If You Love Israel, Don’t Boycott It

In a column in the Washington Post, two American professors have simultaneously announced their undying love for the Jewish state and called on readers to damage its economy through a boycott. Too bad, notes Elliott Abrams, they are so ignorant of the subject on which they write:

[The authors] simply claim that “domestic movements” in Israel to avoid “making the occupation permanent” have “withered.” Now, it is obvious that the Israeli left, and the “peace movement” there, have been weakened. Why might that be? The professors, self-styled “progressives,” tell us it is “thanks to an economic boom and the temporary security provided by the West Bank barrier and the Iron Dome missile-defense system.” This shows a deep lack of understanding of Israel and Israelis, for the “peace movement” has “withered,” all right—but for a very different reason.

This reason is the conduct of Palestinians, a factor that is almost entirely absent from the professors’ account. This is remarkable. The Palestinian refusal of negotiations is not mentioned. The waves of terror—from Arafat’s intifadas to today’s stabbings—are barely mentioned. . . .

Particularly striking is what the professors demand of Palestinians: nothing. They do not demand that the Palestinians negotiate. They do not even demand an end to terrorism, not even during a month of terror by stabbing. . . . [Palestinians] are not players in this drama. Only Jews are.

Read more at Washington Post

More about: BDS, Israel & Zionism, Israel on campus, Israeli left, Israeli-Palestinian Conflict

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