Assad’s Chemical-Weapons Attacks Are Meant to Humiliate the West

On Tuesday, Syrian forces slaughtered civilians in the Idlib province with sarin nerve gas and thereafter they (or their allies) launched rockets at the clinics where the wounded were being treated. According to the Syria Report, the atrocity was timed to send a message to the U.S. and its allies:

The attack occurred the day the European Union hosted in Brussels a large international-funding conference for Syria—which was initially supposed to focus on reconstruction but was scaled down—and as the U.S. administration was sending mixed signals with regard to its policy toward Syria’s President Bashar al-Assad.

[W]hile the regime is sensing a gradual shift toward a restoration of ties, it knows the West is not there yet. Thus, rather than making concessions or political gestures, the regime is further raising the stakes and the political cost for the West of not cooperating. . . . By committing large-scale massacres, the regime shows the West’s impotence and weakness to the world, delegitimizing all the political values it claims to stand for. [Assad is, in effect, saying], “You don’t want to restore ties? I will kill more civilians and show the world how impotent and cowardly you are.”

The more the attack is publicized, the more the West is humiliated—hence the timing of the attack during the Brussels conference. As soon as the outcry fades, pro-regime analysts, bureaucrats, and politicians in the EU and U.S. will complete the regime’s job and push for restoring ties and accepting the regime’s blackmail “for the sake of protecting Syrian civilians and improving their livelihood.” . . .

Since the former U.S. president Barack Obama’s green light in September 2013, Assad has known that a large-scale attack against [Syrian] civilians is a short-term public-relations liability but a long-term political asset.

Read more at Syria Report

More about: Barack Obama, Bashar al-Assad, European Union, Politics & Current Affairs, Syrian civil war, 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