Israel Is in the Middle East, Israelis Are Middle Easterners, and Don’t You Forget It

Why does Israeli Judaism not resemble our Judaism, ask American or European Jews? Why are Israelis so different in their politics, in their culture? Well, replies the noted journalist and author Matti Friedman in an interview with the Times of Israel, it’s because Israelis live in the Middle East, and “without understanding the Middle Easternness of this country, you can’t get anywhere.”

[Israel is] much more a Middle Eastern place than the one in the stories. It was designed as a refuge for the Jews from Europe but it came too late for that. It became a refuge for Jews from the Middle East. It’s part of the continuum of the Jewish presence inside the Muslim world, in different circumstances.

This country does not rest on socialism and secularism [the values of the early Zionist pioneers]. It rests on a bedrock of Jewish identity that has a lot to do with people who came here from Baghdad, Aleppo, and Casablanca, and who understand things that are deeply important about being Jewish in the Middle East and the Arab world. That wisdom was disdained in the first few decades of modern Israel, but is coming increasingly to the fore now.

What’s more,

the Jews of European origin are becoming more Mizraḥi here — in their behavior, their attitude to religion. Your Israeli kids are more Middle Eastern than you if you are a Western immigrant. 

And what does this revised self-conception mean for Israel’s place in the region? “To throw out one far-fetched idea,” Friedman says, “I’d love it if we, if Israel, became part of the Arab League, for instance.”

If we keep thinking of ourselves as Europeans, dumped here, we’ll continue to be the outsider. But the continuum of Jewish life in the Middle East offers us the way to see ourselves as, and to be, part of the region.

Read more at Times of Israel

More about: Israel & Zionism, Middle East, Mizrahi Jewry

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