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For many people, the Orthodox Union is synonymous with the small “OU” symbol found on millions of kosher products. But  Executive Vice President and Chief Operating Officer Rabbi Josh Joseph says that’s only one piece of the organization’s story.

“The OU is very well known for its kashrus with 1.5 million products worldwide,” Joseph told The Jerusalem Post on Monday. “It is a huge part of what we do, and we’re a nonprofit. But that money goes back into the community and into all of our actions and activities and programs and projects.”

Founded in 1898 as an umbrella organization for Orthodox synagogues, the OU initially focused on representing Jewish communal interests. Kosher certification was added in 1916 and has since become its most recognizable function, but far from its only one.

Some of the OU’s most well-known projects outside of kashrut are NCSY (the international youth movement), Yachad (the National Jewish Council for Disabilities) and JLIC (Jewish Learning Initiative on Campus). It also runs a Daf Yomi initiative, with 10,000 plus people learning the Talmud daily.

Then there are other subsets that don’t necessarily have the OU’s name on them.

The Teach Coalition, for example, is a grassroots organization that fights for equitable government funding, security resources, and affordable tuition.

“When it comes down to it, it’s about support, and it’s about relationships and growing those relationships externally, but also within the community,” Joseph told the Post.

Of course, in many ways, the nature of the OU’s advocacy and relationships has shifted since October 7th.

“Absolutely yes there’s challenges. Yes, there’s antisemitism around the world. In America. And yes, there’s challenges in Israel. But that also means that Hashem is asking each one of us what our role is in fixing it instead of just sitting back.”

Joseph says one of the OU’s values is being solution-oriented.

“You can point things out, you can complain. But then what are you going to do about it? What’s next? How are you going to try and make it better?”

On October 6th, 2023, there were 304 Jewish Student Unions (JSUs) in US public schools. And “really overnight, without doing any recruitment, it went from 300 to well over 500 clubs across the country,” Joseph told the Post.

What he found interesting was that the JSUs were not interested in asking the OU to come to the schools and talk about combatting antisemitism.

“They told us: ‘We want to know what it means to be Jewish. What does it mean to have a Jewish identity? What does it mean to be proud of your Judaism? Give us some content. Give us some context. Give us some something that’s genuine and that’s authentic and that’s content rich.'”

“So there is a moment of opportunity right now at every stage for us to talk about Torah, Torah concepts. It’s not necessarily about making people orthodox, but to share thousands upon thousands of years of godly ideas with the entire Jewish world.”

“What we find inside is a spark. And if we can connect that spark to God and to inspiration and to spirituality, then we have a chance to light the world on fire.”

Combating the divide

Joseph noted that the relationship between American orthodoxy and Israel is changing, but nevertheless remains at the heart of US Jewry.

“What happens in Israel really matters to us in America and certainly in the Orthodox circles. When a member of Knesset might do something or say something that gets our politicians all riled up, there’s no separation.

“We are one community. And yet there is a divide that we need to keep working on.”

In order to combat this divide, the OU organizes many trips to Israel for people of all ages; “In both directions, we can learn about each other, and we can talk to each other face to face.”

Joseph doesn’t agree with the idea that Jews worldwide must be unified. He says a little fraction is okay.

“We can disagree as long as we can do that agreeably. There are different pathways, but we’re all ending up at the same place.”

In terms of combatting antisemitism, Jospeh says what works best is one-on-one conversations.  

“It’s going to somebody and saying, come visit the Holy Land with me, and then coming to Israel and taking them to the Valley of Elah and showing them where Goliath stood and where David stood. That’s a different conversation than I’m going to take you to Nova. Both are important. Both have a role, and some people might need to see one and some people might see others, and some people might need to see both.”

When it comes to political antisemitism, Joseph stressed the importance of thanking supporters instead of just criticizing opposition.

“There were 104 Democrats who voted for the Massie Amendment. But there were also 98 Democrats who voted against it. Did anybody reach out and say thank you?”

“Nathan Diamond from the OU put out an action order to not the 104, but also to thank the 98 for standing up.”

“It’s very hard to go one-on-one, especially when there are maybe 15 million Jews, but the more we can have some of those engagements, I think the better shot we have,” he concluded.

Multiple teenage girls and young women in Iran have reportedly died by suicide or in honor killings after their photos were published on a Telegram channel alongside accusations regarding their sexual conduct, according to Iranian media reports and legal organizations.

Over the past week, two girls in Lorestan province ended their lives after their photos were leaked on the Telegram channel. The Iranian newspaper Sharq reported that several others also attempted suicide after having their photos published without consent.

Weeks earlier, a 16-year-old girl and a 20-year-old woman were also reported to have ended their lives in two separate incidents linked to claims published about them on the Telegram channel. However, an informed source told IranWire that the photo used of the young woman was “just an ordinary photo, not even a private one, taken directly from her Instagram page.”

انتشار تصویر یک زن در شهر ما ممکن است موجب مرگش شود.

پنج دختر خودکشی کردند و یک دختر توسط پدرش به قتل رسید.#لرستان#زن_کشی

— فرشته تابانیان ⁦ (@Fereshtetabani1) July 14, 2026

One of the two 16-year-old girls, identified as “Esma,” was buried in the Khazar Cemetery without a reception ceremony and in the presence of only a few friends and relatives, against local customs, according to the legal advocacy network Dadbaan.

Women across the provinces of Lorestan, Kermanshah, and West Azerbaijan have experienced extortion attempts connected to the channel, according to reports. The channel’s administrators reportedly demanded payment in exchange for removing posts.

In addition to the suicides and suicide attempts, Sharq reported at least one case of honor killing linked to the channel’s actions. Defense attorney Fereshteh Tabanian said online that a young girl had been killed by her father in connection with a post made about her.

IranWire also reported that one woman lost her job, another was expelled from her home by her husband, and another had her engagement called off as a result of the channel.

Reports link Telegram channel to suicides and honor killing

“From a criminological perspective, this case illustrates how the combination of cyber violence, social stigma, and cultural pressures related to the concept of ‘honor’ can inflict severe psychological harm on victims, especially teenagers. Preventing the recurrence of such incidents requires not only criminal prosecution of the offenders but also strengthening psychological support for victims, digital literacy education, and combating victim-blaming culture,” Dadbaan published in a statement.

افزایش شمار جان‌باختگان پرونده انتشار تصاویر خصوصی زنان در لرستان

روزنامه شرق در ایران با انتشار گزارشی از افزایش شمار جان‌باختگان پرونده انتشار تصاویر خصوصی زنان در لرستان خبر داده است.

بر اساس این گزارش انتشار تصاویر خصوصی زنان در یک کانال تلگرامی و اخاذی از قربانیان، به… pic.twitter.com/j2YijQ0AqW

— دادبان (@dadban4) July 19, 2026

IranWire, citing an informed source, claimed that student groups affiliated with universities in Khorramabad and Borujerd were targeted by the channel. The situation escalated, however, as “some individuals began sending in photos of other people’s daughters and sons out of personal grudges and enmity, accompanied by highly offensive and immoral captions.”

The channel initially claimed to be “punishing the regime’s parastous (honeytraps),” but has largely targeted those labeled “enemies of the state” as well as pro-regime figures, according to IranWire.

Activists warn misogyny-fueled abuse campaign

Samaneh Sawadi, a lawyer and gender equality activist based in the United Kingdom, told DW Persian that “this is a cybercrime and a violation of women’s privacy, but those who committed such an act knew in what context and culture they were doing it. They took advantage of the misogynistic atmosphere and touched on parts of the culture that could have led some of those women to a point where some of them were willing to lose their lives, and some were forced to delete social networks and leave cyberspace.”

“When society does not think that the presence of women is fundamentally sinful, it will not resort to such tactics to eliminate them. We can certainly report them, but then another channel will emerge. We need to see in what context these channels are created; in a context where the family considers the daughter and niece as its own personal property and sees her body, face, and social presence as its own, and turns her decision to have a profile into a tool and says, ‘I will not allow you to do this,’” she added.

Police arrest three suspects, search for fourth continues

Some reports have claimed that despite promises from the police and judiciary, no action has been taken to remove the Telegram channels or follow up on numerous complaints filed in connection with the account. However, the Lorestan prosecutor’s office reported that three of the channel’s operators were identified and arrested by police, while an ongoing search remains underway for a fourth suspect.

Five members of the Council for Higher Education (CHE) resigned on Monday in protest over legislation expanding gender-segregated academic studies, warning that the law constituted “unprecedented interference” in the council’s independence and could lead to the exclusion of women from Israeli academia.

According to Israeli media reports, four of the members submitted a joint resignation letter to President Isaac Herzog and Education Minister Yoav Kisch, who serves as chairman of the council. A fifth member, Moshe Vigdor, resigned in a separate letter.

The four signatories were Hebrew University chemistry Prof. Edit Tshuva, a former deputy chairwoman of the council; Technion Prof. Marcelle Machluf of the Faculty of Biotechnology and Food Engineering; Ben-Gurion University computer science Prof. Jihad El-Sana; and Prof. Lia Laor of the Levinsky-Wingate Academic College. Vigdor is CEO of the Mandel Foundation Israel, a former director-general of the CHE, and served on the council as a public representative.

CHE members cite threat to academic independence

“Approval of the law concerning gender segregation in advanced-degree studies in academia constitutes unprecedented interference in the independence of the Council for Higher Education,” the four wrote.

The intention to advance separate study programs was expected to severely harm the fundamental values on which Israel’s higher education system was based, including “academic freedom, equality, excellence and pluralism,” they said.

The amendment represented a substantive change in the nature of Israeli higher education and could lead to the exclusion of women as students, researchers and faculty members, they warned. It could also harm academic standards, public trust in the system and the international standing of Israeli academia.

“In these circumstances, we cannot continue to serve as members of the council and thereby grant legitimacy to steps that contradict the values for which we were asked to serve,” they wrote, announcing their immediate resignations.

Vigdor said separately that the legislation had undermined the council’s ability to bear responsibility for academic standards, equality, academic freedom and diversity.

“The law will grant state legitimacy to the exclusion of women in academia, and subsequently in additional public spaces,” he wrote, per reports.

“In the situation that has been created, in which the Council for Higher Education may become a rubber stamp for measures that contradict its scientific and ethical foundations, I cannot lend a hand to this – not through my voice and not through my silence.”

Vigdor stressed that his decision was not political, saying he had served as a public representative for approximately a decade out of a belief that a strong, free, equal and excellent academic system was a central component of Israel’s national resilience. Reports of the resignations said they were submitted one day before the council was due to hold its first discussion on implementing the legislation.

Knesset expands legal basis for gender-segregated programs

The Knesset approved the amendment to the Student Rights Law in a 52-43 vote early Thursday. Sponsored by Otzma Yehudit MK Limor Son Har-Melech, it expressly permits the CHE to approve separate programs for men and women in bachelor’s, master’s and doctoral studies.

At institutions that otherwise teach men and women together, separation is limited to classrooms, and enrollment must be voluntary. The legislation also states that operating separate institutions or programs for religious reasons will not, in itself, be considered discrimination. Son Har-Melech has argued that the legislation expands freedom of choice and allows religious students to pursue advanced degrees without abandoning their way of life.

High Court petition challenges new law

Six haredi women and 10 academics petitioned the High Court of Justice against the law hours after it passed, asking the court to strike it down or interpret it narrowly.

The petitioners argued that the amendment dismantled the safeguards on which the High Court relied when it upheld the council’s previous, limited framework for gender-segregated studies in 2021. That framework was restricted primarily to haredi students studying for bachelor’s degrees, limited separation to classrooms, and prohibited the exclusion of female lecturers.

The Council for Higher Education has yet to issue a response.

Israel’s Foreign Ministry has received 45 reports of antisemitic incidents against Israelis abroad since July 2025, the ministry revealed in its new “Map of Distress.”

According to ministry officials, this is a record number of antisemitic incidents. It included physical assaults, fights, spitting, verbal abuse, denial of service, and expulsion from hotels, cafes and restaurants.

“Over the past year we have seen a phenomenon we had never encountered on this scale before: Israelis contacting us after experiencing antisemitic incidents while abroad,” said Deputy Director-General for Consular Affairs Eli Yifrah.

“In several countries, there were reports of Israelis being identified because of their nationality or visible Israeli symbols and becoming targets of harassment, threats and even physical attacks.”

Alongside the 45 cases of antisemitic incidents, there were 384 cases involving missing persons or loss of contact, 292 arrests of Israeli citizens, 196 Israelis hospitalized abroad, 149 rescue operations from dangerous areas and 23 Israelis involved in natural disasters.

The countries with the highest number of cases where assistance was provided were the United Arab Emirates (615 incidents), Thailand (347 incidents), Greece (206), the US (202) and Italy (181).

Data collected from TravIL app

Overall, consular systems processed nearly 200,000 cases during the first half of 2026. This included the sensitive task of arranging the return of 846 deceased Israelis for burial in Israel, most of whom were from New York and Paris.

The newly released data follows the successful launch of the TravIL emergency app two weeks ago.

The Foreign Ministry said the figures demonstrate exactly why the app is needed. TravIL was developed to help prevent these situations and provide critical assistance during emergencies.

The app includes a secure digital document vault where travelers can store copies of their passport, helping speed up the replacement process and reducing bureaucracy. It also has a location-based emergency button that instantly transmits your GPS coordinates directly to the ministry’s Situation Room in Jerusalem.

“The Foreign Ministry’s consular network continues to operate around the clock, 24 hours a day, through Israel’s missions worldwide, providing assistance and services to Israeli citizens in a wide range of routine and emergency situations,” Yifrah said.

He told Israeli media that the increase in consular activity reflects both the growing number of Israelis traveling abroad and the complex security situation since the outbreak of the Swords of Iron War.

A pilot program under which Lebanese Armed Forces (LAF) troops will enter designated areas in southern Lebanon to verify they have been cleared of Hezbollah operatives and weapons is expected to begin in the near future, two sources familiar with the matter told The Jerusalem Post on Monday.

Later on Monday, the US State Department confirmed that pilot zone operations began in three southern Lebanon villages ” in accordance with the Trilateral Framework and under the auspices of the Military Coordination Group for Lebanon.”

The State Department said that the operations began in the villages of  Froun, Srifa, and Zawtar al-Gharbiya.

The development follows last week’s meeting in Rome between the Israeli and Lebanese delegations, led by Israeli Ambassador to the US Yechiel Leiter and Lebanese Ambassador to the United States Nada Hamadeh Mouawad, under the auspices of senior US administration officials.

An Israeli official said after last week’s talks that the sides had reached an agreement on the two designated pilot areas. 

The official added that the discussions were constructive and further reinforced the understanding that Israel and Lebanon agree on the need to disarm Hezbollah.

“The pilot areas will serve as a test of Lebanon’s ability to exercise its sovereignty in practice by implementing the agreed-upon conditions through the Lebanese Armed Forces, under the supervision of [the United States],” the official said.

Rubio, Aoun discuss implementing trilateral framework, Hezbollah disarmament

US Secretary of State Marco Rubio and Lebanese President Joseph Aoun discussed the implementation of the trilateral framework agreement between the US, Lebanon, and Israel during Aoun’s visit to Washington on Sunday.  

Aoun, according to a statement released by his office on X/Twitter, emphasized to Rubio the necessity for Lebanon and the US to remain in alignment regarding the implementation of the framework, specifically regarding the withdrawal of Israeli troops from designated pilot zones in southern Lebanon.

He also highlighted the importance of US support in strengthening the Lebanese military and investment in improving Lebanese energy, communications, and transportation infrastructure.

According to Aoun’s office, Rubio asserted that full Lebanese sovereignty “can only be achieved by a Lebanese decision issued by the Lebanese constitutional institutions.

Goldie Katz contributed to this report.

The Kurdistan Freedom Party (PAK) accused Iran of using white phosphorus in a drone attack on one of its bases on Sunday.

Iran has carried out numerous deadly attacks targeting Kurdish Iranian dissident groups. Many of these groups have bases and posts in the Kurdistan Region of Northern Iraq because they have been forced to leave Iran due to the oppression from the regime. PAK is one of the groups.

