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As a child of survivors, I see my parents in every Ethiopian immigrant to Israel

(JTA) — Recently, I watched a mother reunite with her son for the first time in 41 years.

On May 9, I was part of a delegation of the Jewish Agency for Israel that accompanied Ethiopian olim (immigrants) from Addis Ababa to Ben Gurion Airport and new lives in Israel. The mother had made aliyah in 1982 as part of Operation Moses, when Ethiopian Jewish immigrants trekked for weeks through the Sudan, hiding out from authorities in the daytime and walking by moonlight, to reach Israeli Mossad agents, who were secretly facilitating their transport to Israel.

But the son, due to family circumstances, was left behind. And here she was on the tarmac, praying and crying, and the embrace they had when the now grown man walked down the stairs, that depth of emotion after decades of waiting and yearning, was something that I will never forget.

The Ethiopian Jewish community dates back some 2,500 years, from around the time of the destruction of the First Temple. We know that they have always yearned, from generation to generation, to be in Jerusalem. Most of the Ethiopian Jews emigrated to Israel during the 1970s and 1980s and in one weekend in May 1992, a covert Israeli operation, dubbed Operation Solomon, airlifted more than 14,325 Ethiopian Jews to Israel over 36 hours. Those coming today are being reunited with family members who came during one of these earlier operations.

On my four-day trip from Addis Ababa to Tel Aviv and Jerusalem, I listened to the stories of incredible perseverance, and of heartrending suffering, among Ethiopian Jews — our brothers and sisters. Close to 100,000 of them have made their way to Israel over the past 40-plus years, fulfilling this community’s centuries-long quest to come to Israel.

I heard about the Ethiopian Israeli who, as a 15-year-old, marched through Sudan with his family and lost three of his siblings to starvation. I heard the stories of families waiting, for months or years, for that moment of aliyah, as clandestine negotiations among government negotiators dragged on. It was so powerful to hear of the sacrifices they made and how strong the dream was, and is today, of coming to Jerusalem, to Israel.

RELATED: How Israel’s Falash Mura immigration from Ethiopia became a painful 30-year saga

And I thought of my own family’s journey — a different time, under different circumstances. But also a Jewish journey of perseverance, suffering and, for the fortunate among us, survival.

My parents were born in Poland in the 1930s. During World War II, my father and his family survived in a Siberian labor camp and then in a remote part of Poland. My mother’s family managed to get work papers, but her father did not have them. He survived the war by hiding under the floorboards of a barn on a farm where they were living. The woman who owned the farm did not know they were Jewish, so it was a harrowing day-to-day existence.

But my mother and father survived, managed to make it to liberation, and eventually came to the United States. They were first sponsored by the Birmingham, Alabama, Jewish community, and then made their way to New York and New Jersey, where our family has built a new life. We now have fourth-generation children growing up here in New Jersey, and we feel so fortunate for the lives we have.

Here is the essential difference from their story and mine: For my family, there was no state of Israel. Many members of my family perished in the Holocaust. There was nowhere for them to go.

This drives what I do. Today, everything has changed because we have a state of Israel, and we have a Jewish Agency that ensures that Jews can make aliyah and helps them make new lives in Israel.

Last year, after the Russian invasion of Ukraine, I traveled to Poland and stood at the border as thousands of Ukrainian refugees streamed across. I was standing only a few miles from where my grandfather hid under the floorboards of that barn about 80 years earlier. Back then, there was no one there to protect my family, no one to do anything for them. And here I was in 2022 standing amid a massive array of aid agencies, and the very first thing these refugees saw — whether they were Jewish or not — were signs with the Star of David, marking the Jewish Agency, the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee and other Jewish groups.

