As Saudi Arabia Inches Closer to Peace with Israel, Hostility Remains

Last week, Israel approved Egypt’s transfer of the Red Sea islands of Tiran and Sanafir to Saudi Arabia, a de-facto move toward normalization between Jerusalem and Riyadh. The Saudis took another step in this direction by opening their airspace to Israeli flights, and an Israeli journalist has reportedly visited Mecca, from which non-Muslims are generally barred. Jacob Magid, another journalist who came to Jeddah on the first-ever direct flight from Tel Aviv to the kingdom, spoke to several Saudis in the Haifa mall, located on the city’s Palestine Street:

“A Jew is a Jew, whether in Israel or Moscow,” said Sultan, a salesman at a watch kiosk, as Beyonce’s “Halo” played in the gleaming mall. . . . Aware he was speaking with a member of the Israeli press—I was one of three reporters for Israeli publications who joined the White House press corps for the Saudi leg of Biden’s Middle East trip—the salesman had no problem launching into a diatribe about how the Jews wanted to kill the prophet Mohammad and are “the enemies of Islam.”

Learning my name, Sultan admitted that he had never met a Jew before. “The Quran says it’s good that we’re all different,” Sultan clarified, in an impressive 180-degree turn from his original argument. Experts say a similar about-face will be needed if Israeli-Saudi normalization—a process Riyadh claims is not happening—is to see a warm welcoming of Israeli and Jews after decades of hostility and demonization.

Although Sultan was not alone in expressing this view, Magid encountered another position as well:

Out in the Jeddah night, my Uber driver, Ahmed, echoed a sentiment expressed by many others in the mall: that he didn’t have much of an opinion on the matter and that he trusted the Saudi government to act appropriately.

Read more at Times of Israel

More about: Arab anti-Semitism, Israel-Arab relations, Saudi Arabia

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