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‘A battle of Jews against Jews’? Arab Israelis debate whether and how to join Israel’s democracy protests
TAYIBE, Israel (JTA) — Prominent figures among Israel’s Arab minority are calling on its members to join the mass protests against the Netanyahu government’s judicial overhaul plan, arguing that Arabs will be the first victims of any weakening of the Supreme Court.
“If the government succeeds it will make our chances for equality and a just peace more remote,” said Suheil Diab, former deputy mayor of Nazareth, Israel’s largest Arab city, and one of the organizers of a nonpartisan push to get Arabs to demonstrate alongside their Jewish counterparts.
“If we don’t repel the attack on the judiciary, we can’t go forward with our agenda,” Diab went on. “I want Arabs to participate and to know that participating is in their interest.”
The proposed reforms would give the Knesset — now controlled by a right-wing coalition — the power to override Israel’s Supreme Court, in a move that proponents say is needed because, in their view, the court has grown too liberal and out of step with popular sentiment. Leaders of some of the parties in the coalition have called for curbing rights of LGBTQ Israelis, non-Orthodox Jews and Arab Israelis. At least one of them has openly suggested that Arab citizens who are “disloyal” should be deported.
Diab and other Arab leaders fear that without the protection of the Supreme Court, the Arab minority might face measures limiting funding, access to jobs and opportunities and even their political representation. Even expulsion feels like a realistic concern given the far-right influence in the government, he said.
”We need to convince a distinct share of the Jewish majority that both of us are threatened,” Diab told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency. “The only way is a shared Jewish-Arab struggle.”
But while massive protests including tech entrepreneurs, army reservists, academics and others have shown the extent of determination among Jews to stop the government’s bid to legislate what it terms “judicial reform,” Arab Israelis, who make up one-fifth of the population, have hardly turned out.
This dynamic has been true in the Knesset as well as in the streets. Mansour Abbas, the leader of the Arab Ra’am Party, has said he opposes the changes, but when he was invited to participate in a press conference with other leaders of the political opposition, he declined.
Palestinian flags were seen at some of the early pro-democracy protests in Israel, such as at this one in Tel Aviv Jan. 14, 2023, but have appeared less frequently since. (Gili Yaari/NurPhoto via Getty Images)
A push to get Arabs to participate in the protests began Friday with publication of a petition calling for public activism, inked by more than 200 Arab personalities, including retired judges. A gathering here on Saturday sought to work through thorny questions about what Arab participation might look like, and what demands it might make.
Getting Israeli Arabs to the protests that have become a recurring feature of life in cities across Israel every Saturday night won’t necessarily be easy. The push is likely to run up against perceived disenfranchisement on the part of Arab Israelis, whose political parties have rarely been part of governing coalitions and whose participation in electoral politics has been portrayed in the past as illegitimate by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his allies.
Another likely obstacle is a narrow focus for the protest organizers, almost all Jewish.
In the first weeks of the protests in January, Palestinian flags raised by protesters drew criticism from right-wing and pro-government pundits. National Security minister Itamar Ben-Gvir called for a ban on the flag in public and warned that those waving Palestinian flags in future demonstrations would be arrested. Fewer Palestinian flags were seen in the following weeks, and issues relating to the Israeli occupation of the West Bank or to the new government’s attitude toward the Israeli-Palestinian conflict were all but dropped from the agenda. An Israeli activist who asked to carry a Palestinian flag while speaking was declined.
The organizers do not seem interested thus far in broadening the agenda, and only a few Arab speakers have been featured in the demonstrations. Just hours after the Tayibe meeting on Saturday, Reem Hazzan, a leader of the predominantly Arab Hadash party in Haifa, was told by organizers who reviewed a copy of her planned speech to make changes to it. She refused and there was no Arab speaker.
Haaretz quoted unidentified organizers as saying the problem was that Hazzan refused to call in her speech for the Arab public to turn out for the protests. But Hazzan, in remarks to JTA, said she sees a deeper problem.
