Can a Television Serial Help Bridge the Divide between the Ultra-Orthodox and the Rest of Israeli Society?

Debuting in 2013, the Israeli television serial Shtisel, most of whose cast is secular, focuses on the internal dynamics of a ḥaredi family. It has proved surprisingly popular even with the Ultra-Orthodox themselves—despite the fact that their rabbis generally discourage or forbid television. Liel Leibovitz writes:

[I]t is clear that Shtisel heralds a new era in the fraught relationship between secular and ḥaredi Israelis. While the two groups maintain their traditional mutual animosity—the secular seeing the Ḥaredim as parasitic bums who live off taxpayer money while refusing to work or serve in the army, the Ḥaredim seeing the secular as heathens who have abandoned Judaism’s core tenets—Shtisel, it is now clear, has served as a bridge between these two feuding camps in two important ways. First, it has given many secular Israelis their first glimpse into ḥaredi life, portraying the otherwise foreign men in black hats and long black coats and women in head-coverings and ankle-length skirts as facing just the same familial and emotional tribulations as everyone else.

More importantly, perhaps, it has given Ḥaredim a prime-time lens through which to glance at themselves, not in the tightly controlled way typical of the community itself, where imperfections are frequently concealed and virtue portrayed as effortless and absolute, but in an intricate, sensitive, and candid manner, unafraid to take on even thorny topics like the difficulty some people have in finding a [mate] and the suffering of those who fail to couple early and well.

Read more at Tablet

More about: Arts & Culture, Israeli society, Television, Ultra-Orthodox

What a Strategic Victory in Gaza Can and Can’t Achieve

On Tuesday, the Israeli defense minister Yoav Gallant met in Washington with Secretary of State Antony Blinken and Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin. Gallant says that he told the former that only “a decisive victory will bring this war to an end.” Shay Shabtai tries to outline what exactly this would entail, arguing that the IDF can and must attain a “strategic” victory, as opposed to merely a tactical or operational one. Yet even after a such a victory Israelis can’t expect to start beating their rifles into plowshares:

Strategic victory is the removal of the enemy’s ability to pose a military threat in the operational arena for many years to come. . . . This means the Israeli military will continue to fight guerrilla and terrorist operatives in the Strip alongside extensive activity by a local civilian government with an effective police force and international and regional economic and civil backing. This should lead in the coming years to the stabilization of the Gaza Strip without Hamas control over it.

In such a scenario, it will be possible to ensure relative quiet for a decade or more. However, it will not be possible to ensure quiet beyond that, since the absence of a fundamental change in the situation on the ground is likely to lead to a long-term erosion of security quiet and the re-creation of challenges to Israel. This is what happened in the West Bank after a decade of relative quiet, and in relatively stable Iraq after the withdrawal of the United States at the end of 2011.

Read more at BESA Center

More about: Gaza War 2023, Hamas, IDF