Despite Its Involvement in at Least Two Attacks, Islamic State Still Has Little Influence in Israel

Although Hamas seems to bear primary responsibility for the violence on the Temple Mount last Friday, and for some of the terrorist attacks beforehand, these were preceded by two attacks in March perpetrated by Israeli Arabs affiliated with Islamic State (IS). Yoram Schweitzer, Ephraim Lavie, and Meir Elran analyze the two incidents, and the efforts of IS to make inroads in Israel:

An examination of previous . . . Islamic State activity in Israel shows that the organization has not gained a deep hold among the country’s Arab citizens. Since the establishment of Islamic State in 2014, no more than 100 Israeli citizens have been imprisoned for allegiance or any connection to the organization, including those who were arrested following the latest attacks. Thus, in spite of attempts by media identified with IS, primarily al-Naba, its most important publication, to exploit the “success” of the incidents in order to boast of its extensive activity against Israel, the facts show that apart from toxic rhetoric, the organization has not devoted many resources or much attention to planning terrorism in Israel. This also applies to its past actions and those of its allies in other parts of the world.

Even after [last month’s] attacks, there are no signs of a strategic change in IS priorities with regard to Israel. In its current media discourse, the organization continues to highlight its extremely negative attitude toward the Palestinian terrorist organizations of Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad, and toward Hizballah. This has not changed even though these groups praised recent IS-supporting terrorists in Israel, such as the Palestinian from Jenin who carried out the attack in Bnei Brak on March 29. As a rule, IS is careful to condemn strongly these organizations as collaborators with the enemies of Islam; it sees them as heretics and accuses them of helping to block its attempted jihad against Israel over the past decade.

The particularly strong Arab condemnation of the attacks carried out by IS supporters, which they defined as “terrorism,” derives from the fact that Arab society in Israel, as well as the majority of residents in Palestinian Authority areas, including those who support Hamas and the Palestinian Islamic Jihad, are fiercely opposed to IS ideology and its association with the Palestinian national struggle.

Read more at Institute for National Security Studies

More about: ISIS, Israeli Arabs, Palestinian terror

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