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American Jews created historic summer camps. Or did summer camps create American Jews?
(JTA) — Among Sandra Fox’s most memorable finds during her years mining American archives for materials about Jewish summer camps was a series of letters about the hours before lights-out.
The letters were by counselors who were documenting an unusual window in the day when they stopped supervising campers, leaving the teens instead to their own devices, which sometimes included romance and sexual exploration.
“It was each division talking about how they dealt with that free time before bed in ‘age-appropriate ways,’” Fox recalled about the letters written by counselors at Camp Ramah in Wisconsin, the original iteration of the Conservative movement’s network of summer camps.
“I’ve spoken to Christian people who work at Christian camps and have researched Christian camps. There is no free time before bed,” Fox told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency. “That’s not a thing if you don’t want kids to hook up. So it was just amazing to find these documents of Camp Ramah leaders really having the conversation explicitly. Most of the romance and sexuality stuff is implicit in the archives.”
The letters are quoted extensively in Fox’s new book, “The Jews of Summer: Summer Camp and Jewish Culture in Postwar America.” Fox, who earned a PhD in history from New York University in 2018 and now teaches and directs the Archive of the American Jewish Left there, tells the story of American Judaism’s most immersive laboratory for constructing identity and contesting values.
Next week, Fox is launching the book with an event at Congregation Beth Elohim in Park Slope, Brooklyn. (Tickets for the Feb. 23 event are available here.) Attendees will be able to tour adult versions of some of the most durable elements of Jewish summer camps, from Israeli dance to Yiddish and Hebrew instruction to Color Wars to Tisha B’Av, the mournful holiday that always falls over the summer.
“I never considered doing a normal book party,” Fox said. “It was always really obvious to me that a book about experiential Jewish education and role play should be celebrated and launched out into the world through experiential education and role play.”
Sandra Fox’s 2023 book “The Jews of Summer,” looks at the history of American Jewish summer camps. (Courtesy of Fox)
We spoke to Fox about her party plans, how Jewish summer camps have changed over time and how they’ve stayed the same, and the cultural history of that before-bed free time.
This interview has been condensed and lightly edited for clarity. We’ll be continuing the conversation in a virtual chat through the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research Feb. 27 at 1 p.m.; register here.
Jewish Telegraphic Agency: Given how much Jews like to talk about camp, were you surprised that this book hadn’t already been written?
Sandra Fox: There’s been a lot of fruitful research on the history of various camps, but it’s usually been focused on one camping movement or one camp type. So there are articles about Zionist camps. There are certainly articles out there about the Ramah camps. A lot of camps have produced books — either their alumni associations or a scholar who went to let’s say, Reform movement camps have created essay collections about those camps. And there are also books about Habonim and other Zionist youth movements.
I don’t really know why this is the first stab at this kind of cross-comparison. It might be that people didn’t think there would be so much to compare. I think the overwhelming feeling I get from readers so far, people who preordered and gotten their books early, is that they’re very surprised to hear how similar these camps are. So perhaps it’s that scholars weren’t thinking about Jewish summer camps that came from such diverse standpoints as having something enough in common to write about them all at once.
Also distance from the time period really helps. You can write a book about — and people do write a book about — the ’60s and ’70s and have been for decades, but there’s a certain amount of distance from the period that has allowed me to do this, I think, and maybe it also helps that I’m generationally removed. A lot of the scholars who’ve worked on camps in the postwar period went to camps in the postwar period. It makes a lot of sense that it would be harder to write this sort of sweeping thing perhaps. The fact that I’m a millennial meant that I could write about the postwar period — and also write kind of an epilogue-style chapter that catches us up to the present.
What’s clear is that there’s something amazing about studying summer camp, a completely immersive 24/7 experience that parents send children away for. There’s no better setting for thinking about how adults project their anxieties and desires about the future onto children. There’s also no place better to think about power dynamics and age and generational tension.
I was definitely struck by the “sameyness” of Jewish camps in your accounting. What do you think we can learn from that, either about camps or about us as Jews?
I do want to say that while there’s a lot of sameyness, whenever you do a comparative study, there’s a risk of kind of collapsing all these things and making them seem too similar. What I’m trying to convey is that the camp leaders from a variety of movements took the basic structure of the summer camp as we know it — its daily schedule, its environment, its activities — and it did look similar from camp to camp, at least on that surface level.
