Europe’s Double Standards Come Back to Haunt It

In January, Margot Wallstrom, Sweden’s foreign minister, called for an investigation into incidents where Israeli security forces have shot Palestinian terrorists in the midst of committing acts of murder. Tom Wilson wonders if she will make similar calls regarding French and German police:

Yesterday, when an . . . Islamic State devotee in Germany began attacking commuters on a busy train, he was quickly shot and killed by security. Similarly, the horrific truck attack last week in Nice was brought to an end only when the French police shot and killed Mohamed Lahouaiej Bouhlel, who also appears to have been linked with IS. . . .

[T]he question is not whether Wallstrom’s comments about Israel were acceptable; we already knew that they were not. Rather, the question here is whether the Swedish foreign ministry is going to be consistent because a standard has now been set. As such, Margot Wallstrom has a choice on her hands. Either she can come out and call for equivalent investigations into the actions of the German and French police—and provoke popular and diplomatic fury from across Europe—or she could not hold European countries to the same standard she holds Israel to and, in doing so, confirm that she operates a bigoted and discriminatory attitude toward the Jewish state.

When Wallstrom made her comments in January, many will have assumed the latter to be the case. But if she cares to, recent events have now provided her with an opportunity to prove otherwise.

Read more at Commentary

More about: Car intifada, Europe and Israel, Islamic State, Israel & Zionism, Sweden, 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