While there has been significant hardship and struggle for the first generation of Ethiopian Jews in Israel, it was incredibly inspiring for me to meet members of the second generation — those who made the trek as children or teenagers in the 1980s and ’90s — who are now Israeli adults in positions of leadership and significant responsibilities. We heard from Havtamo Yosef, who immigrated as a young child from Ethiopia with his parents, and then watched his father become a street sweeper and his mother a housecleaner while he was growing up. Now he heads up the entire Ethiopian Aliyah and Absorption services for the Jewish Agency, ensuring that there are stronger absorption procedures, better education and firmer foundations for better lives for these new immigrants than there ever was for his family.

While there was no Israel for my family when we were refugees, there were — in Birmingham, Alabama; in Hillside, New Jersey; and everywhere along the way of my family’s journey — people who thought outside of themselves, who cared and took care of my relatives. This is my legacy and what motivates me today.

So when I stood on the tarmac at Ben Gurion earlier this month, I cried tears of sadness at the long family separations and tears of joy that today this Jewish journey continues, from Ukraine and Russia and Ethiopia to Israel. Today, there is a place to go and a people to welcome Jews on that tarmac, with an Israeli flag, a smile and a warm embrace, and a promise of better lives in freedom.

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Is Netanyahu dead? Has Tel Aviv been flattened? AI videos are dominating the Iran war.

(JTA) — Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu posted an unusual video this week: of himself buying coffee at a Jerusalem-area cafe.

It was hardly typical fare for wartime, when Netanyahu can more often be seen giving recorded addresses or touring missile damage within Israel. But the prime minister had come with an important mission: to debunk viral claims of his death.

The claims, which originated on Iranian state media last week, were picked up by social media users on Thursday after Netanyahu gave his first press conference during the war.

Zooming in on details in the seemingly innocuous address, some claimed that Netanyahu had an extra finger on his right hand and missing teeth, signs they said were key tells of AI-generated content.

“Imagine Netanyahu was actually dead this entire past week,” the pro-Palestinian TikTok influencer Guy Christensen wrote in a post on X. “It’s too good to be true but Israel has been using AI generated videos of Netanyahu ever since. One can only hope.”

From the cafe Sataf, Netanyahu issued his response to the conspiracy, posting a video on Sunday of him ordering a coffee, chatting with baristas and telling Israelis that the wars against Iran and Hezbollah in Lebanon were going well.

“They say I’m what?” the caption read. Mocking the idea that he had been killed, he joked, “I’m dying for coffee!” Then, alluding to the speculation about the earlier video, he asks, “Do you want to count the number of fingers?” before holding up each hand with his fingers outstretched.

But rather than quelling the claims of his death, the Israeli leader’s response instead spurred more speculation, with users on social media calling into question details in the video including the physics of his coffee cup. In another video posted by Netanyahu on Monday, some social media users pointed to a clip where a ring seemingly disappears from his hand in one of the frames.

“ISRAEL: ‘Benjamin Netanyahu is still alive. Here’s another AI video of him as proof. Just trust me, goy,’ the antisemitic podcaster Stew Peters wrote in a post on X.

The churn of conspiratorial claims about the Israeli leader’s death, which also included an AI-generated image of him being pulled from rubble, highlights the growing challenge of combating misinformation in an era of artificial intelligence and viral deepfakes, especially during times of conflict.

The war with Iran has produced an absolute flood of fabricated imagery, from AI-generated clips circulated by pro-Iran accounts purporting to show missile strikes flattening Tel Aviv or the capture of American troops by Iranian forces. The Israeli disinformation detection company Cyabra said it identified networks containing tens of thousands of accounts that generated material garnering 145 million views in the first two weeks of the war — almost all pro-Iranian, and mostly on TikTok. (The company said during the last Israel-Iran war, in June 2025, that Iran’s internet outage had quelled disinformation bot farms located there.)

“The campaign did not spread organically. Clear coordination patterns were identified, including repeated narratives, identical videos and captions, fixed hashtag clusters, and synchronized burst posting,” Cyabra said in its report published Friday. “These tactics allowed the network to rapidly flood the information environment and dominate online discussions during key moments of the conflict.”

