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The crew of a military helicopter carrying US President Donald Trump that came too close to a passenger jet on August 4 failed to contact air traffic controllers before departing, the National Transportation Safety Board said on Thursday.

The incident involving a plane departing Reagan Washington National Airport raised questions about why the passenger airplane was allowed to depart while ​Marine One was nearby, a time when commercial traffic is typically halted.

The incident was tied to communication problems that have emerged since Marine One helicopter flights were moved off the White House south lawn in May to the nearby Ellipse, and have not resumed as work on a helipad continues.

The NTSB said the Marine One crew at least twice attempted to give controllers a required three-minute notice of departure but were hampered by communications issues. The NTSB said the crew also sought to contact controllers through the helicopter facility at Joint Base Anacostia-Bolling, which was also unsuccessful.

Marine One said communication ‘had been spotty’

On Tuesday, the head of the Federal Aviation Administration, Bryan Bedford, said the agency relocated an antenna and changed a procedure after the incident. The NTSB said checks made after the relocation have shown no communications issues.

On July 30, Marine One and air traffic control staff met and controllers sought “to discuss concern with recent reports of their not receiving the required 3 minute to liftoff call,” the NTSB said.

The Marine One crew said communications “had been spotty,” the NTSB said and they agreed to use other means of communicating with the tower in situations where they were unable to reach them.

FAA rules require aircraft to remain separated by at least 1.5 miles (2.4 km) horizontally and 500 feet (152 m) ​vertically around airports. The NTSB said Marine One and the plane were at one point separated by 0.82 nautical mile (0.94 mile or 1.5 km) laterally and 700 feet (213 m) vertically.

Envoy Air 3742, an Embraer EMBJ3.SA E170 regional jet, was bound for Pensacola, Florida. Another regional flight, Republic 4700, was 3 ​miles from Reagan during the incident and was rerouted out of caution.

The FAA imposed permanent restrictions on helicopter operations around Washington’s Reagan Airport after the January 2025 midair collision between an ⁠American Airlines ​regional jet and an Army helicopter.

This post was originally published on here. 

Gilad Erdan, chairman of the Unity Party said Thursday morning that he is holding talks with Blue and White chairman Benny Gantz over a possible merger between the parties ahead of Israel’s upcoming election.

“We are in talks with Benny Gantz’s Blue and White party,” Erdan said in an interview with 103FM.

Erdan said that if several parties join together and the alliance passes the electoral threshold, voters will begin to consider more seriously what such a move could offer.

“Once several parties join together and the connection between them passes the electoral threshold, people will start thinking deeply about what this gives us,” Erdan said.

“Do we want to continue as we have until now, where it is either Netanyahu and then we get Aryeh Deri and Yitzhak Goldknopf controlling things, or Gadi Eisenkot and then we perhaps get Yair Golan the extremist or Mansour Abbas controlling the government?”

‘I have no ego on the matter’ of political partnerships, Erdan said

“I did not establish a party and leave 30 years in Likud to deal with personal matters,” Erdan said. “I want to fix the things Likud is not doing well. This is the prime minister’s responsibility, because he is leading it. He truly is not trying to extend a genuine hand to the other side.”

Erdan said he is open to additional political partnerships, including with Ofer Winter, Yoaz Hendel, and Hili Tropper.

“I have no ego about this matter,” Erdan said. “I preferred not my political security, but rather to leave and try to convince the public to think deeply about what is best for them. Anyone who is willing to unite with us, we will consider it, as long as we reach policy lines. I am a man of the right, I am not willing to support a government that advances things that contradict my beliefs.”

Erdan concluded by saying: “I hope this will be an election campaign that will bring a real message, and not just looking for victories one over another. Our enemies are Hamas, Hezbollah, and Iran, not the other political side.”

Gantz confirmed in an interview on Walla’s election podcast with Yehuda Schlesinger that he met with Erdan the previous day for a lengthy conversation, and said he remains open to additional partnerships ahead of the election.

“We sat for a long and serious conversation, we learned about each other, and there will be another meeting,” Gantz said. “There are no agreements at the moment, but we are talking about similar things.”

“I call on everyone to join the bloc of the people of Israel. Ofer Winter leans more toward the right, but there are good people around him. My door is open to anyone who promotes unity, but Feiglin, for example, is not realistic in my view.”

Gantz pushed back against calls for him to withdraw from the upcoming election, criticized his former political partners Gadi Eisenkot and Hili Tropper, and warned against another narrow coalition government

“It is not pleasant to see a ‘struggling garden,’ let’s look reality in the eyes,” Gantz said at the start of the interview, acknowledging his party’s weaker position in recent polls. However, he rejected calls for him to step aside and said he should lead any alliance formed before the deadline for submitting party lists.

“The demand that I step down in order not to ‘waste votes’ for the camp is not legitimate,” Gantz said. “No one should sign me onto a camp, I belong to the people of Israel. Nothing will move me from first place. I need to lead this path because I initiated the idea of the third bloc and I have the experience. I will not step down.”

‘We will establish a second change government,’ Gantz said

Gantz also criticized calls to form another narrow coalition without the traditional right, arguing that both a narrow “change” government and a fully right-wing government had failed.

“What is becoming clear as a mistake is that a narrow government, even if it is made up of good people, tears apart,” he said. “Bennett and Lapid were unable to maintain it, the right moved right, the left moved left, and it was torn apart in the middle.”

“We received a reaction that put Ben-Gvir where he is today. Now we will establish a second change government and we will receive another reaction, except the argument will not be whether Ofer Winter is suitable, but rather Ben-Gvir will be defense minister.”

“We saw that a narrow change government did not work, and we saw that a ‘full right-wing’ government is truly dangerous. The only solution is the third bloc and a unity government.”

This post was originally published on here. 

Let me get my own record out of the way first, because it’s relevant to everything that follows.

In December 2022 I argued in The Jerusalem Post that forcing religion on Israelis produces the opposite of what its advocates want. Circumcision is nearly universal here because nobody legislates it; marriage through the Chief Rabbinate has been falling for years because it’s compulsory. The example I leaned on hardest was the draft.

When Yair Lapid pushed haredi (ultra-Orthodox) conscription from inside the government, enlistment stalled. When he left office, and the pressure came off, more young haredi men quietly went to the induction centers on their own. Pressure, I wrote, makes people dig in, and sometimes makes them worse.

I still held some version of that in March 2024, when I wrote here that the way forward was to talk to haredi men directly rather than negotiate with their rabbis. Community forums, education, haredi soldiers telling their own stories. Persuasion.

By July 2025 I was writing that the state should cut yeshiva stipends, tie welfare benefits and tax discounts to service, and hold up travel abroad for men who haven’t settled their draft status.

The second position is the thing the first one said would fail, and I’d rather say so than call it growth. The war changed my mind about something I’d argued in print for years.

An issue that changed owners

The reason the old column matters now has nothing to do with me.

I reached for Lapid in 2022 because haredi conscription was his. It had been the secular center-left’s issue for three decades. Shinui ran on it in 2003 and took 15 seats.

On Tuesday night, Brig.-Gen. (res.) Ofer Winter launched a party called People of Israel, and put haredi conscription at the center of it, with a bereaved mother from the settlement of Eli standing beside him as one of the country’s most prominent campaigners on the subject.

Politicians switch parties all the time, for reasons that are usually boring: a better slot, a grudge, or a calculation. Issues are different. An issue doesn’t wander from one camp to the other unless something has happened to the camps.

Something has. The state commission of inquiry into October 7 was an opposition demand for two years, and Winter now demands it from the Right. Yoseph Haddad, an Arab Christian and a wounded Golani veteran, is number two on a right-wing list and says he means to be the first Arab in Israel’s security cabinet. A religious officer is leading a list with a secular majority. Reserve service and bereavement have turned into political credentials.

My street

I live in Gush Etzion, which is supposed to be safe territory for Bezalel Smotrich and the Religious Zionist Party. Several of the people who won that party’s primaries live here, and so do the voters who chose them.

I won’t present what follows as reporting. It’s what I’ve been hearing for weeks at kiddush, the supermarket, and the park: people who’ve voted the same way for 20 years telling me they have no idea what they’ll do this time. None of them has drifted left. A few have gone further to the Right. They’ve simply stopped being sure.

A few weeks ago I wrote about a couple I know here, where the wife plans to vote the way she always has and the husband, who is no less right-wing than she is, can’t bring himself to vote for Smotrich again. When I wrote about them, he was looking at a former chief of staff. He’s now looking at Winter. He hasn’t landed anywhere. That’s the part I’d ask you to notice.

Israelis have been splitting and reforming parties since the 1970s, and if that were the whole story here it wouldn’t be worth your time.

The reshuffle

For two years I’ve been writing about Jews who came loose from their institutions after October 7 and keep turning up in arrangements nobody planned. I’ve called it the reshuffle, and the people caught in it are hanodedim, the wanderers.

I treated it as a Diaspora story. That was too narrow, and this is where I stop pretending otherwise. The same thing is happening here, in Hebrew, and this year you can vote for it.

Take Laly Dery, who’s on Winter’s list. She buried her son in this war. She’s religious, she lives in a settlement, and in Israeli shorthand that tells you exactly where she stands on religion and state.

Except it doesn’t. She came from France and spent years advocating for French olim (immigrants to Israel), and French Jews arrive with an assumption that startles Israelis: religion and state are separate things, because in France they are. I’ve met plenty of French olim who look strictly observant by any Israeli measure and will tell you they see no reason the buses shouldn’t run on Shabbat.

I’ve known Dery for years, from long before any of this. She was a Likud member. She told me she couldn’t run for office again through Likud.

Fleur Hassan-Nahum arrived from Gibraltar 25 years ago and built a career on olim and public diplomacy. Natali Shem Tov left a news desk. Winter’s own family was expelled from Gush Katif, which is why, when people on the Right spent this week questioning his credentials, he told them nobody was going to teach him what the Right is.

Two weeks ago I asked in this column why so few immigrants from Western countries turn up on Israeli party lists, and used Michael Oren as the case. Voters never rejected him. Nobody asked them to consider him. Likud set aside slot 43 for a new immigrant while the party was polling at 23. What this week suggests is that waiting for that door to open was never the route.

The evidence against me

Ofer Hadad’s breakdown at N12 on Thursday cuts against most of what I’ve written here, and it’s the most useful piece of analysis published all week.

Sixty percent of Winter’s support is coming from inside the existing Right: 30% from Likud, 15% from Smotrich, 15% from Itamar Ben Gvir. That’s not a realignment; it’s the same voters moving between rooms in the same house, and it means the argument Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu made this week rests on something solid.

The other 40% is where it gets interesting. A quarter of Winter’s voters had already been telling pollsters they intended to vote for a party that didn’t exist yet. Another 15% were undecided. Four in 10 of them had let go of everything on offer before this party had a name.

I don’t know which of those numbers ends up mattering more, and I’d be careful of anyone who says they do.

The refusal

The sharpest thing I saw this week wasn’t in a poll.

Benny Biton, the mayor of Dimona and a Likud man, said publicly that Winter had been slated for a reserved slot on Likud’s list and answered by cutting contact and screening calls from the Prime Minister’s Office. Netanyahu is holding five realistic slots, three of them high, to compensate candidates who give ground in mergers. People around Winter explain the refusal simply: they won’t join a party that was in charge on October 7.

Biton’s own interpretation is worth as much as what he revealed. He said Netanyahu isn’t worried, that this is what campaigns look like, and that the two of them will sit in a government together when the time comes. That’s the establishment’s answer to everything I’ve written here, and he might be right. Lists are filed Monday and Tuesday.

Nobody can find these voters

Two polls came out Wednesday, one by Lazar Research for Walla and one by Direct Polls for i24, and they disagree about almost everything. Likud at 21 or at 26. Naftali Bennett at 15 or at eight. Smotrich out of the Knesset, or comfortably in with four. Across the week’s polling, Winter himself ranges from zero to six seats.

The whole Israeli argument this week has turned on whether Winter pushes Smotrich under the threshold, and two competent houses sampling on the same day can’t agree on it.

I’d treat that instability as the real result. Pollsters find people when the categories are stable enough to ask about. Three days before lists close, in the middle of a campaign, they can’t.

Not a foreign story

Reading this in New York or London or Melbourne, the easy move is to file it under Israeli political dysfunction, which is a familiar genre and requires nothing of you.

I’d file it somewhere else. The categories that organized Jewish life outside Israel for 50 years – denomination, affiliation, where you stood on Israel – don’t predict much anymore either. Most of us have watched people walk out of communities that fit them perfectly on paper and turn up somewhere that makes no sense at all. Institutions have mostly settled on calling it polarization, which I think is wrong, since polarization assumes there are still poles.

Israel is going through the same thing with the lights on and pollsters in the room, failing to measure it.

I have no idea whether Winter will sit in the next Knesset. What I can tell you is that the people who built these categories keep assuring us they’ll hold; the categories aren’t behaving that way, and I’m not where mine says I should be either.

This post was originally published on here. 

An official IDF social media channel should never sound like a guide for avoiding the consequences of ignoring a draft order. Yet that is how a video published Wednesday on the IDF’s haredi-facing Instagram account reasonably came across. The clip told haredi (ultra-Orthodox) men facing travel restrictions that a “brief visit” to a recruitment office with medical documents could prevent an arrest at Ben-Gurion Airport before a trip to Uman.

At a moment when Israel is consumed by the unresolved haredi draft crisis, every official message about enlistment carries national weight. Soldiers and reservists continue to shoulder extraordinary burdens while the state wrestles with who must serve and how draft obligations should be enforced.

The attorney-general warned last Thursday that weaker enforcement against haredi draft evaders was harming enlistment and creating unequal enforcement. Against that backdrop, an army channel cannot appear to tell people how to sidestep the consequences of ignoring the law.

In response, the IDF told The Jerusalem Post that the video had been removed and did not reflect the military’s activity regarding the regularization of draft status, which it said is intended solely to lead to enlistment and meaningful service.

The IDF said the video was originally meant to explain the process through which eligible recruits can regularize their status, after which restrictions placed on them are removed. It also acknowledged that the video was uploaded contrary to IDF Spokesperson’s Unit instructions governing content during the election period and said the incident would be investigated.

It’s great that, according to official channels, guidelines on draft dodging are still against official IDF policy. But it also raises a more serious question: If the messaging did not reflect policy and violated existing instructions, how was it approved for publication on an official IDF account?

The concern is not simply that someone made a poor communications decision. It is that messaging capable of being understood as advice for draft evaders slipped through the army’s own controls and appeared under the IDF’s name. By the time it was removed, it had already been published, circulated, and associated with the military. Deleting the post may have stopped further distribution, but it could not undo the message already sent.

Any IDF platform, speaks for the whole institution

Anyone managing an official IDF platform speaks with the authority of the institution. These are not private accounts where careless wording can be dismissed as an individual mistake. Israelis reasonably expect information distributed through official military channels to reflect policy and to have passed a meaningful level of review, particularly when it concerns an issue as politically and socially sensitive as conscription.

That standard is especially important when the IDF is trying to increase haredi enlistment. Haredi enlistment has shown signs of increasing, but the broader fight over conscription remains deeply divisive. Ambiguous or misleading messaging risks undermining that effort, while reinforcing the perception that enforcement is not being applied equally.

The IDF’s investigation therefore needs to establish more than who uploaded the video. It should determine who conceived the message, who reviewed it, what approval process existed, and why IDF Spokesperson instructions failed to prevent its publication. If someone with access to an official military platform knowingly pushed messaging that contradicted IDF policy, there must be accountability. If the failure was institutional, the oversight system itself must be corrected.

Equality of service

Serving soldiers, reservists, and their families are entitled to expect consistency. Israelis are being asked to spend months away from home, interrupt careers, risk their lives, and repeatedly return to reserve duty because the country requires it. In the middle of a national debate over equality of service, the IDF cannot afford official communications that create even the impression that another group is being shown how to navigate around enforcement.

The investigation the IDF has promised must therefore produce clear answers and, where appropriate, consequences. Removing the video was necessary, but the more important task is preventing such messaging from slipping through again.

Official IDF channels carry the weight of the institution behind them. The army must ensure that those entrusted with those channels understand that responsibility and that failures of judgment or oversight are not allowed to disappear with a deleted post.

This post was originally published on here. 

Deep in the trees and swampy thickets of Lithuania’s Rūdninkai Forest, a series of makeshift forts is sinking into the earth. 

These represent the remains of underground bunkers where Jewish partisans resisted their annihilation in the Holocaust. Under German occupation, some 400 Jews escaped the Vilnius ghetto to this forest and organized attacks against the Nazis.

After World War II, the story of these partisans was folded into Soviet propaganda, leaving a shroud of mystery over the bunkers. Now, construction of a new German military base in the area is throwing into question the fate of the forts, and the memory of their fighters. 

Jewish former partisans and their descendants have traveled for decades to visit the bunkers, which mark the only memorial to their resistance in Lithuania. But in recent months, new obstacles have appeared: Signs forbidding entry and demarcating a “dangerous area” are installed on the road to the forest and pinned on trees approaching the forts. 

Lithuania is nearing the final stage of constructing a military base for German troops in Rūdninkai Forest, nestled about 27 miles south of Vilnius. The training ground near the former partisan camps was planned after Russia’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine to shore up NATO’s eastern flank.

Bunkers aren’t protected as cultural heritage sites 

Strategically located some 12 miles from the border with Moscow-allied Belarus and east of Russia’s Kaliningrad exclave, the troops will be Germany’s first permanent deployment abroad since World War II. About 5,000 German soldiers will begin arriving this fall.

“You cannot easily find the forts, so those who know how to get there, we just go,” Aušra Mikulskienė, a Jewish history tour guide from Vilnius, told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency. “But now, there are ‘don’t enter’ stickers and stop signs. It’s becoming impossible to get there because they are closing all of the forest.”

