Uncategorized
A Florida bill attacking ‘critical theory’ in higher education has the state’s Jewish academics worried
(JTA) — The University of Florida has more Jewish students than any other public college in the United States — and last week, one of them reached out to a professor, fearing that it would no longer be possible to study Jewish topics there.
Citing a graphic that had been making the rounds on social media, the student asked if it was true that a new bill working its way through the state legislature would remove all “Jewish Studies courses, majors and minors” in the state. The graphic was shared by several people with large online followings, including comedian D.L. Hughley, who has more than 750,000 followers on Twitter.
“I love my major and I can’t imagine switching to anything else,” the student wrote, according to Norman Goda, director of the university’s Center for Jewish Studies.
Goda wasn’t able to console the student. Like other Jewish academics in Florida who spoke to the Jewish Telegraphic Agency, he doesn’t know whether H.B. 999 would affect Jewish studies on the state’s college campuses. Though the bill’s author — a Republican state representative — says that won’t be the case, the bill’s language is much less clear.
That’s because the bill’s current wording would forbid the state’s public higher education institutions from teaching or offering any major or minor based in “methodology associated with Critical Theory.” That prohibition, say academics and other critics of the bill, would make teaching courses in Jewish studies impossible — and would also outlaw many other fields in higher education.
Exactly what the bill means by “critical theory” is unclear. To academics, the term refers to a tool for analyzing society and culture, created in the 1930s by German Jewish academics, that encourages people to view the world through power structures, and to consider why they fall short. To political conservatives, it’s a relative of “critical race theory,” a watchword for those who want to inhibit classroom instruction about racism. An earlier version of H.B. 999 mentioned only critical race theory, not the umbrella theory.
“These people don’t know what they’re talking about,” said a Jewish faculty member at a Florida university, who requested anonymity due to fear of retaliation from the state government, regarding the lawmakers behind H.B. 999. “You’re putting people who don’t know what critical theory is, but have heard the words — and now you’re putting them in charge of universities.”
A university that completely purged such ideas from its classrooms, the anonymous faculty member said, “would be non-existent.”
The bill in question is the latest example of conservative-led state efforts to snuff out culture-war modes of thought like critical race theory and gender studies, often referred to euphemistically by lawmakers as “divisive concepts” in education. Such efforts have occasionally ensnared efforts to teach Jewish history and the Holocaust.
Attempts to legislate the classroom are particularly potent in Florida, where Republican governor Ron DeSantis, a likely presidential candidate, has frequently stated his desire to ban “woke” concepts from being taught in the state. (DeSantis has stated he will wait to see H.B. 999’s final form before he decides whether to sign it, but in a discussion with college administrators last week he continued to rail against what he called the “ideological agenda” of campus diversity, equity and inclusion programs.)
The state recently rejected the curriculum for a new Advanced Placement African-American Studies course in high schools, forcing the College Board to rework the class. Florida is also home to several active conservative “parents’ rights” groups that have lobbied to remove objectionable books and clubs from public schools.
While most legislation in this realm to date has targeted what’s taught in K-12 public schools, this bill and other efforts in Florida have gone a step further by seeking to regulate the world of state-funded higher education — creating what critics say are new and dangerous threats to academic freedom, with broad and vague wording that leaves efforts to research and teach a variety of disciplines in doubt.
“This bill would cripple the long-standing freedom universities have to design and teach a curriculum based on the development of academic disciplines,” Cary Nelson, an emeritus professor at the University of Illinois and past president of the American Association of University Professors ,who has taught multiple courses on Jewish issues, told JTA.
In a recent subcommittee hearing on the bill, Republican state Rep. Alex Andrade, who co-authored the legislation, said, “I believe that state universities should be focused on teaching students how to think, not what to think.” He said the bill’s banning of “radical” ideologies referred to “a system meant to direct and promote certain activism to achieve a specific viewpoint.”
Efforts to limit the material taught to children and college students are underway in several states. But Florida has an especially large population of Jewish students. The University of Florida stands atop Hillel International’s ranking of public colleges with the highest proportion of Jewish students, and the University of Central Florida has the third-largest. Florida State University, Florida International University, Florida Atlantic University and the University of South Florida also rank in the top 60.