If you look at the daily schedules in comparison, they might have a lot of the same features but they’ll be called slightly different things depending on if the camp leans more heavily towards Hebrew, or Yiddish, or English. But the content within those schedules would be rather different. It’s more that the skeletal structure of camp life has a lot of similarities across the board and then the details within each section of the day or the month had a lot of differences.
But I think what it says is that in the postwar period, the anxieties that Jewish leaders had about the future of Judaism are really, really similar and the solution that they found within the summer camp, they were pretty unanimous about. They just then took the model and inserted within it their particular nationalistic, linguistic or religious perspectives. So I think more so than saying anything about American Jewry, it shows kind of how flexible camping is. And that’s not just the Jewish story. Lots of different Americans have embraced summer camping in different ways.
So many people who have gone to camp have a fixed memory of what camp is like, where it’s caught in time, but you argue that camps have actually undergone lots of change. What are the most striking changes you documented, perhaps ones that might have been hard for even insiders to discern as they happened?
First of all, the Israel-centeredness of American Jewish education as we know it today didn’t happen overnight in 1948, for instance. It was a slower process, beyond the Zionist movements where that was already going on, for decades before 1948. Ramah and the Reform camps for instance took their time towards getting to the heavily Zionist-imbued curricula that we know.
There was considerable confusion and ambivalence at first about what to do with Israel: whether to raise an Israeli flag, not because they were anti-Zionist, but because American Jews had been thinking about proving their loyalty to America for many generations. There were some sources that would talk about — what kind of right do American Jews have to raise the Israeli flag when they’re not Israeli? So that kind of Israel-centeredness that is really a feature of camp life today was a slower process than we might think.
It fit camp life really well because broader American camps used Native American symbols, in some ways that are problematic today, to create what we know of as an iconography of camp life. So for Jews, Israel and its iconography, or Palestine and iconography before ’48, provided an alternative set of options that were read as Jewish, but it still took some time to get to where we are now in terms of the Israel focus.
One of the reasons I place emphasis on the Yiddish summer camps is to show that in the early 20th century and the mid-20th century there was more ideological diversity in the Jewish camping sphere, including various forms of Yiddishist groups and socialist groups and communist groups that operated summer camps. Most of them have closed, and their decline is obviously a change that tells a story of how American Jewry changed over the course of the postwar period. Their legacy is important, too: I have made the argument that these camps in a lot of ways modeled the idea of Yiddish as having a future in America.
What about hookup culture? Contemporary discourse about Jewish camps have focused on sex and sexuality there. What did you observe about this in the archives?
I think people think of the hookup culture of Jewish camps today and certainly in my time in the ’90s and 2000s as a permanent feature, and in some ways I found through my research and oral history interviews that that was the case, but it was really interesting to zoom out a little bit and think about how Jewish summer camps changed in terms of sexual romantic culture, in relationship to how America changed with the sexual revolution and the youth culture.
It’s not it’s not useful to think about Jewish hookup culture in a vacuum. It’s happening within America more broadly. And so of course, it’s changed dramatically over time. And one of the things I learned that was so fascinating is that Jewish summer camps were actually their leaders were less concerned in a lot of ways about sexuality at camp in the ’40s and ’50s, than they were in the late ’60s and ’70s. Because earlier premarital sex was pretty rare, at least in the teenage years, so they were not that concerned about what happened after lights out because they kind of assumed whatever was going on was fairly innocent.
In the late 1960s and 1970s, that’s when camps have to actually think about how to balance allowance and control. They want to allow campers to have these relationships, to have their first sexual experiences, and part of that is related to rising rates of intermarriage and wanting to encourage love between Jews, but they also want to control it because there’s a broader societal moment in which the sexuality of teenagers is problematized and their and their sexual culture is more public.
There’s been a real wave of sustained criticism by former campers about the cultures that they experienced, arguing that the camps created an inappropriately sexualized and unsafe space. There’s been a lot of reaction to that and the broader #MeToo moment. I’m curious about what you can speculate about a future where that space is cleaned up, based on your historical research — what is gained and what, potentially, could be lost?