Mikulskienė has brought the children and grandchildren of Jewish partisans to Rūdninkai for 10 years. They need her guidance to find eight standing forts, covered in logs and soil, which are not marked on maps and GPS systems.

In such remote corners of the forest, partisans planned to ambush their enemies, lay explosives on German trains and equipment and sabotage telephone lines and infrastructure in Vilnius.

The bunkers are not protected by the Lithuanian government as cultural heritage sites, and they have deteriorated over years of neglect. But as the German base is completed and military training begins, Mikulskienė worries that prohibitory signs related to construction will turn into more serious barriers to the forts, and visitors could lose access altogether.

Twists of history over decades plunged the forts into obscurity. Lithuania was occupied from 1944 to 1990 by the Soviet Union, which honored hundreds of Soviet partisans who went to Rūdninkai Forest to battle the Germans. The Jewish partisans who joined them, and who helped Russian forces liberate Vilnius from the Nazis in 1944, were not part of this narrative. 

The Lithuanian Soviet Republic, or Lithuanian SSR, began to commemorate Soviet partisans on the site of the Rūdninkai forts in the 1970s.

Soviet and Jewish fighters only had access to wood and soil to build their bunkers. But the forts standing today are reinforced with concrete, an indication that the Soviet government fortified the structures to serve as memorials, said Mikulskienė.

She remembers visiting the site on a school trip in the 1980s and listening to lessons about how the forebears of Soviet citizens resisted the fascists. 

Since the fall of the Soviet Union, researchers have debated how much of the structures is original, and how much was reconstructed by the Soviet government for propaganda purposes.

Some see the partisans as traitors, fighting with the Soviets

The first sign memorializing Jews was installed in the area by Bildungswerk Stanisław Hantz, a German educational group, in 2024. A small silver plaque reads, “In memory of the Jewish partisans who fought out of these forests against the Nazi occupiers and their helpers.”

The legacy of the forts, and the memory of Jewish partisans, is now mired in Lithuania’s repudiation of its Soviet past. Thousands of Lithuanian intellectuals, dissidents and other citizens were arrested, deported to Gulags and executed under Soviet rule. Once Lithuania gained independence in 1990, the stench of Soviet repression overpowered that of the Nazi occupation for many Lithuanians.

Lithuania was for centuries a center of rich Jewish thought, religious life and secular culture; Vilna, as the capital was known in Yiddish, was nicknamed the “Jerusalem of the North.” But after more than 90% of Lithuanian Jews were killed by the Nazis and their collaborators, few remained to commemorate the Holocaust.

“The collective memory of Lithuanians basically sees only one occupation: the Soviet occupation,” said Ilya Lempertas, a researcher and editor of books on the Holocaust in Lithuania. “Soviet partisans, in Lithuanian memory, are those who deported Lithuanians to Siberia.”

That means the Jewish partisans of Rūdninkai Forest are often viewed not as heroes, but as traitors, according to Mikulskienė. “They are not considered as fighting against Nazis, these Jews,” she said. “They are considered to be fighting with the Soviets.” 

Fania Brantsovsky, the last living Jewish resistance fighter of Rūdninkai Forest, died in 2024 at 102. She joined a Jewish partisan unit under the command of the writer Abba Kovner, known as the Nokmim, or Avengers. On Sept. 23, 1943, the same night she was smuggled out of the Vilnius ghetto, the Nazis began their final liquidation of the ghetto. None of her family survived.

Brantsovsky led tours to the forest bunkers in the 2000s. Until her death, she advocated for the structures to be preserved and protected as a site of learning about the Jewish partisans’ struggle. 

Dovid Katz, a Brooklyn-born, Vilnius-based scholar of Yiddish and the Holocaust who runs the online journal “Defending History,” was a friend of Brantsovsky’s.

“Her one last request was, ‘Dovid, please, never stop reminding Jews around the world to speak up for the existence of the forts,’” said Katz. “‘Let our grandchildren be able to come to this place in the forest and see wooden forts in the ground, which were the only postwar physical remnant of Jewish resistance.’”

Germany’s federal government has signaled that it will not disturb the site. In response to a parliamentary inquiry, the Bundestag announced in July that it was “committed to preserving the former World War II partisan camp in Rūdninkai Forest, located on the training grounds of Panzer Brigade 45 stationed in Lithuania, as a place of learning and remembrance.” 

The government added that the former partisan bunkers were not part of Germany’s training facilities and would not be affected by construction, but it was in Lithuania’s hands to manage the site’s preservation and access. 

“The Lithuanian government has been asked to examine whether the area in question merits protection and to take this into account in further planning,” said the Bundestag.

Lithuania’s Ministry of Culture told JTA that the bunkers do not have protected status as cultural heritage sites because they “are not authentic and are not located at their original sites.” Instead of being linked to Jewish fighters, the ministry said the forts were “associated with Soviet partisans.”

“During the Soviet era, they were included in the list of historical monuments of the Lithuanian SSR, while a significant proportion of such ‘monuments’ were intended to reinforce Soviet ideology and historical narratives,” the ministry said in a statement.

The area will be maintained in the future with an information board installed nearby, according to the ministry, which said the content of that information has yet to be decided. Visiting the forts won’t be prohibited altogether, but those who wish to go will have to comply with military rules and obtain advance approval from the Rūdninkai Training Area Command, the ministry said. 

Katz believes nationalist factions in the Lithuanian government are revising the history of a site that hosts genuine remnants of Jewish bunkers. He views the government’s resistance to protecting the site as an outgrowth of the “double genocide” theory, a nationalist narrative that emerged in Lithuania after the fall of the Soviet Union.

This theory equates World War II atrocities committed by the Soviets, who occupied Lithuania in 1940-1941 following a non-aggression pact between Stalin and Hitler, with those of the Nazis, who took control after Hitler broke the agreement and invaded the Soviet Union. (The Soviets reoccupied Lithuania in 1944.)

In this framework, the Soviets committed genocide against Lithuanians through mass deportations, with the complicity, some add, of Jewish communists, and only afterwards came the killing of Jews by the Nazis and their Lithuanian collaborators. 

“The Soviets and their Jewish friends, as the narrative has it, committed the first genocide, and then came the reaction, the tragic second genocide,” which was the Holocaust, said Katz.

Families of Jewish fighters need to see the forts, Lempertas says

The equating of Soviet deportations with the Holocaust has been widely rejected by international scholars and Jewish institutions. The Soviet regime deported some 17,500 Lithuanians in 1941 to remote parts of Siberia and northern Russia. While individual Lithuanian Jews served in the Soviet administration, Jews were also disproportionately targeted in the deportations.

Lempertas, who like Katz is Jewish, does not believe the forts standing in Rūdninkai Forest include genuine remains of Jewish partisan bunkers. He supports the government’s view that the structures were built entirely as Soviet propaganda, but even so, he believes they should be protected.

“It has to be saved, from my point of view, for those who are coming there because of family,” said Lempertas. “It serves as an exhibition.” 

Mikulskienė said the forts are deeply important to the families of Jewish fighters. She watches visitors stand before them, recite memories of war and sing partisan songs passed down through generations. 

Yet in recent years, as Russia’s invasion of Ukraine sparked security threats and surging anti-Russian sentiment in Lithuania, Mikulskienė has found it increasingly difficult to advocate for the memory of Jews who fought alongside Soviets. 

“You are seen as a follower of Soviet propaganda, and also now Putin’s propaganda,” she said. “That’s a bit dangerous, being this person in Lithuania.” 

Anna Avidan, who was born in Vilnius to Holocaust survivors and founded the Jewish history nonprofit Jerusalem of the North, said the bunkers should be treated as a memorial site with educational opportunities. 

“There is a strong stereotype here that Jews were communists and they deserved the killings, this simplified worldview,” she said. Dispelling such stereotypes “is a good case for explaining why it has to be commemorated.” 

One the eve of World War II, about 4 in 10 people in Vilnius were Jewish. But decades after the end of the Soviet Union, Avidan said the city has yet to fully recognize the Jewish world that vanished from Lithuania’s cities, towns and forests.

“Lithuania has been independent for more than 35 years already,” said Avidan. “Still, we have no clear memorial in this city to the victims of the Holocaust, and for me, that’s a message.” 

This post was originally published on here. 

South Korea, Japan, and the United States will conduct joint military drills from September 9 to 11 to test readiness against North Korea’s missile and nuclear weapons threats, South Korea said on Friday.

The annual Freedom Edge drills, which are defensive in nature, will be held in international waters to the south and east of the South Korean southern island of Jeju, Seoul’s Joint Chiefs of Staff said in a statement.

The exercise comes after US President Donald Trump scaled back a major joint exercise with South Korea and then the US subsequently canceled a joint Marine Corps drill scheduled for next month.

Trump cited in part Seoul’s refusal to offer help in the Iran war and said the Ulchi Freedom Shield drills this month sent a wrong message to North Korea. Trump has been trying to hold a new summit with North Korean leader Kim Jong Un.

The two met in 2018 and 2019.

This is a developing story.

This post was originally published on here. 

Social media influencers Andrew and Tristan Tate will remain in a Miami jail for now as they contest extradition to Britain, where they are wanted on rape charges.

At a hearing in Miami federal court on Thursday, Magistrate Judge Lauren Louis declined to rule immediately on the Tate brothers’ request for bail, meaning they will remain in federal custody until she issues her ruling.

The Tates were led out of the courtroom in handcuffs and shackled at the feet by US marshals.

The brothers were arrested in Miami on July 18 after Britain requested their extradition. The Tate brothers, who have ​dual US and British citizenship, have denied any wrongdoing.

The former kickboxers have built a large online following promoting their views on masculinity and wealth. Andrew Tate, 39, has previously described himself as a misogynist.

Tate brothers ran pornographic webcam business for years, prosecutors say

The Tate brothers were seeking to preempt federal prosecutors’ argument that they should remain detained as they contest extradition to Britain, where they face charges of rape, assault and facilitating trafficking, because they would pose a danger to the community if released.

After the Tates testified, prosecutor Abbie Waxman showed the court a video of Andrew Tate saying, “slap, slap, grab, choke, shut up bitch, sex.”

“They promote incredible violence against women,” Waxman said. “It is not a character, it is who they are.”

The Tates recruited dozens of women to work for a webcam pornography business starting in 2014, and later ran online courses called “Hustler’s University,” prosecutors with the Miami US Attorney’s office said in an August 10 court filing.

On the witness stand on Thursday, Andrew Tate said he stopped saying “stupid things” on the internet when he was first arrested in Romania about five years ago. The brothers face human trafficking charges in Romania.

“Top G is a caricature,” he said, referring to an online moniker that he called a “hyperbolic character.”

“I do this to shake men out of apathy,” he said.

Tristan Tate, 38, testified he and his brother played characters online to help their posts gain traction.

“It’s his flamboyant, outlandish, sometimes crude comedy that makes him go viral,” Tristan Tate testified, referring to his brother. “He’s the only person in the world who is judged by a character that he plays.”

Andrew Tate’s romantic partner testifies

At the hearing, the brothers were shackled at the feet, wore beige prison garb and sported beards.

The Tates’ defense lawyers proposed that Louis release them on the conditions they post bond, surrender their passports and submit to location monitoring.

Earlier on Thursday, the mother of one of Andrew Tate’s children, Natasha Sesay, said his sometimes provocative comments online did not reflect who he truly was.

“It’s a very different character between the person that you see online and the person I know,” said Sesay, who is expecting another one of Andrew Tate’s children next month.

On cross-examination by federal prosecutor Abbie Waxman, Sesay acknowledged that Andrew Tate paid for her home in Dubai as well as luxury bags, shoes and jewelry.

British charges span seven years of accusations

The legal process ​for determining whether the Tate brothers may be extradited could take months. ​Britain has until ⁠September 16 to submit its full extradition request to the State Department, U.S. court records show.

The impetus for the brothers’ arrests in Miami was new charges brought by Britain’s Crown Prosecution Service relating to alleged offenses ​involving four alleged victims between July 2010 and August 2017.

They had previously faced rape and human trafficking charges in Britain related to three alleged victims, the ⁠CPS said. A ​British judge issued a warrant for their arrests in ​2024. They have not appeared in British court to enter a plea to those charges.

Britain is seeking to extradite the brothers to ​face both sets of charges.

This post was originally published on here. 

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu urged Otzma Yehudit leader Itamar Ben-Gvir and Religious Zionist Party leader Bezalel Smotrich to reach an agreement to run together ahead of the upcoming election in a video posted to social media on Thursday.

At the beginning of the video, Netanyahu was asked, “Prime Minister, what about Smotrich and Ben-Gvir?” He replied: “They must unite. Every time we ran together, we won. When we ran separately, we lost.”

“In 1992, they had, just like today, more votes than the Left, but because they ran as three separate parties, we did not pass the electoral threshold and lost to the Left. We got the Oslo disaster, we got [Yasser] Arafat here, Hamas here, and everything else is a disaster, ongoing disasters. Therefore, this can happen this time as well. Every time we went together, we won.”

“Every time we went separately, we lost. I understand that there are personal grievances between them. They need to overcome them. I will invite them in the coming days. We will make a supreme effort to unite, and this is what the public expects from them, and rightfully so.”

Ben-Gvir responds to Netanyahu’s suggestion

“You want a small Otzma Yehudit party so you can join Eisenkot to establish a ‘broad national government,'” National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir responded in a video.

“Only a large Otzma Yehudit, together with Smotrich and Ofer Winter running together, only in this way can a fully right-wing government be formed.”

Ben-Gvir’s video prompted a response from Netanyahu. “Ben-Gvir, don’t bring down the Right. I did not understand your video,” the prime minister said in a post on X/Twitter.

“Are you saying that I want Otzma Yehudit to be weak because I am asking you to unite with Smotrich?”

בן גביר, אל תפיל את הימין.

לא הבנתי את הסרטון שלך.

אתה אומר שאני רוצה ״עוצמה יהודית חלשה״ בגלל שאני קורא לך להתאחד עם סמוטריץ׳?

הפוך!

לפי כל הסקרים: בלוק טכני של בן גביר + סמוטריץ׳ = מפלגה חזקה שתחזק את גוש הימין ולא תבזבז את קולות הימין.

סמוטריץ׳ על גבול אחוז החסימה. אם…

— Benjamin Netanyahu – בנימין נתניהו (@netanyahu) August 27, 2026

“It’s the opposite! All the polls show that if Ben-Gvir and Smotrich unite it will create a strong party that strengthens the right-wing bloc,” Netanyahu said. “Smotrich is on the verge of the electoral threshold. If you don’t unite with him, we’ll get a left-wing government of Eisenkot with Yair Golan and the Arab parties.”

“I can’t believe that because of personal whims you’re willing to risk the country.”

Ben-Gvir further shoots down Netanyahu’s plan

“Prime Minister, I didn’t understand your video,” Ben-Gvir responded in a post on X.

“The attempt to weaken Otzma Yehudit party in order to form a broad national government with Eisenkot is neither right-wing nor nationalistic.”

אדוני ראש הממשלה,

לא הבנתי את הסרטון שלך.

הניסיון להחליש את עוצמה יהודית בשביל להקים ממשלה לאומית רחבה עם אייזנקוט זה מעשה לא ימני ולא לאומי.

אתה מכיר היטב את הנתונים ומחקרי העומק בדיוק כמוני.

שוחחנו מספר פעמים בשבועות האחרונים,

לפי כל הסקרים חיבור שלי וסמוטריץ מרחיק…

— איתמר בן גביר (@itamarbengvir) August 27, 2026

“You know the data and research as well as I do,” he added. “According to all the polls, a connection between me and Smotrich distances Jewish Strength by 3-4 mandates who won’t come to vote, and the right-wing government will fall!”

He claimed that “the perfect script” would be for Winter and Smotrich to combine their parties. “In your words, Winter doesn’t bring any votes from the undecided!”

“I will do everything so that you do not form a government with Eisenkot! Only a right-wing government!!!”

זמן לאחדות ואחריות במחנה הלאומי.

— בצלאל סמוטריץ’ (@bezalelsm) August 27, 2026

Smotrich, on the other hand, seemed to agree with the prime minister’s suggestion, writing in a post on X that “the time for unity and responsibility is now.”

This post was originally published on here. 

As Michigan US Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed made campaign stops with a prominent Jewish congressional leader on Wednesday, there was one subject neither he, nor his Democratic allies onstage, were interested in discussing.

“Don’t any reporter ask me again about Hasan Piker,” Michigan US Rep. Debbie Dingell told the crowd at an Ann Arbor, Mich., town hall, to cheers. “It’s not what November is about.”

Dingell’s crack was the only time the prominent left-wing streamer’s name was mentioned at all during the pair of El-Sayed rallies that day. Piker recently commented, “If Jews in America keep putting this idea out there that they are singularly invested in Israel, eventually someone’s going to come around and take action… against American Jews.”

His remarks prompted uproar from several corners of Democratic leadership and pushback from El-Sayed, who distanced himself from Piker’s remarks in a statement prior to his latest rallies. Despite this, El-Sayed’s new Jewish campaign surrogate, US Rep. Jamie Raskin of Maryland, avoided the topic altogether. 

That reluctance to talk about Piker on the campaign trail Wednesday extended to the candidate himself. El-Sayed didn’t mention Piker, nor Israel, once in either of his campaign stops with Raskin, except when asked directly by reporters. 

El-Sayed criticized increased focus on Piker

The former county health official campaigned with Piker during the primary, including at one stop at the University of Michigan a stone’s throw away from Wednesday’s event, as the two made opposition to Israel a central issue of his candidacy.

But at a press conference following his Ann Arbor event, El-Sayed described Piker as “a streamer in California,” adding that the media was putting too much focus on his most prominent supporter.

“I’m less interested in going to the tabloid version of our politics where we cover this as who’s in, who’s out, who’s up, who’s down, who’s talking to who,” El-Sayed said. “I’m a lot more interested in talking to the people in the state who had a bum deal because of Donald Trump and the politics that [El-Sayed’s GOP opponent] Mike Rogers has been the epitome of for a very long time.”

