People hold up pictures of the victims of the AMIA Jewish center bombing during a ceremony to mark the 22nd anniversary of the 1994 attack in Buenos Aires, Argentina, July 18, 2016. Photo: REUTERS/Enrique Marcarian

Argentina’s authorities are investigating yet another suspected antisemitic incident after a suspicious package addressed to a local branch president of the country’s main Jewish umbrella organization was intercepted, further heightening alarms among community leaders amid a recent surge in attacks.

On Wednesday, the Pilares del Rosario medical center received a package containing explosive material addressed to Gabriel Dobkin, who serves as both the institution’s director and president of the local branch of the Delegation of Argentine Israelite Associations (DAIA) in Rosario, a major city in the central-eastern Santa Fe province.

According to local media, clinic staff received a package containing a pack of Philip Morris cigarettes wrapped in transparent tape, which the facility’s manager said felt unusually heavy and immediately aroused suspicion.

Because the package had arrived unrequested via a delivery service, the clinic’s manager quickly raised concerns and called in the police explosives unit.

Police bomb squad dogs later detected explosive material inside the cigarette pack. According to the ongoing investigation, the package also contained a strange substance, though authorities have not yet released further details.

After digging a pit in the facility’s backyard, police experts carried out a controlled detonation of the material.

Even though the package did not include an automatic triggering mechanism, it reportedly contained a number of coins intended to serve as shrapnel in the event of an explosion.

Local law enforcement is treating the incident as a targeted antisemitic attack, describing it as either an attempted act of violence or, at the very least, an act of intimidation.

As the investigation continues, detectives are still analyzing the substance found inside the package but have not yet determined its composition or origin. Surveillance footage from the area is being reviewed, and staff from the clinic are also expected to be interviewed.

DAIA Rosario strongly condemned the attack, describing it as a troubling escalation of threats against Jewish institutions, reflecting a wider atmosphere of hostility toward the community.

“This is an expression of hatred that not only targets the Jewish community, but also undermines the fundamental values of coexistence, respect, and democracy. Such acts must be condemned unequivocally and confronted with resolve. Simply denouncing them is not enough — decisive action is essential,” the organization said in a statement.

“Impunity cannot be an option. Every act of antisemitism that goes unpunished sends a message of tolerance toward hatred,” it continued. “Every firm response from the state is a clear signal that society will not back down. To prevent these acts from recurring, determination, action, and justice are essential.”

This latest incident comes amid heightened security concerns within Argentina’s Jewish community after unknown individuals threw a homemade firebomb at the Chabad-Lubavitch Jewish Community Center in La Plata, a city in southeastern Buenos Aires Province, last Sunday.

The Buenos Aires Security Ministry and Police Counterterrorism Division have opened an investigation into the incident, examining possible links to another attack last week that appears to share a similar modus operandi.

The Israelite Literary Center and Max Nordau Library in La Plata were also targeted last Thursday when unidentified individuals threw a homemade Molotov-type device at the building’s entrance.

Although the device failed to ignite, it shattered the building’s windows and caused some material damage. Fortunately, no fires broke out and no injuries were reported.

In response to these latest attacks, Jewish institutions across the country have strengthened preventive protocols and reinforced internal security and surveillance measures.

Symbolic mock-ups of Iranian missiles are displayed on a street, amid the U.S.-Israeli conflict with Iran, in Tehran, Iran, March 22, 2026. Photo: Majid Asgaripour/WANA (West Asia News Agency) via REUTERS

More than two months into the war, Iran’s ability to develop nuclear weapons has suffered a major setback as US and Israeli strikes have ravaged critical facilities, crippled essential infrastructure, and killed personnel central to Tehran’s nuclear ambitions, according to a new analysis

On Friday, the Institute for Science and International Security (ISIS), a Washington, DC–based think tank, released a new assessment of the impact of Israeli and US strikes on Iran’s nuclear program, concluding that the attacks significantly damaged Tehran’s ability to advance nuclear weapons development, particularly by disrupting its weaponization activities.

