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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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Exclusive: As Ceasefire Extended, Iranian Voice Describes Deepening Repression, Waning Hope Under Regime’s Grip
People attend the funeral of the security forces who were killed in the protests that erupted over the collapse of the currency’s value in Tehran, Iran, Jan. 14, 2026. Photo: Majid Asgaripour/WANA (West Asia News Agency) via REUTERS
As a fragile ceasefire halting the US-Israeli military campaign in Iran continues, some Iranians say the pause in fighting has not brought relief but rather fear that the regime is regaining strength while internal repression intensifies.
In western Iran, a former schoolteacher who asked to be identified as “Maddie Ali” for security reasons says the ceasefire has left many ordinary citizens feeling abandoned and exposed, watching authorities tighten control while hopes for meaningful change fade.
“People actually felt more hopeful when the war was ongoing. Now, with the ceasefire in place, many feel discouraged and disappointed about the future, which feels increasingly uncertain,” Ali told The Algeminer in an exclusive interview.
Ali lost her job after authorities imposed a nationwide internet blackout when fighting erupted earlier this year — a disruption that continues to shape daily life and restrict communication with the outside world, effectively cutting millions of Iranians off from independent reporting on the war and access to global news.
Internet access remains unstable across much of the country, forcing many people to rely on illegal black-market virtual private networks (VPNs) — tools that bypass government censorship — to stay connected beyond Iran’s borders, with access reportedly costing millions of tomans per gigabyte. (A toman is one-tenth of the rial, the official currency of Iran.)
Iran’s nationwide internet blackout has become the longest recorded of its kind, as authorities continue restricting access to the outside world in an effort to suppress internal opposition and silence domestic dissent.
Iranian authorities have even warned that citizens suspected of accessing the internet through VPNs could face arrest or imprisonment. According to state media reports, Iranian security forces have arrested several citizens in recent weeks for using the Starlink satellite internet system, which allows users to bypass state-controlled terrestrial infrastructure.
Human rights groups have warned that the regime repeatedly uses nationwide internet shutdowns as a tool to intensify its crackdown on opposition movements and conceal ongoing abuses from international scrutiny.
Ali said many people in Iran fear the ceasefire is giving authorities time to regroup and rebuild.
“People are deeply disappointed that the US and Israeli sides agreed to a ceasefire without taking the Iranian population into account,” Ali told The Algemeiner. “The regime has repeatedly proven its capacity to rebuild and recover time and time again.”
The US–Iran ceasefire, which took effect on April 8, was initially set to expire on Wednesday night if no agreement was reached. US President Donald Trump told Bloomberg on Monday that he was “highly unlikely” to extend the truce without a deal with Tehran.
“I’m not going to be rushed into making a bad deal,” the president said.
On Tuesday, however, Trump announced that he was extending the ceasefire indefinitely, to allow the two countries to continue peace talks to end the war.
In a statement on social media, Trump said he had agreed to a request by Pakistan, which has mediated the talks, “to hold our Attack on the Country of Iran until such time as their leaders and representatives can come up with a unified proposal.”
Noting Iran’s government was “seriously fractured,” Trump said the US military would remain ready and continue its blockade on Iranian ports but continue abiding by the ceasefire “until such time as [Tehran’s] proposal is submitted, and discussions are concluded, one way or the other.”
According to Ali, who spoke with The Algemeiner before Trump’s announcement, reconstruction efforts began quickly after the fighting stopped, even as widespread infrastructure damage remained and internal repression intensified.
“There is frustration that the ceasefire may help the regime recover,” she said. “They started reconstruction for damaged sites and internal repression is still going on.”
Ali also said security forces remain highly visible across the country, especially after a sweeping crackdown earlier this year following mass demonstrations.
“We don’t have an option to really be out on the streets right now. It is really hard because of what happened in January. People are too afraid,” she said, referring to the nationwide anti-government protests, which security forces violently crushed, leaving tens of thousands of demonstrators tortured, imprisoned, or killed.
Checkpoints and surveillance now shape daily movement across many areas of the country.
“There are security forces on the streets stopping people, checking phones to see who they have been in contact with and reviewing messages — and they even make arrests,” Ali said.
Despite the risks, Ali said frustration with the regime runs deep after years of sustained crackdowns and tightening control.
“Most Iranians want an end to this regime. People are exhausted after decades of repression, arrests, executions, surveillance, and control,” she said. “Everybody was waiting for Israel and the US to do something and help us.”
