The EU’s New Labeling Policy Enables Boycotts of Israel

The European Union has rolled out new regulations requiring special labels on items produced by Jews in the West Bank. While EU officials insist that the labels are for purely informational purposes, they clearly serve the interests of boycotters and other supporters of the anti-Israel cause. Judith Bergman writes:

There is a perversity about the labeling/boycott issue that seems to be completely lost on most Europeans, despite the obvious associations that it raises with Nazi Germany’s measures against Jewish shopkeepers. Conceivably, this is because many Europeans abhor the reminder and prefer to cast Israelis as the “new Nazis.” . . .

Especially perverse is the timing of the labeling. At a time when Arabs in Israel are stabbing and shooting as many Jews as they can get their hands on, while Arab leaders incite . . . murder in the name of fighting the “occupation” and every other conceivable excuse, Europe chooses to support the attacks implicitly by giving credence to the lie that terror has a moral justification. In this way, Europeans are in fact encouraging and perpetuating the conflict, as they and the international community have been doing for decades now by consistently and one-sidedly condemning Israel, while egging the other side on in its pursuits by giving it the credible impression that it can do no wrong, no matter what.

Read more at Israel Hayom

More about: BDS, European Union, Israel & Zionism, Nazism, West Bank

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