Explaining Palestinian Leaders’ Silence over the Deaths of Their Brethren in Syria

According to a recent report, 3,840 Palestinians have been killed in the Syrian civil war—more than were killed during the second intifada. But neither Mahmoud Abbas nor Arab-Israeli parliamentarians have said a word about these deaths in public. Edy Cohen comments:

The causes of death [enumerated in the report] ranged from artillery shelling to shootings to torture in the regime’s infamous prisons across the country. . . . The [same report] also said that 1,682 Palestinians are still missing, their fates unknown. According to some assessments, these Palestinians were either killed at some time during the bloody civil war or—“in the best case”—are still in prison. . . . .

The Yarmouk refugee camp, which was home to tens of thousands [of Palestinians], was utterly demolished over the course of the war. Before the camp was destroyed, the Assad regime laid siege to it. During that time, images of emaciated Palestinians began emerging in Syrian opposition media outlets.

Despite these horrors, not one official in the Palestinian Authority (PA) publicly condemned the Assad regime. [But when] a Hamas or Islamic Jihad terrorist from Gaza is killed by IDF soldiers while trying to plant a roadside bomb or trying to breach the border fence, the Arab and Western worlds are apoplectic. The Arab League issues its familiar condemnation; the consistently hostile Kuwait denounces Israel at the UN and tries to convene the Security Council; Mahmoud Abbas requests international protection for the Palestinians; and all of these reactions are covered around the clock by the Arab and Western press. . . .

Throughout the war in Syria, Abbas’s silence on the plight of the Palestinians there has been deafening. He has never repudiated Bashar al-Assad or Iran for killing Palestinians. He seeks the best of all possible worlds: support from both Iran and the Arabs. It appears he has been successful. During the atrocities perpetrated in Iraq several years ago, a downtrodden Yazidi woman held a placard that said: “The tragedy of the Yazidi people is that the Jews aren’t their enemy.”

The same can be said of the tragedy of Syria’s Palestinians.

Read more at BESA Center

More about: Mahmoud Abbas, Palestinian Authority, Palestinians, Politics & Current Affairs, Syrian civil war, Yazidis

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