The UN’s Latest Anti-Israel Outrage, and What Congress Can Do about It

In May of 2021, the UN Human Rights Council—whose current members include such paragons of human rights as China, Venezuela, and Qatar—created a special Commission of Inquiry (COI) to investigate human-rights violations “in the Occupied Palestinian Territory [sic], including East Jerusalem, and in Israel, . . . leading up to and since April 13, 2021.” This commission, whose open-ended remit has no real parallel within the United Nations, released its second report last week. Clifford May comments:

[T]he COI is funded—with Americans contributing the lion’s share—for the express purpose of demonizing and delegitimizing Israel in perpetuity. . . . The report urges UN members to prosecute Israeli officials for alleged violations of “international humanitarian law.” What does the report say about Hamas and the more than 4,000 rockets it fired at Israelis, its routine use of Palestinian civilians as “human shields,” and the support it receives from Tehran? Not a word. “Hamas,” “rockets,” and “terrorism” are not mentioned.

Israelis are protesting the report as they have protested such slanders in the past and will in the future. They’re also reminding anyone who will listen—not a large cohort—that one of the COI’s prominent members, Miloon Kothari, has questioned why Israel is “even a member of the United Nations.” Needless to say, Mr. Kothari has not suggested [the expulsion of] the Russian Federation, the People’s Republic of China, or the Islamic Republic of Iran.

To [the COI], Jewish lives don’t matter. But they regard Palestinian lives as cheap, too. What other conclusion can we draw when they incessantly give Palestinians incentive to kill and be killed?

For now, American taxpayers still lavishly fund the UN. But a bill before Congress, the COI Elimination Act, would at least cut off dollars to one of its Jew-hating entities. Its passage would represent a small step toward decency.

Read more at FDD

More about: Anti-Semitism, U.S. Foreign policy, UNHRC, United Nations

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