A nuclear program generally begins with uranium enrichment, the process of producing material that can power civilian reactors or, at higher levels of purity, be used in a nuclear weapon. Much of Iran’s enrichment infrastructure was destroyed during last year’s 12-day war.

The second element is weaponization, which involves the design, testing, and production of the components needed to assemble a functioning nuclear device — a central focus of the more recent Israeli and US military campaign.

According to ISIS’s newly released report, at least six confirmed nuclear-related sites were destroyed so far, with three additional locations possibly connected to the program also struck, bringing the total number of targeted facilities linked to nuclear weapons development to between nine and 12.

Since the start of the war earlier this year, Israel and the United States have struck a wide range of military-industrial facilities involved in missile, drone, and conventional weapons production.

However, the report indicates that some previously undisclosed sites may also have had connections to Iran’s nuclear activities, potentially raising the true scale of the damage.

By analyzing satellite imagery, the report concludes that Iran’s ability to successfully complete a nuclear weapon has been significantly degraded, with the strikes greatly extending the timeline required to produce a bomb while sharply increasing the likelihood of technical failure.

Before the June 2025 war, intelligence assessments estimated Iran could likely produce a nuclear weapon in less than six months with a high probability of success.

Now, the regime’s chances of successfully completing the weaponization process are considered technically low even over a one- to two-year period, largely because the strikes destroyed not only facilities, but also critical equipment and personnel involved in the final stages of bomb development.

ISIS’s latest findings contradict earlier US intelligence assessments, which reportedly concluded that Iran’s nuclear timeline had not been significantly delayed, arguing that such data is inconsistent with extensive visible destruction across key nuclear sites.

The report also argues that there are no signs Iran has resumed uranium enrichment activities, as facilities repeatedly targeted by Israeli and American airstrikes remain heavily damaged with no detectable reconstruction efforts underway.

Despite extensive damage to the regime’s infrastructure, the report cautions that Iran’s nuclear threat has not been fully eliminated.

ISIS has identified tunnel complexes near Esfahan and Natanz in central Iran that were not directly targeted and are believed to contain most of Iran’s enriched uranium stockpile, including roughly 440 kilograms enriched to 60 percent — far above civilian requirements and much closer to weapons-grade material.

At the University of Michigan’s recent commencement ceremony, history professor Derek Peterson delivered a five-minute speech in which he celebrated all those who have fought for justice at the university, my alma mater. Invoking our legendary sports-focused fight song, he asked the crowd to “sing” for suffragist Sarah Burger, who battled to get women admitted as students; for Moritz Levi, Michigan’s first Jewish professor; for all the students who fought for racial justice at Michigan as part of the Black Action Movement; and for the “pro-Palestinian student activists, who have over these past two years opened our hearts to the injustice and inhumanity of Israel’s war in Gaza.”

Peterson’s address was a historian’s invitation to every student and parent in the Ann Arbor stadium to recognize that the fight for Palestinian rights shares roots with our greatest movements for justice, including the struggle against antisemitism.

The backlash, predictably, was swift. The university’s president apologized; the speech was condemned by pro-Israel Jewish organizations and outlets; and I know it upset many college parents, my Gen X peers — we who were raised to believe with all our hearts that Jewish identity and Zionist identity are inextricable.

But to me, Peterson’s speech was a reminder of one of the most important lessons I took away from my time at the University of Michigan: that questioning Zionism is a necessary part of any Jewish life that aims to center justice.

I graduated from Michigan in 1989, and spent much of my last year in Ann Arbor ensconced at Hillel, where I edited a magazine for Jewish students. I’d grown up going to Young Judaea summer camps and had spent a college semester in Israel, where I’d witnessed the beginning of the first Intifada. I returned to find a shanty in the middle of campus that had been erected, a student organizer told our magazine, “to bring the uprising to the community. It is to show the conditions of the Palestinians and the brutal oppression of the Israeli army.”

The shanty evoked those then prevalent on campuses everywhere to symbolize the struggle of Black South Africans against settler colonialism and apartheid. The new shanty on our campus asserted that these words also applied to Israel.

