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A ‘historic’ day in Israel ends with a political compromise — and big questions about the future
(JTA) — Like hundreds of thousands of her fellow Israelis, Kelly Breakstone Roth’s instinct on Sunday was to take to the streets.
The only wrinkle: She and her family have been in Brooklyn for the last two years, part of the diaspora of hundreds of thousands of Israelis living abroad. They couldn’t just walk out the door of their apartment and join the sweeping nationwide protest that ignited after Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu fired his defense minister, who had called for a pause on proposed changes to Israel’s judiciary.
So they bought one-way plane tickets, set to take off at 2 a.m. on Monday and land in Israel that evening. “It was a very spontaneous decision,” Breakstone Roth, an entrepreneur, told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency on Sunday evening, as she ran errands to prepare her family of five for a trip of indeterminate length. “But the sensation that we have to be there has been building up for quite a bit now.”
She likened the experience to that of Israeli military reservists who receive an emergency call-up notice, known in Israeli jargon as a “tzav shmoneh,” Hebrew for “order eight.”
“This is a tzav shmoneh moment for anybody who wants there to be a Jewish and democratic state,” she said.
By the time Breakstone Roth landed in Tel Aviv Monday evening, conditions in Israel had shifted dramatically. Late-night protests on Sunday that shut down a main highway and riveted Jews the world over had been dispersed, but protesters convened again on Monday in Jerusalem, where the parliament was waiting to hear whether it would vote on a key piece of the judiciary legislation. The country’s labor unions had called a general strike, and everything from universities to McDonald’s franchises to some departures at the Tel Aviv airport had shut down.
The Breakstone Roth family poses with protest signs in New York City’s John F. Kennedy International Airport en route to Israel, March 27, 2023. (Courtesy of Kelly Breakstone Roth)
Meanwhile, Netanyahu had spent Sunday night negotiating with his coalition partners, trying to keep their government together despite a mounting sense that proceeding immediately with its signature legislation could plunge Israel into unprecedented turmoil — possibly even civil war. By the evening, even the justice minister who threatened to quit if Netanyahu delayed the vote said he would respect a decision to pause — one that Netanyahu made official only as night fell.
Netanyahu did not say what he had promised his partners to sign off on the pause, but a far-right minister said he had exacted permission to launch a civilian police corps.
Earlier, breaking his public silence, the prime minister had tweeted, “I call on all the demonstrators in Jerusalem, on the right and the left, to behave responsibly and not to act violently. We are brotherly people.”
Big questions loomed: What would happen when right-wing supporters of the judiciary reform — including a notoriously racist and combative group of fans from the Beitar Jerusalem soccer club — heeded a call to take to the streets, too? Would a delay satisfy protesters who have spent a dozen weeks articulating deep-seated grievances that, in many cases, go far beyond the particular reforms? Would Netanyahu and his coalition offer any meaningful concessions before resuming the legislative process in the future? What would be the cost of the promises he offered his most extreme partners in exchange for their acquiescence?
The answers to those questions will help determine what kind of country Israel will be after this crisis ends, whenever that is. But on Sunday night and Monday, the protesters and those watching them could be forgiven for taking a moment to bask in the sense that history was being made.
Thousands of Israeli right-wing protesters rally in support of the Israeli government’s judicial overhaul bills outside of the Israeli parliament, the Knesset, in Jerusalem, March 27, 2023. (Gili Yaari/Flash90)
“What we witness in Israel is a historical revolution in the style of French, Russian, Iranian revolutions and the collapse of the Soviet Union,” tweeted Yossi Melman, a journalist who has covered military affairs for multiple Israeli newspapers.
“A historic night. Each of us will remember where we were tonight,” tweeted the journalist and political analyst Anshel Pfeffer. “And whoever was not in the streets will say that they were.”
The head of the country’s labor union, the Histadrut, also used the word “historic” to describe the general strike he was supporting.
Ahmad Tibi, an Arab lawmaker, tweeted in language drenched in history. He posted in Hebrew transliteration a slogan associated with the 2011 Arab Spring: “The people want to bring down the regime.”
It’s not at all clear that the Israelis who protested on Sunday and Monday will ultimately be satisfied. Revolutions don’t always succeed, as the Arab Spring and countless other examples in history make clear. Many of the social and demographic forces that brought Israel to this moment haven’t changed. Netanyahu has survived political crisis after political crisis before.
In addition, while a substantial majority of Israelis oppose the specific judicial reform legislation that is on the table now, many still say they believe some changes are merited. Israel’s far right, in particular, still views a disempowered Supreme Court as essential to achieving its vision of expanded Jewish settlement and control in the West Bank.
Supporters of the judicial overhaul were framing the stakes as historic, too, but casting the demonstrations as a threat to democracy. It is “inconceivable that the minority will force its opinion with violence and the creation of anarchy in the streets,” declared 17 leading religious Zionist rabbis in a joint statement calling on the government to push forward with the legislation on Monday.
Yet for Monday, at least, the politically diverse anti-government coalition that has solidified over the last three months could exult in the power of the people. And at a time when some liberal Israelis are so alarmed by the country’s political direction that they are packing up and moving away, the Breakstone Roths were coming home.
