Ali Khamenei’s Successor Will Continue Iran’s Descent into Totalitarianism

According to Ray Takeyh, the Islamic Republic’s supreme leader has likely already designated as a successor one Ibrahim Raisi, who is anything but a moderate:

It is often suggested that the most consequential barrier to Iranian pragmatism is Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. Once the elderly Khamenei passes from the scene, the argument goes, his successors will embrace prevailing international norms. The sun-setting restrictions of the nuclear deal need not be of concern, for a revamped Islamist regime will find global integration too tempting to discard for the sake of nuclear arms.

The only problem with such expectations is that the candidate Khamenei and the Revolutionary Guards are grooming to ascend to the post of supreme leader is one of the most reactionary members of Iran’s ruling elite. . . . [Ibrahim Raisi] has spent his entire career in the Islamic Republic’s enforcement arm. . . . In one of his most notorious acts, he served as a member of the “death commission” that, in the summer of 1988, oversaw the massacre of thousands of political prisoners on trumped-up charges. . . .

The 2009 uprising may be a faded memory in Washington, but it was a watershed event for the guardians of the theocracy. Under Khamenei’s watchful eye, Iran is being transformed into a police state. The logical extension of these developments is a supreme leader who comes from the heart of Iran’s repressive organs. . . .

This leader has to share their penchant for conspiracy theories, demonstrate contempt for the West, and be prepared to shed blood on behalf of the regime. The next supreme leader not only has to believe in the theocracy’s mission of repression but also have been an integral part of that machinery. No one in the Islamic Republic embodies these attributes more than Raisi. He seems to be the right man for the right time.

Read more at Washington Post

More about: Ali Khamenei, Iran, 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