Israel Risks Losing Its Deterrence over Hizballah

Since its 2006 war with Hizballah, the Jewish state has been able to maintain relative calm on its northern border. The IDF has for the most part refrained from attacking the Iran-backed terrorist group in its South Lebanon stronghold, where it has an arsenal of some 120,000 rockets, while Hizballah has been reluctant to retaliate when the IDF strikes its positions in Syria. But Orna Mizrahi and Yoram Schweitzer fear that the Shiite militia has been gradually eroding this uncomfortable status quo:

Hizballah can boast of several accomplishments over the past two years, including its claim that its own activities have forced Israel to scale back its operations in Lebanon’s airspace; the expanded presence of Hizballah operatives along the border with Israel in observation posts (which were constructed under the guise of Green Without Borders, a Lebanese environmental NGO); skirmishes with Israeli forces along the borders; and the self-confidence that [its leader Hassan] Nasrallah has demonstrated since the maritime border agreement between Israel and Lebanon was signed in October 2022, which Nasrallah claims as a victory for Hizballah thanks to its threats against Israel.

In addition, Hizballah—like the other members of the [pro-Iran] axis—sees the internal Israeli dispute over [judicial reform] and the widespread protests against the Israeli government as an expression of Israel’s inherent weakness and mistakenly interprets this as a significant blow to its military strength. The false narrative that Nasrallah has spun, especially over the past twelve months and that has come to the fore in his speeches, is, it seems, the reason for the excessive daring that he has displayed during recent events.

Read more at Institute for National Security Studies

More about: Hizballah, Israeli Security, Lebanon

 

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