Professor Chomsky, as much as I admire many of your other criticisms, the criticism about Israel seems to be a blind spot in your desire to be rational and fair.
Ultra orthodox Jewish men protest at construction site in Yehud, claiming the construction site is on Jewish graves, on May 27, 2025.(photo credit: Flash90/Yossi Aloni)ByMORDECHAI BECK
I’ve never met Yehezkiel Toombeck, but I have seen him, or his like, a dozen times or more on television railing against conscription to Israel’s army. With his fedora, long black coat, white shirt, and laceless shoes, he is representative of thousands of young haredi men who have refused to be inducted into the IDF, which is in dire need of their physical support. Up to now, their refusal has been on religious grounds – their daily studies of holy texts takes precedence over everything else, even the protection of their fellow citizens in a war that has been dragging on for well over a year and a half. Whatever the justification these youngsters have, they are sticking to their beliefs in a way that is reminiscent of conscientious objectors. In fact, according to their placards, they would rather die than serve in the army.
However, Mr. Toombeck now has another, more practical, reason for his objections (according to an interview in Yediot Aharonot on May 16). “Why should I go and fight with an army which has a high number of causalities” he argues. “It is like asking me to commit suicide. I should join an army like this?” he asks rhetorically. “You have the nerve to ask us to endanger ourselves in such an army?”
Besides the temerity of his outburst (more commonly known as chutzpah) and his insensitivity to the war effort, he expresses a certain arrogant pride in the fact that he will not serve in the army because he might die. But this is not his only claim. “If we had an army made up of haredim only, which behaved according to the directives of the Torah, we would defeat all our enemies and leave the land in peace.”
It is hard to imagine such an army, to put it mildly. But a similar situation comes to mind in Lord Tennyson’s famous poem “The Charge of the Light Brigade.” In his ballad, Tennyson describes the fate of 600 British horsemen during the Crimean War who attacked entrenched batteries of Russian artillery. In a somewhat ironic way, he describes how “boldly they rode and well, into the jaws of death, into the mouth of hell...” Their decimation at the hands of their foes was inevitable. The reason was clear: “Someone had blundered.”
One imagines something similar would happen with this much vaunted haredi army that Toombeck would have us believe in.
HAREDI DEMONSTRATORS protest in Jerusalem on July 23, 2025. (credit: MARC ISRAEL SELLEM)
“Yiden, kum arayn. Mach amilchomo (Yiddish for “Come Jews, fight, prepare for battle). On your horses. Let’s go and show these naysayers who claim that we – the real Yiden – can’t fight. We’ll show them. We’ll show them the power of God Almighty who will defeat all our enemies and leave the Promised Land quiet. Come with sword and buckle by your side and defeat the forces of evil. Not like the secularists who are dying like flies. What for? That’s why you go to the army? No, we the haredi army will show everyone how to fight with God on our side.” What? Someone forgot to tell us that the enemies of Israel use rockets, and bombs and state-of-the-art guns? Oy vay. We’ll have to ask our rabbis...”
The pathetic nature of their claims underlines how far they are removed from the realities of modern life. Unfortunately, their fantasies are being nurtured by a government which is totally dependent on the haredi parties in order to remain in power with their so-called coalition. Like the Light Brigade, they too will have to face up to the realities of modern warfare.
Noam Chomsky’s critique
Noam Chomsky, the leading radical intellectual from the US, recently sent out a message on YouTube criticizing Israel for basing its claim to the Land of Israel on biblical precedents. No one, declared the professor, can base their claim on such extraneous and archaic sources. However, a moment’s reflection reveals that most countries in the world do claim that the territory that they inhabit was handed down to them by tradition, many of which stretch back thousands of years. If you asked the Russians, the Chinese, the Indians, the Italians, the Greeks and so on, how they come to be living on their particular territory, historical precedents is obviously going to be one of their reasons. In fact ,it is so obvious to them that they would never even ask themselves the question.
One of the only countries that could not make such a claim is Chomsky’s own place of residence, the United States, a mere fledgling nation of two or three hundred of years in the making, and that at the expense of the Native Americans, Mexicans, etc.
Israel has a right to make its claim for no other reason than it is in a unique situation. The historical record is clear. No one can argue otherwise. In his speech accepting the Nobel Prize for Literature, S.Y. Agnon stated that he was only not a native of Israel because his ancestors had been cruelly exiled from their land all those thousand of years beforehand by the Roman Empire, but the Jewish people never forgot the land of their origins, unlike many peoples who, after being exiled for whatever reason, vanished from the planet.
So, Professor Chomsky, as much as I admire many of your other criticisms, the criticism about Israel seems to be a blind spot in your desire to be rational and fair.
And now a word from our sponsor
I’ve been thinking about President Donald Trump’s descent into the Middle East and his apparent drawing away from Netanyahu and cozying up to the oil-rich kingdoms of the Islamic-Arab nations. Is it possible that his strategy will bring about the much-desired peace to the region, and that his business-like approach to political problems will actually work where all other stratagems have failed?
It would be pleasant to think that the Trump solution will work. However, there appears to be a deep flaw in his thinking. Like many before him, he too believes that “Money is the answer for everything” (Ecclesiastes 10:19), although the preacher Kohelet notes this in a profoundly ironic sense. All people of faith know that materialism is not the be all and end all. There is a spiritual factor to be considered. Time and time again, it has been shown that the spiritual essence of man is much stronger and more durable than his material achievements. This seems to have been forgotten in this whirlwind tour of the Arab states. Of course, they have riches beyond our imagination. But they also have spiritual traditions that cast doubt on even the most well wrought out agreements of the material kind. Who knows what will happen if there is a sudden change of regime, a change that can be extremely rapid as we have recently witnessed in this region? “Trust not in princes, in mortal men, who cannot save. When their spi rit departs, they return to the ground. On that day, their plans come to nothing...”(Psalm 146:4).
Melanie Phillips
British journalist and author Melanie Phillips has earned a well-deserved reputation as someone who speaks to power, whatever the consequences are to her. Her outstanding defense of Israel led to her leaving the liberal-left Guardian, where she had been voicing her radical views for a good number of years. She changed from being a liberal-left journalist to a very right-wing apologist, moving on first to the Daily Mail and then to the Times, not forgetting The Jewish Chronicle. Well, that’s her privilege. To quote former British prime minister Edward Heath, “If I have a change of mind, it means that I have a mind to change.”
However, her latest rant puts her squarely in the camp of “never mind the facts – my ideology takes precedence.” Her commentary this time is that the Israeli army is not killing people of Gaza, especially those who are lining up for much-needed food. Not only have organizations such as Breaking the Silence and B’Tselem continuously shown this to be the truth, as tragic and unfortunate as this may be, but the IDF itself recently published an admission that it has killed innocent Palestinians, including non-combatant women and children. Despite her highfalutin Oxbridge-tinged language, her sentiments in this area are just wrong.
Why we are in Iran
The midrash on the Torah portion “Lech Lecha” asks why the Jews were first exiled from the Land of Israel to Iran (Babylonia or Persia back then) and answers because Abraham came from there. The sages of old were asking why did our patriarch have to leave Ur when he could have been a believing Jew right there! Some 3,000 years later, we have an answer. Our latest foray into modern Iran is in order to repair the world (tikkun olam) and to show that we could still be as Jewish as Abraham back in Iran/Persia/Iraq/Babylon, but that God thought it better that we move to Israel. Go argue with God! ■
