As Jews Are Murdered, the Left Stands Idly By—and Worse

When not simply ignoring murderous attacks on Israeli civilians, the Western Left rushes to justify them, as Brendan O’Neill writes:

[T]he response in the West to the spate of foul murders by car, knife, and meat cleaver in Israel has been almost as shocking as the killings themselves. Many have stayed silent. . . . Others have asked, “Well, what do Israelis expect?” The crashing of cars into rabbis waiting for a bus and the hacking at Israeli citizens doing their weekly shopping is treated as a normal response by Palestinians to their woes.

When the Guardian glorifies these killings as a “knife intifada,” and radical writers describe them as a natural kickback against Palestinians’ “ongoing humiliation,” they’re really saying Israeli citizens deserve to be murdered. . . .

And with their handwringing over “Palestinian despair,” with one writer claiming Palestinians are lashing out with knives because it’s “the only option left to them,” they infantilize Palestinians, reducing them to robotic knife-wielders who aren’t responsible for what they do. They heap contempt on both sides, demonizing Israeli citizens and pitying Palestinians so much that they end up seeing [the latter] as mentally deficient, with no choice but to hack at the nearest Jew.

Read more at Jewish News

More about: Guardian, Israel & Zionism, Israeli-Palestinian Conflict, Media, Palestinian terror

 

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