All News (Page 106)

Iran claimed to have struck and damaged US military sites in Kuwait, Jordan, and Bahrain with drones, according to Iranian state media outlet Islamic Republic of Iran Broadcasting (IRIB) in the early morning hours on Saturday.

According to IRIB, drones targeted US ammunition stores and communication assets at Kuwait’s Ali Al Salem Air Base. They also claimed to have targeted US military assets at Muwaffaq Salti Air Base in Jordan.

IRIB additionally claimed that they targeted US aircraft hangars, fuel tanks, and communication assets in Bahrain. 

Later on Saturday, Jordanian media reported the interception of ten Iranian ballistic missiles by Jordan’s military. No casualties or material damage were reported.

On Friday evening, Iran fired several ballistic missiles and drones towards Kuwait, Kuwait’s military stated in an X/Twitter post citing Kuwaiti Defense Ministry Spokesperson Maj.-Gen. Saud Abdulaziz Al-Otaibi.

Several Kuwaiti soldiers were wounded by falling shrapnel from intercepted aerial targets, according to the statement.

Multiple sites were hit by the Iranian attack, including a power station, water desalination plant, and other civilian infrastructure, with reports of fires and material damage.

بيان رقم (75)

صرّح المتحدث الرسمي لوزارة الدفاع، العقيد الركن سعود عبدالعزيز العطوان

بأن القوات المسلحة رصدت، منذ فجر اليوم، صواريخ باليستية وطائرات مسيّرة معادية، داخل المجال الجوي الكويتي، وقد تم اعتراضها والتعامل معها.

وأضاف أن العدوان الإيراني الآثم أسفر عن استهداف عدد من… pic.twitter.com/NSrynUFMN7

— KUWAIT ARMY – الجيش الكويتي (@KuwaitArmyGHQ) July 17, 2026

Kuwait’s military noted that no civilians were wounded in Iran’s attack, which caused additional damage across the country through falling shrapnel from intercepted missiles and drones.

Earlier on Friday, Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) claimed responsibility for previous strikes on Kuwait, claiming it had targeted US military facilities, according to a report by Iran’s semi-official Mehr News.

The IRGC also claimed that it had struck and damaged a US military drone depot in Bahrain in response to US strikes last night.

Iranian official warns Tehran may initiate ‘full-scale offensive operations’ in response to US strikes

On Friday, advisor to Iran’s Supreme Leader Mohsen Rezaei threatened that Tehran will “move into a phase of full-scale offensive operations” if the US continues strikes against Iran for “several more days,” during an interview with Iran’s State TV.

He also warned that if the US attempts to seize any locations, Iran may engage in an “offensive war instead of a defensive one.”

Ariella Roitman and Reuters contributed to this report.

Sunday’s World Cup final will see Argentina face off against Spain, setting up a showdown between two countries that have recently taken sharply opposing views on Israel.

Their stars, too, symbolize the split: Argentina’s Lionel Messi has drawn attention for his past ties to Israel, while Spain’s Lamine Yamal has made headlines by displaying a Palestinian flag after a crucial win. 

Online discourse has now cast the match as something of a proxy for the Middle East conflict, and sparked more than a few anti-Israel and antisemitic conspiracy theories.

“We are getting an Israel versus Palestine World Cup,” wrote content creator Ryan Rozbiani on X/Twitter.

“Argentina is the only team among all participants that is openly and consistently pro-Israel,” wrote one X user, whose bio says they oppose the Islamic Republic of Iran. “That’s why I’m rooting for them.”

Khabib Nurmagomedov, the former MMA fighter and vocal supporter of the Palestinian cause, posted a similar message to his Instagram story and wrote, “I know who I’m supporting.”

Sneako, the streamer who has spread antisemitic conspiracy theories and used Nazi slogans, weighed in a couple of weeks ago: “Argentina is the Israel of South America.”

Argentinian President’s pro-Israel stance

Argentina’s President Javier Milei, a self-described “anarcho-capitalist” who took office in December 2023, has transformed Argentina’s foreign policy toward Israel, shifting the country from a more critical stance to one of its closest allies.

Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez of Spain, a socialist, has emerged as one of Europe’s most outspoken critics of Israel’s military campaign in Gaza and a leading advocate of Palestinian statehood.

Sánchez expressed pride after the Spanish forward Yamal was photographed in May celebrating a crucial win with a Palestinian flag. The 18-year-old FC Barcelona star, whose father is Moroccan, waved the flag while riding on an open-top bus during the club’s celebrations after winning the La Liga title on May 11.

“Lamine has merely expressed the solidarity with Palestine that millions of Spaniards feel,” Sánchez said at the time. “Yet another reason to be proud of him.” 

‘Existence is resistance’

Spanish actor Javier Bardem, a supporter often shown on camera during the team’s World Cup games, is an outspoken advocate for Palestinians. He has held up a Palestinian flag at multiple games during the tournament, and told another attendee during the recent semifinal, “Existence is resistance.”

Spain has been among Europe’s most vocal critics of Israel’s actions in Gaza. In May 2024, it formally recognized a Palestinian state, joining a growing number of European countries advocating greater international recognition of Palestinian self-determination.

The partisan discourse has also taken a dark turn. The CEO of CyberWell, an Israeli nonprofit that tracks antisemitism online, wrote in a statement that the massive stage of the World Cup is being “exploited by those seeking to spread antisemitic conspiracy theories.”

Tal-Or Cohen Montemayor said posts criticizing Messi and Argentina often “do not explicitly mention Jews” but “invoke antisemitic conspiracy theories through indirect references.”

“The targeting of Lionel Messi, the invocation of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, and claims that Jews control FIFA all rely on the same idea: that Jewish people are the secret master manipulators of the world,” said Cohen Montemayor. 

Messi, Argentina’s captain, has largely avoided political statements throughout his career. Ahead of the World Cup semifinal against England, when much of the Argentine media repeatedly linked the match to the Falklands/Malvinas dispute between the countries, Messi kept his comments focused exclusively on football.

His relationship with Israel has instead been shaped through football and personal visits, including trips to Jerusalem, participation in matches involving Israeli teams, and professional ties with Israeli businesses. 

A number of posts criticizing Messi and Argentina include photos of the megastar from his visits to Israel, including a 2013 picture of him at the Western Wall. They also suggest that Argentina, which has won a handful of games with late comebacks, is guaranteed to win – with the help of referees or FIFA more broadly – because of the country’s support of Israel.

Fanning the flames of discord is a perception among other Latin American countries that Argentinians see themselves as distinct from the region, in part because a large majority of its population is descended from European immigrants. An Argentinian club was fined in 2023 after its fans made racist gestures toward fans of a Brazilian team. In 2024, Argentina players came under fire after they were heard chanting about the French squad: “They play for France, but their parents are from Angola. Their mother is from Cameroon, while their father is from Nigeria. But their passport says French.” 

Both countries’ history with Jews is complicated and at times fraught: Argentina, which attracted substantial Jewish immigration at the turn of the 20th century, also became a refuge for Nazis fleeing defeat and justice after World War II. Jews were disproportionately targeted during the terrors of the country’s Dirty War in the 1970s, and the military regime was seeded with antisemitic beliefs. The investigation into the massive 1994 bombing of the Jewish community center, believed to be the work of Hezbollah, was notoriously mishandled.

Spain since the 1970s has tried to redress its 15th- and 16th-century persecution, mass torture and expulsion of Jews by highlighting the country’s Jewish past and inviting Jewish immigration. Its fascist regime was ostensibly neutral but practically allied with Nazi Germany. More recently, it has reported a spike in antisemitic attacks.

Some Argentinians have shot back at the narrative that theirs is the pro-Israel team. 

“No Argentinian that is a real Argentinian supports Israel,” one supporter said in a widely circulated video taken after the country’s semifinal win against England. “Don’t believe our f***ing president that has been put with money there.”

Others have pointed to Diego Maradona, the late, all-time Argentina soccer great who once told Mahmoud Abbas, “My heart is Palestinian.”

Argentina supporters and Messi loyalists cheered on the country during a recent watch party in Gaza.

In Israel, a recent poll by a magazine found that Argentina was the clear favorite among Israeli World Cup viewers, named by 38% of respondents as the team they hope wins the tournament. 

Jewish entertainer and podcaster Jonah Platt offered a breakdown of “the Jew view” of the final four World Cup teams – Argentina, Spain, France and England – earlier this week, giving Argentina the highest score of “who Jews should root for.” Spain, whose government is “going for Western Europe’s gold medal in anti-Israel hysteria,” wrote Platt, was ranked last.

The Lod District Court issued an injunction on Thursday blocking a planned Likud vote after accepting a petition filed by the Social Forum affiliated with the National Labor Federation.

The vote, which was scheduled to begin at noon, was intended to determine new rules for selecting the Likud’s candidate list ahead of the election for the 26th Knesset.

Likud officials announced Thursday afternoon that no vote would take place following the court order. Likud legal adviser attorney Ilan Bombach requested that the party convention vote be postponed due to delays in the legal proceedings, while the Likud court convened to discuss the matter.

The Social Forum alleged that the Likud administration had acted in direct violation of a party court ruling by preventing the forum’s proposed election rules from being brought to a vote.

The proposal was intended to ensure that all Likud members, including people with disabilities, could participate in the process.

The court issued a temporary order barring the Likud from holding the vote unless the forum’s proposal was also presented to the delegates, in accordance with a Supreme Court ruling. The petition was filed by attorney Eric Twito.

“This is a victory for common sense,” the Social Forum said. “We will not allow the Likud elections to be stolen. The Social Forum affiliated with the National Labor Federation will continue to serve as the protective vest of the Likud’s 150,000 members.”

Thousands of delegates

The fifth Likud convention had been expected to bring together approximately 4,500 delegates in a vote that could reshape the party’s candidate list and test the balance of power among Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, Likud Central Committee chairman, Health Minister Haim Katz, MK David Bitan, and thousands of party activists.

Polling stations were scheduled to operate from noon until 8 p.m. at 17 locations across Israel. Eligible delegates would have been allowed to vote at any location.

The secret ballot made the result difficult to predict and would have allowed delegates to oppose the proposal without openly confronting Netanyahu.

At the center of the dispute was a set of election rules approved by the Likud Constitution Committee, headed by Katz and supported by Netanyahu.

The proposal would grant the Likud chairman eight reserved positions on the party list, in slots 3, 5, 9, 11, 15, 18, 26, and 31.

Six of those positions would fall within the top 20, pushing candidates elected in the primaries further down the list.

The proposal represented a retreat from Netanyahu’s initial demand for as many as 11 reserved positions, including five in the top 10.

At one point, Likud officials assessed that delays in agreeing on the system could result in the cancellation of the primaries and the establishment of a committee to appoint the party’s candidates.

The proposal would also introduce significant changes to the structure of the candidate list, including redistributing district slots and guaranteeing representation.

It would allow ministers, deputy ministers, and incumbent MKs to compete in district races, a provision that has drawn strong opposition from party activists.

District slots have traditionally provided new candidates with a path into the Knesset while preserving geographic representation.

Allowing incumbent lawmakers to compete for those positions would give an MK concerned about failing to secure a place on the nationwide list the option to run in a smaller, potentially more favorable district race.

Such candidates would compete against activists who have spent years building local support.

Opponents argue that combining reserved positions with the opening of district races to incumbent lawmakers would significantly limit Likud members’ influence over the final list.

The proposal also includes guaranteed representation for women, young people, immigrants, and other groups.

Although the primaries would formally remain in place, critics argue that fewer viable positions would be determined through the nationwide vote.

Ahead of the scheduled vote, Bitan released a video urging delegates to reject the proposals.

“The proposals today are Haim Katz’s proposals, which he pressured the prime minister to bring to a vote,” said Bitan.

“Anyone who loves the Likud and protects democracy in the movement is voting today against the proposals at the convention,” he added.

Bitan noted that if the proposal were rejected, Netanyahu could present a new plan that was not adopted “under pressure from Haim Katz.”

He also argued that eight high-ranking reserved positions would effectively amount to “an appointments committee in practice.”

Bitan does not oppose granting the Likud chairman the authority to reserve positions in principle.

During the negotiations, he promoted a more limited proposal that would give Netanyahu three viable reserved positions, in slots 2, 6, and 16, as well as two additional positions in slots 39 and 48.

His proposal also called for regular primaries and for district positions to remain reserved for new candidates.

Bitan: No ‘blank check’ for Likud chairman

Bitan argued that the party chairman should not be given a “blank check” without delegates knowing who the intended candidates were, what electoral value they would bring, and which incumbent lawmakers would be pushed into nonviable positions.

Tensions escalated during a meeting of the Likud Constitution Committee, where Bitan warned against the “political elimination” of incumbent lawmakers.

Netanyahu responded, according to those present, that Bitan should run for Likud leader and see how many Knesset seats he could deliver.

Bitan became angry after details of the exchange were leaked to the media in real time. He blamed Netanyahu’s associates and left the meeting.

The committee later approved Katz’s proposal by a majority vote.

Although the plan has sometimes been described as “Netanyahu’s proposal,” it was developed through cooperation between Netanyahu and Katz.

Netanyahu demanded the reserved positions, while Katz, who heads both the Likud Central Committee and the Constitution Committee, drafted the mechanism and advanced it through the party’s institutions.

As part of the negotiations, Netanyahu visited Katz’s home after Katz had expressed reservations about the original demand for more reserved positions.

Bitan has sought to persuade delegates that voting against the proposal would not amount to voting against Netanyahu.

He argues that his campaign is directed against an arrangement that Katz imposed on the Likud chairman.

The approach is also intended to give delegates political space to oppose the proposal without appearing to challenge Netanyahu directly.

The dispute comes amid a longstanding power struggle between Katz and Bitan, two of the Likud’s most influential figures.

The two have competed in recent months for control of the party convention’s institutions and the Likud constitution.

Bitan demonstrated considerable strength in internal branch elections, while Katz retains formal control of the Central Committee and the Constitution Committee.

Supporters of the proposal argue that Netanyahu needs flexibility to refresh the list, recruit figures with electoral appeal, and facilitate political alliances ahead of the election.

Gideon Sa’ar is among the names mentioned as a possible candidate for a reserved position.

Supporters view the eight positions as a reasonable compromise compared with Netanyahu’s original demand and with the earlier possibility of canceling the primaries altogether.

The plan has also caused unease among ministers and MKs who are not aligned with Bitan.

Many have avoided publicly confronting Netanyahu, but each reserved position near the top of the list pushes other candidates further down.

An MK who secures the 20th position in the primaries could fall into the 30s once reserved positions, district slots, and guaranteed representation are added.

The secret ballot has therefore caused greater concern in Netanyahu’s office than an open vote, since delegates who publicly support the proposal could vote against it in private.

If the proposal is approved, the primaries are expected to take place on August 17 under the new rules.

If it is rejected, the Likud will face a brief and pressured effort to formulate an alternative system, with Bitan expected to push for a more limited proposal.

One possible compromise would preserve Netanyahu’s reserved positions while rejecting the provision allowing incumbent MKs to compete in district races.

The result would reflect more than a disagreement over the structure of the candidate list.

Approval would strengthen Netanyahu and Katz and demonstrate their control over the new convention.

Rejection would give Bitan, concerned lawmakers, and district activists a significant political victory, while showing that the Likud leadership can no longer assume that the party’s institutions will automatically support every proposal.

“Likud chairman Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu insists that all Likud members be able to exercise their right to vote,” the Likud Party said in response. “In light of the fact that legal delays disrupted the voting process, and many Likud members did not exercise their right to vote, Likud chairman Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu instructed the Likud administration not to hold the vote today and to set a date in the near future for a new vote.”

The 43rd Jerusalem Film Festival, which began on July 9 and runs through July 19, had a far more festive atmosphere than the previous two editions, which took place while the war with Hamas continued and Israeli hostages were still held.

So many screenings this year have sold out, and there was an excitement in the air, beginning with the opening screening at the Sultan’s Pool amphitheater, where 6,000 movie buffs watched the Israeli premiere of Moshe Rosenthal’s coming-of-age drama, Tell Me Everything.

The garden behind the Jerusalem Cinematheque, where the festival was held (with additional screenings at the Lev Smadar theater), was filled with people drinking cocktails and having freshly made pizzas throughout the festival.

But, as we all know, the war isn’t exactly over, and title cards before each screening told audiences where to take shelter if a missile alert were heard during the festival, and several new Israeli films grappled with the war.

One of these was the documentary Find Me, Okay?, by Yula Gidron, which was shown in the Diamond Competition for Full-Length Israeli Documentaries, about the kidnapping and murder of the hostage Eden Yerushalmi from the Nova Festival, and the ordeal her family endured while she was held in Gaza and how their suffering continues.

The title comes from the words Yerushalmi uttered to a police dispatcher as she fled the terrorists, and the movie details her family’s attempt to do just that.

Yerushalmi, who was 24 when she was kidnapped, was held for 11 months and spent much of that time in the tunnels alongside Carmel Gat, Hersh Goldberg-Polin, Alex Lobanov, Almog Sarusi, and Ori Danino, the group that Hersh’s mother, Rachel Goldberg-Polin, dubbed “The Beautiful Six.”

Death of ‘The Beautiful Six’ at the hands of Hamas

They were shot to death at the end of August 2024, and their deaths sparked one of the largest demonstrations of the war, as about half a million people took to the streets all over Israel.

The film focuses on the struggle of Yerushalmi’s mother and sisters to keep her name in people’s minds. “Eden asked us to fight for her. If you were there, wouldn’t you want people to fight for you?” asked one of her sisters.

She also noted the absurdity of how they were urged to go to the US to lobby for her release, where American diplomats told them to go home and pressure the Israeli government. This close-knit family pulled together in the face of the agonizing situation, and their courage is as heartbreaking as it is inspiring.

Another film in the Diamond Competition, Hanan Brandes and Matan Sacofsky’s Good Morning, Gaza, a play on the title of the Robin Williams classic, Good Morning, Vietnam, focuses on a reserve tank driver who broadcasts an improvised podcast to fellow soldiers and tells their stories through radio interviews and raw combat footage from combat.

The movies in the Haggiag Competition for Full-Length Israeli Feature Films are probably the most closely watched in the festival, and those shown there have gone on to receive Oscar nominations and awards, including the Golden Lion at the Venice Film Festival.

The war was present in different ways in several of these movies. Two out of the six movies were about Israelis in Berlin, and these movies, Assaf Machnes’s Where To, and Hadas Ben Aroyo’s I Can’t Say No to Myself, were set just before and after the war began, and the characters find different ways to cope with the fallout from a conflict they would rather forget.

Where To is a two-character movie that explores the bond that forms between Hassan (Ehab Salami, who won an Ophir Award for Eran Kolirin’s Let It Be Morning) and Amir (Ido Tako, who has starred in such films as Tell Me Everything, The Vanishing Soldier, and the Netflix drama, Mary).

Hassan is a hard-working Palestinian cab driver who grew up in a village near Nazareth but had to relocate to Jenin, and eventually left for Germany to earn a better living. Amir is an Israeli whose father committed suicide and who came to Berlin to join his German lover.

Both are lonely and are searching for something to make them feel complete, and the friendship that develops between them is credible and touching. It shows a scene of young people partying in the city that runs parallel to the hard-working immigrants just trying to get by.

Humor in drama

The movie also contains what was an incredibly funny scene, when Hassan is talking to his cousin on speakerphone, while two Israeli passengers (Dov Navon and Sarit Vino Elad) are on board. Hassan and his cousin tease them by dropping words like “jihad” into their conversation, which has nothing to do with politics, and it’s funny to watch them try to keep their cool as they are actually terrified.

The scene everyone is going to talk about from I Can’t Say No to Myself features a young Israeli woman wearing nothing but panties, in a room full of three European men she is planning to have sex with, who sings “Hatikvah,” translating the lyrics into English and stumbling over the word for “yearning.”

It’s much funnier and less shocking than it sounds, partly because the characters spend much of the movie nude or in their underwear, so you are used to it by then. I’ll have more to say about this movie when it is released, but, like Where To, it is effective in conveying the aimlessness and hopes of young Israelis in Berlin, who want to forget what is going on at home but can’t quite manage it.