Without being involved in camping today — and I want to really make that disclaimer because I know a lot of change is happening and lot of organizations are involved to talk about this issue better, to train camps and camp leaders and their counselors to not create a pressured environment for camper — I think what the history shows is that this hookup culture did not come about out of nowhere. It was partly related to the broader changes in America and the sexual revolution.
But it was also partly created because camps really needed to have campers’ buy-in, in order to be “successful.” A huge argument of my book is that we think about the power of camps as if camp directors have campers as, like, puppets on strings, and that what they do is what happens in camp life. But actually, campers have changed the everyday texture of life at camp over the course of the decades in so many different ways by resisting various ideas or just not being interested.
So hookup culture is also part of making campers feel like they have freedom at camp and that’s essential. That’s not a side project — that is essential to their ability to get campers to come back. It’s a financial need, and it’s an ideological need. If you make campers feel like they have freedom, then they will feel like they freely took on the ideologies your camp is promoting in a really natural way.
The last part of it is rising rates of intermarriage. As rates of intermarriage rose in the second half of the 20th century, there’s no doubt in my mind from doing the research that the preexisting culture around sexuality at camp and romance at camp got turbo-boosted [to facilitate relationships that could potentially lead to marriage between two Jews]. At that point, the allowance and control that camp leaders were trying to create for many decades leans maybe more heavily towards allowance.
There are positives to camp environments being a place where campers can explore their sexualities. There’s definitely a lot of conversation about the negative effects and those are all very, very real. I know people who went through horrible things at a camp and I also know people who experienced it as a very sex-positive atmosphere. I know people in my age range who were able to discover that they were gay or lesbian at camp in safety in comparison to home, so it’s not black and white at all. I hope that my chapter on romance and sexuality can maybe add some historical nuance to the conversation and give people a sense of how this actually happened. Because it happened for a whole bunch of reasons.
I think there’s a consensus view that camp is one of the most “successful” things the Jews do. But it’s hard to see where lessons from camp or camp culture are being imported to the rest of Jewish life. I’m curious what you see as kind of the lessons that Jewish institutions or Jewish communities have taken from camp — or have they not done that?
Every single public engagement I do about my work has boiled down to the question of, well, does it work? Does camp work? Is it successful? And that’s been a question that a lot of social scientists have been interested in. I don’t want to oversimplify that research, but a lot of the ways that they’ve measured success have been things that are not necessarily a given to all Jews as obviously the right way to be a Jew. So, for instance, in the ’90s and early 2000s, at the very least, a lot of research was about how, you know, “XYZ” camp and youth movement were successfully curbing intermarriage. A lot of them also asked campers and former campers how they feel about Israel, and it’s always if they are supportive of Israel in very normative ways, right, giving money visiting, supporting Israel or lobbying for its behalf — then camps have been successful.
I’m not interested in whether camps were successful by those metrics. I’m interested in how we got to the idea that camp should be successful in those ways in the first place. How did we get to those kinds of normative assumptions of like, this is a good Jew; a good Jew marries a Jew; a good Jew supports Israel, no matter what. So what I wanted to do is zoom out from that question of success and show how camp actually functions.
And then the question of “does it work” is really up to the reader. To people who believe that curbing intermarriage is the most important thing, then camps have been somewhat successful in the sense that people who go to these heavily educational camps are less likely to marry out of the faith.
But I am more interested in what actually happened at camp. And in terms of their legacies, I wanted to show how they changed various aspects of American Jewish life, and religion and politics. So I was really able to find how camping was essential in making kind of an Israel-centered Jewish education the norm. I was also able to draw a line between these Yiddish camps over the ’60s and ’70s that closed in the ’80s and contemporary Yiddish. The question of success is a real tricky and political one in a way that a lot of people have not talked about.
And is camp also fun? Because you’re creating a camp experience for your book launch next week.
Camp is fun — for a lot of people. Camp was not fun for everyone. And so I do want to play with that ambivalence at the party, and acknowledge that and also acknowledge that some people loved camp when they were younger and have mixed feelings about it now.
The party is not really a celebration of Jewish summer camp. People will be drinking and having fun and dancing — but I want them to be thinking while also about what is going on and why. How is Tisha B’Av [the fast day that commemorates the destruction of the ancient Jewish temple in Jerusalem that falls at the height of summer] commemorated at camp, for example?
