The Partisan Divide over Israel Is Widening

Drawing on several polls about perceptions of the Israel-Palestinian conflict published in 2021 and 2022, Elliott Abrams reaches some sobering conclusions:

In late May, the Pew Research Center reported again on support for Israel in the United States and once again found a significant partisan gap.

The report . . . states that “Republicans are far more likely than Democrats to view the Israeli people favorably and the Palestinian people unfavorably (44 percent vs. 12 percent).” Pew also found that “Republicans and those who lean to the GOP are much more likely to express a favorable view of the Israeli people (78 percent) than of the Palestinian people (37 percent). Among Democrats and Democratic-leaners, on the other hand, similar shares express favorable views toward both groups (60 percent and 64 percent, respectively).”

In each poll the numbers differ but the conclusion is the same: Republicans are significantly more supportive than Democrats of Israel, while Democrats are now more sympathetic to Palestinians. Whether this is good or bad news depends, of course, on one’s own views of the Middle East and one’s own partisan leanings. But it is certainly a message to pro-Israel Democrats, and to the pro-Israel community, that whatever is being done to maintain—or better, to recover—Democratic support for Israel is not working.

Read more at Pressure Points

More about: Democrats, US-Israel relations

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