The Turkish Prime Minister’s Unrequited Love for the Palestinians

Expressions of sympathy for Palestinians, and concomitant condemnations of Israel, are a standard part of the rhetoric of the Turkish prime minister, Ahmet Davutoglu, who recently gave a pathos-laden speech about witnessing the raising of the Palestinian flag at the UN. Yet, writes Burak Bekdil, the Palestinian Authority has consistently declined to return the favor:

The colors of the Palestinian flag are pan-Arab colors. . . . Before being the Palestinian flag, it was the flag of the short-lived Arab Federation of Iraq and Jordan. [It and other, similar Arab] flags draw their inspiration from [those used during] the Arab revolt . . . against Davutoglu’s beloved Ottoman empire. . . .

Similarly, Davutoglu’s [warm sentiments toward] Mahmoud Abbas do not sound as if they are shared by the Palestinian leadership. Abbas’s Christmas message, which went unnoticed in Turkey, contained references to the Armenian genocide (still largely a taboo topic in Turkey) that would have caused a small political earthquake in Turkey. . .

Without caring much about whether the Palestinians love the Turks, the Turks keep on loving to love the Palestinians. Political Islam has its many prerequisites. If one of them is unconditionally to hate Israel and the Jews, the other is an unconditional devotion to the “Palestinian cause.” Turkey’s leaders successfully fulfill both prerequisites.

Read more at Gatestone

More about: Islamism, Israel & Zionism, Mahmoud Abbas, Palestinians, Turkey

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