Europe Has Little to Gain from Standing by Iran

Today the Trump administration is imposing further sanctions on the Islamic Republic, making it harder for European as well as American firms to do business there. The leaders of the EU, meanwhile, seem determined to preserve economic ties with Tehran, and are considering various legal and financial measure to counter U.S. sanctions. Morgan Ortagus warns against these efforts:

What is lost on European governments, but not on business leaders, is that Iran has proved to be a difficult place to do business. After its 30 years of effectively being out of the mainstream of world economics, many emerging-market entrepreneurs were salivating to reach a new and potentially explosive untapped market. What European businesses have found instead is a lack of trust with their Iranian business counterparts, inability to get payments on time, and endless arguments over terms. Moreover, after the huge fines paid by European banks to American regulators during the Obama administration, many financial institutions and corporations were loath to enter the Iranian market in the first place. . . .

As lines are drawn in the sand, European governments must ask themselves: is anger at Trump for his tactics worth standing by a brutal regime which has been caught multiple times in the past six months planning attacks on European soil? That just this week tried to assassinate an Iranian dissident in Denmark? Is it worth deepening the wounds of the transatlantic alliance, in order to stand by an enemy of America?

Read more at Washington Examiner

More about: European Union, Iran, Politics & Current Affairs, U.S. Foreign policy

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