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‘There was no time to sleep’: 4 Jews reflect on a year of helping Ukrainians at war
(JTA) — In the months after Russian tanks rolled into her country last February, the music largely stopped for Elizaveta Sherstuk.
The founder of a Jewish choral ensemble called Aviv in her hometown of Sumy, in the northeastern flank of Ukraine, Sherstuk had to put singing aside in favor of her day job and personal mission: delivering aid to Jews in Sumy.
“There was no time to sleep,” Sherstuk recalled to the Jewish Telegraphic Agency recently. “All my team members worked the same, 24/7.”
A year later, Sherstuk is still hustling as the Sumy director of Hesed, a network of welfare centers serving needy Jews in the former Soviet bloc. But she has also begun teaching music classes again, too — with performances sometimes held in bomb shelters.
Catch up on all of JTA’s Ukraine war coverage from the last year here.
Sherstuk’s story reflects the ways that Russia’s war on Ukraine has affected Jews in Ukraine and beyond. The conflict has killed hundreds of thousands, left even more in peril and fundamentally altered the landscape and population of Ukraine, forcing millions to flee as refugees.
But the war has also mobilized the networks of Jewish aid and welfare groups across Europe, leading to a Jewish organizational response on a massive scale not seen in decades. And Ukrainian Jews who have remained in the country have recalibrated their lives and communities for wartime.
Here are four stories about Jews who stepped in and stepped up to help, and a taste of the on-the-ground situations they found themselves in.
‘I was needed there’
Enrique Ginzburg, second from right, is shown with Ukrainian doctors in Lviv. (Courtesy of Ginzburg)
Since nearly drowning at 23, Dr. Enrique Ginzburg has felt he “had to pay back” for the extra years of life he was granted.
Now 65, the professor of surgery at the University of Miami’s Miller School of Medicine and its trauma division has lent his critical care expertise in Haiti, Argentina, Kurdistan and Iraq, in various emergency situations. But until last year, he had never been to a war zone.
The Cuba native felt drawn to Ukraine because his grandfather is from Kyiv, while his grandmother is from nearby eastern Poland. So early on in the conflict, he called Dr. Aaron Epstein, an old friend and the founder of the nonprofit Global Surgical and Medical Supply Group.
“Get yourself a flak jacket, a helmet, a gas mask and come on over,” Ginzburg said Epstein told him.
He has been to Ukraine twice under the nonprofit’s auspices, last April and July. Ginzburg’s explanation for why he flew across the world to put himself in danger: “I was needed,” he said.
His base was an emergency hospital in Lviv, a city located west enough that it became a major refugee hub. He consulted with front-line Ukrainian physicians, many of them young and inexperienced, and hospital administrators, watching the doctors in action. He also visited patients in hospital wards and helped to treat gunshot wounds and assorted combat injuries.
Ginzburg’s bags were packed with meaningful supplies. Some had been requested by his Ukrainian colleagues for medical use, mostly specialized catheters. But he also brought tefillin, the phylacteries used by Jews in their morning prayers. Ginzburg, who studied in a yeshiva while young but no longer considers himself Orthodox, wrapped them every day while in Ukraine.
Even though Lviv was far from the fighting, he could hear air raid sirens and the explosion of the Russian missiles, sometimes feeling the earth shake. When intelligence reports warned Ginzburg’s medical team of impending missile attacks, they sought refuge in safe houses.
“Today,” he told the Miami Herald last June, “I was calling my life insurance [company] because I have young sons and my wife, so I’m trying to make sure I have good coverage.”
By the end of his trips, Ginzburg lost count of the number of doctors he helped train and the number of patients he saw. “I’m sure it’s hundreds.” He plans to make a third trip sometime this year.
‘This is our new reality’
Karina Sokolowska is the director of the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee’s activities in Poland. (Courtesy of the JDC)
As the director of the JDC, or the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee, in Poland, Karina Sokolowska has heard countless harrowing stories over the past year. But one sticks out in her memory.
It involved an elderly Ukrainian couple she met at the Poland-Ukraine border in late spring. The husband was in a wheelchair, and Sokolowska helped push him — back towards Ukraine. They had spent three months in a shelter in Poland but eventually “realized we cannot go looking for jobs, we cannot restart our lives. We are too old,” the woman said.
