The U.S. Remains Clueless about Iran’s Use of Symbolism

American negotiators, writes Michael Rubin, ought to pay more attention to the Iranian government’s canny employment of dates and gestures. Take, for example, last week’s extension of the deadline for the nuclear talks, which almost led to a partial agreement being announced today:

Ever since the victory of the [1979] Islamic revolution, the Iranian government has commemorated the fourth Friday in Ramadan—this year on July 10—as Qods Day, a commemoration that is usually marked with the most vile anti-Israel and anti-American rhetoric. It was on Qods Day back in 2001, for example, that former president Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani suggested Iran should use a nuclear weapon against Israel because it would wipe Israel out while Iran’s large size would allow it to absorb any retaliation. To announce a deal on Qods Day that effectively blesses a full-scale Iranian nuclear program and will allow Iran to break out and build not a bomb but an arsenal after as little as a decade will be the ultimate humiliation to the United States, and will be spun by the Iranian regime as the start of the countdown to the fulfillment of its promise to enable Israel’s ultimate destruction.

That Iran always manages to maximize such symbolism is no coincidence. It not only shows that reconciliation isn’t a goal for Tehran, but it also indicates the extent to which Iranian officials have been running circles around their American counterparts.

Read more at Commentary

More about: Iran nuclear program, Iranian Revolution, Politics & Current Affairs, U.S. Foreign policy

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