When Charities Fundraise for Hamas

Israel has recently arrested employees of both World Vision, a major U.S.-based humanitarian organization, and the United Nations Development Program (UNDP) for actively diverting funds to Hamas. To Elliott Abrams, these are not mere isolated instances of corruption:

What we can now see clearly is that none of these organizations—UNDP, World Vision, or UNRWA [the UN subsidiary tasked with caring for Palestinian refugees, about which similar allegations have surfaced in the past]—was ever going to find the facts, fire people, clean out the Hamas agents, and solve these problems. . . .

The larger question is [that of] the culture of foreign aid to the Palestinians, much of which [is a product of] what President George W. Bush once called (in an entirely different context) “the soft bigotry of low expectations” and some of which [is a product] of terrorism, threats, and plain fear [of Hamas violence]. . . .

It’s likely that some percentage of local employees [of World Vision and UNDP] in Gaza are sympathetic to Hamas—and it seems likely to me that administrators don’t want to know about it. If they came face to face with [such information], what would they do? Fire [these employees]? Turn them in to the Israelis? Start difficult and likely very long back-and-forth communications with headquarters, which likely doesn’t want to know and won’t thank the employee who insists on revealing the truth? Simpler to be blind to what is happening.

Read more at Pressure Points

More about: Hamas, Israel & Zionism, NGO, UNRWA

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