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Bosnian Jews mourn Moris Albahari, one of Sarajevo’s last Ladino speakers
(JTA) — Moris Albahari, a Holocaust survivor, former partisan fighter and one of the last Ladino speakers in Bosnia and Herzegovina’s dwindling Jewish community, passed away at the age of 93 last month.
It is believed that he was one of four native Ladino speakers remaining in a country where the Judeo-Spanish language once flourished and was spoken by luminaries like Flory Jagoda, the grande dame of Ladino song, and Laura Bohoretta, the founder of a uniquely Sephardic feminist movement in Bosnia.
Bosnia’s small Jewish community — with barely 900 members throughout the country, 500 of whom live in Sarajevo — are mourning the loss of a living link to communal memory as well as a dear friend.
“From you, uncle Moco, I learned a lot about Judaism, about life, about nature and especially about people. About both the good and the evil,” Igor Kožemjakin, the cantor of the Sarajevo Jewish community, wrote in a memorial post on Facebook, referring to Moris as “Čika,” or uncle, a term of endearment in Bosnian.
“It is a terrible loss, especially for Sarajevo. Our community is very small, especially after the Holocaust,” Eliezer Papo, a Sarajevo-born Jew and scholar of Ladino language and literature at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency. “We’re not speaking just in terms of prominent members of the community, we’re speaking in terms of family members. Everyone is like a family member.”
When Albahari was growing up in the 1930s, the Jewish community of his native Sarajevo numbered over 12,000. Jews made up more than a fifth of the city and it was one of the most important centers of Jewish life in the western Balkans.
In his youth, the city was part of what was then the Kingdom of Yugoslavia. Formed out of the borderlands between the Ottoman and Austro-Hungarian empires, it was a multiethnic state composed of Croats, Serbs, Bosniaks, Slovenians, Macedonians, Hungarians, Albanians and more. Among them were many Jewish communities both Ashkenazi and Sephardic.
The unique mix of of Muslim, Jewish, Catholic and Orthodox Christian communities, with their mosques, synagogues and churches defining Sarajevo’s skyline, earned the city the nickname “Little Jerusalem.”
Speaking in a 2015 documentary made by American researchers, “Saved by Language,” Albahari explained that his family traced their roots back to Cordoba before the Spanish Inquisition, and through Venice, before settling in what would become Bosnia when it was part of the Ottoman Empire.
“We didn’t want to ‘just’ write an article about Moris or Sarajevo; we wanted [the audience] to see what we saw and hear what we heard,” Brian Kirschen, professor of Ladino at Binghamton University, who worked on the documentary with author Susanna Zaraysky, told JTA. “This resulted in a grassroots initiative to create the documentary.”
In the film, Albahari takes the researchers and their viewers on a tour through what was Jewish Sarajevo, giving glimpses of the thriving Ladino speaking community in which he was raised and explaining how ithe language would save him many times, when the Nazis and their Croat allies, the Ustaša, came to shatter it.
“In sharing your story of survival during the Holocaust, you opened doors that remained closed for decades,” Kirschen said in a memorial post on Facebook. “Some of your stories were even new to members of your family, but each survivor has their own timeline. While you experienced great pain during your life, from your story, we also learn about moments of kindness and heroism. Through your story, you also taught us about the power of language.”
Albahari wasn’t yet a teenager when, in 1941, Nazi Germany and Mussolini’s Italy invaded Yugoslavia. The Nazis occupied the eastern portion of the country, including what is now Serbia, while they raised up a Croat fascist party, known as the Ustaša, to administer the newly formed “Independent State of Croatia” — often known by its Serbo-Croatian initials, NDH — in the western regions that included the modern-day Bosnia and Herzegovina.
The Ustaša collaborated in the Nazis’ genocidal plans for Europe’s Jewish and Roma comunities, and they had genocidal designs of their own for the Orthodox Serb communities living in the NDH.
To that end they established the Jasenovac concentration camp, which would become known as the Auschwitz of the Balkans. By the war’s end it had become the third largest concentration camp in Europe, and behind its walls the overwhelming majority of Sarajevo’s Jews — at least 10,000 — were massacred. Including Serbs, Jews, Roma and political dissidents of Croat or Muslim Bosniak background, as many as 100,000 people were killed in Jasenovac.