Two of the Haggiag movies are quiet, slice-of-life dramas that focus on people who often fall through the cracks. Ruthy Pribar’s What is to Come?, which had its world premiere at the Tribeca Festival, tells the story of a widow, Yehudit (Ronit Yudkevitch), whose farm has gone bankrupt.

Alone in her grief and feeling helpless to cope with her debts, she flees to Eilat, where she works as a maid in a small hotel run by Eli (Yaakov Zada Daniel), and bonds with a family of foreign workers.

Efrat Corem’s Heart of Gold is about a withdrawn bus inspector in Ashkelon, traumatized by horrific childhood abuse and neglect, who finds an abandoned baby and takes him home rather than going to the police. Chen Amsalem Zaguri, Israeli Atias, and Menashe Noy star in it.

The final two feature films were from communities whose voices are heard less often on screen: Arabs and the haredim (ultra-Orthodox).

Amal is a collaboration between directors David Ofek and Nahd Bashir and screenwriter Sharon Azulay Eyal, and tells the story of a brave woman (Rebecca Esmeralda Telhami), who lives in an Arab village in the north and rebels against the blood feuds that have taken the lives of so many of the villagers and tries to save both her family and the whole village’s future.

Shuli Rand and Gidi Dar have collaborated on many films, notably Ushpizin, and their latest movie, The Wedding Entertainer (The Tale of Moishe Badhan), may be their best ever.

The fable-like movie, which premiered at the Tribeca Festival, is a meticulously plotted, beautifully acted comedy-drama about a once-famous haredi wedding entertainer (Rand) whose career was derailed by alcoholism, and his search for redemption. American actor/comic Elon Gold co-stars, and even those who have no knowledge of this world will be charmed.

The Israeli movies shown at the festival will be released in theaters and shown on television in Israel throughout the coming year, and many will also be shown at film festivals, mainly Jewish and Israeli ones, around the world.

When Vincent Grashaw, who will be a guest of the Jerusalem Film Festival this week, first read the screenplay for Gangland, a crime drama starring Lou Diamond Phillips as a veteran tribal police chief, he was immediately struck by how authentic the world of the film felt.

“It felt wholly authentic and lived-in,” Grashaw said in an interview ahead of his visit to Jerusalem, where he will present the movie. “That’s how it registered to me – very believable.”

Set on the fictional Thunderstone Reservation in the American Southwest, Gangland examines a Native American community struggling with poverty, drug trafficking, gang violence, and the weight of generations of trauma.

Phillips plays Teddy, the head of a small tribal police force, who is joined by Sandra, an officer transferred from outside the community and carrying her own troubled history.

Phillips, who was a rising star in the 1980s in such movies as Stand and Deliver and La Bamba, gives the performance of his career as the troubled but devoted cop.

Grashaw, who previously visited Israel for a wedding, found the script while browsing the Black List, a website where screenwriters can upload their work. The screenplay had not appeared on the organization’s prestigious annual list of highly regarded unproduced scripts. It was simply the first screenplay uploaded by its writer, Zach Montague.

When Grashaw contacted him, he learned that Montague was a Canadian police officer who had worked in communities on reservations.

‘It just felt very real’

“That made a lot of sense because, like I said, it just felt very real,” Grashaw said.

The director had already been interested in gang culture and in the forces that lead people into violent organizations.

“I’ve always been curious about how people can fall into that certain way of life, which is violent and ugly in a lot of ways,” he said. “What was the appeal to it? I was always interested in why people make those decisions.”

Although the script was originally set in Canada, Grashaw and his collaborators adapted it to the United States, where tribal police departments operate under a complex system of agreements and jurisdictions involving local sheriffs and other law-enforcement agencies.

“Sometimes they help each other, and sometimes there’s conflict,” he said. “That’s a real thing in the treaties there, and we thought it was really interesting.”

The filmmakers considered setting the story on a specific reservation, such as Pine Ridge in South Dakota, which has faced serious gang problems. But consultant Marcus Red Thunder, who had previously worked with Phillips on the television series Longmire, advised them not to identify the community with one particular tribe.

“He said, ‘Make it Native American – like it could be any tribe,’” Grashaw recalled.

Red Thunder helped create the fictional Thunderstone Reservation and advised the production on the script, locations, policing, and numerous cultural details.

The film was ultimately shot in Oklahoma, with Native American performers and community members involved both in front of and behind the camera. Some were experienced actors, while others had never performed professionally.

Michael Tubby, who plays gang member Luke Spencer, was appearing in his first movie. Grashaw said Tubby had once belonged to a gang and had served time in prison.

“Lou Diamond Phillips was his hero,” he said. “And here he is acting in the rain opposite him.”

Grashaw acknowledged that he approached the film as an outsider.

“I’m not Native American,” he said. “But I have a curiosity inherently. I want to make movies where I don’t necessarily know the world. I want to inject myself into learning it.”

He described his method as investigative and collaborative. While filmmakers are often advised to tell only stories they know personally, Grashaw said he is also attracted to scripts that offer entry into unfamiliar lives.

‘You fall in love with it’

“You fall in love with it, and then you make it your own, and you learn, and you collaborate,” he said. “I really enjoyed that process on this one.”

One memorable image in the film is a herd of bison, shown both during the story and again near the end.

Grashaw filmed the animals on the Cheyenne and Arapaho reservation after witnessing a similar moment while scouting locations.

“I was like, ‘Please let me film this. This is just beautiful,’” he said. “It’s emotional, actually, to see that, because it’s such a part of their culture.”

At the center of the movie is Phillips, whom Grashaw described as both an exceptional actor and an unusually generous presence on the set.

“He’s a gem,” Grashaw said. “He levels everybody up. He’s such a good guy and really generous to everyone on set.”

The film’s distributors are mounting an awards campaign on his behalf.

“It is his best performance, in my opinion,” he said. “I think a lot of people are seeing that.”

The director was equally enthusiastic about Elisha Pratt, who plays the menacing gang leader Richie Black Lance.

“When those choices are limited, it’s easy to judge,” Grashaw said. “But I at least wanted people to understand where he was coming from and how you can fall into that sort of life.”

That moral ambiguity extends throughout the film. Teddy and Sandra may be the protagonists, but they are not always correct, while even the most threatening characters occasionally have understandable motives.

“Everybody is sort of right and wrong at times,” Grashaw said. “Maybe the heroes and the good guys are right 80% of the time, but wrong 20% of the time.”

Sandra also acts as the audience’s guide into the reservation, but her own experience of drugs, guilt, and loss complicates her perspective. Teddy, Grashaw suggested, may know more about her past than he initially admits, and hires her partly because he senses that her instincts resemble his own.

Beyond the film itself, Grashaw hopes Gangland will create opportunities for its Native American cast members, including Pratt, James Whitecloud, and Riker Sixkiller.

He would especially like to see them cast in stories that are not defined entirely by Native American identity.

“These are fantastic actors,” he said. “I hope their careers flourish as ordinary people, too. I don’t see enough Native American actors in movies that don’t revolve around the theme of their identity. Why not cast these actors in roles that are just everyday life? I hope that happens.”

Gangland is scheduled to be screened on Friday, July 17, at 6:45 p.m. (followed by a Q&A with director Vincent Grashaw) and on Saturday, July 18, at 9:30 p.m.

Foreign Minister Gideon Sa’ar revealed links between Global Somud Flotilla activists and Hamas during a conference on the rise of political terrorism, led by US Secretary of State Marco Rubio in Washington on Thursday.

Sa’ar described the links between radical left-wing political movements in the West and Islamist terrorist organizations, asserting that the alliance between extremists is “a real challenge to the values ​​of democracy and freedom.”

He highlighted the Global Sumud Flotilla as a prime example of how terrorist organizations hide behind leftist activist movements. 

The flotilla attempted to breach Israel’s legal naval blockade on the Gaza Strip multiple times under the guise of attempting to deliver humanitarian aid, but, according to Sa’ar, carried no aid materials.

Sa’ar asserted that the flotilla actually aimed to serve the interests of terrorist organizations, mainly Hamas in Gaza. 

בדברי בכנס שרי החוץ בוושינגטון על הטרור הפוליטי חשפתי את הקשרים בין פעילי המשטים מהשמאל הרדיקלי לבין חמאס וארגוני טרור אחרים.

In my remarks at the Foreign Ministers’ Conference in Washington on political terrorism, I exposed the links between activists involved in the flotillas… pic.twitter.com/W2w0GUvFvB

— Gideon Sa’ar | גדעון סער (@gidonsaar) July 16, 2026

“Hamas documents seized by the IDF indicate financing, operational involvement, and covert ownership of the vessels through a Spanish shell company,” he told fellow foreign ministers present at the conference. 

He added that the organization behind the flotilla’s trips was operated through a network connected to Hamas and the Muslim Brotherhood, “thereby giving legitimacy and civilian cover to terrorist organizations and their goals.”

He accused such organizations of “whitewashing of terrorism and its goals” by using left-wing activists to recruit participants, mobilize student groups, and create public pressure. 

Western media outlets, such as the BBC and The New York Times, have fallen for the strategy of using activists to obtain legitimacy for terror-backed movements, Sa’ar said.

Sa’ar highlights Hamas, Hezbollah-linked flotilla activists

Sa’ar specifically highlighted two flotilla activists, Zaher Birawi and Tiago Avila, for their ties to designated terrorist organizations.

According to a 2021 document signed by former Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh, who was assassinated in Iran in 2024, Birawi is a leading Hamas operative who was involved in organizing flotillas for over 15 years and is the head of Hamas’s European wing. The document, Sa’ar stated, was uncovered from Hamas’s terror tunnels underneath Gaza.

Sa’ar also shared a photo of Avila, a Brazilian citizen and leading pro-Palestinian activist, at the funeral of Hezbollah Secretary General and terrorist leader Hassan Nasrallah.

“The evidence is clear,” Sa’ar asserted. “We have documented direct links between the flotilla’s organizers and terrorist organizations, including Hamas, Islamic Jihad, Hezbollah, and the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine. Senior Hamas activists are running these campaigns from Britain and other Western capitals.”

The US completed its seventh consecutive night of strikes against Iran in the early morning hours of Saturday, US Central Command (CENTCOM) announced in a statement on X/Twitter.

According to CENTCOM, US forces struck Iranian surveillance sites, military logistics infrastructure, underground weapons storage, and naval capabilities.

Fighter jets, drones, and warships were used to carry out the strikes.

On Friday night, when announcing the start of the strikes, CENTCOM stated that the attack was “designed to continue degrading Iranian military capabilities.”

https://t.co/7V8iGAGbGh

— U.S. Central Command (@CENTCOM) July 18, 2026

In a separate statement, CENTCOM also announced that since reimposing the US’s blockade on Iranian ports along the Strait of Hormuz, US forces have redirected four commercial vessels, disabled one vessel, and boarded an additional vessel to ensure compliance with the blockade.

Shortly after CENTCOM announced the strikes, Iranian state media outlets reported that multiple explosions were heard in the central Iranian city of Yazd and that areas of the southwestern city of Ahvaz were attacked by US missiles.

US destroys IRGC surveillance tower used to target vessels in Strait of Hormuz

On Friday, CENTCOM announced that US forces destroyed a surveillance tower along Iran’s Gulf of Oman coastline, part of a surveillance network used for decades by the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) to track and target commercial vessels transiting the Strait of Hormuz. 

According to CENTCOM, the tower’s destruction “directly degrades IRGC’s ability to coordinate attacks on innocent civilian crew members.” 

The strike on the Chah Bahar Shahid Kalantari Port surveillance tower came as part of the US’s most recent wave of strikes against Iran conducted early Friday morning. 

The US also denied the IRGC’s claim that they had attacked a US special operations command center and captured or killed US soldiers at al-Tanf in Syria in retaliation for the strikes. 

“Fact: No US troops in the region have recently been killed or captured,” CENTCOM wrote in a post. 

Iran threatens ‘full-scale offensive operations’ if US continues strikes

On Friday, advisor to Iran’s Supreme Leader Mohsen Rezaei threatened that Tehran will “move into a phase of full-scale offensive operations” if the US continues strikes against Iran for “several more days,” during an interview with Iran’s State TV.

He also warned that if the US attempts to seize any locations, Iran may engage in an “offensive war instead of a defensive one.”

The IDF detained several Israeli civilians on Friday for illegally crossing into Syrian territory, the military said, following a search operation.

The Israelis, who had crossed from the Majdal Shams area on Thursday, were transferred to the Israel Police for further processing.

Also on Friday, the IDF detained multiple Israelis who attempted to cross into Syria from the Golan Heights, the military added.

The military said that it “strongly condemns” the crossings and attempted crossings, saying that such actions “divert IDF soldiers’ attention from their ongoing operational activities and compromise security.”

“Such actions constitute a criminal offense that endangers civilians and IDF soldiers,” the military added, noting that it expects disciplinary actions against the suspects on the part of the Israeli law enforcement authorities.

Illegal crossings a growing problem for the IDF

The incidents follow several similar incidents throughout July, including as recently as Monday, when the IDF detained several Israelis following an attempted crossing in Syria.

The IDF noted in its statement that it has identified a recent increase in illegal border crossing attempts into Syria, both successful and unsuccessful.

Last week, right-wing “HaBashan Pioneers” movement activists attempted to cross the border in an attempt to establish a Jewish settlement in the area.

About 100 such activists were detained by the IDF after crossing into the Syrian side of Mount Hermon on July 5.

As the International Criminal Court (ICC) prepares to vote on the fate of chief prosecutor Karim Khan following accusations of sexual misconduct, one of his alleged victims spoke publicly for the first time about the misconduct in an interview with CNN on Thursday.

A Malaysian lawyer identified only by her first name, Sarah, who has worked for the ICC since 2017, told CNN that the alleged sexual misconduct lasted for over a year after she started working as Khan’s assistant in February 2023.

CNN stated that it had obtained a leaked copy of a United Nations investigative report into the allegations against Khan, in which Sarah claimed that Khan had repeatedly sexually harassed her, subjecting her to non-consensual sexual acts such as groping, kissing, and penetration.

In the interview, Sarah asserted that she never wanted to be forced into this position and described feeling “humiliated” by what she stated were escalating attempts at sexual engagement and violations of emotional boundaries from Khan.

Sarah stated that she froze at times and was afraid to reject Khan’s advances for fear of retaliation that could impact her career and her work visa, which allowed her to live in the Netherlands with her husband and son.

“There is no way for something to be consensual when you have such a power disparity,” she told CNN. “What I think many people don’t understand is that Mr. Khan was not just my boss, he was everyone’s boss.”

Sarah stated that even in early interactions with Khan, he behaved in a manner that made her uncomfortable. Khan reportedly continued to escalate to more overt actions, including entering her hotel room late at night and groping her after pressuring her to join him for a “nap.” 

CNN stated that the UN investigative report found evidence that showed a “factual basis” for the accusations based on reports from Sarah, her colleagues, and witnesses to the alleged abuse.

The report detailed further claims that Khan non-consensually tried to sexually touch Sarah in Khan’s office, his home, and on business trips.

Sarah also alleged that after colleagues expressed concern over her well-being, she told them about the alleged inappropriate conduct. She then reportedly faced pressure from Khan and another ICC employee to write a letter retracting her allegations.

Khan denies allegations of sexual misconduct

Khan has repeatedly denied the accusations made against him and was suspended from his role in June, after months of investigation into the claims.

Khan previously disputed that he had any relationship with Sarah, reportedly telling UN investigators that he “completely denied engaging in any harassment, abuse of authority, inappropriate behavior whatsoever.”

Sarah denies that her claims were a part of alleged Israeli efforts to discredit Khan

After accusations against Khan first emerged, some speculated that Sarah’s allegations were part of an Israeli effort to discredit Khan, who was in the process of seeking arrest warrants for Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and former defense minister Yoav Gallant in relation to the Israel-Hamas War.

Sarah denied that she had worked as a “state actor” and, according to the UN report, “multiple credible witnesses dismissed the notion that she was a spy.” One ICC employee reportedly told investigators that the accusations against Sarah were “a load of bull.” 

Sarah noted that to work for the ICC, she underwent security clearance investigations, telling CNN that  “If ever there was even a hint of suspicion that I was a state agent of any kind, I would have been dismissed.”

“I think many parties have, for their own agenda, conflated the two things,” she told CNN. “That conflation has only helped to distract and deflect from the validity of that complaint.”

I have just returned from Haifa, where I delivered the closing address at a conference on antisemitism that had long been planned and repeatedly postponed because of the war.

There were scholars from 20 countries, 500 participants, and 220 speakers, among them the following three notable mentions: Deborah Lipstadt, who served as the United States Special Envoy to Monitor and Combat Antisemitism until US President Donald Trump took office.

Dina Porat, the eminent historian of the Holocaust, former chief historian of Yad Vashem, and one of the architects of the internationally accepted definition of antisemitism.

Cochav Elkayam-Levy, the young Israeli jurist and expert in international law who, the day after October 7, began documenting the sexual crimes committed by Hamas against Israeli women.

This conference, organized by the Comper Center for the Study of Antisemitism and Racism at the University of Haifa in partnership with the London Centre for the Study of Contemporary Antisemitism and Gratz College, was the largest annual academic gathering devoted to the subject.

Its proceedings ranged from the anti-Zionist obsession of major international organizations and the corruption of language that follows it to the destructive role of social media in amplifying the phenomenon, and the effects of artificial intelligence on the human mind.

It was a great honor for me to deliver its concluding address.

I recalled, of course – as had all those who spoke before me – the unprecedented wave of hatred that has swept across the world since October 7.

But I also insisted that the battle is far from lost.

I reminded the audience that the Jewish people have many allies: among Catholics since Vatican II, among Evangelicals since the Six Day War of 1967, among moderate Muslims, and among liberals of integrity everywhere.

And I dwelt at length on the tour of American campuses that I undertook a year ago, where I found that it was entirely possible to shake the certainties of lecture halls convinced that Israel is a colonial state, founded on apartheid, and potentially genocidal.

At times, I reminded them that Israel is, historically, a decolonized nation, born of one of the first great decolonial movements of the postwar era, wrested from the leading colonial power of the time, the British Empire.

At other moments, I showed that a state which grants equal civil rights to all its citizens, and in which one citizen out of five is Arab and often openly hostile to the very principles of Zionism, is the exact opposite of an apartheid regime.

And then, finally, I explained that I reported on one genocide at the age of 20 in Bangladesh, and another at 60 in Darfur; that I have reflected extensively on several others – the Armenian genocide, the extermination of the Tutsi in Rwanda, and, of course, the Holocaust. 

I further explained that it is not only morally obscene but logically absurd to speak of genocide in a war where warnings are issued before strikes, humanitarian corridors are opened every day, and ceasefires are constantly being negotiated.

And the fact is that these arguments of reason had an effect. 

Folly wavered.

And, sometimes, an entire auditorium changed its mind.

In short, in Haifa I delivered a speech of combat – but also, I believe, of hope.

Politics and profound injustice

And yet.

Of course, there were Israelis in the audience.

They came from the Right and the Left.

Supporters and opponents of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

Among them were Jews, of course, but also – as Haifa is that singular city where different communities do not merely live side by side but share the same neighborhoods, the same streets, the same apartment buildings – Druze, Kurds, and Arabs.

What struck me was that, as they listened, these Israelis remained possessed by a feeling stronger than any argument: the feeling of being the victims of a profound injustice.

Of being cast, without examination or judgment, beyond the pale of the democratic nations. Of being boycotted – whether they were scholars, writers, filmmakers, musicians, or simply students – regardless of their individual opinions.

Of being betrayed, or on the verge of betrayal, by great democracies whose right to criticize this or that Israeli government they readily accepted, but which they had never imagined would go so far as to suspend their support, restrict arms deliveries, and leave them alone to face the enemy.

The feeling, among those who had all too rashly placed their hopes in Trump, that they could be traded away overnight for a Qatari mess of pottage or a deal with Tehran.

And then, whatever new alliances might emerge, there was the vertigo inspired by an America caught in the double whirlwind of a radical Left that would not mind “globalizing the Intifada,” and a MAGA Right outraged at the prospect of being dragged into yet another “Jewish war.”

I was also there to present the Hebrew language edition of The Solitude of Israel.

