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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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Mamdani Hedges in Response to Mob Targeting New York City Synagogue
New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani holds a press conference at the New York City Office of Emergency Management, as a major winter storm spreads across a large swath of the United States, in Brooklyn, New York City, US, Jan. 25, 2026. Photo: REUTERS/Bing Guan
Protests targeting an Israeli real estate event at a New York City synagogue have put Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s leadership under renewed scrutiny after demonstrators returned to the Upper East Side location on Tuesday night.
The demonstration prompted a significant police response and raised concerns about rising antisemitic rhetoric in the city home to the world’s largest Jewish population outside of Israel.
Protesters gathered outside Park East Synagogue in Manhattan during a showcase called “The Great Israeli Real Estate Event 2026,” which included the marketing of properties in Israel proper as well as West Bank settlements. At the demonstration, activists held signs and chanted slogans that went beyond criticism of Israel, seemingly calling for the death and expulsion of Jews and, in some cases, support for US-designated terrorist groups.
“Death, death to the IDF [Israel Defense Forces],” “Rapists,” and “Settlers, settlers go back home, Palestine is ours alone” were among the insults screamed by the protesters, some of whom also waved flags belonging to the Lebanese terrorist group Hezbollah.
The scene marked a return to the same synagogue that was the site of a contentious protest in November, which drew widespread condemnation and sparked debate over the boundaries between political expression and hate speech. At that gathering, demonstrators chanted “We don’t want no Zionists here” and “Resistance, you make us proud, take another settler out,” among others. One speaker claimed, “It is our duty to make them think twice before holding these events! We need to make them scared.”
Both protests were organized by the anti-Zionist activist organization Pal-Awda.
This time, however, the New York City Police Department (NYPD) appeared better prepared. Officers established barricades and maintained distance between demonstrators and synagogue attendees, preventing the kind of close confrontations seen in the earlier protest. While tensions remained high, authorities largely kept the situation contained, avoiding major physical clashes.
Still, video circulating on social media appeared to show hordes of protesters storming and attempting to penetrate the barricades erected by the NYPD to separate the synagogue from the demonstrations. According to multiple reports, police had to deploy pepper-spray and at least one officer was hospitalized during the chaos.
Ronen Levy, a Queens-based pro-Israel counterprotester, repudiated the demonstrations as a threat to the local Jewish community.
“You want to protest? You want to assemble on the street, you want to assemble in a park, you want to assemble in a center or Columbus Circle? You’re more than welcome,” Levy told AMNY. “But to protest in a shul or a mosque or a church, that’s unethical, that’s un-American.”
“It came to where they do it in the shul, because it’s a lot easier to get Jewish people to come down, because it’s a Jewish congregation,” Levy continued. “Most people in synagogues, they want to go live in Israel.”
The incident came amid an ongoing surge in antisemitic hate crimes in New York City. According to police data, Jews this year have been targeted in the majority of all hate crimes committed in the city, continuing a troubling trend of rising antisemitism following Hamas’s Oct. 7, 2023, massacre across southern Israel. Mamdani took office on Jan. 1.
Jewish community leaders have increasingly voiced concern about demonstrations occurring near religious institutions, warning that such actions blur the line between protest and intimidation.
Mamdani, who faced criticism over his response to the November protest outside the same Manhattan synagogue, on Wednesday expressed support for the police’s response but also condemned the Israeli real estate event.
“I think that I’ve made it clear time and time again that we in this city believe in the sacrosanct nature of the right to protest, and also are committed to ensuring that any New Yorker can safely enter or exit from a house of worship, and that access never be in question, while we also protect the First Amendment,” Mamdani said during a press conference. “And I do believe that the police ensured that yesterday evening.”
However, the mayor went on to defend the protesters’ cause.
“There is no tolerance for hatred of Jewish New Yorkers,” he said. “I’ve also been clear to New Yorkers, my honest opinions about the fact that when we have a real estate expo that is promoting the sale of land, which includes the sale of land in occupied West Bank in settlements that are a violation of international law, that that is something that I firmly disagree with.”
“I also believe that many New Yorkers firmly disagree with it, because it has been at the heart of an ongoing effort to displace Palestinians from their homes,” Mamdani added.
Mamdani’s office issued a similar statement on Tuesday in the hours leading up to the protest.
