In Jerusalem, Calm Prevails, Despite Dire Warnings and Palestinian Threats

On Sunday, a Palestinian stabbed an Israeli security guard in the chest in the Jerusalem central bus station; the perpetrator was immediately arrested and the guard is now said to be in stable condition. Otherwise—and despite predictions that massive and uncontrollable Arab violence would greet President Trump’s recent Jerusalem announcement—there has been relative calm in Israel’s capital, something that is not clear from much of the reporting on the subject. Emma Green records Arab Jerusalemites’ response to their leaders’ call for “three days of rage”:

The area outside of [Jerusalem’s] Damascus Gate is literally set up like a stage: big steps lead down on three sides to the lowered platform where people emerge from the Old City. A few dozen people stood on the steps and chanted in Arabic, holding a sign featuring a truck that called on America to “dump Trump” and another sign showing the president’s lips as urinals. A throng of journalists surrounded this group, outnumbering them roughly three-to-one. As protesters moved, the cameras shifted around them, moving like a flock of birds near a power line. Most Palestinians, however, went home.

A half-mile away at the Educational Bookshop on Salah Eddin Street, Najwa Muna fussed with her coffee machine and worried. That morning, she and her husband Imad had opened their store as usual. But they had closed the previous day when young [Arab] men came running by and yelling “Close, close, close!” . . . “It’s not good for us,” Muna said. She doesn’t like strike days, [which were declared on the previous days], when kids don’t go to school and people don’t work and they can’t open their store. It was “too dangerous” to stay open when Palestinian leadership called for a shut-down, she said, [implying that she feared retaliation from Palestinian organizations]. . . .

Back at the Damascus Gate, twenty-two-year-old Wissam Abu Madhi watched the protests from the sidelines with a group of friends. He had been protesting, he told me, but stepped out to finish his cigarette. “This is not angry days. These are normal days,” he said. . . . For his part, Abu Madhi says he wishes the Israeli government would make east Jerusalem a little nicer. . . . He pointed to the Damascus Gate area. “Why shouldn’t we have here a garden, and here a basketball court? This thing that I prefer, the government could do.”

Even though he came out for the protest, he’s more focused on finishing his degree at Hebrew University and keeping his job in Beersheba, where he works on air conditioners, than pushing for political change. . . . “Just [wait] one hour, and you’re going to see everything’s okay,” Abu Madhi said. “You’re going to see an Arabic man and a Jewish man sitting here.”

Read more at Atlantic

More about: Israel & Zionism, Jerusalem, Palestinians, 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