The European Union’s Absurd Insistence That Hizballah Is Not a Terrorist Group

Seven years ago, the EU took the much-belated step of recognizing that Hizballah routinely engages in terrorism. But, relying on a fictive distinction, Brussels designated the Lebanon-based Iranian proxy’s “military wing” a terrorist group, while refusing to apply the same designation to its “political wing.” Lukas Mandl and Daniel Schwammenthal write:

This fiction has allowed the Shiite terror group to continue operating in Europe in support of its so-called “political” arm. But an EU that [claims] to stand for democracy, human rights. and the [so-called] “rules-based international order” ought not at the same time be a safe haven for terrorists or their supporters. What’s more, the EU’s commitments to Israel’s security and to combating anti-Semitism are incompatible with a policy that allows a deeply anti-Semitic organization dedicated to the destruction of the Jewish state to use Europe as an operational hub.

Unfortunately, a flawed analysis rejecting the total listing of Hezbollah has become conventional wisdom in some European foreign-policy circles. The standard arguments raised by these skeptics usually come dressed as hard-nosed Realpolitik, but increasingly reflect a fantasy world. One such argument is that banning Hizballah would supposedly “destabilize” Lebanon, suggesting that Iran’s main proxy somehow contributes to Lebanon’s stability. The Lebanese people protesting governmental corruption, who call out Hizballah as being at the center of this graft that has brought the country to the brink of financial ruin, beg to differ.

Among Hizballah’s various malicious behaviors, some should be especially troubling to the EU, which likes to fancy itself the great upholder of international law:

[I]n violation of UN Security Council Resolution 1701, Hizballah has rearmed since its 2006 war with Israel and remains a state within a state with its own militia. . . . It commits the dual war crime of using its own civilian population as human shields to hide some 150,000 missiles, while also threatening Israeli civilians. To argue, therefore, that weakening such a destructive force could be “destabilizing” is to ignore all empirical evidence.

The only chance for economic recovery and political stability in Lebanon is the removal of the Hizballah stranglehold on the country. Rather than destabilizing Lebanon, a total EU ban of Hizballah would help strengthen the democratic forces in the country.

Read more at Newsweek

More about: European Union, Hizballah, Iran, Lebanon

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