On Sunday, the PAK said that a drone attack carried out early in the morning had targeted a base of the PAK’s Kurdistan National Army (SMK). This is their unit of fighters.

“The Islamic Republic of Iran used munitions containing white phosphorus,” the group said. PAK is one of at least six different Kurdish Iranian opposition groups that are part of a coalition against the regime.

The other groups include PDKI, PJAK, two branches of the Komala party and a group called Khabat. PAK played a key role in the battle against ISIS. Their Kurdish Peshmerga fighters helped repel ISIS attacks on numerous front lines between 2014 and 2019.

A grave violation of international humanitarian law

On Sunday, the group said that, “based on eyewitness observations, medical examinations of nine wounded Peshmerga fighters, and the extensive fires caused at the targeted site, the munitions employed in the drone attack are believed to have contained white phosphorus.”

Hussein Yazdanpanah, the president of the PAK and also General Commander of the SMK, put out the statement. “This act is not only a grave crime but also a clear violation of the fundamental principles of international humanitarian law.

The use of munitions that inflict severe incendiary effects and cause widespread harm to people and the environment is incompatible with humanitarian principles and the international legal obligations of states,” the statement noted.

The World Health Organization noted that “white phosphorus is a chemical waxy solid substance typically appearing yellowish or colorless, and some have described its odor as resembling garlic.”

It noted that “it is often used by militaries to illuminate battlefields, to generate a smokescreen and as an incendiary. Once ignited, white phosphorus is very difficult to extinguish. It sticks to surfaces like skin and clothing.”

The PAK said that this crime should be addressed by the international community. “We call upon the Secretary-General of the United Nations, the United Nations Security Council, the United Nations Human Rights Council, the International Committee of the Red Cross, and all relevant international institutions to take the necessary legal measures to hold the Islamic Republic of Iran accountable,” he added.

He also called on the local authorities of the Kurdistan Region to protect the “security, rights, and environment of their citizens against Iran’s military aggression and cross-border attacks.”

The KRG does not have air defenses against drone attacks. In the last months, the Iranians and Iranian-backed militias have carried out more than 900 attacks on the region. This has resulted in destruction and death.

Nine Kurdish militants killed last week

In some cases, the US, which has a large consulate in Erbil and forces in the region, has been able to shoot down drones and missile threats. Over the last week, at least nine other Kurdish Iranian dissidents were killed in an Iranian attack on the Komala party in the KRG.

The PAK noted that “silence in the face of the use of prohibited weapons only paves the way for the repetition of such dangerous crimes. Defending human dignity, protecting civilians, and upholding international humanitarian law are shared responsibilities of all states and international institutions.”

Why is white phosphorus controversial?

White phosphorus is considered a controversial weapon, and its use has been reduced over the years by many militaries.

The WHO noted that “the use of white phosphorus may violate Protocol III (on the use of incendiary weapons) of the Convention on Certain Conventional Weapons (CCCW) in one specific instance: if it is used, on purpose, as an incendiary weapon directly against humans in a civilian setting.”

It can be used by militaries legally to illuminate a battlefield. “To establish an illegal use under the CCCW, an investigation into the intent behind the use of white phosphorus would be needed,” the WHO noted.

On July 20, Iran continued its attacks on Kurdish groups. “Iran launched fresh missile and drone strikes on bases belonging to the Iranian Kurdish opposition group Komala in the Kurdistan Region early Monday, the party said on Monday, just a day after nine of its members killed in an earlier attack were laid to rest,” Rudaw media noted.

“Amjad Hussein Panahi, head of communications for the group, said missiles struck the group’s headquarters in Alana valley in Erbil’s Choman district shortly after midnight before two drones targeted another base in Surdash camp near Sulaimani about an hour later.”

Regarding the attack on the PAK, the Hengaw Organization for Human Rights said it “expressed grave concern over reports that the Islamic Republic of Iran used prohibited chemical-incendiary munitions in the Kurdistan Region.

Hengaw called on the United Nations and the International Committee of the Red Cross to establish an independent international fact-finding mission to conduct an on-site investigation, examine those injured in the attack, and determine whether prohibited weapons were used.”

Hengaw is a human rights group that often focuses on Kurdish rights in Iran and abuses in Kurdish areas.

Andy Burnham becomes Britain’s seventh prime minister in a decade on Monday, promising to “rewire” the nation to focus more clearly on issues people care about, such as a cost-of-living crisis and poorly performing services.

His Labour Party colleague, outgoing premier Keir Starmer, made his farewell speech outside 10 Downing Street, telling supporters that “my work is done” and that he was leaving with “good grace” and a “smile.”

After he formally tenders his resignation to King Charles, the monarch will receive Burnham to ask him to be prime minister.

Then the hard work begins for the 56-year-old who, as mayor of Greater Manchester, earned the nickname ‘King of the North’.

Once he has unveiled his cabinet – already the subject of much debate in the governing Labour Party – he will have to tackle a long list of problems ranging from anemic economic growth to a cost-of-living crisis and underperforming utility firms.

Burnham to lay out new government path

Starmer, who was ousted by his Labour lawmakers about a month ago, said his work as prime minister was “the privilege of my life” and that, as he passed the baton to Burnham, “I wish him every success.”

“He has my full support,” Starmer said.

Within an hour or so, Burnham was set to take his place in front of Number 10 with a speech setting out a path for “a more stable and responsible politics,” his office said in a statement.

Presenting his appointment as a moment of “reflection,” he planned to say it was time to be honest about Britain’s challenges, and that only political stability could deliver improvements.

On Friday, Burnham described his election to become Labour leader as “the most significant change moment in our politics for 40 years.”

He promised to radically change the political system to quickly raise living standards and help a country hungry for change become one where “life is more affordable, and all people and places are lifted from where they are now.”

He directed that message at Labour lawmakers, who see him as one of the few politicians capable of tackling the threat from veteran Brexit campaigner Nigel Farage’s populist Reform UK – something they doubted the unpopular Starmer could do.

Burnham urged Labour to ignore speculation

Burnham’s first challenge will be the appointment of his cabinet team and especially his finance minister. Friction in this crucial partnership at the heart of government has led to the downfall of previous administrations.

An early frontrunner for the position, energy security and net zero minister Ed Miliband, has been the object of some hostile briefing, and interior minister Shabana Mahmood now appears to be the favorite for the job.

Burnham urged his party on Friday to ignore “speculation” and said he had not yet decided on his team.

His early policy decisions will also face scrutiny.

On Sunday, plans were scrapped for all employees to be required to hold a digital identity document, a scheme designed to tackle illegal migration but deemed a “fiasco” by a cross-party committee of lawmakers.

More attention will be paid to decisions on taxation and spending, oil and gas, and underperforming utility companies, for which Burnham wants stronger public control.

Thames Water, Britain’s largest water company, is weighed down by debt and under fire for frequent sewage leaks.

On Sunday, Deputy Labour Leader Lucy Powell, Burnham’s ally, suggested Thames Water could be brought under “special measures,” meaning it would operate under government control.

“He wants to refocus and reprioritize the government’s resources, the government’s attention onto his priorities of tackling the cost of living, really rewiring the way the country, the economy works,” she told Sky News.

A police officer was indicted in Haifa District Court on Sunday on allegations that he used confidential police databases to obtain women’s personal details and subjected them and their relatives to a years-long campaign of sexual harassment, threats, and extortion through fake WhatsApp accounts.

The 15-count indictment filed by the Justice Ministry’s Police Investigation Department names 28-year-old Samer Sheikh of Abu Snan, who served in the traffic division of the police’s Yarkon district.

He is charged with offenses including extortion by threats, sexual harassment, threats, impersonation, invasion of privacy, fraud, causing an indecent act, fraud, and breach of trust.

According to the indictment, Sheikh carried a police tablet connected to internal databases even when he was not on duty and, from 2022 until his arrest, repeatedly used it to retrieve the personal information of numerous women. He allegedly stored screenshots of the information on his personal devices and used it to contact women and members of their families.

Prosecutors said Sheikh created a series of fictitious WhatsApp accounts through which he posed as different people, at times presenting himself as a man and at others using the name and photograph of one of the women.

Police officer secretly records intimate video calls

The indictment describes 14 main complainants, as well as relatives and friends who were allegedly contacted as part of the scheme.

In one of the central counts, Sheikh is accused of secretly recording intimate video calls with a woman with whom he had previously been in a relationship. He later allegedly threatened to distribute the recordings unless she participated in further sexually explicit video calls.

To reinforce the threats, prosecutors said, Sheikh used an intimate image of the woman as the profile photograph of a fictitious account and sent sexual material involving her to her brother and fiancé.

In another count, Sheikh allegedly threatened to publish intimate photographs and videos of a woman unless she performed sexual acts during video calls. The woman ultimately sent him sexually explicit videos in response to the threats, according to the indictment.

Officer continued harassing women after they rejected him

Other counts allege that Sheikh repeatedly sent women unwanted sexual propositions and sexually explicit material, falsely told relatives that women appeared in pornographic videos, and threatened to harm their reputations or distribute intimate content if they did not comply with his demands.

In several cases, he allegedly continued contacting the women after they rejected him, blocked his numbers, or threatened to report him to the police.

The final count focuses on the alleged abuse of his position as a police officer. Prosecutors said Sheikh unlawfully accessed police systems to facilitate the sexual and other offenses described in the indictment, constituting fraud and breach of trust by a public servant.

Israel will have its first dedicated home for Israeli startups based in New York, after Hakibbutz launched its NYC operations on Monday, aiming to become a hub for the hundreds of Israeli companies operating in the Big Apple.

Created in collaboration with Israeli Mapped in NY, the project already includes the cybersecurity company Zafran Security, according to their release, while additional companies are expected to join in the coming months.

“We didn’t want to build just another office space. We wanted to create a place that people and companies genuinely want to be part of,” said Amir Wolner, Founder and CEO of Hakibbutz.

“The model we’ve built in Israel is based on the understanding that in an era when people can work from almost anywhere, a workplace is no longer defined only by its offices, but by the people around you and the value created through those connections,” he added.

The project also announced its roadmap, which will include several events throughout the year to attract new startups and help Israeli entrepreneurs expand their operations into New York.

Some 470 startups in one city

The main house will be located in Chelsea, one of Manhattan’s leading technology and innovation districts, with the organizer saying they designed the site to become a central gathering place for founders, startups, venture capital firms, investors, corporations, and other key players.

According to Israeli Mapped in NY, 470 Israeli startups currently operate in New York City, alongside venture capital firms, investors, multinational corporations, and thousands of professionals.

“When we realized that New York had become a major hub for Israeli technology companies, we knew it was the right place to bring what we do best,” added Wolner, who has already opened similar sites with Hakibbutz over the last several years.

‘It’s time to have a home in NYC,’ Guy Franklin, founder of Israeli Mapped in NY

Guy Franklin, founder of Israeli Mapped in NY, added, “When I first started mapping the Israeli tech ecosystem in New York, there were only 56 Israeli startups here. Today there are nearly 470. This isn’t just growth in the number of companies; it’s the maturation of an entire industry. Once you have nearly 470 Israeli startups in New York, it’s time they have a home.”

“Our goal is that no Israeli company arriving in New York should have to start from scratch. Instead, they should be able to immediately connect with a network of founders, investors, customers, and business partners,” he explained.

“Our vision is for Hakibbutz NYC to become the place every Israeli CEO operating in New York, every founder visiting the city, every venture capital firm looking for Israeli innovation, and every American corporation seeking to work with Israeli startups knows they should visit.”

Australian synagogues have been forced to cancel services and divert funds in order to cover security costs, Jewish community representatives told the Royal Commission on Monday.

The fifth Hearing Block, which began on Monday, focuses on Jewish security concerns.

Counsel assisting Richard Lancaster told the commission that synagogues have canceled Friday night services because they “couldn’t afford to pay a guard, and felt that they could not discharge their duty of care to congregants without one.”

“The commission has received submissions from very many synagogues around Australia,” said Lancaster. “A constant theme is the organizational time, energy, and money that has to be committed to security.”

“This underscores the difficulty that members of the Jewish community presently face: if they close themselves off for security reasons, they may be unfairly criticized as deliberately insular, but without the barriers they wish they did not need, they may be left unduly exposed.”

Lancaster then said that this is a burden which no other religious community in the country has to contend with, just to attend school or a religious service.

Community Security Group warns of increased incidents since October 7

ACO, a senior figure from the Community Security Group (CSG) Victoria, told the commission of increased incident reports since October 7, and how volunteer hours have increased as a result.

ACO estimated that more than 113,700 hours were given by volunteer security guards and administrative staff in 2025.

“The pressure has been immense on all of our staff and volunteers,” ACO said.

Witness ACS, another CSG member, told the commission that being a security worker takes a psychological toll.

“I quite quickly became desensitized to the impact. And even to this day, I’ll see something that is objectively shocking, yet not have the visceral response that I should have.”

“Because we are adapting to that degrading environment, it’s much, much easier to overlook that growing burden on volunteers, on financial resources, and on the quality of Jewish way of life,” ACS said.

ACS said they have contributed approximately 8400 hours to CSG in the last five years, including 3500 documented volunteer hours and 1500 hours of unpaid work.

“Long term it’s not sustainable. It’s not sustainable for anyone to be working essentially two full-time jobs at once, especially given the risks associated with working Jewish communal security.”

Former Australian A-G urges government to restrict synagogue protests

Former attorney-general Mark Dreyfus urged the government to impose restrictions on protests outside synagogues, in line with the current imposition on protests around abortion clinics in Victoria.

“It’s time to consider whether we need some similar restriction on protest activity outside synagogues, on protest activity outside schools, and Jewish places of gathering,” he told the commission.

“Not to ban political protest, but rather to protect Jews,” he said, adding that protests are often “cover for some worse activity, for violence, for some actual physical threat to those places or people.”

Yemen’s Iran-backed Houthis on Monday declared a naval blockade against Saudi Arabia effective immediately, their military spokesperson said in a televised speech.

The militant group announced “a maritime embargo against the criminal Saudi enemy, based on the equation of ‘an eye for an eye’ effective immediately upon the issuance of this statement.”

The Houthis said the blockade was in response to Saudi Arabia’s alleged continued “unjust and oppressive siege on our dear people for nearly 12 years, plundering our resources and imposing a comprehensive blockade on our ports and airports by land, sea, and air.”

Houthis fired missiles at Saudi Arabia last week

The group fired missiles at Saudi ​Arabia last week after accusing the kingdom of bombing an airport under their control, breaking a four-year truce in the conflict between ‌the kingdom and the Iran-backed group.

The strikes ​were the first claimed by the Houthis against Saudi Arabia since an informal truce went into effect in March 2022 following Houthi attacks on ​Saudi energy infrastructure.

Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps thanked the “Honorable people and mujahid soldiers (those who struggle for jihad) of Jordan,” claiming it was provided with intelligence that supported recent attacks on the US military, the IRGC-affiliated Fars News Agency reported on Monday morning.

“Honorable people and mujahid soldiers of Jordan, with thanks for your sincere cooperation and precise information that enabled the accurate targeting of Islamic fighters and the destruction of 20 warehouses housing the positions of the child-killing American army forces in the Al-Azraq region and the killing of dozens of American terrorist forces,” the IRGC released in a statement, alleging to have received “intelligence” on the US’s C17 transport aircraft and P8 command-and-control aircraft.

The IRGC claimed on Monday to have damaged the crafts in attacks on Jordan’s Aqaba Airport, which notably came after Amman denied having evacuated the airport and seaport.

The IRGC’S claim came after a July 15 message pushed by the Revolutionary Guards to the Muslim civilians of Jordan and Kuwait. “We expect you not to miss any opportunity to destroy the aggressive American institutions and to liberate the Islamic lands from the bases of the American occupiers,” the IRGC published.

Though the IRGC bragged that the strikes were facilitated by information provided by Jordanian civilians, seemingly an attempt at indicating support for Tehran in the current war, Professor Ronen Yitzhak, an expert on Jordan from the Moshe Dayan Center for Middle Eastern and African Studies, told The Jerusalem Post on Monday that the Islamic Republic has no real support base in Jordan.