“We want to change the rules of the game, not just preserve what exists. What exists is not good,” she said. “We need to speak about the occupation and about discrimination. If you want Arabs to participate you must take into account that Arabs have an agenda.”
Exactly what that agenda should be was under debate during the gathering in Tayibe, a sprawling town in central Israel that like many Arab municipalities suffers from spiraling crime and violence.
“People say it’s a battle of Jews against Jews; others say they don’t want us there so why should we go and others point to times when the court sided against us,” said Mohammed Ali Taha, 82, former head of the Arab Writers Association, who spoke at the Tayibe gathering.
Arab Israelis cast their vote at a voting station in Tayibe, Nov. 1, 2022. (Jamal Awad/Flash90)
“It’s all true,” he continued. “But still we must join the protests because we will be the primary losers. When the far right rises, it strikes against the weak. We are the weak.”
With no constitution, Israel lacks any explicit guarantee of equality for all its citizens. Some laws, including those ensuring the right for immigration, advantage Jews. To the extent that Arabs have been able to challenge discrimination in recent decades, it has been largely through the Supreme Court inferring equality on them based on liberal legislation such as the Basic Law: Human Dignity and Freedom, passed in 1992, which specifies, “Every human being is entitled to protection of his life, body and dignity.” Critics of the proposed reforms warn that they could result in the rollback of that basic law.
The court has also at times ruled against Arab Israeli interests, such as when it refused to consider petitions against the 2018 Nation State Law, which enshrines Jewish settlement as a national value, declares that national self-determination in the state of Israel is “unique to the Jewish people” and demotes Arabic from an official language.
Tayibe’s deputy mayor, Malik Azzem, said that despite its mixed record, an independent Supreme Court is essential for Israeli Arabs.
“The High Court is our last defense for our rights as a minority,” he said. “The struggle for our rights is not separate from this struggle. We need to mobilize the public.”
He added that as an elected official, he fears that without the court’s oversight, the government would simply cut the budgets of Arab municipalities.
”People need to raise their voices and join,” Azzem said. “We should be at the center of the demonstrations. We are already late in dealing with this.”
Taha, the writer, whose works often focus on the Nakba, an Arabic term meaning catastrophe that is used to describe the plight of Palestinians after Israel’s 1948 War of Independence and which he lived through as a child, told the gathering: ”Without Jewish-Arab cooperation we cannot achieve anything. This is an opportunity for cooperation.”
He said he believes Arab Israelis are today more vulnerable than they have been at any time since the period that they lived under military rule, from 1948 to 1966. At that time they were so restricted that they could not travel within Israel without permits. The danger today, he says, is due to the clout of far-right ministers Ben-Gvir and Bezalel Smotrich, who have expressed anti-Arab views and, in Ben-Gvir’s case, even called for the expulsion of “disloyal” citizens.
“If they succeed it will be worse for us than military rule was,” Taha said. To avert this, he argued, Arabs need to join the protests alongside Jews even if it means not raising Palestinian flags.
”It’s not the time and place for a protest about a Palestinian state,” he said. “This could cause conflict among the protesters.”
But to others, the idea of protesting without highlighting the need to end both the occupation and inequality is akin to denying one’s very identity.
“I’m against participating in any demonstration that is embarrassed to talk about context and the occupation. I support something broader,” said Sondos Saleh, a former member of Knesset for the Arab Ta’al party.
Sondos Saleh, an Arab Israeli politician then on the Joint List Party candidate list, speaks during a press conference in Tel Aviv, Feb. 23, 2021. (Miriam Alster/Flash90)
Merav Ben-Ari, a legislator for the largest opposition party, Yesh Atid, told JTA she would welcome greater Arab participation in the protests. ”Anything that strengthens the protests is excellent,” she said.
But she showed little enthusiasm for talking about many of the topics that animate Israeli Arabs in the political sphere, including the core one that liberal critics of the protest movement say is being given short shrift.
“How is the occupation connected?” Ben-Ari asked. “What is needed is to talk about the reform. Everyone who loves the country and cares about it has to fight against the reform and the harm to the Supreme Court.”
