Amnesty International Has Become an Apologist for Terrorism and an Enemy of Israel

When the Columbia University chapter of Amnesty International invited Alan Dershowitz to speak, the organization’s central leadership ordered it to disinvite him. Why? Because, he writes, he supports Israel and opposes terrorism.

In general, Amnesty International . . . has abandoned its commitment to human rights in preference for an overtly political and ideological agenda. Its position on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict has become particularly troubling. In addition to providing an abuse excuse to Palestinian honor killers in the West Bank, it has demonized Israel for its attempts to protect its citizens from Hamas war crimes. In a recent report it condemns Israel for its military actions in Gaza without even mentioning the Hamas terror tunnels that provoked Israel’s defensive actions. These tunnels—I was in one of them just before the war—were built for one purpose and one purpose only: to kill and kidnap Israeli citizens. The tunnel I was in exited right near an Israeli kindergarten with more than 50 children. The sole purpose of the tunnel was to send Hamas death squads into Israel to kill and kidnap as many of these children as possible.

Read more at Algemeiner

More about: Amnesty International, Anti-Zionism, Terrorism

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