The videos have left some of Israel’s critics confident that the country has been battered far beyond what has been officially reported.

But even Israeli television has not been immune, airing its own misinformation too — albeit unwittingly.

Channel 12 News last week aired a night-vision clip that it said showed American B-2 stealth bombers over Iran flying in formation with F-18 fighter jets.

Within hours, the clip was identified not as a Pentagon release, as Channel 12 military correspondent Nir Dvori had suggested on air, but as footage from the combat flight simulator Digital Combat Simulator World. Itay Blumental, Dvori’s counterpart at rival public broadcaster Kan, wrote on X that the footage was “indeed incredible, but also lifted from a video game,” sharing the same YouTube clip from March 2023.

During Monday evening’s broadcast, Dvori apologized and said the mistake was “entirely mine,” but did not specify which footage he was referring to, leaving viewers who had missed the earlier segment with little indication of what had gone wrong. The news network also issued an apology, saying it would “examine its procedures.”

The right-wing Channel 14 also aired the clip — more than once.

i24 News made a similar mistake, the Haaretz newspaper reported, airing a video it treated as apparent footage of an American strike on Iran, though the clip was also from Digital Combat Simulator World.

The segments quickly became internet fodder, with social media users lampooning the news networks and posting their own tongue-in-cheek “exclusive war footage.”

Omer Babai, who runs Kan’s social media, posted a GIF on X of shoot ’em up video game Chicken Invaders, saying it showed “American bombers in Iranian skies.”

Another X user quipped: “Nir Dvori: Iran scattered mines across the Strait of Hormuz,” alongside a screenshot of vintage PC game Minesweeper.

A third posted an image of fellow 1990s gaming staple “Digger,” with the caption: “Exclusive footage of Sinwar in the tunnels of Gaza,” referencing the Hamas chief killed by the IDF. Street Fighter and Pac-Man made cameo appearances too.

Channel 14, widely seen as sympathetic towards Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, is no stranger to broadcasting dubious footage. Earlier in the war, the channel aired a video it said showed crowds in Tehran appearing to express support for the Israeli premier with chants of “Bibi joon” — a Persian term of affection translated roughly as “dear Bibi.” But the online Israeli fact-checker FakeReporter later said the chant had been generated with artificial intelligence.

But the B2 gaffes are one side of a much wider phenomenon.

One viral clip, shared across X, TikTok and other platforms, appeared to show missiles pounding Tel Aviv and apartment blocks collapsing under a barrage. AFP and several other outlets found it had been generated using AI, citing telltale distortions in cars, rooftops, smoke trails and even the placement of an Israeli flag sans pole. The Grok AI chatbot on X, however, helped amplify the video, with repeated assurances that “the video is real,” AFP reported.

After the video was exposed as AI-generated, an X account under the name Abdulruhman Ismail, one of the first to share the footage in a post that drew 4 million views, said he would leave it up “because the scene reflects, painfully, what Gaza has endured under Israeli bombardment.” He added, “I am keeping this post for transparency. The video may not be real, but the devastation it evokes is real, and it mirrors what Palestinians have lived through.”

During the June 2025 war, pro-Iran accounts similarly circulated fake videos and images claiming to show strikes devastating Tel Aviv as well as Iranian forces downing Israeli F-35s.

Australian wire AAP debunked several fakes from this round of conflict, including a video claiming that an Iranian strike set a CIA facility in Dubai ablaze, as well as a fabricated image purporting to show late Iranian supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, dead under a pile of rubble.

A separate fabricated clip that racked up tens of millions of views purported to show the Burj Khalifa engulfed in flames as crowds rushed in its direction.

The Tehran Times also shared false images and false reports of extensive damage to the US Navy’s Fifth Fleet headquarters in Bahrain.

Iran’s embassy in Austria posted an AI image of a child’s backpack, claiming it was taken at the Minab school in Iran that was hit on the first day of the war.

