Obscuring Iranian Aggression to Defend the Failure of the Obama Administration’s Middle East Policy

In a recent essay for the magazine Foreign Affairs, Robert Malley, who served as one of Barack Obama’s senior Middle East advisers, outlines the dangers he perceives in the Trump administration’s current policies toward the region. The thrust of his argument is that only by lifting sanctions on Iran, punishing Israel, and abandoning Sunni Arab allies can Washington reduce the dangers of a major war. To make his case, he systematically tries to downplay the undeniable dangers posed by the Islamic Republic, and shift the blame for regional disorders onto those countries, like Israel, that have tried to contain it. Tony Badran dissects Malley’s claims:

Because the Iranian role throughout the region is so obvious and bloody, Malley can’t deny it directly. Instead, he uses the passive voice, open-ended questions, and lawyerly weasel words to open up as much space as possible in the reader’s mind for deniability and doubt, while refusing to answer the questions he raises—because the answers that would best suit his larger argument are simply false. “Iran almost certainly helps the Houthis and Iraqi Shiite militias, but does it control them? The People’s Protection Units, a movement of Kurdish fighters in Syria, are affiliated with the Kurdistan Workers’ Party in Turkey, but do they follow its command?” [Malley asks].

According to Malley, “local struggles” might attract Iranian support. [Conflating cause and effect], he’s obscuring the plain fact that Iran has deliberately dedicated forces and resources to its regionwide expansionist program dating back to the first days of the Islamic Revolution. As such, Malley sagely opines, in Lebanon, “Hizballah may be focused on power and politics.” Malley’s phrase rules out nothing, and is therefore entirely meaningless—but it presumably sounds better than “Hizballah runs a sectarian army deployed in multiple theaters under Tehran’s command, with an arsenal of over 150,000 missiles pointed at Israel.”

Malley’s tactic of muddying the waters also extends to Iran itself. “Even in seemingly well-structured states, the locus of decision-making has become opaque. In Iran, the government and the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, the military force created in parallel to the regular military that answers directly to the country’s supreme leader, at times seem to go their separate ways. Whether this reflects a conscious division of labor or an actual tug of war is a matter of debate, as is the question of who exactly pulls the strings [emphasis Badran’s].”

In reality, of course, the “questions” that Malley raises have answers that are, analytically, quite clear. The point is to obfuscate. And the objective of that is to muddle the concept of allies and adversaries, which in turn is necessary in order to proclaim that enemies are the new allies, and allies are the new enemies.

Read more at Tablet

More about: Barack Obama, Donald Trump, Iran, Middle East, U.S. Foreign policy, US-Israel relations

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