Iran long aimed to destabilize Jordan, overthrow authorities

Iran has long aimed to overthrow the Jordanian authorities and destabilize the country, he noted. Its militias have used Jordan to smuggle weapons and arms, and carry out infiltration operations to support Palestinian terrorist groups.

Despite its efforts, Yitzhak stressed that Iran “finds it difficult to operate effectively in Jordan” for several reasons. Firstly, Jordan lacks a sizeable Shi’ite population, making up less than 2% of the population, according to the Alibaba International Center.

“Shi’ism is not legitimized and therefore is not recognized in the country. Therefore, Iran has no support,” Yitzhak commented.

Secondly, Yitzhak noted that public opinion surveys in Jordan have shown consistent hostility toward Iran.

Overwhelming majority of Jordanians see Iran as a competitor or enemy

The Amman-based research organization the Politics and Society Institute found in April, based on a review of 363,300 public online posts about the war, that while the majority are against the current war, they have not expressed support for Iran.

A June study by the Fikra Forum, an initiative of the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, found “the overwhelming majority” of Jordanians perceived Iran as either a competitor (45%) or an enemy (42%).

Finally, Yitzhak stressed that “Jordanian intelligence is considered the best Arab intelligence in the Middle East” and, given that Amman maintains intelligence ties with Western intelligence agencies including the Mossad, “it succeeds in thwarting terrorist threats or organizations of hostile elements in the country,” including espionage attempts.

Iranian attacks have wounded dozens of American soldiers in Jordan over the last week, but only a few were announced by the United States Central Command (CENTCOM), The New York Times reported on Monday.

The Iranian strikes also damaged several helicopters, several anonymous US officials revealed.

One official told the NYT that CENTCOM is not obligated to reveal information about wounded soldiers, particularly when the soldiers are expected to quickly return to duty, and when doing so could give Iran a tactical advantage in targeting future attacks.

A separate source noted that the US would not share information that could “help Iran zero in on its deadly ballistic missiles and drone attacks in Jordan and other bases in the Middle East.”

This same reasoning is why CENTCOM has stopped confirming how many Iranian targets it has struck each day.

The Trump administration has also failed to report the cost of weapons used against Iran, and how the regime has retained and rebuilt its current missile capabilities, according to the NYT.

Wounded soldiers claim injuries worse than designated

Last month, wounded US soldiers also told CBS that their injuries were more severe than had been designated by US Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth.

Sergeant First Class Cory Hicks was one of the dozens hurt in the strike in Kuwait that killed six soldiers. He suffered severe shrapnel wounds and underwent emergency surgeries in Kuwait. A US Army official had told his wife that his injuries were “minor,” he told CBS.

CBS cited Hicks as saying that he “absolutely” believed that the Pentagon has tried to downplay the incident. 

Shir Perets and Danya Saperstein contributed to this report.

Years of war, instability, weak governance, and public policy failures have left 15.4 million Yemenis without access to clean water and 17.4 million without adequate sanitation and hygiene, creating conditions for preventable public health crises, according to a newly published report by the Sana’a Center and the Arab Reform Initiative.

Access to water in one of the world’s most water-scarce countries has become even more critical as the region has descended into a new war, in which critical infrastructure such as desalination plants have become targets.

Those most affected by water inequality in Yemen are women, marginalized groups, those in rural communities, and those internally displaced by the conflict. While these communities bear the burden of the crisis, the report noted that influential individuals and businesses have been allowed to exploit a lack of governance to deplete the country’s finite resources.

“The findings suggest that water injustice in Yemen is not only about scarcity but also about power, regulation failure, and unequal distribution,” the report noted.

“Marginalized populations – including women, displaced communities, small farmers, and internally displaced people (IDPs) – bear disproportionate burdens in access, cost, and quality of water. Conversely, influential actors and commercial interests often benefit from weak enforcement, unsanctioned drilling, and the monopolization of water sources.”

Heavy metals, oil pollute water sources

Unable to afford the cost of water from tankers, which do not always contain safe drinking water, many are forced to consume water from wadis, which in many cases include pollutants like oil and heavy metals thanks to nearby oil operations.

The report noted that this issue was recorded particularly in the areas of Al-Aliyah and Sah, meaning the issue persists in both Houthi and government-controlled areas of Yemen.

Until the 1970s, water resources were used fairly sustainably across Yemen, but new public policy was introduced that saw the encouragement of ground extraction, which, largely thanks to a lack of oversight, led to aquifer depletion. Though legislation started to address this issue in the 90s’ and early 2000s, lack of oversight meant changes were limited.

Already damaged by public policy failings, the issue has only been worsened by the outbreak of the 2014 civil war, which saw 40% of the country’s water infrastructure damaged.

The country’s instability prompted several international donors and organizations to withdraw, leaving local organizations to fill the gaps despite often lacking the expertise or resources to do so effectively. As a result, many were discredited by public officials.

As of 2024, 81 national NGOs were working on water-related issues in Yemen, along with tribal and religious leaders. Just short of three-quarters of the organizations were formed from 2012 to 2025, which the report said coincided with the decline in formal state institutions following the 2011 popular uprising. 

Mediators between Iran and the United States have proposed new ideas, Iranian Foreign Ministry Spokesman Esmaeil Baghaei confirmed at a press conference on Sunday.

“The principle of the matter is clear: mediators are working and trying to prevent tension from escalating,” Baghaei explained. 

On the other hand, Baghaei said, Iran was also determined to continue “stopping the crimes” of the US.

“While our armed forces are responding with strength and power and destroying the source and origin of American aggression, diplomacy also knows its duties well and spares no effort.”

He emphasized the dual roles diplomacy and defense played in the Iranian strategy, describing both as indispensable.

“To imagine that diplomacy is the negation of defense or that defense is incompatible with diplomacy is not at all correct logic,” he explained. “The goal is to protect Iran‘s national interests; sometimes with the means of defense, sometimes with the means of diplomacy, and sometimes by using both simultaneously.”

Memorandum of Understanding unambiguous, Iran claims

Baghaei also denied claims that the Memorandum of Understanding between Iran and the US was ambiguous in any way.

“The text of the memorandum of understanding is a short text and has 14 paragraphs. Read the text; which paragraph is ambiguous?” he retorted. “The text is completely clear, and there is no excuse for the US to break the agreement. Just as we have never seen anywhere before that the American side has announced that it has resumed attacks against Iran due to a mistake or difference in interpretation of the text. Therefore, making such a claim has no valid basis.”

The extension of mandatory IDF service approved by the Knesset last week will not solve the military’s growing manpower shortage, Maj.-Gen. Dado Bar Kalifa, head of the IDF Personnel Directorate, said in a letter sent to service members and commanders on Friday.

Bar Kalifa wrote that the extension of mandatory service approved by the Knesset plenum on Thursday “does not eliminate the need to expand the pool of draftees.”

According to Bar Kalifa, Israel’s operational needs require legislation to create an effective conscription law, as well as an additional extension of mandatory service to enable a broader force buildup.

He also referred to Israel’s wartime reality, writing: “The IDF has been at war for about three years and is carrying out its missions, thanks to you, the male and female service members, with determination and professionalism, and is achieving exceptional operational results. The state of war requires extraordinary physical and mental strength.”

The Knesset plenum approved on Thursday, in its second and third readings, a bill extending mandatory IDF service to 32 months under a temporary order.

Measure passed amid controversial debate over equality in IDF service

The measure passed by a vote of 43-12 amid public debate over equality in military service and includes an economic compensation mechanism for soldiers whose service will be retroactively extended.

Under the approved law, the reduction of mandatory service to 30 months, which had been scheduled to apply to soldiers drafted in July 2024, will now apply only to those drafted in June 2029. The bill’s explanatory notes state that the extension is needed immediately to enable the IDF to meet its operational goals and security requirements.

Despite the law’s passage, IDF representatives told the Knesset Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee that the additional service time is insufficient and that the military is facing a shortage of approximately 12,000 soldiers, including 7,500 combat troops.

IDF Chief of Staff Maj.-Gen. Eyal Zamir recently presented cabinet ministers with what he described as a grim assessment, calling for mandatory service to be extended to 36 months and warning the political leadership: “I am raising 12 red flags; the army will collapse into itself.”

Senior officers said the extension is urgently needed to ease the burden on the overstretched reserve system and allow regular units to resume training.

Supporters of India’s youth-led “cockroach” movement were caned by police on Monday as they sought to march on parliament in the capital, New Delhi, despite authorities denying permission for the protest.

The months-old movement and the planned protest are seen as the biggest public challenge to Prime Minister Narendra Modi in his third term in office, drawing millions of supporters on social media before broadening its appeal.

A police decision to forcibly move hunger-striking activist Sonam Wangchuk to hospital on Saturday has galvanized the movement, with thousands of supporters arriving through the night at the protest site of Jantar Mantar in the heart of New Delhi for the march on the opening day of parliament’s monsoon session.

Delhi police held meetings with Cockroach Janta Party (CJP) members, but no consensus had yet been reached, Sachin Sharma, Delhi’s Deputy Commissioner of Police, told Reuters.

“The protest site has already run out of space, and this can lead to an untoward situation,” he said, adding that there were around 10,000 protesters on Monday morning.

Scores of police, security deployed to parliament area

Scores of police and paramilitary security personnel were also deployed at the site, threatening a standoff close to parliament if the march goes ahead.

Television visuals showed police caning some protesters in a heavily barricaded area.

Protesters say that security personnel also fired tear gas shells to disperse supporters as they attempted to march to parliament. Reuters journalists in the area heard blasts but could not see shells being fired.

“Government is now bent on violence and firing tear gas shells on peaceful protestors!” the Cockroach Janta Party movement said in a post on X/Twitter.

Delhi Police denied any use of force and said the “protest is being handled professionally.”

Protesters chanted slogans as they arrived peacefully in a rainy central Delhi.

“Quit, quit,” they chanted. “Dharmendra Pradhan quit,” “Narendra Modi quit,” they chanted in Hindi, referring to the education minister as well as the prime minister.

“The administration is trying to open talks with the government… They have come very late, but we have opened our hearts and said that we are willing to talk to them,” Saurav Das, chief CJP spokesperson, told the ANI news agency.

The CJP movement began after national medical school entrance test papers were leaked in May, affecting more than 2 million students as it forced them to sit the test a second time.

“All these leaders in power are illiterate, and I am here to protest because we do not want question papers to leak,” said Adi Nathan, 21, a student from Meerut city, about 100 km (62 miles) from the capital. “This should come to an end.”

Mohammed Tabrez, 22, a student preparing for competitive examinations that allow students admission into professional courses or jobs, said he had come from Amroha in Uttar Pradesh state, about 165 km (103 miles) away.

“We want this corruption to end,” he said. “We want all the frauds in paper leaks, in competitive examinations to end, and this is the reason I have come here.”

Activist sets terms to end his fast

The CJP initially drew support largely online, amassing 22 million followers on Instagram within days, but has since drawn support from some opposition parties.

CJP founder Abhijeet Dipke and his supporters began a sit-in last month seeking the resignation of Pradhan. Wangchuk joined them on June 28, launching an indefinite hunger strike at the site.

In a handwritten note from the hospital posted on his X account on Monday, Wangchuk said he would end his fast if the government took responsibility for recent failures in the education system and for paper leaks, or if CJP protesters were allowed to reach parliament and lawmakers assured them they would take up the issues.

He said he would also end the hunger strike if lawmakers and leaders of various parties met him in hospital and gave him the same assurances since his health did not allow him to march on parliament.

The rise of the CJP reflects frustrations among young Indians over issues like high youth unemployment and frequent examination paper ​leaks, analysts say.

Unemployment in 2025 stood at 3.1% among those aged 15 and above, government data show, but was 9.9% among those aged 15 to 29. In urban areas, it was 13.6%, and 8.3% in rural regions.

Two Palestinians were arrested in a joint operation by the Israel Police, Border Patrol, and IDF on Monday, on suspicion of having ignited the fire at the Gilad Farm in Samaria on Saturday.

The fire damaged dozens of structures and vehicles and led to the injury of several people, including two firefighters.

Army Radio noted that the two suspects were alleged to have thrown a cigarette out of the window of their vehicle while driving on Highway 55, and that there was no evidence or direct suspicion of the incident having been an intentional case of arson.

“The community thanks the security forces and the police for the rapid action that led to the arrest,” the Gilad Farm committee stated after the arrest. 

“We demand that the law enforcement authorities fully investigate, act decisively, and impose the most severe penalties provided for by law on those responsible for this criminal act. This is terrorism, and this incident should be treated as terrorism.”

Ben-Gvir congratulates police on arrest

National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir also responded, congratulating the police force for the arrest.

“Anyone who sets fires, harms residents, and tries to terrorize should know that the security forces will pursue them, reach them, and bring them to justice,” he announced. “This is the policy, and we will continue to act decisively against anyone who seeks to harm the security of Israeli citizens.”

On Saturday, The Jerusalem Post reported that a preliminary investigation showed the fire at the farm had started due to a cigarette butt thrown on the side of the road.

The fire at Gilad Farm led to the mass evacuation of residents and police blocking part of Highway 55 before firefighters eventually brought that blaze under control.

Two firefighters were moderately and lightly injured, and several residents were treated for smoke inhalation, Ynet reported.

Miri Sela-Eitam, Ruby Sadikman, Alon Hachmon, and Moshe Cohen contributed to this report.

Hamas has repeatedly attacked food distribution points in the Gaza Strip, hijacking aid and threatening locals, Palestinians told The Telegraph in a report published on Saturday.

In one instance, according to one anonymous Gazan civilian, armed Hamas terrorists had been waiting near a shelter containing displaced women, children, and elderly people, when a group of men asked them to move away so that the shelter would not become a target.

“The group left, only to return with greater numbers. They stormed the shelter and opened fire, causing panic and terror among the women and children, and proceeded to arrest several people.”

The source also told the Telegraph that the Hamas terrorists had refused to release the civilians they’d arrested until they were compensated for the ammunition they had expended – around NIS 24,500.

Another source said that Hamas had been smuggling various goods inside trucks belonging to aid organizations, as well as commercial ones, in order to generate funds.

“While the exact method of concealment remains unclear, it is believed that these items are often loaded at warehouses in the countries of origin, while merchants bribe officials to include illicit goods during the packing process,” the source told the Telegraph.

Hamas attacks WFP humanitarian aid site

Last week, Hamas terrorists invaded the warehouse at the Abu Rashid food distribution point in Jabalia, operated by the World Food Programme (WFP), and assaulted two drivers who were delivering humanitarian supplies, according to the UN.

Asserting that he “strongly” condemned the incident,  United Nations Deputy Special Coordinator for the Middle East Peace Process Dr. Ramiz Alakbarov acknowledged there was a “dangerous pattern of intimidation, violence and obstruction, including smuggling attempts, targeting and abusing humanitarian operations” being carried out by the “de facto authorities.”

Though Hamas went unnamed in the statement, Alakbarov labeled Israel’s expansive control of the territory as a major threat to humanitarian supplies in the Palestinian territory.

Danielle Greyman-Kennard contributed to this report.

US Vice President JD Vance and his wife, Usha, welcomed their fourth child, a boy, on Sunday.

Vance said the baby, Alec Neel Vance, was born on Sunday at Walter Reed National Military Medical Center in Bethesda, Maryland.

“Usha and the baby are happy and healthy, and our kids are overjoyed to meet their little brother,” Vance wrote in a post on his X/Twitter account.

Happy, healthy, overjoyed

Vance, an Ohio native, and Usha, the daughter of Indian immigrants, met while attending Yale Law School, where they graduated in 2013.

Their first son, Ewan, was born in 2017, followed by another son, Vivek, in 2020. The couple’s daughter, Mirabel, was born in 2021.

Massive wooden beams charred by the fire that destroyed Jerusalem and the First Temple were unearthed during a recent dig at the Jerusalem Walls National Park in the City of David, the Israel Antiquities Authority (IAA) announced on Monday morning.

