The End of the Arab-Israeli Conflict, and What It Means for the Arab World

With the recent spate of peace treaties between Arab states and the Jewish one, writes Dan Schueftan, it is clear that the decades-long struggle is “fading away.” He explains:

What is new is Israel’s success, aided by the Arabs’ structural weaknesses, in breaking the pan-Arab front against it, and in convincing the majority of the Arab countries to . . . acknowledge in their policy that a strong Israel is an essential condition for their survival, not a threat to rally round. Violence and instability in the region remain as they were, but the axis of struggle is not between Israel and “the Arabs”; it is between an Arab-Israeli coalition on the one hand, and Iran’s Islamic Revolution and Erdogan’s Turkey (and the Salafi-jihadist threat) on the other. The former to a large extent overlaps with the de -facto coalition of Israel and a majority of the Arab countries against the Muslim Brotherhood.

The prevailing idea in Europe, and of former President Obama, that “the Middle East conflict” revolves around the struggle between Israel and the Palestinians, supported by “the Arab world,” was always misguided, simplistic, and ideologically (as opposed to analytically) driven, but it is now proven to be unfounded and untenable. The most recent conflict with the Palestinians in the Gaza Strip (Operation Guardian of the Walls in May 2021) confirmed this assessment. Following the operation, relations between Israel and the major Arab countries that are part of this coalition, primarily Egypt, became closer, and the overt and covert partnership between them deepened. These countries fear that a Hamas achievement is apt to encourage the Muslim Brotherhood in their territory and threaten their regimes

To elucidate his argument, Schueftan presents a brief and eye-opening history of the Arab-Israeli conflict, an explanation of how the Arab Spring helped bring it to an end, and an evaluation of the current state of the Middle East.

Read more at Strategic Assessment

More about: Abraham Accords, Israel-Arab relations, Israeli-Palestinian Conflict, Middle East

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