Will the Sinai Attack Mark a Turning Point for Egypt?

Last Friday, Islamic State’s “Sinai Province” carried out a carefully planned terror attack on a Sufi mosque, killing over 300 worshippers. Examining its motivations, Yoram Schweitzer and Ofir Winter ask whether the attack will lead to a shift in how the Egyptian regime pursues its campaign against both Islamic State (IS) and the other terrorist groups operating within its borders:

From [IS’s] perspective, the attack was designed to serve several operational and ideological goals: first, to project a show of its strength at a time [when the organization] is being trounced in Iraq and Syria and challenged by competing terrorist groups (Egypt and Sinai are [also] home to groups affiliated with al-Qaeda and the Muslim Brotherhood); second, to humiliate the Egyptian regime by portraying it to domestic and international publics as helpless, and to deal another blow to its efforts to rebuild the nation’s economy and tourist industry; third, to settle a score [with] locals cooperating with the regime’s struggle against terrorism . . . and to deter other groups from doing the same; fourth, to torpedo the understandings reached over the last year between the Egyptian regime and Hamas about increased supervision of the Gaza-Sinai border and opening the Rafah crossing [connecting Gaza to Egypt]; and, finally, to harm the believers in Sufism, seen by some Salafist jihadist groups as heretics who have deviated from the true path of Sunni Islam and are therefore subject to the death penalty. . . .

The increasing number of attacks in Sinai has forced the Egyptian regime to embark on a series of military operations against the jihadists, but despite the military efforts, attacks have continued unabated in the peninsula, taking a steep human toll, in particular of police and army personnel. . . . While the expanding Egyptian campaign against terrorism in Sinai succeeded in 2017 in eliminating many terrorists and senior leaders and reducing the number of attacks overall, the attacks that were carried out have become more focused and deadly. . . .

Egypt must make radical changes in how it fights terrorism in general and in Sinai in particular. The Egyptian security services are in urgent need of reorganization, closer coordination, and increased cooperation [among themselves].

[Furthermore, Egypt must have] high-quality, accurate intelligence, which makes it possible to target elements planning, assisting, and perpetrating the terrorism in a focused way, and distinguishing them from the population at large. This distinction is critical to reducing the civilian population’s motivation to cooperate with the terrorists and encourage the locals to help the authorities actively fight terrorism.

Read more at Institute for National Security Studies

More about: Egypt, ISIS, Politics & Current Affairs, 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