The First Temple, built by the biblical King Solomon, was destroyed in 586 BCE by Nebuchadnezzar II, the second king of the Neo-Babylonian Empire. 

IAA and Tel Aviv University archaeologists discovered the burnt beams inside a building that had collapsed in the fire.

“The beams appear to have served as the roof of an inner courtyard in a building from the First Temple period,” noted IAA Excavation Director Efrat Bocher.

What had likely preserved the beams for 2,600 years, explained Bocher, was plaster that had melted off the building’s walls, sealing the wood beneath it.

Beams offer significant research potential

Dr. Johanna Regev of the IAA, who is studying the beams, highlighted the rarity of such a discovery. 

“It is very rare in Israel to find wood with such a large number of growth rings,” said Regev. “Here, in the City of David, we found thick beams with many rings, offering significant research potential, with more growth rings enabling higher dating resolution.”

“Until now we could date finds within a range of hundreds of years. Now we can attain much greater precision, narrowing the dating range down to as little as ten years.”

The excavation directors note that Jerusalem’s returning residents, as they began to rebuild the city, probably made a deliberate decision to preserve the memory of the destruction by leaving behind remains that tell the story of the catastrophe.

“The concept of a landscape of memory is familiar from many cultures around the world,” explained Dr. Yiftah Shalev, who directs the excavation on behalf of the IAA alongside Professor Yuval Gadot of Tel Aviv University. 

According to Shalev, “preserving memory is a human need, seeking to preserve what once existed. Here we see it in its clearest form: a deliberate choice to leave ruins in place as a testament to the destruction and build the new layer over them.”

Evidence of the city’s ancient past

“We are just before Tisha B’Av,” added Bocher. “This discovery makes you feel that you are witnessing the very moment of destruction, the moment when it all happened. It’s deeply moving.”

“Jerusalem’s soil continues to provide tangible evidence of the city’s ancient past,” said Heritage Minister Amichai Eliyahu on the discovery. “The wooden beams burned in the destruction of the First Temple stand as a powerful reminder of the Jewish people’s presence in Jerusalem some 2,600 years ago.”

“On the eve of Tisha B’Av, this discovery underscores that our connection to Jerusalem is rooted not only in faith, but also in history, archaeology, and collective memory. It is our responsibility to continue uncovering, preserving, and passing this heritage on to future generations.”

Several former and current employees of Israel’s Tax Authority were arrested on Monday on suspicion of accepting bribes, Israel Police announced.

Investigating Lahav 433 forces carried out four arrests at the suspects’ homes and offices.

According to the police, the arrested suspects were thought to have granted around NIS 80 million in illegal tax returns in exchange for the bribes.

Three of the suspects were former employees, while one had still been serving as an assessement team coordinator in Petah Tikva at the time of their arrest.

Lahav 433 questions Shas MK for misconduct

Last week, Shas MK Haim Biton was questioned by Lahav 433 as part of supplementary investigative proceedings into his alleged misconduct and use of public funds to finance a haredi (ultra-Orthodox) newspaper.

He is suspected of using funds from the Ma’ayan HaChinuch HaTorani education network to finance a private Shas-affiliated newspaper while serving as the network’s director general about seven years ago.

The case has been handled by Lahav 443 over the past year and is expected to be transferred soon to the state attorney and attorney general for a decision on whether to file an indictment in the affair.

Efrat Forsher contributed to this report.

Over 70 mayors and council leaders from across Israel filed a petition on Wednesday condemning the haredi (ultra-Orthodox) draft exemption bill.

“Studying Torah is an important value in the Jewish people, but no less important than that is the value of preserving and defending the land,” the petition stated.

“Many of our residents are proving that it is possible to both study Torah and serve the state in the IDF and the security forces. The legislation that was approved in the last few days is a serious blow to national resilience and the cohesion of Israeli society. It should not have come into the world, and certainly not at this complex time, and in light of the challenges that the State of Israel is facing at this time and the challenges that we will be required to face in the future.”

Among the petition’s signatories were Idan Greenbaum, head of the Jordan Valley Regional Council; Haim Bibas, mayor of Modi’in and chairman of the Federation of Local Authorities; Shay Hajaj, head of the Merhavim Regional Council and chairman of the Federation of Regional Councils;  and the mayors of several major cities, including Herzliya, Ramat Hasharon, Kfar Saba, and more.

Last week, the Knesset plenum passed the contentious bill to temporarily freeze arrests of haredi draft evaders, a measure expected to remain in effect for at least six months, with 58 lawmakers voting in favor and 54 against.

The passage of the bill in its final readings comes following severe legal warnings that the legislation is unbalanced and will not increase haredi enlistment amid the IDF’s severe manpower shortage, as well as outrage from bereaved families and reservists.

High Court freezes haredi draft law

The next day, the High Court of Justice temporarily froze the law, with Justice Ofer Grosskopf issuing a provisional order suspending the law’s entry into force until further notice.

Grosskopf also issued a conditional order requiring the Knesset and government to explain why the law should not be struck down.

Keshet Neev and Sarah Ben-Nun contributed to this report.

The United States is still open to a diplomatic solution with Iran, US Secretary of State Marco Rubio told reporters on Sunday night.

“It has to be real,” he explained. “It has to be a deal that they’re willing to live by.

“Look, Iran, a week ago, was supposed to put out a statement saying that the Straits of Hormuz would be open, that they would no longer attack shipping. And instead of doing that, they attacked three ships. I think that was last Friday or Saturday. So, I mean, their behavior has to change in order for ours to change.”

Rubio also stated that there was a “growing split” in Iran between the more militant extremists who continue to attack the US and other countries and those who are concerned with Iran’s economy.

“If the guys that want to do something productive for Iran win and take control of that system or take control of the negotiations, that’ll be a very positive development,” he said.

One of the reasons Iran’s economy was struggling was because it had funneled so much of its funds to proxy terror organizations, Rubio stated.

“Every penny that this regime there gets, be it through sanctions relief or through the oil they’re able to get out, they invested in Hezbollah. They invested in Hamas. They spent billions of dollars supporting militias in Iraq, Hezbollah, and Hamas. They should be spending billions of dollars supporting the people of Iran. They should be spending billions of dollars building their country.”

US providing international service in Strait of Hormuz, Rubio says

According to Rubio, while the conflict with Iran was ongoing and they continued blocking the Strait of Hormuz, the United States would take on ” the burden of protecting global shipping.”

“So we are basically providing the service of protecting these ships on behalf of the world,” he said. “We’re the only ones doing anything about it.” 

As such, Rubio explained, US President Donald Trump wanted other countries to “step forward and provide at least financial assistance for the cost of providing this very valuable service.”

“The world has to decide whether or not it’s going to allow an international waterway to be under the control of a country like this,” he said, referring to Iran, “which is completely illegal, unlawful, and unacceptable.”

The headlines of recent days have been filled with airstrikes, missile interceptions, and military communiqués. The United States has continued its campaign against Iranian military targets, Israel remains engaged on multiple fronts, and Hezbollah’s infrastructure in southern Lebanon is still being dismantled.

Together, these developments have created a strategic opening that would have seemed unimaginable only a few years ago.

The IDF, working alongside an American administration willing to confront Tehran directly, have shown that Israel and its allies can strike their enemies effectively. Iran’s military capabilities have been degraded, Hezbollah has suffered significant setbacks, and Hamas has lost much of the infrastructure that enabled the October 7 massacre.

These are real achievements, but they are not yet victory.

Military campaigns can destroy launchers, command centers, and weapons stockpiles. They cannot, by themselves, create a durable security reality. History is filled with wars won on the battlefield and squandered through strategic drift. Israel has learned that lesson more than once.

Converting military achievements into lasting security gains

The challenge now is to convert military achievements into lasting security gains.

That begins with defining victory. Any definition of victory must also include the return of every hostage, living and dead, from Gaza. It must allow displaced Israelis to return home securely, with confidence that the threats across their borders have been removed. It must also ensure that the sacrifices of Israel’s soldiers produce a safer country rather than another temporary pause before the next war.

If Iran rebuilds its missile industry within a few years, the current operations will have achieved only a temporary reprieve. If Hezbollah returns to southern Lebanon under the cover of another unenforced international arrangement, residents of Kiryat Shmona, Metula, and Shlomi will remain under threat. If Hamas is weakened but Gaza again becomes fertile ground for an extremist army, Israel will have postponed the danger rather than removed it.

These questions should already be shaping decisions in Jerusalem and Washington.

Lebanon offers the clearest warning. For nearly two decades, UN Security Council Resolution 1701 was supposed to keep Hezbollah away from Israel’s border. Instead, Hezbollah built a vast missile arsenal, embedded military infrastructure inside civilian villages, and turned southern Lebanon into Iran’s forward operating base.

Israel cannot repeat that mistake. Any future arrangement must be judged by its enforcement mechanisms and by Israel’s ability to prevent Hezbollah from rebuilding. Diplomatic promises have value only when backed by surveillance, consequences, and credible military power.

The same clarity is required regarding Iran. Tehran is vulnerable, although deterrence is never permanent. Iran’s leaders have repeatedly shown that they are willing to absorb setbacks when they believe time remains on their side.

The objective must therefore be broader than punishment. Iran must be prevented from restoring its missile, drone, and nuclear capabilities. That requires sustained Israeli military readiness, intelligence cooperation, economic pressure, strict verification, and clear consequences for renewed rearmament.

Coordination with Washington essential for cementing survival

Coordination with Washington is essential. Israel must also retain the freedom and capability to act whenever its security requires it. The US is Israel’s most important ally, but no Israeli government can outsource the country’s defense or place its survival in the hands of shifting international commitments.

Gaza also requires a defined outcome. Victory means preventing Hamas, or any successor organization committed to Israel’s destruction, from rebuilding military control. Any governing alternative must deny terrorist groups weapons, territory, and the ability to threaten Israeli communities. Reconstruction cannot become another mechanism for rearmament.

The current conflict has also deepened the alignment between Israel, the US, and pragmatic Arab states that see Iran as a common threat. That cooperation should become permanent. Integrated missile defense, intelligence sharing, and coordinated deterrence can form the basis of a regional security architecture capable of confronting Iran and its proxies over the long term.

Israel has spent years responding to crises. This moment offers an opportunity to shape the region.

The soldiers of the IDF have created a strategic opening. The task of Israel’s political leadership is to ensure that their achievements are not exchanged for vague promises, temporary quiet, or another unenforced agreement.

Winning the war is indispensable. Preventing Iran, Hezbollah, and Hamas from rebuilding is the harder task and the true measure of victory.

State Employees Union Chairman Ofir Alkalay objected to Tax Authority workers returning to Bnei Brak until their safety is guaranteed, Ynet reported on Sunday.

Tax Authority Director Shay Aharonovich met with Bnei Brak Mayor Hanoch Zeibert at the mayor’s office on Thursday afternoon to discuss the latest attack on Tax Authority workers. Following the meeting, the Tax Authority announced that operations in the city would resume.

Mayor Zeibert, who had initially refrained from publicly condemning the attacks, issued his first statement on the incident following the meeting.

“There is no place for violence in the city of Torah and Hasidism, whose ways are ways of pleasantness,” he said. “Public employees, including Tax Authority employees, carry out their work faithfully in Bnei Brak, just as they do in every city in the country.”

The meeting was also attended by Senior Deputy Director for Customer Service David Rotenberg, Senior Deputy Director for Assessment and Auditing Ruby Botbol, and Municipal Director General Rabbi Yisrael Ehrenstein.

Employee Union representatives were not at the meeting

Alkalay said union representatives were not present at the meeting and expressed doubt that the assurances would guarantee workers’ safety.

“A publicized meeting with the mayor still does not guarantee the safety of Tax Authority employees,” he said. “Unfortunately, no discussion was held with the employees’ representatives on the matter, and another attack could take place as soon as tomorrow. 

Alkalay said employees would not return to work in Bnei Brak until clear measures were put in place to ensure their safety while carrying out their duties.

Tax Authority employees were violently assaulted by a mob in Bnei Brak’s Kiryat Vizhnitz neighborhood numbering in the hundreds on the afternoon of July 16 while carrying out enforcement activities in the city.

Aharonovich sent a sharply worded letter to Mayor Zeibert the following day, ordering the suspension of war damage claim processing in the city until Bnei Brak’s leadership publicly and unequivocally condemned the attacks.

Thursday’s attack on employees was deliberate

In its reporting, Ynet obtained messages revealing that Thursday’s attack was not a spontaneous incident but rather a deliberate act by residents against Tax Authority employees. 

As the employees entered the neighborhood, Hasidic residents received a recorded warning via a telephone hotline: “Unwanted guests are walking around.”

Another message said: “To manage the campaign in the neighborhood, yeshiva students who can come urgently are needed. Unwanted guests are currently walking around Kiryat Melech Rav. The public is asked not to cooperate and not to answer questions. From good to good.”

The Employees Union said the Tax Authority’s decision to resume services following the meeting was unacceptable and that employees would not return to Bnei Brak for the time being.

Sanitation officials have distributed hundreds of traps to combat the infestation of rats and mice in communities near the Gaza Strip, although the method does not seem to be enough. 

Residents have reported finding droppings near children’s beds and even incidents where injured residents needed to be hospitalized for proper treatment. 

Motke Hai, a maintenance worker at a kibbutz near the Gaza border, described traveling through the kibbutz and removing “traps packed with these rodents.”

“It is simply terrible,” he said. 

Hai thinks the rodents are coming from inside the Gaza Strip, citing soldiers who said camps and bases have been infested. 

Rainy winter, excavation contribute to rising rat population

Some have put forth the theory that the rodents have emerged from their burrows for two main reasons: an especially rainy winter and the extensive excavation work happening inside the Gaza Strip. 

Rodent infestations have risen in the past during excavations in Israel as well, specifically in Jerusalem and the Tel Aviv area, where the rodent population seemed to grow as the excavation work for the light rail systems operated. 

Additionally, efforts by the authorities to address hazards in areas beyond the border are extremely limited, and the border barriers pose little threat to the small pests. 

From the fields, the rodents spread to the communities where they can reproduce undisturbed. 

Both families in the communities and sanitation workers said that while there had been incidents of multiple rats being found in homes, the rate of this rise in infestation hadn’t been seen in decades. 

The Eshkol Regional Council, whose communities have been affected by the rodent population growth, said that measures were being taken to combat the problem. 

The Health Ministry said that the responsibility for addressing the infestation lies with the Environmental Protection Ministry. 

Residents of Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, and Jordan criticized Iranian aggression and called on the US and Israel to act in interviews with N12 published on Sunday. 

The latest US strikes on Iran have raised tensions in neighboring countries as Iran retaliated with strikes on US bases in the region and threatened to target infrastructure in Gulf states. 

“Since Iran resumed launching missiles over the past week, the situation in Bahrain has been extremely tense,” Bahraini author and activist Fatima Al Harbi told N12. 

“There is great concern about the escalation, because every additional missile or attack could affect the lives of innocent people in Bahrain and the Gulf states, as well as critical facilities, in a way that could harm Bahrain’s economic situation,” she said, but added that the Bahraini people were not just afraid. 

“Of course, there is great anger among the Bahraini people toward Iran, and all Bahrainis stand united behind Bahrain’s wise leadership, whether by volunteering for public service in every field or through prayers against our enemies,” she said. 

Iran will not succeed in defeating Israel but will harm region, former Saudi general says

Former Saudi general Abdullah bin Ghanem Al-Qahtani criticized the Iranian regime’s actions and emphasized the importance of a response. 

“What Iran is doing in the region and against the region is extremely dangerous. All of its actions are directed against the region, its stability, its future, and the future of coming generations. This is a dangerous act that cannot be met with silence, and it cannot simply be allowed to pass without extremely serious consequences, when it is directed against everything in the region,” he said to N12.

Al Qahtani explained that “Iran will not succeed in defeating Israel, fighting it, or harming it as it expects or claims it will, but it has certainly harmed the entire region.”

