time, say U.S. officials. . . .

Fortifying Assad on the battlefield was always meant to keep him physically alive and politically immovable, making his ouster—long a nominal Western precondition for peace talks—a diplomatic non-starter. Well, no one now disputes that that objective has been achieved spectacularly.

Read more at Daily Beast

More about: Bashar al-Assad, ISIS, Politics & Current Affairs, Syrian civil war, U.S. Foreign policy, Vladimir Putin

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