“If they are to die, they’d rather die back home,” Sokolowska said. “It’s a story of hopelessness. They are so vulnerable.”
Last year, about 8 million Ukrainian refugees made their way to Poland, the bordering country that accepted the most refugees. Early on in the conflict, Sokolowska contacted and visited Jewish communities throughout Poland, investigating the availability of places where the soon-to-be-homeless refugees could be housed. She also traveled to some of the border crossings where the Ukrainians entered, to arrange transportation to venues in Poland and to oversee the conditions in which the refugees would begin their new lives.
Later she would help with, among other things: arranging legal advice for the people who arrived with few identification documents; lining up medical care and drugs; finding them short- and long-term housing; connecting them to psychological counseling; providing kosher meals; and even caring for the refugees’ pets (“dogs and cats with no documents”).
According to JDC statistics, the organization “provided essential supplies and care” to 43,000 Jews in Ukraine and “aided 22,000+ people” there with “winter survival needs … more than double the amount served in previous years.” The welfare organization also claimed to provide “life-saving services” to more than 40,000 refugees in Poland, Moldova, Romania, Hungary, Bulgaria and other European locations. It also helped evacuate about 13,000 Jews from Ukraine. (Israeli Foreign Minister Eli Cohen recently said 15,000 Ukrainian Jews in total have immigrated to Israel since the start of the war.)
Karina Sokolowska, JDC director for Poland and Scandinavia sits in her office down the hall from a hotline room, in early March 2022. (Toby Axelrod)
At the height of the refugee flood, Sokolowska said her monthly JDC budget ballooned to more than what she previously spent in an entire year. Her office went from having a few employees to over 20. The amount of sleep she got decreased in tandem; she started taking sleeping pills to get rest when she could.
“This is our new reality” in Poland, she says of the JDC work with Ukrainian refugees. “This is our life now.”
Sokolowska, the granddaughter of Yiddish-speaking Holocaust survivors, became active in Jewish life during college, when a classmate heard her pronouncing some German words with a Yiddish accent and persuaded her to lead the Polish Union of Jewish Students. As JDC director for Scandinavian countries in addition to Poland, she typically organizes educational conferences and helps Jewish families learn about traditions they had not learned while growing up in the communist era.
Today, her sense of optimism has been ground down.
“Everything changed when war came to Ukraine — there is less hope,” Sokolowska said. “It’s a totally new everything. Every aspect of our life changed. Our hope for this to be over soon is going down, down, down. Nothing will change.”
‘It could [have been] me’
Tom and Darlynn Fellman volunteered in Krakow in October 2022. (Courtesy of Tom Fellman)
Sometime in the late 1890s, Harry Fellman, about 20 years old, left his home in Ukraine. According to family legend, he was a sharpshooter in the Ukrainian army and was about to be sent into active combat. Instead, he emigrated to the United States and settled in Omaha, Nebraska, where he became a peddler.
His grandson Tom Fellman — whose middle name is Harry — doesn’t know all the 120-year-old details, but he knows that he is grateful that Harry Fellman decided to leave Ukraine when he did.
“It could [have been] me, if my grandparents had not left when they did,” said Fellman, a successful real estate developer and philanthropist in Omaha.
In October, at 78 years old, Fellman made the reverse trip across the Atlantic to pitch in to the relief effort. He also wanted to pay what he sees as a debt to the memory of his late grandfather and to help the current generation of Ukrainian Jews.
He and his wife Darlynn served as volunteers for a week at the Krakow Jewish community center, joining hundreds (possibly thousands) of volunteers from overseas who have gone to Poland and the other nations in the region over the last year to participate in humanitarian programs on behalf of the millions of Ukrainian refugees. Fellman worked nine hours a day with a half-dozen fellow foreign volunteers in the basement of the community center, transferring the contents of “big, big” sacks of items like potatoes and sugar into small containers to be distributed to refugees in the building’s first-floor food pantry. His wife spent her time in an art therapy program that was set up for the refugee mothers and children to raise their spirits.
Fellman is “not particularly religious” but supports “anything Jewish.” In 1986, he accompanied a rescue mission plane of Soviet Jews headed to Israel. “It was the most rewarding experience of my life,” he recalled.
