No, an American Diplomat Didn’t Encourage Israel to Annex the West Bank

Last weekend, news spread that David Friedman, the U.S. ambassador to Jerusalem, had given a green light to the Netanyahu government to annex parts of the West Bank. In the interview cited by these news stories, however, what Friedman actually said was this: “Under certain circumstances, I think Israel has the right to retain some, but unlikely all, of the West Bank.” Jonathan Tobin explains why such a statement, despite the hysteria it engendered, should be entirely uncontroversial:

[An] important point that was lost in the rush to put words in Friedman’s mouth and to condemn the Trump administration for allegedly overturning decades of U.S. policy: it has been official U.S. policy for more than twenty years that Israel has “the right to retain some” of the West Bank. That was the formula for peace pursued by Washington at the Camp David summit in July 2000 when President Bill Clinton and Prime Minister Ehud Barak offered the PLO chairman Yasir Arafat an independent state in most of the West Bank, Gaza, and a share of Jerusalem. But part of that plan, which Arafat turned down, was that Israeli would retain some of the West Bank. It would be repeated in all future peace negotiations carried out under George W. Bush and even Barack Obama.

Bush put [a version of this formula] in writing in a letter to Ariel Sharon in 2004 prior to the withdrawal from Gaza, in which he assured the Israelis that they could count on U.S. support for holding onto Jerusalem and the West Bank settlement blocs. So the argument that Friedman said something worthy of his being fired—as some [of his critics] have claimed—is as absurd as it is outrageous. . . .

Friedman is . . . willing to say that the West Bank or any other part of the country isn’t “Palestinian territory” but disputed land, and that Israel can assert its rights as well as its security needs in any negotiation. He’s right about that. And he’s also right that the United States is not opposed to Israel’s holding on to at least some of the West Bank in the event of a theoretical peace agreement that the Palestinians clearly have no interest in negotiating, let alone signing.

Read more at JNS

More about: Benjamin Netanyahu, US-Israel relations, West Bank

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