The Far Left Chases out Jews Who Won’t Renounce Israel

As organizations like the Green party and Black Lives Matter have adopted radically anti-Israel stances, leftist Jews supportive of such groups but unwilling to endorse boycott measures and accusations of genocide have found themselves in a tenuous position. Alan Dershowitz writes:

Using the pretext of “intersectionality”—a pseudo-academic theory which insists that all social-justice movements, except those supportive of Jews or Israel, are inexorably linked—anti-Israel activists have successfully made opposition to Israel and support for BDS a [prerequisite], especially for Jews, for belonging to “progressive” movements focused on a wide range of issues. . . .

For hard-left activists . . . hostility toward Israel does not stem from any particular Israeli actions or policies. Even if Israel were to withdraw from the West Bank, destroy the security barrier, and recognize Hamas as a legitimate political organization, it would still not be enough. For these radicals, it is not what Israel does; it is what Israel is: the nation-state of the Jewish people—or, to use hard-left terminology, an imperialistic, apartheid, genocidal, and colonialist enterprise.

Read more at Gatestone

More about: BDS, Black Lives Matter, Israel & Zionism, Leftism

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