Fellman says he plans to return to Poland, in June, for the JCC’s annual fundraising bike ride from Auschwitz to Krakow.
What did his friends think of his septuagenarian volunteer stint? “They thought it was cool,” he said. “But none of them are going too.”
‘Everything was a risk’
Elizaveta Sherstuk runs a branch of Hesed, a network of welfare centers, in Sumy, Ukraine. (Courtesy of Sherstuk)
Sherstuk’s parents would have sent their daughter to a Jewish school in her early years if they had had the option. But Jewish education was not permitted In Sumy during the final years of communist rule in the Soviet republic. Sherstuk was exposed to Jewish life only at home.
Her parents infused her with a Jewish identity, she said, and her grandparents used to talk and sing songs in Yiddish. That inspired Sherstuk’s first career as a singer and a music teacher, during which she founded Aviv and took it on tour throughout the region singing traditional Jewish songs. Later, she became the director of Sumy’s branch of the JDC-funded Hesed network.
Sumy, an industrial city with a population of 300,000 before the war situated only 30 miles from the Russian border, was one of Russia’s first targets. In the days before the pending invasion, Sherstuk stockpiled food, which was certain to become scarce in case of war, and arranged bus transportation to safer parts of the country for hundreds of vulnerable civilians, mostly the elderly and disabled. The bus plan fell through for safety issues.
As the bombing started, it became dangerous for members of the local 1,000-member Jewish community, many of them elderly, to venture outside of their apartments. Sherstuk, working out of a bomb shelter, assisted by a Hesed network of volunteers, coordinated food and medicine deliveries.
The situation grew more dire, and she coordinated the Jewish community’s participation in a brief humanitarian corridor evacuation of vulnerable civilians that the Russians permitted. She communicated with Sumy residents mostly by smartphones provided by the JDC — the Russian attacks had cut the landlines — and accompanied the busloads of Sumy Jews to western Ukraine. Some of them eventually moved on to Israel, Germany, or other nearby countries, she said.
Sherstuk stayed in western Ukraine for a while (“The humanitarian corridors are only for one-way trips,” she noted), moving from place to place, keeping in touch with the Jews of Sumy and waiting for Ukraine’s army to make the trip back safe. But Sumy, like many Ukrainian cities, has come under frequent Russian rocket attack.
“Everything was a risk,” she said. “We were following whatever our hearts told us to do. We had to save people. I was the one who had to do it.”
Last May, Sherstuk was among 12 men and women (and the sole one from the Diaspora) who lit a torch at the start of Israel’s Independence Day in a government ceremony on Mount Herzl. During two weeks in Israel, she spent some time with members of her family, and held a series of meetings with JDC officials, government ministers and donors. “It was not a vacation,” she said.
After going back to Sumy, at the suggestions of her choral group members and fellow Sumy residents, she organized concerts in Hebrew, Yiddish, Ukrainian and Russian — some in person, some in a bomb shelter in the city’s central square, some online. She has now resumed her music classes, too, and it has all boosted morale. “I [teach] all the time,” she said.
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The post ‘There was no time to sleep’: 4 Jews reflect on a year of helping Ukrainians at war appeared first on Jewish Telegraphic Agency.
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‘He made Black Jews not invisible anymore; he was the bridge’
Rabbi Capers C. Funnye, Jr. rabbi and spiritual leader of Beth Shalom B’nai Zaken Ethiopian Hebrew Congregation in Chicago, and the Chief Rabbi of the International Israelite Board of Rabbis, died Nov. 2 at the age of 74.
A cousin of Michelle Obama and an important leader for Black Jews in America, Funnye was raised in the African Methodist Episcopal Church and converted to Conservative Judaism. He held leadership positions in Chicago’s Jewish community and was a consultant to many cultural institutions throughout the United States.
“I’ve known him my whole life,” said Rabbi Tamar Manasseh said. “There is nothing that prepares you for this. I think it’s really important for people to know that he made Black Jews not invisible anymore. He was the bridge.”
“At that time it was not the priority for other Black Jews, but for him it was the priority,” Manasseh continued. “There were a million times that he was uncomfortable to one day bring comfort to us all.”
Funnye was born in 1952, in Georgetown, South Carolina, and attended Howard University. He received a B.A. in Hebrew literature and a rabbinic ordination from the Israelite Board of Rabbis, Inc., in Queens, New York, and a B.A. in Jewish studies and an M.A. in human services administration from the Spertus Institute of Jewish Studies, in Chicago.
