Abandoning the East-Med Gas Pipeline Strengthens Vladimir Putin’s Hand

Three years ago, Egypt, Israel, Cyprus, and Greece created the Eastern Mediterranean Gas Forum to cooperate in the export of their offshore fossil-fuel reserves. They planned eventually to build an undersea pipeline that would bring the gas to Bulgaria and Italy, from which it could be transported to the rest of Europe. Shoshana Bryen explains why, despite legislative support from the U.S. Congress, Washington has stopped supporting the project, which is now stalled:

Amos Hochstein, now President Biden’s senior advisor for energy security, has said he would be “extremely uncomfortable with the U.S. supporting” East Med because of its environmental implications. “Why would we build a fossil-fuel pipeline between the East Med and Europe when our entire policy is to support new technology . . . and new investments in going green and in going clean?” Hochstein said, as reported in the Jerusalem Post. “By the time this pipeline is built we will have spent billions of taxpayer money on something that is obsolete—not only obsolete but against our collective interest.”

As a foreign-policy matter, Turkey and Russia heavily disapproved of the entire East Med project, which did not include either of them. Although Israel has said more than once that Turkey should be included in the consortium, Ankara has adamantly declined because it claims part of the energy resources of Cyprus as its own. Russia, for its part, would be happy to scuttle the pipeline to ensure its monopoly in Europe.

Russia already has enormous leverage. It is January and it is cold. Europeans are now facing shortages of natural gas, as Russia reduced its exports to Europe by more than 41 percent from the level of January 2021. It’s not that Russia can’t deliver more; it just chooses not to. . . . The final foreign-policy element in the East Med story is the Russia-U.S.-NATO standoff over Russian threats to Ukraine.

In particular, Germany, dependent on Russia for energy sources, has been reluctant to support providing NATO assistance to defend Ukraine or to shore up the defenses of Poland and the Baltic states.

Read more at Newsweek

More about: Israel diplomacy, Israeli gas, Russia, 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