An American Career Diplomat Expresses Her Concerns about Jewish Money

Nominated by the Biden administration to serve as America’s ambassador to Brazil, Elizabeth Frawley Bagley has held diplomatic positions in every Democratic administration since Jimmy Carter, including a stint as ambassador to Portugal from 1994 until 1997. Adam Kredo, who obtained a copy of an interview Bagley gave in 1998, examines some of its more alarming content, which also disturbed two members of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee:

The interview was conducted by a historian at the Association for Diplomatic Studies and Training for an oral history project. . . . Bagley opened up about the “Jewish lobby” and its impact on Democratic party politics. She was asked about “the Israeli influence” on the Clinton administration.

“There is always the influence of the Jewish lobby because there is major money involved,” Bagley said. . . . Democrats, she said, “always tend to go with the Jewish constituency on Israel and say stupid things, like moving the capital to Jerusalem always comes up. Things that we shouldn’t even touch.”

The “Jewish factor” is not about the raw number of electors who care about these issues, Bagley said, “it’s money.”

When questioned about these remarks during a May 18 confirmation hearing with the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Bagley claimed they were the result of a “free-flowing discussion” with the interviewer.

Bagley’s assertion that the discussion was “free-flowing” hardly exonerates her. Meanwhile, the “stupid” decision to relocate the U.S. embassy to Israel’s capital—supported by decades of bipartisan legislation—did not bring about any international crises, and was instead followed by major breakthroughs in Israel-Arab peacemaking.

Read more at Washington Free Beacon

More about: Anti-Semitism, Bill Clinton, Democrats, Joseph Biden

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