Summer Camp, Hamas-Style

In 2014, over 100,000 Gazan children attended summer camps run by the terror organization. These camps, in the words of one high-ranking Hamas official, “are designed to prepare a generation that carries the Quran and the rifle.” Riley Clafton describes what that entails:

This summer, Muhammad Nofal’s ten-year-old son will be participating in all of the typical Gaza summer-camp activities: scouting, beach games, media lessons, military training sessions, and introductory programs on this year’s theme, the “Jerusalem intifada.” Other campers will spend their summer like twelve-year-old Musaab, learning to crawl beneath barbed wire and wield assault rifles in simulated attacks on Israeli military outposts.

Worse still are the camps run by Palestinian Islamic Jihad. True, there are other options, but they are problematic as well:

Summer camps organized by the UN Relief Works Association (UNRWA) offer a popular alternative to those of Hamas and Islamic Jihad. . . . Hundreds of thousands of young Palestinians turn out to participate in such activities as swimming, painting, pottery, theater, dance, sports, lessons on life skills, and museum excursions.

[Although] UNRWA does not provide military training, the organization implicitly contributes to incitement, and its summer camps are no exception. . . . [T]he staff teaches young Palestinians that “Jews are the wolf” and “with God’s help and our own strength we will wage war. And with education and jihad we will return to our homes!”

Read more at Tower

More about: Gaza, Hamas, Islamic Jihad, Politics & Current Affairs, UNRWA

 

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