In 1995, Funnye, Michelle Stein-Evers and Robin Washington (an editor-at-large at The Forward) founded the Alliance of Black Jews.
Funnye became the first African American member of the Chicago Board of Rabbis in 1997, and was named Chief Rabbi of the International Israelite Board of Rabbis, in New York in 2015.
He also served as a rabbi for congregations in Nigeria, Uganda, and other sub-Saharan African nations.
“Rabbi Capers Funnye was my ‘rebbe’ for connecting with the Black community and for understanding how important it is to bring the Black Jewish community to the very center of the Jewish community,” said Rabbi Asher Lopatin.
“I was inspired as he fought hard to gain acceptance as a full member of the Chicago Board of Rabbis and then succeeded in getting full membership in the New York Board of Rabbis and opening up the New York Board of Rabbis to graduates of the Israelite Rabbinical Academy,” Lopatin said. “I will never forget his passion, his brilliance, his insight and his love for Judaism, the Jewish community and Israel. May his memory be a blessing.”
“It was an honor to welcome Rabbi Funnye and members of the International Israelite Board of Rabbis to become part of our rabbinic family. His steadfast commitment to group relations helped us to better understand the dynamics of the Black Jewish community,” said Rabbi Joseph Potasnik, executive vice president of the New York Board of Rabbis. “May we continue to perpetuate his legacy.”
“Rabbi Funnye has touched countless lives with his spiritual leadership, wisdom, and unwavering commitment to our congregation and the broader Hebrew Israelite community. His legacy of faith, service, and dedication will continue to inspire generations,” Beth Shalom B’nai Zaken Ethiopian Hebrew Congregation wrote on its Facebook page.
The post ‘He made Black Jews not invisible anymore; he was the bridge’ appeared first on The Forward.
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Top Jewish lawyers quit Indiana ACLU amid controversy over new director
Four attorneys have resigned from the ACLU of Indiana amid concerns over the incoming executive director’s approach to free speech and allegations of antisemitism.
Legal director Kenneth Falk, a prominent Jewish civil rights lawyer who has twice argued before the U.S. Supreme Court, along with deputy legal director Gavin Rose, senior staff attorney Stevie Pactor and staff attorney Josh Bleisch, all resigned in recent weeks, the ACLU of Indiana’s board confirmed in a statement to the Forward. Their resignations were first reported by the Indy Star.
The concerns center on Nikkita Oliver, a lawyer and longtime Seattle activist who was announced in June as the next executive director of the ACLU of Indiana.
Oliver, who posted a Palestinian flag on Instagram about two weeks after Oct. 7, 2023, alongside quotes about oppressed peoples’ “right to resist,” made comments during a July meeting that a former staff member interpreted as questioning Jewish attorneys’ ability to represent pro-Palestinian activists fairly.
Oliver, who uses they/them pronouns, also said they objected to the ACLU’s landmark legal defense of neo-Nazis’ right to march in Skokie, Illinois in 1977, which raised questions for some former staff about whether Oliver was committed to defending free speech irrespective of ideology.
Oliver’s original start date of Sept. 1 has been pushed back as the ACLU of Indiana conducts a third-party investigation “to establish the facts.”
“It is distressing that a small group of staff who have, at most, interacted with me once seem to have generated these rumors and false allegations,” Oliver wrote in a statement to the Forward, adding that they “welcome a fair, third-party review.”
A disputed meeting
The wave of resignations followed a July “get to know you” coffee conversation between Oliver and Neil Hudelson, ACLU of Indiana’s director of philanthropy at the time.
Hudelson told the Forward that during that meeting, Oliver brought up a 2016 free speech case involving pro-Palestinian student activists at Indiana University, which the ACLU had declined to take. Two community members had reached out about the case after their hiring was announced, Oliver said.
Hudelson said he was unfamiliar with the case, or why the ACLU might have decided not to pursue it, and asked Oliver for details, which Oliver said they didn’t know. Hudelson then recalled explaining to Oliver that the ACLU of Indiana has repeatedly defended pro-Palestinian activists’ right to free speech.