While I was strongly against the Israeli occupation of the West Bank and Gaza — where Israel would not remove any settlements until 2005 — I was distressed and confused by the shanty’s silent, everpresent message about Israel’s past and present. Is Israel an apartheid state, I wondered?

So I put that question on the cover of our magazine.

The Hillel director called me into his office and somberly expressed his concern. But Hillel International had not yet officially clamped down on student activities that question Israel and Zionism.

So our cover story ran and we dropped our magazine in bundles across campus. At the time, I thought of myself as a liberal Zionist, and I secretly rooted for the student who tried to disprove the devastating charge. But as young journalists, my fellow magazine staffers and I were committed to exploring the views of those who erected the shanty, no matter their hostility to Zionism. We didn’t code the hostility as danger. No one thought we should report our ideological opponents — the kids who fell asleep on their books in the library just like we did — to the dean or to the government for arrest or deportation.

Over my time as an undergraduate, I’d come to recognize in these kaffiyeh-clad Palestinian, Arab, and Muslim students the same history-minded, righteous hope that animated me.

Decades later, in the spring of 2024, we all watched as pro-Palestinian student activists — including many Jewish students — set up campus encampments around the country to protest Israel’s assault on Gaza. At Michigan, the encampment was set up on the Diag, the university’s public square, where on the day of my own graduation I’d protested the university’s military research. As the mother of a recent college grad, I was humbled by the determination of these kids, who put up tents, organized teach-ins, and then suffered as police turned off their bodycams and used pepper spray against them. They were lawfully protesting for the university to divest from Israel as it bombed the people of Gaza, the children of Gaza — which is now home to the largest number of child amputees in modern history.

What I understand, and Professor Peterson understands, is that the student activists that he lauded at the commencement are fighting not against Jewish life but for Palestinians’ right to survive daily, as people, and as a people. These activists have asked us to understand, finally, that Zionism is what it does.

“It has been hard work to examine my own mind,” Tzvia Thier, a Jewish Israeli mother, wrote in an essay in the 2021 collection A Land With A People: Palestinians and Jews Confront Zionism. As a child, Thier immigrated to Israel from Romania in the wake of the Holocaust. In 2009, Thier accompanied her daughter to “protect” her while she joined an action to fight the evictions of Palestinians from their homes in the Jerusalem neighborhood of Sheikh Jarrah. Thier was 65, and realized that it was the first time in her life that she had had conversations with Palestinians. She understood then that “it was not my daughter who needed to be protected, but the Palestinians.”

“Many questions leave me wondering how I could have not thought about them before,” she wrote. “My solid identity was shaken and then broken. I have been an eyewitness to the systematic oppression, humiliation, racism, cruelty, and hatred by ‘my’ people toward the ‘others.’ And what you finally see, you can no longer unsee.”

When that shanty went up on Michigan’s campus in the late ’80s, I began to question all that I’d learned about Israel’s founding. I began to question the very idea of an ethnostate — in the name of any people, anywhere — that enshrines the supremacy of one group of people over another.

By the time I became a mother, I’d become anti-Zionist. I understood — with a grief that does not abate — that, as Jews, our history of oppression has become an alibi for Israel’s oppression of the Palestinian people.

We must reject the bad faith accusations of antisemitism that have emptied the word of meaning and enabled authoritarian repression. When students on campuses today charge Israel with apartheid and genocide, they are echoing reports from B’Tselem, Israel’s leading human rights organization. I ask the parents of my generation to read these reports and do as Thier did — to allow themselves to see what we have not wanted to see.

I stand with the more than 2,000 University of Michigan faculty, staff, students and alumni who have condemned the university’s response to the commencement address heard round the world.

For the sake of all of our children, I ask that we each do all we can to open our community’s heart to Palestinian history and humanity. That we each join the urgent struggle for the liberation of the Palestinian people.

This is the way that our Jewish college kids will find the deep and true safety of community: by leaving hatred, fear, and isolation behind; by honoring Jewish history by standing in solidarity with all who are oppressed; and by roaring in a stadium for freedom and justice, along with their entire generation.

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