The U.S. Has an Opportunity to Defend Its Interests in Syria against a Murderous Tyrant—but Will It Seize It?

While a ceasefire agreement recently concluded between Turkey and Russia has temporarily reduced the fighting in the northwest Syrian province of Idlib, it is likely that Moscow and Damascus will eventually violate it as they did the 2018 ceasefire that created a “de-escalation zone” in Idlib. America, argues Frederic Hof, could use the situation to its strategic advantage, but instead has resorted to the same “pseudo-diplomacy” that has characterized its policy toward Syria since the civil war broke out there in 2011:

Ideally Washington would be encouraging Ankara to plan a ground campaign to clear Assad’s forces and Iranian-led foreign fighters from much of Syria’s northwest. . . . The plan would be implemented quickly after the [Assad] regime violates the current ceasefire. The desired result would be a protected zone large enough to allow recently displaced Syrian civilians safely to return home. Once the protected zone is established, al-Qaeda-related elements can, to the delight of Syrian civilians, be identified and neutralized.

Ankara would not undertake such an operation without adequate air defense for its ground forces. This is where a serious private warning from Washington to Moscow would be in order, something along the following lines: “If your client violates the ceasefire, we will support Turkey’s efforts to rectify the matter militarily. We would not hesitate, using our own assets, to engage and to destroy your client’s air forces and air defenses. And if Turkish ground forces come under air attack from any quarter, we will assist Turkey in countering that threat.”

Perhaps such a quiet message has already been delivered. But at least three times senior American officials have publicly gutted American diplomacy by declaring military measures to be off the table.

For nine years the West has . . . preemptively conceded escalatory dominance to Russia and even to the Assad regime. It has hoped against hope that Syria’s suffering would stay inside Syria, and it has lulled itself into stupor with useless communiques condemning “in the strongest possible terms” ongoing crimes against humanity and reciting the mantra about there being “no military solution” for Syria. Russia has seen abject weakness and has exploited it far beyond Syria. This will continue unless the West decides to adopt diplomatic practices appropriate to countering adversaries feeling no limits to their violent, criminal depredations. Yes, even interventions far short of invasion and occupation pose risks. Will anyone still argue that preemptive passivity and pseudo-diplomacy do not?

Read more at Atlantic Council

More about: Russia, Syrian civil war, Turkey, 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