Stones Can Be Deadly Weapons, and Should Be Treated as Such

Late Monday night, a group of Israeli soldiers entered a Palestinian village to arrest terror suspects. While leaving, the soldiers were set upon by ten villagers throwing stones, one of which killed Sergeant Amit Yigal. Meir Indor, who was himself once injured in the head by a rock thrown at his car, urges the Israeli government to change its policy toward stone throwers, who are now give light sentences and protected by the IDF rules of engagement:

The current jail sentence for stone-throwing is three to seven months. If someone is injured, the terrorist will get between one year and eighteen months, if the injuries aren’t permanent. [Yigal’s] murderer could have been caught after an earlier stone-throwing, that didn’t cause damage, and would have gotten a slap on the wrist, which sends [the] message: try again until you succeed.

[Earlier] this week, youngsters threw stones and Molotov cocktails at IDF forces who came to demolish a terrorist’s home, and their jeep was burnt—without any real response. . . . Israeli soldiers can no longer be abandoned in their battle against terror. . . . Opening fire on stone-throwers must be legislated as it is in the U.S., where a stone is considered a weapon.

The U.S. has understood the devastating potential of stone-throwing and has defined it as using a lethal weapon . . . which allows for harsh sentencing and punishment.

Read more at Israel Hayom

More about: Israeli Security, Palestinian terror

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