Albahari was 11 years old when the Ustaša came to deport him and his large family to Jasenovac. A former teacher working as an Ustaša guard in the town of Drvar, where the train stopped, warned Albahari’s father, David, about their destination, and he was able to help his son escape from the train.
The teacher helped guide the young Moris to an Italian soldier named Lino Marchione who was secretly helping Jews.
This was the first case when Albahari’s Ladino came in handy. Ladino is largely based on medieval Spanish, with a mixture of Hebrew, Aramaic, Turkish and other languages mixed in. For speakers of Serbo-Croatian, a Slavic language, it’s entirely incomprehensible. But for a speaker of another Romance language such as Italian, it’s not such a stretch to understand, and Moris was able to converse with his Italian savior.
With his family gone, he was taken in by a Serb family, and changed his name to Milan Adamovic to hide his Jewish identity. Still, by 1942, it became clear that neither as Adamovic nor Albahari would he be safe in the town. So he fled to the mountains.
“If there was [a battle] I took clothes from a dead soldier to wear, I lived like a wolf in the mountains, you know. Visiting villages [asking for something] to give me for eating, it was a terrible time,” Albahari recalled in “Saved By Language.”
He would only feel safe in villages under the control of partisan forces. Yugoslavia was the only country in Europe to be liberated from Nazi rule by its own grassroots resistance.
During his time in the mountains, Albahari joined up with a partisan unit aligned with the movement of Josip Broz Tito, who would lead Communist Yugoslavia after the war. By the war’s end, Tito’s partisans numbered over 80,000 and included more than 6,000 Jews, many in prominent positions, such as Moša Pijade, who would go on to serve as vice president of the Yugoslav parliament after the war.
Moris was out on patrol as a partisan when he came upon a group of American and British paratroopers. They raised their weapons at him, thinking he was an enemy. Moris tried to communicate, but he spoke no English.
When he asked the soldiers if they spoke German or Italian, they shook their heads. When he asked about Spanish, one perked up: a Hispanic-American soldier by the name of David Garijo.
In Ladino, Alabahari was able to explain that he was not an enemy but could lead them to a nearby partisan camp where they would be safe.
“Ladino saved my life in the war,” Albahari recalled in the documentary.
At the partisan camp, Morris received even bigger news: The family that he had assumed had all perished after he left the train were in fact alive. The former school teacher and Ustaša guard who had warned his father had met them at the next train junction to help them escape. Furthermore, around half of the Jews in the train car were able to escape using the same hole Moris used during his initial escape.
Ultimately the family all survived the war, unlike so many other Jews of Sarajevo.
“Where is Samuel, where is Dudo, where is Gedala? They never came back,” Albahari lamented, listing missing neighbors while walking through Sarajevo’s old Jewish neighborhood in the documentary. “Maybe we are happy because we are alive after the Second World War, but also unlikely because every day we must cry for these dead people.”
When Moris returned to Sarajevo, it was an entirely different place from the bustling Jewish community he had once known.
Gone was the sound of Ladino in the streets and alleyways of Bascarsija, the market district where so many of Sarajevo’s Jews had once lived. Gone were the synagogues — only one of the many synagogues that had existed before WWII still functions. Gone was the robust Jewish life that was once a central part of Sarajevo.
Moris was still only 14 by the war’s end, so he returned to school and ultimately graduated at the top of his class. He became a pilot and later director of the Sarajevo Airport.
In this new world, Ladino was spoken, if at all, only in the home.
“Always, when I hear Spanish, I hear my father and mother, and all the synagogues, prayers in Ladino and rabbis who spoke Ladino. But that is in the past,” Albahari says in “Saved by Language.”
Eliezer Papo, who is a generation younger than Albahari, recalled that in his youth Ladino had long been reduced to a language of secrets.
“Mostly, Ladino was used when the elders didn’t want youngsters to understand,” Papo said.
Only later, in the 1980s, did community members realize what was being lost and begin to gather to maintain their language, recount what Jewish Sarajevo had been like and share their wartime stories of survival.
“He never took his story to the places of revenge, but he took it and his life experience to a place of ‘Never again,’ not just ‘Never again for Jews’, but never again for anybody,” said Papo.