Unfortunately, as Jordanian journalist Mustafa Zouati explained to N12, while Israel would attack back if attacked, not every Gulf state can afford to. 

“Jordan cannot take a firm and clear position in this war because of the political and economic consequences that could result. Jordan is a country that cannot bear such consequences, and it does not have the ability to adopt a hostile position, either toward Iran or toward the American side,” he said. 

According to Al Harbi, while diplomatic efforts continue to try preventing escalation, “it is also important for US military activity to continue as long as the Iranian threat to our countries has not yet been removed.” 

Al Qahtani also called on Israel to take action to resolve conflicts within the region. 

“Israel must resolve the Palestinian issue. The United States must assist all the countries of the region so that terrorism does not return and so that Iran or any other party no longer has excuses,” he told N12. 

“The reasonable people in Israel must quickly resolve the existing problems between themselves and the Arab countries. There are already Arab plans ready for implementation, but it seems Benjamin Netanyahu does not want peace at this stage, or at least not a peace that would ensure the security and stability of everyone,” he added. 

Hungarian Prime Minister Péter Magyar announced on X on Sunday that he plans to ask chess grandmaster Judit Polgár to serve as the country’s next president.

“Judit Polgár’s name has been synonymous with talent and perseverance for decades,” Magyar said in his post. 

He highlighted Judit Polgár’s illustrious and trailblazing chess career, noting that she is a five-time Chess Olympiad champion and international grandmaster whose story was featured in the 2026 Netflix documentary Queen of Chess.

Her early success included helping Hungary win the women’s competition at the 1988 Chess Olympiad alongside her sisters, Zsuzsa, known as Susan, and Zsófia, known as Sofia, as well as Ildikó Mádl, ending years of Soviet dominance.

Polgár went on to compete primarily against men, breaking into the absolute world top 10 and becoming the only woman to surpass the 2700 rating threshold associated with the “Super GM” distinction.

The greatest female chess player of all time

Widely regarded as the greatest female chess player in history, she led the women’s world rankings for an uninterrupted 26 years. In one of the most memorable victories of her career, she defeated chess legend Garry Kasparov in September 2022.

In August 2015, then-President János Áder awarded Polgár the Order of Saint Stephen, Hungary’s highest state honor, which recognizes individuals whose talent, determination, and perseverance have brought about meaningful change and helped shape society and the nation.

Polgár was born into a Jewish family in Budapest whose history was deeply affected by the Holocaust, with several relatives murdered and her paternal grandparents surviving Auschwitz. Her family has maintained close ties to Israel, where her sister Sofia and their parents later settled.

A hazánknak egységre, békére és olyan elnökre van szüksége, akire minden magyar büszke lehet. A köztársasági elnökség nem egy foglalkozás, nem egy munkahely, hanem a legmagasabb szolgálat. Az elnök feladata: szolgálni és képviselni. Minden magyart.
A magyar közélet elismert…

— Magyar Péter (Ne féljetek) (@magyarpeterMP) July 19, 2026

Sulyok: the amendment weakens the rule of law

Current President Tamas Sulyok signed a constitutional amendment passed by Magyar’s ruling party, Tisza, that ended the president’s term immediatley, Reuters said Saturday.

The legislation formed part of Magyar’s broader effort to weaken the power structures built under former Prime Minister Viktor Orban. Magyar said voters had given him a clear mandate to pursue those changes after his landslide election victory over the right-wing leader in April.

Sulyok said he had to sign the law because it met Hungary’s legal requirements, but warned that it had weakened the rule of law. “The seventeenth amendment to the Constitution has marked a watershed in Hungary’s constitutional democracy,” he said, adding that it had set a dangerous precedent.

Orban also criticized the reforms, saying, “Tyranny is no longer a threat but reality. If this could be done to the President, tomorrow, no one will be safe.” Fidesz has faced several senior resignations and declining public support since losing the April election.

The amendment set term limits for lawmakers to 12 years, for Constitutional Court judges to retire at 70

The amendment also limits lawmakers to 12 years in office and requires Constitutional Court judges to retire at 70, forcing the court’s current president, Orban ally Peter Polt, to step down.

Parliament Speaker Agnes Forsthoffer would assume the role of interim president from Monday until the next president is chosen.

“Judit Polgár’s career to date has always been about achievement,” Magyar said. “The recognition surrounding her is not due to political affiliations or connections, but to her exceptional talent, diligence, unparalleled resilience, and integrity.”

“Personally, I would consider it a tremendous honor if she accepts the invitation,” Magyar concluded.

Jerusalem Post Staff and Reuters contributed to this report.

Ferran Torres scored in the 106th minute to lift Spain to their second World Cup title with a 1-0 win in extra time over gutsy, 10-man Argentina in Sunday’s final.

Torres’ deserved winner came 16 years and eight days after Andres Iniesta also scored in extra time to lift the Spaniards to their first World Championship with a 1-0 victory over the Netherlands.

It came on La Roja’s 20th shot on the contest against a defending champion Argentina that failed to manage any to that point and struggled to wrest possession away from their superior Iberian opponents.

That was true at even strength and became more difficult when the Albiceleste’s numbers were reduced when Enzo Fernandez’s late challenge of Pau Cubarsi left referee Slavko Vincic no choice but to produce a second caution just before the end of normal time.

Spain remain the only nation ever to win a European Championship and World Cup in successive tournaments, having now done so a second time. They are also the first World Cup champion ever to concede only once across an entire tournament.

Lionel Messi the second player to feature in three World Cup finals

Lionel Messi’s Argentina failed to earn a title for the first time in three major tournaments, having also captured the 2021 and 2024 Copa Americas either side of their 2022 World Cup triumph.

The 39-year-old, eight-time Ballon d’Or winner Messi finished the competition with eight goals and four assists, but had little time on the ball until Spain finally took the lead and never seriously looked like lifting his side to another great moment as he has so many times in the last two World Cup cycles.

Emi Martinez made 11 saves for the Albiceleste, who fell short in their bid to be the first consecutive World Cup champions since Brazil won the 1958 and 1962 titles.

What had felt so difficult for the first 105 minutes suddenly looked easy after 37 seconds of play in the second period of extra time.

Pedro Porro curled in an outswinging cross from the left to the back post, Nico Williams won the header and nodded it back into space, and Torres hammered a half-volley at last past the flailing Martinez. It was his only goal of the tournament, making him the seventh player to score during a tournament in which his side never trailed.

The Likud Constitution Committee convened on Sunday and voted to grant Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s authority to determine eight slots within the first 30 spots on the party list ahead of the upcoming elections. 

The committee also decided that in the event of wartime, defined as escalation on the home front, Netanyahu could appoint the members of a selection committee that would determine the party’s candidate list, instead of holding primaries. 

Likud Central Committee members are expected to vote on the newly approved proposal on Tuesday.

Cancellation of primaries or reservation of slots for Netanyahu marks a significant shift in the party’s system for holding primaries.

For years, Likud has prided itself on conducting primaries in which its over 100,000 registered members are eligible to vote for the Knesset list.

The meeting on Sunday came after the committee approved last week’s controversial changes to the primary system that were also expected to grant Netanyahu authority to determine eight reserved slots on the party list.

The eight reserved slots were drawn from within the party’s first 31 positions on the list.

After the decision was made, the Likud Central Committee, which consists of thousands of party activists, was set to vote on the changes last week on Thursday.

Lod District Court issues injunction against Likud

However, shortly ahead of the vote, the Lod District Court issued an injunction against the changes following a petition against the party.

The renewed meeting in the Constitution Committee on Sunday was attended by Netanyahu to reconvene on changing the primary system.

Ahead of the meeting, Netanayhau met with the Likud local authority heads.

Amid the tensions, the committee also decided last week to postpone the primaries from August 8 to August 17.

The proposal to change the primaries system has drawn internal opposition from senior Likud figures, including Construction and Housing Minister Haim Katz and MK David Bitan, who have objected to the changes.

There has been fierce internal objection to canceling the Likud primaries. 

Netanyahu reportedly has held several meetings with Katz ahead of the meetings, seeking to bridge disagreements over the primary system.

The first vote on the primaries had been postponed multiple times, prompting reports that Netanyahu was working to secure internal support for changing the system.

There have also been reports that Netanyahu has threatened to leave Likud if the proposed changes are not advanced.

Some of the reserved slots could reportedly go to figures such as Foreign Minister Gideon Sa’ar and former finance minister Moshe Kahlon.

There have been objections from MKs within the party, who oppose changing the primary process, as it could cause those who would otherwise score highly in the primaries to fall further down the list.

A fierce critic of changing the system has been MK Tally Gotliv, who is viewed as a candidate who would receive broad support from registered party members.

Gotliv released a video last week claiming that Justice Minister Yariv Levin and Defense Minister Israel Katz were working behind the scenes to cancel the primaries to secure a high slot from Netanyahu.

Most Israeli political parties do not hold primaries

Parties are not required to hold primaries in Israel, and only a few do so.

The Likud primaries are expected to be highly competitive. Likud currently has around 40 ministers and MKs serving in the government and Knesset, but recent polls project the party winning only about 25 seats, leaving many at risk of losing their places on the party’s Knesset list.

There have been MKs in the party who have also expressed support for changing the system so that Netanyahu could secure the slots, such as MK Amit Halevi. He has stated that it is most important to do whatever is necessary to best help the party succeed in the elections.

Democrats Party leader Yair Golan warned against changing the system of the primaries in the event of a security situation.

He stated that the change should be “a red flag tonight for every democratic Israeli citizen, because the same decision could be made just as easily regarding the general elections once he [Netanyahu] realizes he will be defeated in them.”

“I suggest that the Central Elections Committee, the Supreme Court, and the president keep a close eye on the situation,” Golan added.

The debate on how to hold the Likud primaries comes ahead of the general elections, which are set to take place on October 27.

Egypt had enough to argue about without inventing a conspiracy.

Its World Cup run ended in a 3-2 loss to Argentina after Egypt had led 2-0. A goal by Mostafa Ziko was ruled out after a video assistant referee (VAR) review, and Egypt complained about the officiating. Fans argued about the referee, the late collapse, and whether FIFA’s system had failed.

That is soccer.

Then the explanation moved somewhere else.

In parts of Arabic-language media and online discourse, Egypt had not simply lost to Argentina. It had lost to FIFA, Zionism, Israel, the referee, Lionel Messi, Argentinian President Javier Milei, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, and a hidden system built to keep Egypt out. 

One Egyptian commentator made the claim openly: Egypt had lost to “Zionism, the referee, FIFA, and Argentina.”

That was not match analysis. It was the oldest conspiracy theory in a new stadium – a new version of the mutating virus that is antisemitism.

The old claim has always found new hosts: banks, media, governments, wars. Now Jews, or “Zionists,” control the game. The institution changes. The accusation survives.

Egypt’s anger was not imaginary. Referees, VAR, FIFA, and Israel can be criticized. None of that is the problem.

The problem begins when criticism turns into a control story. A disputed call becomes Zionism. A referee becomes the system. A soccer loss becomes proof that Jews still run the world from behind the curtain.

That leap is visible in Arabic online reactions around the match. One post said “forces of evil and Zionism” had moved against Egypt. Another framed the game not as Egypt vs Argentina but as Egypt vs FIFA, the referee, Freemasonry, and Zionism, with a repeated caption saying the calls had rescued “Messi and his Zionist team.” 

This is not a complaint about VAR. It is a claim of hidden agency.

The mutation was not confined to Arabic. Bassem Youssef, the Egyptian American comedian with a large English-speaking audience, did not enter this debate cold. He had already faced public accusations over comments about Jews and Israel, and had been challenged on air for floating an Israel-related conspiracy claim. 

After Egypt-Argentina, he pushed the frame outward. One post said the match crisis taught children “what Zionism means,” and that this generation would witness the Zionists’ expulsion from Palestine and from North and South America, “just as they were expelled multiple times from Europe.” 

Another circulated the claim that referee Francois Letexier was Jewish, even though X/Twitter’s community context said no credible record supported it.

That is the mechanism: a referee controversy becomes a lesson in Zionism. A claim about the referee’s Jewishness becomes relevant to the result. The expulsion of Jews from Europe becomes sports commentary. The language shifts. The structure stays the same.

Egypt-Argentina did not create that vocabulary. It activated it.

Dangerous shortcuts

The World Cup had already been pulled into the Gaza war and the politics around Israel. Arabic posts tied the tournament to Palestinian flags, Israeli flags, FIFA double standards, US President Donald Trump’s relationship with FIFA, and earlier VAR controversies. 

A viral Al Jazeera Arabic post put it bluntly: the world was watching the World Cup while Gaza was bleeding. The tournament was bound to the war before a whistle blew in this match. Days later, Egypt-Argentina arrived inside that atmosphere.

That matters because the conspiracy did not have to begin with antisemitism. It could have begun with a real sense of injustice. The antisemitic turn came when the bad call, or the bad system, became evidence of Jewish control.

This is the old shortcut: pain gets a false author. Humiliation becomes evidence. The harder question – what actually happened – is replaced by the easier one: who secretly did this to us.

That shortcut is dangerous for Jews and Israel because they become the hidden hand behind every defeat. It is also dangerous for Arab societies because failure no longer has to be studied. If Zionism controls the referee, FIFA, Argentina, Messi, Milei, Netanyahu, and the world around them, then nothing has to be learned. The loss was not soccer. It was another scene in a permanent cosmic plot.

That is not resistance. It is a surrender to the oldest excuse.

This was not “the Arab world” speaking with one voice. Some Arabic coverage stayed inside the real question: refereeing, VAR, and whether Egypt had been treated fairly. The problem surfaced when soccer anger became a story of Jewish control.

That makes it harder to dismiss. The issue is not that every Arab fan believes Jews control soccer. The issue is that the script remains available and useful. It can be pulled into war, politics, media, and now sport. It starts with the answer already chosen.

The scapegoat arrives before the facts.

Egypt deserved a serious argument after Argentina. The players deserved one. VAR may deserve one, too.

A bad call can explain a match.

It should not become proof that Jews control the beautiful game.

Dr. Omar Mohammed, the historian known as “Mosul Eye,” is director of the Antisemitism Research Initiative and a Senior Research Fellow at the Program on Extremism at The George Washington University, and teaches at Sciences Po. A former UNESCO senior consultant, he holds a Ph.D. from EHESS in Paris, France.

Asher Stern is a researcher at the Program on Extremism at The George Washington University. Before joining the Program on Extremism, Stern served as project manager and researcher at the International Institute for Counter Terrorism, where he directed applied counterterrorism analysis focused on extremist networks, radicalization dynamics, and emerging threat ecosystems. He led structured analytical projects, developed threat assessments, mapped network relationships, and built open-source monitoring frameworks used to track organizational activity and mobilization indicators. Stern holds an MA in International Relations from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and a BA in Government, Strategy, and Diplomacy from Reichman University.

The Middle East has a long history of wars of attrition. It now appears that the Trump administration is prepared for a war of attrition with the Iranian regime.

The evidence for this is that we have now seen several rounds of fighting. The first round was in June 2025, when the US supported Israeli strikes on Iran. The second round began in February 2026 with US and Israeli strikes, and now there is a third round.

Why are wars of attrition so common in the Middle East?

While some people think back to the 1967 Six-Day War and the US-led Gulf War in 1991 as examples of decisive victories in which enemies were defeated quickly, the Middle East has also seen its share of long, seemingly endless wars.

For instance, the Iran-Iraq War of 1980-1988 was a very long conflict in which huge numbers of people were killed. Iraq and Iran used missiles to attack each other’s cities, and Iraq also used poison gas. It was a brutal, vicious war in which infantry slogged through trenches, with fighting more reminiscent of the First World War than the Second.

That is one example of a war of attrition, but there are many more.

Another example is the fighting that took place after the 1967 Six-Day War. While Israel had vanquished the Egyptian, Syrian, and Jordanian forces in 1967, the aftermath of that conflict saw continued fighting along the Suez Canal with Egypt. This became known as the War of Attrition.