H.B. 999 would affect education at those schools in other ways, too. The bill, which recently advanced to committee, would overhaul the state’s post-tenure review process, so that instead of checking on a faculty member’s research productivity every five years, as is currently the case in the state, tenured professors could face reviews “at any time for cause” including “violation of any applicable law or rule.”
The result, one academic in the state said, would be “open season on faculty,” who could be out of a job if their university’s board — which, in public schools, is beholden to the governor — disagrees with their syllabus.
Andrade rejected the idea that H.B. 999 would undercut Jewish studies in Florida.
“Outsiders are wrong. Ethnic studies are not affected by the bill either by the bill’s intent or the bill’s language,” Andrade wrote in an email to JTA, accusing the bill’s critics of “lying and claiming that Florida’s leaders have tried to ban teaching black history in schools.”
The state’s only Jewish Republican legislator, state Rep. Randy Fine, did not return a JTA request for comment on whether he supports the bill. Fine has promoted similar culture-war legislation in the past, including a bill he co-authored in February that would prohibit all K-12 schools in the state from referring to either students or employees by pronouns that do not correspond to the sex they were assigned at birth.
With a Republican-dominated House and Senate, some form of H.B. 999 seems likely to reach DeSantis’ desk. (A parallel bill in the state Senate does not contain wording on critical theory.) But there is strong opposition from the academic community. Groups including the American Historical Association, the American Association of University Professors and Florida’s statewide faculty union have harshly condemned the bill and urged lawmakers to oppose it.
The American Historical Association’s statement on the bill this month calls it a “blatant and frontal attack on principles of academic freedom and shared governance central to higher education in the United States.” More than 70 academic, historical and activist organizations co-signed the statement.
The executive committee of the Association for Jewish Studies signed a different statement authored by the American Council of Learned Societies, decrying the bill as an “effort to undermine academic freedom in Florida.”
“If it passes, it ends academic freedom in the state’s public colleges and universities, with dire consequences for their teaching, research, and financial well-being,” the statement said of the bill. “Academic freedom means freedom of thought, not the state-mandated production of histories edited to suit one party’s agenda in the current culture wars.”
Asked for comment on the bill, Warren Hoffman, the executive director of the Association for Jewish Studies, pointed to the statement.
Rachel Harris, director and endowed chair at Florida Atlantic University’s Jewish Studies program, is in her first semester at the university, having just arrived from the University of Illinois. “I’m now wondering if that was a terrible mistake,” she joked. (Harris is spending this term in Israel, researching on a Fulbright fellowship.)
Still, Harris said she was “confident” that legislators would “continue to support educational commitments in the state,” noting that Florida has a Holocaust education mandate for K-12 public schools. Her Boca Raton university is currently building an expanded center for Jewish and Holocaust studies, funded by private donors. H.B. 999 in its current form would prohibit universities from teaching critical theory concepts even when such programs are privately funded.
Despite what he described as a few students at the Jewish Studies center who are concerned about the new bill, Goda said he did not think the legislation would change the experience of Jewish students on his campus.
“Jewish kids these days are really choosing universities based on whether or not Jewish kids feel comfortable there,” he said. “And I would argue that [the University of Florida] is a very welcoming campus for Jewish kids overall. There are strong Jewish institutions associated with the campus.”
Instead, he feels the bill’s real effects would be felt in the state’s ability to recruit faculty and staff while its legislators jeopardize academic freedom, tenure and other lodestars of the humanities. He said, “The real question to me is how and in what way it’s going to be enforced.”
—
The post A Florida bill attacking ‘critical theory’ in higher education has the state’s Jewish academics worried appeared first on Jewish Telegraphic Agency.
Uncategorized
Blinken, Pompeo: Strong U.S.-Israel ties, assistance to continue despite Trump call to end aid
(JTA) — Former secretaries of state Antony Blinken and Mike Pompeo both downplayed the potential end of American military aid to Israel on Sunday, insisting such a development would not harm U.S.-Israel ties during a joint appearance in Washington.
Speaking at the Jewish Federations of North America’s annual General Assembly, both men also defended Israel’s security and its need to defend itself in the wake of the Hamas attack on Oct. 7, 2023, condemning voices who try to equate Israel’s actions with those of Hamas and accuse it of committing genocide.
But Blinken, who was secretary of state in the Biden administration at the time, also didn’t spare Jerusalem from criticism over its conduct of the war.
