The Terrorist Attack in Sweden Suggests a Motive Other than “Retaliation”

Watching Swedish television report the truck-ramming attack in Stockholm last Friday, Annika Hernroth-Rothstein came to some disturbing conclusions:

The most common explanation of previous attacks around Europe has been that Islamic State was retaliating against countries with some sort of military involvement in the Middle East, but in this case we know that is not true. Sweden, famously anti-Israel and pro-Palestinian and infamously neutral in every great conflict, has done little to merit such retaliation, which means we must look at this another way.

While reporting on the attack, the reporters kept saying, “This is exactly the same method used in the attacks in France, Germany, and England.” I noticed that each time one country was carefully left out. Israel saw these attacks first, . . . but saying so would mean admitting that we are all victims of the same terrorism and must all [work] together to stop it. Coming to that conclusion would not only mean a dramatic detour from [current] Swedish policy on Middle East affairs but it would probably also result in an identity crisis, as Sweden would have to learn from its imaginary enemy—[Israel]—how to combat the real one at its door. . . .

[Instead], the probable outcome will be nothing more than a few vaguely supportive rallies in the name of love, while hate is let in through the back door.

Read more at Israel Hayom

More about: Europe and Israel, European Jewry, ISIS, Politics & Current Affairs, Sweden, Terrorism

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