Palestinian Terror Claims an American Victim

Elan Ganeles was one of three civilians killed by jihadists this week. The editors of the New York Sun comment:

The funeral . . . in Israel of Elan Ganeles is a moment to reflect on the intimacy in which America and Israel—and our city—are linked. An American graduate of Columbia University, Ganeles, a native of Connecticut, according to wire and other reports, was killed [on Monday] by terrorists who shot him at close range. The terrorists then burned their car and fled on foot to Jericho, which is governed by the Palestinian Authority.

Ganeles had attended the Hebrew Academy at West Hartford and was graduated from the Hebrew High School of New England. While a student at Columbia, according to the wires and other reports, he worked as a geospatial analyst at the university’s Center for International Earth Science. He’d served in the IDF for two years and was living at Manhattan. He’d returned to Israel for a friend’s wedding, only to be shot while in a car.

Yet we note that the murder has received scant coverage in the press, whose focus has fallen away from the human dimension of the terror attacks in Israel.

Thousands attended Ganeles’s funeral in the city of Ra’anana, many if not most of whom had not known him personally.

Read more at New York Sun

More about: Palestinian terror, 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