Raskin, one of the most prominent Jewish Democrats in the House, also showed a reluctance to talk about Jewish voters in general. The Jewish Telegraphic Agency asked the congressman in Ann Arbor how he would sell El-Sayed to Jewish Democrats uncomfortable with his rhetoric. In response, he did not mention Jewish concerns.

“Those of us who have been fighting Donald Trump and his authoritarianism and corruption and violence against American citizens and immigrants for 10 years now understand that this is an essential referendum about the future,” Raskin said in response. “Will we have democracy or will we have autocracy?”

He added that he has been “campaigning for Democrats all over the country,” and praised the party for being “a very big tent.”

“Just like any big family Thanksgiving dinner, there can be arguments and people jostling, and there’s unruliness,” Raskin said. “But fundamentally, we all believe in democracy and freedom and the progress and prosperity of our people.”

Yet questions about Piker, and how close the movement he represents may come to remaking the Democratic Party’s values, hang over both Michigan’s Senate race and the future of Jewish inclusion in the party.

El-Sayed will need to prove himself to the Jewish community, Rep. Moss says

As the party fights to retake Congress this fall, some liberal Jewish voters believe the growing backlash against Israel among the “big tent”’s progressive wing is damaging their historic coalition. A growing number of Jewish voters in Michigan who previously backed Democrats are now supporting Rogers instead, and El-Sayed’s association with Piker is often cited as a key reason why. 

In playing the role of uniter, Raskin is slaloming carefully between the party’s different factions. Before campaigning with El-Sayed, the congressman stumped for Michigan Rep. Hillary Scholten, a moderate Democrat who has withheld her endorsement of El-Sayed while specifying his association with Piker as a sticking point.

Also being silent on the rallies is a key target of Piker’s: Michigan state Sen. Jeremy Moss, whose likeness the streamer had made his latest comments in front of. The Jewish and pro-Israel Democratic congressional candidate is running in a heavily Jewish district that encompasses Oakland County, where El-Sayed’s second rally of the day took place.

In recent days, Moss said that El-Sayed was “going to have to demonstrate some serious outreach to Oakland County’s Jewish community.” He declined to comment to JTA about the day’s rallies.

As they largely avoided the elephant in the room among Democrats, El-Sayed and his allies also preached the importance of party unity in taking on their Republican opponents. 

“There’s a big effort to divide us,” Raskin told the second rally’s audience in Farmington Hills. “They’re trying to pick on disagreements in our party, trying to exacerbate conflict, because we have freedom of thought in our party and freedom of speech in our party and freedom of dialogue.”

This post was originally published on here. 

The Pentagon’s policy chief told NATO members on Thursday that the alliance must adapt and that he wants to hear from allies as part of a review of US forces in Europe he said was meant to enable a more European-led defense of the continent.

Washington announced a six-month review of US troop deployments in Europe in June and in recent weeks sent NATO members a questionnaire covering issues ranging from defense spending to strategy, procurement and support for US foreign policy priorities.

The review will create at least four sets of options for Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth by November 6, well ahead of a December deadline for its completion, according to a document seen by Reuters.

The process has fueled questions among European officials about whether the US administration is seeking to use the review as a real consultation, symbolic gesture or negotiating tactic.

“We believe that in order to survive and indeed thrive, NATO must change,” US Under Secretary of Defense for Policy Elbridge Colby told ambassadors representing NATO countries during a meeting at NATO headquarters in Brussels on Thursday, according to prepared remarks published by the Pentagon.

“This is not a narrow review about places and bases alone, although those are of course important. Rather, it is a look at our strategic posture here in the broader sense,” he said, adding that “it will encourage, enable, and impel a transition to a more durable and powerful European-led conventional defense of the continent”.

Europe remains critical area for US

Colby also praised progress within the alliance and said that Europe remains a critical area for the US.

“Consultations and engagement are a vital part of this review,” he said. “We want to hear from you”.

Diplomats described the discussion with the Pentagon policy chief as positive but preliminary.

The meeting “went pretty well and showed allied efforts and contributions to the burden shifting are on the way,” said a NATO diplomat.

A European diplomat described the discussion as “mainly sounding out” and said “the overall message from Allies was quite clear: Europe is stepping up and unity is key. This was well understood, I believe.”

This post was originally published on here. 

The UN human rights office said on Thursday the Trump administration’s designation of the Palestine Action group as a terrorist organization was “a disproportionate and unnecessary restriction” on free speech rights that amounted to an expansive use of the term terrorism and will have a chilling effect.

Washington designated Palestine Action on Wednesday as a terrorist group, saying the step was part of President ‌Donald Trump’s effort to crack down on left-wing groups in its counter-terrorism efforts. Israel’s foreign ministry welcomed the designation.

The designation “appears to be both a disproportionate and unnecessary restriction on the rights to freedom of expression, peaceful assembly and association as well as the right to participate in public affairs,” the office of United Nations human rights chief Volker Turk said.

“Expansive use of the term ‘terrorism’ has been documented to have a chilling effect on civic space.”

Banned group says its actions are aimed against Israel’s war with Hamas

Britain ⁠previously banned Palestine Action as a terrorist organization, which was also condemned by Turk’s office. The UK’s ​Supreme Court ⁠has said it will hear an appeal against a lower court ruling that Britain’s decision to ban the campaign group as a terrorist organization was lawful.

Palestine Action has targeted Israel-linked defence companies in Britain, especially Israel’s largest defence firm Elbit Systems, often blocking entrances or spraying red paint.

It was banned by Britain shortly after a break-in at the Royal Air Force’s Brize Norton base in June 2025 in which activists damaged two military planes. The UK ban on the group had prompted protests in which about 3,000 people were arrested.

The group says its activities “have always been about saving lives by disrupting the Israeli war machine” and opposing Israel’s war against Hamas. It says it uses “disruptive tactics” to target “corporate enablers of the Israeli military-industrial complex.”

The Trump administration has attempted to deport pro-Palestinian foreign protesters, threatened a funding freeze for universities over protests, enforced social media screening for immigrants and sanctioned critics of US ally Israel.

Ben Saul, UN special rapporteur on human rights and counter-terrorism, and Francesca Albanese, a UN expert on the Palestinian territories, also raised concerns about Washington’s designation.

Sarah McLaughlin, senior scholar of global expression at free speech group FIRE, said that “we must reject that censorship – not import it.”

This post was originally published on here. 

When Endalkew Yemani Tesma fled Ethiopia in 2005, he did not know what awaited him on the way to Israel, nor that once he arrived, he would spend nearly two decades without permanent status.

He passed through Sudan, then Libya, then Sudan again, and reached Israel in 2008 by way of Egypt’s Sinai Peninsula. There, Yemani Tesma said, he was held captive and abused by Bedouin traffickers, treatment that refugee rights organizations in Israel have documented extensively among those who crossed the same route. 

After claiming asylum due to civil unrest in his home country, Yemani Tesma was given a 2(a)5 visa, the renewable permit that lets asylum seekers stay while their claims are pending. He settled in Jerusalem, married a fellow Ethiopian asylum seeker and started a family.

His children have grown up in Israeli schools and, by every measure that matters to them, as Israelis. Although they are not Jewish, their first language is Hebrew, and they learned Israeli history alongside Jewish traditions and holidays.

Yemani Tesma works at a hummus restaurant in Jerusalem, the kind of job he described as paying the bills and supporting his six children, but nothing beyond that. National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir ate there once, Yemani Tesma recounted, “And he didn’t even try to deport me.”

But Yemani Tesma and his family are still in danger. A High Court decision last December allowed their group protection to be revoked. After years of feeling that they had found an oasis of safety, the family now faces the possibility of deportation. To prevent that from happening, a Jewish organization originally founded to help Jews fleeing Eastern European pogroms is taking the Israeli government to court.

Few given refugee status 

Israel’s asylum approval rate is roughly 0.1%, or about five people a year, according to the UN High Commissioner for Refugees.

It’s so low that Sigal Rozen, the public policy coordinator at the Hotline for Refugees and Migrants, an Israeli NGO she helped found in 1998, can name those whose applications have been approved by first and last name. In the European Union, by comparison, 39% of asylum decisions in 2025 were approvals.

She claimed that the bureaucracy, and the deferral of decisions on some files for years, is deliberate. “They want to make life as difficult as possible, so that people give up and leave,” she asserted.

According to Israel’s Population and Immigration Authority, 1,334 asylum applications from Ethiopian citizens are currently pending. And Ethiopians are just a sliver of the asylum-seeking population. Roughly 30,000 asylum seekers live in Israel, a country of just over 10 million people. Most of those asylum seekers are Eritrean and Sudanese who crossed the Sinai before Israel completed its border fence with Egypt in 2013. 

Eritreans still hold group protection that shields them from deportation, because Israel accepts that conditions in the country are too dangerous for them to return, and most Sudanese have obtained status through the courts, as Israel does not have official diplomatic relations with Khartoum and cannot deport them there. Ethiopians have no such shield.

Israel had granted group protection to Ethiopian nationals in light of the civil war between the Ethiopian armed forces and the Tigray People’s Liberation Front back in November of 2021. In January 2024, Israel’s then-Interior Minister Moshe Arbel withdrew it, citing advice that the security situation in Ethiopia was sufficiently stable for nationals to return. Arbel declined to be interviewed for this story.

In December 2025, the High Court upheld that decision, rejecting an appeal by the Hotline, HIAS Israel and the Aid Organization for Refugees and Asylum Seekers in Israel. The three-judge panel gave them four months to prepare to leave.

The Population and Immigration Authority has since begun pulling individual case files, some untouched for years, to the front of the queue in order to reject them, telling asylum seekers to leave the country or risk deportation.

Ethiopians whose claims have been rejected can now be detained if they come to a government office for any reason, Shahar Mandil, policy advocate at the Forum of Refugee and Asylum Seeker Organizations in Israel, said. Some do not know they have been rejected, as notices were sent to email addresses they no longer use or to lawyers who no longer represent them.

“A decision on an asylum application is delivered through the contact channels provided by the asylum seeker,” the Population and Immigration Authority told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency. “It is the asylum seeker’s responsibility to keep those contact details updated,” adding that every asylum seeker whose application is rejected is asked to leave the country.

The Population and Immigration Authority’s position is that conditions in Ethiopia no longer justify group protection, and that asylum seekers can return to the country’s capital of Addis Ababa even if other areas remain unstable.

Under international refugee law, a state can reject a claim of asylum by arguing that the applicant could move somewhere safer within their own country (known as an internal flight alternative). But that argument carries a requirement, said Nimrod Avigal, director of legal aid at HIAS Israel: “You need to show that this specific person can actually move within the country.”

Yordanos, who declined to give her last name for fear of deportation, said it was not possible to go elsewhere in Ethiopia. “We can’t move from one place to another,” she explained. “Any police checkpoint can stop you, depending on who you are and where you’re from.” When it comes to Addis Ababa, she continued, “Even if it were safe, it’s not possible. You can’t bring 130 million people to live in Addis,” referring to the entire population of Ethiopia.

Yordanos reached Israel in 2022 after securing a visa for a religious pilgrimage to Jerusalem, another route that many Ethiopian asylum seekers described taking to JTA. She and her husband hold advanced degrees and once ran a business that took them to more than 11 countries. In Israel, she cleans houses.

Israel historically backed refugee rights

On Sept. 22, the district court in Tel Aviv will hear a case seeking a new way to prevent the deportation of non-Jewish Ethiopians currently in Israel. A petition from HIAS Israel argues that the government has never created a mechanism for asylum seekers to claim protection from deportation under the principle of non-refoulement, which bars states from returning people to countries where they face danger.

HIAS was founded in 1881 as the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society, to help Jews fleeing persecution in the Russian Empire. It spent the following century assisting Jewish refugees fleeing pogroms and the Holocaust.

As Jewish migration slowed in the 2000s, the organization expanded its work to non-Jewish refugees, including Syrians, Afghans, Ukrainians and Somalis, dropping “Hebrew” from its name in 2014. Its Israel branch now represents non-Jewish asylum seekers, with the government of the Jewish state as the defendant.

Israel was among the first countries to ratify the 1951 Refugee Convention, and Israeli jurists helped write it, including Jacob Robinson, a Lithuanian-born legal adviser to Israel’s UN delegation who was a central figure in its drafting. The treaty’s cardinal principle is non-refoulement, that no state may return a person to a country where they face serious danger.

Israeli courts operate on what Anat Ben-Dor, a clinical instructor at Tel Aviv University’s Refugee Rights Clinic who is currently handling several Ethiopian cases, called an interpretive presumption: “Unless there is clear contradictory legislation, the government should be assumed to abide by international law.”

James Loeffler, the Felix Posen Professor of Modern Jewish History at Johns Hopkins University, who studies the Jewish role in building the postwar human rights system, said the people who wrote those rules would not recognize what Israel is doing now. Robinson and his contemporaries “were committed to non-refoulement.

They would have seen that as the cardinal principle above all and would be gravely disappointed by a situation in which Israel is sending thousands of people back to a country where they still face serious peril,” Loeffler said.

Not everyone sees the low asylum recognition rate as a failure, however. Yonatan Jakubowicz, founder and executive director of the Israeli Immigration Policy Center, which advocates for tighter immigration controls, argues that Israel has struck a deliberate balance between “maximum compliance with the principle of non-refoulement” and restricting long-term settlement and the “pull factor” it creates for mass migration.

Israel, he notes, is the only developed country with a land and sea border with Africa, apart from the Spanish enclaves of Ceuta and Melilla, into which roughly 70,000 people crossed from Morocco in a matter of days last month, prompting an emergency EU meeting. 

Israel’s granting permanent residence to Ethiopians, Eritreans and Sudanese “could collapse its immigration policies, triggering a massive influx of illegal and mixed migration” over the Egyptian fence or by sea, “followed by a wave of family reunification requests.”

The route he described has been effectively closed for more than a decade; crossings from the Sinai all but stopped after the border fence went up. Most Ethiopians reached Israel by other means, on tourist or work visas or, like Yordanos, on visas for religious pilgrimage to Jerusalem, and applied for asylum after arriving. 

Jakubowicz’s arguments are echoed elsewhere in the Western world. Earlier this month, a US district judge cleared the way for the Trump administration to terminate Temporary Protected Status for Ethiopians, after the Department of Homeland Security announced in December that conditions in Ethiopia “no longer pose a serious threat to the personal safety of returning Ethiopian nationals.” The language is nearly identical to the advice Israel’s former interior minister, Arbel, cited in Jerusalem two years earlier. 

Mola, who asked to be identified by his first name only as he still has family in Ethiopia and also fears deportation, worries that Israel will follow the US lead and step up deportations of Ethiopian asylum seekers ahead of the national elections scheduled for Oct. 27 as a campaign victory for the right-wing coalition now in power.

“Every time there’s an election, asylum seekers suddenly become a target,” said Mandil of the Forum of Refugee and Asylum Seeker Organizations. “Because there are many groups, in many parts of the Israeli public, and it’s both the coalition and the opposition that make promises, trying to convince people to vote for them if only they can take care of this situation.”

In addition to repeating common tropes in the developed world tying migrants to theft and violence, Israelis who support cracking down on immigration often invoke another argument: demography. They worry that letting asylum seekers stay permanently in Israel would erode the Jewish majority of the Jewish state. 

“The logic is, if we allow groups of non-Jewish people to stay here, they could, God forbid, marry Israelis, and that threatens Jewishness, the Jewish majority,” Mandil said. Loeffler traces the same anxiety to Israel’s unresolved conflict with the Palestinians. Non-Palestinian refugees, he said, have “absolutely gotten caught up in that struggle,” because Israeli leaders resist any move they fear “might open up more opportunities for Palestinians to make legal claims.”

Sivan Carmel, country director of HIAS Israel, calls the numbers argument a non-starter. “Israel has a population of about 10 million, this is 50,000, 60,000 people. It doesn’t make a dent in the demography of the country,” she said.

A clock that keeps ticking

The children of asylum seekers have long been a focus of civil society organizations working on their behalf. They argue that the state should treat them as cases separate from their parents and that even if Israel tries to deport the parents, the children are a different question. Mandil has spent years making that case in the Knesset.

“How can they be asylum seekers when 94% of them were born in Israel?” she said. Asked whether they speak Hebrew, she answered: “Completely. Better than I do.” Yet they are classified, she noted, not as asylum seekers but as infiltrators. “How can you be an infiltrator when you were born in Israel?”

Ethiopian asylum-seeking parents who spoke with JTA described a particular kind of parenting, shielding their children from what their lack of status would eventually cost them, while preparing them for the moment they turned 18 and found out.

Yemani Tesma likened it to a “a clock that keeps ticking. I know the alarm will ring, and I have to decide what to do by the time it does.” 

Eventually, the time came. 

When his son turned 16, his classmates began preparing for the military draft. His son, however, was left out. No call-up notice, no aptitude test, none of the photographs with families at the recruitment office. So he asked his father why.

“It is because you are not Israeli, and cannot become Israeli,” his father told him. His son shut his bedroom door, Yemani Tesma said, and did not open it for a day.

Israel, like most countries outside the Americas, does not grant citizenship on the basis of birth alone. A child’s status is derivative of a parent’s, said Ben-Dor of the Refugee Rights Clinic. Courts will occasionally make exceptions, for a child with a disability, or one whose integration into Israeli society is exceptional, say, but the government, she said, is wary of any principle suggesting that being born in Israel could confer legal status.

Ben-Dor is representing two Tigrayan mothers of children with special needs whose humanitarian applications cannot be considered at all because the Interior Ministry demands Ethiopian passports the women do not have in order to process their claims.

In early 2012, then-interior minister Eli Yishai lifted collective protection for South Sudanese nationals, clearing the way to deport 1,500 people. The first flight left Tel Aviv for Juba on June 17 of that year, in an operation the government called “Returning Home.” Civil war broke out the following year. 

