Benjamin Netanyahu Has Succeeded Where Barack Obama Failed

Difficult though it may be for American liberals to accept, writes Walter Russell Mead, Israel’s prime minister has conducted a far more successful foreign policy than his American counterpart:

The reason that Netanyahu has been more successful than Obama is that Netanyahu understands how the world works better than Obama does. Netanyahu believes that in the harsh world of international politics, power wisely used matters more than good intentions eloquently phrased. Obama sought to build bridges to Sunni Muslims by making eloquent speeches in Cairo and Istanbul while ignoring the political realities that Sunni states cared most about—like the rise of Iran and the Sunni cause in Syria. Netanyahu read the Sunnis more clearly than Obama did; the value of Israeli power to a Sunni world worried about Iran has led to something close to a revolution in Israel’s regional position. . . .

Obama is an aspiring realist who wanted to work with undemocratic leaders on practical agreements. But, despite the immense power of the country he leads, Obama has been unable to gain the necessary respect from leaders like Vladimir Putin and Xi Jinping that would permit the pragmatic relationships he wanted to build. Netanyahu is a practicing realist who has succeeded where Obama failed. Netanyahu has a practical relationship with Putin; they work together where their interests permit, and where their interests clash, Putin respects Netanyahu’s red lines. Obama’s pivot to Asia brought the U.S. closer to India and Japan, but has opened a deep and dangerous divide with China. Under Netanyahu’s leadership, Israel has stronger, deeper relationships with India, China, and Japan than at any time in the past, and Asia may well replace Europe as Israel’s primary trade and investment partners as these relationships develop.

Inevitably, all these developments undercut the salience of the Palestinian issue for world politics and even for Arab politics and they strengthen Israel’s position in the region and beyond. Obama has never really grasped this; Netanyahu has based his strategy on it.

Read more at American Interest

More about: Barack Obama, Benjamin Netanyahu, Israel & Zionism, Israel diplomacy, Middle East, U.S. Foreign policy

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