The UN’s Latest Anti-Israel Libel

The UN Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees (UNRWA) recently announced that, for the first time in 50 years, infant mortality in Gaza has increased. Its report states that the cause of the rise can’t easily be determined, but goes on to blame the Israeli blockade. Claudia Rosett writes:

Was there, perhaps, some overarching development—unmentioned by UNRWA—that shaped events in Gaza during the interval in question, from 2008 to 2013?

Here’s a one-word answer, which does not appear anywhere in either the UN press releases or in the underlying UNRWA report: Hamas—which has ruled Gaza since 2007. . . .

[A]ssuming that UNRWA’s infant-mortality statistics for Gaza are remotely reliable, for decades—while UNRWA deplored Israel’s presence in Gaza—infant mortality rates in the enclave were declining. Then, in 2005, Israel withdrew. In the Gaza elections in 2006, Hamas won a legislative majority. In June 2007, in a bloody coup, Hamas evicted the rival Fatah forces of the Palestinian Authority. Since then, Gaza has been under the boot of Hamas. . . .

UNRWA, for its part, uses this kind of report as leverage to collect hundreds of millions in donations every year for its welfare operations in Gaza (the biggest contributor being the U.S.). That further frees Hamas to devote its resources not to decent governance, but to terrorism.

Read more at PJ Media

More about: Gaza, Hamas, Israel & Zionism, Palestinians, UN, UNRWA

 

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