And I found myself thinking that I could almost have given the book a different title: The Sadness of Israel.

Content warning: This article contains disturbing references and descriptions of sexual assault. Reader discretion is advised.

A pediatrician at a Tel Aviv clinic has been charged with repeatedly committing indecent acts against an employee over several months, including incidents that allegedly involved the use of force, according to an indictment filed this week.

The indictment alleges that the doctor’s conduct escalated from unwanted touching and kissing to physically restraining the employee and committing sexual acts against her despite her repeated resistance and demands that he stop.

74-year-old Lod resident Merabi Janshvili was charged with indecent acts and indecent acts by force. The indictment was filed in the Tel Aviv Magistrate’s Court by attorney Sharon Har Zion of the Tel Aviv District Attorney’s Office.

Janshvili worked as a pediatrician at a Clalit Health Services clinic in Tel Aviv, where the complainant began working in 2025.

Shortly after she began working at the clinic, Janshvili allegedly started touching her on numerous occasions. According to the indictment, he stroked her head, shoulders, and face and touched her back, all against her will and for the purpose of sexual arousal, gratification, or humiliation. 

The alleged conduct later escalated. Janshvili initially kissed the complainant on the back of her neck, according to the indictment. On later occasions, he allegedly pulled her toward him as she passed him in the clinic, stroked her face, and kissed her against her will.

During another incident, Janshvili allegedly closed the door after the complainant entered his office, hugged her, and kissed her on the face.

Janshvili ignored victim’s attempts to resist

The indictment states that he ignored her resistance and attempts to free herself from his grasp, telling her, “give me a little more.” She was able to leave the office only after breaking free.

On January 29, 2025, the complainant entered Janshvili’s office after examining his ear. He allegedly asked her to close the door, pushed her toward the examination table, lifted her shirt, touched her beneath her bra, and committed indecent acts against her.

He then allegedly placed her hand on his genitals over his clothing, against her will. Despite her repeated requests that he stop, he continued and only later allowed her to leave, according to the indictment.

During another incident, the complainant entered Janshvili’s office to deliver a document to him. He allegedly instructed her to close the door, hugged her, kissed her against her will, and asked her to touch his genitals.

When she refused, he allegedly placed her hand on his genitals over his clothing. He then pushed her toward the examination table and continued to hug and kiss her.

The complainant escaped only after telling him that patients were waiting outside and that she had to return to work.

In February 2025, Janshvili allegedly approached the complainant while she was standing near a photocopier, kissed her on the face against her will, and left the area.

Additional indictment against Janshvili

Another incident allegedly occurred shortly before Purim that year, after a patient asked Janshvili to provide her with documents.

When the complainant entered his office, he allegedly closed the door, hugged her, pinned her against a wall, and lifted her shirt and bra.

He also allegedly touched her breasts and genital area over her clothing. When she begged him to stop, he replied, “no,” and attempted to move her toward the examination table.

According to the indictment, he released her only after she said she had to return to work.

On March 30, 2025, the clinic manager entered Janshvili’s office during one of the alleged incidents. The complainant moved away from him, while he stroked her shoulder and kissed her on the face, according to the indictment.

When asked about his actions, Janshvili replied, “I am asking you not to touch me anymore,” before leaving the office, the indictment states.

The State Attorney’s Office alleges that the acts were committed repeatedly and without the complainant’s free consent. Some of the alleged offenses involved the use of force and were carried out for the purpose of sexual arousal, gratification, or humiliation.

The over 150-year-old antislavery documents currently on display at the Lincoln Memorial are being removed after exposure to unsafe temperatures, The Washington Post reported on Thursday, citing a spokesperson for philanthropist Kenneth C. Griffin.

“The National Park Service (NPS) has informed us that the documents on view for the Lincoln Memorial celebration were exposed to temperatures modestly above the optimal conditions for long-term preservation,” the spokesperson said in a Wednesday statement to The Washington Post.

“Out of an abundance of caution, these sacred documents are being temporarily relocated while the National Park Service resolves the environmental challenges driven by the heatwave engulfing Washington DC.”

Griffin had bought the documents – rare copies of the Emancipation Proclamation and the 13th Amendment to the Constitution, bearing the original signatures of Abraham Lincoln and other American Civil War-era officials – at auction for a reported $18 million in 2025. 

Griffin’s copy of the Emancipation Proclamation is one of 27 remaining copies printed for the 1864 Great Central Fair in Philadelphia. His copy of the 13th Amendment, which outlawed slavery in the United States, is one of only 15 known signed copies.

The original documents are housed in the National Archive.

Griffin’s copies have been on loan at the Lincoln Memorial’s new undercroft exhibition since its opening in late June, in honor of the United States’s 250th anniversary. Their display was slated to be open through June 2027.

The $69 million exhibit takes up some 15,000 square feet in the basement of the memorial, allowing visitors a glance into the site’s concrete foundations while telling the story of how it was built.

Documents will be moved to a climate-controlled facility

The documents will be moved to a climate-controlled facility. There, they will undergo a detailed inspection to identify the extent of the damage, a person familiar with the matter shared with The Washington Post.

The move comes after City Cast DC reported on Wednesday, citing NPS employees, that the screens designed to protect the documents from light are defective, and that the temperature inside the display case has repeatedly risen to over 80 degrees Fahrenheit.

On its website, the National Archives’ recommended temperature for historic documents should stay between 65 and 75 degrees Fahrenheit.

The temperature in Washington however rose into the 90s (Fahrenheit) on Wednesday, and is expected to rise to over 100𝇈F on Thursday. 

“The National Park Service is committed to the preservation of these historic resources and would not display them if their preservation or security were compromised,” said a National Park Service Spokespereson in a Wednesday statement to The Washington Post. “Once this work is complete, the documents will be returned. Our absolute priority is their long-term preservation.”

Responsibility to strengthen the American promise

“Most Americans know these documents from textbooks. Very few ever have the chance to stand in front of them and reflect on what they changed,” explained National Park Foundation President and CEO Jeff Reinbold at the opening of the exhibit in June. “Not only for the nation, but for millions of individual lives.”

“Bringing them to the Lincoln Memorial this year creates a powerful connection between the ideals carved into this monument and the unfinished American story they represent, he said and thanked Griffin for “helping make that experience possible for visitors from around the world.”

“Since our founding, America has been on a journey to form a more perfect union,” said Griffin at the exhibit opening. “The Emancipation Proclamation and the 13th Amendment marked a profound step forward, abolishing the scourge of slavery and moving the country closer to its founding ideals.”

“As we approach our nation’s 250th anniversary, I am proud to partner with the National Park Foundation to share these sacred documents as a reminder of our ongoing responsibility to strengthen the promise of America.”  

Content warning: This article contains disturbing references and descriptions of sexual assault. Reader discretion is advised.

A Lod mathematics teacher was arrested on Wednesday on suspicion of repeatedly committing sexual offenses against one of his students, according to Israeli media.

The suspect, who is in his 20s, teaches at a recently opened middle school affiliated with a well-known, long-established high school. Police suspect the alleged offenses occurred on several separate occasions and involved the same student.

The suspect linked himself to the alleged offenses during questioning after investigators presented him with some of the evidence collected in the case, Walla reported.

Following a court hearing, the teacher’s attorney, Rotem Sari, said his client “claims that the relations were consensual.” When Walla asked how consent could be claimed when the alleged victim was a child, Sari replied, “At this stage, the matters are being examined.”

Police opened an investigation in recent days after receiving information about the alleged offenses at the Tel Aviv North Police Station in the Yarkon District.

Investigators carried out a series of evidence-gathering measures before obtaining a warrant for the teacher’s arrest. He was subsequently arrested and taken in for questioning.

The Tel Aviv Magistrate’s Court on Thursday extended the suspect’s detention by five days at the request of police to allow the investigation to continue.

Police request publication of suspect’s name

Police also asked the court to permit publication of his name to determine whether there are additional victims who have not yet filed complaints.

Sari opposed the request, and the court issued a gag order barring the publication of the suspect’s name at this stage.

“This is a teacher who was arrested yesterday on suspicion of engaging in sexual contact with one of his students. There is no dispute that these were consensual acts; there are other issues regarding age and so on. At this stage, this is a very, very preliminary stage, and therefore his name is still prohibited from publication, and the hearing is being held behind closed doors,” Sari said.

“I believe that as the investigation progresses, matters will become clearer and it will become apparent that the situation is not as serious as claimed,” he added. “At this stage, all matters are being examined, including the full nature of the allegations.

“Because the proceedings are at such an early stage, I believe it is too soon to comment,” continued Sari. “It is true that, at this stage, and in light of the preliminary nature of the matter and the existence of reasonable suspicion, his detention was extended by five days.”

Takana Forum director says allegations a breach of trust

Attorney Lili Getz Horowitz, director of the Takana Forum, which was established to combat sexual abuse involving relationships of authority and power, said the allegations represented a serious breach of trust.

“Sexual abuse of a student by an educator is not only a criminal offense, but a profound betrayal of the trust of the child and of society as a whole,” said Horowitz. “If the suspicions are found to be true, this constitutes a serious exploitation of a relationship of authority and power by someone whose role is to educate and serve as a personal example.”

“Precisely because such abuse does not begin in a single moment, but sometimes through the blurring of boundaries, an unusual personal relationship, or conduct that is inconsistent with the role of an educator, it is important to remain alert to every small sign that may indicate improper conduct,” she added. “Open dialogue with children, listening, and the early identification of warning signs can prevent the next incident of abuse and save additional children.” 

Rahm Emanuel, who is exploring a run for the US presidency in 2028, came to Tel Aviv to warn that Israel was losing international legitimacy, that its current trajectory with the Palestinians was unsustainable, and that fundamental changes are needed to preserve the alliance with America. He’s right – but he’s also only telling half the story.

There’s indeed no doubt that Israel, under the leadership of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, is losing the Democratic Party, which has long been a friend and which may soon be back in power, whether in Congress or at the White House. Indeed, Netanyahu’s Israel – with its hubris, indifference to the world and vulgar populism – is also rapidly losing the Republican Party; the death of Sen. Lindsey Graham badly weakens its non-antisemitic, non-isolationist wing.

I reject the pedantic argument that says outsiders have no right to lecture. This is a globally connected world in which events in one country can ripple across the planet. In fact, Israel’s mess contributed to the Democratic loss of the White House in 2024.

The problem is not what the former Chicago mayor and Obama official said in his Tel Aviv speech last Wednesday. The problem is what he did not: Israel would have trouble among Democrats no matter what it did, because of a virus that has infected the American Left.

Somewhat centrist Democrats like Emanuel would like to be able to support Israel again wholeheartedly. But the “Progressive” faction views Israel as a totem for everything it opposes: colonialism, the idea of Western civilization, nationalism, and inequality. This is why Israel appears repeatedly in debates that ostensibly concern other subjects: racial justice, capitalism, colonialism, gender politics, and academic freedom.

This ideological fixation around hating Israel, turbocharged by vicious social media campaigns that are well-financed by outside actors, is the reason why, after the Hamas-led massacres on October 7, 2023, universities across the United States saw large-scale protests, encampments, and demands for divestment from Israel – the victim.

Criticism of Israel is not antisemitic. I criticize Israel. Nor is displeasure with Zionism automatically antisemitic: one may believe that nationalism itself is outdated, or that the creation of Israel was historically unjust. The problem begins when Israel is singled out by standards applied to no other country – and when its own suffering is dismissed.

The world is overflowing with injustice, much of it barely noticed.

Tens of millions of Kurds live without a state, divided among Turkey, Iraq, Iran, and Syria. Catalans and other distinct national groups have their own languages, histories, and identities but no sovereign country. The Armenians of Nagorno-Karabakh were driven en masse from a land where they had lived for generations.

Entire peoples face something far worse than statelessness. China has subjected the Uyghurs to mass detention, forced labor, and coercive assimilation. Myanmar drove hundreds of thousands of Rohingya from their homes through killing, rape, and village-burning. The Yazidis suffered sexual enslavement at the hands of ISIS – the fellow traveler of Hamas. Afghanistan’s women have been erased from education and public life.

Sudan has been devastated by mass killing, ethnic atrocities, famine, and the displacement of millions. Eastern Congo has endured decades of massacres, sexual violence, and armed conflict. Across the Sahel and Central Africa, civilians are slaughtered, starved, and uprooted. Russia is waging an imperial war against Ukraine, destroying cities, killing civilians, displacing millions, and abducting Ukrainian children.

Where are the campus protests? Where are the fake connections to transgender rights based on “intersectionality”?

Yes, Palestinian civilians have suffered terribly, and concern for them is entirely legitimate. But it’s reasonable to ask why this conflict generates a much higher level of sustained activism and moral outrage than all other humanitarian disasters.

There are antisemites on the Republican and global Right, and historically they have been far more dangerous. But in today’s Democratic coalition, the more new and immediate challenge is that the Progressive faction – still a minority, but growing fast and with tons of frenzied energy – has made hostility toward Israel a central element of its political identity.

That’s the challenge facing Democrats like Emanuel, who still believe in the US-Israel relationship: that the far Left sees Israel as, absurdly, the global symbol of evil – and unlike the right-wing antisemites, they claim it is in the name of justice.

They have international allies for their obsession, of course. The UN Human Rights Council has a permanent agenda item devoted exclusively to Israel – the only country in the world singled out in this way. Since its creation in 2006, the council has adopted more condemnatory resolutions against Israel than against any other country. 

The UN General Assembly has routinely adopted more country-specific resolutions condemning Israel in a single year than against all other countries combined. In 2023, for example, it passed 14 resolutions singling out Israel, and just seven targeting all other countries.

The big question

The political side of this nonsense is the activist ecosystem surrounding the Progressive wing of the Democratic coalition: socialist organizations, racial-justice groups, university activists, Progressive unions, queer organizations, and anti-colonial movements. Jewish Voice for Peace explicitly argues that Palestinian and queer liberation are intertwined, while queer activists have portrayed Israeli references to its comparatively strong LGBTQ protections as “pinkwashing” – an attempt to distract from Palestinian oppression. Hamas, of course, would have them killed; it is not clear if they don’t know this, or don’t care.

So fanatical has this coalition become that one must put a question to Rahm Emanuel.

He’s right when he says that America cannot continue with “the assumption that the best thing Washington could do for Jerusalem was to blindly and silently stand behind your government, without conditions, without demands, and without consequences, when we disagreed.” The Netanyahu coalition – demonizing the Palestinian Authority while enabling Jewish terrorism in the West Bank – is too awful for that. But what if Israel did everything Emanuel wanted?

Suppose it restored a reasonable, moderate, centrist governing coalition after the October election, expelling from power the reprehensible likes of Itamar Ben-Gvir and Bezalel Smotrich. Suppose it ended settlement expansion and committed itself unequivocally to a negotiated two-state settlement. Would the Progressive movement then be mollified and end its obsession? Or would we discover that, for a significant part of this movement, the animating principle is that the Jewish people must not exercise self-determination in any part of their historic homeland?

And if opposition to Israel has become central to Progressives, then what exactly is the Democratic Party going to do about it?

Will centrist Democratic leaders call out the madness? Will they state clearly and repeatedly that they support Israel’s right to exist as a Jewish and democratic state within borders negotiated with legitimate Palestinian representatives? Will they say plainly that they oppose not only Israeli extremism but also the jihadist project that rejects any Jewish state in the Middle East? Will they defend Israel’s existence with the same moral clarity with which they condemn the abysmal failures of the Netanyahu coalition?

And do they believe they can prevail? Can Progressives be persuaded to distinguish between opposing Netanyahu, opposing settlements, and opposing Israel itself?

Emanuel, having inserted himself into this debate and having prescribed a political transformation for Israel, owes us an answer to a fundamental question: Are moderate Democrats ready for a fight that would set their house in order?

The writer is the former Cairo-based Middle East editor and London-based Europe/Africa editor of the Associated Press, the former chairman of the Foreign Press Association in Jerusalem, and the author of two books.

Seven American aid workers who had been in Congo to fight the Ebola outbreak are quarantining at a new isolation facility in Kenya after the US government introduced travel restrictions, the head of a US charity employing them told Reuters.

The aid workers are the first known people to quarantine at the facility, which has sparked huge opposition in Kenya and is at the heart of a legal case in which a court has ordered the work to be suspended. Construction continued, however, according to US officials and satellite imagery reviewed by Reuters.

Washington’s new policy says American citizens returning from the Democratic Republic of Congo, where there is an Ebola outbreak, must spend three weeks in a third country before entering the United States.

The US government is building the 50-bed bio-isolation unit on an air force base in central Kenya for asymptomatic Americans exposed to the virus in the Democratic Republic of Congo or Uganda. Many Kenyans are angered at what they see as the US offloading the health risk such patients pose.

Last month, Kenya’s health minister announced an immediate halt to the facility’s construction after he was found in contempt of court for failing to observe the order to halt work pending a final ruling.

“Samaritan’s Purse has seven American Disaster Assistance Response Team staff members there,” Franklin Graham, president and CEO of Samaritan’s Purse, told Reuters in response to questions.

“None of them have any symptoms, but they are being quarantined by the Kenyan government for 21 days,” Graham said.

 Aid workers under US health observation

A US State Department official told Reuters a group of asymptomatic Americans who had served on the front lines of the Ebola response had “voluntarily moved to the Kenya facility for precautionary monitoring and isolation.”

“Kenyan authorities have authorized their movement into the facility under the observation of the US Public Health Service clinicians,” the official said, adding that the decision was taken “strictly out of an abundance of caution.”

Kenyan health ministry officials did not immediately respond to calls or requests for comment on the move. A senior Kenyan foreign ministry official said they had no information on it.

Another source familiar with the matter who asked for anonymity said that the group had arrived at the site in central Kenya on Monday and were sleeping in army cots in tents.

He said some had treated Ebola patients at the Christian aid group’s treatment centers in Congo, but others had carried out work such as construction, with no direct contact with the sick.

“There is one potential high-risk exposure,” he said, adding that their health was being monitored. Kenyan authorities are not allowing the group to leave the facility and travel elsewhere in the country, he added.

The often ​fatal viral disease spreads through direct contact with bodily fluids from infected people ​or animals.

Calls for treatment in Kenya

Samaritan’s Purse, which has been promised several million dollars from the Trump administration for the Ebola response, is an evangelical Christian group that works in disaster zones around the world.

It is one of the biggest foreign aid groups treating Ebola in Congo and has the largest number of Americans there, working closely alongside the World Health Organization to contain the outbreak.

One of its US staff members who caught Ebola earlier this month was transferred to a hospital in Germany on Monday. The State Department official said any decisions on treatment would be made on a case-by-case basis.

There is no proven treatment for or vaccine against the rare Bundibugyo species of the virus, which has already killed at least 828 people since mid-May, and the World Health Organization says it is still spreading largely undetected.

Graham, who had criticized the travel restrictions, said he would like Americans who catch Ebola to benefit from treatment in Kenya, after members of the group toured the facility this week.

“It’s a state-of-the-art facility. If somebody did get sick, that’s the place you want to take them,” he said.

In the midst of the Holocaust, a child sang a song about his mother’s death in the Bershad ghetto, a pocket of current-day Ukraine that was occupied by Romania and Nazi Germany. In the song, the child watches strangers come and pray for his mother, and other strangers carry her away to be buried, but none pay attention to him. 

This story was discovered in a trove of 263 songs collected by Moisei Beregovsky, a Soviet Jewish ethnomusicologist who recorded Yiddish music from Jews in Ukraine just after they were liberated from the Romanian occupation in 1944. 

The music rescued from the Holocaust was nearly lost in Joseph Stalin’s crackdown on Yiddish culture. Beregovsky was arrested in the Soviet Union in 1950, accused of “Jewish nationalism” and sent to a gulag for six years. The music was confiscated, and Beregovsky died in 1961. Only in the 1990s did librarians discover his collection in the basement of Ukraine’s Vernadsky National Library in Kyiv. 

Now, the song about a mother’s death is one of 15 in Yiddish Glory: The Silenced Songs of World War II, an album released in April by Six Degrees Records. It was compiled by Anna Shternshis, a professor of Yiddish and Jewish studies at the University of Toronto, together with 17 musicians. 

