Why America Should Seek to Come to Terms with Turkey

During his tenure as Turkey’s president, and before that as prime minister, Recep Tayyip Erdogan has been a source of frustration for the U.S.—supporting Hamas, intervening in Libya, and dismantling democracy at home. But, Michael Doran argues, two consecutive American presidents have failed to counter Erdogan effectively due to “a pervasive misdiagnosis of the problem.”

Regardless of what one thinks of Erdogan, his policies that have most enraged Washington—such as launching a military offensive last fall to drive American forces away from the Turkish border or buying the S-400 anti-aircraft system from Russia—have enjoyed very broad domestic support, precisely because the Turkish public reviles the policies of the United States. In short, America does not have an Erdogan problem; it has a Turkey problem. And that is a problem largely of its own making.

The source of America’s Turkey problem is U.S. support of the Syrian wing of the Kurdistan Worker’s Party (PKK), a terrorist separatist group formerly supported by the Soviet Union:

The disintegration of the Syrian state offered the PKK a new opportunity. Throughout 2013 and 2014, the PKK’s Syrian arm, “the Peoples Protection Units,” or YPG, established control of the Kurdish cantons all along the Turkish border. . . . The PKK openly presents Rojava, [as it calls this slice of Syria], as the southern part of a much larger polity that will encompass all of eastern Turkey. As Kurdish autonomous regions sprang up in Syria, a number of Kurdish towns in Turkey also proclaimed their autonomy.

Historically, the United States has respected the Turkish assessment of the threat. But as then-President Obama negotiated his way through the labyrinth of the Syrian civil war, he broke with precedent and allied the United States with the PKK by selecting the YPG as its main partner for combating Islamic State.

[A]rriving at [a strategic] accommodation with Turkey should be seen . . . as a top priority of American foreign policy—the key to managing the central contradiction in American policy vis-à-vis the Middle East. On the one hand, talk of withdrawing from the Middle East is rife on both sides of the political aisle, and the American public has no tolerance for significant military commitments. On the other hand, if the United States leaves the region, Russia, China, and Iran will fill the ensuing vacuum. America is thus betwixt and between.

Read more at Caravan

More about: Kurds, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, Syrian civil war, Turkey, 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