What Jordan’s Elections Mean for the Muslim Brotherhood, and For Israel

In September, parliamentary elections took place in Jordan. Although by most indications the process was fair and transparent, Jordan remains a monarchy where the representative body plays a limited role. Yet given Jordan’s high unemployment, an influx of refugees from Syria, and hundreds of subjects who have joined Islamic State (situated on the country’s doorstep) Oded Eran sees reason to believe the king may wish to give parliament a greater role in confronting the nation’s many problems. Meanwhile, the Muslim Brotherhood, having sat out the previous two elections, participated in this one under a different name, winning a small but significant number of seats. Among Eran’s conclusions are these:

Jordan emerged from the election as an island of stability in a seething Middle Eastern sea, a nation successfully overcoming internal difficulties that have worsened because of the humanitarian and political chaos plaguing the region. . . .

[Under current circumstances], the question of the parliament’s involvement in foreign affairs, in particular Jordanian-Israeli relations, can be expected to resurface. Since the peace treaty between Israel and Jordan, the Jordanian parliament has served as a forum for lambasting Israel, opposing processes of normalization, and criticizing the Jordanian government for not severing the bilateral relations.

[The issue of relations with Israel] provides the Muslim Brotherhood with a ready-made platform to attack the government, since [its stance on the subject] is shared with many partners in other political parties. At the same time, the political alliance between the Christian and Circassian communities in Jordan and the Muslim Brotherhood, in its new and less rough-edged form, creates interesting possibilities from Israel’s perspective, as Israel has parallel communities who maintain widespread connections with their brethren in Jordan.

Read more at Institute for National Security Studies

More about: Arab democracy, Israel diplomacy, Jordan, Muslim Brotherhood, 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