How Hizballah Maintains Its Grip on Lebanon

In December, a Lebanese journalist was able to interview two Hizballah fighters held captive by Nusra Front, a Syrian affiliate of al-Qaeda. David Daoud explains what this interview reveals about Hizballah’s influence in Lebanon and its current war in Syria:

Hizballah . . . runs its own private educational system [in Lebanon], which graduates some 2,000 competitive and well-trained university students a year. Though mixed with the party’s ideology, the education these schools provide far exceeds anything offered by the state and even rivals the country’s prestigious Christian missionary schools. . . . [Furthermore, Hizballah] helps needy families with tuition—a luxury not available to them in other Lebanese school systems.

The indoctrination [found in these schools and other] institutions constructs children’s identity so that their moral compass is based on the ideology of . . . “guardianship of the jurist” [i.e., a belief in the absolute religious and political authority of Iran’s supreme leader] that governs political life in Iran, Hizballah’s main backer. And even if these institutions do not transform young Shiites into adult party ideologues, they make them more amenable to Hizballah’s pressures by force-feeding them the notion that they have no alternative to the party. . . .

Once . . . inexperienced fighters [like the two captives] are in Syria, . . . they are often handed to the Iranians. In Syria . . . the Iranians “are running the show,” giving deployment and battle orders to Hizballah fighters, who are thrown together with other Shiite foreign fighters including Iraqis and Afghans.

Read more at National Interest

More about: Hizballah, Iran, Lebanon, Nusra Front, Politics & Current Affairs, Syrian civil war

 

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