“Children who had studied in Israeli schools found themselves drawing water from wells in South Sudan,” HIAS Israel’s Avigal said. “These are Hebrew-speaking children.”

Why did we come here?

Most asylum seekers in Israel hold a 2(a)5 visa. “It’s a specific visa whose only function is to say you can’t be deported,” said Mandil. The visa is stamped “This permit is not a work permit.” Asylum seekers are able to work, however, because the state promised the High Court it would not fine their employers. 

“Every right, every basic right, every social service, we have to fight for,” Mandil said. “They aren’t eligible for anything, not a driver’s license, not the ability to leave the country and come back, not health insurance, not higher education. Certain professions are closed to them because they have no status.”

That has left many Ethiopian asylum seekers in a cycle of poverty in the country where they sought refuge. Now, with a deportation deadline already behind them, 18 years after Yemani Tesma arrived and raised a family here, some are asking why they came at all.

Mola is a community leader and translator and spends his unpaid hours helping asylum seekers file petitions with the Interior Ministry. 

“When I am not doing my backbreaking work,” he told JTA, “I do all I can to help asylum seekers fill out paperwork.” He once worked as a project coordinator and Amharic translator at the Canadian Embassy in Israel.

“Anyone who has had the option or ability to leave Israel for a third country has done so. Everyone who is left here has nowhere else to go,” he said.

In the aftermath of the Hamas-led attacks of Oct. 7, 2023, it seemed there might be an opening for the Ethiopian asylum seekers to cement their place in Israel. 

As Israel’s largely foreign agricultural workforce was evacuated and Palestinian work permits were suspended, some of the people the Interior Ministry is now preparing to deport went to farms along the Gaza border to pick fruit.

Members of the Ethiopian asylum-seeking community bought supplies at supermarkets and delivered them to Israeli soldiers, Mola said.

Multiple busloads of asylum seekers traveled to farms in the envelope to harvest crops that would otherwise have rotted. None of them were paid. “After Oct. 7, we saw asylum seekers volunteering to assist people in the south, distributing food, volunteering in agriculture. I’ve seen it with my clients, and I’ve seen it with groups of asylum seekers,” Avigal, of HIAS, said.

Three months later, the Interior Ministry revoked their protection from deportation.

Asked whether any of this had left him bitter toward Israel, one Ethiopian asylum seeker, who asked not to be named for fear of deportation, rejected the premise. “I don’t hate,” he said. “Bless Israel.”

Told that someone else in his position might feel differently, he answered, “No. What we hate is the decision.”

Avigal added, “What we say at HIAS is, we used to help people because they’re Jewish, and now we’re helping people because we’re Jewish.”

This post was originally published on here. 

Trump administration officials are working on a deal to secure long-term access to a portion of Venezuela’s crude reserves, sources with knowledge of the negotiations said on Thursday, a move that could ultimately lower the cost of crude imports.

The agreement, which could be signed and made public soon, is expected to operate in a way that would let the US government lock in a group of Venezuelan oilfields to be developed by American companies, the sources said, adding that the resulting supply would be guaranteed for the US.

“This is real and being discussed at the highest levels of the US and Venezuelan governments,” one of the sources said.

A separate source said a “lease” was in consideration as the legal model to make the deal work, with a further auction or tender to allocate each one of the fields among US producers.

A list of 17 fields in negotiation seen by Reuters includes green fields in the vast Orinoco Belt combined with mature areas in Lake Maracaibo, some of which are currently operated by a small Chinese firm whose contract was signed during Maduro’s administration.

The White House referred questions to the US Department of Energy. Venezuela’s oil ministry, state oil company PDVSA and the Energy Department did not immediately reply to requests for comment. Venezuelan oil minister Paula Henao could not be reached for comment.

Venezuela is considering leaving the OPEC oil production group as it strengthens ties with the US, Bloomberg reported late on Thursday. Venezuela, which joined the group as a founding member in 1960, has not met OPEC quotas for years as its state-run oil industry suffered from neglect and corruption. The US has long been at odds with OPEC for its influence on oil prices.

Hydrocarbon regulation, legislation in Venezuela

Current hydrocarbons regulation in Venezuela, which has the world’s largest crude reserves, does not include acreage leases for oil areas, while the Constitution reserves the industry’s core activities to the state.

Recently reformed oil legislation allows oilfield operation through joint ventures and production-sharing contracts. For decades, the Venezuelan government has prevented foreign producers from booking the country’s oil reserves.

While full details of the prospective deal between Washington and Caracas have yet to emerge, it could raise constitutional questions and face legal challenges, according to experts.

Axios first reported on the talks on Thursday and said US Energy Secretary Chris Wright is planning a trip to Caracas as soon as next week.

Since the US captured and removed former President Nicolas Maduro from power in January, Washington has been trying to secure a stable flow of Venezuelan crude for US refineries while promoting American investment into the OPEC country’s deteriorated energy industry, which currently produces some 1.25 million barrels per day of crude.

President Donald Trump‘s administration is under pressure ahead of midterm elections scheduled later this year over rising gasoline prices, which could be eased through cheaper oil supplies and expanded output. The US also has been looking for solutions to replenish its Strategic Petroleum Reserve, the world’s largest emergency oil stockpile, including the possibility of crude swaps with US producers.

The SPR currently holds about 290 million barrels in underground salt caverns, about 41% of its total capacity. Funding shortages and ongoing maintenance at the reserve have limited the administration’s efforts to refill it after the US tapped it following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022 and then again after the Iran war began in February.

Venezuela weighs OPEC exit

Venezuela is closely examining plans to leave OPEC, Bloomberg News reported on Thursday, citing people familiar with the matter.

The idea of an exit has been a topic in conversations with US officials, and no final decision has been made, the report added.

Reuters could not immediately verify the report.

This post was originally published on here. 

Iran’s Supreme National Security Council head Mohsen Rezaee tied the opening of the Strait of Hormuz to regional peace in an interview broadcast by Lebanon’s Al Manar TV on Thursday.

“The issue of the Strait of Hormuz is related to ending the wars in the entire region, and in particular in Lebanon and Gaza,” he declared.

“If the Americans want to open the Strait of Hormuz, they must commit to this condition. Mediators have asked Iran to present its conditions for opening the Strait of Hormuz,” he said.

Iran is preparing a list of conditions for reopening the Strait of Hormuz after mediators asked Tehran to set them out, said Rezaei, adding that ending the regional war was among them.

Iran, Oman yet to agree on Hormuz agreement, source says

Rezaei said Iran had agreed with Oman on a shipping corridor through the strait, with parts of the route in Omani waters and parts in Iranian waters. Ships would use a designated central channel if the US met Iran’s conditions, he said.

On Wednesday, a senior source said Iran and Oman were still working on details of an agreement on the waterway after Iran’s Revolutionary Guards said the two countries had agreed on how to share control of the strait and its revenues.

A Guards spokesperson said Iran would not allow the strait to reopen unless Washington lifted what Tehran describes as a blockade of Iranian ports while also paying compensation and removing sanctions.

Rezaee also said reports about a potential plot to assassinate US President Donald Trump’s youngest son are a lie in the interview.

The US Secret Service said on Tuesday that it was aware of a video broadcast by Iranian state television discussing a potential plot to assassinate US President Donald Trump’s youngest son Barron Trump.

This post was originally published on here. 

It has been five years since the attack at Abbey Gate in Kabul, Afghanistan. US President Donald Trump put out a proclamation on August 26, the anniversary. “The terrorist was one of the thousands of prisoners released by the Taliban just 2 months earlier.  As a result, 13 American service members were killed, 45 were wounded, and more than 160 civilians were injured,” President Trump said.

He noted that on August 26, “a lone ISIS-K terrorist pressed into the crowd at Abbey Gate in Kabul, Afghanistan, and detonated a body-worn bomb.”

Trump called on the nation to honor the fallen. “On the fifth anniversary of the attack at Abbey Gate, we solemnly honor their selflessness and valor.” He noted that for 20 years Americans fought in Afghanistan.

He then got to the tragedy of the 2021 withdrawal. “Yet within months, President Biden squandered those hard-fought gains, putting politics over strategy and rushing through a poorly executed withdrawal that would soon become one of the worst military disasters in our Nation’s history.”

The Wall Street Journal’s Opinion section also released a new video documentary about the withdrawal. It is called The Path to Zero: The Withdrawal From Afghanistan.

The Journal described this as “an unflinching account of America’s disastrous withdrawal from Afghanistan, told by the people who lived it. Structured around President Biden’s 2021 decision to draw down to “zero” troops, the film traces how one choice cascaded into a chaotic, deadly ending – the closure of Bagram, the collapse of the Afghan army, and a frantic evacuation through three Kabul airport gates, culminating in the tragic Abbey Gate suicide bombing attack.” It includes “candid interviews with the diplomats, generals, and soldiers who were there, the film tells the riveting story of the unfolding tragedy – and gives voice to the moral injury many young Marines who manned the gates still carry.”

Withdrawal from the airfield was tragic chaos

The video illustrates how the withdrawal became a tragic chaos and led to death and suffering.

The US left Bagram Airfield in July, before the final date of withdrawal. That withdrawal was supposed to go on through September but was accelerated. The Afghan security forces collapsed, and Afghanistan rapidly fell to the Taliban. This fall was likely envisioned in talks that had taken place in Doha. The first Trump administration had wanted to withdraw from Afghanistan. In fact, it was never clear why US troops had stayed so long.

The problem is that it’s easier to get into wars like Afghanistan than it is to leave.

The US has seen this before in Vietnam or other conflicts. However, the 2021 withdrawal from Afghanistan had large ramifications. Trump said this week that the withdrawal from Bagram  “surrendered our largest military base in the country, lost billions of dollars of military equipment, and left our remaining forces without their strategic advantages as the Taliban rapidly advanced.” He described the collapse in Afghanistan as the result of the previous Biden administration’s incompetence.

The WSJ video reminds us of how the tragedy unfolded. It also sheds a concerning light on the failed planning for withdrawal and a sense that no one was accountable for the failure. It also leads to questions about whether other countries looked at the withdrawal and drew lessons about a weakened America that couldn’t deter enemies.

Geopolitical crisis, faltered international agreements that followed

In February 2022, Russia invaded Ukraine. The Biden administration had warned that Russia would invade. However, when the chips were down, many Western governments evacuated Kyiv and appeared to believe half of Ukraine would fall to Russia. In the end, the Ukrainians held on, and Russia failed to take Kyiv. Russia felt that it could get away with the invasion because it was not deterred. Did the Afghanistan chaos of withdrawal lead to that sense?

Other crises followed. In April, a civil war broke out in Sudan. Did the Rapid Support Forces (RSF) feel it could get away with launching a conflict in Sudan after there had been hope of transition to democracy? The civil war has been brutal and has included massacres. Did the US try to stop the civil war? It’s not clear, but it appears the Biden White House failed to do much. The Trump administration has called for a ceasefire, but it still hasn’t happened.

In Yemen, the administration also failed to make much progress, despite talks in Oman. A UN-backed truce in Yemen in March 2023 was a rare silver lining.

On other fronts, the US continued to appear to lose leverage around the world. Armenians in Nagorno-Karabakh were cut off throughout much of 2023 and under siege. This had followed a previous short conflict between Azerbaijan and Armenia in 2020. In September 2023, a new offensive led to 50,000 Armenians fleeing the enclave. Here, again, the US appeared absent.

On October 7, Hamas launched its attack on Israel, murdering 1,000 people and taking 251 hostages. Did Hamas feel emboldened by the Taliban victory? Hamas leaders were hosted in Doha, as the Taliban had been hosted. The Taliban had been careful not to carry out massive massacres when they marched on Kabul, instead handing the US a fait accompli. Hamas believed it could carry out a massacre and get away with it. It apparently believed it could then take over the West Bank and spread war across the region. What was the Hamas calculus? Didn’t it know Israel would launch a major war in response? Did it think the massive hostage taking would prevent the war?

We know that Hamas released two elderly Israelis and also several Americans soon after October 7, apparently hoping to achieve some kind of deal. This didn’t work, but it raises some questions. It has never been fully explained about the two Americans released by Hamas in October, before the Israeli offensive on October 27. At the time Reuters reported on October 21, 2023 that “U.S. President Joe Biden thanked Qatar and Israel” after the women were released. “Hamas said the two women, who Israel’s Kan public broadcaster reported were dual Israeli-American nationals, were freed ‘for humanitarian reasons’ in response to Qatari mediation.”

Trends that emerged since Kabul 2021

Is there any connection to the US withdrawal from Afghanistan? Did that withdrawal lead to Russia assuming that the US wouldn’t stop its march on Kyiv? Did that lead to Hamas assuming it could get away with an unprecedented attack? Was US deterrence weakened? We may never know, unless we have access to internal documents of the Putin administration or Hamas leadership. What is clear is that the years after 2021 were ones of accelerating global chaos as the world order has shifted. Many countries want to weaken the US-led world order that emerged in the 1990s. Russia, China, and others have been clear about this.

Other trends were clear in the period 2021-2024. Economic blocs such as BRICS and the SCO expanded, as Russia and China grew their power. Many US partners and allies began hedging their bets by working with China.

The Abraham Accords also appeared to stagnate. No new countries joined. Concepts such as I2U2, meant to bring together India, the UAE, Israel, and the US, didn’t progress as much as hoped. Neither did the Negev Forum. Regional integration didn’t happen as planned. Instead, October 7 derailed hopes of peace. Iran also prodded its militias in Iraq to increase attacks. They targeted US forces in Erbil, and Iran also targeted ships using drones.

Iran also moved its Shahed 136 drones to the Houthis in Yemen in 2020, foreshadowing how it would send them to Russia. As such, it is clear that the years around the fall of Kabul became ones in which there were serious setbacks for the US and the US-led world order.

We now live in the aftermath of that era. The war in Ukraine and Sudan continues. The war in Gaza and the Middle East that began on October 7 has continued for more than 1,000 days with no end in sight. China continues to position itself as a more powerful country. The war with Iran, which began in February, has shifted US focus to the Middle East. This may embolden China.

Many trends that began years ago are continuing. The Trump administration has deterred US enemies and has had successes, such as in Venezuela. However, it remains to be seen if all the lessons of Kabul will be learned. 

This post was originally published on here. 

Though the Islamic Republic of Iran has established a “sophisticated panoply” to protect itself against the possibility of regime change, its trump card, the Strait of Hormuz, is losing its strategic value and will continue to do so, Thomas O’Donnell, an American energy and geopolitics strategist and a Global Fellow of the Wilson Center, told The Jerusalem Post on Thursday.

With many of the regime’s regional proxies degraded over years of war with Israel and its nuclear ambitions delayed after the 12 Day War in June last year, Tehran only has its rockets, drones, and ability to threaten the Strait of Hormuz left as an insurance policy against attempts to topple the regime, he noted.

These remaining elements will be used to dissuade action while it restores the others, but they are losing the weight they once carried, O’Donnell added.

Though 14 to 15 million barrels of oil traveled through Hormuz per day before the war, he argued that it was very possible to manage without much of that supply.

Saudi Arabia’s East-West Crude Oil Pipeline moves around five million barrels per day for non-domestic use, while the United Arab Emirates moves an average of 1.5 to 1.8m. bpd through its own pipeline, he calculated.

Some 400m. barrels of oil and refined petroleum products were unanimously approved for release by the 32 member nations of the International Energy Agency (IEA), while the US government committed 172 million barrels from its Strategic Petroleum Reserve.

None of this even touches on the oil supplied by the Western Hemisphere, where roughly 32% to 40% of the world’s total oil originates.

“There’s more production in other places, but [the disruption of] oil has not been anything like it would have been 20 years ago if they closed the strait,” he said, explaining how the US’s own oil and fracking industries have helped mitigate much of the damage.

Could Iran’s weakening control of Hormuz force a deal with the US?

“The oil price, it’ll go up and down. The fact that it went over $100 [a barrel], and the next day it was $80, that means that’s geostrategic variability. That’s not fundamental.”

A number of planned pipelines, namely the UAE’s plans to double its oil output through a parallel pipeline and Iraq’s plans for an Iraq-to-Syria pipeline, will also weaken the strategic value of Hormuz as states develop alternative routes.

Reflecting on these developments, US Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent shared earlier this month the prediction that the strait “is going to become just another body of water” over the next two years, estimating that 50-70% of the exports passing through the waterway would instead travel through underground pipelines.

Noting that the Iran-backed militias operating in Iraq could still cause some issues with the planned pipeline, he reasoned that this would provide further motivation for Iraq to keep to its September 30 deadline to disarm the groups.

O’Donnell further argued that beyond Hormuz becoming less valuable as a transit point for fuel, Iran’s own ability to defend its claim over the waterway has also diminished, as has its ability to attack neighboring states’ alternative oil routes.

“The Americans systematically bombed the region and knocked out every radar that was ever turned on. Little by little… they systematically degraded it. And now you see [oil tankers] are sneaking or being escorted at night, where Iran can’t visually see the tankers very well,” O’Donnell explained.

“Iran had a more or less static defense or offense, missiles and drones that they can’t reproduce, and electronic eyes that undoubtedly the Americans can only degrade at some rate. And so their ability to control Hormuz will degrade over time.”

In other words, Iran is losing leverage over Hormuz from both directions: The waterway is becoming less indispensable to global energy markets, and Tehran is becoming less capable of controlling it.

The natural outcome of this will be vessels traveling largely unimpeded through the strait as Iran is left with degraded weapons and defenses, he continued, predicting that even the regime’s hardliners would eventually need to make a deal with the US despite their current “bravado” as the financial crisis hitting Iran worsens.

Aware of this, Iran may make a “desperate attempt” to step up its pressure campaign on the US through attacks on Gulf states, potentially even launching a ground incursion, O’Donnell said.

What will happen to Hormuz if Iran loses control? 