Where the conversation took a turn, according to Hudelson, was when Oliver said three times that it was “very interesting” that the ACLU had declined to take the case.
The two parties’ interpretations of the interaction differ.
Hudelson’s interpretation was that Oliver viewed the organization’s Jewish attorneys, who had vigorously defended pro-Palestinian activists’ free speech rights, as biased against Palestinians.
“It’s not hard to know that 50% of our legal team at the time was Jewish,” Hudelson, who is not Jewish himself, told the Forward. “The fact they kept repeating, just finding it ‘very interesting,’ struck me as antisemitic.”
While Oliver also recalled bringing up the 2016 case, they disputed the idea that it had anything to do with the attorneys’ religious background.
“I am a direct person who says exactly what I mean without hedging,” Oliver said in a written statement documenting their recollection of the meeting. “I did not intend or insinuate anything beyond providing an example of a meritorious case the affiliate did not take.”
Hudelson filed a complaint at the time about the interaction and said he hoped the matter would be resolved with a private investigation.
Tensions flare
Pactor, one of the Jewish attorneys who resigned, told the Forward she had raised concerns about Oliver’s commitment to the ACLU’s nonpartisan mission. (The legal arm of the ACLU must refrain from intervening in political campaigns in order to maintain its 501(c)(3) tax-exempt status.)
Pactor said she filed a complaint expressing concern over a comment Oliver made during a meeting with her in July about wanting to turn Indiana “light red.”
In a statement to the Forward, Oliver said by turning the state “light red,” they meant ensuring equal access to voting, which “naturally shifts the political landscape away from an exclusive focus on a single party.” (Indiana has largely voted for Republicans for president.) Oliver also noted that Pactor was in the running to become executive director but was not selected.
For Pactor, those concerns were compounded by Oliver’s social media history.
Less than two weeks after the Oct. 7 attacks, Oliver posted a Palestinian flag to Instagram and quoted author Arundhati Roy, who said “People have the right to resist annihilation.” Oliver added in the post that Martin Luther King Jr. “began to see the limits of non-violent protest” toward the end of his life.
“I am heartbroken and angry,” Oliver wrote at the time. “If we want the violence to stop, we must stop the root cause. This means ending the occupation of Palestine by Zionist Israel, supporting Palestinian liberation and ending the apartheid state.”
The ACLU of Indiana board defended the post to the Forward as “an intellectual critique of power dynamics, not an incitement of violence.”
After two Israeli embassy staff, Yaron Lichinsky and Sarah Milgrim, were shot and killed outside the Capital Jewish Museum in May 2025, Oliver reposted this message on their Instagram story: “20k children dead: violence is okay. 2 israeli embassy staff members dead: violence is not okay anymore.”
In another post, after the May 2026 shooting at the Islamic Center of San Diego that killed three people, Oliver reshared an image on their Instagram story calling the attack “the direct result of white supremacist, Zionist and anti-Muslim rhetoric being pushed by the state and media.”
Blaming the mosque attack on “Zionist” rhetoric without evidence was concerning, Pactor said, especially since the two teenage gunmen had expressed neo-Nazi views in writings they left behind.
In a statement to the Forward addressing their social media posts, Oliver wrote, “These posts speak to the double standard that can exist in the media when some deaths are deemed tragic, and others are deemed necessary. All life is precious. I understand that, outside of free speech, pro-Palestine advocacy is not within the ACLU of Indiana’s portfolio, and I do not intend to change that.”
On Sept. 27, a group of 79 Jews across the country who identified themselves as “organizers for Palestinian rights” submitted a letter of support for Oliver, writing that they could “attest that Nikkita [Oliver] explicitly and consistently cares about the safety of Jewish people.”
Tensions continued to flare among the ACLU staff, culminating in a Sept. 29 board meeting attended by Hudelson, who said board members said Oliver was the victim of false allegations.
Hudelson said he was fired two days later. The board said it would not comment on the details of personnel matters but noted that one employee was fired “for cause.”
Pactor resigned a few weeks later, on Oct. 19.
The Skokie question
Oliver also brought a perspective to free speech advocacy that appeared to diverge from the ACLU’s longstanding tradition of defending the rights of even the most objectionable speakers.