Shternshis took the album on tour in May to perform concerts across Asia, with stops in Seoul, Shanghai, Hong Kong and Beijing. The music project is complemented by a new book she published in June, Postwar Life, Hopes, and Fears, the latest in a series about the history of Soviet Jews published by New York University Press.  

The story behind the song Dear Mama may not align with historical truths 

At first, Shternshis believed the song now titled Dear Mama gave an account of daily life in the Bershad ghetto, where more than 8,000 people died of hunger and disease. But the more she patched together testimonies and memoirs, the more she recognized a series of untruths.

Funerals were scarcely allowed in occupied Bershad, and public prayers for the dead were virtually impossible, said Shternshis. She realized that this song was fiction, an imagination of a dignified death.

“One of the biggest traumas that people had in the Bershad ghetto was that no one would notice the death,” Shternshis told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency. “So the song that did talk about the lack of empathy, but also talked about the funeral, was actually a fantasy that all these things would happen, a prayer, a grave.”

This is Shternshis’ second Yiddish Glory album, aiming to resurrect music from witnesses of the Holocaust in the Soviet Union. Her first album in 2018, titled Yiddish Glory: The Lost Songs of World War II, was nominated for a Grammy. 

That project was the first she reaped from the discovery of Beregovsky’s documents, and it focused largely on songs collected from Russian soldiers who fought against the Nazis. The Silenced Songs album centers almost entirely on Jews who lived in the ghettos and concentration camps of Ukraine’s Vinnytsia region, which was occupied by Romania and Nazi Germany from 1941 to 1944.

Shternshis wanted to trace the footsteps of Beregovsky, who was himself a survivor of the Holocaust. After Germany invaded the Soviet Union in 1941, Beregovsky and other academics from the Ukrainian Academy of Sciences were evacuated to the eastern republic of Bashkir. He returned to Ukraine in 1944 with a group of scholars, including linguists and folklorists, seeking to record music from survivors. 

Beregovsky hoped to publish this music. Because of that, he and his editors likely tailored the words to make them acceptable to the Soviet regime after World War II, said Shternshis. That meant removing explicit references to Jewish despair, which could contradict the Soviet narrative of total victory. 

Any such alterations were not sufficient. When Beregovsky was arrested, his interrogators accused him of promoting “Jewish nationalism” by coaching his subjects to speak about their experiences as Jews. He never saw his musical documents returned, and he believed they were destroyed. 

These words kept. being silenced

“This is why we called this album The Silenced Songs of World War II,” said Shternshis. “Because those words kept being silenced, first by self-censorship, then by scholars and editors who tried to preserve it, and then by Stalin’s government.”

Her goal was to present not just eyewitness accounts of the Holocaust, but also partial truths and untruths, like the fantasy of a mother surrounded by prayers in the Bershad ghetto. The result was a patchwork of stories that mattered to people living through extreme violence, death and censorship.

Pavel Lion, a Russian literature scholar better known by his stage name Psoy Korolenko, played a key role as a singer-songwriter on both Yiddish Glory albums. Kolorenko grew up in a secular Jewish family in Russia during the Soviet era. Yiddish was not spoken in his home, other than a few words from his grandmother, but he became deeply interested in Yiddish music as a young adult. 

The more Korolenko studied klezmer music, the more he discovered a “latent, indirect, unconscious Jewish heritage,” he said. Although the Soviet Union repressed many forms of Jewish culture and communal life, Korolenko said he gradually became aware of how Jewish history marked popular music during his childhood in the 1970s. 

“Many composers in the Soviet Union were influenced by Yiddish popular folk and theater songs, sometimes directly, because many of them in that generation were actually Jewish,” said Korolenko. 

He added that broader trends in popular music during the Soviet era embraced folk genres.

“The entire spectrum of post-imperial music included peasant songs, Romani gypsy songs, street songs , and one of the important trends, klezmer folk and theater songs in Yiddish,” said Korolenko. “These were trends that came from the periphery to the center in the Soviet Union.”

While Shternshis extracted a growing body of songs with sheet music from Beregovsky’s archive, she found other documents with lyrics alone. Korolenko wrote melodies for these songs from scratch, drawing on his knowledge of Yiddish, Soviet and 19th-century Russian music traditions. 

Yiddish Glory songs performed in Asia

Shternshis and Korolenko traveled together to perform the Yiddish Glory songs in Asia. Most of their audiences were hearing Yiddish music for the first time, translated through subtitles.

Sealing Cheng, a professor at the Chinese University of Hong Kong who researches migration, forced displacement and gender, hosted the pair for a concert that drew about 80 attendees. Cheng said much of the audience knew little about the history of Soviet Jews and the daily experiences of Holocaust victims. Many learned about the period through their regional history: Hong Kong was occupied during World War II by Japan, which allied with Nazi Germany to expand its empire and committed atrocities in Asia.  

“I don’t think we have a lot of discussion of what World War II was like outside of the Japanese colonial context,” said Cheng.

Another Yiddish Glory concert took place at the Holocaust Museum of Korea in Paju, located near the demilitarized zone that separates North and South Korea. Shternshis said the audience there raised comparisons with their own history, including “topics of separation, longing, the impossibility of returning home, and also communism versus non-communism dividing families.”

At the Museum of Jewish Refugees in Shanghai, listeners asked questions about censorship and the subversiveness of music. 

“They were asking what it takes for a folk song to become a dangerous artistic production, what kind of folk song could lead to imprisonment,” said Shternshis. “People were very interested in what is in between the lines of these songs. They are praising Stalin, they are praising the Soviet regime, they are condemning Hitler, but they’re also saying other things that they cannot fully say in the Soviet context, we got a lot of questions about that.”

Shternshis hopes to continue broadcasting the silenced voices of “Yiddish Glory” to listeners around the world. But there is one place in particular where she dreams of transporting their music. 

“The only country where we haven’t presented it yet, and where I really want to go one day, is Ukraine,” said Shternshis. “Once that war is over, once peace comes back to that land, it would be so important to me, and to Psoy and to other musicians, to just go there and perform this program.”

The official date for the 2026 general elections has been announced, and the race is on.

Parties are meeting with the public and doing rounds with the press as the campaign season nears. These months are crucial in determining how the Knesset and government will look when the dust settles.

And for Yael Yechieli, there is one particular goal to achieve this election: a 50/50 split between men and women in power.

An activist for many years, Yechieli leads the 5050 project, a grassroots initiative to pressure all parties – regardless of their stances or demographics – to have equal gender representation.

And after the present government was widely criticized for lacking adequate women’s representation in its ranks, this issue is sure to be more prominent than ever in the lead-up to the polls.

In Jerusalem sat down with Yechieli to talk about her work.

What made you want to get involved with the cause of having more women in Knesset?

Motivated through meeting with Palestinians

I’ve been an activist for more than 20 years, mostly relating to dialogue between Palestinians and Israelis. University was the first time I really met Palestinians, and I was stuck with them in the same rooms and classes, and that motivated me to work in fostering dialogue.

Another activism I did was pushing for separation between religion and state. I always said, I love the religion, I love the state, and I think mixing them together is bad for everyone.

That’s what I did for years. But then I spent several years in the US because my partner was a professor at UC Berkeley. 

I started looking at how decision-making tables looked in California and other places. One day, one of my neighbors told me that Mexico voted for over 50% of parliament to be women. I was shocked that Mexico would do this, but as I did more research, I realized that this wasn’t an isolated case.

I learned about Rwanda, Finland, and other places where it could happen. It isn’t a new thing, but I needed to learn how they did it there so I could build a plan for Israel.

Tell me about the 5050 project.

We came back to Israel in 2021. Then we had the 2022 elections, and I saw the numbers. I realized the representation of women was going to be really bad when looking at women in the coalition and women heading different ministries and government agencies.

I didn’t even sleep the night after the elections. I founded the 5050 project the very next day, with the goal of having this last election be the last one ever where women weren’t represented equally or not in realistic slots on the party lists.

I said I had a plan to bring together the vision of 50% women representation in realistic slots on lists.

Surprisingly, thousands of people came to me to join the project.

Our first target was the municipal elections. I told everyone to open a 5050 WhatsApp group in their cities ahead of the vote and we can start working.

A ‘zipper’ list

I live in Jerusalem, so I went to a public meeting with [Mayor] Moshe Lion. I asked him there if he would have 50% women in his party, and he said yes. Then I asked if it would be a “zipper” list (requiring parties alternate members of their list by gender, meaning each member would be the opposite gender of the previous slot on the list), and he said he hadn’t decided yet.

The next day, I told my neighbors in the city to also ask Lion if he was going to do a zipper list. Every day, when he went to these public meetings, he got the same question. And 60 other groups in 60 other cities all did the same thing.

We had the option to use our strength to pressure them into this. And after one month, Lion said yes to having a zipper list.

It wasn’t just male party leaders who were asked this. Women were also asked. The goal was to make all municipal councils 50% men, 50% women.

In the end, most of the people who promised to have zipper lists actually followed through on it.

We shared this on social media, praising the different politicians who went through with having zipper lists, large and small parties alike.

We pushed people to go vote for the parties that had zipper lists. And we saw that 21 municipal councils got to 50/50.

Did you work in all cities?

I must admit we mainly worked in liberal Jewish cities, and not in ultra-Orthodox and Arab localities – though we had some exceptions like Jerusalem.

Still, this had other results outside the cities we worked in, such as in the town of Kedumim, which got to 50/50.

What about the Knesset?

This is harder because we don’t always know when the next Knesset elections will be.

However, we already started working on it, and we’re doing it in the same way. We go to all the public meetings of party leaders – even with Arab parties – and ask the same questions.

So far, the Democrats Party has already committed to a zipper list in their bylaws. Gadi Eisenkot said he’d have 50% women, though he has not committed to a zipper list. 

As for Naftali Bennett and Yair Lapid, they were even asked by a journalist from Haaretz, which is a big deal for us, since it means the issue is growing beyond just us activists.

Bennett’s response, by the way, was that he doesn’t pick people by gender, but by skill, but at the moment his list had more women than men.

In Hadash, there was a prominent woman high on their list for years, Aida Touma-Sliman.

Now, they only have a woman in the No. 5 slot, which isn’t realistic. This is a big deal because Hadash is supposed to be a party that deals with equal rights.

But there are people in the Arab sector working for this goal, and I can tell you that Arab journalists and media figures are with us. They always ask politicians if they have 50% women on their list.

As for the haredim, we have a list of 30 women who say they want to be in the Knesset, but the rabbis and MKs don’t want them there. But you can’t say there aren’t any women who want to be in the Knesset.

But realistically, do you think they will be able to be in the Knesset?

It will happen, but not in the next election. It could happen in the next municipal election in 2028, which we will start preparing for immediately once the Knesset election is done.

What about right-wing parties like the Likud, Otzma Yehudit, and the Religious Zionist Party?

So the Likud has primaries, and we have Likud members who are part of 5050 trying to work on this. However, they don’t do meetings with the public, so we can only pressure the media. 

We’re also waiting for Otzma Yehudit and the Religious Zionist Party to do public meetings, if they ever do.

I want 50% women in all of these parties, even the parties I don’t vote for.

Israel has built one of the most sophisticated national security systems in human history. 

We have developed world-class intelligence capabilities, layered missile defenses, cyber expertise, elite special forces, and an extraordinary culture of innovation. 

Our enemies have repeatedly discovered that they cannot easily defeat us on the battlefield. So, they have increasingly shifted the battlefield.

For too long, Israel has been under attack from a different kind of missile – one that cannot be intercepted by Iron Dome, David’s Sling, or Arrow. 

It is a coordinated campaign of narratives, disinformation, lawfare, diplomatic isolation, media manipulation, and psychological warfare aimed not at our territory but at our legitimacy.

The accompanying illustration depicts this reality. 

The missiles falling over Israel are not explosives. They are accusations: “Genocide,” “war crimes,” “apartheid,” “ethnic cleansing,” “sanctions,” “international isolation,” and “From the River to the Sea.” 

They represent the messages, campaigns, and narratives launched through governments, international institutions, media outlets, universities, activists, influencers, and social media platforms.

Unlike conventional missiles, there are no shelters for these attacks.

That should concern every Israeli.

The eighth front

Since October 7, Israel has fought on multiple military fronts. Yet there is another front that receives far less attention despite its strategic significance: what many now refer to as the Eighth Front – the campaign to delegitimize the State of Israel.

This campaign did not begin after October 7. It has evolved over decades, drawing upon political activism, legal campaigns, diplomatic pressure, digital media, and coordinated messaging. 

It now operates globally and continuously, with significant investment and political support from the likes of Qatar, Iran, Russia, and China, and the “Red Green Alliance.”

Military victories can secure borders.

They cannot by themselves restore legitimacy once it has been eroded.

That is precisely why this front deserves to be treated as a national security issue rather than merely a public relations challenge.

The warning sirens have been sounding

The most troubling part of the cartoon is not the incoming missiles.

It is the dialogue inside the bunker.

One officer remarks: “To be fair, the warning sirens have been sounding for years. No one paid attention.”

There is uncomfortable truth in that observation.

For years, many researchers, diplomats, Jewish organizations, and communications professionals have warned that Israel was steadily losing ground in the battle for international public opinion. 

Too often these warnings were viewed as secondary to more immediate military threats. But public opinion is not merely about image.

It influences elections.

It shapes diplomatic alliances.

It affects military assistance.

It influences sanctions, trade, investment, tourism, academic cooperation, and international legal initiatives.

Narratives ultimately influence policy.

The numbers should concern us

Recent polling suggests that attitudes toward Israel have become significantly more negative in several Western democracies, particularly among younger generations.

Surveys have also shown widening partisan differences in the United States, with support for Israel weakening even among Republicans, as has been made overwhelmingly clear with the public statements by the vice president of America, who aspires to be the next president.  

While the Democrats are even less supportive and that support is weakening at alarming rates, one need only look at the New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani phenomenon to get a better sense of where the Democrats are heading. 

Even among some traditionally supportive constituencies, including younger Evangelical Christians, support appears less automatic than it once was.

Reasonable people can debate the causes.

They should not ignore the trend.

Israel’s strategic alliance with the United States rests on shared interests, but long-term democratic support is strengthened when public opinion remains resilient.

If public legitimacy weakens substantially over time, policymakers inevitably operate within a more constrained political environment.

Modern warfare has changed

Throughout history, military campaigns have often been accompanied by propaganda. Today’s environment is fundamentally different.

Social media allows falsehoods to spread globally within minutes.

Artificial intelligence enables convincing fabricated content.

Universities, influencers, international institutions, NGOs, television networks, legal forums, and online communities all participate – sometimes intentionally, sometimes unintentionally – in shaping global perceptions.

The objective is not simply criticism of Israeli policy.

Criticism is legitimate in any democracy.

The objective, in many cases, is something broader: to redefine Israel itself as uniquely illegitimate.

That distinction matters.

A democracy can survive criticism.

It cannot easily survive systematic delegitimization.

Iron Dome cannot stop narrative attacks

Nor was it meant to.

While every missile is inherently malicious, not every criticism of Israel is unfair or malicious.

Rather, we need to acknowledge that democracies, especially ours, require a government institution with the same prioritization as our Defense Ministry, capable of competing effectively within the modern information environment, and ever more so, as we are under attack.

Israel invested decades in developing missile defense.

Have we invested comparably in defending truth, credibility, strategic communications, digital influence, and international engagement?

The answer is embarrassingly far less clear.

We are not starting from zero

It would be unfair to suggest that government ministries, NGOs, universities, think tanks, Diaspora organizations, and volunteers have done nothing. Many people have devoted enormous effort to defending Israel internationally.

The problem is not the absence of commitment.

It is the absence of both the prioritization of the issue as a national security concern and the sustained strategic integration across all related defense, intelligence, and technological capabilities in Israel.

Too often, initiatives operate independently, responding tactically rather than strategically. 

There is no widely recognized national framework that aligns research, communications, diplomacy, civil society, technology, and international partnerships around common objectives.

Israel coordinates military campaigns across multiple fronts.

It should aspire to coordinate its cognitive defense with a similar discipline.

A national security priority

Several months ago, I wrote that Boaz Bismuth, the chairman of the Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee, should examine this challenge as a matter of national security. 

I addressed him, knowing that he had the right extensive communications background and drive to make a difference. 

Since then, in the midst of all the other pressing matters, he has agreed to make this an issue to be reviewed by the committee. 

Whether we reach a proposal in the first attempt is less important than acknowledging that the discussion itself is overdue and must eventually reach a conclusion.

This conversation should not belong to one political party.

Nor should it become another ideological battleground.

Israel’s legitimacy belongs to every Israeli.

Protecting it should be viewed as a national mission.

Building shelters for the next war

The lesson of Israel’s history has been remarkably consistent.

We are challenged.

We adapt.

We innovate.

We learn.

We grow.

When faced with new military threats, we developed new capabilities.

The challenge before us now is different but no less consequential.

We need institutions that monitor narrative threats as seriously as missile launches. We need greater cooperation between government, academia, civil society, technology experts, the media, and Jewish communities worldwide. 

We need better measurement of influence, improved coordination, and sustained investment in long-term strategic communications. Most importantly, we must recognize that this is not merely a communications problem.

It is a strategic existential one.

The cartoon’s title captures the central message: “The War for Which Israel Built No Shelters.”

The good news is that shelters can still be built.

The good news is that we know how to defend ourselves, lessening the need for shelters.

But only after we acknowledge that the missiles are already falling can we demand that the government build us the needed shelters and take this fight for our legitimacy seriously.

The writer is a global strategist and a strategic adviser at the Jerusalem Center for Security and Foreign Affairs. He can be reached at globalstrategist2020@gmail.com.

Passengers were stranded in London after a pushback tug at London Luton Airport (LTN) struck an Israir aircraft scheduled to fly to Tel Aviv on Thursday evening, forcing the airline to cancel the flight.

Israir flight 116 from London Luton Airport to Ben Gurion Airport was scheduled to depart at 5 p.m. BST on Thursday and arrive in Israel at 12:05 a.m. on Friday.

According to a message sent to the passengers from the airline, the tug damaged the aircraft while it was being towed, leaving it grounded.

According to Israir, this was the third incident of its kind at the airport, and no investigation had been conducted into any of the cases.

“Following the accident and after its evacuation, the passengers were taken off the plane, transferred to the terminal and waited to receive their luggage,” Israir said in a statement.

‘Safety and security is top priority’ 

The airline arranged transportation and accommodations for the passengers. It also offered to reimburse passengers for food and travel expenses incurred through private arrangements, subject to the submission of required documentation and in accordance with company policy.

Passengers reportedly waited for hours aboard the aircraft without air conditioning before disembarking and being transferred to hotels.

“Just had the most horrific experience I’ve ever had on an airplane,”  Shoshanna Keats Jaskoll said in a message on their X/Twitter account.

“We were on @Israir_israel plan for over 2.5 hours with no AC. Doors closed most of the time. Children & adults panicking. An absolute NIGHTMARE,” she said. 

just had the most horrific experience I’ve ever had on an airplane. We were on @Israir_israel plan for over 2.5 hours with no AC. Doors closed most of the time. Children & adults panicking. An absolute NIGHTMARE. Apparently @LDNLutonAirport would not let the pilot turn on the…

— Shoshanna Keats Jaskoll (@skjask) July 16, 2026

Shabbat observant passengers were forced to remain in England and are expected to return to Israel on Sunday, according to the airline.

“Israir apologizes to its passengers for the inconvenience caused to them as a result of an event beyond its control, and continues to accompany the passengers until they return to Israel. The safety and security of the passengers is the company’s top priority,” the airline said.

Entering a 100-day election campaign this weekend, it is instructive to note what the coming Israeli vote is about and what it is not. 

The election is mainly about government responsibility for the October 7, 2023, disastrous attack by Hamas and the government’s outrageous indulgences during wartime to the ultra-Orthodox (haredi) Israeli public.

The election is not about classic foreign and defense policy issues, because on these matters, there is today a broad Israeli consensus. It is important to recognize this and understand the reasons why. 

The past three years of devastating enemy attacks on Israel have taught Israelis an important lesson – which is the need to maintain a proactive defense posture, including strategic ascendancy against enemies near and far.

