Why Jews Should Fear the Anti-Western Current in Recent Protests

In America and Britain, protesters have taken to vandalizing and even tearing down statues in the name of anti-racism—and not just statues of former Confederate generals and the like, but also of such figures as Abraham Lincoln, Winston Churchill, and Mohandas Gandhi. To Melanie Phillips, Jews should be particularly wary of this trend, and the anti-Western impulses behind it, given its similarities to the anti-Israel movement:

In Britain, the Board of Deputies of British Jews has set up a commission to investigate racial prejudice within the Jewish community. It isn’t clear whether this is to be confined to alleged racism by the community towards its tiny number of black Jews or whether it will cover alleged community racism towards non-Jews.

[T]he risk is that the Board of Deputies may have appointed a hanging jury to find Britain’s Jewish community guilty under rigged cultural rules. If so, this would be yet another example of the board “taking a knee” to people with a rotten agenda, but who have the power to dictate the terms of public debate. It’s not just that many liberal Jews are on the wrong side of this titanic struggle to defend civilization. It’s not even that they don’t recognize the danger to themselves from an agenda of destroying a culture whose roots lie in the Hebrew Bible. It’s also a striking fact that the tactics now being used in this ramped-up onslaught against the West are mirrored in the attempt to bring down the state of Israel.

Pulling down the statues is the physical manifestation of the decades-long attempt, through the hijack of the education system, to destroy the West by erasing the record of its achievements and presenting it instead as intrinsically racist, colonialist, and evil. In Israel, Palestinians have systematically vandalized archaeological digs in Jerusalem in order to tip into the garbage excavated materials containing possibly priceless artifacts. They do this to destroy the evidence that is constantly being dug up of the ancient kingdom of Israel and thus the unique claim of the Jews to the land. By attacking these ancient items, they are physically trying to erase the Jews’ own history.

What starts with the Jews never stops with the Jews. In this current mayhem on the streets of America and Britain, [this] is now playing out before our horrified eyes.

Read more at JNS

More about: Black Lives Matter, British Jewry, Palestinians

 

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