With Talk of Annexation, Benny Gantz Sends a Message to the U.S.

On Tuesday, the former IDF chief of staff Benny Gantz, who is campaigning for a third time to oust Benjamin Netanyahu from the Israeli premiership, announced that if elected he will seek to annex the Jordan Valley. He added the important caveat that he wants to do so “in coordination with the international community”—a promise that, as many have pointed out, is nearly impossible to fulfill. While it is easy to speculate about the political calculations behind this pledge, Jonathan Tobin suggests that it is also intended as a message to American liberals:

Listen to any of the Democratic candidates for president talk about the Middle East, and all you hear are promises to pressure Israel to do exactly what both Ehud Barak and Ehud Olmert tried to do: trade land for peace. . . . The only significant difference among them is whether that pressure would come in the form of gentle urging or of a brutal push in which U.S. aid to the Jewish state would be withheld as part of a diplomatic quid pro quo.

The same sort of sentiments can be heard from many of those who purport to represent the interests of the American Jewish community. . . . Gantz’s continued efforts to tilt to the right reveal how out of touch Americans are when it comes to the conflict with the Palestinians. It also shows how out of touch Jewish Americans are with the beliefs of the overwhelming majority of Israelis. Their critiques of Benjamin Netanyahu and his government not only ring hollow; it’s just as likely that the only alternative to the Likud will also disappoint them, since Gantz’s views on security issues are fairly close to those of the [current] prime minister.

If they were not so blind to the reality of Palestinian intransigence, Donald Trump’s would-be opponents might be listening to Gantz and his talk about the Jordan Valley. If they did, they’d realize that their plans to pressure Israel are based on magical thinking about peace that sensible Israelis from left to right abandoned years ago. Sensible Americans should do the same.

Read more at JNS

More about: Benny Gantz, Democrats, Israeli Election 2020, Jordan Valley, U.S. Politics

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