Russia’s Role in the Changing Face of Israel’s Syria Strategy

Over the weekend, an aerial attack destroyed a shipment of weapons intended for Hizballah fighters in Syria as it made its way overland from Lebanon. Although Jerusalem took no credit, the attack resembles hundreds of similar IDF strikes on arms and positions belonging to Iran and its proxies. Alex Fishman notes that, just a week beforehand, Naftali Bennett had his first meeting since taking office with Vladimir Putin, who has allied with Iran in backing up the dictatorship of Bashar al-Assad. In Fishman’s view, the timing isn’t coincidental:

Over the past months, according to Syrian opposition forces, Israel has intensified its military operations in Syria. While 2020 saw some 400 missiles allegedly fired by Israel at its neighbor to the northwest, the past year saw a 25-percent increase—and we’re only in November.

The Iranian activity in Syria has also very much changed. The overall presence of Iran’s advisers in Syria had already started to decrease in 2020, with the number of Iranian fighters dropping by some 50 percent. However, the quantity and quality of the weapons and supplies Tehran is shipping into Syria have increased.

Israel’s strategy, meanwhile, has remained the same: thwart Iran’s efforts to entrench itself more deeply in Syria. But when the rate and ferocity of attacks increases, Israel runs the risk of having this cold war turn hot. So why does Israel continue with this strategy and has even intensified its activity? The real change over the past months has not been with Israel or Iran, but with Russian policy towards Syria.

Moscow has realized that in order to bolster the regime of the Syrian president Bashar al-Assad—and ensure his, and its own, continued hold on the region—it needs to begin bringing Syria out of its diplomatic isolation and to ramp up the rehabilitation efforts. . . . [Therefore], Moscow is pressuring Damascus to change its behavior in order to open itself to the rest of the world, with the weakening of Iran’s presence in Syria being a key part of achieving that goal.

Read more at Ynet

More about: Hizballah, Iran, Israeli Security, Russia, 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