The U.S. Is Right to Withdraw from UNESCO

Citing, among other things, the body’s “continuing anti-Israel bias,” the State Department announced last week that the U.S is withdrawing from the UN Educational, Social, and Cultural Organization (UNESCO). Sohrab Ahmari applauds the decision:

UNESCO’s anti-Israel stances have been egregious even by [the United Nations’] debased standards, especially since 2011. That was the year the Palestinian Authority sought and won admission to UNESCO as a full member-state. . . . UNESCO only doubled down on its anti-Israel agitation in the years that followed, passing a raft of resolutions that denied the Jewish (and Christian) connection to Jerusalem and other holy sites in Israel.

A resolution on Jerusalem passed in May described Israel as the “occupying power,” denying the Jewish state’s claim to its own capital. Another Jerusalem resolution, approved last year, referred to the Western Wall and the Temple Mount by their Muslim names only. The agency thus attached the UN’s name to the odious Arab project to de-Judaize the City of David. . . .

[A]nti-Israelism and—it must be said—anti-Semitism are part of UNESCO’s diplomatic culture. When, in July this year, Israel’s ambassador to UNESCO called for a minute of silence for Holocaust victims, Cuba’s envoy objected: “Only the chairman can request a minute of silence. So with your indulgence, let me request, Mr. Chairman, that we stand for a minute of silence for all of the Palestinians who have died in the region.” Footage of the scene . . . shows numerous delegates standing up and clapping in favor of the Cuban motion. . . .

By withdrawing from UNESCO, . . . the Trump administration is sending an important message to the UN mandarins: that America doesn’t have infinite patience for international institutions that function as platforms for Jew-hatred. Long before Donald Trump came on the scene, that used to be a bipartisan American position.

Read more at Commentary

More about: Anti-Semitism, Israel & Zionism, Jerusalm, Palestinian statehood, UNESCO, United Nations

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