Consequently, Israel will not return to the containment policies of recent decades that prioritized restraint and diplomacy over enemy degradation and military triumph. 

This approach allowed enemies to develop attack capabilities under the cover of diplomatic breathing time – what some Western officials mistakenly called periods of “stability.”

That approach blew up in Israel’s face, with terror and invasion from the West Bank and Gaza and from Syria and Lebanon and with the march of Iran’s nuclear bomb program to near completion and Iran’s ballistic missile array to near-annihilation-of-Israel potential.

Instead, Israel understands today that it must continue to make fierce and overwhelming moves against enemy strongholds from Sidon to Khan Yunis and from Nablus to Isfahan.

Israel will attack, not defend. It will initiate, not respond. It will hunt down its enemies, not be hounded by them.

Israel also has adopted a buffer-zone military strategy, with areas of long-term IDF control over borders where territory is dominated by Islamist-jihadist organizations. Behind the buffer zones now established in Lebanon, Gaza, and Syria is a set of ideas that identify a grim reality and provide a concrete and practical response. 

Israelis also realize that their neighbors will seek true reconciliation only when Jerusalem is strong. Additional Abraham Accord-style peace treaties are possible and desirable, but these will be based on muscular defense partnerships, not mushy notions of goodwill.

Notice that opposition figures now challenging Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu for leadership of the country are not talking much about any of this, because they have nothing to say differently from him in this regard. 

Neither Gadi Eisenkot, Naftali Bennett, Benny Gantz, nor Yair Lapid would or could act otherwise if they sat in the prime minister’s chair. 

They would have to clobber Iran and its proxies (which includes most actors in the irredentist Palestinian national movement) no less than Netanyahu has. And they will have to resist international pressures on these matters no less than Netanyahu has.

A new Israeli security consensus

They also know that Israeli public opinion won’t brook any weakness in these matters. Consider several recent Knesset decisions and declarations that were passed by overwhelming majorities – approved by crushing majorities that are so rare in the raucous and often-poisonous Israeli political playground.

In February 2024, 99 out of 120 members of Knesset – essentially representing the entire country aside from Israeli Arabs – voted to reject unilateral recognition by European and other countries of Palestinian statehood.

In July 2024, the Knesset issued a declaration by a 68-9 vote opposing Palestinian statehood altogether. The nine votes opposing the resolution came from the Knesset’s two Arab parties.

“The Israeli Knesset firmly opposes the establishment of a Palestinian state west of the Jordan [River]. The establishment of a Palestinian state in the heart of the Land of Israel will pose an existential danger to the State of Israel and its citizens, perpetuate the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and destabilize the region. 

“It will only be a short matter of time before Hamas takes over the Palestinian state and turns it into a radical Islamic terrorist base, working in coordination with the Iranian-led axis, to eliminate the State of Israel,” the declaration stated.

Indeed, recent polls indicate that 80% of Israelis, again almost the entire Jewish public, oppose the establishment of another Palestinian state beyond the ruinous one already extant in Gaza. 

As a result, settlements in Judea and Samaria have manifestly become a consensus issue too. Israelis now understand that broad and deep settlement in Judea and Samaria is needed to torpedo the nightmare scenario of runaway Palestinian statehood.
 
This issue, which tore the Israeli public apart for four generations, has been resolved. Settlements are a security and Zionist asset, not a burden or a bar to peace. 

Sure enough, and understandably so, settlements are not an issue in the coming election campaign. No mainstream Israeli politician is stupid enough to dredge up stale paradigms about territorial withdrawals or to talk about tearing down the pioneering and more important-than-ever settlement enterprise. 

(The muckraking “Democratic Party” leader Yair Golan, heir to the tiny extreme left Meretz Party voting public, is the exception to this rule.)

In fact, in July 2025, a majority of 71 out of 120 Knesset members from the coalition and opposition passed a non-binding resolution in favor of applying Israeli sovereignty to Judea, Samaria, and the Jordan Valley. 

And I expect the next Israeli government – any government – to advance a declaration of Israeli sovereignty in at least Area C of these territories.

Congruent with this updated, necessarily tough, Israeli mindset on defense and national matters, the Knesset approved a law in March this year by a walloping vote of 93-0 (no objections or abstentions!), enabling the prosecution of Hamas’s Nukhba terrorists. 

Indictments are expected in special military courts against more than 400 Hamas barbarians for crimes against the Jewish people, crimes against humanity, war crimes, murder, rape, abduction, and looting. 

The death penalty for convicted terrorists is explicitly an option, and this applies also to terrorists who killed Israeli hostages in captivity long after October 7. 

The Israeli public demands no less. Protestations from the world against these trials and possible executions will fall on defiant and appropriately deaf Israeli ears.

Alas, I sense that much of the international community and even the Diaspora Jewish community still does not comprehend the deep changes in national security thinking and practice that are now the rock-solid Israeli mainstream path and which will not change much under the next Israeli government – whoever heads it.

Some highhanded politicians around the world refuse to consider the views of Israelis. They know better than Israelis how to secure this country. They flock to Israel to posture like peacocks and take this country’s leadership to task.

A classic example: The arrogant Rahm Emanuel, a US Democratic Party presidential candidate wannabe, who alighted in Tel Aviv last week to deride Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu as a “drunk driver” and to dispense warmed-over, hackneyed advice from the dreadful playbook of his former boss. 

Like President Barack Obama, Emanuel only pretended to be upset about drawing away from Israel.

Emanuel is stuck in a world of double illusions – the illusion that his election will advance by bashing Israel and the fantasy that Israel’s election can be swayed by pressure from abroad in favor of infirm foreign and defense policies. 

It would be smarter for world leaders to get used to a revamped Middle East strategic situation anchored by a hard-hitting, confident, and undivided Israel. 

The writer is a managing senior fellow at the Jerusalem-based Misgav Institute for National Security & Zionist Strategy. The views expressed here are his own. His diplomatic, defense, political, and Jewish world columns over the past 30 years are at davidmweinberg.com.

Herb Keinon’s excellent article, “Sinwar’s letter and Israel’s blind spot,” opens a disturbing window into the psychology of a fanatical leader.

The handwritten document attributed to Yahya Sinwar showed that, long before October 7, he had contemplated not merely a fierce Israeli response to a Hamas invasion, but even the possibility of Israel using a nuclear weapon against Gaza. 

Yet that possibility did not deter him. In Keinon’s reading, Gaza’s devastation was not an unforeseen consequence. It was a price Sinwar was prepared to pay in the hope of igniting a regional war that would ultimately destroy Israel. 

That is the essence of fanaticism. It is placing an ideological objective above every ordinary calculation of human welfare, national survival and moral responsibility. 

Rational leaders may take terrible risks, but they remain answerable to consequences. Fanatics treat consequences as irrelevant, or even useful, provided suffering advances the sacred cause.

A second article, published by The Times of Israel, describes a completely different political and moral world, but raises an uncomfortable question about the same psychological mechanism.

The Knesset has passed legislation temporarily preventing the arrest and prosecution of tens of thousands of haredi (ultra-Orthodox) men who have evaded military service. Its practical effect is to halt most haredi enlistment for months, even as the IDF says it urgently needs thousands of additional soldiers during an ongoing multifront conflict. 

The chief of staff called the proposal “inconceivable” and incompatible with the army’s needs. The legislation and the military leadership’s objections were also independently reported by the Associated Press. 

Some haredi politicians did not receive the legislation with embarrassment or sober recognition of a painful national dilemma. They celebrated it. They described enforcement as “persecution” of Torah students. 

One threatened unprecedented civil rebellion if the courts intervened. A total of 18 haredi MKs proudly disclosed that their own children or grandchildren might benefit, invoking the biblical Tribe of Levi. 

Let me be absolutely clear. I am not comparing the haredi community to Hamas.

Hamas is a murderous terrorist organization committed to Israel’s destruction. Haredim are our fellow Jews, neighbors, and family. Many live lives of kindness, devotion, charity, and genuine holiness. 

Some serve in the IDF, emergency organizations, and other forms of national service. There is no moral equivalence between Hamas and haredi Judaism. Any suggestion that there is would be grotesque.

I am comparing something narrower: the fanaticism of leaders who elevate one ideological demand above the safety of their own people.

Sinwar was willing to expose Gaza to catastrophic destruction because destroying Israel mattered more to him than protecting Gazans. 

Certain haredi political leaders, together with rabbinic leaders who insist upon blanket exemption, are willing to weaken Israel’s army, prolong the crushing burden on soldiers and reservists, and deepen social division because preserving that exemption matters more to them than the consequences for the country in which their community lives.

The scale is different. The intent is different. The moral universe is different. But the refusal to allow reality to modify doctrine is recognizably similar.

Fanaticism begins when a leader can no longer say: “Our belief is precious, but the facts have changed.”

A reminder of Torah values

Israel after October 7 is not the Israel of 20 or 40 years ago. The IDF has fought across several fronts. Reservists have lost businesses, careers, health and, in too many cases, their lives. Parents are sending sons and daughters back into danger for repeated rounds of reserve duty. 

The very legislation protecting draft evaders comes while soldiers and reservists continue shouldering an extraordinary burden. 

Against that background, insisting that an entire and rapidly growing sector remain outside military or meaningful national service is not the defense of Torah. It is the absolutization of a social arrangement that arose under completely different circumstances.

I write this as a rabbi who believes that Torah study is indispensable to Jewish existence. A Jewish state without Torah would be spiritually impoverished. Serious scholars should be nurtured, and exceptional students enabled to devote themselves to learning.

But the claim that every haredi young man is a member of a modern “Tribe of Levi,” exempt from defending Jewish life while others repeatedly risk theirs, is neither morally sustainable nor politically viable.

Torah cannot become a slogan used to transfer danger from one Jewish family to another. The preservation of life is a supreme Torah value. Shared responsibility is a Torah value. Refusing to stand aside while one’s neighbor is in danger is a Torah value.

A leadership that speaks endlessly of the holiness of study while ignoring the blood, exhaustion, and fear of those protecting its communities has confused the defense of an institution with the defense of Judaism.

As presented, the legislation does not offer a serious program for gradual integration, tailored military frameworks, expanded civilian service, or genuine compromise. It removes the immediate consequences of refusal. It tells one sector that the law may be suspended for its benefit while everyone else remains bound by the duties of citizenship. 

That is not social peace. It is state-sponsored resentment.

Israel is due to vote on October 27. The election will involve many urgent questions: leadership, security, the economy, the conduct of the war, and the future of Israel’s democratic institutions.

But shared service cannot be dismissed as a narrow dispute between secular and religious Israelis. It is now a question of national survival.

At the ballot box, citizens should examine not merely what parties say about “unity,” but what they are prepared to do when coalition arithmetic collides with the needs of the IDF. Will they insist on a fair, realistic, and enforceable framework of service? Or will they again trade national security for parliamentary support?

Keinon’s article reminds us of the danger of assuming that every actor will ultimately be restrained by concern for his own people. Israel made that mistake with Sinwar, imagining that prosperity and deterrence would moderate Hamas. 

We must not make a domestic version of the same analytical mistake by assuming that haredi leaders will eventually compromise simply because the present course endangers the country they inhabit.

They may not. Fanatics rarely do so voluntarily.

The task of a democratic state is not to demonize a community, but neither is it to surrender to its most uncompromising leaders. 

Israel must make room for haredi life, Torah learning, and religious difference. It must not permit any leadership, however politically powerful or religiously revered, to make the safety of the nation negotiable.

Tax Authority Director Shay Aharonovich sent a scathing letter to Bnei Brak Mayor Hanoch Zeibert on Thursday, ordering the suspension of war damage claims in the city after Tax Authority employees were attacked earlier that day.

According to the letter, Tax Authority employees were violently assaulted by a mob numbering in the hundreds on the afternoon of July 16 while carrying out enforcement activities in the city.

“Tax Authority employees who had arrived in the city to carry out enforcement activities were violently attacked,” Aharonovich said in the letter.

Videos shared online showed a crowd surrounding the officials as stones and other objects were hurled at their vehicle and at police officers at the scene.

The employees were rescued by police.

‘Tax Authority employees are not welcome in your city’

“In light of the above, I can only conclude that Tax Authority employees are not welcome in your city,” Aharonovich said.

Aharonovich said he had instructed the Compensation Fund to immediately suspend the handling of claims for damage caused during operations “Rising Lion” and “Lion’s Roar” until the municipality publicly and unequivocally condemns the attacks through haredi media outlets, including newspapers, radio stations, news hotlines, and other channels.

אני מגנה בתוקף את האלימות שהופעלה היום כנגד אנשי רשות המיסים על ידי בריונים פורעי חוק בבני ברק.

לא ניתן לקבל אלימות כזו כלפי אנשי חוק, הממלאים את תפקידם בנאמנות ובמקצועיות.

אני מגבה את העובדים ואת אנשי רשות המיסים כולם, ודורש ממשטרת ישראל ומרשויות האכיפה למצות בנחישות…

— בצלאל סמוטריץ’ (@bezalelsm) July 8, 2026

The letter also referred to an earlier violent attack by Bnei Brak residents against Tax Authority employees on Wednesday, July 8.

The Bnei Brak Municipality has yet to condemn the violence in either case.

Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich, who oversees the Tax Authority, strongly condemned the July 8 attack in a post on X, expressing his full support for Tax Authority employees and calling for the rioters to face the full force of the law.

“I strongly condemn the violence perpetrated today against Tax Authority personnel by lawbreaking thugs in Bnei Brak,” he said. “Such violence against law enforcement officers, who carry out their duties faithfully and professionally, cannot be tolerated.”

Israel’s system for victims of hostile acts remains centered on proving the extent of a person’s disability rather than helping them rebuild their lives, survivors, mental-health experts and political representatives warned at a Tel Aviv conference on Sunday.

The conference was organized by 121 Engine for Social Change through two partnerships it leads: Or BaOfek (“Light on the Horizon”), which advocates for victims of hostile acts, and Tikva LaNefesh (“Hope for the Soul”), which focuses on mental-health and resilience policy.

The conference took place at Riverside in Tel Aviv, and was sponsored pro bono by Rafi Pomrock, the CEO of the Dynamo Group and a member of 121’s public council. It was hosted by journalist Rina Matzliach.

Founded in 2017, 121 describes itself as a nonpartisan social-policy organization that works with civil-society groups and professionals to advance legislation and government policy.

Or BaOfek was established following October 7 to press for changes to a system of recognition and rehabilitation that the organization argues was not built to handle tens of thousands of physical and psychological injuries.

Victims of terror’s employment, financial situations falling apart

At the conference, 121 presented interim findings from a survey it conducted among 145 victims of hostile acts. Only 27% had returned to the same scope of employment they held before their injury, while 35% were not working at all, and 34% had returned only partially.

Nearly two-thirds of respondents – 61.8% – said their financial situation had deteriorated even after receiving allowances and compensation, while 35.2% said a first-degree relative had been forced to reduce their workload because of the respondent’s condition.

Two-thirds said they had not received continuous and consistent guidance from the state, and respondents gave the assistance they received in navigating their rights an average score of 2.5 out of 5.

Taken together, the findings underscored how the consequences of an injury can extend beyond the person formally recognized by the state, affecting the employment and finances of entire families and placing additional burdens on relatives providing care.

Roni Katz, whose son Arad survived the Supernova music festival massacre, said in a video presented at the conference that she had been forced to stop working to care for him around the clock.

“My son Arad returned from Nova in a severe psychological condition, and since then I have been caring for him constantly,” she said. “I lost my source of income, but I received no response from the state – no financial assistance, no guidance, and no treatments that could have helped me cope.”

Ron Segev, another Nova survivor, said he had previously worked 12-hour days as a salesman but could no longer function as he had before October 7. Segev said he was currently recognized as having a temporary disability through the end of 2026, with a permanent determination expected only in 2027.

“Instead of a system that focuses on disability percentages, I need a personal rehabilitation track that determines what I need in order to return to functioning and to life,” he said.

Recognition is only the first step

Recognition as a victim of hostile acts and the determination of a disability rating are two separate stages of the process.

A person seeking recognition submits a claim to the National Insurance Institute (NII). The claim is then transferred to the certifying authority in the Defense Ministry, which determines whether the incident meets the legal definition of a hostile act and whether the person should be recognized as a victim.

Once recognized, a person seeking disability compensation must file a separate claim and appear before a medical committee, which determines whether the recognized injury created a temporary or permanent disability and assigns a percentage to it. The committee may assess only injuries connected to the hostile act for which the claimant was recognized.

A disability rating below 10% does not entitle the victim to disability compensation. Ratings between 10% and 19% generally lead to a one-time grant, while those rated at 20% or above receive a monthly disability payment.

Recognition can fund medical treatment connected to the recognized injury even without a 20% disability rating, but many of the broader rehabilitation, treatment, and family benefits depend on crossing higher thresholds.

The “One Soul” reform, for example, applies to victims receiving monthly compensation with a disability rating of at least 20% for post-traumatic stress disorder, another mental injury, or a head injury.

Given the unprecedented number of people who entered the system in the past three years, the distinction is significant.

Approximately 82,000 civilians were recognized as victims of hostile acts between 2023 and 2025, excluding those killed, according to NII data presented in a recent Knesset Research and Information Center report.

By April 2026, approximately 38,000 had applied for a disability determination. Of those, around 88% were determined to have a mental disability, along with approximately 6% with a physical disability and another 6% with combined physical and psychological injuries. Among those with psychological disabilities, the largest group received ratings between 20% and 34%.

Religious Zionist Party MK Michal Woldiger said on Sunday that the committees intended to determine those ratings had themselves become an obstacle to recovery.

“The vast majority of medical committees today are anti-rehabilitative,” she said. “They focus on the question of how injured a person is, instead of asking what that person needs to return to functioning.”

Woldiger said the committees should not necessarily be abolished, but their purpose and methods should be changed to support individualized rehabilitation.

Similar criticism was raised at a June 9 meeting of the Knesset Labor and Welfare Committee on medical committees for disabled IDF veterans and victims of hostile acts. One participant told the committee that a psychiatrist had reduced her disability rating by 20 percentage points after asking whether she had begun studying – an example of the fear that signs of recovery can be interpreted as evidence that assistance is no longer required.

Trauma that does not fit existing definitions

Yashar Party candidate Inbar Yehezkeli Blilious argued that the legal criteria themselves must be reconsidered as the nature of exposure to terrorism changes.

“Terror has changed, and the law must also change,” she said.

People may sustain severe psychological harm despite not being physically present at an attack, she said, including through watching events unfold in real time on their phones or through videos. Where serious harm can be demonstrated, the state should consider expanding recognition to include them, she said.

Yehezkeli Blilious also called for earlier intervention through the health funds and for support to be extended to siblings and other family members affected by a survivor’s condition.

Some victims may return to work while continuing to require long-term support, she noted, meaning employment alone should not be treated as proof that rehabilitation is complete.

Prof. Mooli Lahad, founder and president of the Community Stress Prevention Center, warned against treating every prolonged response to the war as PTSD. Some people are experiencing other forms of unresolved distress, including what he described as “ambiguous loss,” requiring a broader therapeutic vocabulary and response.

Individual treatment remains important, Lahad said, but cannot succeed fully when a person returns to a family, workplace, or community that lacks the ability to support them.

“Real healing comes in an ecology of healing,” he said.

After years of continuing war and repeated attempts to recover, people are also experiencing what he described as “healing fatigue.” Strengthening communities would allow them to provide a protective structure around individuals and families, he said.

“The more we heal communities, the more they will wrap around the individuals themselves,” Lahad said, adding that resilience should be understood as a muscle that must be continually strengthened.

The pressure on those communities is already visible throughout the public mental-health system.

A State Comptroller’s survey conducted in April 2024 found that 35% of adults reported moderate or severe post-traumatic stress symptoms, 32% reported symptoms of depression, and 21% reported anxiety.

Among respondents who said they or someone close to them had been present at the October 7 events, 54% reported moderate or severe post-traumatic stress symptoms.

In the first six months after the attack, health funds and resilience centers provided psychotherapy to approximately 58,000 adults and children. By the spring of 2024, the average period between requesting care and beginning treatment, including the diagnostic process, was around six-and-a-half months.

