Mahmoud Abbas: The Greatest Obstacle to the Two-State Solution

The Palestinian Authority’s president has devoted years to stunts ostensibly aimed at gaining recognition of a Palestinian state, the latest of which is his new plan to sue Britain for issuing the Balfour declaration in 1917. But, Benny Avni writes, he has shown little interest in actually creating such a state:

Abbas has already raised a Palestinian flag at Manhattan’s First Avenue UN headquarters and received blessings for a Palestinian state in places like Geneva, Sweden, Mauritania, and the back pages of U.S. party platforms. Yet he has proved completely useless in creating a state on the West Bank.

And his attempt to pretend that the last century of history—in which Jews created an independent and thriving state—never happened raises suspicions that Abbas never really was all that comfortable with the existence of Israel on lands Arabs consider their own. . . .

So all those who get so exercised about how the two-state solution is represented in American party platforms had better relax. America, Britain, Europe, and even Israel won’t prevent Palestinians from peacefully living and thriving in an independent state. As they always have, only Palestinians will.

As for that other side of the vaunted two-state solution: [Abbas] can’t turn back the clock to 1917, or any other time in history. So Israel will continue to flourish, with or without Palestine by its side.

Read more at New York Post

More about: Israel & Zionism, Mahmoud Abbas, Two-State Solution, U.S. Presidential election

 

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