US
Fred Kaplan points out that America’s fight against ISIS is not going to prevent terrorist attacks of the kind we’ve been seeing recently:
It’s true that American airstrikes, Iraqi and Kurdish ground assaults, and the occasional raid by U.S. Special Forces have lately pummeled ISIS forces, severed their supply lines, and recaptured some of their strongholds. But it’s extremely unlikely that the spike of terrorist attacks for which ISIS has claimed credit (or for which the killers have claimed allegiance to ISIS)—in Orlando, Jordan, Lebanon, Istanbul, Baghdad, Saudi Arabia, Bangladesh, and now southern France, just in the past month—has any correlation with the ups and downs of tactical military operations.
Adam Garfinkle tries to imagine “the next Israeli-Arab peace process” and America’s modest role in it:
Unless the parties understand the real barriers to success and what it will take to overcome them, a new process will only waste time and aviation fuel. The next President and Secretary of State, whoever they turn out to be, will not be able to afford that kind of waste. And they should not casually inflict unanticipated hardships on the local protagonists just to satisfy some quixotic do-gooder reflex. Remember: from the building of castles in the sky bricks soon fall.
Israel
Mazal Mualem takes a look at Israel’s attempt to keep its tech giants from fleeing the country:
The road to social justice is still clearly long. It’s also clear that the public discourse has changed and that decision-makers understand they have to act accordingly, but all too often they give in to populism. In the case of taxation of tech giants, the decision resists the desire to please the public by imposing heavy taxes on the rich and powerful, acknowledging that something else is at stake: proper integration into global competition that could yield billions of shekels a year for the state treasury. Ignoring the issue will drive the companies out, and we might end up with nothing.
Following Newt Gingrich’s suggestion to interrogate Muslims, Jeffrey Goldberg gives Israel as an example of a place in which Sharia law is state sanctioned:
There is much to critique in Gingrich’s approach, but I was struck in particular by his statement that “Sharia is incompatible with Western civilization.” One of the Middle East countries that officially endorses sharia as a legal system is one of Gingrich’s most favored countries, Israel, which is, by his lights—and mine—a crucial component of Western civilization. Israel’s sharia courts, which are supervised by the Ministry of Justice, allow the more than 15 percent of Israel’s population that is Muslim to seek religious recourse for their personal dilemmas. These courts have been in operation since Israel’s founding, and yet the country does not seem to have been fatally undermined by their existence.
Middle East
Soner Cagaptay believes that both the coup and Erdogan’s expected response to it are bad news for Turkish Democracy:
Though we do not yet know who was behind the Turkish coup plot to overthrow the Justice and Development (AK) Party government and the country’s president, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, one thing is for certain: after this attempt, Turkey will be less free and less democratic. If the military had won, then Turkey would have become an oppressive country run by generals. And if Erdogan wins, and this looks the likely outcome, Turkey will still become more oppressive.
Elliot Ackerman writes about Erdogan’s fight against the historical legacy of Ataturk:
Throughout his tenure as Prime Minister and now as President, Erdoğan has distanced himself from Atatürk. He views himself as the father of a new Turkish identity, one aligned more closely with its Ottoman past, its Islamic heritage. He has taken the country in a more religious direction, similar to a place it was in before the 1997 coup. Just before that coup, a poll conducted by the World Values Survey found that ninety-five per cent of Turks trusted their military. A Pew poll taken last year in the run-up to national elections found that only fifty-two per cent of Turks gave the military a positive rating. With support for the military less dominant now and with Erdoğan’s support still solid among much of the population, the coup has faltered. Citizens have taken to the streets in protest.
Jewish World
Yossi Shain and Daniel Goldman try to figure out why British Jews aren't “drifting away” from Israel as much as American Jews are:
British Jews remain more ethnically distinctive, and more particular. Thus, while not necessarily strictly observant, fully 70 percent belong to Orthodox or ultra-Orthodox synagogues; by contrast, most of their American brethren are either non-Orthodox or unaffiliated. Similarly, 60 percent of British Jewish children attend Jewish schools, as opposed to less than a third of their American counterparts. The statistics for teenage trips to Israel tell a similar story.
In sum, Jews in Britain are more interconnected, more homogeneous, and more closely tied to Israel than Jews in the U.S., and far likelier to take part actively in Jewish life.
Rabbi Stuart Weinblatt answers critics of Eli Wiesel:
In the shadow of the Holocaust, when one third of our people was annihilated, it should not be a surprise that Wiesel could not endorse a movement whose primary tactic is the killing of innocent Jews. How could he embrace a movement that celebrates and glorifies death. It is unrealistic to expect that he would condone a cause whose leaders practice and promulgate disturbingly virulent anti-Semitic propaganda, often using images first created by the Nazis and whose leaders deny that the Holocaust occurred.
More news and opinions than at a Shabbat dinner, right in your inbox.