Following Oct. 7, “the Israelis did, for the most part, the bare minimum of what they felt they needed to do for people who were stuck in the middle of this crossfire in Gaza,” he said. “There was a certain amount of disregard, a certain amount of disdain for the well-being of the Palestinian civilians.”
He added that “that is vastly different, vastly different from an intent to do them harm, from an intent to eliminate them. The target was Hamas, and horrifically, too many people were caught in the middle of that and suffered terribly as a consequence.”
Still, he said, it is important to “recognize that we’re at an inflection point” when it comes to American attitudes toward Israel. Blinken recalled discussions with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu as the Gaza war was raging in which he warned that Israel was “not only losing the Democratic Party — and that may be fine from your perspective — you’re going to be losing young Republicans, young evangelicals.”
On Election Day last week, following campaigns in which many candidates called for reducing support for Israel, President Donald Trump declared that the money “gets cut off at the end of the year.”
Pompeo, who served as CIA director and secretary of state during the first Trump administration, said that while he did not “know exactly how this administration will follow through on that,” there had been conversations between Jerusalem and Washington “about what’s the appropriate level of assistance and what [is] the right model” for cooperation.
Calls to change the nature of U.S. military aid have become “bipartisan,” he noted.
Stating that he is “very optimistic,” the former Republican congressman asserted that “whether we provide the $4 billion a year — which … mostly goes to buy U.S. weapons systems from Lockheed and Raytheon and big defense contractors — is much less material than the nature of the relationship between the United States and Israel.”
“And so whether we provide that particular money, there will still be deep connectivity. There’ll still be lots of assistance, and there will be a partnership that is historically important, not just for Israel, but for the United States of America as well … we couldn’t do the intelligence work we need to do without them.”
“They save American lives all the time,” he continued. “I still have a death threat on me from the Iranians. The Israeli intelligence has been very helpful at making sure that I’m where I need to be and I’m not where I ought not be.”
Israel’s 10-year memorandum of understanding (MOU) with the United States, which currently pledges Israel $3.8 billion annually for the fiscal years 2019-2028 subject to congressional appropriations, has proven a political liability for Trump. Last week he questioned why his administration should have to deal with criticism from Democrats over the issue. Following the GOP’s loss in the midterms, Vice President JD Vance explicitly called to put America first and “change our relationship to Israel.”
Blinken responded similarly to his Republican counterpart on the question of U.S. aid to Israel.
“I think you’re seeing a recognition on the part of the Israeli government that this thing is not going to last forever, and an attempt to make it clear in the body politic in Israel that, no, we can pay for our own stuff. We don’t need the kind of assistance that we’re getting from the United States in terms of paying for what we’re acquiring,” Blinken stated, adding that “it doesn’t change anything … about the inherent value of the relationship and the partnership.”
But while Pompeo and Blinken appeared largely on the same page regarding military aid to Israel, the two differed significantly regarding the conflict with Iran and a future resolution to the long-running conflict with the Palestinians.
Asked how to negotiate a settlement with Iran, Pompeo replied that “I just I simply don’t think that it’s possible with the regime” even as he admitted the United States cannot currently curtail Iran’s ambitions through military means.
Pompeo called to “continue to apply pressure there” through the current economic blockade and by “going after further assets inside of Iran” because “they still have the capability to muck up the Gulf region and to threaten Israel [while] we have the capacity to, if not eliminate it, mitigate that materially.”
As for offering concessions to keep the Strait of Hormuz open and maintain the flow of oil, Pompeo insisted that “we should never give the Iranians a damn thing.”
Blinken, on the other hand, stated that Trump needs to acknowledge that the war against Tehran “might not be a loss” but it “wasn’t a real win.”
But while concessions, possibly including sanctions relief, may be needed to bring the Iranians back to the table, “I think what you have to do is exert sustained, systematic pressure on them economically … for purposes of getting to negotiate,” he added.
The lesson learned from the 2015 Iran deal, otherwise known as the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, Blinken said, is that it can take time to get Iran to the point where it is ready to negotiate.
Blinken added, “Same thing with the Iran-Iraq war. There wasn’t a capitulation. There was a negotiation. I think at this point that’s in our interest.”
Turning to the Palestinian issue, Blinken argued that part of why Hamas attacked on Oct. 7 was to preempt the further expansion of the Abraham Accords and that “for that vision to be fully realized, it requires a resolution of the Palestinian question.”
