The U.S. Rewards Mahmoud Abbas for His Snubs

One might expect that an unpopular leader facing an upcoming election and narrowing diplomatic horizons would bend over backwards to stay in the good graces of an American president who has already remitted $90 million in aid money and promised to be more favorable than his predecessor. But such laws of political gravity don’t seem to apply to the Palestinian Authority (PA) president Mahmoud Abbas, as Ruthie Blum explains:

In mid-February, Secretary of State Antony Blinken personally phoned Abbas, undoubtedly to discuss all the goodies that the PA could anticipate from President Biden and company, and perhaps to wish him well in the upcoming elections. But rather than bask in the attention that he was receiving from America’s top diplomat, Abbas refused to take the call.

Yes, the head of the tiny terrorism-supporting entity was deeply offended that someone of Blinken’s “inferior” stature was on the line. Abbas, after all, had demanded that Biden himself initiate the conversation, “president to president.”

Instead of warning Abbas not to overestimate his standing in the world relative to that of the secretary of state, Blinken accepted the snub. . . . Ramallah and Washington are now discussing the option of Blinken’s holding the chat with the PA prime minister Mohammad Shtayyeh or the senior PA official Hussein al-Sheikh.

Abbas’s gall is not new and has served the PA ruler well with the international community, which has elevated him to ill-deserved heights. This is due to an unfounded, knee-jerk opposition to Israel, not to the way in which he rules his own people, who view him with disdain and outrage.

Read more at JNS

More about: Antony Blinken, Mahmoud Abbas, Palestinian Authority, U.S. Foreign policy

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