John Kerry Holds Fast to His Middle East Misconceptions

On the second night of the virtual Democratic convention, the former secretary of state John Kerry gave a speech touting the supposed foreign-policy accomplishments of the Obama administration. In his remarks, the one-time Massachusetts senator made clear that he still maintains the beliefs about the Middle East—especially those involving the nuclear deal with Iran—that informed his diplomatic career, and that have been proved so damaging to regional order, to the lives of millions of people who live there, and to American prestige. David Harsanyi comments:

Kerry himself acknowledged [during his tenure] that sanctions relief would likely end up in the coffers of Iran’s Revolutionary Guard—now a designated terror group. Surely, then, he knew that the pallets of euros and Swiss francs he was shipping to Tehran in an unmarked cargo plane would also find their way to the groups triggering conflicts across the Middle East—not to mention subjugating people at home. [All the while], Kerry was placating Russia and allowing a humanitarian disaster to unfold in Syria in an effort to save the [nuclear] deal with Iran.

Obama-administration officials—led by Kerry—long peddled this false choice: the Iran deal or war. Well, the U.S. is no longer a party to the Iran deal, and there is no war. Meanwhile, there is a highly weakened Iran, and there are growing alliances between our Sunni allies and Israel.

Kerry would continue to entertain Iranian officials even after he was out of government. When President Trump ordered the drone strike that killed the terrorist Qassem Suleimani, a man who masterminded the killing of American soldiers and thousands of Iraqi civilians, Kerry said the world was in “no way at all” safer, and claimed that Trump was risking an “outright war.” All Iran did was launch a performative counterstrike.

Kerry was wrong about Iran. Kerry was also wrong about Israel—a nation he doesn’t ever seem to consider an “ally” in his speeches about Obama’s alleged foreign-policy successes. And when the U.S. embassy was about to be moved to Jerusalem, Kerry warned it would lead to “an explosion” in the Middle East—more specifically, “an absolute explosion in the region, not just in the West Bank and perhaps even in Israel itself, but throughout the region.” Moreover, Kerry declared, it would have a serious and negative repercussions on relations between Israel and the Arab world, making peace far less likely. . . . Of course, outside of some typical Palestinian noise, the opposite has happened.

Read more at National Review

More about: Iran, John Kerry, Middle East, Syrian civil war, U.S. Foreign policy, US-Israel relations

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