The German Left’s Undeclared War on Israel

In Undeclared Wars with Israel: East Germany and the West German Far Left 1967-1989, Jeffrey Herf examines the active support for warfare and terrorism against the Jewish state in both Germanies during the cold war. Benjamin Weinthal writes in his review:

[East Germany’s] leaders, many of whom had opposed Hitler, [nonetheless] internalized the lethal anti-Semitism of the Nazis, which led inexorably to their desire to dismantle Israel. . . . Herf supplies exhaustive evidence of the German Democratic Republic’s secret military deliveries to Israel’s enemies in the Middle East—including the bellicose Hafez al-Assad regime in Syria, which was a strategic partner for East Germany. . . .

[Furthermore], the GDR supplied weapons and sophisticated training to the Palestinians in exchange for their refraining from carrying out terrorist attacks in Western Europe. In other words, East Germany largely subcontracted its war against the Jews to the Arabs in the Middle East. . . .

Herf [also] does not let the West German government off the hook. A scarcely covered topic in modern German history is Chancellor Willy Brandt’s abandonment of Israel during the 1973 Yom Kippur War. After a surprise attack by multiple Arab armies, Israel was on the ropes, desperate for arms and ammunition. To the frustration of Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger, Brandt stuck to an ironclad “neutral position toward the conflict in the Middle East,” [refusing to allow the U.S.] to use the port of Bremerhaven to deliver weapons to the Israelis. . . .

While the extreme left in West Germany was not part of the GDR, it benefited from East Germany’s sponsorship of Palestinian terrorists. This year marked the 40th anniversary of the hijacking of an Air France plane to Entebbe by a team of German and Palestinian terrorists in 1976. The Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP) and the West German Revolutionary Cell’s members Wilfried Böse and Brigitte Kuhlmann carried out the hijacking.

Read more at Weekly Standard

More about: Anti-Semitism, East Germany, Germany, History & Ideas, Israel & Zionism, Palestinian terror, Yom Kippur War

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