What Will the Middle East Look Like in Five Years?

After analyzing the crises that have beset Syria, Iraq, Saudi Arabia, and Egypt, Jacques Neriah ventures some predictions about what will become of the Middle East once the dust settles:

Five years after the outburst of the so-called Arab Spring, the Middle East has changed radically. Not only have nation-states crumbled, transformed, or become failed states, the moderating forces that used to hold the structures together are no longer present. . . . Arab states are questioning U.S. policy and raising questions about [America’s] resolve to lead the military coalition against the Islamic State. Russia found the cracks in the geopolitical wall and easily replaced the United States with its traditional clients. Russia’s success in Syria is but another sign of the weakness of the United States in these dire times.

Five years from now, what Middle East can we expect? It would be foolish to prophesy. But it would not be adventurous to say that we will be confronted with a new map with new entities born or reborn. . . . [S]ooner or later, the traditional forces will destroy [Islamic State]. But this does not mean that the jihadist, Salafist ideology will be eradicated and that jihadist cells will no longer be established. Unless the roots of the problem are dealt with—the financing of [extremist] religious institutions—the jihadist movement will continue . . . receiving funds from Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Kuwait, and even Morocco.

Read more at Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs

More about: Islamic State, Middle East, Politics & Current Affairs, Russia, Salafism, 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