The state comptroller warned that delayed treatment could cause symptoms to become entrenched and lead to long-term damage to victims’ employment, family lives, and social functioning.

The local welfare system expected to form part of the community response is also struggling. A June State Comptroller’s Report found that only 18% of the additional municipal social-work positions allocated in response to the war were filled in 2023, rising to 32% in 2024 before falling to 28% in 2025.

In a nonrepresentative survey conducted for the report, 54% of municipal social workers said they had experienced high or very high burnout since the war began. The principal difficulties they identified were workload, staffing shortages, and the growing number of cases.

Together Party representative Liran Avisar Ben Horin called for a shift from responding to crises only after they become severe to actively identifying people in distress.

Just as workplaces are required to appoint officials responsible for preventing sexual harassment, they should consider appointing a mental-health officer able to recognize signs of distress and connect employees with treatment, she said.

The conference’s proposals varied, but they shared a central premise: Israel cannot treat psychological rehabilitation as a temporary emergency project or reduce recovery to the percentage written beside a person’s name.

“The war created a new reality that the State of Israel has still not adequately addressed,” Liat Eilam, executive director of 121, said.

Israel must redesign the rehabilitation process around a person’s return to functioning, extend support to families carrying the burden of care, and build a national mental-health and resilience system rooted in local communities, she said.

“These are two national missions that must stand at the top of the priorities of the next government and Knesset.”

“Don’t know much about history,” songster Sam Cooke’s timeless line from the last century, emerged this week as our culture minister’s motto, and the ruling party’s rallying cry. 

The minister, Miki Zohar, is not the point. The point is a statement about history that he made during a live broadcast and reflects the spirit of denialism that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his operation are determined to foment. 

Having heard Zohar tell KAN radio interviewer Esti Perez that the October 7 massacre is “possibly one of the most difficult [events] the State [of Israel] ever experienced,” Perez asked in astonishment: “Do you, Miki Zohar, not think that October 7 is the most terrible event Israel saw since its establishment?” 

Zohar, it turns out, actually thinks just that. “We also had the Yom Kippur War,” he argued in the telephone interview, “and we also had the Six-Day War; these situations were not simple, and we also lost thousands of people in them.” 

And after Perez explained to the new historian that in those wars the casualties were soldiers, not civilians; and after Zohar still stuck to his thesis; and after she asked angrily: “Why can’t you say that it’s the worst event that happened here?” – the minister of culture (of all things) lost his wits and ranted: “You are dealing with nonsense!” and hung up. 

The art of denial brought to exceptional new heights

If only any of this were nonsense. In fact, this is about memory, denial, and denial’s dire consequences – consequences that can be catastrophic, as we Jews should know better than all others. 
 
The art of denial has been practiced and perfected by many since antiquity, but two nations brought it to exceptional heights: the Jews and the Palestinians. 

The Jews, in the aftermath of their failed revolts against Rome, avoided the objective study of history, as this writer showed in The Jewish March of Folly. Unlike Flavius Josephus, a real historian who collected facts systematically and tried to interpret events impartially, the sages who led the Jews failed to probe the strategic, military, diplomatic, and political blunders our forebears made en route to the grand defeat that the Jewish people will mourn on Tisha B’Av next Thursday. 

Instead, every Jew was made to confess every holiday “because of our sins we were exiled from our land.” Blame was thus shifted from reckless leaders’ political decisions to everyone else’s religious conduct. Looking at history objectively, and listening to its verdict humbly, was too scary. And when shifting blame is the aim, history’s denial becomes the means. 

The same thing happened in our time with ultra-Orthodox explanations of the Holocaust. 

The truth – that major rabbis banned Zionism and forbade immigration to America, and thus unwittingly trapped their followers in Nazi Europe – was too scary to admit. That is what made Rabbi Menachem Eliezer Shach say “God conducted… a long account that sprawled over centuries until it accumulated to a sum of six million, and that is how the Holocaust happened.”

Other rabbis’ denialism produced the absurd libel that Zionist leaders wanted, and even aided, the Nazis’s extermination of ultra-Orthodox Jews (see Kimmy Caplan’s book, Internal Popular Discourse in Israeli Haredi Society, Zalman Shazar Center for Jewish History, Jerusalem, 2007, p. 150).

The same denialism has plagued the Palestinians. 

No Palestinian leader, to this day, was ever prepared to publicly admit the folly of denying the Jews’ roots in this land, the recklessness of waging war on them, and the futility of rejecting the 1947 Partition Plan.

Yes, introspection is hard to do. Blaming everyone else except yourself is always easier, and if history, logic, justice, and morality all stand in the way – so be it. 

That is exactly what is happening now with the leaders who presided over, and are out to belittle, Israel’s most catastrophic event in its 78 years. 

Denialism plagues Palestinians to their detriment

The facts, despite Mr. Zohar’s revisionism, are incontrovertible. 

Never mind his bewildering ignorance of the 1967 Six-Day War; Israel didn’t lose in that war “thousands of people”; it lost 800, as historian Michael Oren noted in Six Days of War. Much more crucially, there is no comparison between wars with minimal civilian losses, as both the Six-Day War and the 1973 Yom Kippur War were, and a war with massive civilian losses, as we have endured since 2023. This is, of course, besides the gap between the swift victory in which the Six-Day War ended, and the current war did not.

The quest to blur these simple facts is part of a broader concert in which Netanyahu is playing first violin. Its opening allegro was the refusal to appoint a judicial commission of inquiry, reflecting the fear of truth that was discussed here when that decision was taken (“The truth about denial,” November 21, 2025). 

It was in that spirit of denialism that Netanyahu tried to shift the blame to the army, to military intelligence, to the Shin Bet (Israel Security Agency), to the judiciary – anyone but himself. Zohar’s clumsy attempt to join this effort only shows he understands what his leader expects. Both men want to make us doubt what happened, and instead believe that what didn’t happen happened. 

Now, with election day hardly three months away, the war on truth will intensify, as the Likud’s propaganda masters set out to invent, multiply, and yelp lies like Benjamin Netanyahu’s libels and Miki Zohar’s canards.

Denialism’s cost is exorbitant. Had the Jews studied their history impartially, they would have understood centuries before Theodor Herzl that regaining their land and restoring their power is their task, not God’s. And had the Palestinians not denied the same history, they would never have been displaced, dishonored, and dismembered. 

Now the political establishment that led Israel before, during, and after its most catastrophic moment is climbing the same path – the path that begins in denial and ends in eviction, dissolution, and disgrace.  

www.MiddleIsrael.net

The writer, a Hartman Institute fellow, is the author of the bestseller, The Jewish March of Folly (Yedioth Books 2026), now available in English on Amazon.

Interviews with Jewish communal leaders tend to run on rails. The communications person, the polished quotes, the photographer, and six months later nothing has moved.

Gary Torgow shows up alone and speaks so softly you lean in.

Several meetings with the Jewish Federations of North America chairman over the past few years leave the same impression. He hosts people from across Detroit’s Jewish community in his home, Orthodox and Reform, big donors and young couples, and somehow all of them have a real relationship with him. People call him a mensch, and in that world the word is not handed out for free. What they mention next, usually with some wonder, is that this soft-spoken man can get almost anyone in America on the phone. You will never hear that from him, and you will never see a photo of the meeting.

He rarely gives interviews. When he does, it’s because he wants to move something for the Jewish people, not because he wants to be seen. So when he agreed to answer questions from The Jerusalem Post, the real question was what he wanted to move.

It turns out to be big. Over the past year, Torgow has lined up money for Jewish day schools from two governments at once.

Washington and Jerusalem

The American side first. The tax law US President Donald Trump signed in July 2025 created something that has never existed before: a federal tax credit for scholarship donations. Starting in January 2027, any taxpayer can give up to $1,700 to a scholarship granting organization and deduct every dollar of it from their federal tax bill. The scholarships go to families earning under 300% of their area’s median income, which covers most day school families.

JFNA is building a national scholarship organization to point that money at Jewish schools. That build is not Torgow’s alone; the day-to-day operation runs through the organization’s president and CEO, Eric Fingerhut, and the division of labor between them is the classic one done right: the chairman opens the doors, and the professional staff builds what walks through them.

It’s worth being precise about what this is, because it is not charity. The $1,700 is money the taxpayer already owes the government. The credit simply lets them decide that it educates a child instead. Nobody is asked to give anything, only to redirect, and that distinction is the whole ballgame: appeals for generosity have limits, but this one asks for a signature.

“This should be an easy victory for education,” Torgow said, “by utilizing taxes that are owed directly to the Federal government, and shifting them legally into the coffers of education for all of our children.”

Then, on June 28, the Israeli cabinet unanimously approved a NIS 200 million first-year plan to strengthen Jewish education in the Diaspora, in partnership with JFNA. Torgow and Fingerhut sat in the cabinet room together for the vote. Pause on that, because it quietly reverses a century of Jewish geography. For a hundred years the money flowed from the Diaspora to Israel. This is money flowing the other way, from a country at war, on the theory that a Jewish school in New Jersey is now a strategic asset.

The government’s own numbers explain why: 1.8 million Jewish school-age children live in the United States. Only a small fraction of them sit in a Jewish classroom, and that fraction is overwhelmingly Orthodox. The real target of both funding streams is the majority of American Jewish families who never seriously priced a day school, because everyone already knew the answer.

Anyone who has covered cabinet decisions about the Diaspora knows that most of them die somewhere between the press release and the budget. This one has a real partner on the other side of the ocean, and it did not come out of nowhere. Torgow chaired the steering committee of Mosaic United, the government’s earlier Diaspora vehicle, so he knew his way around these corridors long before the vote.

The awkward part

There’s a problem with the American money, and the Post put it to him directly. The tax credit is a school choice program from a Trump law that most American Jews opposed. Teachers’ unions hate it. Two Democratic senators want it repealed. States have to opt in, and so far the map mostly follows party lines, though Colorado’s Jared Polis joined and New York’s Kathy Hochul says she will. JFNA is lobbying Democratic governors. So how do you ask liberal Jews to claim a Trump win?

“We aren’t asking anyone to claim victory; we only ask that they embrace our shared responsibility,” he said. The law, he insisted, “reflects the support for education across the political spectrum.”

Everyone who has sat through a federation gala knows that answer. Usually it’s a dodge. With Torgow it’s less clear, because he has spent his whole life on both sides of lines other people don’t cross. He’s the Orthodox yeshiva president who chaired the NAACP’s Fight for Freedom Fund Dinner and holds its Lifetime Achievement Award.

He raised $250 million for Detroit neighborhoods while running Yeshiva Beth Yehudah, the city’s largest Jewish day school. Maybe he actually believes the aisle is crossable, because he keeps crossing it.

Fingerhut, who has partnered with him since he took the chair a year ago, said at the time that the federation system “could not be more fortunate” to have Torgow at the helm at a moment of historic antisemitism and surging Jewish engagement. A year in, the assessment is holding up.

What’s driving him is not subtle. “In light of the significant rise in antisemitism,” he said, “it has become more clear every day that a critical antidote to this terrible scourge is by providing our next generation with the tools to stand as proud, educated and engaged Jewish citizens.”

He’s right about the antidote. And it’s worth saying honestly that the tuition crisis is not new. Every commission and task force has named it for forty years, and the wealthiest Jewish community in history never fixed it. Whether this is the moment that changes, nobody knows yet. But it is the first time federal money, Israeli money, and a chairman who can work both systems have shown up in the same year.

The stipend from Heaven

Asked what he would tell a parent looking at the tax credit for the first time, he didn’t offer numbers. He offered the Talmud. Tractate Beitzah teaches that a person’s income is set each year on the High Holy Days, except for what he spends on Shabbat, the festivals, and his children’s Torah education. That spending, Torgow said, is “a fully additional stipend from Heaven.” Every dollar spent on Jewish education “will be fully reimbursed by the Almighty.”

He has written two books, and neither is about him. One is about his grandfather, M. Manuel Merzon, who came to America from Russia alone at 16. The other is about Rabbi Avrohom Abba Freedman, the Detroit rabbi he learned Torah with for 30 years. Asked what that says about how he understands leadership, he gave the lesson those two men left him: “None of the important work we will do in our lives is for or about ourselves.” He even hid his grandfather inside the name of his first bank. Talmer. Merzon.

And what needs to be true when his grandchildren ask what he did as chairman at this moment in Jewish history? He answered with two Hebrew words before anything else: Kiddush Hashem, the sanctification of God’s name.

The date he chose

In the cabinet room on June 28, after the vote, Torgow told the ministers how this actually began. He first pressed Netanyahu on Israeli investment in Diaspora Jewish education at a private meeting on July 5, 2022. He picked the date deliberately: the sixth of Tammuz, the yahrzeit of the prime minister’s brother Yoni. Then he waited. It took four years, a war, and the worst wave of antisemitism in living memory for the idea to come back around the table.

The Government Press Office photographed him that morning, standing among the ministers beside the prime minister. It is one of the few pictures of him you will find anywhere.

He didn’t share it. He never does.

Some writers complain of an occasional mental block. I suffer from a bottleneck. Every week, there are so many topics rivaling for attention and column inches that it’s a struggle to decide which one should come out first, and hard to control the flow of ideas – or stream of consciousness – that inevitably follows.

Several of last week’s stories spilled over into this week. Rahm Emanuel’s carefully crafted speech at Tel Aviv University, followed by multiple media interviews, was acknowledged as his opening bid for the Democratic presidential nomination. He warned Israel: “You don’t have a problem with the Democratic Party. You have an America problem.”

As Micha Danzig put it in The Algemeiner, “Emanuel isn’t a principled man bucking his party’s drift. He’s a cynic chasing it… A friend does not import the vocabulary of Israel’s worst-faith accusers and call it ‘tough love.’”

If Emanuel’s trip was well-scripted, the visit by Democrat Californian Congressman Ro Khanna was well-staged. He knew that making an uncoordinated visit to “the West Bank” (Judea and Samaria) would end up in a confrontation. And if he didn’t know, then certainly his guide from the Breaking the Silence movement did. That’s the point of these visits – create a provocation and film the consequences. The “settlers” fall for it every time. And Israel is paying the price.

As Jerusalem Post editor-in-chief Zvika Klein noted, Khanna’s story about being detained by settlers and soldiers grew with every retelling, but in a TikTok world, the facts don’t matter. If you repeat the buzzwords “genocide,” “apartheid,” and “colonialism,” you can get away with murder.

If the so-called Squad, Emanuel, and Khanna are the face of America’s future, it doesn’t bode well for the world at large.

Emanuel and Khanna made the sudden death this week of South Carolina Senator Lindsey Graham an even more painful loss. A true friend of Israel – not Emanuel’s fake version – Graham’s support sprang from a deep devotion to Israel’s survival rather than his political survival. He also had a real awareness of the dangers of the Russian-Iranian-Chinese axis.

The chants “Death to America” and “Death to Israel” that accompanied the funeral in Iran of supreme leader Ali Khamenei were part of the ritual. The procession that passed through multiple locations, both in Iran and in neighboring Iraq, took place some five months after he was assassinated at the start of February’s joint US-Israel operation. Iranian sources claimed more than 15 million attended the funeral parade.

Iranian missiles and drones continued to pound targets, mainly US military assets, across the Gulf States and Jordan this week, while Iran’s Houthi proxy attacked Saudi Arabia. Together with Iranian piracy in the Strait of Hormuz, the attacks show that peace is not around the corner. Allowing the Islamic Republic to develop nuclear weapons and ballistic missiles would be suicidal.

Among the stories jostling for attention, a special place is reserved for the reports, initially published in The New York Times, that Israel planned to replace Ali Khamenei with former Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, utilizing a Kurdish uprising. The plan, reportedly cultivated over several years, reached the stage where Ahmadinejad met with then-Mossad chief David Barnea in Hungary but later got cold feet. He was last seen at Khamenei’s funeral. It’s understandable if he cried there.

It’s hard to determine how much of the plot is truth and how much fiction, but after Israel’s extraordinary eradication of the Hezbollah terrorist organization’s top cadre in the September 2024 Pager Operation, anything is possible.

I frequently warn that regime change shouldn’t be carried out without a known successor, but Holocaust-denier Ahmadinejad does not spring to mind as the best candidate. I’m also not alone in wondering who leaked the story, why, and what was the significance in the timing.

The Middle East’s dangerous power games

There was another noteworthy funeral this week following the death of Qatar’s former leader Sheikh Hamad bin Khalifa Al Thani. By chance, Israel’s public broadcaster KAN had just released an episode in its Enemies series dedicated to the most powerful woman in the Middle East: Sheikha Moza bint Nasser. She is the late sheikh’s widow and mother of the current emir, Sheikh Tamim bin Hamad Al Thani, who ascended to power after his father’s abdication in 2013.

The program showed how the photogenic and stylish Sheikha Moza, as a co-founder and head of Qatar Foundation, puts the presentable face on the tiny country’s tactics of buying friends and influence through its gifts, endowments, and, of course, its media network Al Jazeera. Qatar’s double game has enabled it to be perceived as philanthropic while simultaneously pushing its religious extremist agenda.

Two quick takeaways from the program: the first, that Qatari money and support contributed to the Hamas invasion and mega-atrocity of October 7, 2023, and the second, that Qatar continues to offer sanctuary to the Hamas leadership.

Turkey’s leader Recep Tayyip Erdogan played the host at last week’s NATO summit in Ankara, but he also helps Hamas and doesn’t hide his Islamist colors. Erdogan last month declared: “Zionism threatens not only me, not only our party, and not only our alliance, but everyone.” In a CNN interview ahead of the summit, Turkish Foreign Minister Hakan Fidan said: “These people [Israelis] have become a burden that humanity can no longer bear.”

When US President Donald Trump accepted a $400 million plane from Qatar, he ignored the strings that came with the gift-wrapping – and continued to promote Qatar as an ostensibly neutral mediator with Iran. Trump is now considering granting Turkey the F-35s fighter jets it covets. 

Israel, of course, is not alone in perceiving the threat from Erdogan’s longings for a renewed Ottoman Empire; Greece and Cyprus are also anxious (especially as Turkey still occupies Northern Cyprus after its 1974 invasion), and Turkish and Russian meddling in Syria should not be ignored.

Granting Turkey and Qatar a role in rebuilding Gaza – destroyed due to the murderous Hamas regime they support – will not be constructive in any other sense of the word.

The 2026 FIFA World Cup has provided some global distraction. The Norwegians won hearts as the team’s “Viking row” went viral – although why the world today thinks violent Viking colonialism is cute is food for thought.

Looking into the Norwegian success, I came across a darker story in Politico. Norway – the country that gave the world the term Quisling and the Oslo Accords – is struggling to get Israel ousted from FIFA using the usual slogans à la Rahm Emanuel. The Norwegian Football Federation doesn’t seem to have a problem with Palestinian Football Association head Jibril Rajoub, a convicted terrorist-turned-functionary who is also calling for Israel’s removal (and preferably Israel’s destruction).

So many stories, so little space. The decision by outgoing British Prime Minister Keir Starmer to designate Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps a threat to national security is overdue but welcome, especially accompanied by a boost in funding to counter antisemitism. 

Yet, this week, the Church of England’s General Synod voted in favor of a motion “to hear” the so-called Kairos II document. Tellingly titled “A Moment of Truth: Faith in a Time of Genocide,” it accuses Israel of being a “racist,” “colonial enterprise,” and carrying out “genocide” in Gaza. The document also voices opposition to the Abraham Accords and objects to Christian Zionism. So much for world peace.

There was a certain irony in the rejection of Israel as a Jewish state coming this week – as we enter the Nine Days leading up to Tisha B’Av, the Ninth of Av on the Hebrew calendar. It’s a day of mourning that commemorates the destruction of the First and Second Temples in Jerusalem.

Israel is not an implanted Western colony, as the pro-Palestinian forces would have the world believe. On the contrary, our indigenous roots here as Jews go back millennia, centuries before Christianity was created and the even later birth of Mohammed and Islam (and well before the Vikings rowed and rampaged their way to new lands).