“He further inflamed tensions on an already volatile situation,” the Anti-Defamation League’s New York/New Jersey branch said of Mamdani’s comments. “The mayor had a responsibility to de-escalate. He did the opposite.”
Mamadani faced intense criticism from Jewish leaders and pro-Israel advocates after issuing a similar statement in November that appeared to legitimize the gathering of demonstrators who called for violence against Jews outside Park East Synagogue.
Julie Menin, the speaker of City Council, defended the protesters’ first Amendment Rights while admonishing efforts to intimidate synagogue attendees.
“The right to peaceful protest must be protected, and so must the ability of individuals to safely access a house of worship without fear or intimidation,” Menin said.
Mamdani has come under immense scrutiny over his record of anti-Israel statements, repeatedly accusing Israel of committing “genocide” in Gaza and claiming that Israel does not grant “equal rights” to all of its inhabitants. Given his track record of anti-Israel sentiment, which according to critics has fueled hostility toward Jews, Mamdani’s handling of antisemitism has come under the spotlight.
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AI-Generated ‘Rabbis’ on TikTok Push Antisemitism, Generate Over 10 Million Likes, Report Reveals
TikTok app logo is seen in this illustration taken, Aug. 22, 2022. Photo: REUTERS/Dado Ruvic
The Combat Antisemitism Movement (CAM) released a report on Tuesday exposing 49 TikTok accounts which have amassed large followings pushing bigoted stereotypes with phony rabbi videos created using generative artificial intelligence programs.
Analysts at CAM’s Antisemitism Research Center found that the accounts — which use handles such as @rabbirothstein @rabingoldmaan @rabbistirberg, and @rabbi_silverstein — had collected 950,000 users and provoked over 10 million likes.
Across accounts, researchers found similar narratives and linguistic patterns in service of a common modus operandi: recasting conventional antisemitic stereotypes by having rabbis promote them as obvious truths.
The first “rabbi” introduced in the report is “RabbiSilverman.” One video features the rabbi figure holding a bottle of Coca-Cola with the caption “$4 at the airport and $7 on a flight.” Another shows the rabbi sitting inside of a limo while he holds a gold bar and a stack of $100 bills alongside the description “when the dollar and gold go up together.” Three more images show the rabbi sitting and studying the Torah at a table while a red sports car sits in a showroom behind him.
The rabbi in one video sports a giant nose and says, “As Jews, never sign a contract without reading every single line.”
Another fake “rabbi” presented is “Rabbi StirBerg.” Sitting in front of a bookshelf in what resembles a synagogue’s office, videos include such instructions as “never give your kids an allowance” and “Jews are wealthy because we don’t feel guilty for wanting more money.” Another taunts, “by 8 our kids know why yours stay poor.”
Examples of AI-generated rabbi videos pushing antisemitism on TikTok. Photo: Screenshot
CAM noted that the antisemitism on TikTok would especially impact youth.
“The danger is clear. By masquerading as authentic Jewish voices, these ‘rabbis’ erode trust, normalize hatred, and incite real-world violence targeting Jews,” CAM said. “By amplifying this content to young, impressionable audiences, TikTok is complicit in accelerating radicalization in an era when AI is making disinformation increasingly difficult to detect.”
CAM called on TikTok to “immediately invest in AI detection tools specifically trained to identify synthetic religious impersonation, implement guidelines to ensure traffic is not actively directed to such accounts, and launch a public awareness campaign highlighting how to spot AI-generated propaganda.”
Jewish creators on TikTok have long objected to antisemitism on the platform. In November 2023, a group of more than 40 content creators and public figures raised the alarm about the antisemitism they had experienced on the platform, calling for more robust safety features and content moderation. TikTok responded at the time saying, “We’ve taken important steps to protect our community and prevent the spread of hate, and we appreciate ongoing, honest dialogue, and feedback as we continually work to strengthen these protections.”
The research into TikTok follows similar findings from CAM in a March report that revealed a proliferation of fake AI rabbis on Meta’s Instagram platform. One “Rabbi Goldman” account identified in the report had reached 1.4 million followers. Combined with 11 other imposters, the following reached 2.1 million. CAM noted how the variety of rabbis each presented with different voices and persona, but all promoted the same money-obsessed stereotypes.
