U.S. Investment in Israel Pays Off

While the America-Israel relationship began as one of a great power extending a hand to a vulnerable fledgling state, it has grown, in the words of Yoram Ettinger, into “an exceptionally productive, mutually beneficial alliance.” He explains:

Israel has been the most cost-effective, battle-tested laboratory of U.S. defense industries [and] the most reliable and practical beachhead and outpost of the U.S. defense forces, sharing with the U.S. unique intelligence, battle experience, and battle tactics. . . .

The plant manager of Fort Worth-based General Dynamics/Lockheed Martin, which manufactures the F-16, asserted that Israeli lessons have spared the manufacturer ten to twenty years of research and development, leading to over 700 modifications in the current generation of the F-16, “valued at a mega-billion-dollar bonanza to the manufacturer.” . . .

According to George Keegan, a former U.S. Air Force intelligence chief, the value of intelligence shared by Israel with the U.S.—exposing the air capabilities of adversaries, their new military systems, electronics, and jamming devices—“could not be procured with five CIAs.” . . .

Israel [is] a special strategic partner to America—and not a member of the “foreign-aid” club of supplicants—increasingly contributing to mutually beneficial . . . joint ventures.

Read more at inFocus Quarterly

More about: CIA, Israel & Zionism, Israeli military, U.S. military, 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