“This is a critical time in Israel’s history,” Breakstone Roth said before boarding. “In terms of our daughters, we felt it was really important for them to know that we’re doing everything that we possibly can to try to make an impact.”
She said she hoped to hear upon landing that Netanyahu was pulling the legislation, if only temporarily — then turned to realpolitik. “Hopefully If he does say it, he intends it, and … we’ll be able to say that the demonstrations were a success,” she said. “And if he’s just fooling, trying to do some sort of maneuver, then it’s going to be ignited once again.”
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Forverts podcast, episode 8: Subway stories
דער פֿאָרווערטס האָט שוין אַרויסגעלאָזט דעם אַכטן קאַפּיטל פֿונעם ייִדישן פּאָדקאַסט, Yiddish With Rukhl. דאָס מאָל איז די טעמע „די אונטערבאַן“.
אין דעם קאַפּיטל וועט איר הערן צוויי אַרטיקלען: משהלע אַלפֿאָנסאָס פּערזענלעכן עסיי „און אַלץ צוליב אַ יאַרמלקע!“ וואָס איר קענט אַליין לייענען דאָ, און אַ צווייטן אַרטיקל פֿון שׂרה־רחל שעכטער, „זכרונות פֿון אַן אונטערבאַן־פּאַסאַזשיר“, וואָס איר קענט לייענען דאָ.
צו הערן דעם פּאָדקאַסט, גיט אַ קוועטש דאָ.
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New York City Police Investigate Antisemitic Subway Assault
New York City Police Department (NYPD) vehicles are seen in Brooklyn, New York, United States. Photo: Kyle Mazza via Reuters Connect
The New York City Police Department (NYPD) is investigating an antisemitic incident in which an African American male assaulted a Jewish public transit commuter on the subway, according to local reports.
The victim, Jeremy Garrett, told an ABC affiliate that he was reading a psalm on Monday morning when the assailant struck him on the head, knocking off his kippah in the process. Garrett later received treatment at a local hospital, WABC-TV reported.
“I thought the window of the subway fell on me,” Garrett recalled. “We tussled a bit, I was trying to hold him on the train, and then the doors closed, and they opened the doors again, and he ran off … it’s horrible because it happened on Purim, you know, right before the holiday.”
Garret added, “I still want justice, but I do forgive the man … They keep coming for us. We still keep living, so we’re not going to stop.”
New York City has seen similar incidents in recent months. In January, a woman was punched in the face while riding the New York City subway for wearing a hat that said “F—k Antisemitism,” according to a local report.
“F—k Jews,” the suspect, described as a “Black man in his 40s,” allegedly said to her before striking the blow, the New York Daily News reported, citing local law enforcement.
The victim then “fled” the railcar at the 116th St. – Columbia University subway station in Morningside Heights, Manhattan, while the assailant remained on board, the News added. She was reportedly not seriously injured, as medics did not treat her following the incident’s being reported to law enforcement.
Just last month, a 17-year-old student who attended the Renaissance Charter School in the Jackson Heights section of the Queens borough called on his classmates to “rise up and kill the Jews.”
Antisemitic hate crimes in New York City have seen a dramatic rise in recent years. The latest NYPD hate crime statistics show a 182 percent increase in January 2026, Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s first month in office, compared to the same period last year.
Mamdani, a far-left democratic socialist who has made anti-Israel activism a cornerstone of his political career, has repeatedly accused Israel of “apartheid” and refused to recognize its right to exist as a Jewish state.
Such positions have raised alarm bells among not only New York’s Jewish community but also Israeli business owners and investors, who fear a hostile climate under Mamdani’s leadership.
Jews were targeted in the majority (54 percent) of all hate crimes perpetrated in New York City in 2024, according to other data issued by the NYPD.
A recent report released in December by the Mayor’s Office to Combat Antisemitism noted that figure rose to a staggering 62 percent in the first quarter of 2025, despite Jewish New Yorkers comprising a small minority of the city’s population.
As The Algemeiner has previously reported, antisemitism in New York City has eroded the quality of life of the city’s Orthodox Jewish community, which is the target in many antisemitic incidents.
In just eight days between the end of October and the beginning of November 2024, three Hasidim, including children, were brutally assaulted in the Crown Heights section of Brooklyn. In one instance, an Orthodox man was accosted by two assailants, one masked, who “chased and beat him” after he refused to surrender his cellphone in compliance with what appeared to have been an attempted robbery. In another incident, an African American male smacked a 13-year-old Jewish boy who was commuting to school on his bike in the heavily Jewish neighborhood. Less than a week earlier, an assailant slashed a visibly Jewish man in the face as he was walking in Brooklyn.
In 2025, New Yorkers have seen organized antisemitic harassment. In November, hundreds of people amassed outside a prominent New York City synagogue and clamored for violence against Jews.
“The Jewish community is filled with anxiety and trepidation. We know that it’s open season,” Rabbi Mark Schneier, president of the Foundation for Ethnic Understanding, said in a statement to NY1 in February. “We’ve encountered these kinds of threats for the last 2,500 years, but if anything, there’s never been a greater time to be alive as a Jew than today.”
