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Israel’s Government Can’t Force Change on the Ultra-Orthodox

Sept. 2 2016

Over the course of the past year, it has become clear that much-vaunted government efforts to transform ḥaredi society have come to naught: yeshiva students still receive draft deferments, laws increasing the secular-education requirements at ḥaredi schools have been repealed, and subsidies have been reinstated. However, argues Yedidia Stern, this return to the “status quo ante” doesn’t mean stagnation; it’s only a reminder that governments can encourage social change, but can’t bring it about:

Politics and the law have only a limited role to play: to permit [beneficial social] change, support it, and not impede it.

[C]hange from below is already taking place. Today, about half of all ultra-Orthodox men hold jobs; the number of ultra-Orthodox individuals enrolled in colleges and universities has grown several-fold; and the percentage of “modern” ultra-Orthodox families who want their sons to receive a general, and not only Torah, education has expanded. . . .

Going forward, the public purse must be used intelligently. . . . Economic benefits to those who do not serve in the IDF and do not work should be curtailed, on the one hand; but the coffers should be opened to pay for employment-oriented higher-educational programs and the promotion of jobs in the ultra-Orthodox sector, on the other.

Rather than reduce the total budgetary outlay for these categories, funds should be distributed in a different fashion than they have been until now. The ultra-Orthodox public will both understand and support this.

Read more at Jewish Week

More about: Israel & Zionism, Israeli politics, Israeli society, ultra-

The Summary: 10/7/20

Two extraordinary events demonstrate something important about Israel’s most fervent adversaries. One was a speech given at something called The People’s Forum (funded generously by Goldman Sachs), which stated, “When the state of Israel is finally destroyed and erased from history, that will be the single most important blow we can give to destroying capitalism and imperialism.”

The suggestion that this tiny state is the linchpin of a global, centuries-old phenomenon like capitalism goes well beyond anything resembling rational criticism. Even if Israel were guilty of genocide, apartheid, and oppression—which of course it is not—it would not follow that its destruction would help end capitalism or imperialism.

The other was an anti-Israel protest that took place in front of New York City’s Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, deemed “complicit” in Israel’s evils. At organizers’ urging, participants shouted their slogans at kids in the cancer ward, who were watching from the windows. Given Hamas’s indifference toward the lives of Gazan children, such callousness toward non-Palestinian children from Hamas’s Western allies shouldn’t be surprising. The protest—like the abovementioned speech—deliberately conveyed the message that Israel is the ultimate evil and its destruction the ultimate good, cancer patients be damned.

The fact that Israel’s adversaries are almost comically perverse does not mean that they can be dismissed. If its allies fail to understand the obsessive and irrational hatred that it faces, they cannot effectively help it defend itself.

Read more at Mosaic