Or what songs are we singing and what do they mean? I think a lot of people when they’re little kids, they learn songs in these Jewish summer camps that they can’t understand and later they maybe learn Hebrew and go, whoa, we were singing what?! My example from Zionist summer camp is singing “Ein Li Eretz Acheret,” or “I Have No Other Country.” We were in America and we obviously have another country! I don’t think anyone in my youth movement actually believes the words “Ein Li Eretz Acheret” because we live in America and people tend to kind of like living in America and most of them do not move to Israel.
So at the party we’ll be working through the fun of it, and at the same time the confusion of it and the ambivalence of it. I want it to be fun, and I also want it to be something that causes people to think.
—
The post American Jews created historic summer camps. Or did summer camps create American Jews? appeared first on Jewish Telegraphic Agency.
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‘The Girl in the Red Jacket’: A Testimony From Inside Iran
Cars burn in a street during a protest over the collapse of the currency’s value, in Tehran, Iran, Jan. 8, 2026. Photo: Stringer/WANA (West Asia News Agency) via REUTERS
I am Maddie, a millennial woman from Iran and an eyewitness to a bitter reality impossible to unsee.
I woke up on the morning of January 7, 2026, and checked my phone, scrolling through clips of my favorite shows. I walked into the living room with my phone still in my hand, when I realized that protests had broken out in the capital, Tehran.
At first, I ignored it. I had seen this before. In the 2019 “Bloody November” protests (Aban-i-Khoonin), the streets did not just protest; they bled. What started as fury over oil prices became a desperate fight for survival and freedom. The only thing more deafening than the gunfire was the chilling realization that this regime would rather rule a graveyard than lose its throne.
In 2022, the death of Mahsa Jina Amini in police custody sparked a new wave of demonstrations, and headscarves were burned. Streets filled again. Bullets tore through the chants; the shadow of the gallows grew longer every passing day. For every burned scarf, a life was taken.
Every time the streets stir, that old terror returns. The memory of what happens to empty hands never really fades. Our only weapon is our voices, but voices don’t stop bullets. You can’t save your loved one with chants; the memory of the consequences of rising against a totalitarian regime is etched in the pavements of this land in the form of stains.
This time, I knew the protests would be suppressed as they always are, and people would be forced back into silence. I put on my hoodie and left to buy eggs and dog food. I hadn’t been to the market for over a week. At the counter, I handed my card to the shopkeeper. The card machine beeped and showed an insufficient funds error. I knew I had money; I was certain of it. I asked the shopkeeper why the payment was being declined. He looked at me and said I didn’t have enough.
That was when I realized what had happened. Prices had tripled in less than two weeks. The US dollar had surged past 150,000 toman. At that moment, something broke inside me. I was not just shocked. I was angry, frustrated, and humiliated. Standing there, unable to pay for basic necessities, I understood that the crisis was no longer something happening on screens in Tehran. It had reached my hands, my wallet, and my life.
I spent the day reading, watching videos, and playing with my dogs. By the afternoon, I had to go to work. I went, finished my shift, and came back home. When I returned, I asked my uncle whether there had been any protests where we live. He said there were none.
“This is a small city,” he said. “Everyone knows everyone, you can’t just disappear in a crowd, so even if there are protests, you are not going anywhere.”
I nodded and went out to see my friends. We talked about ordinary things while the news played in the background, the way people do when fear has become a routine. Injustice lingered in the air like a toxin, impossible to escape. Near the main street, I noticed two men and a few young boys and girls standing together in silence. A police van parked in front of them, close enough to silence them without a word. Chanting wasn’t allowed. No banners, no organization — this alone was dangerous.
I went home with a pounding heart. I took off my shoes, then put on a black mask and wrapped a black shawl around my head and neck. In my rush, I forgot to change my red jacket. I found myself already moving before I had fully decided.
Uncle called out, “Where are you going?”
“I am just going to see, not going to do anything!”
“It is dangerous, they will find out, this is a small town,” he warned me about the consequences.
“Ten minutes? I will keep my distance,” I pleaded.