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Redemption Doesn’t Wait for Heroes — It Begins With Ordinary People Doing the Right Thing
Nobuki Sugihara, a son of wartime Japanese diplomat Chiune Sugihara, credited with helping Jewish refugees escape Nazi persecution by issuing transit visas, speaks during a ceremony at a square in Jerusalem on Oct. 11, 2021, after the square was named “Chiune Sugihara Square.” Photo: Kyodo via Reuters Connect
In the summer of 1940, as Europe collapsed into darkness, a Japanese diplomat sat behind a modest desk in the Lithuanian city of Kovno and faced a decision that would echo far beyond anything he could possibly imagine.
Chiune Sugihara never planned to be a hero. He was a career civil servant, with clear instructions from Tokyo not to do what he was about to do — and a young family to support. But outside the gates of the Japanese consulate, thousands of Jewish refugees waited in growing desperation. Among them were the students and teachers of the Mir Yeshiva, one of Europe’s great centers of Torah learning.
The Mir Yeshiva had already been on the run for months. After the Nazis overran eastern Poland in September 1939 and the Soviet army occupied western Poland — where Mir was located — the yeshiva’s faculty and most of its students fled, relocating first to Vilna and then to Kėdainiai, both in Lithuania.
But before long, Lithuania also fell under Soviet control, placing the yeshiva’s future in grave doubt, even as the Nazi threat loomed ominously nearby. One farsighted student, Leib Malin, argued persuasively that there was only one real option left: the yeshiva had to leave Europe, and quickly.
That idea triggered a frantic race against time and bureaucracy. Hundreds of students had no passports. Exit visas, transit visas, and destination papers were all required — documents that under normal circumstances would have been impossible to obtain — and in a wartime situation, with everyone clamoring to leave, it was practically impossible.
Yet, piece by fragile piece, the paperwork came together: temporary identity papers from British officials; entry stamps to the Caribbean island of Curaçao issued by the Dutch consul, Jan Zwartendijk; and, finally, the most critical hurdle of all — Japanese transit visas.
It was here that Sugihara suddenly found himself with a decision to make. He asked his superiors in Tokyo for permission to issue the transit visas, but they turned him down flat. He asked again and was refused again. He tried a third time, and the answer was still no.
So, he stopped asking. For weeks, he sat and wrote out the transit papers by hand, issuing visa after visa, often working 18 hours a day. When the Soviet authorities ordered the consulate to close, he continued writing anyway.
Even as he boarded the train out of Kovno, Sugihara leaned out of the window, handing stamped visas to waiting hands on the platform. Over 6,000 Jews were saved via Sugihara’s visas, including the entire Mir Yeshiva.
The most remarkable thing about it all was this: Sugihara had no idea who he was saving. Those transit visas carried the Mir Yeshiva across Siberia to Vladivostok, then by ship to Japan, and eventually to Japanese-controlled Shanghai, where the yeshiva remained until 1946.
Among the refugees were figures who would later shape the postwar Torah world in the immediate aftermath of the Holocaust — Rav Chaim Shmulevitz, Rav Chatzkel Levenstein, and the Amshinover Rebbe. But mixed among them were also young men who, at the time, were nothing more than anonymous students — teenagers and twentysomethings with no titles, no positions, and no hint of what lay ahead for them.
Rav Leib Malin — the young man who had spearheaded the push for the Mir Yeshiva to leave Europe — would later found the Beis HaTalmud yeshiva in Brooklyn.
Rav Zelig Epstein was in his mid-20s when Sugihara issued his visa; he went on to become one of New York’s most respected yeshiva heads in the latter half of the 20th century.
Rav Pesach Stein, barely in his early 20s in 1940, later became a rosh yeshiva at Telz Yeshiva in Cleveland.
Rav Shmuel Berenbaum had just turned 20; he would later lead the Mir Yeshiva in New York.