“At the same time, people don’t support war itself — they support removing the regime, which is deeply rooted throughout the country,” Ali continued.
She said many Iranians initially saw the outbreak of fighting as a rare opening for change after years of failed internal protest movements.
“When the war began, many people actually felt hopeful,” Ali told The Algemeiner. “It’s not that they didn’t try to overthrow the regime themselves before — they did. But nothing worked.”
Even those who opposed the war, she said, are not necessarily defending the government.
“Those who were against the war mostly believed it would not lead to real change in the end — not that they supported the regime,” she explained.
More broadly, Ali said many citizens viewed outside military pressure as a necessary catalyst rather than something they welcomed.
“For many Iranians, support for the US and Israeli strikes came out of necessity and exhaustion — not because they support war,” she said.
Despite significant leadership losses during the conflict, Ali said the regime’s structure remains deeply entrenched nationwide.
“The regime and its ideology are embedded at every level — in cities, towns, and institutions across the country,” she said.
“From what we can see, the system is still functioning almost completely intact,” she continued. “It remains coordinated at both the national and local levels, and internal repression is actually increasing.”
“It feels suffocating and extreme, but at the same time it isn’t surprising,” she added.
For some inside Iran, Ali said, this reality has reshaped how people understand the scale of effort needed to dismantle the regime’s entrenched security apparatus.
“People support Israel and the United States, but they also believe airstrikes alone are not enough,” she said.
“Many believe that only a military ground intervention with troops on the ground could remove the regime from its roots,” she continued.
At the same time, she said many Iranians feel especially frustrated by what they see as political solidarity between Muslim-majority governments and Tehran’s leadership rather than support for ordinary citizens.
“Just because a government presents itself as Islamist does not give it the right to repress dissidents and crush its own people,” she said.
“Many Muslim countries have continued to cooperate with this regime, shaking hands with a killer regime instead of standing with the Iranian people,” Ali added.
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Netanyahu heckled at Israel’s official Memorial Day ceremony as bereaved families grasp for comfort
(JTA) — TEL MOND, Israel — Thousands of Israelis gathered in cemeteries all over Israel to commemorate the nation’s fallen soldiers and terror victims on Memorial Day, as public mourning collided with political anger, fresh wartime uncertainty and the private aftershocks consuming bereaved families.
In a Memorial Day message to bereaved families, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu also addressed the war against Iran and its Lebanese proxy Hezbollah, saying Israel has “already removed an existential threat.”
A short while later, President Donald Trump told CNBC’s Joe Kernan that he “expects to be bombing” Iran again if talks collapse ahead of Wednesday’s ceasefire deadline.
“We have returned all our hostages, struck our enemies hard, and made Israel a nation stronger than ever before,” Netanyahu said at an official Memorial Day ceremony at Mount Herzl in Jerusalem.
His comments prompted a heckler in the crowd to yell out, “Some of them died in tunnels,” in reference to the Israelis kidnapped to Gaza by the Hamas terror group and held underground.
Skirmishes broke out during a speech by MK Ofir Sofer, of the far-right Religious Zionist party at the Kiryat Shaul military cemetery in Tel Aviv, when attendees attempted to snatch signs held up by protesters that read “Government of death” and “I refuse to hear words of comfort from a government of criminals.”
At a cemetery in Tel Mond, Eyal Golan, whose sister Shirel died by suicide on her 22nd birthday, a year after surviving the Nova massacre near the Gaza border, also had harsh words for the government.
Reflecting on Knesset debates he attended after his sister’s death, as he pushed for a law in her name to provide unlimited, comprehensive mental health care to victims of terror, Golan said he was furious at what he described as the performative behavior of politicians from both the coalition and opposition.
“Off camera, they speak to each other normally,” he said. “But the moment the cameras turn on, it’s showtime. They fall into their roles, shouting and attacking each other. I’m sitting there thinking, how can this be real?”
“Instead of coming together, they just deepen the divide,” he said, but he credited two Knesset members from opposite sides of the political aisle — Moshe Gafni of United Torah Judaism and Merav Michaeli of Labor — with taking up the cause and advancing the legislation.
Eyal and other members of his family say the government failed Shirel as she grappled with acute PTSD in the months after the attack. Now advancing the bill, he said he hopes it will spare other families the same fate.
“The whole point of my crusade is to save others. No one will be able to bring back my sister. If I’m able to save one more soul, I’ve done my job,” he said.
