The Mossad Head Suggests That Turkey Might Be More Dangerous Than Iran

Two years ago, Yossi Cohen—the director of the Mossad who has been praised for his role in making peace with the UAE and presided over such successes as the theft of the Iranian nuclear archive—commented that in the long run it may be Turkey, rather than the Islamic Republic, that poses the greatest threat to Israeli security and regional stability. Roger Boyes seeks to explain why:

“Iranian power is fragile,” [Cohen] reportedly told spymasters from Egypt, Saudi Arabia, and the Emirates, “but the real threat is from Turkey.” His point . . . was not that Iran had ceased to be an existential menace but rather that it could be contained: through sanctions, embargoes, intelligence sharing, and clandestine raids. Turkey’s coercive diplomacy [and] its sloppily calculated risk-taking across the Middle East posed a different kind of challenge to strategic stability in the eastern Mediterranean.

At present, writes Boyes, the biggest problem lies in Ankara’s attempts to exploit oil and gas reserves located beneath Greek territorial waters:

Greece and its many islands are preparing to exploit the deep-sea gas fields in the eastern Mediterranean basin and thus turn the sea into a prosperous Greek lake. The ambitions of the Republic of Cyprus have also drawn Turkish anger: it surmises that Turkish-dominated Northern Cyprus will not be able to share in the Greek bonanza.

The dream of mutually beneficial wealth returning to this corner of the Mediterranean . . . is shared not only by Greece and Cyprus but also by Israel, Egypt, Jordan, Italy and even the Palestinian Authority. Yet Recep Tayyip Erdogan views regional energy co-ordination as a project designed chiefly to marginalize Turkey. Here, then, is why the eastern Mediterranean has become such a volatile mess: it is torn between Erdogan’s drive to make Turkey into the indispensable Eurasian power [and] Russian opportunism. . . . Neither the European Union nor NATO seems ready to calm the waters.

Read more at The Times

More about: Greece, Israeli Security, Middle East, Mossad, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, Turkey

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