We beat a different tune to those suddenly beloved Vikings, but unlike them, our ancestors would still recognize our religion, language, and culture (and the Jew-hatred they elicit). Of all the things I could write about, Jewish ties to Jerusalem and the survival of the Jewish people and civilization is the most important story. 

There are few moments in a nation’s history when its citizens can watch events unfold in real time and say they witnessed their own government knowingly, deliberately, and willingly weaken the country.

That is exactly what this government has done over the past few days by passing two laws designed to allow ultra-Orthodox (haredi) Israelis to continue evading military service while shielding them from the consequences of breaking the law.

The first is the Basic Law that elevates Torah study to a national value on par with military service. The second, passed Tuesday night, effectively prevents draft evaders from being arrested despite existing laws requiring them to serve. 

Together, these laws, backed by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s coalition, send a devastating message.

At a moment when the IDF says it is short nearly 15,000 soldiers, reservists have served hundreds of days with no end in sight, and Israel’s enemies are rebuilding in Gaza, Lebanon, and Iran, this is about far more than equality before the law.

It weakens the military, erodes the social contract, and once again places narrow political interests ahead of Israel’s national security.

What is hard to swallow is just how close the parallels are to the judicial overhaul. 
After October 7, Netanyahu repeatedly argued that no one had warned him Hamas was preparing for war or that Israel’s internal divisions were creating dangerous vulnerabilities. We now know that was not true. 

The head of Military Intelligence’s Research Division at the time had sent him a number of letters warning exactly this, and the IDF chief of staff then, Herzi Halevi, famously tried to meet with Netanyahu just before the Knesset voted on a key judicial overhaul, but was rebuffed. 

Shin Bet (Israel Security Agency) chief Ronen Bar also warned that Israel’s enemies saw Israel’s domestic crisis as a sign of weakness.

Those warnings were all ignored, and the consequences are well known – an attack that was the darkest day in Israel’s history, followed by three years of war that still do not seem to have a clear ending.

I am not suggesting that these draft laws will lead to another October 7. But there is no ambiguity – the warnings are not buried inside classified letters. Instead, they are being delivered publicly by the IDF itself.

The military has been saying for months that it does not have enough soldiers. The number – nearly 15,000 – is staggering. 

Reservists continue to carry the burden of this war despite having already served hundreds of days, leaving behind businesses, careers, and families while answering call-up after call-up because the country needs them.

But instead of doing what it can to alleviate the burden, the government’s response is to extend compulsory service for those already serving and ask reservists to continue carrying the load.

This is despite the fact that tens of thousands of healthy young Israelis who are capable of serving remain outside the system simply because they are haredi.

Instead of bringing them into the army, this government is doing everything possible to cement their exemption.

This debate is not about faith or observance. A person can value Torah learning while also understanding that everyone needs to serve in the IDF. 

There have been countless examples of deeply religious soldiers studying Talmud inside tanks, teaching Torah classes from the battlefields of Gaza and Lebanon, and combining strict, serious religious commitment with meaningful military service.

Torah learning has preserved the Jewish people for thousands of years and remains one of the foundations of Israeli society, but it does not stand alone. No society can survive without sharing in the burden of the collective. That is what the haredim refuse to accept.

Politics over national security

Netanyahu knows all this. So do the members of his coalition who voted for the two laws this week. They also know that their Likud and Religious Zionist Party voters do not support giving the ultra-Orthodox a continued exemption from service.

The problem is that Netanyahu’s overriding objective today is not about what is right for the country. It is about preserving his political bloc for the day after the election on October 27.
 
Every concession made to United Torah Judaism and Shas is designed to ensure that those parties remain loyal to him when recommendations are made to the president and the race to form Israel’s next government begins.

I know that a lot of people think that this is impossible because both former prime minister Naftali Bennett and Yashar party leader Gadi Eisenkot have promised they will not sit with the ultra-Orthodox and that they will make sure to pass the necessary laws to draft them.

That is all true right now. But in the aftermath of an election, if Eisenkot and Bennett have the opportunity to sever the ultra-Orthodox alliance with Netanyahu and bring the haredim into a coalition, they will potentially do so.

Even if some voters are upset that they have reneged and backtracked on their promise, it will be accepted and swallowed because it will lead to the removal of Netanyahu from office.

At the end of the day, the voters who support Eisenkot, Bennett, and Lapid do so mostly because of their desire to remove Netanyahu. How do I know this? 

Think back to the so-called “change government” formed by Bennett and opposition leader Yair Lapid in 2021, and ask why that government, which did not have ultra-Orthodox members, did not draft yeshiva students?

The answer is because, in his heart, Bennett hoped that one day he would be able to bring the ultra-Orthodox into the government. He hoped that he could sever the alliance that Netanyahu had forged with them, and therefore, he didn’t want to ruin his chances. 

So, he refused to take the steps then that were necessary to draft them.

Now, though, what makes this moment so troubling is that the government knows exactly what is at stake. This is after October 7. No one can claim they do not understand the potential consequences.

For decades, Israeli governments have operated on one basic principle: security comes first. Coalition agreements, budgets, and legislation were ultimately expected to serve the needs of the defense establishment.

Here, the opposite has happened. These laws may help Netanyahu preserve his coalition and improve his chances of remaining prime minister after the election, but that is not what leadership is meant to be about. 

Leadership is supposed to be about making difficult decisions for the good of the country, even when they carry political costs. What we saw this week is the opposite: sacrificing the country’s interests for short-term political survival.

October 7 taught Israel the price of ignoring clear warnings. Today, the IDF is warning, publicly and clearly, that it does not have enough soldiers and that these laws will only make that shortage worse.

No one will be able to say today that they didn’t know the price of their actions. And if the consequences come, history will record that this time the government knew exactly what it was doing.

The writer is a co-founder of the MEAD Forum, a senior fellow at the Jewish People Policy Institute, and the former editor-in-chief of The Jerusalem Post. His latest book (with Amir Bohbot), While Israel Slept, is a bestseller in the United States.

The Military Prosecution for the West Bank filed an indictment on Thursday against Shadi Juma, the terrorist who killed Ido Zoldan in 2007, the IDF spokesperson said in a statement. 

The terrorist was recently released from Palestinian Authority custody and was arrested in Kalkilya on May 26, 2026, during a joint operation by IDF forces and the Shin Bet.

According to the indictment, in November 2007 the defendant and two others devised a plan to carry out a shooting attack against Jewish settlers on a major route.

The defendant and his accomplices reportedly gathered the necessary weapons and prepared the vehicle for the attack.

Juma’s accomplices were indicted in 2008.

The indictment displays Juma’s intent to kill Zoldan

They then set out to look for vehicles driven by Israelis, agreeing to confirm that the victim was Jewish before shooting, the IDF spokesperson explained.

After spotting Zoldan’s car, they approached it in their own vehicle, and one of the accomplices fired at it from close range with the intent to cause death.

Zoldan died as a result of the attack.

The indictment charges Juma with intentionally causing death while acting in concert, which is equivalent to being charged with murder.

For decades, the Israeli Right has proudly claimed Ze’ev Jabotinsky as its ideological father. His doctrine of the Iron Wall has been the intellectual foundation of the national camp for more than a century. It was built on one simple truth: Israel can only achieve security when its enemies understand that they cannot defeat it militarily.

That “Iron Wall” was never merely a metaphor, it was a strategic doctrine. It required an army so strong, so resilient and so capable that no enemy would ever believe Israel could be worn down through attrition or intimidation.

This week, the coalition that repeatedly describes itself as “the most right-wing government in Israel’s history” took a sledgehammer to that very doctrine.

By passing legislation that effectively prevents the arrest and prosecution of ultra-Orthodox draft evaders, while simultaneously advancing a Basic Law declaring Torah study a “foundational value” of the State of Israel, the coalition has done something unprecedented. It has chosen to institutionalize military inequality at precisely the moment Israel requires the largest, strongest and most capable army in its history.

This is not a technical legal debate over exemptions. It is a fundamental strategic choice about the future security of the State of Israel.

For years, the Israeli Left argued that Israel should gradually reduce its reliance on military power. Many believed diplomacy, international guarantees and conflict management could replace overwhelming military superiority. 

The Right consistently rejected that approach. We understood the Middle East as it is, not as we wished it to be. We recognized that Israel’s existence depends first and foremost on its ability to defend itself, by itself.

That was the essence of Jabotinsky’s Iron Wall.

Yet today it is a self-proclaimed Right-wing coalition that has embraced a policy whose inevitable consequence is a smaller army, a more overstretched reserve force and a weaker Israel.

The contradiction could not be more glaring.

Manpower shortages will force Israel into an impossible position

The Israel Defense Forces have made their position unmistakably clear. The Chief of Staff, appointed by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu himself, has repeatedly warned that the IDF faces a severe manpower crisis. 

After years of continuous fighting on multiple fronts, reserve soldiers have served hundreds of days away from their families and businesses. Regular units are stretched thin, new battalions are needed, and existing forces require reinforcement.

These are not political opinions, they are operational realities.

Every exemption granted today means another reservist called up tomorrow.

Every young man who is permanently exempt from service increases the burden on those already carrying it.

Every political compromise made in the coalition room is eventually paid for by soldiers on the battlefield.

Israel today is unlike any period in its history. Hamas remains a threat in Gaza. Hezbollah continues to rebuild its capabilities in Lebanon. Iran openly seeks Israel’s destruction while expanding its regional network of proxies. Syria remains unstable. Terrorism in Judea and Samaria demands an ongoing military presence.

A genuinely right-wing government would understand that these realities demand expanding the IDF, not shrinking the pool of those expected to serve.

Instead, we are moving in precisely the opposite direction.

The result will not simply be longer reserve duty or heavier burdens. It will eventually become a strategic dilemma.

If manpower shortages continue to worsen, Israel may soon be forced to make impossible choices. Do we maintain sufficient forces in Judea and Samaria to protect our communities there? Do we maintain our presence in Lebanon? Do we retain enough combat brigades for operations in Gaza? Or do we simply accept that the IDF cannot simultaneously fulfil every mission expected of it?

These are choices Israel should never have to make.

Yet they are becoming increasingly likely because this coalition has chosen politics over security.

Judiasm balances Torah study and combat

Supporters of these laws insist Torah study contributes to Israel’s security in its own way. Judaism has always recognized the immense spiritual value of Torah learning, and Torah scholars have played an indispensable role in preserving Jewish civilization throughout history.

Our sages understood the balance between learning and combat very well, and the Talmud, the Rambam, and multiple other authorities ruled that in a time of obligatory war, which we face every single day, a bride and groom can be pulled from the bridal canopy.

This example was used specifically by our rabbis to demonstrate the enormity of the need and the immediacy of the moment. 

The tragedy is that this legislation, led by those who claim to be Orthodox Jews, does not merely weaken the IDF, it reforms Jewish law and practice. 

It also fundamentally rewrites the identity of Israel’s national camp.

For over one hundred years, the Right believed military strength was the indispensable foundation upon which every other national aspiration rested. 

Settlement, sovereignty, deterrence and diplomacy all depend on an army capable of defending them.

Without sufficient soldiers, there can be no effective security presence in Judea and Samaria. Without enough combat units, deterrence erodes. Without deterrence, the Iron Wall itself begins to crack.

Jabotinsky understood this better than anyone.

The irony is difficult to ignore. Those who most loudly proclaim themselves guardians of Jabotinsky’s legacy have become the first government in Israel’s history to legislate policies that knowingly reduce the country’s military capacity during wartime.

History will judge this moment harshly.

Not because the coalition reached another political compromise.

Not because another Basic Law was enacted, but because at a defining moment for Israel’s security, it abandoned the central principle that sustained the Zionist Right for generations: that the first responsibility of any government is to ensure the State of Israel possesses an army strong enough to defend every citizen, on every border, against every threat.

That was Jabotinsky’s Iron Wall.

This coalition has not strengthened it.

It has broken it.

The writer is a Member of Knesset and Yisrael Beytenu Knesset Faction Chairman.

Why Gadi Eisenkot distanced himself from Yitzhak Yosef’s embrace, and what that says about the changing fault lines of Israeli politics

Former chief rabbi and Shas spiritual leader Rabbi Yitzhak Yosef offered Yashar Party head Gadi Eisenkot a political bear hug on Saturday night. Throughout the week, Eisenkot worked carefully to loosen the grip.

To understand Eisenkot’s tepid reaction – and how what would have been a political asset in the 1990s has become an electoral liability today – is to understand how profoundly Israeli politics has changed.

“Due to our many sins, we are in a secular, non-haredi state,” Yosef bemoaned during his weekly religious sermon. “We pray that everyone repents. There are those who will repent; there are those who won’t.”

Then came the surprise.

Shas may support Eisenkot as the next prime minister

Yosef, whose party has been a core pillar of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s right-wing bloc for decades, declared there was “not a chance” that Netanyahu might “repent.” Of Eisenkot, however, he mused, “perhaps he will.”

Yosef went so far as to suggest that Shas could support Eisenkot as the next prime minister.

“Gadi Eisenkot is a good person, a warm Jew; he loves those who study Torah,” Yosef said, gleaning personal anecdotes from an interview Eisenkot had recently given the haredi website Kikar Hashabbat. “His grandmother voted Shas and wanted him to be a rabbi; while that didn’t happen, you could trust him.”

By contrast, Yosef blasted Netanyahu, who spent the week pushing through highly controversial legislation demanded by Shas leader Arye Deri to freeze the arrest of haredi draft evaders. “Netanyahu cheated us on the conscription law,” he said. “He cannot be trusted; he’s a liar.”

Electoral gold, right? The spiritual leader of a party projected to win eight seats – enough, according to many polls, to push an Eisenkot-led coalition over the 61-seat threshold – was publicly signaling openness to replacing Netanyahu.

In another era, prime ministerial aspirants would have celebrated.

When Shimon Peres battled Netanyahu in the 1990s, a public blessing from a leading haredi rabbi was the sort of breakthrough campaign strategists dreamed about. Labor and Likud leaders alike made highly publicized pilgrimages to the homes of haredi rabbis, donning kippot, asking for blessings, and treating an endorsement as a massive political victory.

But not today.

Asked on Channel 12 on Wednesday about Yosef’s remarks, Eisenkot quickly distanced himself from them.

“I saw them in the media,” he said coldly, adding that he hadn’t met Yosef in a decade.

He was even more emphatic in dismissing reports of contacts with the haredi parties. “I am not flirting with them,” he said. “I haven’t seen a single Shas MK over the past year. I haven’t seen one, and I haven’t spoken to one.”

This response reflects the profound shift in the issues shaping Israeli elections.

In the 1990s, many centrist and left-wing voters prioritized the Oslo Accords and the peace process; they grumbled about “religious coercion” and funding for yeshivot, but those concerns generally took a back seat to diplomacy. Coalition math was coalition math, and if Shas was needed to advance the peace process, many accepted the necessity.

Today, however, the defining fault line has moved.

Much of Eisenkot’s potential electorate – including many of the soft-right voters he hopes to attract – view haredi conscription as a top priority, often because they and their children are paying a high personal price for this lack of conscription.

Against that backdrop, any hint of a deal would fuel accusations that Eisenkot is ready to trade away IDF draft reform for political gain.

This is especially true given Yosef’s own record. He has argued not only that yeshiva students should remain exempt from military service, but that even haredim who are not studying full-time should not be drafted. He has urged recipients of draft notices to throw them into the toilet and suggested that if ultra-Orthodox men are forced into the army, they should emigrate.

For a candidate whose campaign revolves around the need to repair Israel after October 7 – including addressing the manpower crisis in the IDF – embracing Yosef’s endorsement wouldn’t be a bridge to power. Instead, it would be instantly weaponized by political rivals as a modern-day “stinking maneuver” – a callback to Peres’s infamous, failed 1990 attempt to bring down a unity government through secret, backroom deals with the haredi parties.

Yet distancing himself from Shas is not the same as ruling it out, and that distinction lies at the heart of Eisenkot’s political strategy.

Eisenkot said in the Channel 12 interview that he would rule out as a coalition partner any party that rejects the principle of military, national, or civilian service. But that means the converse is also true: he would form a government with parties that accept those principles, including the haredi and Arab parties if they accept those rules of engagement.

That position immediately distinguishes him from one of his most natural coalition partners, Yisrael Beytenu chairman Avigdor Liberman, who has repeatedly declared that he will not sit with either the haredi or Arab parties.

‘We will establish a Zionist, statesmanlike government’

Eisenkot, by contrast, is being extraordinarily careful not to box himself in.

For instance, in the Kikar Hashabbat interview, he was asked directly whether he would establish a government dependent on Arab parties.

“We will establish a Zionist, statesmanlike government,” he said, sidestepping the issue.

Pressed three separate times, he dodged the issue three separate times. Finally, the interviewer, Yishai Cohen, asked: “If you have to choose between relying on the Arab parties or on the haredi parties, which would you prefer?”

Again, Eisenkot declined the invitation.

Instead, he outlined three principles that, he said, would determine coalition eligibility.

First, recognition of Israel as the nation-state of the Jewish people with a solid Jewish majority. Second, acceptance of the principles embodied in the Declaration of Independence. Third, acceptance of the obligation to serve – whether in the IDF or through National Service.

“I say this both to the haredim and to the Arabs,” he added.

The answer was revealing not because it answered the question, but because it didn’t. It left every political door open.

The same pattern emerged in the Channel 12 interview when Dana Weiss asked if he would unequivocally say he will not sit with Netanyahu.

Netanyahu, Eisenkot said, along with “all the other members of his security cabinet,” is “not fit to hold any leadership position” in Israel. Pressed to give a “yes or no answer,” he demurred. “It’s a question I don’t even need to answer.”

Wrong, it’s less a question he doesn’t need to answer than one he does not want to answer.

And for understandable reasons. Why voluntarily reduce your coalition options months before an election whose outcome remains impossible to predict?

Naftali Bennett provides a cautionary tale.

Before the 2021 election, Bennett repeatedly promised not to form a government with Yair Lapid or rely on Mansour Abbas’s Ra’am Party. He even signed a written pledge to that effect.

After the election, political reality forced him to do precisely that. Five years later, many voters on the soft Right still cite that reversal as evidence that he cannot be trusted.

Eisenkot appears determined not to repeat the mistake. He is allowing himself maximum flexibility before Election Day, knowing that the coalition math after the votes are counted may look very different from today’s polling.

That strategy also invites inevitable comparisons with the last former IDF chief of staff to enter politics amid enormous public expectations: Benny Gantz.

Much has already been written comparing Eisenkot to his erstwhile ally, and the similarities are obvious.

Both reached politics after serving as IDF chief of staff. Both entered public life carrying enormous reservoirs of public trust. Both benefited from an electorate inclined to view senior generals as competent, responsible national leaders.

And both saw their parties surge almost immediately in the polls.

But there is also an important difference. When Gantz burst onto the political scene in 2018, much of his appeal rested on ambiguity.

Few voters knew where he stood on many of the central issues confronting the country, and for months he revealed remarkably little. Whether by instinct or by design, he allowed voters to project their own views onto him.

Eisenkot has been considerably less opaque.

For starters, he is not entering politics from scratch, having served three years in the Knesset as a National Unity MK and eight months in Netanyahu’s national-emergency government after Oct. 7.

The public knows considerably more about him than it knew about Gantz in 2019.

Still, Nahum Barnea captured something when he wrote last month in Yediot Aharonot that Eisenkot’s rise is being driven largely by emotion; by an emotional affinity with a former chief of staff, a bereaved father (Eisenkot’s son and two of his nephews were killed in Gaza), a man from the periphery (Eilat), and someone of Moroccan descent.

These are, for many, important emotional markers. But they don’t tell the whole story.

Eisenkot’s appeal may ultimately rest on something deeper than emotion alone.

For three decades, Netanyahu has assembled a political coalition built not only around ideology but also around identity.

His was always a coalition rooted in the periphery, among Mizrahi voters, among traditional Jews, among Israelis who often felt culturally dismissed by the country’s old Ashkenazi Labor establishment and elite.

Eisenkot arrives possessing many of those same cultural credentials. He is Moroccan. He comes from the periphery. He speaks respectfully about Jewish tradition. He served as chief of staff.

Yet politically, he offers something very different from Netanyahu. That may explain why he has focused so much of his campaigning outside Tel Aviv and in the North and South.

