First

 Of all the aspects of the threatened draft of Eretz Yisrael’s bnei Torah one must be addressed before all others. Before we consider whether there is any way to explain our worldview to secular Israelis in terms they can understand and accept there is a far more important question to ponder: Do we shlomei emunei Yisrael accept and understand it? Do we perceive why this is evil? Do we appreciate just how great a danger this poses to our nation?

The unfortunate answer to a very large extent is that we do not. There is a huge perhaps unprecedented misunderstanding about this issue. This is evident simply from the conversations one has and hears as well as from numerous other developments. A sampling:

• A magazine produced by and for Torah Jews features a young chareidi woman’s account of her army service under the title “The Courage to Serve.” To enlist in defiance of not only family and a community where one “never truly fit in” but also of a psak of yehareig v’al yaavor indeed takes courage — not of a good sort.
• A frum website features a chareidi army battalion officer’s 12 questions for — scathing indictments of really — Eretz Yisrael’s frum community. It is an astounding exercise in blame the victim a specimen of cycle-of-violence-style moral equivalence that when aimed at Israel by the New York Times we all recognize as a perversion of logic and fact. But somehow its author’s background in Ponevezh and as a rosh kollel is supposed to give him carte blanche to perpetrate such distortions. It does not.
• A kippah-wearing politician whose policies seek quite simply to end the chareidi community as we know it visits these shores for a victory lap after an electoral win that will prove far more short-lived than he knows — and is received with high honor in shuls headed by talmidei chachamim and filled with ehrliche Yidden.

We must attain clarity on what is at stake and what precisely we believe. Let us begin with that on which both sides agree. Former Mossad head Ephraim Halevy recently stated that whileIran is “a formidable enemy” it does not represent “an existential threat” toIsrael. Rather it is “the growing haredi radicalization” in Israeli society that “poses a greater threat than … Ahmadinejad.”

Let us ignore for now if we can the breathtaking demonization of fellow Jews that statement represents. The man is right — Ahmadinejad is not the problem. There is indeed a threat different not only in degree but in kind an existential one facing the Jews inIsrael but it is not that slithering Persian snake and his mad pursuit of a nuclear device with which to bring about his dream of a world without Jews. It is there of course that the meeting of minds with Halevy ends and a gaping chasm wider than all the universe opens between him and us.