What Rulers and Politicians Won’t Learn from the Holocaust Commemoration Ceremony in Jerusalem

Yesterday, an impressive roster of world leaders visited Yad Vashem in Jerusalem to commemorate the 75th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz. Some—including Prince Charles, Emanuel Macron, and Vladimir Putin—will also be stopping in Ramallah to meet with the Palestinian president Mahmoud Abbas, an unrepentant Holocaust denier. For Lyn Julius, this is evidence enough that many of the attendees will return to their homes having learned the wrong lessons:

There is a danger that [these] leaders will come away with confirmation of the idea that anti-Semitism was a purely European phenomenon. Israel is “Europe’s penance” for killing six-million European Jews. The world’s leaders will visit Ramallah with little inkling of the depth of pro-Nazi feeling among Arabs during World War II.

The Palestinian leadership will take care not to mention that one of the foremost Arab leaders, the wartime mufti of Jerusalem, Haj Amin al-Husseini, was complicit with the Nazis. After the Palestinian mufti incited the 1941 farhud massacre of Iraq’s Jews, he spent the rest of the war in Berlin as Hitler’s guest. While pumping out vicious anti-Jewish radio propaganda to the Arab world, he sought Hitler’s permission to manage the extermination of the Jews across the Middle East and North Africa—not just in Palestine—should the Nazis win the war.

When the war ended, the Allies did not put Husseini on trial at Nuremberg. As a result, the Arab world was never “de-Nazified.” Its legacy of anti-Semitic, Nazi-inspired Islamofascism and Islamist terrorism—represented by the Muslim Brotherhood, Islamic State, al-Qaeda, and Hamas—also fuels jihadist anti-Semitism in the West today.

Will anyone at Yad Vashem make the point that 850,000 Jews were forced to flee Arab lands because Arab League states implemented anti-Jewish laws eerily reminiscent of Nuremberg laws against their Jewish citizens, stripping them of their rights and dispossessing them of their property?

Read more at Harry’s Place

More about: Amin Haj al-Husseini, Arab anti-Semitism, Holocaust, Mahmoud Abbas, Yad Vashem

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