In 1977, the ACLU famously represented neo-Nazis who wanted to march through Skokie, Illinois, a heavily Jewish suburb of Chicago that has been home to many Holocaust survivors. The neo-Nazis never ended up marching, though they won the legal right to do so in court — with Jewish ACLU attorney David Goldberger arguing on the neo-Nazis’ behalf.
The ACLU’s decision to defend the rights of neo-Nazis was controversial; at the time, many Jewish lawyers resigned in protest. But it also helped establish the organization’s credibility as a group committed to the principle of free speech for all.
The ACLU has repeatedly reaffirmed its decision in the Skokie case. Today, the ACLU website notes that many consider the Skokie case “one of the ACLU’s finest hours.”
Oliver told Hudelson during their July meeting that they disagreed with how the ACLU handled the case.
“If I had been the head of the ACLU during Skokie, I would have found a different approach through integrated advocacy — such as submitting an amicus brief on the First Amendment — that protected the free speech of all without subjecting a Jewish community to potential harm,” Oliver wrote in their account of the meeting with Hudelson.
That approach conflicts with the way the ACLU has historically operated. Falk, who had served as legal director at the Indiana ACLU since 1996 before resigning, is among those Jewish free speech lawyers who have represented clients many find unsavory. He has argued on behalf of the Ku Klux Klan on multiple occasions, including when the hate group wanted to host a rally at the Gary, Indiana City Hall.
“If we don’t stand up for the rights of everyone, even people we don’t necessarily personally agree with, all of our rights are diminished,” Falk told The Indiana Lawyer in May. (The Forward was unable to reach Falk for comment.)
Hudelson and Pactor both told the Forward they were concerned by Oliver’s approach.
“Ken was always saying, ‘You don’t know what it’s like until your rabbi has to ask you why you have the Grand Wizard of the KKK in your office,’” Hudelson said. “But that’s what we do. We’re the ACLU.”
In a statement, the board said the ACLU of Indiana was not changing its approach to free speech litigation.
“I understand that under the law hate speech is free speech, and I believe in the ACLU’s mandate to protect all people’s civil liberties and civil rights,” Oliver wrote in a statement to the Forward. “I am aware of the ACLU’s stance and understand the difference between the affiliate’s work and my own frameworks and political leanings.”
The third-party investigation is set to be completed in November.
The post Top Jewish lawyers quit Indiana ACLU amid controversy over new director appeared first on The Forward.
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Arab parties are kingmakers, but will Israel’s Jewish leaders accept them?
(JTA) — JERUSALEM – Less than an hour after election night exit polls were published, Mansour Abbas, the leader of the Islamist Ra’am party, whose representation was predicted to almost double, declared: “We will translate this electoral power into an influential political force … we’re here — not on the sidelines.”
With all the votes now counted, Ra’am has indeed grown from five to eight seats, while the other Arab party, the Joint List, has received 11. Their combined unprecedented 19 seats out of a total of 120 in Israel’s parliament, the Knesset, now make the Arab parties a powerful force and one that could potentially break the political deadlock after neither the bloc led by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu nor the opposition bloc led by Gadi Eisenkot have enough seats to form a governing coalition.
A record number of Arab-Israelis voted in last Tuesday’s election, signaling for the first time in Israel’s history that the country’s Arab public, which makes up around 21% of the general population, is demanding to be counted in Israel’s political process.
The question, now, is whether Israel’s Jewish political leaders — and the public they represent — are ready to accept them as legitimate partners in governing the country.
“The Arab parties managed to produce an historic turnout in the Arab community, a reflection of this population joining Israeli democracy and the democratic process, and their desire to see their issues being taken care of by the Israeli government and political system,” Yohanan Plesner, president of the Israel Democracy Institute, told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency.
“But while they performed phenomenally and beyond any expectation, it’s still too early to tell whether the massive expectations that led Israeli Arab voters to the streets will actually be met by a political system willing to respond to this desire,” he said.
The record voter turnout among Arab-Israeli citizens breaks with a decades-old tradition of shunning Israel’s political institutions in protest over the conflict with the Palestinians – many themselves identify as Palestinian citizens of Israel – and a feeling that whoever is in power will not truly address their needs.
After four years of a government dominated by far-right Israeli nationalists, however, Arab voters felt they had no choice but to step up, analysts told JTA. It was not only the inflammatory rhetoric and attacks on the Arab community by senior government ministers that drove up turnout to some 80% – compared to only 53.2% in the last election in 2022 – but also the outgoing government’s policies.
