A Terrorist Mastermind’s Career Comes to an End

Last week, one of Hizballah’s highest-ranking military commanders, Mustafa Badreddine, was killed in Damascus under mysterious circumstances. But, writes Clifford May, whether he was brought down by an Israeli airstrike, by rivals within his own organization, or by any of the Lebanese and Syrian organizations that would have liked to see him dead, his demise is good news for Israel and the U.S.:

In 2005, the former Lebanese prime minister Rafiq Hariri, a vocal opponent of Bashar al-Assad’s attempts to dominate Lebanon, was assassinated. . . . In 2011, the UN-established special tribunal for Lebanon indicted Badreddine, calling him “the overall controller of the operation.”

Badreddine launched his career in terrorism while still in his teens. Family connections may have helped: his cousin and brother-in-law was Imad Mughniyeh, for years Hizballah’s top military commander. The two worked together to plan the 1983 bombing of the U.S. marine barracks in Beirut that killed 241 servicemen. Additional attacks followed, including at the U.S. and French embassies in Kuwait. . . .

Two years ago, the Iranian foreign minister Javad Zarif, regarded by President Obama as a leading Iranian “moderate,” laid a wreath on Mughniyeh’s grave in Beirut. And on Friday, in a message to Hizballah’s Secretary General Hassan Nasrallah, Zarif expressed his government’s condolences on the death of Badreddine, saying he had died “defending the ideals of Islam.”

Read more at Washington Times

More about: Bashar al-Assad, Hizballah, Iran, Israeli Security, Lebanon, Politics & Current Affairs

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