Having rubbed shoulders with a number of diplomats and analysts in the region, O’Donnell said he had been told by a number of sources that Gulf states were aware, prior to the war’s outbreak on February 28, that Iran had strategized a plan to target them as a means to pressure the US into dropping or moderating any campaign against it should the need ever arise.

When the US continued to attack despite Gulf pressure, quickly eliminating Tehran’s leadership, the Islamic Republic went for the Strait of Hormuz, “because it’s so important globally.”

Despite not approving of the US’s attacks on Iran due to the consequences for them, O’Donnell said that Gulf states were unwilling to see Hormuz remain under Iran’s control for reasons outside of the issue of fees.

“As soon as there’s something on Asharq or on Sky News that they don’t like, they’ll hold up the UAE ships,” he said. “As soon as there’s something on Al Jazeera they don’t like, they’ll hold up the ships for a week.”

This, he reasoned, is why Gulf states would not allow the United States to leave the conflict, despite alternative oil routes becoming available in the not-so-distant future.

“If they’re going to make a deal, now’s the time to make a deal and get it over with. They can cause a lot of pain, but in the end, Iran is really going to become diminished. And if they go diehard, it’s going to be hard for everybody, obviously,” O’Donnell said.

“If you have a diminishing lever, best to make what deal you can… The US knows it’s going to take a long time, it’ll be fairly painful for allies, [but] in the end, it’s going to get better for us.”

This post was originally published on here. 

Hundreds of haredi (ultra-Orthodox) individuals gathered to protest the expansion of the light rail in the Bar-Ilan Street area of northern Jerusalem on Thursday night, Ynet reported. 

Protesters reportedly tore down fences, set fire to cardboard installations, and attempted to break into the construction site.

This is a developing story.

This post was originally published on here. 

The criticisms of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s handling of war and peace by his challengers in the October 27 election are well-known: whatever tactical wins he achieved militarily, he has either failed or not yet succeeded, after losing an unprecedented amount of the country’s global legitimacy, to lock in long-term diplomatic gains.

While there are nuances to every front, this would be the broad critique on all fronts by former prime minister Naftali Bennett, who is competing with Netanyahu and Gadi Eisenkot over who will run the country’s war and peace decisions from the premier’s chair going forward.

When Bennett puts his own personal stamp on this broadly accepted critique among the opposition, he would say that a gorilla must construct the jungle.

He would add that the gorilla must embody humility, but must also be active, and active here means on the diplomatic plane as much as the military one.

On the military one, Bennett agrees with Netanyahu about maintaining some kind of significant security zone in Gaza, Lebanon, and Syria,

But in Bennett’s view, Israel under Netanyahu since October 7 has been mind-bogglingly passive on the diplomatic plane, with the US, Qatar, Turkey, and sometimes even more overtly hostile adversaries running circles around or over the head of the Jewish state.

Bennett’s views on the future of the Gaza Strip

According to Bennett, Netanyahu has zero Gaza diplomatic policy.

Rather, he argues that Netanyahu’s only Gaza policy to date has been to bomb or invade.

Although Bennett wants to dismantle and disarm Hamas as much as Netanyahu, he believes this can only be accomplished by a mix of military and diplomatic tools.

Bennett believes that the Trump administration’s Gaza vision on its own is unworkable, but that it has been imposed on Netanyahu and Israel because they failed to suggest anything else.

In Bennett’s view, Egypt is the key, which Netanyahu has ignored or which his coalition partners have so angered that Cairo has not been a workable part of its Gaza strategy, when it should be at its center.

He accuses Bezalel Smotrich and Itamar Ben-Gvir of destroying any credit that Israel as a country might have with Egypt and other countries like Jordan, if Jerusalem were working with these countries and their leaders as the close allies they have been in recent decades.

Moreover, he would say that the constant drumbeat of new incidents of Jewish extremist violence in the West Bank, such as with the recent Kusra incident, reduces Israel’s legitimacy in the world with allies in the US and the region even more.

Bennett would say that whoever is prime minister should be meeting with Egyptian President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi at least twice a year and should be in regular touch on the side.

In contrast, Sisi has refused to meet with Netanyahu for years because of the provocative actions of Smotrich and Ben-Gvir even before October 7, and since the war started, because Netanyahu ignored any of Sisi’s needs and did not give him a serious consultative capacity.

In contrast, if Bennett were prime minister, he believes that he would restore traditional positive relations with Sisi, and with that restored trust and including the Egyptian president in key consultations, Cairo would be ready to invest more in a joint vision for reducing Hamas’s power in Gaza.

Unlike outsiders from the proposed International Stabilization Force (ISF) who are afraid of Hamas and have to play by restrictive Western rules, Sisi would be willing to provide Egyptian soldiers to assist, who would follow local Middle Eastern rules and scare Hamas.

If Bennett were prime minister, he would say that stability and order would be restored in the West Bank so that Israel only needs to take hits to its legitimacy in the US and the region for vital national interest, not unnecessary errors.

With stronger buy-in from Egypt, Jordan, Abraham Accords countries, potential Abraham Accords countries, the US, and even the EU, Bennett’s view is that Hamas can truly be hedged in, in a way that will lead it to be disarmed.

Part of what is interesting about Bennett’s plan on these issues is that he is not endorsing the Trump plan of fully bringing in the Palestinian Authority to Gaza.

Bennett has not changed his long-held opposition to a Palestinian state and he is willing to give the PA some role in Gaza and to strengthen it in the West Bank, especially to build goodwill with the US, Egypt, and others.

But he strongly believes that Egypt, as a local powerhouse, is the only country besides Israel capable of handling and intimidating Hamas.

Part of what is fascinating about his theory is that we have no real way of evaluating it.

Nothing Egypt has said since October 7 has suggested it is any more ready than other countries to put its soldiers into harm’s way against Hamas, and all indications have been that it wants to keep Gaza away and at a distance.

Effectively, Bennett is asking the public to think about pre-2023 cooperation with Egypt and to have faith that this can be returned to and even heavily built upon to new levels of joint operational action to rein in Hamas.

Bennett’s views on the future of Israel’s policy towards Iran

What happens if Bennett is elected prime minister, US President Donald Trump is still prohibiting Israel from directly and overtly striking the regime from the air, and Tehran starts producing new ballistic missiles more rapidly?

According to Trump’s public statements, he is almost exclusively focused on the Strait of Hormuz and nuclear issues, and has essentially dismissed Iran’s ballistic missile arsenal as a normative non-issue (he compared it to the Saudis having ballistic missiles).

It appears that Bennett would turn back to the Mossad to prevent the Islamic Republic from crossing a problematic ballistic missiles volume threshold.

This means turning back the clock somewhat in terms of returning primary responsibility for combating Iran from the IDF to the Mossad.

Presumably, the IDF would still be ready to strike should Iran dare to try to near the nuclear threshold again, as that might still get a green light from Trump.

However, when Bennett was prime minister in 2021-2022, the ballistic missile problem had not yet become an existential issue, so he would also likely dive into the latest intelligence on the issue, the way he did learning about Iran’s nuclear problem and proxy power projection in his earlier term.

Rewinding to the 2015-2021 period, both Bennett and IDF officials have said that Israel’s ability to strike Iran went down some notches because the Islamic Republic had been keeping aspects of the 2015 nuclear deal it had signed.

However, starting in late 2018, following Trump pulling out of the 2015 deal, and increasingly in the second half of 2019 and almost full-on in 2020 and 2021, the regime started crossing a new redline by moving its uranium enrichment forward.

Bennett has been on record many times that Netanyahu and the IDF did not adjust fast enough to this Iranian shift during the 2018-2021 era.

Recently, it was disclosed to The Jerusalem Post and a small number of other media outlets that part of what was set back or delayed during this time period was, according to foreign sources, the Blue Sparrow ballistic missile weapons, which could be fired by Israeli F-15s against Iran from such a long range that the aircraft themselves would not be within range of Iranian air defenses.

In 2021-2022, Bennett then moved the IDF, Israel Aerospace Industries, and Rafael along to be more ready with the appropriate weapons for striking Iran, should the need arise.

This was not simple since various officials said it would take three years to develop the weapons and plans needed to carry out such operations.

Sources have said that then-Mossad director David Barnea stepped up and said that his agency could transfer resources from other projects to develop plans to strike Iran within only one year.

At the point at which Barnea was ready to make this move, the Post understands that the rest of the defense establishment then said that it could achieve the goals Bennett was requesting on a faster basis than originally claimed.

One of the big mysteries when Bennett took office was how much Iran had advanced in the weapons group aspects of the nuclear program, as opposed to only in uranium enrichment.

The Post and others learned recently that for a period of months, Israel was unsure about this issue, but by mid-fall 2021 sources had established that Iran’s weapons-group aspects of its nuclear program had not yet advanced.

This would later shift sometime in late 2024, which was part of the reason that Israel struck Iran in June 2025.

But all of this narrative shows that while much has changed since Bennett was prime minister in 2022, he has a strong argument that he has been as on top of Iran at an operational level as much as anyone and has the skills to push the defense establishment to perform at its highest levels.

Bennett has fewer critiques of Netanyahu’s policies in the Lebanon sphere of operations

Regarding Lebanon, Bennett has fewer specific critiques of Netanyahu’s policy, being that he does not believe Hezbollah can be disarmed or dismantled the same way he believes Hamas can be.

Once again, he also supports maintaining a security zone for the foreseeable future, pending reducing the Hezbollah threat.

However, even with Lebanon, he believes there might be diplomatic openings which are being missed that an Israel which is more appreciated worldwide under his leadership could take advantage of.

Syria remains the most unclear of all of Israel’s fronts with regard to security policy

Syria is the most unclear of all of the fronts.

Bennett would say that it is still unclear what new Syrian leader Ahmed al-Sharaa’s ultimate intentions are and whether he is a reformed jihadist or a wolf in sheep’s clothing.

In the meantime, his view would be that the buffer zone in Syria needs to be held onto until the issue is further clarified.

It appears that he would want to get a better sense of Sharaa before deciding how aggressive to be in Syria and how much to delay Trump’s plans to help the country normalize with Israeli withdrawals from the current security zone.

Ultimately, Bennett believes he can radically improve the situation in Gaza compared to Netanyahu, can do as well or better versus Iran, and might even be able to improve the situation in Lebanon and Syria.

He would accomplish this partially by shifting certain specific strategies and partially by engaging in basic diplomacy, which he would argue Netanyahu has ignored since October 7.

This post was originally published on here. 

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has a serious problem. Israel is approaching an election in which voters will be asked to judge not only the country’s longest-serving prime minister but the man who was prime minister on October 7.

If the election becomes a referendum on responsibility for the greatest security failure in Israel’s history, the hostages, the economic cost of prolonged war, Israel’s international isolation, and the government’s failure to turn military achievements into a better strategic reality, Netanyahu faces a difficult election. But if Israel goes to elections while fighting another war, the political terrain changes.

Netanyahu can once again present himself as “Mr. Security”: the experienced leader standing between Israel and enemies determined to destroy us. Responsibility for yesterday is pushed aside by fear of tomorrow. Netanyahu needs a war to win.

It may not matter much where it is fought. It could be Gaza, where Israel has still failed to transform Hamas’s military defeat into a viable political alternative. It could be the West Bank, where settlement expansion, settler violence, and Palestinian despair increase the danger of a major explosion. It could be Lebanon, Syria, or Iran. Given the deterioration in relations with Ankara, even a confrontation involving Turkey can no longer be dismissed as unimaginable.

Why war is needed for Netanyahu’s election success?

Netanyahu’s great political advantage has always been fear. He does not need Israelis to believe everything is going well. He needs them to believe everything is dangerous and that only he is experienced and tough enough to protect them.

October 7 should have destroyed the myth of “Mr. Security.” Instead, Netanyahu has spent the years since rebuilding it. The catastrophe did not occur because Israel lacked military power. It came after years in which Netanyahu’s governments convinced themselves that the Palestinian conflict could be managed rather than resolved, Hamas contained, the Palestinian Authority weakened, and military superiority substituted for political strategy.

Since October 7, Israel has demonstrated extraordinary military capabilities. But tactical military success is not strategic victory. The purpose of military force is to produce a political reality better than the one that existed before the fighting began. By that standard, Israel’s achievements remain incomplete.

Hamas has been devastated, but legitimate Palestinian governance has still not been allowed to take full responsibility in Gaza. Gaza remains destroyed and unstable. The West Bank is moving toward greater violence. Iran remains a strategic threat. Lebanon lacks a durable political arrangement with Israel, and relations with Turkey are deteriorating.

Netanyahu knows how to order military operations. What he repeatedly refuses to do is cash military achievements in for diplomatic and political gains. That is the central failure of his leadership.

A strategic leader would use Hamas’s weakening to replace it with legitimate Palestinian governance backed by Arab states and an international security structure. He would use Israel’s military strength to negotiate from confidence, connect Saudi normalization to Palestinian statehood, and build a regional structure in which Israeli security depends less on permanent control over Palestinians and more on secure borders, regional partners, and enforceable guarantees.

That would be victory.

Another bombed building is not victory. Another assassination is not victory. Another military operation that produces only the next military operation is not victory. Israel has demonstrated that it can destroy. The question is whether its government knows how to build anything afterward.

War serves Netanyahu politically because diplomacy requires decisions while war postpones them. Peace requires deciding what happens in Gaza after Hamas, whether Israel intends to rule Palestinians forever, what happens to the settlements, and whether Palestinian statehood is ultimately in Israel’s interest.

War postpones those questions. It also transforms an election campaign. When missiles are flying and reservists are being called up, October 7 becomes yesterday’s argument. The immediate question becomes: Who can protect us now? Netanyahu knows how to campaign on that terrain better than almost anyone in Israeli history.

Every proposed war should have to answer four questions: What is the military objective? What is the political objective? What happens the day after? How does this make Israel safer five or 10 years from now?

The IDF chief of staff also bears an extraordinary responsibility. He is subordinate to Israel’s elected civilian government and does not determine national policy. But his professional duty is not simply to mobilize whatever forces the political leadership demands. He must give the cabinet his best professional judgment about whether a proposed war is actually necessary for Israel’s defense.

If Netanyahu proposes a new war, or renews an existing one, before elections and the chief of staff concludes professionally that it is unnecessary for Israel’s defense and is being driven primarily by political considerations, he has a duty to tell the cabinet and government so unequivocally.

And if, despite that warning, the government orders the IDF into a war the chief of staff believes is not necessary to protect Israel, he faces an extraordinary choice. He should not turn the IDF into an instrument for protecting a prime minister’s political future.

If that is genuinely his professional conclusion, he should resign rather than personally lead the army into such a war, and tell the Israeli public – without revealing operational secrets – why he can no longer take professional responsibility for the decision.

That would not be a military coup against civilian authority. The elected government would remain free to appoint another chief of staff and pursue its lawful policy. It would be an act of professional accountability by the officer entrusted with the lives of Israel’s soldiers.

Because soldiers are not political assets. Israeli soldiers die. Reservists lose months of their lives. Families live under constant anxiety. The economy absorbs another shock. Palestinians pay an enormous civilian price, and whenever the battlefield expands, Lebanese, Syrians, and Iranians may pay as well.

The question is therefore not whether Israel has the military capacity to start another war. It usually does. The question is whether the war is necessary.

And Israelis should ask one uncomfortable question: Does this war make Israel safer, or does it make Netanyahu politically safer?

There is also the disturbing possibility that a major security crisis close to election day could create pressure to postpone elections. I am not claiming Netanyahu has such a plan, and an Israeli prime minister cannot simply cancel elections by decree.

But one principle should be established now: War cannot become an electoral strategy, and national emergency cannot become an instrument for postponing democratic accountability.

The alternative Netanyahu should fear most is not another enemy army. It is an end to the wars.

Imagine Israel approaching elections with Hamas removed from government, a new Palestinian administration entering Gaza, Israeli forces withdrawing as Palestinian and international forces take responsibility, reconstruction underway, Saudi normalization advancing, and the United States leading a regional process that strengthens Israeli security while creating a genuine political future for Palestinians.

What does Netanyahu campaign on then? He would finally have to defend his record rather than defend the country against the next emergency. He would have to answer for October 7, for the belief that Hamas could be managed, for weakening Palestinian moderates, and for repeatedly failing to transform military superiority into political strategy.

Israel needs strength. It needs a powerful military and the willingness to use force when necessary. But permanent war is not strength. The real test of power is whether it produces a political outcome that makes the next war less likely.

Netanyahu has spent decades telling Israelis that only he can keep them safe. If he needs Israel to remain at war in order to remain in power, Israelis should ask a much simpler question: Whose security is he really protecting?

This post was originally published on here. 

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s bloc will probably not reach 61 seats. Yet Likud figures are already reportedly exploring what happens next: A unity government in which Netanyahu – who else? – remains would insist on him serving as prime minister first, followed by Gadi Eisenkot in a rotation.

Around that swirls a broader media discussion of what should happen if “neither bloc gets a majority.” A unity government in which Netanyahu – who else? – remains prime minister first, followed by Gadi Eisenkot in a rotation. 

The entire thesis rests on a false premise.

The two outcomes of the election

On Election Day, there are two possible political outcomes: A majority for continuing Netanyahu’s tenure or a majority for replacing him. 

If Netanyahu does not get 61 seats, the other bloc does, with the sole exception of an exact 60-60 tie in a 120-seat Knesset. Yet the wily prime minister has relentlessly seeded the idea that Israeli politics consists of three blocs.

These would be the Netanyahu bloc (clerical, autocratic and settler-driven), the bloc opposed to him, and a separate Arab bloc that somehow floats outside the calculation when deciding who won.

The media, which until the 2019 elections generally spoke of two blocs, gradually adopted this framing. Polls now routinely display the Arab parties as a third category, with a separate slice in its own color. It is nonsense that plays directly into Netanyahu’s hands. Worse, parts of the opposition have gone along with it.

