Driven from Iraq and Syria, Islamic State Turns Up the Heat in the Sinai

With the recent fall of the Syrian city of Raqqa, Islamic State’s de-facto capital, and the organization’s collapse in Iraq this summer, it has now been deprived of its territorial base. But Islamic State (IS) is far from extinguished elsewhere. Its Sinai branch demonstrated this on Sunday by firing rockets into populated areas of southern Israel and attacking Egyptian military positions on the peninsula. Ron Ben-Yishai comments:

These two operations . . . had two [primary] purposes: first, to demonstrate that despite being beaten in its strongholds in Syria and Iraq and being driven out them, IS is still alive and kicking; and second, to disrupt Hamas’s reconciliation agreement with Fatah and its tightening relations with Egypt.

Both the reconciliation agreement between the two Palestinian organizations, and mainly the cooperation agreement with Egypt, contradict IS’s interests. The rocket fire into Israel, in the Gaza vicinity, is therefore aimed at raising the tensions and perhaps leading to an escalation and an active military conflict between the Gazan terror organization and Israel. [Yet] another purpose of the operation is to attract activists who are fleeing Syria and Iraq and looking for a new area of activity.

Under its new leader in the Gaza Strip, Yahya Sinwar, Hamas prefers to ease the Gazans’ distress and reach agreements with Egypt and . . . Mahmoud Abbas rather than continue its alliance [with IS]. That is the reason Sinwar has stepped up the security measures in the Philadelphi Route [connecting Egypt and Gaza] and is preventing IS people from moving in and out of the Strip. He is also arresting activists of IS-affiliated organizations within Gaza quite intensively. As a result, IS feels the need to act against the enemies of its Sinai branch—Egypt, which is fighting the organization with [still] insufficient success, and Hamas, which is currently cooperating with Egypt in a bid to ease the lives of the Strip’s residents. . ..

What happened Sunday night possibly marks the beginning of a relocation of Islamic State’s main military activity from Syria and Iraq to the Sinai. The Israeli defense establishment is already preparing for this possibility.

Read more at Ynet

More about: Egypt, Hamas, ISIS, Israel & Zionism, Israeli Security, Sinai Peninsula

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