Vladimir Putin’s Existential Struggle against the West

From very early in its history, Israel found itself aligned with the U.S. against the Soviet Union, which armed Syria and Egypt so long as they fought the Jewish state, cultivated the PLO, and unleashed the global anti-Zionist propaganda campaign that remains with us even after the USSR is long gone. Jerusalem and Moscow now have good relations on the surface, but the Kremlin protects Iran and fights alongside it in Syria. More importantly, perhaps—as Leon Aron explains—the modern-day Russian regime is anti-American to its core:

Contrary to the prevailing view, Vladimir Putin’s domestic regime is not merely a corrupt autocracy founded on propaganda, political manipulation, and repression. . . . Over the past two decades he has ceaselessly and systematically reshaped Russia’s national identity: the ways in which Russians see themselves, their country, and their history. He has rewritten, updated, or reawakened the elements of his country’s legitimizing myths—what he calls “spiritual bonds” (dukhovnye skrepy)—and deployed them in ways that proved deeply satisfying to tens of millions of followers.

Along the way, Putin has recovered the defining elements of the cold war and made them part of the national credo: the conflict between Putin’s Russia and the West is not about normal competition among large states and occasional frictions about specific issues. It is about an incompatibility of values. Just as the Soviet leadership did, the Kremlin today perceives the struggle with the U.S.-led “West” as ubiquitous and global, whether in Georgia, Syria, or Ukraine. This contest is permanent, and the West’s effort to undermine Russia, [according to Moscow propaganda], is relentless.

Exceeding Soviet propaganda in stridency is a sign of a disturbing difference between the two cold-war regimes. . . . [T]he Politburo elders had little to prove and could rest on their laurels. Having known firsthand the horrors of [World War II], they were wary of provoking a direct confrontation with the West. . . . By contrast, since 2014, when Putin recast himself as a wartime president, war or threat of war has been the key to his regime’s legitimacy. What my Russian colleagues called “militarized patriotism in peacetime” became the leitmotif of the Kremlin propaganda orchestra.

Read more at Dispatch

More about: Cold War, Russia, U.S. Foreign policy, Vladimir Putin

 

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