Did Ayatollah Khamenei Approve the Iran Deal?

Now that the U.S. has begun implementing the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, and the Iranian parliament has voted in favor of it, Iran’s supreme leader has finally given his opinion. As Michael Rubin writes, it is something short of an endorsement:

[I]n an open letter to President Hassan Rouhani, Khamenei effectively has declared he will accept the agreement so long as the United States accepts his interpretations. He has put many of Iran’s commitments with regard to the plutonium-producing Arak heavy-water reactor and the depletion of Iran’s uranium stock on hold until the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) certifies that concerns regarding the possible military dimensions of Iran’s programs have been sufficiently addressed. In effect, unless Iran gets a satisfactory ruling that it has cooperated fully and resolved [any outstanding] issues, it simply will continue business as usual (all the while receiving sanctions relief and its unfrozen assets as if it were cooperating).

In addition, Khamenei has demanded that Iran will not suffer any new sanctions, regardless of what behavior it might engage in. . . . If President Barack Obama and Secretary of State John Kerry accede to Khamenei’s interpretation, they will in effect be granting him immunity from any accountability if, for example, he openly conducts terrorism against civilians, anywhere on earth. . . . If he decides, for example, that Iran’s remaining Bahai should be imprisoned or put to death, he expects to pay no penalty.

Read more at Commentary

More about: Ali Khamenei, Baha'i, Iran nuclear program, John Kerry, 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