Welcome to the Post-Palestine Middle East

To Hussein Aboubakr, the signing of the Abraham Accords by Bahrain, the United Arab Emirates, and Israel on Tuesday represents a massive change in the Middle East, and the Islamic world as a whole. For nearly a century, successive political and religious movements have held up the Palestinian—or, better, the anti-Israel—cause as a lodestar, imbuing it with near-eschatological significance. The willingness of these two Arab monarchies to engage openly with the Jewish state suggests signals that this cause is rapidly losing its power:

When I was a fourteen-year-old jihadist wannabe in Cairo in 2013, I didn’t care about Egyptian politics, Arabs, Hosni Mubarak, regional powers, Arab monarchy, Arab republicanism, capitalism, or any of the issues that animate worldly observers of Middle East politics. I cared about one thing and one thing alone: Palestine. All I needed to hear was the word “Palestine” in order to pledge my immediate unconditional loyalty to whoever was speaking. Few words—none, really—were fused with the fascinations, aspirations, emotions, longings, and mystical forces that the term “Palestine” summoned in me. Palestine was never merely a disputed geographical territory; it was a claim to the absolute fulfillment of the Islamic political vision, an eternal moral truth, secularized in Arab nationalism and sanctified in Islamism.

Palestine meant el-helm el-Arabi (the Arab dream), the tajj ‘alras (the crown on top [of Arab-ness]), and the beating heart of Islam. To evoke Palestine was to evoke Islamic brotherhood and Arab honor, for it was a reservoir of identity and a proof of faith. Palestine was the fulfillment of a state of spiritual purity of the Muslim individual and the whole body of Islam. The Arab will to Palestine was a Nietzschean will to power. It was the epistemological glue of the disparate components making up Arab political consciousness.

And I wasn’t alone. To the political and religious Arab minds of the 20th century, the idea of Palestine was everything. . .  . Much has changed in the past decade, however, and we are now entering the age of a post-Palestine Middle East.

Read more at Commentary

More about: Arab nationalism, Islamism, Israeli-Palestinian Conflict, Middle East

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