Reopen the Israeli Embassy in Cairo

During Egypt’s 2011 revolution, a group of rioters attacked the Israeli mission to Egypt and destroyed the building that housed it; thereafter the embassy’s staff returned to Israel. Although order, and normal relations with Jerusalem, have long since been restored, Israel hasn’t acquired a new embassy and its reduced diplomatic staff in Egypt has been returning home every weekend. The Foreign Ministry recently ordered the staff to stay in Cairo for the weekend—a decision that Izhak Levanon, the former ambassador to Egypt, praises but finds insufficient:

It isn’t viable to lean the countries’ relations on one leg (security-intelligence); the [diplomatic and political leg is also] needed to ensure stability. The current Egyptian regime, headed by President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi, doesn’t hide its good relations with Israel and is fostering a positive atmosphere. This provides a window of opportunity to implement full-fledged, proper diplomatic relations. The Egyptian parliament’s decision to extend Sisi’s term in office for many more years opens the window even further, giving the two countries time to stabilize their relationship on more than just the one leg.

To restore diplomatic relations to pre-2011 normalcy, Israel must quickly find a new building for its embassy and staff, including a consular-services department working to encourage mutual tourism and promote Israeli interests in Egypt—precisely as the Egyptian embassy in Tel Aviv operates. . . . In the stormy Middle East, close relations between Israel and Egypt are vitally important.

The Foreign Ministry, to be sure, has to contend with complex challenges across the globe, but Israel’s relations with Egypt need to be prioritized. We must not miss this window of opportunity or squander the current regional climate to re-establish the Israeli presence in Cairo as it was before 2011. The Israeli-Egypt peace accord includes agreement on fully operational embassies. [Israel] must move forward with determination to bring this to fruition.

Read more at Israel Hayom

More about: Egypt, General Sisi, Israel & Zionism, Israel diplomacy

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