Europe Is Waking Up to the Dangers of Funding Palestinian Incitement

A recent resolution passed by the European Parliament expressed concern about “hate speech and violence” taught in schools run by the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees (UNRWA), an organization generously funded by the EU. While UNRWA’s critics have long documented the ways its schools inculcate anti-Semitism and support for terrorism into students, until recently Europe has studiously ignored this information. Shany Mor writes:

The resolution reflects two trends in European engagement with the Palestinian issue. First, the Europeans are increasingly concerned about anti-Israel and anti-Semitic incitement in Palestinian educational materials. They are also troubled by the use of European aid money to fund activities that encourage violence or terrorism by Palestinian factions.

Second, policymakers in Europe are finally beginning to ask tough questions about the kind of organization UNRWA is and whether it is facilitating peace at all. UNRWA’s corruption, its mismanagement, its turning a blind eye to the misuse of its facilities by terrorist organizations, and especially its anti-peace educational materials are now on the agendas of the European Parliament as well as an increasing number of actors in European domestic politics.

UNRWA’s biggest problem, [however], is not corruption or mismanagement or even incitement. UNRWA exists not to mitigate the effects of the Arab-Israeli conflict but rather to exacerbate them. Rather than solving the refugee problem, UNRWA’s dishonest recognition of descendants of refugees perpetuates this problem and ensures that the unrealistic demand for a Palestinian “right of return” will continue to stymie final-status peace negotiations in the future, just as it has since the failed 2000 Camp David summit.

Read more at FDD

More about: Anti-Semitism, Europe and Israel, Palestinian refugees, UNRWA

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