Tasnim, the Iranian state-affiliated news agency, shared an AI-generated image on X purporting to show an American radar installation in Qatar destroyed in an Iranian strike, The New York Times reported. The paper said Iran’s propaganda “appears focused more on swaying international audiences,” portraying the “success of Tehran’s counteroffensive in effusive terms.”

But X’s head of product told the BBC that 99% of the accounts spreading AI-generated war videos were trying to “game monetization,” posting sensational content to rack up engagement and qualify for payments through the platform’s creator revenue program. The social media giant announced that it will temporarily suspend creators from the program if they post AI-generated videos of armed conflict without disclosing that they were fake.

British politician George Galloway posted a video last week containing AI imagery in which he narrates that the “apocalypse is burning Tel Aviv,” that the city “now looks like Gaza,” and that air defenses over Tel Aviv are “no longer operational.” He says his information came from friends on “Sheinkin Street, Tel Aviv, near Dizengoff Square.”

Former Israeli spokesman Eylon Levy seized on the canard, posting reaction videos of sun-soaked beach scenes and one of himself at Dizengoff Square, casually sipping an iced coffee with the very much intact plaza behind him.

Some people responded to the video by cheering Levy on, saying that they, too, were enjoying a beautiful day in a mostly intact Tel Aviv. But others resisted the evidence in front of them. “Cheap Jew propaganda,” one commenter wrote. “It’s basically flattened out.”

The post Is Netanyahu dead? Has Tel Aviv been flattened? AI videos are dominating the Iran war. appeared first on The Forward.

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Jews decry UK newspaper for appearing to justify attack on bakery founded by Israelis

(JTA) — A Guardian column that seemed to rationalize the targeting of a popular Israeli-founded bakery has ignited controversy in the British Jewish community.

The March 14 piece in the British daily, by sports and culture writer Jonathan Liew, came days after the newly opened north London branch of Gail’s was repeatedly vandalized, with its windows smashed and red paint and pro‑Palestinian slogans daubed on its doors.

The Board of Deputies of British Jews denounced the vandalism, saying that “targeting a business on the basis of alleged or perceived Israeli and or Jewish connections reflects a very worrying trend.”

Liew, meanwhile, described the bakery chain’s expansion into diverse neighborhoods as a form of “aggression,” implying that its presence near a Palestinian-owned cafe was inherently provocative.

Critics, including British Jewish media, communal leaders and online commentators, accused Liew of rationalizing an attack on a business they say is being targeted solely because of its founders’ Israeli heritage. Gail’s was founded in the 1990s as a wholesale bakery by Israeli baker Gail Mejia, who with an Israeli partner opened a storefront bakery in 2005. In 2021, the company, today with close to 200 stores, was acquired by the American investment firm Bain Capital.

“We are a British business with no specific connections to any country or government outside the UK,” a spokesperson for Gail’s told the Jewish News. “Our focus right now is on working with the authorities and making sure our people feel safe and supported.”

Although the Guardian piece acknowledges Bain’s ownership, it also notes allegations that the investment firm “invests heavily in military technology, including Israeli security companies.” As a result, wrote Liew, “its very presence 20 metres [65 feet] away from a small independent Palestinian cafe feels quietly symbolic, an act of heavy-handed high-street aggression.” High Street is the British equivalent of “Main Street.”

Pro-Palestinian demonstrators had protested the opening of the branch in the days before the vandalism.

A spokesperson for the Israeli embassy in the U.K. told The Daily Mail that Liew’s article was “an astonishing exercise in bigotry disguised as moral commentary.”

“Beneath its surface lies a familiar and ugly trope: the repackaging of anitsemitic prejudice in fashionable political language,” said Alex Grandler.

