A Conservative Plan for Helping Arab Israelis

Although many on the Israeli left talk about promoting Jewish-Arab “coexistence” and complain about right-wing “racism,” they have few concrete or practical proposals for ameliorating the real problems facing many of Israel’s Arab citizens. Avi Woolf proposes some ways the right can do something about these problems while remaining faithful to its principles:

[Both] the Zionist and anti-Zionist left are promising minorities the moon, while [the right can] offer something realistic and achievable. . . . This means government investment in education, infrastructure, and whatever else is needed to allow minorities to thrive and prosper as law-abiding citizens. . . .

There are two areas which the right often emphasizes and which would benefit the Arab community in particular. The first is law enforcement. . . . Violent crime of all kinds is far more prevalent in the Arab sector than the Jewish one. . . . Drug gangs are a plague [for Arab communities], as are lethal family feuds and domestic violence. It is not for nothing that Meretz’s Arab candidate ran on an anti-crime platform.

Our failure to deal effectively with these . . . problems sends all the wrong messages. We are effectively telling the average law-abiding non-Jewish citizen that the state will not provide the minimum protection necessary for him to live and prosper, as Israel is only interested in enforcing the laws [insofar as they] affect Jews. . . . If a right-wing government cracked down on all law-breaking in the Arab community, it would demonstrate that its enforcement of law is for [the community’s] benefit and not just for protecting the state or Jewish predominance. . . .

The second important thing [the right] can offer to minorities is expansion of the free market. Poll after poll has shown that Israeli minorities are far more concerned with economic issues this election than political or national ones. . . . It’s hard enough for Jews to legally set up and maintain a business in Israel, so you can imagine the extra difficulty an Arab or a Druze faces.

Read more at Mida

More about: Druze, Israel & Zionism, Israeli Arabs, Israeli economy, Israeli politics

 

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