Like many Sarajevans, World War II would not be the last major conflict Albahari would see. Less than 40 years later, war would once again come to Sarajevo with the break-up of Yugoslavia.
From 1992-1995 the city remained under constant siege by Bosnian Serb forces looking to break away from what would become Bosnia and Herzegovina. Moris joined with other Jews of Sarajevo in working to provide aid to their fellow Sarajevans during the harsh period.
Sarajevo’s synagogue was turned into a shelter and a soup kitchen. The community ran a network of underground pharmacies and a message service allowing Sarajevans to get word to family and friends outside of the city during what became the longest siege of a capital city in the history of modern warfare.
“Moris was an inspirational persona to many members of Jewish community and La Benevolencija,” Vlado Anderle, the current president of that local Jewish humanitarian organization told JTA. “He was a man with such inviting spirit and energy.”
When the dust settled on the breakup of Yugoslavia, and the new Bosnian state rose from its ashes, Moris found himself once again in a new role.
During the communist era in Yugoslavia, religious activity was discouraged. Sarajevo’s Jews emphasized the ethnic character of Jewish culture rather than the religious one. In the new Bosnia and Herzegovina, that was no longer true. So the community worked to reconnect with their religious identity as well.
“Everybody looked up to the people who had Jewish upbringing before the Second World War,” Papo recalled. “This doesn’t mean that they were rabbis. Just that they knew it better than anyone else.”
Moris, whose formal Jewish education ended in his preteen years, was appointed president of the community’s religious committee.
As such it often fell on him to represent Judaism to the Bosnian society at large, often in a very creative way, according to Papo, who in addition to being a scholar of Ladino is ordained as a rabbi and serves the Sarajevo community as a rabbi-at-large from Israel.
In one case, while being interviewed on a major Bosnian television station, Moris was asked why Jews cover their head with a kippah or other hat during prayer. Moris’ response, or rather creative interpretation, as Papo called it, was made up on the spot.
Moris’ interpretation began with the ancient temple in Jerusalem where Jews once had to fully immerse in a ritual bath before entering.
“Since the Temple in Jerusalem was destroyed it was reduced to washing the uncovered parts of the body only, before entering a synagogue, similarly to Muslims: the feet, the head, the hands…” Papo recalled him saying. But in Europe, as Moris’ answer went, they began to cover more and more of their body. “In Europe they started wearing shoes, so the feet were not uncovered anymore, and then they started wearing a hat, not to have to wash their head… you know it’s Europe, one could catch a cold if going out with wet hair…”
“A few months later, I came to Sarajevo, and found that everyone has heard this explanation and is talking about it, not just people in the community, but in the street,” Papo said. “And you know, I let it pass, I couldn’t correct them, it was just so beautiful. That was his genius.”
“Identity is all about telling stories. And Moris was one of the great storytellers of the community,” Papo added. And through his stories he expressed an identity which was “made of the same contradictions that Sephardic Judaism is made of, that Sarajevo is made of, that Bosnia and Herzegovina is made and that Yugoslavia was and is made of and that the Balkans are made of.”
Albahari is survived by his wife and a son.
—
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For Bob Dylan’s 85th birthday, an 85-minute playlist
Nobel Prize-winning song-poet Bob Dylan turns 85 on Sunday, May 24. In order to celebrate the august occasion, we have put together an 85-minute playlist featuring one minute of music for every year Dylan has been alive. This playlist isn’t meant to summarize or stand in for Dylan’s overall body of work, which numbers well over 600 songs, nor is it intended to suggest that these are his best songs. Rather, this is a journey through Dylan’s vast songbook, purposely avoiding the tried-and-true in favor of highlighting almost two dozen lesser-known but wholly worthy gems.
Happy 85th birthday, Bob Dylan!
Talkin’ Hava Negeilah Blues (1962)
One of the first original songs Bob Dylan wrote and performed in his early coffeehouse days, “Talkin’ Hava Negeilah Blues” gives the lie to the notion that Dylan consciously tried to hide his Jewish background by changing his name (from Zimmerman to Dylan) and making up stories about his past (e.g., that he traveled with the circus). If there was any truth to that, then why did he kick off his career with a riff on that most recognizably Jewish of songs?