The legislation, known informally as the Shirel Golan law, passed a preliminary reading in January 2026.
Sitting close to his daughter’s grave, covered in flowers, wreaths and candles, Eyal’s father Meir said he has fallen into a strange nightly ritual. Every night, he wakes up at 3 a.m. and makes himself a cup of coffee. He opens the smart TV to her YouTube account and for an hour or so watches the videos she had liked and subscribed to, including trance music emblematic of the Nova scene. At 4 a.m., he returns to bed.
“As soon as I turn it on, it says, ‘Hello Shirel, welcome back,’” Meir said, adding that it gives him a measure of tranquility, as if his daughter “is still around.”
Later, as Eyal made the 45-minute drive back to his home in the central Israeli city of Holon, he described the journey as the emotional hinge between mourning and the return to ordinary life.
“It’s a kind of magic hour during which I store the grief of the day in a box in my mind,” he said. “By Independence Day, I’ll go back to my main role, being a father to two daughters.”
He added, “That journey is a microcosm of Israeli society.”
Meir’s late-night visits to his daughter’s digital world are part of a wider private language of mourning that has taken hold among bereaved Israeli families, many of whom continue to reach for their dead through screens. On phones across the country, especially on the popular messaging platform WhatsApp, parents and siblings keep sending messages to loved ones who were killed, writing as if the conversation never ended. The messages, some of which were recorded in a special Memorial Day project by the Ynet news site, come at unguarded moments, during a football game, before a birthday, or in the middle of the night.
“What a goal, Yahav,” one father, Nir Maayan, wrote to his son, Yahav, who was killed in Gaza in January of last year.
Texting his son from his graveside, Nir wrote: “There are days of collapse, of longing, of not being able to accept reality. Moments when I try to imagine your final moments. What did you think? What did you feel? Answers I will never know. So I just rest my head on you, and somehow you comfort me and hold me. Someone is watching over me from above.”
“Tomorrow is your birthday, send mom a message,” a sister wrote to her deceased brother.
“The sky is beautiful today,” another wrote.
Dorit Ron keeps on texting her son Itai, who was killed on Oct. 7 at the Nahal Oz base near the Gaza border. “I expect an answer, a sign that he’s okay and with his father,” she said, according to the report. “Even though I know he won’t reply, to me he’s alive, just nearby, in another dimension.”
The post Netanyahu heckled at Israel’s official Memorial Day ceremony as bereaved families grasp for comfort appeared first on The Forward.
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Israel jails soldiers who smashed Jesus statue in Lebanon, installs a new one
(JTA) — An Israeli soldier who bludgeoned a statue of Jesus in southern Lebanon and another soldier who photographed the act have both been dismissed from combat duty and sentenced to 30 days in military detention, the Israeli military said on Monday.
“The IDF expresses deep regret over the incident and emphasizes that its operations in Lebanon are directed solely against the Hezbollah terrorist organization and other terrorist groups, and not against Lebanese civilians,” the IDF said in a statement.
The military also announced it had replaced the damaged statue with a new one “in full coordination with the local community of Debel in southern Lebanon.” The town is a Christian enclave within a region that is a Hezbollah stronghold.
A short while ago, in full coordination with the local community of Debel in southern Lebanon, the damaged statue was replaced by IDF troops. The Northern Command worked to coordinate the replacement of the statue from the moment it received the report of the incident.
The IDF… pic.twitter.com/nGh1s1iia1
— Israel Defense Forces (@IDF) April 21, 2026
Photos of the incident, which depicted the soldier striking an overturned Jesus statue, were quickly condemned by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and the IDF as they spread on Sunday.
By Monday, a letter condemning the act had drawn over 80 signatures by prominent Jewish leaders, including former Israeli cabinet minister Michael Melchior; American antisemitism activist Shabbos Kestenbaum; and Orthodox rabbis in Israel and the United States.
“This act is a chillul Hashem — a desecration of God’s name,” the letter said. “It is an affront to the ancient Christian communities of the Middle East and to Christians all over the world. It is a vile betrayal of the Jewish values upon which the State of Israel was founded. And it is a wound inflicted upon the fragile Jewish-Christian friendship that is more important than ever.”
The announcement of the punishment comes as the IDF said it was probing an incident in the West Bank in which a reservist soldier reportedly killed two Palestinians, aged 14 and 32.
The post Israel jails soldiers who smashed Jesus statue in Lebanon, installs a new one appeared first on The Forward.