The conflict is often forgotten today, but it was important at the time. Several years later, in 1973, Egypt and Syria launched a surprise attack on Israel in what became known as the Yom Kippur War.

There have been many other long conflicts in the Middle East. Another example is what followed the US invasion of Iraq in 2003. The US quickly toppled Saddam Hussein’s regime, but an insurgency soon emerged. That insurgency grew, eventually leading to the US troop surge in 2007, in which Washington sent additional forces and sought to break the back of the insurgency by working with Sunni Arab Awakening councils and other groups.

Israel has also faced repeated and prolonged conflicts. There were numerous rounds of fighting in Gaza in 2009, 2012, 2014, and 2021, followed by the war that began with the October 7, 2023, attacks.

There were also other conflicts that Israel fought, including the long conflict in Lebanon. The Lebanese Civil War began in 1975 and continued until 1990, following the 1989 Taif Agreement, which was reached with Saudi Arabia’s support. Israel intervened in Lebanon in 1978 and again in 1982. Israeli forces then maintained a presence in southern Lebanon until 2000.

Which side can sustain repeated rounds of conflict?

There are many other examples. Somalia’s state breakdown in the 1990s led to a long-running conflict that remains unresolved. Israel recognized Somaliland because it has become an independent state due to Somalia becoming a failed state. In addition, in Libya and Yemen, there have been civil wars. North and South Yemen fought wars in the 1960s and 1970s. Later, the Houthi rebels tried to take over Aden after advancing from Sana’a. A Saudi Arabia-led intervention in 2015 stopped the Houthis, but Yemen is still divided. In addition, Libya fractured into several parts after 2011. Today there is some chance at reconciliation. In addition, Libya and Chad fought a long conflict in the 1980s. In addition, there was the Ogadan war between Somalia and Ethiopia, and the Ethiopia-Eritrea war.

The history of the Middle East and the wider region of North Africa, Afghanistan and the Sahel therefore shows that rapid military victories do not always occur; nor do they lead to decisive political outcomes. A military can win a battle or destroy an enemy’s capabilities, only to find itself confronting another round of fighting for months or years later.

This may be the challenge now facing the United States and Israel as they confront Iran. If the current conflict is becoming a war of attrition, then the key question is not simply who can carry out the most effective strikes. The question is which side can sustain repeated rounds of conflict, absorb the costs, and ultimately translate military pressure into a lasting political and strategic outcome.

October 7 did more than expose an intelligence failure; it exposed the exhaustion of Israel’s security doctrine. 

The IDF had become exceptionally capable at surveillance, interception, and precision strikes, yet increasingly organized around a static proposition: watch the borders, absorb the opening blow, mobilize, and rely on air power and missile defense to restore control.

That proposition failed. Sensors became substitutes for presence. Fences became deterrence. Missile defense, indispensable as it is, began to masquerade as strategy. The result was a force tactically sophisticated but strategically reactive.

Israel has gradually adopted the logic of a fortress: defend the center, harden the perimeter, and intercept whatever penetrates it. 

But a fortress cedes the initiative to the besieger. It allows adversaries to choose the timing, direction, and intensity of pressure while Israel bears the recurring cost of defending every border, population center, and piece of critical infrastructure. 

The answer is not simply to reinforce the fortress. It is to break its logic by fighting along the exposed edges of the systems constructed to encircle Israel.

Yet Israel’s post-October 7 debate has produced remarkably little doctrinal ambition. There are arguments over commissions of inquiry, force size, procurement, and responsibility. 

There has been no comparably serious proposal for how Israel should fight in a region transformed by drones, precision missiles, proxy armies, maritime coercion, and the emergence of Turkey as an increasingly hostile regional power.

Israel does not merely need a larger version of the prewar IDF. It needs a new operational instrument: a Tzahal Expeditionary Command (TEC).

TEC would fill the dangerous gap between special operations and full-scale divisional war. It would be a permanent joint command built to deploy a limited but powerful force beyond Israel’s immediate borders, sustain it under fire, integrate naval, air, intelligence, cyber, and ground capabilities, and impose strategic disruption without requiring occupation or total war.

Its purpose would not be imperial expansion. Israel lacks both the scale and the interest for that. Instead, TEC would restore the principle that once stood at the center of Israeli doctrine: the battlefield must be displaced away from the Israeli home front, and the enemy must be forced to defend what it values.

TEC would fight on the edges of the threat rather than remain trapped at its center. It would target the peripheral ports, islands, supply routes, launch areas, command nodes, and maritime corridors that allow adversaries to concentrate pressure against Israel from a distance. 

By forcing those systems to defend their own extremities, TEC would fracture the siege architecture before it could close around Israel.

Today, Israel’s adversaries can impose pressure cheaply. Iran operates through distant proxies. The Houthis threaten maritime commerce. Hezbollah and other armed networks exploit civilian terrain. Turkey is building naval power around its “Blue Homeland” doctrine, deepening its influence in Syria and treating rivalry with Israel as a structural feature of the regional order.

President Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s rhetoric has become openly accusatory, while Washington is again considering advanced weapons sales to Ankara, including the F-35. Israel cannot construct its security around the assumption that American diplomacy will permanently restrain Turkish power.

TEC would answer this challenge through regional maneuver.

It would possess organic sea lift, drones, electronic warfare, mobile air defense, precision fires, engineering, intelligence, and logistics. It would train to operate from ships, temporary airfields, islands, and allied territory. 

Its units would be modular rather than massive, capable of assembling mission-specific task forces for several days or weeks and then withdrawing before tactical success becomes strategic entanglement.

The command’s principal target would not be enemy territory as such, but enemy systems: ports, missile corridors, drone infrastructure, command nodes, maritime chokepoints, and logistical hubs. 

Israel’s current doctrine too often waits for missiles to arrive and then attempts to intercept them at enormous cost. TEC would create the capacity to attack the architecture that launches, supplies, and finances the pressure.

Test of seriousness

Kharg Island offers a useful test of seriousness. 

Kharg is Iran’s principal oil-export hub, handling roughly 90% of its crude exports. The question is not whether Israel should casually invade and occupy an Iranian island. That would be strategically reckless. 

The harder and more revealing question is whether Israel could, during a major regional war, isolate Kharg, temporarily secure critical facilities, and transfer responsibility to an American-led coalition.

At present, the honest answer is probably no. Israel could strike Kharg, but striking is not the same as controlling an operational outcome. Such a mission would demand maritime access, protected logistics, engineering, air and missile defense, intelligence fusion, coalition interoperability, and the ability to sustain a force far from home. Those are precisely the capabilities TEC would be designed to create.

The value of the Kharg scenario is therefore not that it should become policy, but that it exposes the limits of Israel’s existing force structure. A country able only to destroy distant targets remains dependent on others to shape what follows. A country able to seize, secure, transfer, and withdraw possesses a far more consequential form of strategic leverage.

The same logic applies closer to home in the Eastern Mediterranean. TEC would give military substance to Israel’s developing alignment with Greece and Cyprus, whose leaders committed in December 2025 to expanding cooperation on regional security, resilience, maritime affairs, and critical infrastructure. 

Joint exercises and declarations are not deterrence unless they can generate operational facts.

Deployable Israeli battalions able to reinforce threatened positions, protect energy infrastructure, secure sea lanes, conduct evacuation operations, and integrate with American and regional forces would make that partnership militarily credible.

This would provide a necessary deterrence layer against Turkey without turning it into a predetermined enemy. Deterrence is not a declaration of war. It is the creation of options that convince a rival that coercion will fail and escalation will carry costs.

Turkey’s expanding navy, defense industry, geographic depth, and position inside NATO give it advantages Israel cannot answer through rhetoric or air power alone. 

TEC would complicate Turkish planning by demonstrating that attempts to compress Israel behind its borders could be answered along Turkey’s own extended maritime and logistical edges, in cooperation with Greece, Cyprus, the United States, and other regional partners.

Building such a command would require uncomfortable choices. The navy would have to become more than a defensive service protecting coastlines and gas platforms. 

Logistics would need to be treated as a combat arm. The IDF would require greater sea lift, transport aircraft, mobile air defenses, unmanned systems, hardened supply networks, and personnel trained for sustained operations beyond familiar terrain.

Israel would also need clear political rules governing limited interventions, coalition warfare, transfer of responsibility, and withdrawal. An expeditionary capability without political discipline would invite strategic overreach.

The proposal will be attacked as too ambitious for a small state. That objection has things backward: Israel’s small size is precisely why it cannot afford to absorb war indefinitely on its own territory. Geographic narrowness demands operational reach.

October 7 demonstrated the bankruptcy of a doctrine built around warning, walls, and interception. Israel now faces a region in which Iran can regenerate, Turkey can project power, and maritime routes can be disrupted by actors thousands of kilometers away.

The answer is not another layer on the fence, more helicopters, or another tank division. It is the capacity to move, sustain, disrupt, and withdraw.

Israel does not need an expeditionary command because it seeks distant wars. It needs one because distant wars have already adapted to how to reach Israel.

This article draws on the author’s broader proposal for the Tzahal Expeditionary Command, published in the latest edition of the INSS journal.

US President Donald Trump is leaning toward further escalation with Iran, according to statements by several Israeli and American officials on Sunday.

“It appears President Trump is preparing to expand the campaign against Iran,” one official told The Jerusalem Post. “The remaining questions are ‘how much’ and ‘when.’ He understands that, barring an unexpected development, the chances of a diplomatic solution is now virtually nonexistent.” 

However, another official cautioned that Trump has changed course “at the last minute” before, noting that his position could still shift.

Israel’s current assessment is that Iran will refrain from launching attacks against Israel as long as the United States does not significantly escalate its military campaign against Tehran.

Regarding the possibility of Israel joining the strikes on Iran, two Israeli officials told the Post that it could happen under three scenarios: if Iran launches attacks against Israel, if Israeli intelligence detects that Iran is preparing to launch missiles or drones at Israel, or if Trump formally requests Israeli participation in the operation.

Netanyahu hints at escalation

During a meeting of the Likud Constitution Committee, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu hinted that an escalation could occur in the coming days.

“I support holding the primaries, but there is a possibility that we could face an exceptional security situation that would make it difficult to hold campaign events,” said Netanyahu. “It could coincide with election day or occur beforehand, making it difficult to conduct the vote.”

A new haredi (ultra-Orthodox) political party, named “Haredi Public,” was launched on Sunday ahead of the upcoming elections, with the stated goal of securing a spot in the Knesset to bridge the “disconnect” between the haredi population and existing political leadership.

The party has demanded that a representative from their ranks be included on the lists of the two haredi parties in the Knesset – United Torah Judaism and Shas.

The party stated that the demand stems from “a growing understanding that the challenges facing the haredi sector have become a genuine threat to the future of the haredi public in Israel.”

The faction will be led by Moti Leitner, deputy mayor of Beit Shemesh, who stated he has been continuing negotiations with senior haredi party officials over the demand for representation in the Knesset.

It noted that more than NIS 2 million has been invested in the new campaign so far.

The party launched a large-scale advertising campaign on Sunday at the entrances to and exits from major haredi cities, focusing on Bnei Brak, Jerusalem, and Elad.

New haredi party calls to address arrests of draft dodgers

It calls to address the issue of arrests of haredi draft evaders who study in Yeshiva.

It also calls to address “deep poverty within haredi society, and dropout rates among haredi youth.”

The faction noted that unless the haredi parties – Shas and United Torah Judaism – accept its demand for representation, the campaign will intensify, and its leaders will continue raising funds to expand it.

Leitner explained that he believed the “Torah world is under an unprecedented attack, and tens of thousands of yeshiva students and kolel scholars have become targets.”

The current haredi parties in the Knesset include the Sephardic Shas Party and the Ashkenazi United Torah Judaism Party, which is a joint list made up of Degel Hatorah and Agudat Yisrael.

Haredi parties advance legislation against enlistment amid IDF manpower crisis

The haredi parties have continuously encouraged the coalition to advance legislation that would not increase haredi enlistment.

The IDF has repeatedly warned of an urgent manpower shortage after more than two years of war.

A series of legislation was advanced by the haredi parties – with government backing – ahead of the Knesset’s recess before the elections, which critics argue encourages draft evasion, even amid the IDF’s severe manpower crisis.

Legislation had also been passed last week to enshrine Torah study in the country’s Basic Law, which is expected to open the ability for Yeshiva students to receive state benefits.

The haredi parties had boycotted coalition voting when legislation they were seeking to advance was stalled.

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s ruling Likud party has relied on the haredi parties as key coalition partners for years.

Elections are scheduled to take place on October 27.

Last week produced two separate stories that, at first glance, had little to do with one another.

One played out in Washington. The other unfolded in New York.

In Washington, 103 House Democrats – 48% of the caucus – voted in favor of a House amendment to eliminate all US military aid to Israel. Another 10 abstained.

Rep. Pat Ryan (D-New York) immediately followed that vote by declaring on X/Twitter that he no longer wanted support from the American Israel Public Affairs Committee.

By Friday, AIPAC obliged, quietly removing fundraising links for Ryan and 14 other representatives it had previously endorsed for reelection in November who backed the amendment.

Meanwhile, in New York, Mayor Zohran Mamdani reiterated in a New York Times interview on Saturday a campaign pledge that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu should be arrested if he comes to the city in September for the annual UN General Assembly.

Different actors. Different arenas. Yet both stories point to the same underlying development: The political incentives surrounding Israel inside significant parts of today’s Democratic Party are changing dramatically.

The real story is not that there are more anti-Israel Democrats. That has been evident for years. Nor is it that nearly half of the Democratic caucus favors ending military aid to Israel, including seven of the House’s 20 Jewish Democrats.

Rather, it is that positions which only recently carried political risk now increasingly carry political reward.

Political incentives are simple. Politicians ask themselves whether supporting Israel helps them raise money, strengthens their standing within the party, protects them from primary challenges, and improves their chances in the general election.

For decades, the answer to those questions was overwhelmingly yes. Supporting Israel was widely viewed – as an AIPAC motto once succinctly put it – as both good policy and good politics.

Increasingly, however, that calculation is changing – at least in progressive Democratic districts.

Opposing Netanyahu, and by extension distancing oneself from Israel, energizes activists. Breaking publicly with AIPAC earns progressive credibility. Calling for an end to military aid helps establish progressive bona fides. Remaining closely aligned with Israel, by contrast, can invite a well-funded primary challenge from the Left.

Ryan receives nearly $800,000 from AIPAC, yet spurns support

Ryan’s conduct illustrates the point.

According to a Washington Examiner report, Ryan has received nearly $800,000 in campaign contributions through AIPAC since 2022. Yet after voting to eliminate military aid, he didn’t simply cast his vote and move on. He announced that he no longer wanted AIPAC’s support and later said he intended to return the money.

Whether Ryan ultimately returns the money is largely irrelevant. His message was directed less at AIPAC than at progressive Democratic activists. It was intended to demonstrate that he was willing to break publicly with AIPAC and end military aid to Israel, and that – even though he represents a district where Jews make up roughly 10% of the electorate, including the Satmar village of Kiryas Joel – he sees little political downside in doing so.

Mamdani’s comments belong in the same category. He undoubtedly knows that, as mayor of New York City, he has no authority to arrest Netanyahu.

Like Ryan’s declaration, his statement functions primarily as political theater. It signals ideological alignment with his core constituency and reflects a calculation that – even though his electorate is even more heavily Jewish than Ryan’s – there is little political cost to taking such a position. On the contrary, he appears to believe it is politically advantageous.

That is why former US ambassador to Israel Dan Shapiro’s response on X to Mamdani’s statement missed the mark.

Any attempt to arrest Netanyahu would merely strengthen the prime minister politically back home, Shapiro argued.

“A message to Mayor Mamdani: Netanyahu is fighting for his political life,” he wrote. “Many Israelis are sick of him and hope to vote him out. The only possible outcome of a fruitless attempt to arrest him in NYC would be to give him a political boost at home.”

That may well be true. But Shapiro was viewing the issue through the prism of Israeli politics.

Mamdani is looking through an entirely different prism: domestic American politics. His audience is not Israeli voters deciding Netanyahu’s future, but rather progressive Democrats who will determine his own fate and how far he travels in national Democratic Party politics.

