Negotiations with Iran Won’t Make the U.S., or the Middle East, Any Safer

While pursuing its “maximum-pressure” policy toward Tehran, consisting of intense sanctions and the occasional application of military force, the Trump administration still seems to hold out some hope that these measures can induce the mullahs to come to the negotiating table, agree to abandon their nuclear ambitions, and restrain their campaign of regional bloodletting and global terror. But this will never happen so long as the current regime is in place, argue Eric Edelman and Ray Takeyh. (Free registration required.)

[Previous U.S.] administrations have failed to understand that the Iranian regime remains, at heart, a revolutionary organization. Once in power, revolutionaries often yield to the temptations of moderation and pragmatism. . . . But four decades after its birth, the Islamic Republic continues to avoid that fate. Its elites still cling to the revolution’s precepts even when they prove self-defeating.

For [its founder, Ayatollah Ruhollah] Khomeini and his disciples, the continued vitality of their revolution mandated its relentless export. This was to be a revolution without borders; its appeal would not be limited by cultural differences or diverging national sensibilities within the Muslim world. Khamenei has faithfully carried out that mission, backing proxy militias throughout the Middle East with the goal of advancing Iranian-style Islamism and undermining the U.S.-backed regional security order.

In the mullahs’ preferred narrative, the imperialist United States seeks to exploit the region’s resources for the aggrandizement of the industrial West. Achieving that goal requires Washington to subjugate the Muslim world by backing corrupt Arab monarchies and an “illegitimate Zionist entity.” The Iranian regime sees resisting that American dominance as a divine imperative. That is why the Islamic Republic will never evolve into a responsible regional stakeholder. . . . It will never abandon its nuclear ambitions for the sake of commerce. And it will never recognize any U.S. interests in the Middle East as legitimate. The revolutionaries will never give up their revolution.

Read more at Foreign Affairs

More about: Ayatollah Khomeini, Donald Trump, Iran, 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