How the U.S. Can Foster Continued Improvement in Israel-Arab Relations

According to the “old model” of understanding the Middle East, writes Bob Silverman, normalization with the Arab states “was a one-sided benefit to Israel, only to be conceded once Israel meets the needs of the Palestinian Authority.” By contrast, the recent agreements with the United Arab Emirates and with Bahrain suggest a new model that “assumes normalization benefits both Israelis and Arabs, and that Arab engagement with Israel will help achieve a Palestinian-Israeli peace agreement.” Silverman argues that there is much more Washington can do to promote this new model:

Ali Salem, an Egyptian playwright and newspaper columnist, . . . decided to visit Israel in 1993, after the Oslo Accords between Israel and the Palestine Liberation Organization. His subsequent book A Drive to Israel, perhaps the only humorous account of Arab-Israeli contacts, was an Arabic bestseller. But it got him banned by the Egyptian professional unions. No one would publish his writing or stage his plays. . . . He lost his livelihood and professional reputation for normalizing with Israel. And he became an object lesson for other Arabs who might be curious about their Israeli neighbors.

[To] shine a light on anti-normalization practices of Arab governments . . . Congress [should] pass a new bipartisan bill introduced by Senators Cory Booker and Rob Portman. This law would require the State Department to add to [its] annual human-rights report instances of Arab government retribution towards citizens who engage in people-to-people relations with Israelis. Such retribution is unfortunately the law and practice throughout the Arab world. We can support courageous individuals like the Egyptian playwright Ali Salem, but first we need to know about them. This law requires the State Department to make such people-to-people contacts a priority.

Read more at National Interest

More about: Congress, Egypt, Israel-Arab relations, US-Israel relations

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