At the Center for American Progress, Netanyahu’s Visit Makes Some Employees Feel “Confusion and Hurt”

On Tuesday, Benjamin Netanyahu gave a speech at the Center for American Progress (CAP), a prominent left-leaning think tank in Washington. Some of the think tank’s employees objected, as Mark Hemingway writes:

At a meeting on Friday, some staffers read aloud a statement objecting to Netanyahu’s appearance. . . . What’s notable about the statement . . . is how the rhetoric sounds awfully similar to the embarrassing hyperbolic social-justice boilerplate we’ve been hearing at Yale, the University of Missouri, and other colleges:

And at CAP we are a family. . . . It is imperative that we feel confident in this building to improve the lives of all Americans, and essentially to work on getting us all free. It becomes difficult to step outside of our building and say to our allies why this visit is happening, for some of us here we ourselves [sic] feel that we were not considered in that decision.

The statement goes on to address Netanyahu’s role in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict in a way that is predictably pro-Palestinian. But the expectation that merely being in the same building as a democratically elected head of an important state is a threat to employees’ personal wellbeing, exacerbates their “individual struggles,” and is otherwise oppressing people the world over is just cringe-worthy. . . .

[I]nstead of viewing [the visit] as an opportunity to influence Netanyahu, or even expose how his leadership and policies are inferior, CAP employees were worried about how engaging in mere dialogue with someone they find disagreeable has placed them “in a place of confusion and hurt.”

Read more at Weekly Standard

More about: Benjamin Netanyahu, Idiocy, Israel & Zionism, University

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