BDS, Unable to Harm Israel, Has Turned Its Sights on Jews in the Diaspora

March 15 marks the beginning of this year’s Israel Apartheid Week, during which campus groups around the world hold rallies and events for the purpose of defaming the Jewish state and mustering support for the movement to boycott, divest from, and sanction it (BDS). Richard Kemp comments:

BDS’s leaders trumpet their claim to support “freedom, justice, and equality” for the Palestinian people. They are less open about their desire to eradicate the Jewish state for fear they would lose backing from individuals and organizations that have a genuine desire to improve the lives of Palestinians but do not want to eliminate a whole country and its Jewish citizens.

I have discussed all this with students brandishing BDS placards while squawking cliché-ridden slogans during Israel Apartheid Week on various campuses, including New York University and the University of Bristol. . . . All the protesters I met denied that they thought Israel should be destroyed or that they supported violence. Young and impressionable men and women, whose main attention is on studying for their degrees, have been duped by . . . . BDS rabble-rousers into thinking they were demonstrating in support of a two-state solution to be achieved by peaceful means.

The real truth about the global BDS movement is understood by very few. . . . In sixteen years, BDS has not laid a glove on Israel, achieving none of their main objectives. Despite endless efforts to boycott, divest from, and sanction the Jewish state, they have had zero effect on its economy, politics or culture.

That stark and indisputable reality points to their genuine but unspoken purpose. The leaders of the BDS movement are far from stupid. They know from bitter experience that they cannot and will never end the Jewish state economically and are incapable of taking on the might of the Israeli military. Instead, their campaign is all about hounding Jews wherever they can find them, to punish Jews around the world for the existence of the Jewish state and undermine support for Israel among Jews as well as non-Jews.

Read more at Gatestone

More about: Anti-Semitism, BDS

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