Mixed-Up Confusion (1962)
Recorded in the fall of 1962, this rockabilly single recontextualizes (or gives the lie to) the common but false narrative (perpetuated in the film A Complete Unknown) that Bob Dylan “went electric” on his 1965 album, Bringing It All Back Home, and in subsequent concerts the following summer and fall. In fact, Dylan was a rock ‘n’ roller dating back to high school, where the quote appearing beneath his photo in his class yearbook read, “To join Little Richard.” On “Mixed-Up Confusion,” he was already stretching his rock ‘n’ roll muscles several years before the notorious 1965 Newport Folk Festival where he performed with an electric band, much to the horror of the moldy figs of folk music.
4th Time Around (1966)
As early as 1964, the Beatles’ John Lennon began to show signs of having been influenced by Bob Dylan’s songwriting on numbers such as “I’m a Loser” (1964) and “You’ve Got to Hide Your Love Away” (1965), in which Lennon goes so far as to imitate Dylan’s nasal rasp. Bob Dylan was hip to this trend, and after the Beatles released the Dylanesque “Norwegian Wood,” Dylan responded in song with “4th Time Around,” whose melody strongly echoes that of “Norwegian Wood.” Dylan scholar Sean Wilentz wrote in Bob Dylan in America that “4th Time Around” sounds “like Bob Dylan impersonating John Lennon impersonating Bob Dylan.”
Blind Willie McTell (1983)
Unaccountably left off the 1983 album Infidels for which it was originally intended, “Blind Willie McTell” is one of Bob Dylan’s American epics, as it invokes New Orleans, East Texas, bootleg whiskey, plantations, “the ghost of slavery ships,” an unnamed war, and “power and greed and corruptible seed.” Be sure to play it on the 4th of July.
I Want You (1966)
Only Bob Dylan could write such a surrealistic narrative — replete with a guilty undertaker who sighs, a lonesome organ grinder who cries, a drunken politician who weeps, and a child in a Chinese suit — in the form of a bouncy, three-minute pop song that indeed made it into the Top 20 in 1966, when it was released on his greatest (double) album, Blonde on Blonde.
We Better Talk This Over (1978)
“We Better Talk This Over” is one of several numbers on Bob Dylan’s 1978 album Street-Legal that seem to want to bring closure to what Dylan began revealing about his crumbling marriage on 1975’s Blood on the Tracks. Whereas Dylan portrayed himself in pain and bereft on Blood, on this oft-overlooked propulsive number he is ready to put the past behind him and move forward. “The vows that we kept are now broken and swept / ’Neath the bed where we slept,” he sings, somewhat resignedly. Dylan also seemingly reveals an internal spiritual struggle when he sings, “I’m exiled, you can’t convert me,” just a little over a year before he announces to the world his so-called born-again experience on 1979’s Slow Train Coming.
Most of the Time (1989)
An acute, heart-piercing, devastating post-breakup song, featuring an unreliable narrator denying he still hurts but betrayed by his over-the-top insistence that he has gotten over her, in a song featuring a slow emotional and sonic build.
Day of the Locusts (1970)
Poor Bob Dylan. It turns out that the day in 1970 on which he received an honorary degree from Princeton University turned out to be one of the worst days of his life, judging from this song. Nature, a Biblical plague, and David Crosby (in an unnamed cameo, playing the man standing next to Dylan whose “head was exploding”) all conspired against the college dropout to make him fear he might not have gotten “out of there alive.” He could have just transferred to Wesleyan and everything would have been fine.
Everything Is Broken (1989)
In the aggressive, blues-rocking “Everything Is Broken” Bob Dylan recounts the Kabbalistic creation story about the klippot, the broken vessels of divine energy that were left behind everywhere and which point to our ultimate task as humans — to repair the brokenness permeating creation through acts of inherent goodness, otherwise known as mitzvot, in an oft-misunderstood process called tikkun olam. All this in a three-minute song blending New Orleans swamp-rock and classic Chicago blues.
You’re a Big Girl Now (1975)
Another of Bob Dylan’s post-breakup songs of desperation, this from Blood on the Tracks, a recording often referred to as Dylan’s “divorce album.” In “You’re a Big Girl Now,” Dylan drops all anger and defenses in favor of raw emotion: “I’m going out of my mind / With a pain that stops and starts / Like a corkscrew to my heart / Ever since we’ve been apart.”
