Palestinian Islamic Jihad Is Trying to Stir Up Trouble in Gaza. Can Israel Stop It?

Last weekend, Palestinian Islamic Jihad (PIJ) fired a barrage of rockets from the Gaza Strip at the Israeli town of Sderot; the Iron Dome system intercepted most of them, but one damaged a house. The IDF responded with airstrikes, mostly on Hamas targets. While both PIJ and Hamas receive support from Iran, PIJ is more closely tied to Tehran. Yaakov Lappin investigates its motivation:

PIJ has both an interest in destabilizing the security situation with rocket fire and the ability to do so. [At the moment], Hamas is holding out for the results of negotiations with Egypt and the UN aimed at preventing an economic collapse in Gaza. PIJ, in contrast, has no such concerns. It is more than willing to use its rocket arsenal, which is larger than that of Hamas, to upset the security situation.

Iranian funding and rocket production knowhow has helped make PIJ a significant terror army, with some 15,000 armed operatives (compared to Hamas’s 25,000-strong military wing). . . . Since May 2019, PIJ has significantly stepped up attempts to launch attacks against Israel out of Gaza. Most of those attempts have been thwarted, but many more attack plots remain, and the organization’s intent is crystal-clear.

The Israeli defense establishment is focusing its readiness on the northern front, where Iran and Hizballah are seeking to build new attack capabilities. These include upgrading Hizballah’s rocket arsenal into precision-guided missiles in Lebanon and entrenching Iran’s attack bases throughout Syria. Israel is actively working to disrupt both of these Iranian objectives. To help it achieve this mission, Israel is prioritizing the north over Gaza. That formula has held up until now, but if PIJ remains determined to rock the boat, it could collapse into yet another Gaza war.

Read more at BESA Center

More about: Gaza Strip, Hamas, Hizballah, Islamic Jihad, Israeli Security

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