The Settlements, Benjamin Netanyahu, and the Danger of Conflating Politics with Law

Most objections to the State Department’s recent determination that international law does not prohibit Jews from living in the West Bank were based, Evelyn Gordon notes, on prudential rather than legal grounds. Citing as examples the statements of the presidential candidates Joe Biden and Pete Buttigieg, she points to the dangers of this inability, or unwillingness, to distinguish policy from law:

[T]he concept of “it’s legal, but it stinks” has evidently gone out of style, especially on the left. When leftists think something stinks, they want it declared illegal, even if it’s not.

The advantages of this tactic are obvious. Policy questions, by definition, are disputable. . . . But law ostensibly eliminates controversy because once the courts rule something illegal, then everyone is supposed to accept that it must stop. . . . [The] problem is this tactic’s enormous cost, which far outweighs any possible benefit: when people start branding anything they object to as “illegal,” they turn the law into just another player on the political battlefield. And once that happens, legal decisions will be treated with no more respect than any other political pronouncement.

Gordon notes a perhaps far more dangerous parallel within Israel’s political system, in the form of the attorney general’s decision to indict Benjamin Netanyahu:

[T]he attorney general’s office and the courts have intervened in literally thousands of policy decisions over the past three decades, frequently in defiance of actual written law and almost always in the left’s favor. In short, both . . . have routinely behaved like political activists rather than impartial jurists. So rightists have no reason to trust their impartiality now.

[Moreover], Netanyahu has been targeted by frivolous investigations—including, in my view, two of the three now going to trial—ever since he first became prime minister in 1996. All involved genuinely repulsive conduct on Netanyahu’s part. But rather than treating such conduct as a problem on which the public, rather than the courts, must render judgment, the legal establishment repeatedly opened cases against him, to which they devoted countless man-hours before finally closing them.

Now, the legal establishment says it has finally found a real crime. But as in the story of the boy who cried wolf, Netanyahu’s supporters no longer believe it.

Read more at Evelyn Gordon

More about: Benjamin Netanyahu, Israeli politics, Joseph Biden, Pete Buttigieg, Settlements

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