“Only ten minutes! Don’t do anything stupid.”
This is how we negotiate with fear, through time limits and promises that no one believes.
I put my shoes on in a hurry and stepped outside, overwhelmed by adrenaline, moving fast, almost without thinking.
Every step felt like calculating a potential death sentence. Every corner felt like a risk that couldn’t be undone. Here, opposition is not met with dialogue; it is met with batons, bullets, prison, and execution without trial. We grow up knowing the names of the dead even when their stories are erased. We know that a protest is never just a protest; it is a gamble with your future, your freedom, and your life.
As I turned the corner, I saw a few protesters standing apart from one another, careful not to form a crowd. I stopped at a distance. My legs were shaking. My hands would not stay still. I leaned against a wall, trying to steady my breathing. It was my first time standing this close to a protest. I noticed that everyone was wearing black jackets and black masks, as if color itself could be used against us.
I glanced down at my own red jacket and thought of the girl in the red coat in Schindler’s List, a symbol of how innocence and visibility offer no safety when violence is systematic. I stood there for less than a minute, fully aware that in this country, a minute is more than enough to change everything.
Before I could think any further, one of the girls stepped out from the group and walked towards me. I didn’t recognize her at first.
“Maddie, come,” she said.
I didn’t answer. I didn’t have to. My feet moved even as my mind resisted. When I reached the group, I recognized a few of my friends not by their faces, but by their eyes. That was visible.
One of them whispered. “Why are you wearing red? Are you crazy?”
“I didn’t think about it,” I said. I’ll wear black tomorrow.”
We stood there without speaking. One by one, others joined us. Ten people in total. No chants. No movement. Only bodies assembling quietly under constant watch in a small town crowded with the Revolutionary Guard and Basij.
I came home.
Uncle asked. “How did it go?”
“It was fine, I won’t wear a red jacket tomorrow,”
“Tomorrow?” He was quiet. He didn’t say another word.
All night, I kept turning from side to side, consumed by the consequences of having joined a protest. In my family, repression is not an abstract idea. Many of our relatives were killed in the 1970s. We never supported what was called a revolution; what actually took place was a coup d’état. The memories came back uninvited.
During the “Bloody November 2019-2020,” one of my family members was arrested and tortured in a detention center. He spent months as a political prisoner before being released on bail. Those months were filled with a familiar terror: not knowing where your loved ones had been taken, waiting weeks and months without answers, imagining every possible outcome just to survive the silence.
To quiet my thoughts, I downloaded an audiobook from YouTube, The Song of Achilles, my favorite book of all time. In the middle of fear, it offered a strange kind of warmth.
The next evening, at 8 PM, I put on a black jacket and a black mask and returned to the protest with two of my friends, Zahra and Melena. This time it was larger. The ground itself seemed to tremble under the weight of so many feet. Men, women, and children stood together, all dressed in black. The children I was used to seeing run freely through the streets now looked serious, alert.
“Why didn’t you bring your dogs?” one of them asked. They recognized me.
“They might bite you,” I said, and they laughed.
I noticed Snow — a white stray dog — near the sidewalk, looking for me. He finds me wherever I go. I ran home, brought him food, and returned. Dogs are considered filthy and forbidden under Islamic Sharia rules. I have faced constant opposition and mockery simply for feeding and caring for them. That story alone could fill pages.
Snow ate his food and stayed close. When we began walking towards the avenue, he followed along the sidewalk, frightened by the crowd. As we moved, more people joined us.
Then the chants began.
“Death to Khamenei!”
“Death to the dictator!”
“This land will not be free until the clerics are dead.”
The silence was gone, replaced by the brave people who enveloped the town whole.
Those who could not walk with us showed up with their cars, driving slowly in front of and behind the crowd. Their continuous honking, clapping through open windows, and making their presence known gave me the courage to keep walking and chanting even as my heart pounded and I felt certain I could be shot at any moment.
At that moment, Zahra grabbed my arm and shouted at the top of her lungs, “You know what I feel, Maddie?”
“What?” I shouted back.
“I feel free, I feel free to scream, for once in my life I am feeling that my voice is liberated, I have the right to shout.”
I looked at her — the only thing I found was the glistening eyes behind that mask, which was supposed to be a barrier between us and death itself. I nodded, and we held each other’s hands firmly.
