The New Iran-China Pact Is Aimed at Reducing U.S. Influence

In June, Tehran announced that it had concluded an agreement with Beijing for a “25-year joint comprehensive partnership.” Key to the agreement is the Islamic Republic’s prospective role in China’s “Belt and Road Initiative” (BRI), a series of transportation, infrastructure, and telecommunications projects that would link the China to trade routes stretching across Asia and beyond. Ofira Seliktar and Farhad Rezaei consider the implications:

Iran would serve as a regional hub for the BRI, giving China extraordinary leeway across a wide range of economic activity. . . . [Another] section of the draft agreement reveals an exceptionally high level of military cooperation between the two countries. This includes, among other things, shared development of defense industries, intelligence sharing, and joint military maneuvers. Earlier reports indicate that China and Iran have been working on a large arms deal timed to coincide with the ending of the UN Security Council arms embargo.

The benefits of this arrangement to China are clear. Beijing . . . has already built a string of logistical station ports along the Indian Ocean to Djibouti and the Suez Canal. Dominating Iran would give China a side presence in the Gulf, notably through the port of Jask, which is just outside the Straits of Hormuz. Most of the world’s oil transits through that passage. Jask is also critical to the U.S., whose Fifth Fleet is headquartered in nearby Bahrain. A powerful Chinese presence there would brush away decades of American strategic domination of the Gulf and swaths of the Indian Ocean.

For the Iranians, who are operating under the severe pressure of American sanctions, the deal is a lifeline. The agreement states that both countries are determined to implement it “in the face of pressure from a third country,” an unmistakable reference to the U.S. Implied in this phraseology is a Chinese threat to work against the harsh sanctions imposed by the Trump administration.

Read more at BESA Center

More about: China, 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