“I believe to the bottom of my heart, as I have throughout, that the only way forward, and again, this is very unpopular these days, is through a secure Israel and a sovereign Palestine,” Blinken said.
He drew pushback from Pompeo, who argued that “one of the keys to success of the Abraham Accords was not letting the conflict between the Palestinians and the Israelis get in the way of what the Gulf Arab states actually know needs to happen.”
This article originally appeared on JTA.org.
The post Blinken, Pompeo: Strong U.S.-Israel ties, assistance to continue despite Trump call to end aid appeared first on The Forward.
Uncategorized
‘Jews are welcome, Zionists are not’: Is a Zionist ban at a restaurant legal?
Sap Sua, a Vietnamese restaurant in Boulder, Colorado, was one of Emily Lanigan’s favorite restaurants. She even celebrated her 44th birthday there in June. So Lanigan was stunned when the restaurant posted this since-deleted message on Instagram in September: “Jews are welcome, Zionists are not.”
Lanigan, a former synagogue president, identifies as a Zionist, which she defines as the Jewish right of self-determination. Was she really no longer welcome at the place where she had received a complimentary dessert just months before?
She wondered if the restaurant had a different definition of Zionism, she said, and thought maybe reaching out and offering to have an in-person discussion could clear things up.
“Being a Zionist does not mean I do not also believe in the freedom and autonomy of Palestinians,” Lanigan said she commented on Instagram. “You and I are not so far apart.”
But Sap Sua’s owner, Anthony “Ni” Nguyen, doubled down: “As you clearly saw, the full statement was ‘Jews are welcome. Zionists are not.’ Jews are a protected class, and all Jews are welcome,” Nguyen wrote in messages to Lanigan reviewed by the Forward. “Zionism is a political ideology, like Nazism.”
Nguyen’s response to Lanigan implied the law was on his side. He could ban “Zionists,” it seemed, so long as he let in Jews who shared his views about Israel.
Legally speaking, Nguyen was partially correct. Neither federal civil rights law nor Colorado law prohibits businesses from refusing service based on customers’ political beliefs — meaning turning someone away based solely on their political support for Israel could be allowed.
But the line gets murkier when “Zionist” is used as a stand-in for Jewish or Israeli identity, which can violate laws prohibiting discrimination based on religion or national origin.
The distinction matters not only for Sap Sua, as spaces from coffee shops to book festivals to concert venues make disavowing Israel a condition of entry or participation. The troubling practice raises a thorny question: How should the law distinguish between excluding someone because of their political beliefs and excluding them because of who they are?
The right to exclude?
Sap Sua was not the first business to declare itself off-limits to Zionists with no legal consequences. In Utah, after a bar called Weathered Waves declared “no Zionists allowed” in 2024, the attorney general found no evidence of legal wrongdoing. (Weathered Waves later closed over a dispute with its landlord.)
But that doesn’t mean “Zionist” bans are always legal. According to Richard Katskee, a professor of law at Duke University with expertise in public accommodation law, the legality depends on how the ban is enforced.
Does the business ask only Jewish or Israeli customers to disclose their views? Does it make assumptions about the politics of customers wearing kippahs? If Jewish customers are being singled out, Katskee said, that would make a finding of illegal discrimination more likely.
Omer Wiczyk, senior counsel at the Brandeis Center, told the Forward that two cases he’s currently litigating cross that line. At a coffee shop in Oakland, California, a customer wearing a Star of David baseball cap was asked on video if he was a Zionist and told to leave. At an eyebrow salon in Northern Virginia, a customer was kicked out after disclosing she was Israeli-American.
Businesses “cannot turn a customer’s identity into objectionable politics, and then invoke that to justify their exclusion,” Wiczyk told the Forward. “Being Israeli is not a political issue. Being a Jew is not a political issue. It’s who you are.”
But if a business required every customer, regardless of their identity, to affirm a particular political position on Israel before receiving service, that could be legal, Katskee said — though enforcing such a policy fairly would inevitably prove difficult in practice.
“It might be legal, like putting up a sign saying ‘Republicans only’ or ‘Democrats only,’” Katskee said.
Jenin Younes, legal director of the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee, argues that businesses have some latitude to refuse service based on customers’ politics. The ADC is currently making that case on behalf of Poetica Coffee, which is fighting a Department of Justice investigation into its decision to publicly bar Rep. Dan Goldman over his support for Israel.