Positively 4th Street (1965)
Featuring one of the greatest opening lines of all time: “You’ve got a lot of nerve to say you are my friend.” It’s all downhill from there, my friend.
The Groom’s Still Waiting at the Altar (1981)
“The Groom’s Still Waiting at the Altar” is a blistering, urgent missive, with reports of phones out of order and the killing of nuns and soldiers (evocative of American military involvement in Latin America at the time the song was written). Nevertheless, each verse ends with the title refrain, “The groom’s still waiting at the altar,” which I hear as a statement retracting his declaration of conversion.
Can You Please Crawl Out Your Window? (1965)
In September 1965, Dylan nearly hit the top of the pop charts when “Like a Rolling Stone” went to #2; it was kept from the top spot by the Beatles’ “Help!” But Dylan didn’t give up in his quest for the chart-topping hit that had so far evaded him. Songs he recorded and released in coming months that bore musical similarities to “Like a Rolling Stone” included “Positively Fourth Street,” “One of Must Know (Sooner or Later),” and “Can You Please Crawl Out Your Window,” the only studio track recorded with the Hawks — later to become the Band. The single presents the backup group at its fiercest. And Dylan quotes himself when he sings “You’ve got a lot of nerve to say you are my friend,” a line from “Positively 4th Street.”
Going, Going, Gone (1974)
From 1974’s Planet Waves, the only studio album Bob Dylan recorded with the Band, “Going, Going, Gone” stands out on the album for its moody, unsettled nature (surrounded as it is by songs of domestic bliss and naked nostalgia). Robbie Robertson’s evocative electric guitar leads pepper the ballad, saying as much with their clipped notes and anguished tone as Dylan does with lyrics like “I’m closin’ the book / On the pages and the text / And I don’t really care / What happens next.”
Series of Dreams (1989)
An outtake from 1989’s Oh Mercy, this is one of Dylan’s big statement songs that unaccountably got left on the cutting room floor, until demand grew so strong from those who had heard it via bootleg recordings that Dylan’s record company assented to the inclusion of the track on The Bootleg Series Volumes 1–3 (Rare & Unreleased) 1961–1991. Dylan could be alluding to the Shoah when he describes his dreams:
In one, numbers were burning
In another, I witnessed a crime
In one, I was running, and in another
All I seemed to be doing was climb.
One More Cup of Coffee (1976)
This hypnotic if unassuming number off the early-1976 album Desire, featuring Dylan’s only authentic cantorial singing and aided and abetted by Scarlet Rivera’s klezmer-via-Gypsy violin, a relentless minor key, and Emmylou Harris’ harmonies is an overlooked gem. As the song says, its “heart is like an ocean, mysterious and dark.”
Dignity (1989)
Like “Series of Dreams,” the song “Dignity” was an outtake from the Oh Mercy sessions that was first released on Bob Dylan’s Greatest Hits Volume 3 in 1994. And like “Series of Dreams,” this song also seems to refer to the Shoah, when the narrator — bereft at the astounding loss of dignity — refers to “a crowded room full of covered-up mirrors,” as in a Jewish house of mourning, and “steps goin’ down into tattoo land.”
Dark Eyes (1985)
To many, the 1985 album Empire Burlesque introduced one of the low points in Bob Dylan’s recording career, including the two follow-up albums Knocked Out Loaded (1986) and Down in the Groove (1988). Empire Burlesque was a desperate attempt by producer Arthur Baker to update Dylan’s sound to blend in more with the mid-1980s dance music aesthetic. But Baker knew that the album needed a dynamite closer, and he suggested that Dylan write an old-style, solo acoustic ballad. In a fit of inspiration, Dylan stayed up all night and came up with this stunner: sharp, intimate, personal, where the singer looks around himself at a chaotic world from which he is totally alienated — “I feel nothing for their game where beauty goes unrecognized / All I feel is heat and flame and all I see are dark eyes.”