Following the Instagram report, CAM reported that Meta had removed more than 60 Instagram accounts, including those in other languages like French, Italian, German, and Spanish. The watchdog group praised the technology company founded and led by CEO Mark Zuckerberg, saying that “Meta has been highly responsive in working with CAM to better understand this activity and identify ways to reduce its reach and minimize its exposure to users.”
CAM vowed to remain vigilant to the threat, warning that “these identities are easily recreated and quickly reappear. CAM will continue to cooperate with Meta to address this expanding network … without sustained monitoring and rapid response, these false identities will continue to shape online discourse, reinforcing hostility toward Jewish communities that translates into real-world violence.”
In March, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman announced his decision to shut down the AI video-generating app Sora, a platform which hosted videos showing Jews chasing after coins, cheating poor people out of money, and being run over by a car. Research released by the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) in October found that in at least 40 percent of cases, programs would still generate responses when given antisemitic, extremists, or other hateful prompts.
CAM warned of the real-world consequences from the TikTok videos.
The report stated that antisemitic tropes “have historically instigated violence — from pogroms to the Holocaust to contemporary attacks on Jews. In the digital age, this content contributes to a documented global rise in antisemitic incidents by providing ‘evidence’ that justifies hostility. The visual caricatures (large noses, ostentatious wealth) further dehumanize Jews, erasing a psychological barrier to violence.”
In February, police in the Netherlands arrested 15 people, charging them with using TikTok to promote propaganda for the Islamic State. Some videos reached as high as 100,000 views. They urged views to join the terrorist group and glorified the “martyrs” who had died in service of the group’s mission of creating a global caliphate empowered to impose strict, Salafi-interpretations of Shariah law across the entire planet.
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Artists, Cultural Workers Plan Strike for Venice Biennale in Protest of Israel’s Participation
Signage for the 61st Venice Biennale running from May 9 to November 22. Photo: IMAGO/Frank Ossenbrink via Reuters Connect
An anti-Israel collective announced a 24-hour strike for artists and cultural workers on Friday, the day before the 61st Venice Biennale opens to the public, in protest of Israel’s inclusion in the event.
The Art Not Genocide Alliance (ANGA) is organizing the strike on the city’s Viale Garibaldi, and a number of groups, unions, and art spaces have already vowed to participate including Biennaleocene, a coalition of cultural workers in Venice that formed in 2023. The strike was announced right before ANGA hosted a massive protest at the Biennale.
The international art exhibition opened for previews on Wednesday and ANGA disrupted the opening, assembling a protest outside of Israel’s temporary pavilion in the Biennale’s Arsenal complex. ANGA said “hundreds” participated in the protest and claimed the decision to include Israel in this year’s Biennale “constitutes active institutional support for a state committing genocide in Gaza against the Palestinian people.”
“Protestors marched through the Arsenale with large banners, Palestinian flags, placards, and distributed flyers calling for the shut down [sic] of the Genocide Pavilion,” ANGA wrote in an Instagram post that featured pictures from the protest. “ISRAEL YOU CAN’T HIDE, WE CHARGE YOU WITH GENOCIDE! The demand is clear: Boycott the Israeli pavilion and SHUT IT DOWN.”
ANGA previously published an open letter, signed by hundreds of event participants, that called for Israel to be boycotted from this year’s Venice Biennale. Last week, the jury for the 2026 Venice Biennale resigned mere days after saying it would not consider awarding the event’s top prizes to countries whose leaders are facing charges of crimes against humanity by the International Criminal Court, meaning Israel and Russia.
After the jury’s resignation, organizers of the Biennale announced new “Visitor’s Lion” awards. The public will vote for the winners, and Russia and Israel are both eligible to take home those awards. The award ceremony for the 2026 Venice Biennale has also been pushed from May 9 to Nov. 22, which is the last day of the show.
Romanian artist Belu-Simion Fainaru is representing Israel in this year’s event with his installation “Rose of Nothingness,” which will highlight Jewish mysticism, memory, and poetry.
At the 2024 Venice Biennale, artist Ruth Patir closed Israel’s official pavilion to the public until a ceasefire and hostage release agreement could be agreed upon. That same year ANGA supporters protested outside of the American and Israeli pavilions during previews for the Biennale, in condemnation of US support for Israel. The group of anti-Israel activists also protested outside the French, British, and German pavilions, because of each country’s relations with Israel.