Iran Is Stalling as It Awaits Further Nuclear Concessions from the West

On April 3, the Iranian foreign minister Hossein Amir-Abdollahian said a nuclear deal was “close,” and that “the ball is in the U.S. court.” Since then, little progress has been made. Carine Hajjar notes that, despite the growing bipartisan opposition to the deal and the billions in sanction relief that have already been granted to it, the Islamic Republic seems to be waiting for its other conditions to be met.

Iranian demands are the final barrier [to a deal]. Tehran wants the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), one of the world’s most prolific supporters of terrorism, to be delisted as a foreign terrorist organization. It’s underscoring that demand with a request for a guarantee that the deal will remain in place after the Biden administration.

Fully knowing that the Biden administration cannot enact a permanent treaty, this is Iran’s bid to get some extra goodies in the final days of consideration. As of now, any deal passed by the Biden administration would be an international agreement, not a Senate-approved treaty, meaning it could be repealed by a future administration.

To excuse its concessions, the Biden administration has engaged in some damage-control optics. But that’s all they are: optics. For instance, it sanctioned an individual and a handful of companies associated with the IRGC’s ballistics program after the recent strike [on a U.S. consulate in the Iraqi city of] Erbil. But without continual and comprehensive pressure, these narrow sanctions will be one step forward, and four steps back.

The administration is also arguing that even if the IRGC is removed from the foreign-terrorist-organization list, “The IRGC will remain sanctioned under U.S. law and our perception of the IRGC will remain,” according to Robert Malley, the State Department’s special envoy for Iran. To legitimize this move, it has opted for a pinky-promise, asking Iran for a public written guarantee of good behavior. Iran won’t even do that.

Read more at National Review

More about: Iran nuclear program, Joseph Biden, 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