What Jewish and Palestinian Terrorists Have in Common with Israel’s Extreme Left

Last week, the attorneys representing the Israeli Jews arrested for the firebombing of a Palestinian home in the village of Duma accused the Shin Bet of torturing their clients. Caroline Glick notes a common thread connecting those echoing such charges and left-wing organizations that promote unverified allegations of purported Israeli wrongdoing:

Those who blithely accuse counter-terror investigators of torturing terror suspects while ignoring evidence and the nature of the crime itself are terror apologists. In behaving as they do, they serve as the moral equivalent of anti-Zionist leftists from Breaking the Silence and its sister groups who libel Israel internationally.

Both groups of terror apologists use anti-Jewish rhetoric to harm the Jewish state. Both groups libel Israel with false allegations of torture that neither would dare to raise against any other country.

The ultimate goal of such groups [as Breaking the Silence] is the destruction of Israel. They seek Israel’s destruction because they believe that Israel is illegitimate and should be replaced by a non-Jewish state of one sort or another.

Unlike their leftist counterparts, terror apologists on the right do not receive foreign funding. They do not direct their actions to international audiences. . . . Their target audience is the Israeli public. They wish to convince the public to accept the legitimacy of the Jewish terrorists by painting them as victims.

But these terrorists are not victims. In their manifesto, the terrorists make clear that they [also] wish to bring about the destruction of Israel. They view terrorism as a means to achieve that aim. One of the consequences of terrorism is that it weakens Israel’s international standing. And in their manifesto, the terrorists say that they seek to use Israel’s “weak points,” including its diplomatic weakness, in order to destroy it.

By falsely accusing the state of committing torture, right-wing terror apologists are advancing the cause of the terrorists just as surely as Breaking the Silence members advance the cause of Palestinian terrorists when they disseminate their libels about IDF “war crimes” to European and U.S. audiences.

Read more at Caroline Glick

More about: Breaking the Silence, Israel & Zionism, Israeli-Palestinian Conflict, Terrorism

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