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Sunday Reads: Is there a Hillary Doctrine?, A blow to Hezbollah, Soloveitchik’s Maimonides

[additional-authors]
May 15, 2016

US

Jeffrey Goldberg talks to Mark Landler about the possible foreign policy differences between Hillary Clinton and President Obama:

Landler: Well I think that she’s wanted, from the very start, to do something to change the equation on the ground. And President Obama, I think, concluded you couldn’t do enough to change the equation without a major military intervention. I think she will at least explore the possibility of a no-fly zone and creating humanitarian corridors. And I think that she would be willing to substantially expand the level of aid we’re giving to rebel groups [for instance with] MANPADS, and things like that.

Elliott Abrams argues that John Kerry should not be trying to boost Iran’s economy:

Iran is not a democracy with a reliable legal system, but a dictatorship run by the ayatollahs and the Revolutionary Guard where legal rights cannot possibly be guaranteed. There is simply no defensible reason for an American official, much less our top diplomat, to concern himself with how much investment and profit Iran can eke out of the nuclear deal. The effort to do so betrays America’s real interests in the Middle East, which are challenged by a richer and better resourced Iran.

Israel

Ben Dror Yemini believes that, facing the prospect of joining a unity government, Labour leader Isaac Herzog needs to take a stand:

Herzog has not accomplished anything and just yesterday he half-heartedly acknowledged that. He is supposed to receive the desirable post of Foreign Minister, but it is not clear which policies he will represent. Will he defend settlement building outside of the blocs? There are a number of other jobs that his party could receive. But jobs and no change constitute a mockery. Selling out will be the end of the Zionist Union.

Yair Rosenberg explains why supporting Trump and being pro-Israel are mutually exclusive:

In other words, regardless of whether you find his Israel policy positions appealing, Trump would be a disaster for Israel because he would be a disaster for America. He has questioned the need for NATO, one of the great Western bulwarks against Russian aggression and global strife. He wants to impose draconian tariffs on foreign goods that economists project would precipitously penalize American consumers, costing them $459 billion annually, or over $6,000 for every American family. Trump has even threatened to “open up” libel laws so that he can go after media outlets that are critical of him, in blatant violation of the First Amendment.

Middle East

Nick Danforth takes a look at alternative plans to draw the boarders of the Middle East and asks whether they would have made things better:

The borders that exist today — the ones the Islamic State claims to be erasing — actually emerged in 1920 and were modified over the following decades. They reflect not any one plan but a series of opportunistic proposals by competing strategists in Paris and London as well as local leaders in the Middle East. For whatever problems those schemes have caused, the alternative ideas for dividing up the region probably weren’t much better. Creating countries out of diverse territories is a violent, imperfect process.

Nadav Pollack and Matthew Levitt discuss the recent blow to Hezbollah in Syria, the death of one of its most important commanders:

Regardless of who is behind the killing, the bottom line is that Badreddine's death is a significant blow to Hezbollah, operationally and mentally. The group will now need to send another high-level official to oversee operations in Syria — someone with vast military experience and deep knowledge of the Syrian theatre. Two possible replacements are Ibrahim Aqil and Fuad Shukr, both of whom serve on Hezbollah's highest military body (the Jihadi Council) and are already involved in the Syrian theatre. The incident is also a big blow to the group's image as undefeatable and untouchable. If Badreddine can be killed in Syria, no Hezbollah commander is safe there.

Jewish World

An excerpt from a new book by Andrew Nagorski discusses how Israel caught Nazi Mastermind Adolph Eichmann, debunking a few myths along the way:

In the early days of Israel’s existence, there was simply not enough time, energy, or desire to hunt Nazis. That led Eitan to shrug off the controversy that surfaced later about the value of Wiesenthal’s 1953 tip from the Austrian baron about the Eichmann sighting in Argentina. Even if Wiesenthal had provided more precise information about Eichmann’s whereabouts, Eitan asserted, Israel was in no position to dedicate the necessary manpower and resources to track him down that early. The struggle for Israel’s survival in a region filled with enemies trumped everything else.

Alan Brill talks to Lawrence Kaplan, editor of a new book of Rabbi Soloveitchik’s observations on Maimonides:

Soloveitchik distinguishes between two levels in the observance of halakhah. A lower approach where halakhah concerns obedience, duties and practical law; at this level ethics are instrumental. There is a second higher level of identifying with God and thereby with the cosmos. In the lower level there is obedience to a normative halakhah which is distinctly and qualitatively lower than having a cosmic intellectual experience where the divine is internalized as a prophetic experience in which one reaches the pinnacle of human existence.

Soloveitchik declares that halakhah is not about “how to” rather in its ideal state it is about merging into cosmos via cosmic experience to reach a higher truth into reality. (This ideal is quite unlike the way many today conceive of Soloveitchik).

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