In Goldman’s case, Younes said, his public profile and easily searchable voting record help support the idea that the coffee shop targeted him for his political views.
“It’s harder to make the argument that ‘No, this was really about just not letting Jewish people in’ — because he’s a public figure,” Younes said. “He’s said what he thinks on these issues.”
Even Goldman himself said that the coffee shop incident did not warrant a civil rights investigation because of his status as a public figure.
Younes argues that the same principle applies to situations unrelated to Israel and Zionism.
In 2018, for example, the owner of a Virginia restaurant kicked out White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders citing the Trump administration’s “inhumane and unethical” policies. The restaurant faced social backlash, but no legal consequences.
And last year, a Martha’s Vineyard farmers’ market stand refused to sell lawyer Alan Dershowitz pierogi, citing his legal defense of Jeffrey Epstein and other men accused of sexual assault. Dershowitz threatened legal action, but it appears he never actually filed suit.
“In my opinion, businesses should have the right to exclude people whose views it doesn’t like,” Younes said. “And by the way, I would apply this in the other context: If there’s a pro-Israel coffee shop owner and they wanted to say, ‘We don’t want anyone wearing a pro-Palestine pin in here,’ I think they have that right.”
The law’s limits
Whether businesses have the legal right to exclude certain customers is a different question than whether they should.
Such bans can end up holding ordinary Jews responsible for the actions of the Israeli government — with the misguided idea that denying them a meal or a cup of coffee will somehow advance the Palestinian cause.
And since “Zionist” means different things to different people, using the label as a litmus test will almost inevitably lead to erroneous assumptions about peoples’ views.
In cases where the law is not a remedy, the free market may be. Businesses that turn away “Zionists” must be so committed to their beliefs that they are willing to refuse a paying customer, risking boycotts and reputational damage.
At the same time, some businesses may believe the publicity will draw in new clientele. Karimi Brows, which turned away the Israeli-American customer, boasted that it gained 40,000 TikTok followers in the month after the incident.
For its part, Sap Sua appeared to backtrack amid intense public pressure, posting to Instagram that it would welcome “every guest who walks through our doors.” (Sap Sua did not respond to the Forward’s request for comment.)
But for Lanigan, the damage was done.
“It was one of my favorite restaurants,” Lanigan told the Forward. “But I will never set foot in that place again.”
The post ‘Jews are welcome, Zionists are not’: Is a Zionist ban at a restaurant legal? appeared first on The Forward.
Uncategorized
Explainer: Gadi Eisenkot’s four conditions for forming Israel’s next government
(JTA) — JERUSALEM – Israeli President Isaac Herzog tasked Gadi Eisenkot on Sunday with forming Israel’s next government, giving him up to six weeks to assemble a coalition with a total of 61 seats out of 120 in Israel’s parliament, the Knesset.
If he fails to do so, then the president can give another Knesset member the opportunity; most likely this will be incumbent Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. For his part, Netanyahu, has urged Eisenkot to join him in an emergency national unity government that will keep Israel strong against ongoing threats.
Eisenkot has responded that the “national emergency government” he will form will comprise the “four Zionist parties” of the change bloc – his own Yashar Party, B’Yachad headed by former prime ministers Naftali Bennett and Yair Lapid, Avigdor Liberman’s Yisrael Beitenu Party and the Democrats under Yair Golan.
He also said he would welcome “parties and Knesset members who support Yashar’s four principles” to join the coalition.
At the President’s Residence in Jerusalem on Sunday, Eisenkot said he would be sending out formal invitations as soon as possible “to every Knesset faction, calling on all their members, both as parties and as individuals, to take part in forming the government and bringing it to its swearing-in.
“The rule is simple,” he added. “If you are prepared to sign on to the four principles I have set out, you are potential partners in a national emergency government under my leadership.”
Throughout his campaign, and particularly since the Oct. 27 election, Eisenkot has emphasized these four principles as the basis for forming the next government. But what are they exactly? And who, out of the other 11 parties, will be able to accept them and join his coalition?
1) Recognition of the State of Israel as a Jewish and democratic state.
Eisenkot wants to define his coalition as a government that is committed to Israel’s Jewish national identity and to democracy, not simply an alliance united by opposition to Netanyahu.
Any party wanting to join must accept Israel’s identity as the national home of the Jewish people first. The requirement has historically been contentious for Israel’s two Arab parties, who represent 19 Knesset members.