That night, I returned home to find the Internet completely cut off. The blackout had begun. I didn’t care; I threw my phone onto the bed, and slept. In the morning, I realized it wasn’t just the Internet. Phone calls didn’t go through. Messages wouldn’t send. I couldn’t reach friends in other cities. Desperate for information, I watched television, scanning for any mention of what was happening elsewhere.
Reports emerged that a hospital in Ilam had been attacked and besieged by police. In Marvdasht, in Fars province, residents had taken up weapons against security forces. The situation was escalating. Authorities brought in forces from other provinces to regain control.
On the third night, again at 8 PM, we went out again; this time the crowd was even larger. Soon after, security forces opened fire on protesters in a nearby town. The crackdown intensified. Families were harassed. Homes were raided. Tear gas, metal pellets, and live ammunition were used. People were shot in the head and in the back, killed or permanently paralyzed.
A 16-year-old boy I knew was murdered. His name was Mehdi. The IRGC and Basij abducted him and his friend from the protest, beat them with rifle butts, sexually assaulted them, and then shot them. One died on the spot, the other remains in a coma.
This is not an exception; this is the life we have been living for decades. The following day, Iranian Intelligence began calling families of the protesters one by one, threatening them, ordering them to turn themselves in, and to stop protesting. Homes were raided. My friends and family were targeted.
Families were told their lives would be destroyed. In some cases, relatives of those killed were forced to sign documents falsely stating their loved ones had been killed by the “Mossad agents and terrorists.”
My uncle received a call. “Tell your family to stay home, or there will be consequences.”
We did not stop, but I began to lose strength when I could no longer reach my friends in other cities.
Eleven days after the massacre began, I briefly regained Internet access. The first thing I did was message friends in larger cities. One of them, from eastern Tehran, I won’t mention his name, told me that the regime had shot everyone who came out; the streets were flooded with blood. Security forces executed wounded protesters by shooting them in the head while they were receiving medical care. Families were forced to pay a ransom to retrieve the bodies of their children.
There is credible evidence that Iraqi, Afghan, and Pakistani militia, many of whom fought in Syria for Bashar al-Assad, were deployed to suppress protesters.
Another friend from Tehran sent me videos he recorded himself. In it, bodies were tagged and placed into bags. These were not anonymous images pulled from social media; they were scenes witnessed firsthand by people I know. The dead were not statistics; they were protesters who had stepped into the streets just like me, and never returned. Every name was a story. A dream.
What Iranians are suffering is not unrest. It is a calculated campaign of terror. The Islamic regime has turned public spaces into a killing ground, medical centers into execution sites, and mourning families into targets of extortion and intimidation. Violence is applied methodically, meant not only to crush protests, but to teach an entire nation what dissent costs.
This is not a momentary crisis. It is the continuation of a system that has perfected repression over decades, one that survives by bloodshed, silence, and the deliberate erasure of human dignity.
Many Islamic countries remain silent. Their narrative is a lie painted over a massacre. While our streets ran red, the leaders of the Muslim countries looked the other way. Seeing them shake hands with the very men who ordered our slaughter is a sickening sight.
My request is direct and urgent.
World leaders, the UN, and international human rights organizations! The Islamic Republic does not recognize international law. It violates it openly and repeatedly. Human rights abuses are central to its survival. Repression is not a policy failure. It is the policy.
The regime promised it would not execute protesters. From early January up till now, it carried out multiple executions. These were acts of intimidation, intended to terrorize a population into submission. Many political prisoners are at risk of execution.
The world must stop treating this regime as a legitimate governing authority and begin treating it as what it is: a system sustained by violence, fear, and the systematic destruction of human life. Silence, neutrality, and delay are not neutral positions. They are choices with consequences measured in blood.
This is not a warning.
It is a record.
It is an appeal to action, before more victims are added to the documented toll of the Islamic regime’s state violence.
Long live Iran.
پاینده باد ایران
Maddie Ali is a teacher and philosophy student based in Iran. In addition to her academic work, she has been involved in civic activity in her hometown, including participating in and helping organize local protests alongside friends and family. Her name has been changed to protect her identity.