Follow Dion J. Pierre @DionJPierre.
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Gavin Newsom just confirmed the demise of the Democratic party’s support for Israel
“Let no American imagine that Zionism is inconsistent with patriotism,” said Louis Brandeis, American Jewish leader and Supreme Court justice, in 1915. “To be good Americans, we must be better Jews, and to be better Jews, we must become Zionists.”
For much of the next century, most American Jews stacked their liberalism on top of their patriotism on top of their Zionism. They overwhelmingly voted for the Democratic Party, and overwhelmingly supported both Israel and the United States-Israel alliance.
In recent years, however, many have found it increasingly difficult to deny is that support for Israel is, at present, hard to square with liberalism. And a statement this week by California Gov. Gavin Newsom, the probable 2028 Democratic candidate for president, made clear exactly how profoundly that shift has changed the Democratic party.
Israel is discussed by some “appropriately as sort of an apartheid state,” Newsom said on a podcast, adding that the U.S. would likely have no choice but to reconsider its military aid to the Jewish state.
Given that Newsom is broadly a centrist, his words made a clear statement: Politicians understand that uncritical support for Israel is no longer compatible with the Democratic mainstream. Democratic voters are pushing politicians to, if not abandon Israel entirely, then at least condition their support for it. And the future of American Jews and the Democratic Party is now not only up to Democratic politicians who decide how much to give Israel and under what conditions.
It is also up to American Jews, who have to decide whether those politicians, in doing so, are moving away from their values, or bringing them back into alignment.
Shifting sympathies
A Gallup poll released last month found that Americans’ sympathies now lie more with Palestinians than with Israelis. Up until last year, the opposite had held true. For Democrats, whose sympathies already “flipped strongly” — per Gallup — to Palestinians in 2025, the difference is more stark: 65% said they sympathize more with Palestinians, while just 17% say they sympathize more with Israelis.
Those tempted to write the change off as the result of a party captured by a young far-left should consider that, last year, Pew found that 66% of Democrats over the age of 50 have an unfavorable view of Israel, up from just 43% in 2022. (For those ages 18 to 49, the number was 71%.) A full 73% of Democrats over 50 said they had “none at all” or “not too much” confidence in Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
I have no doubt that some will say that the change is because people don’t understand the complexity of the situation in the Middle East; because they have forgotten the lessons of history; or because the Democratic Party is comfortable embracing antisemitism.
These claims ignore a simpler explanation: That the voters who are registered with the one major U.S. political party that still claims to care about liberalism, democracy, and human rights watched as Israel, by its own admission, killed some 70,000 Palestinians in Gaza.
They saw Israel’s leaders make it next to impossible for civilians in the Strip to receive necessary food and humanitarian aid. They see settler violence rising in the West Bank, including against American citizens, amid increased talk of annexation. They hear Netanyhau continue to insist that there can be no Palestinian state, and understand that the alternative he foresees is not one state with equal rights, but either a future of endless wars, or an undemocratic state in which Palestinians live under Israeli control without the rights of citizens.
In that context, many voters see that unflinching support for Israel is no longer in line with the values that drew them to their party. And since they cannot change Israel, they are trying to change their party.
No more cognitive dissonance
Democratic voters, in insisting that their politicians not walk in lockstep with Israel, are insisting that the party break its cognitive dissonance around Israel. Which means that the future of American Jews in the Democratic Party depends not only on how sensitively Democratic politicians navigate criticizing and checking Israel without elevating antisemitism. It also depends on whether American Jews are willing to admit this dissonance to ourselves.
For some, this is not an open question. There are American Jews who have no relationship to Israel, or whose relationship is an overwhelmingly critical one. Per last year’s Jewish Federations of North America National Survey, a combined 32% of American Jews aged 18-34 identify as either anti-Zionist or non-Zionist.
(Only 7% of American Jews overall consider themselves to be anti-Zionist, and just 8% say non-Zionist,. But most don’t subscribe to the label “Zionist,” either, with just 37% describing themselves as such).
In 2021, one poll of American Jews found that a quarter deemed Israel an apartheid state, well before Newsom likened it to one.
There’s also the reality that the vast majority of American Jews do not name Israel as their top issue when they go to the voting booth, and that the Republican Party is undergoing its own schism over Israel.
Still, that same JFNA poll found that most American Jews — 71% — do say that they feel emotionally attached to Israel. And 60% say that Israel makes them proud to be Jewish, even as 69% say that they “sometimes find it hard to support the actions taken by Israel or its government.”
What this means: For many American Jewish Democrats, encouraging politicians to break with Israel — or accepting that break is already in process — is likely more emotionally challenging than it is for American Democrats generally.
What Newsom’s comments show is that this is an emotional problem American Jewish voters will need to face sooner rather than later. Democratic voters are forcing Democratic politicians to resolve a disconnect, and they want it resolved quickly. The year is no longer 1915. Democratic American Jews are going to need to decide what it means to be “good Americans and better Jews.” If it can no longer involve being both liberal and staunchly pro-Israel, we will need to decide which of those items we find most important.
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