None of these young men imagined leadership as they fled Lithuania, and none of them were being “saved for greatness” by Sugihara. Yet each would go on to become a towering rabbinic figure, shaping Torah life in America for decades to come.
And there were many others like them. Sugihara did not save great rabbis. He saved a group of young boys and their teachers — and history took care of the rest.
Sugihara paid dearly for his month-long visa-issuing marathon. After the war ended — and after a period of imprisonment by the Russians — he returned to Japan and was dismissed from the diplomatic service. Far away from those he had saved, Sugihara lived for years in near obscurity, initially supporting his family through a series of menial jobs, and later working as a Japanese trade representative in the Soviet Union.
But he was not forgotten. In the late 1960s, Sugihara visited Israel, where he was warmly welcomed by some of those whose lives he’d saved, including Rav Chaim Shmulevitz, head of the Mir Yeshiva, now reestablished in Jerusalem.
And in 1984, Yad Vashem formally recognized Sugihara as Righteous Among the Nations — for choosing to follow his conscience and save nameless human beings rather than protect his career.
Sugihara’s quiet heroism evokes the cast of seemingly minor characters who populate the opening chapters of Parshat Shemot. There are the midwives, Shifra and Puah, who defy Pharaoh’s orders at enormous personal risk and save nameless Hebrew babies they will never meet again.
There is Miriam, a young girl standing watch among the reeds, refusing to abandon her infant brother to fate. And there is Pharaoh’s daughter, Batya, who reaches into the Nile in an act of moral rebellion against the most powerful man in the world — her own father.
None of them set out to change history. None of them imagined themselves as architects of redemption. They were simply responding, in the moment, to cruelty they could not accept. And yet, because of their courage, a single child survived — Moses — who would grow to become the savior of his people, the lawgiver at Sinai, and the man who would lead an enslaved nation toward freedom and destiny.
Like Sugihara stamping visas in Kovno, they were not saving a future leader in their own minds. They were saving nameless lives. Only later would history reveal just how brightly what they preserved would shine.
It is no coincidence that the Torah opens the Exodus story not with Moses himself, but with the midwives who refused to carry out Pharaoh’s orders, and with the crucial roles played by Miriam and Batya. Rashi notes that the defining trait of the midwives was their fear of God — a moral stance that came before any miracles, before prophecy, and before God revealed where the unfolding story was headed.
The Torah makes clear that redemption doesn’t begin with a savior but with ordinary people who refuse to give up their humanity in the face of cruelty. Sforno adds that God often advances His purposes through figures who appear insignificant in the moment, so that those who later reflect on history do not confuse power or position with righteousness.
History rarely turns on premeditated grand gestures made with full knowledge of their consequences. More often, it is shaped by ordinary people who find themselves at a moral crossroads and then do the right thing. Chiune Sugihara did not know the futures he was preserving when he signed visa after visa in Kovno, just as Miriam and Batya could not have known that they were saving Moses, the redeemer of Israel.
The Torah’s message is deeply empowering: redemption does not wait for heroes. It begins when ordinary people, in unremarkable moments, decide that doing the right thing matters — even when no one is watching, and even when the outcome is unknown.
The author is a rabbi in Beverly Hills, California.
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Kurdish Groups Reject Aleppo Withdrawal as US Pushes to End Fighting
Law enforcement vehicles at an evacuation site, after the Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) made an agreement with the Syrian government to depart, and evacuate to northeastern Syria after days of fighting with the Syrian army, in Aleppo, Syria, Jan. 9, 2026. Photo: REUTERS/Khalil Ashawi
Kurdish groups rejected a Syrian government demand for their fighters to withdraw from parts of Aleppo under a ceasefire proposed on Friday, with Damascus conducting new strikes and Western powers urging an end to days of clashes.
The violence in Aleppo has brought into focus one of the main faultlines in Syria as the country tries to rebuild after a devastating war, with Kurdish forces resisting efforts by President Ahmed al-Sharaa’s Islamist-led government to bring their fighters under centralized authority.
