The Recent Attacks on the Jewish National Fund Involve a Tacit Acceptance of Bigotry

Established in 1901 by the Zionist Congress to purchase land for settlement in Ottoman Palestine, the Jewish National Fund (JNF) today has custodianship over some 15 percent of Israel’s territory. Last week, the State Department, the Union for Reform Judaism, and others condemned this venerable institution for its plans to authorize the use of its funds for buying land in the West Bank. Jonathan Tobin comments:

JNF effectively operates as a kind of non-governmental organization or national trust. . . . Today, it still [purchases land], though most of its work revolves around forest management, the development of vital water resources, building infrastructure, community development, education, and crucial research projects. As such, it’s an institution that is both deeply connected to Jewish history and contemporary concerns related to the environment.

JNF’s proposed activities will not expropriate Palestinians. Any work they do will be done within existing settlements or their immediate surroundings. . . . The JNF’s land purchases will also be purely voluntary. It isn’t stealing land now any more than it did so 100 years ago during the early days of its operations. [On the other hand,] the idea that Western liberals tolerate or even support the Palestinian belief that selling land to Jews is a death-penalty offense for Arabs is outrageous and rooted in prejudice.

Mainstream Jewish groups and all those who care about Israel should be supporting JNF’s ongoing efforts to develop the entire country, including the Negev and the Galilee. It’s vital that friends of Israel not succumb to the lie being promoted by JNF critics . . . that the JNF’s plans will harm peace or wrongly take land. To the contrary, JNF will be doing nothing more than the same job it has been doing for the last 120 years. It should stand its ground with the support of all those who understand that Jewish rights not be sacrificed on the altar of anti-Zionist hate.

Read more at JNS

More about: Jewish National Fund, West Bank

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