Minister of National Security Itamar Ben-Gvir, who prior to his political career was convicted for incitement to racism, has overseen mass demolitions of illegally built homes, especially in the Bedouin towns in Israel’s Negev region, and failed to address soaring crime rates in Arab towns.
Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich has threatened to force the Arab population in Israel out of the land, outlining in September a plan to Judaize Arab-majority areas in Israel’s periphery. In one recent case, he even backed young Israeli Jews who set up an illegal outpost inside an Israeli-Arab town.
It is such moves, as well as multiple statements casting suspicion on Israel’s Arab sector, especially following Hamas’s Oct. 7, 2023, massacre in southern Israel, that ultimately pushed the community to vote en masse, according to experts on the Arab community. Many cast ballots for the first time.
“It was an existential fear,” said Michael Milshtein, head of the Palestinian Studies Forum at the Moshe Dayan Center at Tel Aviv University, who has researched political trends in Israel’s Arab community for years.
He pointed to a poll published following the election by Arabic-language newspaper Kul al-Arab showing that nearly 92% of Arab voters said that the main thing driving them out to vote was the fear of Smotrich and Ben-Gvir.
“It’s an almost unprecedented motivation,” he said. “But it can also be a formula for a cascade of expectations.”
Among those expectations now is that Israel’s majority Jewish parties that have promised change in the country – and promised to oust Netanyahu and his far-right partners – will include Arab parties or at least make use of this electoral momentum.
The political party Ra’am, which has roots in the Muslim Brotherhood, has already shown a willingness to join the government. The party, which focuses on social welfare issues and fighting crime, already broke down barriers in 2021 by joining former prime ministers Naftali Bennett and Yair Lapid in a government that briefly ousted Netanyahu.
For the Joint List, an alliance of three majority Arab parties focusing on socialist politics, civic equality for Arab citizens of Israel and Palestinian nationalism, joining an Israeli government or even providing it with a safety net from the outside is a big step.
All three parties – Hadash, a left-wing socialist party, Ta’al, a party promoting Arab civic rights and equality, and Balad, which represents pan-Arab nationalism – hold at their core the fight for Palestinian rights and national statehood.
Yet at least two of the parties, Hadash and Ta’al, have indicated a willingness to put some of their agenda aside in order to help change Israel’s current leadership.
“We are ready for political cooperation to form an alternative government that will present a genuine alternative and commit to a fundamental change in the current government’s racist policies,” Yousef Jabareen, head of the Joint List, said as votes were being counted on Thursday. “A government that will work to recognize the rights of the Arab public and end its exclusion, and that of its representatives, from the political system.”
However, Gadi Taub, a professor at Hebrew University of Jerusalem and co-host of the Israel Update podcast, called including such parties in Israel’s government “ridiculous.”
“These parties are anti-Zionist, they are against the very existence of Israel and some of them are direct terror supporters,” he said, referring to statements made by Balad’s leader Sami Abu Shehade after Oct. 7, which he later walked back.
“None of them will designate Hamas as a terror organization, even after Oct. 7,” noted Taub, adding that Israeli law should forbid parties that are openly against a Jewish state from running for parliament.
He pointed out that attempts to ban the Arab parties from running in this election were ultimately blocked by Israel’s Supreme Court, although Shehade did withdraw from the race. No other country would tolerate political leaders that “do not acknowledge the self-determination” of the country they live in, said Taub.
Including Arab parties in a government is something that was not even considered by Jewish or Zionist-focused parties until the offer came from Ra’am in 2021. In fact, there have only ever been two Muslim Arab ministers, Ghaleb Majadele, a member of the Labor Party, who served under former prime minister Ehud Olmert and Issawi Frej, from the Meretz Party who served from June 2021 to December 2022.
Three years after Oct. 7, when fear and mistrust of Arabs because of the attack remain high, the idea of aligning politically with Arab politicians who openly advocate for Palestinians is even more complex.
While Netanyahu and his coalition partners painted such a collaboration as an existential threat for the state in the lead-up to last week’s vote, almost all the parties in Eisenkot’s bloc, except for the Democrats headed by Yair Golan, also ruled out the possibility.
