The Palestinian Prisoner Whose Fate Illustrates the Cardinal Flaw of the Two-State Solution

Earlier this month, Hussam Khader, a member of the Palestinian Authority (PA) parliament, was thrown in jail for criticizing the PA president, Mahmoud Abbas, on Facebook. Stephen Flatow explains why Khader’s imprisonment should matter to those in the West concerned over the Palestinians’ fate:

I have no sympathy for Hussam Khader. He is a veteran terrorist who has served time in Israeli prisons. But his arrest tells us a lot about the nature of the Palestinian Authority.

Crushing strikers and arresting dissidents, including members of the Legislative Council, has become routine under Abbas. And it’s just the tip of the iceberg. Critics of the regime are routinely tortured. Unions are intimidated. Women are treated as second-class citizens. Abbas’s “Cybercrime Law” mandates prison sentences and fines for anyone who establishes a website that might “undermine the safety of the state or its internal or external security.”

As for Abbas himself, he refuses to hold elections for his position. Incredibly, he is now in the fourteenth year of his four-year term as head of the PA.

The Jewish “peace” groups that shout in protest if they think Israel has mistreated an Arab rock-thrower are conspicuously silent when it comes to the PA’s daily trampling of the rights of the Palestinian public. Jewish advocates of Palestinian statehood don’t want to talk about this. Acknowledging that the PA is a fascist dictatorship would mean acknowledging that a sovereign Palestinian state would certainly be a fascist dictatorship, too. Too bad for Hussam Khader.

Read more at JNS

More about: Mahmoud Abbas, Palestinian Authority, Two-State Solution

 

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