Facing Widespread Scrutiny, the WHO Focuses on Maligning Israel

Recently the World Health Organization (WHO), a UN agency, has received much criticism because of its handling of the coronavirus pandemic during its early stages. Further undermining its own credibility, at its annual meeting last week it passed a resolution—cosponsored by Cuba, Syria, Yemen, and other tyrannies and failed states—gratuitously condemning Israel. Elliott Abrams comments:

Here we are in the middle of a global pandemic, but the WHO’s annual meeting can still abandon its responsibilities and divert [its attention to] an assault on Israel. . . . The resolution requires yet another time-wasting debate at next year’s annual meeting as well.

This contemptible resolution was supported by France, Spain, Switzerland, Belgium, Portugal, Japan, India, Ireland, New Zealand, Luxembourg, and 72 other countries . . . . The vote was 82 in favor, fourteen opposed, and a very large bloc abstaining (40) or absent (38). That means that 82 countries were in favor and 92 were not. The vote that those European democracies plus New Zealand and Japan cast is a foul politicization of the WHO—at a moment when its handling of the COVID-19 pandemic and of China is very much in question.

The United Nations is supposedly going to lead the effort to assist Gazans while preventing any of that aid from assisting Hamas. One wonders if those who voted for this resolution ever stop to wonder how such actions affect Israelis’ confidence in the UN system’s ability to do its work reliably, honestly, and courageously in the teeth of a terrorist group that will seek to intimidate it. Or perhaps one doesn’t need to wonder very much.

Read more at Pressure Points

More about: Hamas, United Nations

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