Once Again, Facts Give the Lie to the Myth of Iranian Moderation

On Tuesday, the Assembly of Experts—the body responsible for choosing who will succeed Ali Khamenei as Iran’s supreme leader—named Ayatollah Ahmad Jannati as its new chairman. The selection of the eighty-nine-year-old Jannati, writes Amir Toumaj, is yet further evidence that the nuclear deal, despite the claims of its supporters, is hardly encouraging moderation within the regime:

Jannati . . . has a reputation for blistering denunciations of America, of Iranian reformists, and of any attempts to deviate from the founding principles of the Islamic revolution. His victory undermines the unsupported assessment that “moderate” clerics had won this year’s election to the assembly, and might one day choose a similarly moderate supreme leader to replace the aging Ali Khamenei.

In addition to his new post chairing the Assembly, Jannati has since 1992 headed the Guardian Council—which vets all assembly, parliamentary, and presidential candidates, and also oversees elections. Under his leadership, the council supervised and approved the fraudulent 2009 ballot that brought the firebrand president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad to power. On other occasions, he has warned there can be “no room for mercy” for the regime’s opponents at home, and declared, “We are an anti-American regime. America is our enemy, and we are the enemies of America.” . . .

Ultimately, with the assembly that chooses the next supreme leader determined to stay Iran’s revolutionary course, it is all but guaranteed that Khamenei’s successor will be a hardliner’s hardliner like himself.

Read more at Foundation for Defense of Democracies

More about: Ali Khamenei, Iran, Iran nuclear program, Middle East, Politics & Current Affairs

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