Egypt and Israel Send a Message to Turkey, and to the U.S.

On Sunday, Tarek el-Molla, Egypt’s minister of petroleum and mineral resources, paid an official visit to Israel—the first visit from an Egyptian minister since 2016. Molla also met with Palestinian Authority officials in Ramallah. Lazar Berman comments:

Israel and Egypt agreed Sunday to link up Israel’s Leviathan natural-gas field with Egyptian liquid-natural-gas facilities through an underwater pipeline, from which the gas can be exported to European markets.

Analysts say that one of the key purposes of the meetings—beyond the energy discussions—was to send a message to Turkey, and its president Recep Tayyip Erdogan. For the better part of a decade, Turkey has been engaged in a bitter rivalry with Egypt that began when Erdogan backed the Muslim Brotherhood after the group was ousted from power in Cairo.

In the Mediterranean, Egypt has aligned itself with Greece and Cyprus, which accuse Turkey of illegally drilling for natural gas in their exclusive economic zones. Together with Israel, the countries formed the EastMed Gas Forum, headquartered in Cairo, and have conducted joint military exercises.

The visit was also meant to send a message to the Biden administration. Egypt anticipates increased pressure from the U.S. government over its human-rights record. . . . The more Egypt can present itself as a source of stability and cooperation in the region, the logic goes, the less [such] pressure it will face from the U.S.

Read more at Times of Israel

More about: Egypt, Israel diplomacy, Israeli gas, Turkey, 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