The same applies to Ryan.

Mamdani doubles down after winning office

Neither politician apologized for taking a position many Democrats once would have considered politically toxic. Ryan advertised it. Mamdani doubled down on it after winning office rather than moderating his rhetoric.

Both are experienced politicians with a finely tuned sense of their public’s mood. Their actions show that in growing parts of the Democratic Party, distancing oneself from Israel is now believed to be an electoral asset, not a liability.

That is part of a much broader transformation.

Israel is less a foreign-policy issue in America these days and more a marker of political identity inside the Democratic Party. Supporting Israel increasingly identifies a politician with the party establishment. Demonstrating distance from Israel increasingly establishes progressive credibility.

As the comedian Bill Maher quipped last year, anti-Israel politics has become today’s Che Guevara T-shirt.

Attacking Netanyahu earns applause. Rejecting AIPAC wins admiration in progressive circles. Voting against military aid carries relatively little political cost in some deep-blue districts and may even yield political rewards.

None of last week’s events changed US policy toward Israel.

Mamdani cannot arrest Netanyahu. Ryan is not setting American foreign policy. The amendment to eliminate military aid lost by an overwhelming margin and had no realistic chance of passing. While 48% of the Democrats voted for the measure, 72% of the 435-member House thought otherwise and voted against it.

But that misses the larger point: Political theater often foreshadows political change.

In the midst of the 2020 Democratic primary campaign, candidate Bernie Sanders’s decision to boycott the upcoming AIPAC policy conference was widely dismissed as little more than electioneering, with limited broader political significance. At the time, attending the conference was almost obligatory for politicians with national ambitions.

Today, one suspects that many Democratic lawmakers would make the opposite calculation.

That is why last week’s developments matter.

Not because they alter American policy today, but because they reveal what many Democratic politicians now believe their voters want. And when enough politicians reach that conclusion, policy eventually follows.

Iran’s regime is rapidly increasing its attacks on the Kingdom of Jordan. On Sunday, the Iranians targeted the southern Jordanian city of Aqaba. Iran also killed US soldiers in Jordan.

These attacks appear to be more deadly and more extreme than Iran’s attacks in the past. It is not that this is the first time that Iran has attacked Jordan, but that Iran appears to be trying to terrorize the kingdom as well as the US forces that are there.

What is the reason for Iran’s latest shift in focus?

Iran has always decided that when it is attacked, it will strike across the region. Iran has carved out a front line of thousands of miles that stretches from the coast of Lebanon through Iraq and Jordan to the Persian Gulf, and from there to the Gulf of Oman.

This is how the Iranian regime operates; it is how Iran seeks to terrorize the Middle East. Iran is sending a message: every time it is attacked, it will not only strike back at one or two places, but the United States and friendly partner countries in the region will have to prepare for attacks across these thousands of miles of front line. It is likely this reasoning that informs the Iranian leadership’s thinking regarding the strikes on the Kingdom of Jordan.

It should be recalled that Jordan has been a Western ally throughout its existence. It was founded as a British Mandate territory. The kings of Jordan have a lineage that stretches back to what is now Saudi Arabia. In the time of Lawrence of Arabia, the family of the current rulers of Jordan worked with the British against the Ottoman Empire during the First World War.

After the First World War, they built a state in which British officers played a key role in managing and drilling the Jordanian army, at that time called the Arab Legion, to become a competent fighting force. The Jordanians also fought Israel in the 1948 war, Israel’s War of Independence. However, the Kingdom of Jordan maintained quiet ties with Israel until the two countries signed a peace deal in 1994.

As such, the kingdom has not only had relations with Israel for many years, but it has also been a key friend of the West. It has worked with the United Kingdom throughout its existence, including when the kingdom faced threats from Nasser-era officers in the 1950s and Palestinian terrorist groups in the 1960s and 1970s.

Jordan is always in the crosshairs of any potential regional conflagration

Currently, the Kingdom of Jordan occupies a complex place in the Middle East. It is situated between Israel, Iraq, Syria, and the Gulf. This would seem to put it in a strategically advantageous position because it could play a strategic role. However, the Kingdom of Jordan has always seemed to shy away from playing this outsized role. In fact, the kingdom has often felt that it might be threatened by its larger neighbors or any spillover from conflict.

Jordan hosted hundreds of thousands of Syrian refugees during the Syrian Civil War. Many of these Syrians had family or clan connections to Jordan. In addition, Jordan, as a monarchy, always worked closely with the Gulf monarchies. However, the Kingdom of Jordan also balanced these relationships by maintaining ties with Saddam Hussein’s Iraqi regime.

When the US invaded Iraq, Jordan was always concerned that there might be spillover from the insurgency or extremist groups into the kingdom. In fact, the kingdom was threatened by extremist groups, not only from Iraq, but also by Al-Qaeda, ISIS, and others. Therefore, the kingdom has always been very careful to manage its affairs and try not to get involved in regional conflicts, having seen the results of them over the years.

The Kingdom of Jordan cannot always avoid these conflicts, and the recent Iranian attacks have illustrated this challenge. The Iranians are ostensibly targeting US forces in Jordan. It is not the first time Iran has done this: the Iranian-backed proxy group Kata’ib Hezbollah attacked a post called Tower 22 in northeastern Jordan in January 2024, killing three Americans.

For this reason, Jordan is always in the crosshairs of any potential regional conflagration. The current Iran war, which began on February 28, 2026, with US and Israeli strikes on Iran, is no exception. Iran has sought to spread the conflict all over the region and create numerous new front lines.

One of these front lines is in Jordan. Iran appears to believe it has a right to attack US forces there, such as at Tower 22, and potentially strike at the kingdom itself to send a message that Jordan should not host American troops.

Jordan is not the only place where Iran is trying to send this message. It is also doing so through attacks on Kuwait, Bahrain, the UAE, Saudi Arabia, Oman, and especially the Kurdistan Region of northern Iraq. Iran has carried out hundreds of attacks in Iraq, particularly targeting Kurdish Iranian opposition groups with bases and facilities in the Kurdish region.

Iran also recently claimed to target a US garrison in Syria. This garrison, located at Al-Tanf, apparently no longer exists and was evacuated back in February. However, the Iranian regime claimed to target it primarily to show it could strike inside Syria. While it is not entirely clear if the Iranians actually carried out the attack, the messaging is what is important: Iran is trying to put Syria on notice that it can strike there as well using long-range precision ballistic missiles, drones, or other weapons.

This should be a major concern for Jordan because these Iranian-backed militias, which are part of the Popular Mobilization Forces in Iraq, exist in large numbers, especially in Iraq’s Anbar Province. These groups have positioned themselves close to both the Jordanian and Syrian borders.

Indeed, it appears these groups were behind a recent smuggling attempt in which missiles and drones were hidden inside a tanker truck to move them to Syria via the Al-Tanf border crossing. The Syrians busted the smuggling attempt, and the Iranians subsequently claimed to target the Al-Tanf area under the guise of targeting Americans, but they were in fact sending a broader message.

History – particularly Jewish history – does not exist in a vacuum; it is neither random nor capricious. The Sages teach that no event – certainly no major episode in Jewish history, and certainly not regarding Israel – occurs by happenstance. They illustrate this by rearranging the letters of mikreh, accidental, to form the words rak me’Hashem, strictly from God.

Unquestionably, one of the epochal dates in Jewish history is the upcoming Tisha (9th) B’Av.

Beginning with the episode of the spies, the meraglim – wherein the nation faltered in its initial mission to conquer Israel – the day would be indelibly marked as one of continuous tragedy.

The destruction of both Temples would be linked to this ignominious “9/11” (Av is the 11th month in the Hebrew calendar), as were the final blow against Israel’s independence inflicted by the Romans at Betar, the expulsion of Jews from England in 1290, and the start of the Inquisition.

The rabbis wax poetic in assigning a litany of reasons that Jerusalem was leveled and the Temple destroyed. The Talmud in Shabbat quotes numerous sages: Abaye said: Jerusalem was destroyed only because people desecrated the Shabbat in it; Rabbi Abahu said it was linked to our deficiency in prayer; Rav Hamnuna said it resulted from the neglect of proper education for the children; Ulla said Jerusalem was destroyed only because people had no shame before each other; Rabbi Hanina said it occurred because people did not rebuke one another; Rabbi Yehuda said it happened because Torah scholars were disparaged.

Still other sources say that we judged others too harshly, failed to give them the benefit of the doubt, or failed to properly bless the study of Torah.

Perhaps the most famous indictment comes from Yoma, which cites the cardinal sins of adultery, immorality, and murder as responsible for the First Temple’s demise, while blaming sin’at hinam – baseless hatred – for the Second Temple’s destruction.

The little things

I want to suggest that while all of the above “big” reasons for these global catastrophes express the need to mend our ways and require us to make major changes in our behavior, there are other, seemingly “little,” things that we can more easily do to evoke God’s mercy and engender a reversal of the misfortune.

Susie and I recently returned from an extended tour of the Far East. Almost from the moment we arrived, we recognized subtle, yet powerful practices that positively affect those societies; practices that, alas, are rare – if not conspicuously absent – in our own country.

In Singapore, for example, laws are strictly adhered to. Drivers respect road signs, waiting patiently to move until the light turns green, and signal at all turns; they rarely, if ever, honk their horns. Certainly, you will never, ever see a motorized vehicle on a sidewalk, endangering the life and limb of pedestrians.

The streets are spotless; no one discards litter at will. In fact, there are no wastebaskets on the sidewalks; people will carry their trash for hours before finally discarding it at home. Spitting is punishable by law, and gum is neither sold in the country nor allowed to be brought in by tourists, lest it lead to dirtying the pavement.

In Japan, there is a concerted effort to respect the other person’s space. There is no eating on the streets, nor are there public displays of affection, such as hugging or kissing. Clothes, too, are modest; no outlandish or overly revealing clothes are worn in public.

There, the sounds of silence prevail: No one speaks in elevators; no one talks above a whisper in buses or on trains. Phones are on silent mode in all public places.

Tipping at restaurants in Japan and Korea is not only unnecessary; it can be considered an insult to the waiter, as it relegates him or her to the status of a servant rather than an employee carrying out his or her task diligently and in a dignified manner. In fact, a waitress may even chase after a customer, assuming the money was inadvertently left behind on the table by mistake.

Similarly, taxi drivers expect no added recompense for their services.

In Thailand, passersby will not ignore you; they will smile and bow their heads to anyone they see, placing their hands together to offer their blessings. Often, they will say “Kop kun,” thank you, even if you did nothing special for them.

All of this left a deep impression on me. How often are we, here in Israel, besieged by noise pollution? The honking cars, the screaming of parents at their children down the block, the yelling across a crowded restaurant or music concert to a friend. Do I really need to hear the guy next to me on the sherut mini-bus discussing the latest results from his urologist, or the teenager detailing her latest crush? Are people so hard of hearing that all their phone conversations must be on speaker mode? Does every inane TikTok video need to be shared?

And why must I deftly dodge electric bikes and motorcycles as I walk down the sidewalk, not daring to look at the scenery lest I be bowled over by a careless, crazed biker?

‘Kavod’ and ‘tzniut’

We have two Hebrew words that address all these situations: kavod and tzniut.

Kavod is the honor we must show to others, in the assumption that they want the same amount of consideration that we want for ourselves.

It is the honor that we give to the law when we abide by its rules, because all of us will want the law to protect us if and when it becomes necessary.

It is the honor we show to our city, because it reflects on all those who live there.

It is the honor we show our neighbors when we protect their property, as we hope they would do for us.

Tzniut has become associated with modest clothing, but it is much, much more than that.

Tzniut is respecting others’ space and maintaining peace and serenity – rather than engaging in cacophony and commotion – in open spaces.

Tzniut is the act of humbling ourselves by not believing that we are somehow better than others and so we can do whatever we like in their presence.

Every time we let the other person in the conversation finish his or her idea – without bursting in on them every few seconds – we signal that they have value, too, and that their point of view must be heard, even if ours must wait a bit.

These are the so-called little things that add up to a lot, the tiny “pieces of white” that erase the black habits that can darken our society.

If we want – really want – to rebuild the Beit Hamikdash (Sanctuary), then we must begin in our own dalet amot, our own small spaces, in the stores, the synagogues, and on the streets. It starts with us.

The writer is director of the Jewish Outreach Center of Ra’anana. rabbistewart@gmail.com

We are living through an extraordinarily complex moment in Jewish history. The past three years have brought a mixture of triumph and tragedy, miracles and heartbreak. 

Nine months ago, we celebrated the release of hostages and allowed ourselves a measure of hope. Since then, we have ridden the emotional swings of a war whose end remains frustratingly out of sight.

And now we approach Tisha B’Av and confront its perennial challenge: How do we mourn authentically?

Mourning Tisha B’Av in the era of the State of Israel is deeply complex. Genuine mourning must be internal rather than performative. Reciting kinot and observing the day’s rituals are not enough unless they awaken a deeper sense of loss.

Yet we are living through one of the most remarkable periods in Jewish history. Even amid war, uncertainty, and sacrifice, we have witnessed extraordinary renewal. 

We have returned to our land, rebuilt Jewish sovereignty, and watched generations of dreams come to life. Even if the road has been difficult, we recognize that we are living through a chapter of Jewish history.

How, then, do we mourn the destruction of the Temple while also witnessing the unfolding of Jewish redemption?

A modern dilemma

This question has surfaced repeatedly over the past several decades in the debate surrounding the liturgy of Tisha B’Av. In the Amidah (the silent prayer), we recite “Nachem,” which describes Jerusalem as “desolate, in ruins, bereft of her children, with her head covered in shame.”

At first glance, that description hardly reflects Jerusalem today. Her head is no longer covered in shame but crowned by a flourishing skyline. She is no longer bereft of her children. Jerusalem’s real estate market reminds us that Jews are returning to the city in remarkable numbers.

For this reason, some have proposed modifying the wording of Nachem, while most insist that our liturgy should remain unchanged. Whatever one’s position in that halachic debate, it raises a broader question: How do we mourn Jerusalem while witnessing such extraordinary renewal?

The most recent tragedy

One natural response is to allow October 7 and the painful months that followed to shape our experience of Tisha B’Av. 

Those horrific hours and the months of war, loss, anxiety, and sacrifice have transformed Jewish life. For many of us, they provide the most immediate gateway into the emotions of Tisha B’Av.

Yet to focus solely on October 7 feels too narrow. As devastating as those events have been, they cannot exhaust the meaning of Tisha B’Av. Doing so risks reducing a day that spans thousands of years of Jewish history to the pain of a single generation. Tisha B’Av asks us to mourn not only our latest tragedy but the deeper fractures of Jewish history.

The long arc of Jewish history

One answer is to make Tisha B’Av a day to revisit Jewish history. It is a day to retrace its arc, reflect on our mission, and contemplate the price we have paid for representing God in this world. 

Tisha B’Av asks us not merely to mourn isolated tragedies but to absorb the sweep of Jewish history and the suffering that has accompanied our covenant.

It was never meant to unfold this way. History was meant to reach its destination in the year 2448. We were redeemed from Egypt, sustained by open miracles in the desert, and brought to the threshold of the Land of Israel. 

We were meant to enter the land, build a temple, and create a society that would reveal God’s presence to the world. Instead, through failures and betrayals, history was diverted from its intended course. 

We were exiled from our land and forced to pursue our mission from foreign shores. It was never an ideal setting for fulfilling our destiny.

That long exile exacted a terrible price. We endured persecution, discrimination, expulsions, and massacres. We were driven from Christian Europe and humiliated throughout much of the Muslim world. Again and again we built communities, only to watch them collapse in violence and hatred.

It is tempting to view those centuries as nothing more than a painful parenthesis in Jewish history, especially now that we have returned to our homeland. 

Tisha B’Av asks us to step out of our own moment of Jewish renewal and identify with the struggles, sacrifices, and hopes of those who carried the Jewish story through its darkest chapters.

