Hamas Is Creating a Humanitarian Crisis in Gaza

According to the most recent reports, the Gaza Strip is on the verge of a major public-health crisis: shortages of both doctors and medications have become critical, and hospitals have been sending patients home untreated. The Palestinian Authority (PA) sets aside $41.3 million annually for medical supplies for the Strip, but has been withholding the funds because of its dispute with Hamas, which governs the territory. Yet the terrorist group bears even greater responsibility for these problems, as Evelyn Gordon writes:

Two weeks ago, Hamas discussed the humanitarian problem with foreign officials, who then presented its ideas to Israeli officials. The organization proposed three possible scenarios. . . . But none of them involved Hamas lifting a finger to help the people it governs. . . .

[A]side from about 130 million shekels a year that Hamas raises through taxes in Gaza, Qatar alone has given Gaza $1 billion over the last seven years, including $200 million last year. And unlike the billions Gaza receives from other international donors, part of the Qatari money—16 percent, or $160 million—has gone directly to Hamas for its own use and that of other terrorist groups in Gaza. That’s almost four times what the PA spent annually on medical supplies for Gaza back when it was still financing Gaza’s health system. Thus, the Qatari money alone could have solved the entire medical crisis had Hamas so chosen.

So what did Hamas propose instead? That someone else solve the problem. Responsibility for Gaza could be handed over to the PA, the United Nations, or Egypt, it suggested. And if none of them is willing, Hamas’s backup plan is to launch a war against Israel “that would end with an international force occupying the Strip,” . . . that is, another way of trying to shift responsibility to someone else.

Of course, all of these plans are nonstarters so long as Hamas refuses to disarm, because nobody wants responsibility for Gaza while an armed group inside it is repeatedly attacking Israel. . . . Hamas knows this. But being able to continue attacking Israel is more important to it than enabling a solution to its people’s medical crisis.

Read more at Evelyn Gordon

More about: Gaza Strip, Israel & Zionism, Palestinian Authority

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