Heart of Mine (1981)
“Heart of Mine” stands out on the 1981 Shot of Love album as a raucous, joyful bit of R&B music (which flavors most of the album). But it’s a Bob Dylan song, so it has that subversive touch. The narrator addresses the song to his own heart — “Don’t let her see / Don’t let her see that you need her / Don’t put yourself over the line / Heart of mine” — and warns it that only trouble lies ahead if this is the path he (his heart) decides to pursue. The recording’s impressive instrumental lineup — all of whom are in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame — includes Ringo Starr on drums, Ronnie Wood on guitar, and Donald “Duck” Dunn on bass, meaning Dylan was backed on this track by a Beatle, a Rolling Stone, and a member of the Stax house band, also known as the M.G.’s, as in Booker T. and the M.G.’s. Not too shabby.
Congratulations (1988)
This is a bit of a cheat stuck into this list to demonstrate that as much as he has always been a solo artist and an iconoclast, Bob Dylan has also always longed for the companionship — musical and otherwise — of a steady band. He came close to achieving this with the Hawks (later the Band) from the mid-1960s through the mid-1970s, and allegedly asked Jerry Garcia in the late-1980s if he could join the Grateful Dead (which was essentially a Dylan tribute band). But it wasn’t until George Harrison persuaded his friend and sometime songwriting partner to join him — along with Tom Petty, Roy Orbison, and Jeff Lynne — in an “anonymous supergroup” called the Traveling Wilburys in 1988, that Dylan took the plunge and subsumed himself into a collective. In most cases, as with “Congratulations,” you could easily tell one lead singer from the other, and in general that person wrote the song. We’re turning this one — an over-the-top expression of post-breakup bitterness (the first line is “Congratulations for breaking my heart”) — back on Dylan on the occasion of his birthday.
My Back Pages (1964)
Along with “It’s All Over Now (Baby Blue),” the song “My Back Pages” is often heard as a transitional statement: out with the old Dylan, in with the new, if you will. Included on the 1964 album, Another Side of Bob Dylan, which eschewed topical protest for more personal and poetic concerns, “My Back Pages” found the 23-year-old singer-songwriter looking back just a few years at his more serious self and judging him thusly: “Ah, but I was so much older then / I’m younger than that now.” A 1967 version of the song by the Byrds made it into the Top 30 and inspired the all-star version of the song rendered at the Bob Dylan 30th Anniversary Concert Celebration in 1992, which featured George Harrison, Eric Clapton, Tom Petty, Neil Young, and Roger McGuinn trading verses alongside Dylan.
The post For Bob Dylan’s 85th birthday, an 85-minute playlist appeared first on The Forward.
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Don’t dismiss Israel’s most rage-baiting minister as fringe
As Israel drifts toward another election campaign, National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir this week offered voters — and the world — a grotesque glimpse of where a large branch of Israeli politics is heading.
Touring a detention facility holding activists from a Gaza-bound flotilla intercepted by Israel, Ben-Gvir waved a large Israeli flag before rows of bound detainees forced to kneel, mocked them as cameras rolled, and declared Israel was “in charge here.”
The images sparked domestic and international outrage. European governments summoned Israeli ambassadors. U.S. Ambassador Mike Huckabee, a staunch supporter of the Israeli right, charged on X that “Ben-Gvir betrayed” the “dignity of his nation.” Even Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, in a rare move, publicly rebuked his own minister.
That rebuke should not be taken as a signal that Ben-Gvir may fade in power. Because while many Israelis still prefer to think of the controversy-courting minister as a fringe embarrassment attached awkwardly to an otherwise respectable nationalist movement, he is the true face of the Israeli right today.
A week ago, Ben-Gvir ascended the Temple Mount in Jerusalem — one of his many violations of longstanding norms governing the holy site — as tens of thousands of ultranationalist Israelis marched through the Old City in an annual celebration of its 1967 capture, many chanting “Death to Arabs.” The rabble rouser — whose multiple convictions include support for terrorist groups — recently celebrated his 50th birthday with two cakes adorned with nooses, a nod to the death penalty legislation for terrorists that he played a major role in getting passed. No surprise: The law is worded in a way that makes clear it is aimed at Palestinians only. Legislators allied with his camp wore noose-shaped lapel pins while promoting it.
This madness is not some accidental byproduct of the right-wing movement Netanyahu has led for decades, but its natural consequence.