At least nine civilians have been killed and more than 140,000 have fled their homes in Aleppo, where Kurdish forces are trying to cling on to several neighborhoods they have run since the early days of the war, which began in 2011.
The ceasefire announced by the defense ministry overnight demanded the withdrawal of Kurdish forces to the Kurdish-held northeast. That would effectively end Kurdish control over the pockets of Aleppo that Kurdish forces have held.
DEFENSE MINISTRY ANNOUNCES PLANNED ATTACKS
But in a statement, Kurdish councils that run Aleppo‘s Sheikh Maksoud and Ashrafiyah districts said calls to leave were “a call to surrender” and that Kurdish forces would instead “defend their neighborhoods,” accusing government forces of intensive shelling.
The Syrian defense ministry later said it intended to target areas of Aleppo it said were being used by the Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) to launch attacks on the “people of Aleppo,” posting five maps highlighting areas it would strike. It began those strikes roughly two hours later.
Kurdish security forces in Aleppo said the map included a hospital which it said had been struck four times since Thursday, and that it would hold Damascus responsible for any harm to civilians.
Syria’s defense ministry disputed that, saying the structure was a large arms depot and that it had been destroyed in the resumption of strikes on Friday.
It posted an aerial video that it said showed the location after the strikes, and said secondary explosions were visible, proving it was a weapons cache.
Reuters could not immediately verify the claim.
The SDF is a powerful Kurdish-led security force that controls northeastern Syria. It says it withdrew its fighters from Aleppo last year, leaving Kurdish neighborhoods in the hands of the Kurdish Asayish police.
Under an agreement with Damascus last March the SDF was due to integrate with the defense ministry by the end of 2025, but there has been little progress.
FRANCE, US SEEK DE-ESCALATION
France’s foreign ministry said it was working with the United States to de-escalate.
A ministry statement said President Emmanuel Macron had urged Sharaa on Thursday “to exercise restraint and reiterated France’s commitment to a united Syria where all segments of Syrian society are represented and protected.”
A Western diplomat told Reuters that mediation efforts were focused on calming the situation and producing a deal that would see Kurdish forces leave Aleppo and provide security guarantees for Kurds who remained.
The diplomat said US envoy Tom Barrack was en route to Damascus. A spokesperson for Barrack declined to comment.
Washington has been closely involved in efforts to promote integration between the SDF – which has long enjoyed US military support – and Damascus, with which the United States has developed close ties under President Donald Trump.
The ceasefire declared by the government overnight said Kurdish forces should withdraw by 9 am (0600 GMT) on Friday, but no one withdrew overnight, Syrian security sources said.
Barrack had welcomed what he called a “temporary ceasefire” and said Washington was working intensively to extend it beyond the 9 am deadline. “We are hopeful this weekend will bring a more enduring calm and deeper dialogue,” he wrote on X.
TURKISH WARNING
Turkey views the SDF as a terrorist organization linked to the outlawed Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK), and has warned of military action if it does not honor the integration agreement.
Turkish Foreign Minister Hakan Fidan, speaking on Thursday, expressed hope that the situation in Aleppo would be normalized “through the withdrawal of SDF elements.”
Though Sharaa, a former al Qaeda commander who belongs to the Sunni Muslim majority, has repeatedly vowed to protect minorities, bouts of violence in which government-aligned fighters have killed hundreds of Alawites and Druze have spread alarm in minority communities over the last year.
The Kurdish councils in Aleppo said Damascus could not be trusted “with our security and our neighborhoods,” and that attacks on the areas aimed to bring about displacement.
Sharaa, in a phone call with Iraqi Kurdish leader Masoud Barzani on Friday, affirmed that the Kurds were “a fundamental part of the Syrian national fabric,” the Syrian presidency said.
Neither the government nor the Kurdish forces have announced a toll of casualties among their fighters from the recent clashes.
