While Insulting Netanyahu, the Administration Admits That Iran Will Go Nuclear

Disparaging comments about the Israeli prime minister by anonymous administration officials offer an “appalling display of hypocrisy, hostility to Israel, and warmth toward the very powers (Iran, Hamas, et al.) that have killed almost as many Americans as al-Qaeda,” writes Danielle Pletka. More disturbing still is the admission that the U.S. has given up on stopping Iran from getting nuclear weapons:

But let’s forget about Obama’s own ideological dislike of the state of Israel and its leaders, whoever they may be. . . . Let us instead focus on the fact that an unnamed “senior American official” is waxing triumphant over the fact that it is now “too late” for Israel to strike Iran’s nuclear weapons complex. This is good news? The fact that American officials believe it is more advantageous to have a nuclear Iran than to have someone in power in Israel who will not kowtow to the U.S. president says something about the fundamental rot at the core of the Obama administration [and] its contempt for the national security of the American people—who are at terrible risk from an Iranian nuclear bomb. . . .

Read more at AEI

More about: American-Israeli Affairs, Barack Obama, Benjamin Netanyahu, Iran

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