Shlomo Sand and His Arab Admirers

The Israeli historian Shlomo Sand has attracted attention by resuscitating long-discredited theories about the supposedly non-Middle Eastern origins of the Jewish people and ostentatiously declaring that he himself has ceased to be a Jew. Much more interesting than his arguments are their sources, and the way they have been eagerly endorsed by Arab anti-Semites, as Shaul Bartal writes:

Sand’s ideas regarding race theory are borrowed from Nazi, Islamic, Arab, and Palestinian sources that claim to have scientifically proved that the Jews of today do not descend from ancient Israelite stock. One example is a book by the Islamic activist Hassan Bash, at-Tarbiya as-Sahyonia, Min Ansariyat at-Torah ila Damu’ya al-Ihtilal (“Zionist Education, from the Racism of the Torah to the Bloodletting of the Occupation”). . . . [In the Arab world,] Bash is considered a leading researcher of Zionist culture and Jewish religion and has written 32 books, most of which slander the Jewish religion, the Torah, and Christianity. . . .

The unique aspect of Sand’s book thus is not its content but rather its context. Sand’s innovation is that he, a Jewish professor of history from a leading “Zionist” university, step-by-step, in beautifully phrased Hebrew, justifies and approves all the Palestinian historical claims. It is no surprise that The Invention of the Jewish People became a major best-seller in the Arab world and is treasured by Palestinians.

Read more at Middle East Quarterly

More about: Academia, Anti-Zionism, Arab anti-Semitism, Khazars, Racism, Shlomo Sand

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