Preliminary Takeaways from the New U.S. Peace Plan

Yesterday afternoon, the White House announced its long-awaited plan to end the Israel-Palestinian conflict. Shmuel Rosner zeroes in on its most important aspects and likely consequences:

Israel must agree to a Palestinian state. Small, demilitarized, but a state. [But the creation of such a] Palestinian state no longer means an evacuation of settlements or an Israeli withdrawal from territory it deems crucial for its security or for symbolic reasons. In fact, the opposite is true: Israel can quickly annex the rest of the territory.

All peace plans pose the same dilemma to Israel and its neighbors: is this the best deal the sides can hope for, or maybe they ought to wait for a better option, in some unknown, distant future? The Palestinians have no doubt: the future will be better than the present. They could be right. Although, it is worth remembering that they relied on the same math when they rejected all previous peace plans.

Israel faces a true moment of choice this time. . . . Most Israeli leaders up until now have not thought that a Palestinian state is a viable or desirable idea. . . . Basically, the deal offered to Israel is this: accept a symbolic statement of statehood in exchange for an arrangement that includes almost everything you need and want.

Rosner is skeptical of the theory that both the plan’s release and Benjamin Netanyahu’s acquiescence are simply a ploy to help keep the prime minister in power. “[I]t is not at all clear that the release of the plan helps Netanyahu.” Moreover,

there is a very good chance that the plan will not matter, politically speaking. For about a year now, the polls show an unchanged picture of voters who already made up their minds. No crisis or maneuver significantly altered their principled preference—for or against Netanyahu. There is reason to suspect that the Trump deal will [likewise have] no effect on the governing coalition in Israel.

Read more at Jewish Journal

More about: Benjamin Netanyahu, Donald Trump, Israeli politics, Peace Process

 

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