The New U.S. Sanctions on Syria Will Help, Not Harm, Civilians

In 2014, a Syrian photographer known by the pseudonym Caesar escaped to the West, bringing with him some 55,000 images bearing witness to the Assad regime’s brutal and sadistic treatment of its political opponents. Last year, thanks largely to Caesar’s testimony, Congress enacted sanctions on the Syrian government which went into effect this week. Opponents of these sanctions argue that they will inflict as much pain on Syria’s long-suffering civilians as on its rulers. Nonsense, write David Adesnik and Toby Dershowitz:

[E]xtensive U.S. and European efforts to relieve the suffering of Syrian civilians belie such accusations of cruel indifference. For the duration of the war, they have paired their sanctions with billions of dollars of humanitarian aid every year, which is delivered mainly by the United Nations and its partner nongovernmental organizations.

To mitigate the suffering that persists despite historic levels of aid, what Syria needs is not fewer sanctions but a root-and-branch reform of the UN machinery for delivering aid, which Bashar al-Assad has coopted to the point where UN agencies have become de-facto adjuncts to the siege of civilian populations and other war crimes. Lengthy reports from human-rights advocates, along with a disturbing internal review by UN staff, have documented the UN’s departure from the core humanitarian principles of neutrality, impartiality, and independence.

For years, the UN has let the Assad regime give direct aid to supportive populations while systematically blocking deliveries to areas outside of its control. Besieging civilian populations is a war crime, yet convoys en route to deliveries in regime-held areas would pass through besieged neighborhoods without aiding their inhabitants. [Another problem is] the World Health Organization’s deference to the regime, which included parroting the Syrian Ministry of Health’s denials of a polio outbreak despite evidence the disease had begun to spread.

Caesar [himself has argued] that sanctions are not about seeking retribution for the crimes of the past but denying Assad the resources to perpetrate new ones. . . . While sanctions alone are not a strategy, they are an integral element of any plausible approach to putting constant pressure on Assad.

Read more at FDD

More about: Bashar al-Assad, Syria, 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