Islamic State’s Next Target: The Temple Mount

Last summer, terrorists affiliated with the Northern Branch of the Islamic Movement—a Muslim Brotherhood offshoot that operates within Israel—opened fire on border police on the Temple Mount. Since then, Israel has rolled up two cells loyal to Islamic State (IS) that were planning attacks on the al-Aqsa mosque. Nadav Shragai explains what has brought these two jihadist groups to agree on a common strategy:

The leader of the Northern Branch, Sheikh Raed Salah, envisions Jerusalem as the capital of an international Muslim caliphate [in the Middle East]. . . . Islamic State and its supporters, by contrast, have never limited or defined the borders of the future caliphate, or named a capital for it. After their defeats in Syria and Iraq, the issues of Jerusalem and al-Aqsa are, for them, a new horizon—or at least a potential one.

The way that the Northern Branch sees it, the story about al-Aqsa’s being in danger, [a regular theme of its propaganda], is a tool to recruit the masses, and al-Aqsa itself is a place that must be “redeemed from the Jewish desecration” and “freed from its bonds.” . . . For the small cluster of Arab Israeli supporters of Islamic State, al-Aqsa is everything that the Northern Branch says it is, and more: it is a tool that IS can use to spread and promote the idea of an Islamic state, and active war against Jews and Christians—“the new heretics and Crusaders.” . . .

As in July 2017, each of the cells [recently broken up by Israeli police] included three young men from [the northern Israeli village of] Umm al-Fahm, some of whom [likewise] belonged to the Jabarin clan. . . . It’s not hard to picture what would happen if two IS cells from Jabarin, linked by family ties, were to execute an attack. In the Middle East, the Temple Mount is the ultimate powder keg. Any fire that breaks out there spreads quickly and is very difficult to put out. In previous incidents, the spinners of the “al-Aqsa is in danger” yarn found a way to foist responsibility for the attacks onto Israel, as the entity that “rules over Islamic holy sites.”

Read more at Algemeiner

More about: ISIS, Israel & Zionism, Muslim Brotherhood, Palestinian terror, Temple Mount

 

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