The German Foreign Minister’s Spat with Netanyahu Is a Political Ploy

Last week, Benjamin Netanyahu canceled his scheduled meetings with Sigmar Gabriel, Germany’s foreign minister, when the latter insisted on paying visits to representatives of Breaking the Silence during his time in Israel. Benjamin Weinthal argues that Gabriel deliberately created a conflict with the Israeli prime minister to garner votes for his party in an upcoming election:

A new . . . survey shows Gabriel may very well be amplifying his hostility toward Israel’s government for his personal electoral gain. There is a huge pool of Germans who can be whipped up to vote for his Social Democratic party because of hatred of Israel. Just last week, a new independent German government-commissioned report said roughly 40 percent of Germans loathe the Jewish state. Prior to Gabriel’s visit to Israel, [a prominent polling organization] revealed Gabriel’s party running behind the two conservative parties. . . .

Gabriel stumbled, wittingly or unwittingly, into a second fiasco in the German media. He wrote in an opinion article on Tuesday . . . that “Social Democrats were, like the Jews, the first victims of the Holocaust.” . . . The [since-corrected online version] now reads: “Social Democrats were, like the Jews, the first victims of the Nazis.” It is unclear whether the print editions of the article that appeared in Cologne, Berlin, and Frankfurt issued corrections. . . .

The [German] journalist Wolfgang Pohrt captured the hubris of German elites when he described them as acting as Israel’s probation officers to prevent “their victims from relapsing.”

Read more at Jerusalem Post

More about: Benjamin Netanyahu, Breaking the Silence, Germany, Israel & Zionism, Israeli-German relations

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