No, Israel’s New Government Won’t Bring about a Rift with Washington

In America, the left wing of the Democratic party has been growing in influence even as it has become increasingly hostile to the Jewish state—leading to predictions of a fracturing of U.S.-Israel relations. Likewise, Israeli and American media have been publishing various warnings that the hard-right members of the new governing coalition in Jerusalem will push America away. Zalman Shoval argues that these concerns are overblown, citing a recent speech by Secretary of State Antony Blinken to the self-styled “pro-Israel, pro-peace” lobbying group J Street:

Blinken praised Israel’s democratic elections and congratulated Benjamin Netanyahu on his victory, stressing the importance of relations between the U.S. and Israel regardless of the political hue of its government.

He specifically reiterated the importance of American security-related support for Israel, emphasizing that “no peace is possible or sustainable without a strong, secure Israel,” specifying that “our assistance to Israel is sacrosanct” and that “the United States’ ironclad commitment to Israel’s security assistance has never been stronger than it is today.” He also mentioned the administration’s opposition to BDS and anti-Israel discrimination in international forums such as the United Nations.

There were some raised eyebrows over the U.S. secretary of state delivering his speech to an organization that is not known to be supportive of most Israeli positions, and not only Netanyahu’s. However, [Blinken] probably did so expressly in order to signal to the left of the Democratic party in Congress, which opposes aid to Israel—including cooperation on security-related issues—that the administration would continue its course, a stance which was also underpinned by recent statements of the U.S. ambassador to Jerusalem Thomas Nides.

The eminent American historian Walter Russell Mead, one of the most senior and respected experts on U.S. foreign policy, in his recently published book, The Arc of a Covenant: The United States, Israel and the Fate of the Jewish People, advances the thesis that the U.S.-Israel alliance is not only stable but that American support for Israel over the past 40 years served the American interest and that America needed Israel, and not the other way around.

In practice, Shoval writes, this means that Israel has grown too important to America, and vice-versa, for some sort of rift to be on the immediate horizon.

Read more at Jerusalem Post

More about: Antony Blinken, Benjamin Netanyahu, Democrats, J Street, U.S.-Israel relationship

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