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The Balkan Firewall: Why Iran’s Post-War Pivot to Europe Threatens the EU
Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei speaks during a meeting in Tehran, Iran, Feb. 1, 2026. Photo: Office of the Iranian Supreme Leader/WANA (West Asia News Agency)/Handout via REUTERS
In mid-February 2026, Germany and several other European Union member states quietly extended their internal Schengen border controls for another six months. The official reasoning was general irregular migration, but the unspoken intelligence consensus points to a far more specific, acute threat: the “Western Balkans Route” has become the primary artery for Iranian-backed operatives and radicalized actors seeking to infiltrate the continent.
While the world’s attention remains fixated on the Middle East and Iran’s threat to the region, a quieter, equally dangerous shadow war is unfolding on Europe’s periphery. With its traditional Levant proxies heavily battered, Tehran is actively reactivating and expanding its oldest European foothold — the Balkans — to export terror, destabilize the EU, and target Jewish communities from within.
The direct ballistic exchanges between Israel and Iran last summer shattered a decades-old taboo. In its wake, the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) realized that relying exclusively on a Middle Eastern “Ring of Fire” leaves the Iranian homeland unacceptably vulnerable to Israeli and American retaliation.
To restore its asymmetric deterrence, Tehran has pivoted outward, focusing on the soft underbelly of Southeastern Europe. Iran’s ties to the region are deep, dating back to the IRGC’s deployment to Bosnia and Herzegovina during the 1990s Yugoslav wars. Today, however, that dormant infrastructure is being weaponized to exploit a modern phenomenon: the “Red-Green” alliance.
Operating out of opaque cultural centers and state-sponsored NGOs in Sarajevo and beyond, Iranian intelligence is successfully cross-pollinating with radical Far-Left European networks. Under the guise of “anti-war” coordination, Tehran is providing logistical support, secure communications tactics, and financial backing to extreme anti-Zionist factions. The goal is simple: manufacture a self-sustaining engine of domestic unrest and virulent antisemitism that keeps Western European security services perpetually distracted.
Jerusalem is acutely aware of this shifting threat matrix and is not waiting for Brussels to wake up. Over the past year, Israel has launched an aggressive, under-the-radar diplomatic and military offensive to build a geopolitical firewall in the Balkans.
This strategy is evident in the unprecedented intensification of Israel’s ties with Serbia and Albania. Following Israeli President Isaac Herzog’s historic visits to the region, defense and cyber cooperation has skyrocketed. In the first half of 2025 alone, Serbian arms exports to Israel surged to tens of millions of euros, culminating in massive bilateral defense agreements.
Simultaneously, Israel is deepening its strategic embrace of Albania. Tirana, a predominantly Muslim nation with a proud history of saving Jews during the Holocaust, has emerged as one of the fiercest anti-Iran bastions in Europe. Having severed diplomatic ties with Tehran following massive Iranian cyberattacks in 2022, and currently hosting the anti-regime Mujahedeen-e-Khalq (MEK), Albania has welcomed Israeli cyber-defense expertise with open arms.
By strengthening Belgrade and Tirana, Israel is actively working to geographically isolate Iranian influence in Bosnia, creating a buffer zone that protects both Israeli interests and, ironically, the broader European continent.
Despite Israel’s proactive measures, the European Union remains perilously exposed. The “Red-Green” networks incubating in the Balkans do not intend to stay there. They are designed to exploit the geographic proximity and porous borders of the Western Balkans to smuggle operatives, weapons — particularly illicit firearms diverted from legacy stockpiles — and radicalized individuals directly into the Schengen zone.
The recent extensions of EU border controls are a frantic, reactive band-aid to this structural vulnerability. When European university campuses erupt in coordinated anti-Israel violence, or when Jewish institutions in Paris or Berlin face targeted harassment, the logistical and ideological fuel for these actions can increasingly be traced back to the Balkan corridor.
The EU can no longer afford to treat the Western Balkans merely as a stalled enlargement project; it must be recognized as an active theater of Iranian subversion.
Brussels must move beyond temporary border checks and adopt a proactive, intelligence-led framework. This requires conditioning future financial aid to Balkan states on the strict expulsion of IRGC front organizations. Furthermore, European capitals must abandon their diplomatic hesitations and actively support the security firewall that Israel, Serbia, and Albania are attempting to build.
