Want to Distract Attention from Anti-Semitism? Blame Netanyahu

Last week, in the wake of a terrorist attack on a Danish synagogue, Prime Minister Netanyahu reminded European Jews that they have a home in Israel. His statement provoked outrage from European politicians and journalists—much more outrage, notes Seth Frantzman, than the murder of a Jew at a synagogue:

Soon the real narrative of the Copenhagen attack on the Great Synagogue became about Netanyahu. . . . One of the most interesting comments on social media was the claim that “as offended as I am by anti-Semitism, I am equally outraged by Netanyahu’s calls to immigrate.” Numerous iterations of that appeared online.

So why did the European and other press give the Netanyahu call such attention? Why did it become the main story within a day after the attack on the synagogue? Why did those like Piers Morgan write with such outrage against Netanyahu, but not devote a column to the anti-Semitic terror attack? . . .

The fact is that Europe is afraid to face its festering anti-Semitism. No one wants to discuss how a future for Jews in Europe will look. No one wants to ask why Jews need armed guards at kosher markets, why they need armed guards at schools and at their synagogues. No one wants to ask why even though Jews are less than 0.5 percent of [the population of] Europe they are 40 percent of [the] victims of terror on the continent in recent years. Why are hundreds of Jewish graves desecrated? Why is the natural inclination of terrorists to shoot up free-speech events and then a synagogue?

Tough questions. But it’s easier to have Netanyahu.

Read more at Terra Incognita

More about: Anti-Semitism, Benjamin Netanyahu, Charlie Hebdo, European Jewry, Idiocy, Israel & Zionism

 

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