The mistake is conflating two questions: Who won the election, and what coalition will be formed afterward. The bloc answers the first; post-election negotiations answer the second. 

There is an incumbent government and an alternative. In this case, one camp seeks to continue Netanyahu’s tenure, and another seeks to end it. If the first has 61 seats, Netanyahu won; if the second has 61 seats, he lost.

Then the winner will try to translate that majority into a government, and the coalition will need not mirror the winning bloc. It can be a minority government supported from outside, exclude parties that helped produce the majority, or bring in parties and Knesset members from the other camp.

Israeli history makes this perfectly clear. In 1988, the right-wing and religious bloc led by Yitzhak Shamir won 65 seats. Shamir plainly won, yet formed a unity government with the Alignment, his principal center-left rival, and served as prime minister without a rotation. The bloc determined the winner; Shamir then decided what government to form.

Four years later, Labor under Yitzhak Rabin won 44 seats, Meretz 12, and the Arab parties Hadash and the Arab Democratic Party five between them – 61 seats in the camp replacing Shamir. 

Rabin had won. Yet he did not bring the Arab parties into his coalition. Instead, he brought in Shas, with six seats, and relied on Arab support from outside on important votes. Under the “Netanyahu method,” Rabin did not win, and neither bloc had a majority. In reality, Rabin obviously won, and nobody was confused. The bloc determined who won; the coalition was built afterward.

THAT IS what today’s discourse obscures by removing the Arab parties from the bloc calculation. One need not regard Hadash-Ta’al as an appropriate partner for a Zionist government, or even bring Ra’am – a thoroughly worthy party — into the coalition, to understand that if these parties are part of 61 seats opposed to Netanyahu’s continued tenure, there is a majority to replace him.

Whether Eisenkot then relies on outside support, brings in Shas, reaches agreements with Likud figures, or constructs something else comes later; it will be up to him.

Some political logic supports parts of the change camp distancing themselves from the Arab parties. Anyone trying to attract right-wing voters knows that publicly embracing them may scare away the very voters one hopes to attract. 

But everyone should also understand that after the election, Arab votes may be integral to the bloc replacing Netanyahu, which is far preferable to giving him what he wants – to keep milking the country and to lead it over the abyss.

A parallel game is underway on the other side. Netanyahu knows the haredi (ultra-Orthodox) parties hurt him electorally and push some voters toward the opposing camp. Hence the Likud’s talk of a “broad government,” with the obvious implication of reducing dependence on the haredim. 

Both sides are practicing campaign politics, playing down partners who complicate their appeal to swing voters. This can safely be ignored when tallying the two blocs.

Netanyahu certainly understood the arithmetic in 2021, when, after falling short, he tried to lure Ra’am into an arrangement that could keep him in power. It might have worked but for Bezalel Smotrich’s veto, revealing him as a man of principle when it came to racism.

The two camps also represent very different directions for Israel. On one side is a right-wing, religious, and ultra-Orthodox bloc steering the country in a more clerical and autocratic direction, weakening institutional checks on coalition power and accepting indefinite Israeli rule over millions of Palestinians in the West Bank without equal political rights.

NETANYAHU’S ALLIANCE with the ultra-Orthodox parties also prevents serious action on one of Israel’s greatest structural problems. 

The haredi population is growing extraordinarily fast, while large numbers of its men do not participate sufficiently in the workforce, receive the core education needed for a productive modern economy, or share the burden of military service. 

If this model continues, demographics will threaten Israel’s ability to remain a modern and prosperous state. Opposing that is hardly some petty fixation with Netanyahu.

Facing it is an admittedly less homogeneous bloc encompassing the center, Left, parts of the statesmanlike Right and the Arab parties. Its members profoundly disagree with each other on some matters, but share a desire to change direction.

They wish to preserve Israeli democracy and its institutions, confront the long-term implications of ruling the West Bank, overhaul the relationship with haredi society on military service, education, and employment, and guarantee equality for Israel’s Arab citizens.

Two approaches, two blocs.

There is also no shame in defining the election as a contest between a bloc supporting Netanyahu and one opposing him. He has been prime minister for so long that he now embodies a continuation of the status quo. 

If 61 Knesset members oppose Netanyahu’s continued tenure, his camp has lost, whether the 61st seat comes from Ra’am, Hadash-Ta’al, or anyone else. 

If Eisenkot heads that majority, he can form a minority government, rely on Arab support from the outside, negotiate with Shas, or try to bring in parts of the Likud. Coalition-building comes afterward.

And that is why Eisenkot should reject any proposal under which Netanyahu serves first in a rotation after the anti-Netanyahu camp wins 61 – as if he had no leverage.

Another period as prime minister would give Netanyahu time to rebuild alliances, break apart the opposing camp, and change the political landscape before the rotation ever arrives.

Giving that time to a prime minister whose camp lost its majority would turn the election result on its head. It would be pathetic gullibility.

There are two blocs. One of them will win. Please, do not fall for Netanyahu’s spin.

The writer is the former Cairo-based Middle East editor and London-based Europe/Africa editor of the Associated Press. 

This post was originally published on here. 

People of Israel party chairman Brig.-Gen. (res.) Ofer Winter said on Thursday that he would only recommend Benjamin Netanyahu for prime minister.

In a video he shared, Winter addressed questions about whether he is aligned with “Bibi,” saying, “We do not work for any person, only for the people of Israel.” He added, “We are in the right-wing camp, the leader of the right-wing camp is Netanyahu, and we will only recommend him.”

Winter also said that haredim (Ultra-Orthodox) will be integrated into the IDF, saying, “with the haredi activists or without them, we will not dance to anyone’s tune.” 

He said there would be voluntary emigration from Gaza rather than only the establishment of an emigration administration, adding, “There will be a decision here, not containment.”

He also criticized the Public Diplomacy Ministry, saying, “There will be real public diplomacy for the benefit of the State of Israel, what was will not be.”

Winter seeking defense minister position?

Following the launch of the People of Israel party, political officials estimate that Winter is seeking the position of defense minister and that his messages will focus on security issues and changing policy surrounding haredi military service.

The party is seeking support, among others, from right-wing voters who have become disappointed with the current government. According to sources familiar with assessments conducted around the party, some of its potential support could also come from voters who considered or voted for parties associated with Gadi Eisenkot and Avigdor Liberman.

At the same time, Winter made clear that he does not want Eisenkot to serve as prime minister and that he intends to join a right-wing government, provided it is as broad as possible.

This post was originally published on here. 

Israel’s humanitarian aid agency, IsraAID, announced on Thursday that it is deploying an emergency response team to Nepal to assist with disaster relief efforts following recent flooding and landslides in the region. 

According to the agency’s statement, the team is scheduled to arrive in Nepal on Thursday. Their initial mission will focus on urgent relief distributions and providing mental health support and protection for the affected communities. 

IsraAID CEO Yotam Polizer expressed his concern for the region, stating, “We are devastated to see the scenes unfolding in Nepal, as entire communities have been destroyed by flash flooding and landslides. Our thoughts are with everyone affected. We will do everything we can to bring urgent support where it is needed most.”

Joining IsraAID in Israeli-based delegations to the region is NATAN Worldwide Disaster Relief, who also announced they were dispatching an emergency team to the affected area.

“NATAN volunteers – medical and mental health professionals who leave their daily routines at a moment’s notice – are arriving in Nepal to provide medical and psychosocial care to survivors and to strengthen local healthcare systems. Precisely at a community’s moment of crisis, we are there to extend a hand, stand behind them, and walk alongside them on the path toward recovery.” said Gil Reines, Chair of NATAN’s Executive Board. 

Search, rescue for missing Israeli tourist

Harel Insurance Company has also announced that it is sending a search and rescue team to Nepal after receiving a report about a missing Israeli policyholder in a remote mountainous area affected by flooding. 

The Harel team, which consists of approximately eight Israeli rescuers, is scheduled to depart for Nepal on Thursday. They will work to locate the missing policyholder and search for a group of travelers he was hiking with in the Rasuwa region, near the border crossing between Nepal and China.

According to information received by the Harel 669 Search and Rescue situation room, the policyholder, a man in his sixties, embarked on a hiking route with a group of foreign tourists. After severe flooding and heavy mudslides struck the area, communication with the group was lost, and their whereabouts have remained unknown since then.

New risks of flooding

Nepal and China both warned on Thursday of fresh risks of flooding in the Himalayas as two lakes that have developed on either side of their border threaten to burst in a region still grappling with this week’s catastrophic flood.

Search and rescue operations are still underway in the debris-strewn valleys and hillsides, with nearly 1,000 people still missing after Wednesday’s flood struck the border regions of Nepal and China, killing at least 362 people.

Both countries have blamed the flood on a glacier collapse that pushed rock, ice, mud and debris into river systems in the mountains.

Nepal’s disaster authority issued a notice on Thursday warning that a lake formed by debris blocking a river at the flood site is rising and at risk of bursting.

“Residents of the lower banks… passengers, rescuers engaged in rescue operations, and all concerned are requested to exercise special caution and stay in safe places away from the river banks and risky areas,” the authority said.

This post was originally published on here. 

The IDF struck and killed Hamas terrorist Ismail Mohammad Ibrahim Barim in Khan Yunis on Wednesday, the military confirmed on Thursday.

Barim was a commander in the terror group’s Izzadin al-Qassam Brigades, the military noted.

After the October 7 massacre, he was responsible for holding three hostages in a tunnel in the southern Gaza Strip, the military said.

The hostages were identified as Edan Alexander, Matan Zangauker, and Avera Mengistu.

Additionally, he had been “advancing attacks targeting IDF troops and Israeli civilians and attempted to rehabilitate the terrorist organization, while systematically violating the ceasefire,” the military said.

IDF kills Yahya Sinwar’s former bodyguard, add’l Hamas Nukhba terrorist in Gaza strike

The IDF killed two Hamas Nukhba terrorists in strikes on the Gaza Strip on Sunday, the military said in a statement earlier on Thursday.

The IDF and the Shin Bet (Israel Security Agency) killed Razek Sahil Suleiman Abu Shahma, Yahya Sinwar’s bodyguard and a Hamas Nukhba terrorist who infiltrated Re’im on October 7.

The military and Shin Bet also killed Hazem Mousa, a Nukhba terrorist who infiltrated Re’im on October 7.

The IDF said that the two were advancing terror attacks against IDF troops and Israeli civilians while also attempting to rebuild Hamas’ capabilities in the Gaza Strip.

IDF strikes Hamas terror infrastructure in Gaza

This comes after the IDF struck and destroyed a structure in the Jabalya area of the Gaza Strip that was used as an ambush position for Hamas terrorists and as a storage facility for various types of weapons on Tuesday, the military said on Wednesday.

The position was located approximately 50 meters from the Yellow Line, 70 meters from Kamal Adwan Hospital, and 170 meters from a school, the IDF said, calling it an example of Hamas’s systematic use of civilian and humanitarian infrastructure, contrary to both the ceasefire agreement and international law.

This post was originally published on here. 

Two elderly people were found unconscious but breathing in an apartment in Jerusalem on Thursday as firefighters investigated a suspected hazardous materials incident, according to initial reports.

Firefighters from the HaUmah station were operating at a multi-story building on Moshe Dayan Boulevard in Jerusalem following suspicions that hazardous materials were present in a fourth-floor apartment.

Magen David Adom teams are treating two people in their 70s and 80s who were found unconscious but breathing, lying on the floor of their home in Pisgat Ze’ev. They are in serious condition. 

MDA teams treat elderly couple exposed to potential chemical leak

MDA medics and Jerusalem District Police provided medical treatment at the scene. The man was evacuated to Hadassah-University Medical Center on Mount Scopus, while the woman was evacuated to Shaare Zedek Medical Center.

MDA paramedic Nadav Tayeb and motorcycle unit medic David Levy said: “We saw a man and woman in their 70s when they were unconscious. We provided them with life-saving medical treatment, sedated and ventilated the man, and evacuated them to the hospital in serious condition.”

Firefighters were conducting searches and inspections inside the apartment. The circumstances surrounding the incident were not yet known. 

This post was originally published on here. 

Two elderly people were found unconscious but breathing in an apartment in Jerusalem on Thursday as firefighters investigated a suspected hazardous materials incident, according to initial reports.

Firefighters from the HaUmah station were operating at a multi-story building on Moshe Dayan Boulevard in Jerusalem following suspicions that hazardous materials were present in a fourth-floor apartment.

Magen David Adom teams are treating two people in their 70s and 80s who were found unconscious but breathing, lying on the floor of their home in Pisgat Ze’ev. They are in serious condition. 

MDA teams treat elderly couple exposed to potential chemical leak

MDA medics and Jerusalem District Police provided medical treatment at the scene. The man was evacuated to Hadassah-University Medical Center on Mount Scopus, while the woman was evacuated to Shaare Zedek Medical Center.

MDA paramedic Nadav Tayeb and motorcycle unit medic David Levy said: “We saw a man and woman in their 70s when they were unconscious. We provided them with life-saving medical treatment, sedated and ventilated the man, and evacuated them to the hospital in serious condition.”

Firefighters were conducting searches and inspections inside the apartment. The circumstances surrounding the incident were not yet known. 

This post was originally published on here. 

The far Right Otzma Yehudit party is launching a children’s book at its conference on September 1, marking the start of the next school year.

The party confirmed to The Jerusalem Post on Thursday that it will be publishing a children’s book called The Minister Who Didn’t Stop. The book will be launched at the party’s conference in Netanya on September 1.

The book reportedly summarizes National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir’s accomplishments in his ministerial role and as the party’s chairman.

The party added that Ben-Gvir will present his goals for the party at the conference, and that it will distribute the books to students across the country.

Ben-Gvir publishes children’s book after he was sanctioned by France, Ireland

This comes as Ben-Gvir has been sanctioned by multiple European countries over his views on Palestinians and his treatment of prisoners in Israeli prisons.

This past week, Ben-Gvir called for a ban on Ra’am chairman MK Mansour Abbas from running for the Knesset.

“The senior partner of [Naftali] Bennett and [Gadi] Eisenkot in a future government admits that he does not recognize the State of Israel as a Jewish state,” Otzma Yehudit’s statement read.

“We would tell you that what he is saying is delusional, but we are not surprised. He is from the Muslim Brotherhood. The delusion is that Eisenkot and Bennett dream every night about how they will form a government with him.”

This post was originally published on here. 

The far Right Otzma Yehudit party is launching a children’s book at its conference on September 1, marking the start of the next school year.

The party confirmed to The Jerusalem Post on Thursday that it will be publishing a children’s book called The Minister Who Didn’t Stop. The book will be launched at the party’s conference in Netanya on September 1.

The book reportedly summarizes National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir’s accomplishments in his ministerial role and as the party’s chairman.

The party added that Ben-Gvir will present his goals for the party at the conference, and that it will distribute the books to students across the country.

Ben-Gvir publishes children’s book after he was sanctioned by France, Ireland

This comes as Ben-Gvir has been sanctioned by multiple European countries over his views on Palestinians and his treatment of prisoners in Israeli prisons.

This past week, Ben-Gvir called for a ban on Ra’am chairman MK Mansour Abbas from running for the Knesset.

“The senior partner of [Naftali] Bennett and [Gadi] Eisenkot in a future government admits that he does not recognize the State of Israel as a Jewish state,” Otzma Yehudit’s statement read.

“We would tell you that what he is saying is delusional, but we are not surprised. He is from the Muslim Brotherhood. The delusion is that Eisenkot and Bennett dream every night about how they will form a government with him.”

This post was originally published on here. 

Though the Islamic Republic of Iran has established a “sophisticated panoply” to protect itself against the possibility of regime change, its trump card, the Strait of Hormuz, is losing its strategic value and will continue to do so, Thomas O’Donnell, an American energy and geopolitics strategist and a Global Fellow of the Wilson Center, told The Jerusalem Post on Thursday.

With many of the regime’s regional proxies degraded over years of war with Israel and its nuclear ambitions delayed after the 12 Day War in June last year, Tehran only has its rockets, drones, and ability to threaten the Strait of Hormuz left as an insurance policy against attempts to topple the regime, he noted.

These remaining elements will be used to dissuade action while it restores the others, but they are losing the weight they once carried, O’Donnell added.

Though 14 to 15 million barrels of oil traveled through Hormuz per day before the war, he argued that it was very possible to manage without much of that supply.

Saudi Arabia’s East-West Crude Oil Pipeline moves around five million barrels per day for non-domestic use, while the United Arab Emirates moves an average of 1.5 to 1.8m. bpd through its own pipeline, he calculated.

Some 400m. barrels of oil and refined petroleum products were unanimously approved for release by the 32 member nations of the International Energy Agency (IEA), while the US government committed 172 million barrels from its Strategic Petroleum Reserve.

None of this even touches on the oil supplied by the Western Hemisphere, where roughly 32% to 40% of the world’s total oil originates.

“There’s more production in other places, but [the disruption of] oil has not been anything like it would have been 20 years ago if they closed the strait,” he said, explaining how the US’s own oil and fracking industries have helped mitigate much of the damage.

Could Iran’s weakening control of Hormuz force a deal with the US?

“The oil price, it’ll go up and down. The fact that it went over $100 [a barrel], and the next day it was $80, that means that’s geostrategic variability. That’s not fundamental.”

A number of planned pipelines, namely the UAE’s plans to double its oil output through a parallel pipeline and Iraq’s plans for an Iraq-to-Syria pipeline, will also weaken the strategic value of Hormuz as states develop alternative routes.

Reflecting on these developments, US Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent shared earlier this month the prediction that the strait “is going to become just another body of water” over the next two years, estimating that 50-70% of the exports passing through the waterway would instead travel through underground pipelines.

Noting that the Iran-backed militias operating in Iraq could still cause some issues with the planned pipeline, he reasoned that this would provide further motivation for Iraq to keep to its September 30 deadline to disarm the groups.

