While the U.S. Supports Lebanon, Lebanon Supports Hizballah

The U.S. Navy, responding to the Iranian attack on a Saudi Arabian oil field, recently sent a destroyer to the Middle East to demonstrate its willingness to defend its allies. But, write Tony Badran and Jonathan Schanzer, the fact that the ship was dispatched not to the Persian Gulf but to Beirut highlights the confusion of American policy toward Lebanon. For at least a decade, policymakers in Washington have hoped that supporting the country and its armed forces could give it the political and military power to rein in Hizballah, the Iran-backed guerrilla group that operates from its territory. Instead, the opposite has happened:

The institution receiving the most U.S. support, the Lebanese Armed Forces (LAF), has worked hand in hand with Hizballah nationwide. It has deployed jointly alongside Hizballah fighters battling Sunni militants both in Lebanese cities and on the border with Syria. It has laid down supporting fire [for the terrorist group] using U.S.-provided weapons and ammunition. UN Security Council Resolution 1701, passed in 2006 [at the end of Israel’s Second Lebanon War], called for Lebanon to disarm Hizballah. Instead, the LAF looked the other way when Hizballah spent two years digging subterranean cross-border attack tunnels into Israel. The LAF allowed the import through Lebanon’s international airport of technology, flown in by Iranian planes, to upgrade Hizballah’s projectiles into precision-guided missiles. Hizballah controls large parts of the country, even where the LAF is deployed.

The problem isn’t only a lack of control—it’s collusion. Israel recently exposed a Hizballah precision-rocket facility in eastern Lebanon. The site of the Iran-led project is a short drive away from an LAF base, where the U.S. has delivered equipment, including ScanEagle reconnaissance drones. The base also hosts the U.S.- and UK-funded Land Border Training Center, designed to help the LAF secure Lebanon’s porous border. Hizballah, with Iran’s assistance, built a missile facility next door.

The State Department has long classified Lebanon as a “safe haven for terrorism.” In fact, it is something worse. With the banks, the military, and the government itself answering to a terrorist organization, Lebanon is fully entwined with Hizballah. The Trump administration deserves praise for going after dirty Lebanese banks. It’s time to . . . acknowledge Lebanon as the Hizballah state, and act accordingly.

Read more at FDD

More about: Hizballah, Iran, Israeli Security, Lebanon, 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