Is the U.S. Getting Ready to Ransom Hostages Held by Iran?

Last weekend, Iranian officials announced that they were close to reaching an agreement with Washington to release American prisoners. Although the U.S. swiftly denied that such a deal was in the offing, Benny Avni thinks the White House might in fact be close to securing the freedom of Siamak Namazi and other Americans.

[T]he administration’s top hostage negotiator, Roger Carstens, has traveled to Qatar, a country with good relations with Washington and Tehran, indicating a deal could come soon. . . . Mr. Namazi, sentenced in 2016 to a ten-year prison term on bogus espionage charges, gave a heart-wrenching interview last week to CNN’s Christiane Amanpour, calling on Mr. Biden to “bring us home.” It wasn’t clear whether the authorities at the notorious Evin prison, where he is held, facilitated the interview, which created a stir in Washington.

Separately, Iranian news outlets reported over the weekend that Washington agreed to release frozen Iranian funds held in Iraqi banks as part of American sanctions against the regime. A much larger sum, widely estimated at $7 billion, is held in Korean banks. Some or all of it could be used as ransom for the release of the American hostages.

“A deal with Iran to get hostages out is necessary, but that deal doesn’t have to involve release of funds,” a former American hostage who was held at Evin, Xiyue Wang, told the Sun. . . . “Thousands of Iranian Americans live permanently in Iran,” Mr. Wang says. “If you give money today, how are you going to prevent further hostage-taking?” He noted that in his own release in 2019, “no money changed hands.”

Tehran is now attempting to create a “feeding frenzy” for the release of three Americans, a Washington-based lawyer who has been involved in Iranian hostage negotiations, Jason Poblete, tells the Sun. Yet, he says, “if there is an agreement and just one U.S. hostage is left behind, it will be a failure.”

Read more at New York Sun

More about: Iran, 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