O’Donnell further argued that beyond Hormuz becoming less valuable as a transit point for fuel, Iran’s own ability to defend its claim over the waterway has also diminished, as has its ability to attack neighboring states’ alternative oil routes.

“The Americans systematically bombed the region and knocked out every radar that was ever turned on. Little by little… they systematically degraded it. And now you see [oil tankers] are sneaking or being escorted at night, where Iran can’t visually see the tankers very well,” O’Donnell explained.

“Iran had a more or less static defense or offense, missiles and drones that they can’t reproduce, and electronic eyes that undoubtedly the Americans can only degrade at some rate. And so their ability to control Hormuz will degrade over time.”

In other words, Iran is losing leverage over Hormuz from both directions: The waterway is becoming less indispensable to global energy markets, and Tehran is becoming less capable of controlling it.

The natural outcome of this will be vessels traveling largely unimpeded through the strait as Iran is left with degraded weapons and defenses, he continued, predicting that even the regime’s hardliners would eventually need to make a deal with the US despite their current “bravado” as the financial crisis hitting Iran worsens.

Aware of this, Iran may make a “desperate attempt” to step up its pressure campaign on the US through attacks on Gulf states, potentially even launching a ground incursion, O’Donnell said.

What will happen to Hormuz if Iran loses control? 

Having rubbed shoulders with a number of diplomats and analysts in the region, O’Donnell said he had been told by a number of sources that Gulf states were aware, prior to the war’s outbreak on February 28, that Iran had strategized a plan to target them as a means to pressure the US into dropping or moderating any campaign against it should the need ever arise.

When the US continued to attack despite Gulf pressure, quickly eliminating Tehran’s leadership, the Islamic Republic went for the Strait of Hormuz, “because it’s so important globally.”

Despite not approving of the US’s attacks on Iran due to the consequences for them, O’Donnell said that Gulf states were unwilling to see Hormuz remain under Iran’s control for reasons outside of the issue of fees.

“As soon as there’s something on Asharq or on Sky News that they don’t like, they’ll hold up the UAE ships,” he said. “As soon as there’s something on Al Jazeera they don’t like, they’ll hold up the ships for a week.”

This, he reasoned, is why Gulf states would not allow the United States to leave the conflict, despite alternative oil routes becoming available in the not-so-distant future.

“If they’re going to make a deal, now’s the time to make a deal and get it over with. They can cause a lot of pain, but in the end, Iran is really going to become diminished. And if they go diehard, it’s going to be hard for everybody, obviously,” O’Donnell said.

“If you have a diminishing lever, best to make what deal you can… The US knows it’s going to take a long time, it’ll be fairly painful for allies, [but] in the end, it’s going to get better for us.”

This post was originally published on here. 

On Wednesday, the US State Department announced that it is designating the Italy-based extremist group Autistici/Inventati (“A/I Collective”) for its role in providing digital infrastructure for Antifa cells and other radical left-wing networks in the United States, Europe, and elsewhere across the world. At the same time, the Department also announced a ban on the transnational group Masar Badil and UK-founded Palestine Action.

Later in the day, the Department separately released a fact sheet that identifies Portland-based Rose City Antifa as one of the US-based organizations that uses A/I Collective tools to “organize and incite violent and criminal acts domestically, including an attack on Customs and Border Patrol helicopters that led to a federal indictment” and to “disseminate doxing lists and release illegally obtained personal information of Federal Immigration and Customs Enforcement.”

The fact sheet also stated that a “far-left extremist media group claiming to be a ‘tool’ for global militants to share ‘essential information’ to be ‘acted upon,’ relies on A/I Collective tools and services to publish official communiqués and calls to action for US-designated foreign terrorist organizations such as Hamas, the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), Hezbollah, the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP), and Palestinian Islamic Jihad (PIJ).

The Department said the same group was recently cited in a federal criminal complaint against a domestic terrorist who was sentenced to 19 years in prison for targeting a federal building and police car with improvised explosive devices.

While the Department does not name the group, The Jerusalem Post has identified it as Abolition Media which calls itself “an online news source for revolutionary movements” and a “tool for movements dedicated to anarchist, abolitionist, and revolutionary perspectives.”

The quotes the State Department attributes to the unnamed group are lifted exactly from Abolition Media’s ‘About’ page.

Furthermore, Abolition Media has alluded to the accusations leveled against it. It published a statement on Thursday saying it is aware of the State Department sanctions on I/A, which it called “disproportionate.” It then said “we deny all allegations included in the statements, while we strongly affirm our dedication to providing a platform of tools for digital self-defense, addressing the need of free communication for activists and other individuals, groups and associations.”

Additionally, at the bottom of the website reads the banner “hosted by Autistici/Inventati.”

What is Abolition Media?

Abolition Media is overt in its support for Palestinian and Iranian terror groups, and also in its anti-Israel advocacy.

It publishes communiqués directly from US-designated groups. For example, on Thursday, Abolition Media published a statement The Palestinian Alternative Revolutionary Path Movement, Masar Badil, responding to its new designation.

It also published a communiqué from the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine on the “25th Anniversary of the Martyrdom of its Secretary-General, Comrade Leader Abu Ali Mustafa.”

The communiqué calls for the rebuilding of the Palestine Liberation Organization, and resistance “in all its forms.”

In fact, Abolition Media publishes PFLP communiqués almost daily, as well as ones from Hamas and the IRGC.

US official says AI Collective provides infrastructure for extremist organizations

A State Department Official told the Post that “The A/I Collective is a central node in the far-left’s war on our civilization — providing crucial digital infrastructure to violent organizations to enable their acts of terror in the United States and abroad.”

“There will be no refuge for violent extremists who plot to undermine law and order, destroy critical infrastructure, assault political opponents, or conceal their crimes from authorities,” the spokesperson added.

The department did not respond to the questions on Abolition Media.

This post was originally published on here. 

On Wednesday, the US State Department announced that it is designating the Italy-based extremist group Autistici/Inventati (“A/I Collective”) for its role in providing digital infrastructure for Antifa cells and other radical left-wing networks in the United States, Europe, and elsewhere across the world. At the same time, the Department also announced a ban on the transnational group Masar Badil and UK-founded Palestine Action.

Later in the day, the Department separately released a fact sheet that identifies Portland-based Rose City Antifa as one of the US-based organizations that uses A/I Collective tools to “organize and incite violent and criminal acts domestically, including an attack on Customs and Border Patrol helicopters that led to a federal indictment” and to “disseminate doxing lists and release illegally obtained personal information of Federal Immigration and Customs Enforcement.”

The fact sheet also stated that a “far-left extremist media group claiming to be a ‘tool’ for global militants to share ‘essential information’ to be ‘acted upon,’ relies on A/I Collective tools and services to publish official communiqués and calls to action for US-designated foreign terrorist organizations such as Hamas, the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), Hezbollah, the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP), and Palestinian Islamic Jihad (PIJ).

The Department said the same group was recently cited in a federal criminal complaint against a domestic terrorist who was sentenced to 19 years in prison for targeting a federal building and police car with improvised explosive devices.

While the Department does not name the group, The Jerusalem Post has identified it as Abolition Media which calls itself “an online news source for revolutionary movements” and a “tool for movements dedicated to anarchist, abolitionist, and revolutionary perspectives.”

The quotes the State Department attributes to the unnamed group are lifted exactly from Abolition Media’s ‘About’ page.

Furthermore, Abolition Media has alluded to the accusations leveled against it. It published a statement on Thursday saying it is aware of the State Department sanctions on I/A, which it called “disproportionate.” It then said “we deny all allegations included in the statements, while we strongly affirm our dedication to providing a platform of tools for digital self-defense, addressing the need of free communication for activists and other individuals, groups and associations.”

Additionally, at the bottom of the website reads the banner “hosted by Autistici/Inventati.”

What is Abolition Media?

Abolition Media is overt in its support for Palestinian and Iranian terror groups, and also in its anti-Israel advocacy.

It publishes communiqués directly from US-designated groups. For example, on Thursday, Abolition Media published a statement The Palestinian Alternative Revolutionary Path Movement, Masar Badil, responding to its new designation.

It also published a communiqué from the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine on the “25th Anniversary of the Martyrdom of its Secretary-General, Comrade Leader Abu Ali Mustafa.”

The communiqué calls for the rebuilding of the Palestine Liberation Organization, and resistance “in all its forms.”

In fact, Abolition Media publishes PFLP communiqués almost daily, as well as ones from Hamas and the IRGC.

US official says AI Collective provides infrastructure for extremist organizations

A State Department Official told the Post that “The A/I Collective is a central node in the far-left’s war on our civilization — providing crucial digital infrastructure to violent organizations to enable their acts of terror in the United States and abroad.”

“There will be no refuge for violent extremists who plot to undermine law and order, destroy critical infrastructure, assault political opponents, or conceal their crimes from authorities,” the spokesperson added.

The department did not respond to the questions on Abolition Media.

This post was originally published on here. 

Police did not ask the court to extend the house arrest of seven suspects in the investigation into Eldar Dayan’s death on Thursday, allowing the house-arrest restrictions to expire after forensic experts were unable to determine his cause of death.

The decision does not close the investigation or clear the suspects. It does, however, leave all seven outside custody and reflects the central difficulty facing investigators: Without knowing how Dayan died, police have been unable to establish the evidence needed to sustain a murder allegation.

Two of Dayan’s friends, Omri Peretz and Maxim Barberman, were initially arrested on suspicion of murder. Police are now investigating them on suspicion of attempted murder.

Five other suspects from Petah Tikva are suspected of involvement in a fight that preceded Dayan’s disappearance and death.

Earlier this week, police asked the Petah Tikva Magistrate’s Court to place the seven under house arrest for two weeks. Judge Ronen Peleg instead ordered that they remain under house arrest only until Thursday.

Police did not file a request to extend that order, meaning the house arrest expired without a further court hearing.

Condition of remains makes it impossible to determine cause of death

The change followed a report from the L. Greenberg Institute of Forensic Medicine at Abu Kabir, which found that the condition of Dayan’s remains made it impossible to determine his cause of death.

The finding does not establish that Dayan was not killed. It leaves investigators unable to determine how he died or connect any of the suspects’ alleged actions to his death.

At the previous hearing, a police representative acknowledged that the evidence gathered did not support a murder allegation. Police nevertheless said additional laboratory findings were still pending and that the investigation could potentially support a suspicion of attempted murder against Peretz and Barberman.

Their attorneys rejected that suspicion and argued that police had not presented substantial evidence linking their clients either to Dayan’s death or to an attempt to kill him.

Dayan’s relatives have sharply criticized the handling of the investigation, alleging that delays in locating his remains allowed evidence to be compromised.

The investigation can continue despite the end of the house arrest, and police may seek to arrest the suspects again if new evidence emerges. Whether any of the seven will ultimately be charged remains undecided.

This post was originally published on here. 

Police did not ask the court to extend the house arrest of seven suspects in the investigation into Eldar Dayan’s death on Thursday, allowing the house-arrest restrictions to expire after forensic experts were unable to determine his cause of death.

The decision does not close the investigation or clear the suspects. It does, however, leave all seven outside custody and reflects the central difficulty facing investigators: Without knowing how Dayan died, police have been unable to establish the evidence needed to sustain a murder allegation.

Two of Dayan’s friends, Omri Peretz and Maxim Barberman, were initially arrested on suspicion of murder. Police are now investigating them on suspicion of attempted murder.

Five other suspects from Petah Tikva are suspected of involvement in a fight that preceded Dayan’s disappearance and death.

Earlier this week, police asked the Petah Tikva Magistrate’s Court to place the seven under house arrest for two weeks. Judge Ronen Peleg instead ordered that they remain under house arrest only until Thursday.

Police did not file a request to extend that order, meaning the house arrest expired without a further court hearing.

Condition of remains makes it impossible to determine cause of death

The change followed a report from the L. Greenberg Institute of Forensic Medicine at Abu Kabir, which found that the condition of Dayan’s remains made it impossible to determine his cause of death.

The finding does not establish that Dayan was not killed. It leaves investigators unable to determine how he died or connect any of the suspects’ alleged actions to his death.

At the previous hearing, a police representative acknowledged that the evidence gathered did not support a murder allegation. Police nevertheless said additional laboratory findings were still pending and that the investigation could potentially support a suspicion of attempted murder against Peretz and Barberman.

Their attorneys rejected that suspicion and argued that police had not presented substantial evidence linking their clients either to Dayan’s death or to an attempt to kill him.

Dayan’s relatives have sharply criticized the handling of the investigation, alleging that delays in locating his remains allowed evidence to be compromised.

The investigation can continue despite the end of the house arrest, and police may seek to arrest the suspects again if new evidence emerges. Whether any of the seven will ultimately be charged remains undecided.

This post was originally published on here. 

Iran’s regime will fall through a mix of operations, economic pressure, and protests by its own people, recently retired Mossad chief David Barnea said in his first speech since stepping down on June 1.

In a speech to the Jerusalem Municipality, where he received an award on behalf of the Mossad, Barnea supported the Trump administration’s latest economic pressure moves against the Islamic Republic.

He said that it was clear these were needed, but that they would be insufficient alone and would require the use of force as well, although he did not specify whether that force would require another round of massive airstrikes or whether a covert sabotage campaign would be sufficient.

According to Barnea, US President Donald Trump and much of the world – regardless of their complaints about gas prices – now understand deeper than ever the multiheaded threat which Tehran presents to all of them: whether through nuclear weapons, ballistic missiles, or proxy terror.

Regarding Hezbollah and Hamas, he said that both terror groups were far weaker than before October 7, 2023, leaving Israel militarily more secure than it was three years ago.

Specifically, with Hezbollah, he hinted that Mossad’s sleeper operations had harmed the terror group psychologically, while also giving credit to the IDF, which has carried out two massive invasions of Lebanon since 2024.

Addressing Hamas, he said that the organization is no longer anything close to resembling the national military that it constituted in 2023, when it had 24 highly organized and coordinated battalions.

Barnea did not address the low point Israel has hit on the diplomatic plane or criticism of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, his, and the Mossad’s plans to topple the regime in early 2026.

This is a developing story.

This post was originally published on here. 

Iran’s regime will fall through a mix of operations, economic pressure, and protests by its own people, recently retired Mossad chief David Barnea said in his first speech since stepping down on June 1.

In a speech to the Jerusalem Municipality, where he received an award on behalf of the Mossad, Barnea supported the Trump administration’s latest economic pressure moves against the Islamic Republic.

He said that it was clear these were needed, but that they would be insufficient alone and would require the use of force as well, although he did not specify whether that force would require another round of massive airstrikes or whether a covert sabotage campaign would be sufficient.

According to Barnea, US President Donald Trump and much of the world – regardless of their complaints about gas prices – now understand deeper than ever the multiheaded threat which Tehran presents to all of them: whether through nuclear weapons, ballistic missiles, or proxy terror.

Regarding Hezbollah and Hamas, he said that both terror groups were far weaker than before October 7, 2023, leaving Israel militarily more secure than it was three years ago.

Specifically, with Hezbollah, he hinted that Mossad’s sleeper operations had harmed the terror group psychologically, while also giving credit to the IDF, which has carried out two massive invasions of Lebanon since 2024.

Addressing Hamas, he said that the organization is no longer anything close to resembling the national military that it constituted in 2023, when it had 24 highly organized and coordinated battalions.

Barnea did not address the low point Israel has hit on the diplomatic plane or criticism of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, his, and the Mossad’s plans to topple the regime in early 2026.

This is a developing story.

This post was originally published on here. 

A new analysis published by the American Jewish Committee (AJC) claims that antisemitic ideas, conspiracy narratives, and historical revisionism are deeply embedded beneath the surface of Germany’s Alternative for Germany (AfD) party.

Authored by Prof. Dr. Lars Rensmann, a Professor of Political Science at the University of Passau who specializes in modern political ideologies, democratic theory, and the comparative study of antisemitism, the report, published on Tuesday, is titled “‘Friendly Faces’ of antisemitism? Political Antisemitism in the Alternative for Germany Party.”

Rensmann said that political antisemitism functions as a connective element within the party’s broader opposition to modern, pluralist democracy, noting that while the party does not present itself as openly antisemitic and regularly denies harboring antisemitism, “antisemitic ideas, codes, and narratives permeate its rhetoric, mobilization strategies, and memory politics.”

The report said that the AfD has evolved from a Eurosceptic protest party founded in 2013 into the central political force of Germany’s far Right, serving as a durable parliamentary actor and the largest opposition party in the Bundestag.

According to Rensmann, this transformation has been accompanied by a radicalization in which the party positions itself against liberal democracy while cultivating authoritarian, ethno-nationalist, and conspiratorial worldviews.

AfD frames politics into virtuous people versus corrupt domestic elites. external forces

The analysis outlines how the AfD frames politics through a stark friend-enemy logic, dividing society into a supposedly virtuous people versus corrupt domestic elites and external forces. According to Rensmann, this framework “closely mirrors patterns of modern antisemitism, which historically constructed Jews as hidden enemies linking internal ‘traitors’ with external threats.”

Rather than naming Jews explicitly, Rensmann argued that the AfD usually relies on coded language. He noted references to “globalists,” “cosmopolitan elites,” or “shadowy financial powers draw on long-standing antisemitic stereotypes.”

The study further stated that the conspiracy myth of a planned “Great Replacement” of the native population “echoes classic fantasies of a Jewish world conspiracy without explicitly mentioning Jews.” Investor George Soros serves as a recurring personification of these ideas, with Rensmann noting that “AfD representatives repeatedly portray him as a sinister puppet master orchestrating migration, climate policy, and social change.” The author argued that “such narratives revive the core motifs of antisemitic conspiracy theories while maintaining plausible deniability.”

The analysis explained how the party’s ideology has been shaped by ethno-nationalism and the demand for remigration, accompanied by the rehabilitation of Nazi rhetoric. Rensmann argued that this worldview is historically inseparable from antisemitism because it frames cultural homogeneity as a prerequisite for survival and attributes national decline to subversive outside influences.

