The Palestinian Authority Threatens to Revoke Its (Non-)Recognition of Israel

In a recent interview, the PLO official Saeb Erekat announced a radical response to imagined Israeli intransigence: revoking Palestinian recognition of Israel. Ruthie Blum comments:

In the first place, though the only concrete action required of the Palestinians at Oslo was to amend the PLO charter calling for Israel’s annihilation—and even this was only promised in a series of letters exchanged between Rabin and Arafat—its newer version was never ratified. Second, Israel is the only party that has upheld its [Oslo] commitments. . . .

The Palestinian terrorism war that is currently being waged against innocent civilians and soldiers erupted, according to Mahmoud Abbas and his henchmen, as a result of a change in the status quo on the Temple Mount. That there was no such change makes no difference. Spreading lies is how the Palestinian leadership operates. Its success at the dissemination of propaganda only serves to strengthen its resolve. . . .

There are disagreements among Israeli politicians, pundits, and the public about how to handle the current crisis. . . . But a crucial little fact keeps getting drowned out in the cacophony and camouflaged by blood: no official Palestinian body has ever recognized the Jewish state. This is worthy of at least a partial smile, because something that never existed cannot be canceled.

Read more at Israel Hayom

More about: Israel & Zion, Israeli-Palestinian Conflict, Mahmoud Abbas, Palestinian Authority, Saeb Erekat

 

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