The UN’s New Blacklist of Israeli Businesses Threatens Palestinians Most of All

Last week, the United Nations Human Rights Council publicized a database of 112 companies—94 of which are based in Israel—that do business in “Israeli settlements in the Occupied Palestinian Territory [sic], including East Jerusalem.” This list, three years in the making, evidently serves as a guide for those wishing, or promoting, a boycott of the Jewish state. As Itamar Marcus and Nan Jacques Zilberdik explain in a detailed report, such a boycott would above all hurt Palestinians:

[A]ccording to Palestinian workers, Palestinian lawyers, and the Palestinian Bureau of Statistics, Palestinians enjoy better working conditions and prefer working for Israeli employers—including in Israeli settlements beyond the Green Line—rather than working for Palestinian employers. For example, wages are four-times higher with Israeli employers than with Palestinian employers, and Palestinian workers receive the same health benefits, sick leave, and vacation time as their Israeli coworkers.

By trying to harm Israeli companies that have “activities” in the West Bank, the UN is also harming the many Palestinians who work for these businesses and who enjoy the better conditions offered by these Israeli enterprises. If the UN’s new . . . efforts lead to a larger boycott of these businesses, eventually they may have to let go of employees, among them Palestinians. Furthermore, it is likely that the Palestinian Authority (PA) will put pressure on Palestinians who work for the blacklisted businesses to leave their jobs.

The Israeli Arab labor lawyer Khaled Dukhi, who works with the Israeli NGO Workers’ Hotline, says that Israeli labor law is “very good” because it does not differentiate between men and women, Israelis and Palestinians, or Muslims and Jews. However, he explained that Palestinians who work for Israelis still suffer because Palestinian middlemen “steal” a significant part of their salaries, especially those of women.

It should also be noted that the PA itself enjoys the benefits of Palestinians working for Israeli employers. [An estimated] 75 percent of the income tax paid by Palestinians working in Israel is transferred to the PA. In 2017 alone, this provision provided the PA with no less than 135,000,000 shekels [over $39 million].

Read more at Palestinian Media Watch

More about: BDS, Palestinian economy, UNHRC

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