Don’t Let the UN Arms Embargo on Iran Expire

In October, a UN Security Council ban on selling military equipment to, or buying it from, the Islamic Republic is set to expire. Behnam Ben Taleblu explains why it is crucial that Washington do everything in its power to ensure that the ban is renewed:

The end of the embargo brings with it a two-fold conventional-arms challenge: Iranian military modernization through the legal importation of weapons, as well as Iran’s greater export of weapons that enhance the lethality of its proxies and partners. While Iran has already violated [the resolution] through attempts both to procure and to proliferate weapons, losing the international architecture with which to call this activity a “violation” and rally the international community to act permits Tehran to . . . chip away [with greater ease] at the existing balance of power in the Middle East.

At the helm of the effort [to let the embargo lapse] are Russia and China, two states Iran has already lobbied to oppose the U.S. at the Security Council. . . . Both [countries] played an outsized role in Iran’s re-armament after the Iran-Iraq War, helping it gain access to a limited quantity of fighter jets, diesel submarines, and anti-ship missiles. Both states also signed up during that era to aid Iran’s nuclear program.

While Russia and China are not predisposed to provide Tehran with every capability it desires, empowering Iran would create more headaches for Washington and [distract the U.S. from dealing with the problems of Russian and Chinese aggression]. In 2017, the U.S. National Security Strategy warned that the era of “great-power competition” was back, with Russia and China more inclined to challenge Washington’s “geopolitical advantages” around the world. Iran is now set to be one theater for this contest.

Read more at Newsweek

More about: China, Iran, Russia, U.S. Foreign policy, United Nations

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