If Europe fails to dismantle Tehran’s Balkan gateway, the next great security crisis won’t arrive via a smuggler’s boat across the Mediterranean. It will drive straight across a European land border, armed with Schengen access and an ideology purpose-built to destroy the West from within.
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What You Haven’t Heard About: The Looming Hezbollah Threat Across Israel’s Northern Border
Lebanese army members and residents inspect the damages in the southern village of Kfar Kila, Lebanon, Feb. 18, 2025. Photo: REUTERS/Karamallah Daher
On November 27, 2024, Israel and Hezbollah agreed to a ceasefire after more than one year of war, which started when the Lebanese-based terrorist organization launched a front in support of Hamas on October 8, 2023.
From the beginning of the fragile ceasefire through January 2026, Hezbollah committed 1,925 violations.
Today, the threat of Hezbollah continues to loom, amplified by the increasing regional tensions as Israel and the entire Middle East wait to see if and when the US will launch any military operation against the Islamic Republic of Iran.
In addition to preparing for a possible Iranian retaliation in the event of a US strike, Israel is also contemplating the possibility that Iranian proxy Hezbollah will support its sponsor by joining in an attack on the Jewish State.
Despite being severely weakened after IDF operations took out senior leadership and destroyed between 70–80% of its firing capabilities, Hezbollah remains a significant threat not only to Israel’s northern border, but to the entire country, as it still possesses several hundred medium and long-range missiles.
Because of this volatile reality, the IDF has conducted a series of operations targeting both senior and lower levels of leadership in Hezbollah to degrade its ability to regroup and rearm. From February 16 through February 22, 2026, the IDF conducted operations in 25 areas of Lebanon, including air strikes, artillery missions, drone strikes, and ground operations.
The threat posed by Hezbollah is not isolated. It is part of a broader regional network backed by Iran, designed to encircle Israel with multiple fronts and sustained pressure. Since the outbreak of anti-regime protests in Iran, the IDF has remained on heightened alert, suspecting renewed rocket and missile attacks against the country.
New reports have warned that if Israel and the Iranian regime are to return to war, Hezbollah will likely join the fight. This would be a change in the terror organization’s strategy, after having sat out of the war between Israel and Iran in June 2025.
With Hezbollah’s degraded military capabilities, the military organization has effectively handed much of its restructuring and rebuilding efforts to the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC). IRGC officers have been meeting with Hezbollah operatives in Lebanon. Following one of these meetings between the IRGC and Hezbollah at a missile unit site in the Beqaa Valley, the IDF targeted the site, killing eight Hezbollah terrorists.
When this strike was reported in the international media, none of the above context was provided. Instead, the BBC, The Guardian, and Sky News all omitted from their headlines that those killed included eight terrorists. The lede was buried as the outlets suggested that the IDF operation was not based on precise intelligence to remove a looming threat, but rather an indiscriminate targeting of Lebanese civilians. The media have previously similarly framed any targeted strike as an Israeli violation of the ceasefire, rather than a measure to prevent Hezbollah from rebuilding its military infrastructure.
All of this unfolds against the larger reality that Hezbollah continues its refusal to adhere to the ceasefire agreement it signed. In a speech on February 16, Secretary-General Naim Qassem made clear the organization’s refusal to disarm.
While the Lebanese Armed Forces have claimed the disarmament has begun and that it has taken “operational control” of the area south of the Litani River — from which Hezbollah is required to withdraw — Israel’s targeting of Hezbollah infrastructure in those areas suggests the process is far from complete.
Hezbollah today is a fractured version of the terrorist organization it once was. Its leadership is weakened, and its rocket arsenal is nowhere near the extent it was before October 2023. Yet the presence of the terrorist organization on Israel’s northern border remains. Its apparent willingness to join the Iranian regime if a new round of fighting is to break out only goes to display that it has not strayed from its goal of destroying the Jewish state.
The media might try to look away from this reality, but Israel cannot — nor can it afford the consequences of ignoring the security threat.
The author is a contributor to HonestReporting, a Jerusalem-based media watchdog with a focus on antisemitism and anti-Israel bias — where a version of this article first appeared.