For years, the mainstream nationalist camp, with Netanyahu as its most prominent figure, has sold Israelis an illusion: Israel can permanently control the West Bank — and perhaps Gaza, once more, as well — while forever suppressing Palestinian national aspirations, and still somehow remain both democratic and fully accepted by the democratic world.
The terminology changes: “managing the conflict,” “security control,” “economic peace.” But the underlying proposition remains the same. And it is a fantasy.
A country that indefinitely controls millions of disenfranchised people — where almost half the population does not have the right to vote — does not remain a true democracy. A state ruling another nation forever does not remain democratic either, even if elections formally continue among the population allowed to vote.
There are now roughly 15 million people living between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea. About half are Jews, and half are Arabs. That demographic reality sits at the center of every serious discussion about Israel’s future. Yet much of the Israeli right pretends this reality barely exists, and ignores the increasingly brazen Jewish terrorism and the illegal seizing of outposts in the West Bank. Netanyahu himself speaks the language of caution, realism and statecraft, striving to reassure centrists and foreign governments alike that Israel remains fundamentally part of the democratic West.
Not Ben-Gvir.
Ben-Gvir speaks for those on the right who see only two possibilities when it comes to Palestinians: permanent Israeli domination without equality, enforced by as much violence as needed — or expulsion. Officially, much of the far-right prefers the former; once the cameras stop rolling, almost all of them predict the latter.
I was speaking to one prominent right-winger the other day, and asked what they had in mind for the Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza. “Those who don’t want to destroy Israel can stay,” they said.
Obviously, that definition might include none of them, I noted. “Then get the trucks,” was the reply.
That wasn’t moral, I said. The reply: “Is it moral to force my children to fight forever?”
Ben-Gvir’s outrageous behavior is meant to appeal to people with this mindset. And it’s working. Polls show his Otzma Yehudit party expected to get perhaps 13 seats in the next Knesset — more than double their current six.
Moreover, Netanyahu’s Likud party itself has undergone a gradual shift to the right, with many of its Knesset members starting to sound little different from Ben-Gvir. That is why Ben-Gvir was able to ram through the disgraceful bill mandating the death penalty for terrorists.
This political calamity was not unexpected. The occupation of the West Bank, like unchecked power everywhere, was always bound to corrode political culture over time. The sleight of hand of non-annexation is growing old — in part because of Ben-Gvir’s influence, the number of settlements is expanding rapidly — and much of the Israeli right, consumed by hubris, wants to rip off the mask. Ben-Gvir is the most authentic expression of that transformation.
That is the dark reality hanging over the coming election, and the flotilla episode revealed the zeitgeist in its purest form. Israel already had complete control over the activists. They posed no meaningful threat. The performance was about domination, a theatrical display for a domestic political audience increasingly drawn to the aesthetics of vengeance and submission.
Challenged on Israel Radio about the wisdom of such a stunt at a time when Israel is facing a crisis in global public opinion, Yitzhak Kroizer, a Knesset member from Ben-Gvir’s party, offered this: “We’re done bowing our heads and apologizing.” He said the flotilla members were terrorists themselves for wishing to harm Israel, and that there is “great public support for an uncompromising stand.”
He’s right on that last point. Israel faces genuine enemies and genuine trauma. Hamas massacred civilians on Oct. 7, 2023. Hezbollah and Iran openly seek confrontation. Israelis have every reason to fear for their security.
But those realities still leave unanswered a central strategic question: What kind of country emerges from such prolonged conflict?
Ben-Gvir has given us one unsettling answer.
In 1995, a teenage Ben-Gvir famously brandished the hood ornament ripped from Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin’s car and declared on Israeli television: “We got to his car, and we’ll get to him too.” Weeks later, assassin Yigal Amir did just that, and murdered Rabin.
Today, the target in Ben-Gvir’s sights isn’t Israel’s leader, but instead all of Israeli democracy.
The post Don’t dismiss Israel’s most rage-baiting minister as fringe appeared first on The Forward.
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Gaza and Israel go unmentioned in Democrats’ 2024 election autopsy report
(JTA) — Gaza and Israel go unmentioned in the Democrats’ 190-page autopsy of Kamala Harris’ 2024 presidential election loss that the Democratic National Committee released to CNN on Thursday.
