How Israel Can Avoid a Crisis in Gaza

As Jerusalem, via Egyptian mediators, tries to negotiate an end to the ongoing crisis in Gaza, Israeli officials have floated various options for improving the humanitarian and economic circumstances in the territory. Eran Lerman argues that such arrangements, if properly carried out, shouldn’t be seen as concessions to Hamas. However, he warns of three pitfalls Israel must avoid:

The first [pitfall involves] the need to bring back to Israel the bodies of the two soldiers, Hadar Goldin and Oron Shaul, [both captured in 2014], and the two [Israeli] civilians who crossed the border (of their own volition) and are being held by Hamas. It is important to uproot from Hamas’s consciousness the expectation that Israel will again be extorted as it was [following the 2006 kidnapping of Gilad Shalit, who was returned in exchange for 1,027 Palestinian prisoners in 2011]. It is also important that this question, with all of its emotional power, not be the sole consideration [when Israel makes decisions] of strategic significance.

The second threat is likely to come from rebellious groups in Gaza, especially Palestinian Islamic Jihad (PIJ), which has a military branch in Gaza and is liable to resort to large-scale violent provocations should this be the wish of its patrons in Tehran. The Egyptians will have to make it unmistakably clear to Hamas that a cease-fire agreement requires active enforcement of the arrangement against PIJ and other rebellious groups.

The third difficulty, and the main one at this stage, results from the cruel use the Palestinian Authority (PA) president Mahmoud Abbas is making of his legal authority . . . to thwart economic relief for the population of the Gaza Strip so long as the PA and Abbas’s Fatah party have not regained control of the territory. The same Dr. Jekyll/President Abbas who is showing cooperation, moderation, and largeness of spirit to his guests from the Israeli left is behaving like Mr. Hyde/Fatah functionary Abbas by holding the entire population of the Gaza Strip hostage until he obtains his objectives. . . . Under these circumstances, it is possible that there will be no alternative to finding mechanisms to bypass Abbas in order to carry out the relief measures, even if the “reconciliation talks” [between Fatah and Hamas] in Cairo remain deadlocked (as expected).

Read more at Jerusalem Institute for Strategic Studies

More about: Gaza Strip, Hamas, Israel & Zionism, Israeli Security, Mahmoud Abbas

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