What to Make of the Vatican’s Recognition of a Palestinian State?

Yesterday, the Holy See signed a treaty granting official recognition to a putative Palestinian state ruled by Mahmoud Abbas. The American Interest comments:

[Recognition of Palestinian statehood] balances the Holy Father’s tough rhetoric against Islamists killing Christians with a step aimed at conciliating Muslim opinion. And the Pope also has to look after his flock: Palestinian Christians have long played an outsized role in Palestinian nationalism (as they have in other Arab nationalisms) as a way of winning acceptance in their community on a non-religious basis. . . . This gesture may, the Vatican feels, help protect a vulnerable part of the flock by bolstering the communal legitimacy of Palestinian Christians.

On the other hand, for all the tactical considerations, this marks a remarkable change in perceived moral superiority within a fairly short period of time—time during which Palestinian tactics have, if anything, become more brutal and flailing. Both the background of Pope Francis personally and the milieu of intellectual Europe in which many cardinals marinate now militate in favor of the Palestinian cause, whereas a generation ago the international left was broadly pro-Israel. This move, all told, though it will certainly annoy Israel, will likely not represent a huge change in the global status quo. It is, however, a sign of the times.

Read more at American Interest

More about: Catholic Church, Israel & Zionism, Mahmoud Abbas, Middle East Christianity, Palestinian statehood, Vatican

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