Critics of the Biden administration’s support for Israel during the war in Gaza that began on Oct. 7, 2023, have alleged that the party was suppressing its internal findings about the election, which returned President Donald Trump to office, because it would show that Biden’s stance was deeply unpopular.
Axios reported in February that the top Democrats who worked on the report concluded that Harris “lost significant support because of the Biden administration’s approach to the war in Gaza.”
If that’s the case, it’s not reflected in the document that CNN published on Thursday morning. Portions of the document were not included, however, with notes saying that the executive summary and conclusion had not been shared by the authors.
The report points to 10 different “strategic implications” for Democrats, including that “anti-Trump sentiment has limits,” male voters “require direct engagement,” and that voter demographics are not enough to determine which candidate they’ll prefer.
CNN reported that the document was written by Democratic strategist Paul Rivera and annotated by the DNC. The DNC released the document following questions raised by CNN, the network reported.
DNC Chairman Ken Martin told CNN that the report was not yet ready to be publicly released, but concluded that withholding it would create a larger distraction than releasing an incomplete version. “I sincerely apologize,” he said.
“For full transparency, I am releasing the report as we received it, in its entirety, unedited and unabridged,” Martin said. “It does not meet my standards, and it won’t meet your standards, but I am doing this because people need to be able to trust the Democratic Party and trust our word.”
Halie Soifer, CEO of the Jewish Democratic Council of America, said she’d expected to see analysis related to Gaza and Israel in the report.
“As soon as it arrived in my inbox I immediately searched for the word ‘Gaza’ expecting there to be an entire section focused on this issue,” Soifer said in an interview. “So I was surprised that, in fact, there was nothing — on Gaza, Israel, Jewish voters, non-Jewish voters, it was just nothing.”
Though rumors had swirled about the role that Gaza played in the autopsy, Soifer said she heard from a DNC official that there was “never” a section focusing on the issue, “at least not in writing in this report.”
Meanwhile, the Institute for Middle East Understanding, a pro-Palestinian nonprofit, called on Martin to release “the information that the author of the autopsy told us clearly and unambiguously, which is that DNC officials’ review of their own data found Biden’s support to be a net-negative for Democrats in 2024.”
Rivera, the report’s author, met with the IMEU and told them that the war in Gaza hurt Democrats in the 2024 election, according to reporting by Axios.
Soifer said the JDCA was not contacted by Rivera, and did not meet with him.
The pro-Israel lobbying group Democratic Majority for Israel also said it had not met with Rivera. “Our current leadership has not met with the author and hasn’t been contacted,” communications chair Rachel Rosen told JTA.
While Soifer was surprised by the report’s omission of Gaza and Israel, DMFI took it as a sign that support for Israel does not have a detrimental effect on Democrats’ chances in elections.
“We need to learn the lessons of 2024 so we can be successful in 2026, 2028 and beyond,” said Brian Romick, DMFI’s president.
“What is clear — autopsy or not — is a majority of Americans, including Democrats, support the U.S.-Israel relationship, and that support was not the reason Vice President Harris lost the election,” he said.
A DMFI staffer pointed to polling from last fall showing that a majority of Democrats support the U.S.-Israel relationship.
And Soifer pointed to a poll published Friday by the Jewish Voters Resource Center, a nonpartisan firm, that found that more than two-thirds of Jewish voters plan to vote for Democrats this November — suggesting that Israel was not significantly moving votes in one of the demographics most likely to be invested in the issue.
“The poll also demonstrated that the top issue driving the Jewish vote in 2026 – just as it was in 2024 – is the future of democracy, followed by the cost of living. While 70% of Jewish voters have an emotional attachment to Israel, 55% opposed Israel’s conduct of the war in Gaza,” she said. “There is little evidence that the war in Gaza has impacted the Jewish American vote.”
A spokesperson for the Republican Jewish Coalition pointed to the episode as an example of infighting among Democrats.
“The Democrats are tearing themselves apart as they appease the ascendant far-left extremists in their party, from Maine to Pennsylvania,” wrote Sam Markstein, alluding to candidates Graham Platner and Chris Rabb.
“It’s bad policy and it’s bad politics. The GOP is the only party where it’s safe to be proudly Jewish and pro-Israel,” Markstein wrote. “Republicans are righteously taking on the tough fights and winning, while Democrats continue to whistle past the political graveyard.”
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