How Diaspora Jewish Leaders Should Respond to Israeli Political Controversy—and How They Shouldn’t

Founded in 1760, the Board of Deputies of British Jews bills itself as “the only democratically elected, cross-communal, representative body in the Jewish community” of the United Kingdom, and enjoys an authority to speak for its constituents without parallel in the U.S. Thus its decision to ignore Benjamin Netanyahu’s March 24 diplomatic visit to London, where he met with Prime Minister Rishi Sunak to discuss the Iranian nuclear program, was a significant one. Melanie Phillips argues it was also a bad one:

You don’t have to agree with Netanyahu’s judicial reforms, nor with anything that he does, to be appalled by the Board’s behavior. Giving him the cold shoulder was not only a shocking discourtesy. It not only diminished his aim to gain urgent backing against Iran. It not only ignored a mission of deep importance to the defense of Israel against an unconscionable threat.

By treating Israel’s democratic prime minister as a pariah—as if he were a tyrant or dictator—it also revealed that the Board has all the acumen of a left-wing agitprop placard. By contrast, Gary Mond, chairman of the National Jewish Assembly, behaved like the grown-up in the room. The Assembly, he said, was “delighted” to welcome Netanyahu. . . . The judicial reforms and the Israeli demonstrations against them were “issues for the Israeli government and Israeli citizens to resolve” and it wasn’t the UK’s place to interfere.

The Board’s behavior also makes a mockery of the Jewish leadership’s professed concern that certain Israeli politicians promote hatred and division. The chief rabbi, Sir Ephraim Mirvis, wrote pointedly . . . on the eve of Netanyahu’s visit that Jewish unity was a “sacred responsibility—for politicians, leaders, activists” and everyone else. For the Board, however, Jewish unity somehow excludes Netanyahu.

Israel has been weakened when it urgently needs to be strong. And all those who have been telling the world that Israel is about to stop being a democracy and that its prime minister is a putative dictator who should become a political pariah have unforgivably helped empower the enemies of the Jewish people.

Read more at Jewish Chronicle

More about: Anglo-Jewry, Benjamin Netanyahu, Israel and the Diaspora

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