How (Not) to Report on Iranian Jewry and Iranian Public Opinion

The Islamic Republic allowed a journalist from a Jewish paper (the Forward) to travel around the country and interview both officials and private citizens. The resulting article, writes Michael Totten, avoids some of the worst pitfalls of reportage from repressive regimes, but is not without its share of naïveté—beginning with a misunderstanding of the role of the translator and fixer provided by the government to accompany him on his travels:

[Larry Cohler-Esses] has no way of knowing if the translations are accurate, and meanwhile I know for a fact that both the translator and the fixer reported on him to the government. They were required by law to do so. For all he and I know, they worked for the Ministry of Intelligence. . . .

[Furthermore], anyone and everyone in Iran who talks to an American journalist flanked by an official fixer and translator knows that every word he utters will be carefully read by the authorities. That’s as true for people inside the government as it is for people on the street. Authoritarian regimes install fear in everyone, including their own officials. Nobody wants to be purged. So who knows what they privately believe?

As for the insistence of government officials and “senior ayatollahs” to Cohler-Esses that they object to Israeli policies, and not to Israel’s existence, Totten writes:

[I]t makes no sense [to say] that Iran objects only to Israeli policy. Iranian leaders routinely scream “Death to Israel.” (They also routinely scream “Death to America.”) . . . The United States government objects to plenty of Mexico’s policies, but not even Donald Trump or Pat Buchanan begins meetings by screaming “Death to Mexico” or appears at any “Death to Mexico” rallies. The United States doesn’t even have “Death to Mexico” rallies.

Read more at World Affairs Journal

More about: Anti-Semitism, Iran, Journalism, Persian Jewry, 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