It may also explain why, despite his harsh criticism of the government’s performance, he has generally avoided the personal invective against Netanyahu that has become commonplace elsewhere in the opposition.

Eisenkot seems to understand that voters who might consider crossing over from Likud are unlikely to respond to relentless attacks on the man they have supported for years.

The question his campaign appears to be testing is whether identity politics on the Israeli Right can be weakened by a candidate who shares much of that identity while offering a different style of leadership.

Regardless of how the electorate answers that question, Yosef’s embrace – and Eisenkot’s determination to escape it – already tells an important story.

It illustrates not only how one candidate intends to navigate this campaign, but also how profoundly the country’s political map has been redrawn.

The fifth book of the Torah, known as Mishneh Torah (“Repetition of the Torah”), is devoted primarily to reviewing the commandments, statutes, and laws that were given to the Jewish people in the four preceding books. 

The Mishneh Torah also contains Moses’ words of rebuke to the nation on the eve of their entry into the Land of Israel, along with his farewell, blessings, and guidance to the people he had led from the Exodus from Egypt to the threshold of the Promised Land.

As part of this process, the Torah describes another act through which Moses prepared the nation for life in the Land of Israel:

“And it came to pass in the fortieth year, in the eleventh month, on the first day of the month… beyond the Jordan, in the land of Moab, Moses began to explain this Torah.” (Deuteronomy 1:3-5)

Rashi comments: “He explained it to them in 70 languages.”

This raises an obvious question. The Jewish people were about to enter their own land and become a nation living on its own soil, united by a single language – the Holy Tongue. Why, then, was it necessary to explain the Torah in 70 languages? Was the language in which the Torah was given not sufficient and fully understood by the entire nation?

Moreover, throughout the generations, the sages of Israel were extremely cautious about translating the Torah into other languages, lest the nations of the world gain access to its deeper secrets.

The translation of the Torah into Greek

One of the tragic dates commemorated in the Jewish calendar marks the day when King Ptolemy compelled the Jewish sages to translate the Torah into Greek. How, then, can it be that Moses himself translated the Torah into all the languages of the world?

The commentary HaKetav VeHaKabbalah (on Deuteronomy) explains:

“The intention is not the languages of the other nations, for what benefit would that have brought Israel? Nor did our sages abandon their own language in favor of another nation’s tongue. Rather, our sages often use the word lashon (‘language’) to mean an intention or interpretation. Thus, ‘70 languages’ refers to 70 interpretations, corresponding to the teaching that ‘the Torah has 70 facets,’ meaning its many inner dimensions beyond its plain meaning.”

According to this explanation, “70 languages” means “70 interpretations,” in keeping with the sages’ well-known teaching that the Torah has “70 faces.” Yet there is a fundamental principle that “Scripture never departs from its plain meaning,” and indeed most commentators understood Rashi literally – that Moses truly explained the Torah in 70 different languages.

The great masters of hassidic thought offer another explanation. Moses foresaw that the Jewish people would endure future exiles. He therefore prepared them for the reality that lay ahead, when they would be scattered among the nations and would need to study the Torah in many different languages so that it would never be forgotten.

Yet even this explanation leaves a question unanswered. Couldn’t the sages of each generation have translated the Torah as the need arose? Why was it necessary for Moses himself to do so specifically at this moment, just before the people entered the Land of Israel?

It seems that a much deeper principle is being taught.

The eternal Torah

One common claim about the Torah is that it is no longer relevant to the realities of modern life. Yet one of the Thirteen Principles of Faith affirms that the Torah is eternal and will never be replaced.

The generation that received the Torah at Mount Sinai knew how to conduct itself in every situation. The Torah, the Torah of Life, provided clear guidance for every question and every challenge. But as the generations pass, languages change, lifestyles evolve, and reality itself takes on new forms. Naturally, one might begin to feel that the Torah belongs to the past and no longer speaks to the present. For this reason, Moses explained the Torah in 70 languages.

This was not merely a matter of translation. It was the gift of the Torah’s eternal ability to speak to every generation in its own language, through its own concepts and within the realities of its own world. In every era, in every place, and under every circumstance, the Torah retains the power to illuminate the path and guide people in how they should live. The Torah itself is one and unchanging, yet its practical message can be expressed anew in every generation.

When Moses translated the Torah into the “language of life” of every generation, each Jew, in every age, is not merely studying a tradition handed down through history. Rather, it is as though he is hearing the words directly from their original source, just as they were given at Sinai.

Just as the first generation knew with certainty how they were meant to live, so too every generation can hear the voice of the Torah speaking directly to the realities of its own time.

This understanding lies at the foundation of every Jew’s faith. God continually renews the work of Creation each and every day, and the very existence of the world rests upon the holy Torah, through whose letters and combinations of letters the world itself was created. It therefore follows that nothing is more relevant than the Torah. Its laws, values, integrity, morality, and the social principles it instills have accompanied humanity throughout the generations. 

As the world continues to advance, it becomes ever clearer that the Torah is indeed a Torah of Life, providing a straight and enduring path for all who embrace it – and nothing could be more relevant.

The writer is rabbi of the Western Wall and Holy Sites.

When Jordan Wood vied last fall for the Democratic nomination for Maine’s US Senate seat, he avoided accusing Israel of genocide, citing a link between rising antisemitism and “the language” that people use.

Graham Platner, who went on to overwhelmingly win the nomination, did not stint on using the term. Platner is out after accusations of sexual assault, and Wood is once again running in the abbreviated primary to replace him. (Platner has denied the accusations.)

Now the former congressional staffer is changing his tune, and crediting the shift to Platner.

“I believe we can’t continue to fund Israel’s genocide in Gaza,” Wood wrote on social media last week. “It’s a moral atrocity. We should be using our taxpayer dollars to fund schools, healthcare, and childcare here at home, not on bombing innocent civilians.”

Last November, Wood said he was concerned the word was so loaded as to be dangerous. He told Democratic commentator Kaivan Shroff that he believed Israel has committed war crimes in Gaza, but stopped short of using the term genocide.

Wood credits Platner for his change in attitude towards Israel

“I’ve hesitated on it because I’m also seeing a real rise in antisemitism in the United States,” Wood said then. “My husband is Jewish, and the acts of violence toward Jewish Americans is very much connected to the language that we use.”

It would be “a huge deal for the United States Congress to designate what’s going on in Gaza as a genocide officially,” Wood said 

“There could be consequences to that of US citizens that have served in the IDF,” he said. “Do they get prosecuted?”

Wood’s campaign did not respond to a request for comment on what prompted him to adopt the term, but during a televised debate on Thursday night, Wood credited Platner as the inspiration.

“Graham got into this race saying, ‘This is genocide,’” Wood said. “And I learned that it is so important in these moments to draw those moral lines.”

He added, “I embrace that position now, but I learned it from him.”

Candidates campaign to replace Platner

The Maine Democratic Party has until July 27 to nominate a replacement for Platner, an anti-Israel progressive, in hopes of unseating GOP Sen. Susan Collins. 

Wood, along with major candidates Troy Jackson, Nirav Shah and Shenna Bellows have all accused Israel of having committed genocide since launching their campaigns, underscoring the shrinking popularity of Israel among Democratic voters and their representatives in the wake of its war in Gaza, and perhaps noting Platner’s success in making Israel an issue in the race. 

In an interview this week with The Advocate, Wood criticized the embattled Platner, while saying that he would “carry on that platform” that had energized Maine voters.

“I separate Graham, the movement, from the person,” Wood said. He pointed to issues like conditioning aid to Israel and rejecting corporate PAC and AIPAC money, as priorities that he shared with Platner.

The US needs to use its ‘enormous leverage’ against Israel

Wood told Shroff in November that he would not take money from AIPAC, and added that there is a “huge amount of distrust” of the pro-Israel lobbying organization among Democratic voters.

“I believe the only way to truly prove to a voter that you are voting and prioritizing policies in their best interest, and for our country’s best interest, is to remove any perception of corruption or misdealing,” Wood said.

He has also been consistent in saying that he would vote in support of Bernie Sanders’ resolutions to block the sales of certain weapons to Israel, while maintaining that that shouldn’t mean halting the US-Israel relationship altogether.

“The United States should absolutely have a cooperative relationship with Israel, and I want that relationship to work. But a real partnership is not a blank check,” Wood told Jewish Insider last week. “It comes with honesty and accountability. The United States has enormous leverage with the Israeli government, and we’ve been refusing to use it.”

Wood and a number of other candidates will participate in a televised debate on CNN on Thursday night, ahead of the July 27 nominating convention.

British police said on Friday they had charged a 39-year-old man on suspicion of assisting Iran’s intelligence service, the latest in a series of incidents involving Tehran and offenses covered under UK National Security laws.

Police said the suspect, Vahid Aberi, from Liverpool, northern England, was taken to a police station in central England and searches had been carried out at addresses in nearby Birmingham and Liverpool.

UK security officials have repeatedly warned that Iran has sought to use criminal proxies to carry out hostile activity in the country. Since the beginning of the US-Iran war, there have been a number of antisemitic attacks in Britain linked to Iran.

Seeking to use new powers designed to stop the use of state-sponsored proxies, Britain banned support for Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps earlier this week.

On the Aberi investigation, police said they had not identified any direct threat to any community or individual, but said they were having to intervene more frequently to disrupt suspected activity by foreign intelligence services.

“We have seen a significant and sustained increase in the tempo of our work in national security investigations in recent years,” Helen Flanagan, head of counter terrorism policing in London, said in a statement.

Iran rejects claims of being ‘a threat to Britain’

Last week, Britain summoned Iran’s most senior diplomat over the stabbing of an Iranian journalist in London, for which two Romanians were convicted.

In response to being called a threat to Britain, Iran’s embassy in London has previously said it rejected the “unfounded, politically motivated and hostile allegations”.

Aberi will appear in court in London later on Friday.

An 18-year-old from Bat Yam was arrested on Thursday night on suspicion of being involved in throwing a fragmentation grenade at the Japanika branch in Kiryat Ono.

On Monday, July 13, a fragmentation grenade was thrown at the Kiryat Ono branch as part of the wave of grenade attacks on Japanika chain branches in central Israel. 

In the span of a few hours, police announced two grenade explosions, a pipe bomb attack, and an attempted arson. Three of the incidents targeted branches of the Japanika restaurant chain, owned by businessman and Beitar Jerusalem owner Barak Abramov.

The suspect is expected to appear before the Tel Aviv Magistrate’s Court on Friday, where police will request his detention be extended to facilitate the ongoing investigation into the incidents.

In a statement on Tuesday morning, Israel Police said that the thrown grenades were stolen IDF equipment.

Police arrested Musli family crime boss in connection with the attacks

Israel Police arrested Musli crime family boss Yossi Musli on Tuesday night in connection with a series of attacks targeting the Japanika restaurant chain, according to Israeli media reports. 

For years, brothers Yossi and Eli Musli have managed to stay ahead of police, who suspect them of involvement in a long series of murders and attempted murders targeting their rivals.

The criminal organization they lead began in southern Tel Aviv and developed into a powerful network that some have described as a global empire. It is estimated to be worth more than half a billion shekels.

Police suspect the organization of involvement in illegal gambling, extortion, high-interest black-market loans, operating casinos abroad, and other criminal activities.

They also suspect that another brother, Shay, runs a criminal organization in South Africa

Jon Ossoff, the Jewish senator from Georgia and the focus of speculation about a 2028 run for the presidency, is prepared to be the target of an address Thursday night by President Donald Trump. 

Ossoff told reporters that if Trump, as expected, questions his and Sen. Raphael Warnock’s 2021 election wins, then the president would be “calling Georgia voters illegitimate.” 

Trump has repeatedly claimed without basis that his 2020 presidential election defeat in Georgia, and wins by Democrats Ossoff and Warnock in runoffs the following January, were rigged.

He has deployed federal law enforcement to Georgia to search for evidence of fraud, even though repeated probes have uncovered nothing. 

The speech comes as Ossoff has gained national attention for his repeated attacks on the president in his reelection bid against Trump-endorsed Rep. Mike Collins.

Ossoff could be the Democratic presidential nominee for 2028

Ossoff’s battle with Trump could fuel buzz for his vying for the Democratic presidential nomination in 2028. 

Ossoff has repeatedly denied interest in running for president this cycle. But Democratic pollster Adam Carlson imagined an excerpt from a “Former President Ossoff’s memoir in 2060.”

“I wasn’t planning on running for president. It was never an ambition of mine,” Carlson wrote on X/Twitter, following initial reports that Trump’s address could come as soon as Monday. “Then Trump did that super weird address on July 13, 2026 and here we are.”

Were he to run and win, Ossoff, 39, would be the first Jewish president of the United States, and his Jewish identity has crept into discussions about his potential candidacy.

He has drawn comparisons to Barack Obama, who said in 2006 that he “will not” run for president, two years before he did so successfully.

Support from left-wing figures

The buzz around Ossoff has largely focused on his sharp criticism of Trump, attracting some prominent left-wing figures. Progressives such as Gen Z commentator Jack Cocchiarella and Zohran Mamdani adviser Morris Katz have lauded Ossoff’s messaging. 

Left-wing streamer Hasan Piker, a harsh Israel critic who has drawn allegations of antisemitism, said Ossoff “will be my dark horse pick, depending on how he presents himself if he has ambitions for higher office.”

One subject that Ossoff has largely steered clear of during his reelection campaign is Israel, a growing wedge issue among Democrats and a litmus test for democratic socialists like Piker.

While multiple possible presidential candidates have sworn off the pro-Israel lobbying group AIPAC, Ossoff has not weighed in on the group.

Ossoff’s views on Israel

Ossoff has positioned himself as an Israel supporter who opposes Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s government. Just over a month after Hamas’ October 7, 2023, attack on Israel, he referred to himself as a “pro-Israel Jewish American” in an address. He said he was praying for the Israeli hostages’ freedom and urges “mercy for the innocent civilians in Gaza.”

He has since voted to block some weapons sales to the country, along with an increasing number of Senate Democrats who have questioned military assistance to Israel as the war has devastated Gaza, while voting to allow the sale of defensive weapons.

He wrote in July 2025 that “the United States must continue to support the Israeli people, who face the persistent threat of rocket and missile attack and have been subjected to intense aerial bombardment from Iran, Lebanon, and Yemen.”

Ossoff’s first vote against weapons in November 2024 spurred a critical open letter from several Georgia Jewish organizations including synagogues, Jewish schools, the local Anti-Defamation League chapter and other groups. His vote also drew the attention of AIPAC, which released 30-second ads attacking US senators, including Ossoff, who had voted to block weapons sales.

Ossoff could unite the Democratic Party

Radio host Eric Messersmith said last month that, in an effort to win over a party that is divided on Israel, Ossoff “might be the Democrat that can thread the needle because even though he’s Jewish, he’s very critical of the Israeli government, very critical of Benjamin Netanyahu.”

“He has credibility on that issue, so it’s possible that I think he could fill that lane in between the two extremes of the Democratic party,” Messersmith said in a widely circulated conversation on CNN.

CNN’s Elex Michaelson drew criticism online when he added, “As a Jew, some people read a little more Jewish than other people, and Jon Ossoff may not read as Jewish as [Pennsylvania Gov.] Josh Shapiro does, for whatever’s that worth.” Michaelson later apologized. 

Ossoff has deep ties to the local Jewish community, and has spoken about the impact of growing up around his uncle who was a Holocaust survivor.

Living among survivors “has a profound impact on how I view the State of Israel, recognizing that the State of Israel was established 75 years ago as Jews rebuilt in the ashes of the Holocaust, and sought to establish a secure homeland for the Jewish people,” Ossoff told the American Jewish Committee in May 2023.

Ossoff’s Georgia campaign

The Georgia Democrat’s team reported that Ossoff raised $20 million in the year’s second quarter, ending it with $42 million in cash on hand. 

Jewish Insider reported that some Jewish Georgians are torn. Collins has faced accusations of antisemitism and having ties to the far right. Collins’ son-in-law is a white nationalist social media influencer who has shared antisemitic material and Nazi imagery, CNN reported on Thursday. Collins has said some of his own statements were misunderstood, and has defended himself by citing his support for Israel.

“Donald Trump’s handpicked candidate Mike Collins is a notorious bigot, antisemite, and extremist,” Ossoff posted on social media last month.

Ahead of Trump’s address, Ossoff said he expects the president “to use whatever he puts out there on Thursday as a pretext” to interfere in the November election, or “to lay the groundwork for challenging the result.”

German Foreign Minister Johann Wadephul has proposed replacing the expiring UN peacekeeping mission in Lebanon with an EU-mandated force to prevent a security vacuum, he told the RedaktionsNetzwerk Deutschland.

“We should examine in the EU whether we can ensure that no security vacuum arises with a European mandate following the UNIFIL mission,” Wadephul said in an interview published on Friday.

The UNIFIL mission expires on December 31, 2026. Germany’s parliament extended the country’s participation in the mission for the final time just weeks ago.

Wadephul said Lebanon, with a stabilizing government, represented “one of the most hopeful developments in the region at the moment.”

Lebanon and Israel held ambassador-level talks at the US embassy in Rome on Tuesday and Wednesday — their sixth round of face-to-face negotiations since a ​new war erupted on March 2 between Israel and Lebanese armed group ​Hezbollah, triggered by the wider regional conflict.

IDF withdrawal, end to Hezbollah terror

An EU-mandated force could “create the conditions for the Israeli army to withdraw without Hezbollah returning with its terror,” the minister added.

The proposal comes as European nations seek to maintain regional stability while balancing relations with Israel and Lebanon.

Israel’s IDF is currently positioned within a “buffer zone” approximately 10 km (6 miles) into Lebanon along the entire Israeli border to bolster Israel’s defense against Hezbollah.

Lebanon and Israel resumed talks on Tuesday in Rome, with Beirut hoping for progress towards securing an Israeli withdrawal from south Lebanon under a US-brokered deal, although expectations for swift progress were low.

US-led diplomacy has emerged since Hezbollah and Israel returned to war on March 2 amid the wider regional conflict, moving forward despite strong objections from the Iran-backed group, which believes only Iranian pressure on Washington can secure an end to the war and Israeli withdrawal.

Iran demanded an end to the war in Lebanon as part of its interim deal with Washington signed last month, but the agreement has been shaken over the last week by renewed US-Iranian hostilities in the Gulf.

The Jerusalem Post staff contributed to this report.

Malaysia will immediately deport any Israeli citizens found in the country, Prime Minister Anwar Ibrahim said Wednesday, as federal authorities investigate allegations that Israelis using dual citizenship were participating in a technology-focused community in Johor’s Forest City. 

“We will not allow it,” Anwar told reporters. “If there are Israeli nationals, since we do not recognize Israel, they will be deported immediately.” 

The investigation centers on Network School, a co-living community for startup founders and digital nomads established by former Coinbase executive Balaji Srinivasan. The project, located in the China-backed Forest City development across the Johor Strait from Singapore, came under scrutiny after an online promotional video drew widespread attention. 

In the video, residents describe living on “a man-made island near Singapore,” while Srinivasan says, “We’re building Silicon Valley outside Silicon Valley.” 

The promotion also generated criticism online. One social media user wrote: “Sounds like a cult, definitely operates like a cult, recruits like a cult.” 

Malaysia doesn’t allow Israeli citizens to enter the country

The Johor state government subsequently called for a federal investigation into both the commune’s activities and the nationalities of those taking part. 

Malaysia’s Immigration Department later announced that it had inspected 266 foreign nationals from 40 countries at the site and found that all possessed valid travel documents. Officials said, however, that broader inquiries into the identities and activities of those involved remain ongoing. 

Anwar also instructed authorities to examine the project’s business operations, including its premises licenses, accommodation arrangements and land use. He said any violations should be met with “firm action without compromise.” 

Malaysia has no diplomatic relations with Israel and does not permit Israeli passport holders to enter the country without special government approval. Authorities acknowledged that people with dual citizenship may, in some cases, enter using a passport issued by another country. 

Anwar said the government would not compromise on either national security or its political position on Israel. The prime minister has maintained a strongly pro-Palestinian stance and open ties with Hamas following the escalation of the conflict in Gaza.