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Iran Cannot Blame This Catastrophe on Israel
Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei speaks during a meeting in Tehran, Iran, Jan. 3, 2026. Photo: Office of the Iranian Supreme Leader/WANA (West Asia News Agency)/Handout via REUTERS
Iran spent decades waging a “full-scale war” on the West at the expense of the country’s most fundamental civic needs. Now public riots from Tehran to Shiraz are pushing the failed government to the brink of collapse. In response to Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, whose parliamentary minions chant “Death to America, death to Israel,” protesters shout “Death to the dictator.” Khamenei blames the civil rebellion on the US and Israel. But legally speaking, the Ayatollah cannot make that case.
UN Charter Article 2, the international Friendly Relations Declaration of 1970, and customary international law instruct that a state may not “coercively intervene” in the affairs of another state. Scholars debate the precise meaning of coercive intervention. However, there is widespread agreement that a state may not threaten to use military force against another state without justification for such force or otherwise try to frustrate a state’s exercise of its legitimate sovereign powers.
There are many possible forms of coercive intervention. Russia cannot lawfully compel Ukraine to surrender jurisdiction over the Donbas region or require Ukraine to relinquish its right to join NATO. Saudi Arabia cannot validly pressure Qatar to defund its state-run news station.
By the same token, there is no coercive intervention where a state uses military force in self-defense against another state’s act of war. Nor is there coercive intervention when a state orders an enemy state to stop supporting a terrorist organization because terrorism is illegal and therefore not within any legitimate sovereign power. Finally, it is not coercively intervening for a group of states to oppose an enemy state through mere diplomacy or a trade embargo.
The issue of coercive intervention may arise in the context of regime change. In 2023, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu met with Reza Pahlavi, the most visible leader of the Iranian opposition, and discussed a potential normalization agreement called the Cyrus Accord. Cyrus the Great was the ancient Persian ruler who let the Jewish people return from exile to the Land of Israel and rebuild their temple. The Cyrus Accord emulates the Abraham Accords, which normalized relations between Israel and certain Arab states. The proposed Israel-Iran pact would be signed if and when the Islamic Republic is replaced by a secular democracy.
The question for Israel was how to craft the Cyrus Accord in a way that supports the Iranian opposition without breaching the coercive intervention law. Any perceived challenge to the Supreme Leader’s authority may provoke him to violence. During periods of internal unrest like today, the Ayatollah scapegoats the US and Israel and exploits the claim as a pretext for murderous crackdowns on his own civilians, resulting in grave human rights abuses. If the despot could argue that the Cyrus Accord constitutes coercive intervention, he may feel entitled to accelerate the killing. Alternatively, he may fire missiles at Israel, as he did twice in 2024, and orchestrate attacks through his “Axis of Resistance” terror groups. That decision would unleash a storm of war crimes.
The Cyrus Accord does not amount to coercive intervention. It is a plan of mutual assistance. Perhaps the most important issue addressed by the Accord is Iran’s water crisis. Israel has pledged to relieve the drought with its unique expertise in desalination, wastewater recycling for agriculture, and advanced irrigation systems. Another major issue is Iran’s obsolete infrastructure for electricity. Israel would help upgrade the network to a smart grid and meanwhile jumpstart the development of renewable energy sources such as solar and wind. Other sectors of economic assistance would include cybersecurity, satellite technology, and artificial intelligence. None of these projects would threaten military force or risk depriving the Iranian leadership — present or future — of its legitimate sovereign powers.
In exchange for the above-noted economic benefits, the prospective Iranian government would cancel the nation’s threats to Israel’s national security. The new state would decommission its illegal nuclear weapons program, cut all ties to the Axis of Resistance groups, and lend Israel formal diplomatic recognition. These measures would not harm any legitimate sovereign powers.
The Ayatollah may regard the Cyrus Accord as an existential threat to himself and his regime. Indeed, the agreement would upend his ideological agenda by converting Iran from the world’s greatest sponsor of state terrorism to an ally of the West. But he cannot denounce the deal on legal grounds. If he is overthrown, he’ll have only himself to blame.
Joel M. Margolis is the legal commentator of the American Association of Jewish Lawyers and Jurists, the US affiliate of the International Association of Jewish Lawyers and Jurists.