Syria Could Have Had Peace with Israel. Instead, Its Rulers Chose Slaughter and Impoverishment

Exactly ten years ago yesterday, the Syrian president Bashar al-Assad made a stunning offer to American negotiators: he would cut ties with Iran, cease support for Hizballah and Hamas, and stop threatening Israel—in exchange for the Golan Heights. But a mere two weeks later, his troops started shooting peaceful protestors in the city of Daraa, and Assad launched a bloody war against his own people that has not yet come to an end. Frederic Hof, who was an America mediator between Damascus and Jerusalem at the time, reflects:

The destruction of Syria has been senseless. A Syrian president seemingly committed to retrieving [lost] territory in exchange for Syria’s strategic reorientation threw it all away. And for what? . . . One possibility is that Assad deliberately used violence to cancel his conditional peace commitments and escape U.S. mediation. No one forced him to make those commitments; he offered them all during a 50-minute meeting. One wonders, however, if in the weeks following his promise of full strategic reorientation, Assad had second thoughts about Iran’s likely reaction and the domestic political implications of peace. In any event he has all but deeded to Israel the land he said he wanted returned to Syria.

Ten years on, Assad hopes the U.S. will reengage him diplomatically and lavish reconstruction funds on him and his entourage. The view here is that such hopes are illusory.

Hundreds of thousands of Syrians have died. Countless Syrians have been maimed and traumatized, both physically and psychologically. Tens of thousands remain in regime torture chambers. All this to preserve a family business; a business that might have thrived and evolved politically into something more inclusive and representative if it had made pragmatic and humane choices a decade ago. But was it ever capable of doing so? Syria’s condition in 2021 suggests the answer: no.

Read more at Asharq al-Awsat

More about: Bashar al-Assad, Golan Heights, Israeli Security, Syrian civil war

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