The Kurds Fight for a Place in the Middle East

In the past two years, Kurdish militias known as Peshmerga have proved to be the most successful local forces fighting Islamic State. They have also offered refuge to, and earned the loyalty of, a number of persecuted religious minority groups—such as the Kakei and Yazidis (local sects with relatively small populations) and Assyrian Christians. In addition, writes Seth Frantzman, the Kurds and their allies display a strong affinity with Israel:

There is a general sense among the various minority groups in [the region of] Kurdistan that their war against jihadists is similar to what is happening in Israel. There is a great deal of respect for Israel’s fight against Islamist terror, and recognition that what was once done to the Jews has now been visited upon the Kurds and other minorities. In the 1980s, when Saddam Hussein was planning attacks on Israel, he was also committing the Anfal massacres against the Kurds, in which 4,000 villages were damaged and up to 180,000 people murdered. Saddam used the same poison gas on Kurds with which he threatened to “burn Israel” in 1991.

The commander of a Peshmerga unit, when asked which country he feels the Kurds are closest to, [cites] Israel. “We think Israel is our closest friend in the struggle,” he says. “We have a common history.” . . .

Indeed, for decades, Arab nationalists, Islamists, and the Iranian regime have described the Kurdish struggle in terms of Israel. On July 21, for example, the former Iranian foreign minister, Ali Akbar Velayati, was reported to have claimed that the U.S. was “plotting to establish a second Israel in the region” in the form of a free Kurdistan.

Opposition to racism and genocide, and the feeling that both Iran’s mullahs and extremists in the Arab world have targeted them as a “second Israel,” have cemented a unique Kurdish bond with the Jewish state, and with the idea of preserving the kind of regional diversity that Israel represents.

Read more at Tower

More about: ISIS, Israel, Kurds, Middle East, Politics & Current Affairs, Yazidis

 

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