Appropriation of Nazi slogans, ideas, and symbols by party leaders

The report highlighted political and legal responses to the frequent appropriation of Nazi slogans, ideas, and symbols by party leaders, such as the SA slogan “Everything for Germany,” noting that the AfD said these references are entirely innocuous and are criticized or prosecuted in bad faith by representatives of the state.

Rensmann noted that rehabilitating this language is structurally linked to antisemitism because it reactivates the national-revolutionary imagination of the Nazi era, which historically blamed Jews for modernity, liberalism, and pluralism.

Furthermore, the paper examines historical revisionism and secondary antisemitism arising from defense against memory as political motives of the AfD.

Rensmann argued that the party rejected the “cult of guilt,” claiming that this stance relativizes Nazi crimes, prevents national pride, and in effect marginalizes Jewish perspectives on history. According to the report, this promotes what scholars describe as secondary antisemitism, defined as “hostility toward Jews arising from resentment about Holocaust remembrance and perceived moral demands.”

Within this framework, Rensmann said that “Jews appear implicitly as those who prevent a positive national self-image by insisting on confronting German crimes.”

Party’s attempts to shield itself from antisemitic accusations

The report also noted how the party attempts to shield itself from accusations of antisemitism by pointing to its supposed pro-Israel positions as proof that it harbors no hostility toward Jewish people.

Rensmann argued that this maneuver is entirely instrumental and defensive, noting that “instrumental ‘pro-Israel’ rhetoric” is deployed by the party “only insofar as it appears to confirm the AfD’s own ethno-nationalist and anti-migration agenda,” such as expressing hostility toward Muslim migrants.

Rensmann said that this supposed solidarity is selective and disingenuous by highlighting instances where the party exhibits underlying anti-Israel or hostile positions when Israel’s actions or existence do not serve nationalist talking points.

He noted that the party’s foreign policy positions frequently align with anti-Western and authoritarian regimes hostile to Israel, and that its leadership has routinely voted against or opposed cooperative diplomatic frameworks involving Israel while weaponizing the Jewish state merely as a rhetorical tool against political opponents and Muslim immigration.

The paper concluded by stating that far from being an isolated problem, political antisemitism functions as a key mobilizing resource within the AfD’s broader challenge to liberal democracy.

Rensmann argued that understanding this dynamic is essential for assessing the risks the party poses to democratic culture, minority rights, and social cohesion in Germany.

This post was originally published on here. 

A new analysis published by the American Jewish Committee (AJC) claims that antisemitic ideas, conspiracy narratives, and historical revisionism are deeply embedded beneath the surface of Germany’s Alternative for Germany (AfD) party.

Authored by Prof. Dr. Lars Rensmann, a Professor of Political Science at the University of Passau who specializes in modern political ideologies, democratic theory, and the comparative study of antisemitism, the report, published on Tuesday, is titled “‘Friendly Faces’ of antisemitism? Political Antisemitism in the Alternative for Germany Party.”

Rensmann said that political antisemitism functions as a connective element within the party’s broader opposition to modern, pluralist democracy, noting that while the party does not present itself as openly antisemitic and regularly denies harboring antisemitism, “antisemitic ideas, codes, and narratives permeate its rhetoric, mobilization strategies, and memory politics.”

The report said that the AfD has evolved from a Eurosceptic protest party founded in 2013 into the central political force of Germany’s far Right, serving as a durable parliamentary actor and the largest opposition party in the Bundestag.

According to Rensmann, this transformation has been accompanied by a radicalization in which the party positions itself against liberal democracy while cultivating authoritarian, ethno-nationalist, and conspiratorial worldviews.

AfD frames politics into virtuous people versus corrupt domestic elites. external forces

The analysis outlines how the AfD frames politics through a stark friend-enemy logic, dividing society into a supposedly virtuous people versus corrupt domestic elites and external forces. According to Rensmann, this framework “closely mirrors patterns of modern antisemitism, which historically constructed Jews as hidden enemies linking internal ‘traitors’ with external threats.”

Rather than naming Jews explicitly, Rensmann argued that the AfD usually relies on coded language. He noted references to “globalists,” “cosmopolitan elites,” or “shadowy financial powers draw on long-standing antisemitic stereotypes.”

The study further stated that the conspiracy myth of a planned “Great Replacement” of the native population “echoes classic fantasies of a Jewish world conspiracy without explicitly mentioning Jews.” Investor George Soros serves as a recurring personification of these ideas, with Rensmann noting that “AfD representatives repeatedly portray him as a sinister puppet master orchestrating migration, climate policy, and social change.” The author argued that “such narratives revive the core motifs of antisemitic conspiracy theories while maintaining plausible deniability.”

The analysis explained how the party’s ideology has been shaped by ethno-nationalism and the demand for remigration, accompanied by the rehabilitation of Nazi rhetoric. Rensmann argued that this worldview is historically inseparable from antisemitism because it frames cultural homogeneity as a prerequisite for survival and attributes national decline to subversive outside influences.

Appropriation of Nazi slogans, ideas, and symbols by party leaders

The report highlighted political and legal responses to the frequent appropriation of Nazi slogans, ideas, and symbols by party leaders, such as the SA slogan “Everything for Germany,” noting that the AfD said these references are entirely innocuous and are criticized or prosecuted in bad faith by representatives of the state.

Rensmann noted that rehabilitating this language is structurally linked to antisemitism because it reactivates the national-revolutionary imagination of the Nazi era, which historically blamed Jews for modernity, liberalism, and pluralism.

Furthermore, the paper examines historical revisionism and secondary antisemitism arising from defense against memory as political motives of the AfD.

Rensmann argued that the party rejected the “cult of guilt,” claiming that this stance relativizes Nazi crimes, prevents national pride, and in effect marginalizes Jewish perspectives on history. According to the report, this promotes what scholars describe as secondary antisemitism, defined as “hostility toward Jews arising from resentment about Holocaust remembrance and perceived moral demands.”

Within this framework, Rensmann said that “Jews appear implicitly as those who prevent a positive national self-image by insisting on confronting German crimes.”

Party’s attempts to shield itself from antisemitic accusations

The report also noted how the party attempts to shield itself from accusations of antisemitism by pointing to its supposed pro-Israel positions as proof that it harbors no hostility toward Jewish people.

Rensmann argued that this maneuver is entirely instrumental and defensive, noting that “instrumental ‘pro-Israel’ rhetoric” is deployed by the party “only insofar as it appears to confirm the AfD’s own ethno-nationalist and anti-migration agenda,” such as expressing hostility toward Muslim migrants.

Rensmann said that this supposed solidarity is selective and disingenuous by highlighting instances where the party exhibits underlying anti-Israel or hostile positions when Israel’s actions or existence do not serve nationalist talking points.

He noted that the party’s foreign policy positions frequently align with anti-Western and authoritarian regimes hostile to Israel, and that its leadership has routinely voted against or opposed cooperative diplomatic frameworks involving Israel while weaponizing the Jewish state merely as a rhetorical tool against political opponents and Muslim immigration.

The paper concluded by stating that far from being an isolated problem, political antisemitism functions as a key mobilizing resource within the AfD’s broader challenge to liberal democracy.

Rensmann argued that understanding this dynamic is essential for assessing the risks the party poses to democratic culture, minority rights, and social cohesion in Germany.

This post was originally published on here. 

Countries throughout the region have praised the decision by the Syrian Democratic Forces to dissolve itself and integrate into the new Syrian security forces. The process has been in the works since a meeting in March 2025 between SDF commander Mazloum Abdi and Syrian President Ahmad al-Sharaa. A new meeting this week in Damascus became the endpoint for the process. The SDF is now dissolved.

Regional leaders have praised the process. The concept is that this will lead to peace and unity in Syria and also guarantee Kurdish rights in eastern Syria. The SDF was founded with US support in 2015. It played the major role in defeating ISIS. Its leadership and many of its fighters were Kurdish.

Kurdistan Region President Nechirvan Barzani praised the SDF decision on Wednesday. “He also hailed the chief of the now-dissolved SDF and Syrian president for the move,” Rudaw media noted. “I welcome the significant progress made in the process of integrating the Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) with the Syrian government forces, as well as the steps taken to implement the agreements reached between them,” Barzani said. “I see this as an important development toward strengthening Syria’s security and stability,” he added.

He added that “we hope that this step will contribute to building a secure future that preserves the rights of all components of Syria, opens broader horizons for developing its relations with Iraq and the Kurdistan Region, and expands cooperation in all fields in a way that serves common interests.”

Countries in the region, such as Qatar, also praised the move. “Saudi Arabia also welcomed the integration, saying it contributes to Syria’s security and stability, while Turkey described the SDF’s dissolution as an important development in strengthening Syrian state authority,” Rudaw noted.

Abroad, many countries are also enthusiastic. French President Emmanuel Macron praised the decision, especially Abdi’s “sense of responsibility.” France has been a key supporter of Kurds and Kurdish rights over the years.

The UK said that it welcomes “the recent announcement on the dissolution of the SDF as an independent military force and its integration alongside DAANES administrative bodies into Syrian state institutions – an important step towards a peaceful, stable and unified Syria.”

US supports new developments, calling them ‘absolutely historic’

The US is also happy with how this has turned out. US Ambassador to Turkey Tom Barrack, who is also the US Envoy to Iraq and Syria, said the move is “absolutely historic.” He said that US President Donald Trump’s “far-sighted leadership opened the path for the SDF’s orderly integration into Syrian state institutions, transforming past division into lasting partnership and restoring to the Syrian people the opportunity to shape their common future.”

He added that “recognizing the Kurdish language in education and securing substantive roles for our valued partners Mazloum Abdi and Ilham Ahmed within the Syrian government pays due respect to their leadership, the sacrifices of our Kurdish partners, and the constructive contribution they have made to regional stability, turning yesterday’s separations into tomorrow’s shared purpose.”

Syria’s next steps following SDF dissolution

What comes next? The deal to dissolve the SDF is meant to pave the way for several key decisions in the next phase. Mazloum Abdi may take on a new role after having served as a military commander for a decade. Ilham Ehmed and other officials who served in key roles in eastern Syria, either with the SDF or civilian components of it such as the SDC or AANES, may take on new roles.

Wladimir van Wilgenburg, a co-author of two books on Syrian Kurds who is an expert and journalist, noted that the terms of the agreement in Damascus will lead to Abdi becoming a presidential adviser. He based his post on the terms of the agreement on Ibrahim Hamidi, the editor-in-chief of al-Majalla. According to the post he noted that Ilham Ehmed would become a member of the People’s Assembly of Syria. In addition, Kurdish will become an official language for education, and the Kurdish women’s military unit, the YPJ, will “join the Interior Ministry to fight terrorism (as CT units).”

The deal in Damascus could also lead to developments in Turkey with the Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK). This group is also supposed to be disbanding, ending decades of conflict in Turkey. Turkey has long viewed the PKK as linked to the SDF and viewed SDF leaders as “terrorists.” Now this may change. It remains to be seen how this actually develops. Many are concerned that now that the SDF is disbanded, Damascus will have no reason to proceed in good faith. 

This post was originally published on here. 

Kurdish women played a key role in the battle against ISIS.

This was particularly true in Syria, where thousands of women joined the Women’s Protection Units (YPJ). This was part of the broader effort known as the People’s Protection Units (YPG) and the umbrella group of the Syrian Democratic Forces.

The US has backed the SDF since 2015. In recent days, the SDF  announced that it has integrated into the new Syrian security forces.

However, this leaves thousands of YPJ members in limbo. Will the women who played such a heroic and key role in defeating ISIS receive new roles, or be left behind?

What will Kurdish women do in the new Syrian security forces?

According to the Kurdish Hawar News Agency, also known as ANHA, “the General Command of the Women’s Protection Units (YPJ) revealed details of its meeting with the Interior Ministry of the transitional government, describing it as positive and noting that discussions focused on the future of the units and the possibility of integrating them, in their specialized capacity, into the ministry’s structure.”

This illustrates how the integration process may include the women fighters. This is a complex issue on many levels. The command structure of the new Syrian army is made up of conservative Muslim men, many of them drawn from the group Hayat Tahrir al Sham, or other Syrian rebel groups.

The command structure is also primarily Arab. The Kurdish units from the SDF, including the women fighters, were more left-leaning and secular in outlook than the much more conservative and right-leaning HTS. As such, integration is already complex.

Syria’s Interior Ministry presents a more flexible option for the women fighters. Other units from other parts of Syria have also been integrated into the Interior Ministry. In addition, the ministry played a role in February and March during the process of Syria moving into areas in Hasakah, which had been run by the SDF. As such, the ministry has been seen in a positive light in some areas of eastern Syria.

What is Kurdish media saying?

Hawar reported that “the General Command of the Women’s Protection Units (YPJ) published a written statement on its official website Thursday, revealing details of a meeting held Wednesday evening between members of the units’ leadership and Interior Minister Anas Khattab.”

“On August 26, the General Command of the Women’s Protection Units held a meeting with an official delegation from the Interior Ministry of the transitional government in Damascus,” the statement said. 
“During the meeting, issues of security and stability in Syria, as well as the future of cooperation and coordination between the two sides, were discussed extensively.” Both sides are affirming that the YPJ could continue on as “a special and organized force within the structure of the Interior Ministry.”

This indicates that the interaction has been positive so far.

Kurdish media outlet Rudaw also noted that “the Women’s Protection Units (YPJ) could be integrated as a ‘distinct and organized force’ under Damascus’ interior ministry, the all-women force affiliated with the Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) said Thursday. This comes months after the integration of female Kurdish fighters emerged as a sticking point in the wider integration process.”

It added that “the YPJ, an all-female force affiliated with the People’s Protection Units (YPG), forms a core component of the SDF. It played a pivotal role in liberating the symbolic Kurdish city of Kobane in northeast Syria (Rojava) from the Islamic State (ISIS) in early 2015, with significant backing from the US-led Global Coalition to Defeat ISIS.”

An earlier proposal to have the women’s units integrate into the new Syrian army as separate brigades didn’t work.

DAANES representative Abdulkarim Omar told Rudaw in early August that Damascus rejected the proposal, saying “there are no female [forces] in the [defense] ministry.”

As such, the Interior Ministry is the only place that women can apparently serve. Syria already has women serving in the police, for instance.

Rudaw added that “the YPJ have therefore agreed to join the interior ministry as a counter-terrorism force, accepting a Syrian government proposal on its future role within state institutions, Omar said, noting the force would join ‘as a unit or group together under the Ministry of Interior.’”

In a second report, the outlet said the meeting, attended by YPJ leadership members Newroz Ahmad, Sozdar Haji, and Khalisa Ayed, as well as YPJ Media Office spokesperson Ruken Jamal and Syrian transitional government Interior Minister Anas Hassan Khattab, began at 11 p.m. Wednesday and ended around 12:15 a.m.

Time will tell whether these units can integrate as intact groups or whether a different initiative will take place.

After the immense sacrifice of so many women in eastern Syria in the battle against ISIS, it is natural that the YPJ will continue to press for a future role in the new Syria.

This post was originally published on here. 

DAMASCUS – For the first time, the Kurdish language will formally enter Syria’s education system beginning with the 2026-2027 academic year, after being approved as an elective subject taught for two periods per week, marking a significant shift after decades of restrictions on Kurdish language and cultural identity in Syria.  

The decision comes in implementation of Decree No. 13 of 2026 and executive instructions issued by Syria’s Ministry of Education, in a move aimed at safeguarding cultural and linguistic rights and promoting diversity within an inclusive Syrian national identity.  

The introduction of Kurdish instruction is based on the decree issued by Syrian President Ahmed al-Sharaa on Jan. 16, 2026, which states that Syrian Kurdish citizens are “an essential and integral part of the Syrian people” and that their culture and language are part of Syria’s national identity.  

The decree also recognized Kurdish as a national language and permitted its teaching in public and private schools in areas where Kurds constitute a significant proportion of the population, either as an elective subject or as a cultural and educational activity.  

The decision marks a shift in the state’s approach to the Kurdish issue. For more than half a century, Syria’s Kurds faced policies of discrimination and exclusion, most notably after the 1962 special census in Hasakah province, which stripped Syrian citizenship from tens of thousands of Kurds.  

Restrictions deepened after the Baath Party came to power in 1963, affecting political, cultural, and linguistic life.  

Executive decree implementing Kurdish as an elective subject

On Jan. 26, Syria’s Ministry of Education issued executive instructions implementing the decree, approving Kurdish as an elective subject to be taught for two periods per week across all grades covered by the decree. The subject’s grade will be included in students’ overall scores, but the result will not determine whether a student passes or fails.  

The National Center for Curriculum Development was tasked with preparing Kurdish-language curricula for all educational levels and began work on Jan. 29 after forming a committee of linguistic and educational experts.  

On Aug. 17, the ministry announced that it was recruiting Kurdish-language teachers from both within and outside its existing workforce. Applicants will undergo written and oral examinations to verify their proficiency in Kurdish, as well as training and qualification programs.  

 Decree represents a ‘qualitative shift’ in approach to Kurdish issue

Education Minister Mohammad Abdulrahman Tarkou said in press remarks that the decree represents a “qualitative shift” in the historical approach to the Kurdish issue and reinforces a concept of citizenship based on rights and responsibilities. 

Tarkou, who is himself a Syrian Kurd, added that the ministry is working to prepare curricula and secure teaching staff, including in eastern Syria, stressing that the goal is to make schools “a space for national belonging, not discrimination and exclusion.”  

The decision comes amid broader changes in relations between Damascus and the Kurds, as well as the restructuring of state institutions in northeastern Syria. The 2026-2027 academic year will provide the first practical test of turning the new legal recognition of Kurdish into classroom instruction, after decades in which language remained one of the central issues surrounding the identity and cultural rights of Syria’s Kurdish community.  

This post was originally published on here.