But Tisha B’Av asks more of us than simply identifying with their suffering. It asks us to admire the extraordinary courage and quiet defiance with which they endured the impossible conditions of exile. 

They refused to disappear into the woodwork of history. Against overwhelming odds, they built communities, preserved Torah, and safeguarded our identity. Without their faith and resilience, the Jewish people might not have survived.

We owe those generations one day each year to step into their world. To see Jewish history through their eyes, to appreciate the courage with which they preserved our people, and to recognize that without their resilience we might not be here today. Tisha B’Av is our annual encounter with the generations who carried the Jewish story when it seemed it might end.

Rabbi Akiva’s smile

Yet if we are honestly retracing the long arc of Jewish history, we cannot stop with the suffering. We must also recognize the extraordinary moment in which we have been privileged to live.

The Talmud describes Rabbi Akiva walking through Jerusalem’s ruins after the destruction of the Temple. Jerusalem lay in ruins. His colleagues wept over the devastation. Rabbi Akiva shared their grief, yet he smiled. 

He understood that Jewish history unfolds differently from the history of every other nation. The disproportionate destruction Rome inflicted upon the Jewish people, compared to the fate of other nations, fulfilled the prophecies but also convinced him that Jewish history would not follow the normal course of history. 

If our destruction had been so disproportionate, our redemption would be equally disproportionate. If the first half of the story had unfolded, so too would the second.

Rabbi Akiva is speaking to us, granting us permission to smile, even on Tisha B’Av. That smile does not erase the centuries of suffering or diminish the trail of tears. It should never distract from mourning. Yet, if Tisha B’Av is a day to retrace the odyssey of Jewish history, we must reflect not only on destruction but also upon our astonishing restoration. Honest mourning requires us to remember both.

Rabbi Akiva smiled because he believed redemption would come. We smile because we have begun to witness it.

An unfinished redemption

And finally, Tisha B’Av carries a unique resonance precisely because we are living through an era of Jewish renewal. 

For the first time in 2,000 years, we sense that history is once again moving toward its intended destination. We have been privileged not merely to witness redemption but to participate in its unfolding.

Yet redemption remains unfinished. Every day we pray that our eyes should behold God’s return to Zion. Will we merit to witness that moment in our own lifetime or will it occur after our eyes close? 

We stand closer than any generation in centuries, yet so much of what we yearn for still lies beyond our reach. Precisely because we have come so far, we feel even more acutely how much is still missing. That, too, is part of the sadness of Tisha B’Av. 

The writer is a rabbi and educator at Yeshivat Har Etzion (Gush) in Israel. His latest book, Reclaiming Redemption, Vol. II: Faith, Identity, Peoplehood, and the Storms of War, is available at mtaraginbooks.com

The FIFA 2026 World Cup affected Israeli consumers’ habits, as food delivery orders surged by 20% during match hours, with daily orders rising by an average of 7% compared to the month prior to the tournament, according to data released by the food delivery company Wolt last week.

Family pizza orders surged by 35% during the period, the most of any product. At the same time, burger orders increased by 27% compared to the pre-World Cup period, while ice cream orders increased by 44%.

Shawarma, sushi, and pad thai remained among the most popular delivery dishes ordered during the tournament. 

The Argentina-Egypt match saw the highest number of orders during the entire period, with about 57% placed before the round-of-16 match and 43% during the match. 

The World Cup quarterfinal between Spain and Belgium ranked second, with the semifinal between Argentina and England third by sheer number of orders.

Wolt data shows last-minute orders, surges

Wolt’s data analysis showed that although Israelis start scanning the site for orders an hour and a half before kickoff, the largest number of orders comes in just two minutes before the start of a given match. 

Snack orders rose by a significant margin, up to 40%, while plastic cutlery increased by about 26%.

Tel Aviv led the country in the total number of orders, though Eilat ordered more in later periods of the game.

A commemorative plaque honoring a couple recognized as Righteous Among the Nations and their daughter, who saved a child during the Vel’ d’Hiv Roundup, was vandalized in central Paris last week.

The plaque, which honors Arsene et Angele Richard and their daughter Marcelle for saving the life of 13-year-old Edmond Rajchman, was broken down the middle and is now missing most of the words.

Paris Mayor Emmanuel Gregoire condemned the incident on Friday, saying “At a time when antisemitism is growing every day in our society, and on the eve of the weekend commemorating the Vel’ d’Hiv Roundup, I want to reaffirm my unwavering support for the Jewish community.”

‘Their memory remains undiminished’

“Paris is, and will remain, a city that stands against all forms of hatred,” he wrote.

“The fight against antisemitism will always remain an absolute priority of my political commitment,” he added.

“To attack the Righteous is to desecrate the entire universe,” said Alice Rufo, deputy defense minister. “The plaque will be restored. Their memory remains undiminished. In the face of antisemitism, in all its forms, the Republic will not yield an inch.”

What was the Vel’ d’Hiv Roundup?

The Vel’ d’Hiv Roundup, which took place on 16 and 17 July 1942, involved the mass arrest of 13,152 Jewish men, women and children (4,115 total) in Paris by French police. Most of the captives in Paris were taken to the Velodrome d’Hiver (Vel d’Hiv) in the 15th Arrondissement of Paris, near the Eiffel Tower.

The Jewish prisoners were kept in the Velodrome for five days, with no toilet, washing facilities or fresh air. Some were driven to take their own lives, and many were shot.

It was the largest roundup of Jews carried out in France during World War II. The number from the roundup alone represents more than a quarter of the 42,000 Jews deported from France to Auschwitz in 1942. The arrests were carried out with the assistance of 9,000 French police officers and gendarmes on the orders of the Vichy government.

“Faced with a criminal regime that sought to erase our national motto, the Righteous ensured its meaning and strength were preserved,” Gregoire wrote following the commemorative ceremony on Sunday. “They leave us with the ongoing imperative to combat all forms of hatred, racism, and antisemitism.”

The Paris Police said the “duty of remembrance is also the responsibility of pursuing with force and determination the struggle against all expressions of hatred.”

It called the destruction of the plaque “an unspeakable act” and said the police are working hard to identify the perpetrator or perpetrators “in order to bring them before the justice system.” 

For decades, Richard Trank helped tell some of the most important stories in Jewish history.

As the Oscar-winning documentary filmmaker behind The Long Way Home and a long-time creative force at the Simon Wiesenthal Center, Trank chronicled the Holocaust, the birth of Israel, Zionism, and the lives of leaders from Theodor Herzl to Shimon Peres before making aliyah in 2025.

Yet despite spending much of his professional life documenting Israel’s story, he started his work from afar in Los Angeles.

A family shaped by Jewish survival

Born and raised in southern California, a son to first-generation immigrants, Trank grew up in the shadow of the Holocaust, though his childhood looked much like that of any other California kid.

His father, originally from Slovakia, escaped Europe just before the Nazi occupation of Czechoslovakia. One of his earliest Zionist memories was of an uncle making his way to Mandatory Palestine with the Hashomer Hatza’ir youth movement and helping build a kibbutz.

His mother, the child of Yiddish actors from Kyiv and Odesa who came to South Africa as Hitler was taking power in Germany, immigrated from Cape Town to Los Angeles in the early 1950’s.

One surviving uncle’s experience would later inspire The Long Way Home, the film that won Trank his Oscar in 1998. The documentary examined not only how Holocaust survivors endured the war, but how they rebuilt their lives afterward.

“I always wanted to tell the story of what happened after ‘they lived happily ever after,’” he said. “Because, in reality, that wasn’t necessarily the case.”

Discovering the power of Jewish storytelling

Although Richard Trank grew up in a community outside of LA, largely surrounded by non-Jewish peers, some of his most formative experiences came during summers spent at Camp Hess Kramer, a Jewish camp in Malibu.

“It was the only time of the year where, for a month or so, I was around all Jewish kids,” he recalled.

For Trank, those summers provided something he could not easily find elsewhere: a sense of belonging to a larger Jewish story in which Israel was central. Looking back, he sees them as an early connection to Israel long before he would begin making films about the Jewish state.

After high school, Trank attended the University of California, Berkeley, where he studied drama and history. Initially, he envisioned a career writing plays before turning to short stories and eventually enrolling in a graduate writing program at the University of Southern California. His goal was simple: to make a living as a writer.

Instead, he found his way into radio journalism.

A chance encounter would change everything.

At the time, activists connected to the Simon Wiesenthal Center were campaigning to remove statutes of limitations for Nazi war criminals in Germany and supporting efforts to identify and deport suspected Nazi perpetrators who had entered the United States. Trank became acquainted with several of the organization’s leaders and was fascinated by their work.

Recognizing the power of radio as a communication tool, they asked him to create a nationally syndicated Jewish public affairs program.

“I thought I would do it for a year or so,” Trank said.

Instead, it became a relationship that lasted more than three decades, one that would repeatedly bring him to Israel and immerse him in the story of the Jewish state.

One of the first projects was Echoes That Remain, a documentary about life in the pre-war shtetl, narrated by Martin Landau, directed by Arnold Schwartzman, the filmmaker who directed Genocide for the Wiesenthal Center and became a mentor to Trank.

Working alongside Schwartzman, Trank helped produce Liberation, a sweeping documentary chronicling the Allied liberation of Europe and the concentration camps. Narrated by Sir Ben Kingsley, it became the first production by a new division of the Wiesenthal Center, Moriah Films, dedicated to producing original documentaries about Jewish history and culture.

Those early projects laid the foundation for what would become one of the most influential careers in Jewish documentary filmmaking, eventually leading to films about Holocaust survivors, the founding of Israel, Zionism, and some of the most consequential figures in modern Jewish history, including The Long Way Home, narrated by Morgan Freeman, which won Trank his Oscar and along with Genocide, became the Wiesenthal Center’s second.

“I discussed it with Rabbi Marvin Hier, who founded the Wiesenthal Center… How do we tell the story without then getting involved with the intricacies of the Israeli-Arab conflict? That’s when we decided to open the film when the camps were liberated and close it when the State was declared,” he said.

The Oscar-winning film became the official documentary marking Israel’s 50th anniversary in 1998, a moment Trank described as deeply personal.

“It meant the world to me,” he said.

Discovering Zionism through Israel’s founding visionaries

As Trank’s career evolved, his focus increasingly shifted from Holocaust history to the story of Israel itself. What began as an interest in the aftermath of Jewish survival became a deeper exploration of the individuals whose ideas and leadership shaped the modern Jewish state.

“I loved making those movies because the history is fascinating,” Trank said. “It enabled me to be here in Israel a lot and become enmeshed in its story. I also began to see how many Jews outside Israel don’t really understand or appreciate that history. So, I felt like I was contributing something to change that.”

That conviction inspired a trilogy of sorts, films examining three of the most influential figures in modern Jewish history: Theodor Herzl, David Ben-Gurion, and Shimon Peres.

For Trank, the journey began with Herzl.

Surprisingly, despite Herzl’s towering place in Jewish history, no major documentary had been devoted entirely to the father of modern political Zionism. Trank set out to change that. Narrated by Ben Kingsley and featuring dramatic readings by Christoph Waltz, the film sought to introduce audiences to the man behind the movement.

The timing was significant. Trank had become increasingly concerned by efforts to distance people from the word “Zionism,” which was beginning to carry negative connotations in many circles.

“I thought it was insane,” he recalled. “One thing I learned from The Long Way Home was that the largest groups of Jews who survived the camps were people who had something to believe in – communists, religious Jews, and especially Zionists.”

To Trank, Zionism was not a slogan but a source of hope. It represented the belief that the Jewish people could reclaim agency over their future after centuries of persecution. Having seen how that belief sustained members of his own family and countless Holocaust survivors, he wanted audiences to understand what the term originally meant.

“How could you simply dismiss this word,” he asked, “when it helped people like my family survive?”

The film exceeded expectations. Released in 2012, it resonated with audiences around the world and introduced many viewers to Herzl’s own writings rather than contemporary interpretations of his legacy. Trank said people often emerged from the film with a completely different perspective on both Herzl and the Zionist movement. The movie’s premiere took place at the Tribeca Film Festival, one of the major film festivals on the international circuit.

The production itself revealed unexpected connections. During recording sessions, Christoph Waltz astonished the filmmakers by revealing that his children were Jewish and that his grandparents, actors in Vienna, had actually performed in plays written by Herzl decades earlier and staged at Vienna’s Burgtheater. For Trank, it was yet another reminder of how deeply intertwined Jewish history remains with broader European history.

One of the recurring voices in the documentary was Shimon Peres, whose reflections helped connect Herzl’s 19th-century vision to the realities of modern Israel. Peres had written a volume, The Imaginary Voyage, based on a dream in which he guides Herzl through contemporary Israel, showing him what had become of his vision. Trank found the concept profoundly moving and used Peres’s reflections to frame portions of the film.

As work on the Herzl film concluded, Trank turned his attention to another giant of Israeli history: David Ben-Gurion. He began researching a documentary on Israel’s founding prime minister, viewing Ben-Gurion as the practical architect who transformed Herzl’s dream into political reality.

But while production on the Ben-Gurion film was starting, something unexpected happened.

In December 2015, Trank traveled to the Peres Center in Jaffa to interview Shimon Peres, then 92, about Ben-Gurion. Peres was uniquely positioned to discuss him; he was one of the last living leaders who had worked alongside Israel’s founding prime minister.

During the visit, members of Peres’s staff posed a simple question: Why not make a film about Peres himself?

For Trank, the suggestion was irresistible.

“I would love nothing more than to make a film about Shimon Peres,” he remembered telling them.

When they raised the idea with Peres, the former president responded with characteristic modesty.

“Who would go see such a movie?” Peres joked.

Trank and Wiesenthal Center founder Rabbi Hier assured him there was a big audience for such a project.

“We convinced him to make the film,” Trank explained. “We told him it would be our greatest honor.”

The Ben-Gurion documentary was placed on hold. Instead, Trank embarked on what would become one of the most meaningful experiences of his career.

For eight months, he traveled from Los Angeles to Israel roughly once a month, spending one to two weeks at a time with Peres. The interviews ranged far beyond politics. Between takes, the two men discussed family, Jewish history, Israel’s future, and Peres’s lifelong belief in optimism and innovation.

“We finished our principal interviews around his 93rd birthday,” Trank recalled.

The plan was to accompany Peres on a lecture tour to China and continue filming. But just weeks later, before Rosh Hashanah, Peres suffered a stroke and died.

Overnight, the documentary changed from a biography into a tribute.

The resulting film, Never Stop Dreaming, became one of the definitive cinematic portraits of Peres’s life and legacy. Narrated by George Clooney and featuring interviews with world leaders including Barack Obama, Bill Clinton, George W. Bush, and Tony Blair, the documentary offered an intimate portrait of one of Israel’s last founding statesmen. 

Netflix acquired the film and made it a Netflix Original. It is one of the most popular documentaries on the streaming platform around the world and in Israel.

Looking back, Trank sees Herzl, Ben-Gurion, and Peres as three chapters of the same story. Herzl articulated the dream. Ben-Gurion built the state. Peres spent his life carrying that vision into the future.

From visitor to citizen

Although Trank often said that Israel was the only place outside America where he could imagine living, aliyah remained more of a dream than a possibility. His career and his children were in Los Angeles.

Nevertheless, the idea never disappeared.

But things changed in 2025. After more than three decades at the Simon Wiesenthal Center, Trank’s long career there came to an end. His 93-year-old mother had also passed away. His children were established in their careers and living on their own. For the first time, he had the freedom to ask a new question: What comes next?

He started by creating his own independent production company, Sea Point Films and Media. And he began looking for projects to develop and produce, stories like the ones he had been writing and directing for years. 

As he was considering which project to start work on first, he and his partner decided to spend an extended period living in Israel. Trank wanted to see if it was realistic to work from Israel and also to experience everyday life in the Jewish state.

“Every time she and I came here, there was always a sadness when we knew we had to leave,” Trank recalled. “This time, very soon after we arrived, we knew that we could easily work and live in a place we had only dreamed about.”

They made aliyah on October 8, 2025, the day the last hostages were released from Gaza.