How Competition with the Palestinian Authority Led Hamas to Start, and End, Attacks on Israel

Yesterday, the Israeli government reached a ceasefire agreement with Hamas, which has been raining makeshift incendiary devices, and occasional missiles, on Israeli border towns since August 6—sending residents running to bomb shelters and starting severe forest fires. Noa Shusterman and Udi Dekel investigate the reasons for this most recent round of fighting:

Hamas initiated a limited campaign and conducted a measured and calculated escalation in order to attain its goals, but was mindful to maintain intensity below the threshold that would lead to an [all-out] Israeli military campaign. Hamas does not want to jeopardize the achievements of its military buildup, especially its infrastructure for manufacturing rockets, unmanned aerial vehicles, and other weapons. . . . Israel also prefers to postpone a military operation, and has attacked Hamas military infrastructure targets in response, taking care not to cause fatalities.

Hamas’s guiding strategic goal is to make it clear that the Palestinian Authority president Mahmoud Abbas’s political platform has failed, and that challenging Israel with resistance led by Hamas is what will score points for the Palestinian people. Gaining achievements by escalation in Gaza is Hamas’s way of making this point.

Moreover, Yahya Sinwar—the Hamas operative who rules the Strip at the behest of the terrorist group’s Turkey-based politburo—has his own political calculations:

Sinwar’s assertive and aggressive actions and willingness to go to the edge of war can also be attributed to the internal elections process in Hamas scheduled for the end of the year, and the need to fortify his status as leader of Hamas in the Gaza Strip. Sinwar is in dire need to showcase his achievements.

While this round of fighting may be over, Shusterman and Dekel are certain that, sooner or later, the cycle will repeat itself.

Read more at Institute for National Security Studies

More about: Gaza Strip, Hamas, Mahmoud Abbas, Palestinian Authority

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