The U.S. Won’t Be Able to Break the Putin-Assad Alliance

According to a recent report in the Wall Street Journal, high-ranking American officials are considering a policy of trying to drive a wedge between Russia and Bashar al-Assad, hoping that they can then, with the cooperation of Vladimir Putin, impose a peace on Syria somewhat favorable to U.S. interests. Max Boot is skeptical:

Given that Assad himself is a longtime ally of Russia and provides it with military bases in the Middle East, and that [Assad’s closest ally], Iran, is a big and growing customer of the Russian arms industry, it is hard to know what would induce Putin to do a volte-face. Certainly Barack Obama was never able to bribe Putin into supporting the American agenda, even by delaying a planned missile-defense system for Eastern Europe.

Perhaps Trump will up the ante by offering to lift all sanctions and de-facto abandon Ukraine (and possibly other Eastern European states?) to Putin’s tender mercies. Nothing is impossible, but even if that were not immoral it would still be impractical. There is scant point in bribing Russia to abandon Syria now that its intervention has already decisively tilted the battlefield in Assad’s favor. Even if Russia pulled back now, Assad would remain in a position to stay in power and continue his reign of mass murder. Iran, for its part, is getting wealthy from selling oil, and if Russia doesn’t sell it arms, China will. The Iranian threat will hardly disappear no matter what Russia does.

The administration has also talked of creating “safe zones” in Syria so that refugees can come home. . . . But Obama previously tried to implement a version of this scheme in northern Syria and it accomplished nothing for the simple reason that there were no troops on the ground that could actually protect the safe zone. . . . Is the U.S. going to commit its own ground troops for what is essentially a humanitarian intervention devoid of any obvious “exit strategy”?

Given President Trump’s “America First” philosophy, that sounds doubtful. Instead, Trump appears bent on making common cause with Russia to fight Islamic State—the very excuse that Russia already uses to justify its terror bombing of [Syrian] civilians.

Read more at Commentary

More about: Bashar al-Assad, Donald Trump, Politics & Current Affairs, Syrian civil war, U.S. Foreign policy, Vladimir Putin

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