Mairav Zonszein, a senior Israel analyst with the International Crisis Group, said it was difficult to evaluate whether Israeli society as a whole was now ready for such political influence from Arab Israelis, but said the more pertinent question was whether Eisenkot and his political partners, Naftali Bennett and Avigdor Lieberman, were ready for it.
“This is pretty much their only option if they want to get rid of Benjamin Netanyahu,” she said. “The main question is how important it is for them to remove Netanyahu that they would be willing to compromise on something that they made a frontline issue?”
Zonszein added that even center-left former prime minister Yair Lapid, whom she characterized as pragmatic in every other way in his efforts to oust Netanyahu, has stated that he would not work with the Arabs.
She called lumping the entire sector together “outrageous.”
“It really defies the very notion of a democracy,” Zonszein said, accusing Netanyahu of dismissing “Palestinians just for being Palestinians, regardless of the fact that they are law-abiding citizens, that they pay taxes and are present in all aspects of the workforce.”
Throughout Election Day, the embattled Netanyahu published a stream of video clips declaring that Arabs were “flocking” to the polls. He told his supporters that if they did not want an Islamist state in Israel, then they’d better get out and vote for him.
Analysis by some fact-checkers has since revealed that many of the images Netanyahu used to scare his voters were in fact AI-generated fakes.
Tani Frank, director of the Shalom Hartman Institute’s Center for Judaism and State Policy, argued that the delegitimization of the Arab vote was one of the “focal points of the Likud campaign.”
“One reason for this is to weaken the ability of the change bloc to form a government with the support of, or reliance on, the Arab parties — specifically Ra’am and Mansour Abbas, who has already done so previously,” he said.
Frank said he believed that the willingness of Jewish Israelis to accept cooperation with Arab parties, especially after Oct. 7 and the Likud campaign, was extremely limited.
A few days before the election, a snap poll conducted by the Israel Democracy Institute found that “a clear majority of Israeli Jews opposed either Arab party playing a role in any government.”
While a majority of those on the left said that they would support a coalition of center and left-wing parties with the support or participation of the Arab parties, those in the center and right preferred another round of voting rather than forming a coalition with them.
Since the election, Netanyahu and his supporters have tried to cast doubt on the mass Arab turnout and on the legitimacy of the Arab political leadership. This has included accusations by members of his Likud party of voter fraud and foreign interference from Qatar, followed by statements Thursday from the Central Elections Committee that it was investigating foreign funding irregularities.
Netanyahu wrote in a post on X: “The elections in the State of Israel were stolen by Arab parties that support terrorism and the elimination of the Jewish state, through serious criminal offences involving bribery, threats, violence, forgery and the use of prohibited software to mobilize voters.”
Supreme Court Justice Noam Sohlberg, head of the elections committee, said on Sunday at a press conference with the country’s attorney general and the director of the Israel Security Agency, the Shin Bet, that the investigation into alleged foreign funding was serious and ongoing but would not change the results.
“Our position is that even if the suspicions are substantiated, this would not undermine the integrity of the electoral process or the election results as a whole,” he said.
On Saturday night, protests were held by both those against allowing Arabs into the government and those who believe it is the only way forward. A small group of those who are against such a move gathered in Tel Aviv chanting that Israel must not allow “terror supporters into the government.” Much larger groups of protesters in favor of a collaboration gathered around the country urging Eisenkot to take the step.
Mohamed Darawshe, a political analyst and director of strategy at Givat Haviva, a leading center educating for a shared society in Israel, said that if after the massive turnout on Election Day the Arab parties were not included in a change government, there would be great “disappointment.”
“If they are blocked from the right wing, that is understandable. But if their natural partners in Jewish society block them, they will end up turning their back on the whole political scene,” he said.
Darawshe said such a scenario would make Arab society unlikely to participate in such numbers in future elections.
“It will be like a vote of no confidence in the Israeli political system and complete disbelief in the promise that Israel can offer political equality as promised in the Declaration of Independence,” he said.
Political equality, Darawshe pointed out, is “not just allowing Arab citizens to exercise their equal rights on the day of the elections, but also to exercise their rights the day after the election, meaning allowing them to be part of the coalition and not to create a glass ceiling at representation in parliament.”
This article originally appeared on JTA.org.
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