Is the Next Gaza War on Its Way?

The IDF has recently made public its discovery that Hamas has once again been constructing tunnels for infiltrating Israel and killing soldiers and civilians alike. This news, David Horovitz writes, suggests that the terrorist organization might decide that it must attack soon, before Israel finds a way to defend itself:

[P]repared or not, Hamas may now believe it has an urgent incentive to attack Israel again in the near future. It was widely and quite credibly argued, during and in the aftermath of 2014’s Operation Protective Edge, that Israel had narrowly avoided a devastating Hamas onslaught through the network of tunnels the terror group had set up at the time. It was suggested that Hamas had been planning to send hundreds of gunmen through those tunnels, to attack military and civilian targets, to massacre Israelis, to seize hostages—to remake radically the balance of power. It remains unclear to this day why Hamas chose not to attempt such an attack. . . .

With the cessation of hostilities, even as Israel was grappling and continues to grapple with the international community’s failure to understand what it faces from the Gaza terror state—step forward Bernie Sanders, BDS, et al.—Hamas went back to concerted tunneling and rocket manufacture. It has been gaining strength at a “surprising” pace, [an unnamed] senior IDF officer acknowledged in last week’s briefing. And it has been utilizing some 1,000 tunnelers, working around-the-clock six days a week. . . .

Perhaps, Hamas may be asking itself, Israel has been making gains of its own in this relentless battle of wills. Perhaps it has found technologies to combat even Hamas’s well-constructed, deep, and reinforced subterranean attack routes. (Israeli security sources were indeed quoted Monday talking about new “technologies” being utilized to find the tunnels.) . . .

Hamas, which insists on continuing its efforts to destroy Israel, and which demonstrates such supreme indifference to the well-being of the people of Gaza (and doubtless much cynical amusement at the naïveté of the international community), may feel that, fully ready or not, now is the time to attack.

Read more at Times of Israel

More about: Bernie Sanders, Hamas, IDF, Israel & Zionism, Israeli Security, Protective Edge

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