Parties must also accept the country’s democratic institutions, which uphold equality and rights for all citizens and prioritize the rule of law.
This means parties, such as the far-right and the ultra-Orthodox, that, as members of the outgoing government, have been pushing to overhaul the country’s judiciary – a key institution in Israel’s system of democratic checks and balances – might think twice about joining.
2) Acceptance of the values of the Declaration of Independence.
Israel’s Declaration of Independence, proclaimed and signed on May 14, 1948, is a foundational document that has helped shape the country’s constitutional principles, although Israel does not have a single, formal written constitution.
In it, the signatories laid out their vision for Israel, including the historical ties the Jewish people have to the land of Israel and its place as a safe haven for Jews around the world who are in trouble.
For Eisenkot, the emphasis appears to be on one particular section that declares: “The State of Israel will foster the development of the country for the benefit of all its inhabitants; it will be based on freedom, justice and peace as envisaged by the prophets of Israel; it will ensure complete equality of social and political rights to all its citizens, irrespective of religion, race or sex; it will guarantee freedom of religion, conscience, language, education and culture; and it will safeguard the Holy Places of all religions; and it will be faithful to the principles of the Charter of the United Nations.”
By embracing the Declaration of Independence, Eisenkot is recognizing the place of Israel’s minority groups, highlighting their “full and equal citizenship.” A point mentioned twice in the declaration.
The declaration also reaffirms that Israel is a country seeking peace, rather than endless conflict, at a time when Netanyahu has recently been criticized over his handling of the country’s wars on multiple fronts.
3) Mandatory service for all — military, national, and civilian, to strengthen the IDF and expand its ranks.
Including this condition for joining the government is a direct message to the ultra-Orthodox parties, at least one of which is considering supporting Eisenkot’s coalition.
United Torah Judaism, which has been aligned closely with Netanyahu’s bloc for at least the past two decades, on Thursday refused to recommend the prime minister as Israel’s next leader. Instead, the party, which holds seven seats, abstained from recommending any candidate.
Both UTJ and the second ultra-Orthodox party, Shas, have resisted efforts that would include ultra-Orthodox young men studying in yeshiva under a universal draft law requiring all eligible Israelis to perform military service.
Previous exemption laws have expired, and Israel’s Supreme Court has ruled that the state’s blanket exemption of yeshiva students from military service has no legal basis and violates principles of equality before the law.
By including this condition, Eisenkot is telling the ultra-Orthodox – and even the Arab community, most of whose members are also exempt from mandatory military service – that everyone in Israel must do their part, whether through military service or some type of national or community service.
This stipulation could either keep the ultra-Orthodox out of the government, even though Eisenkot’s partners have expressed willingness to allow their participation. Or it could force them to be more flexible on an issue that until now they have appeared unrelenting.
4) Recognition of Hamas as a terrorist organization and commitment to dismantling its military and governing power.
Leaders of the two Arab parties, the Islamist Ra’am Party and the more nationalist Joint List, have refused to make this statement out loud.
Ra’am leader Mansour Abbas, who has repeatedly condemned the Oct. 7 attack, has said he does have a clear position on this but refuses to state it publicly for several reasons ranging from concerns about his personal safety to his ties to the Muslim Brotherhood, to which Hamas is also affiliated. He has also questioned why Arab politicians are required to pass loyalty tests that are not applied equally to Jewish politicians.
When President Herzog pressed him on the matter last week, Abbas said: “I have an unequivocal answer, but leave me space to be a bridge. To also influence the other side.” He argued that maintaining channels of communication with Palestinians requires him not to adopt language that would immediately alienate them.
For the Joint List, the continued refusal to call Hamas a terror group appears to reflect the view that Hamas is part of the broader Palestinian political movement. Some of its members argue that labeling it a terrorist organization risks delegitimizing Palestinian political aspirations as a whole.
Members of the 11-member faction have condemned the Oct. 7 massacre, but are unlikely to accept this particular condition because it could be used to justify Israel’s military campaigns in Gaza and the West Bank. Its leaders also want to preserve their credibility among Palestinian voters, many of whom see the conflict through the lens of occupation and Palestinian national rights.
This article originally appeared on JTA.org.
The post Explainer: Gadi Eisenkot’s four conditions for forming Israel’s next government appeared first on The Forward.