The debate, playing out in fiery messages on social media, has highlighted broader concerns about Jewish-owned businesses in Britain being cast as proxies in disputes over the Middle East. In 2025, the Community Security Trust, Britain’s main antisemitism watchdog, recorded 20 incidents involving vandalism at Jewish businesses and organizations.

“In the Guardian’s hall-of-mirrors morality, smashing up a shop because it was founded by Jews is just a touching little political tantrum,” Jewish News editor Richard Ferrer wrote in a column.

In the Guardian piece, Liew seemed to sympathize with the Palestinian-owned cafe in the neighborhood, Cafe Metro, for having been the frequent victim of “pro-Israel activists” who “regularly descend on it to slap stickers on its windows reading ‘Stop killing people’ and ‘One of these days you’ll thank us.’” At the same time, he referred to the window-smashing at Gail’s among the “small acts of petty symbolism” that grow out of Palestinian frustration with their failure to exert influence on the Israel-Palestine debate.

Hadley Freeman, a former columnist for the Jewish Chronicle who now writes a column for The Times, called out Liew for applying an apparent double standard.

“So let me get this straight,” she wrote on X. “1. Petty activism against a Palestinian-owned cafe is bad (agreed!) 2. But *violent* activism against a cafe that people associate (wrongly!) with Israel is justified and understandable.

“Update your rule book accordingly!” she added.

CAMERA UK, a media watchdog group that monitors coverage of Israel, said it had contacted the Guardian, asking if Liew’s column met its “editorial standards.”

“We know the answer, but are nonetheless hoping to see how they justify Liew’s latest defense of antisemitism,” CAMERA said in a statement.

A Guardian spokesperson did share a terse reply with The Daily Mail. “Complaints about Guardian journalism are considered by the internally independent readers’ editor under the Guardian’s editorial code and guidance,” the spokesperson said.

The controversy even reached across the Atlantic. “Good grief — Gail’s is just a bakery!” Patricia Heaton, the actress and conservative political activist, wrote on X. Heaton said she ”had no idea it had any connection to Israel or the Jewish people. But now I want to support it even more.”

Public defenses of the article have been limited, though some pro-Palestinian activists online argued that Liew was only describing the motivations of the protesters rather than endorsing vandalism.

Liew hasn’t responded to the criticism of his column, although he pinned the article to the top of his Bluesky social media account, with the message “the war at home.”

The post Jews decry UK newspaper for appearing to justify attack on bakery founded by Israelis appeared first on The Forward.

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Report: Israeli group quietly organized charter flights evacuating Palestinians from Gaza

(JTA) — An Israeli organization headed by a right-wing activist quietly arranged a series of charter flights that evacuated Palestinians from Gaza last year, according to an Associated Press investigation.

The organization, Ad Kan, a right-wing Israeli organization founded by Gilad Ach, an Israeli combat reservist and West Bank settler activist, coordinated the flights via another company called Al-Majd, which describes itself on its website as a humanitarian organization “supporting Palestinian lives.”

Among the evacuations facilitated by Ad Kan was a flight in May that transported nearly 60 Palestinians to Indonesia and other locations, as well as two flights in October and November that transported over 300 Palestinians to South Africa.

It was not clear who had planned or paid for the flights. South African Foreign Minister Ronald Lamola decried the evacuations as representing “a broader agenda to remove Palestinians from Palestine,” and an investigation was launched into one of the flight’s origins.

At the time, President Donald Trump had walked back his proposal to relocate the population in Gaza to other countries amid criticism, despite getting Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s endorsement.

The AP investigation found that Ach had stuck with Trump’s plan after the U.S. president dumped it, publishing a report detailing how he would implement the “voluntary exit.”

The newly revealed origins of the charter flights adds to a history of controversy surrounding small-scale efforts to evacuate Palestinians from Gaza. Last August, France suspended its effort to evacuate Palestinians after a woman who took part in the program was accused of making antisemitic comments online. The same month, the United States also suspended a program designed to give Palestinian medical care after the far-right Jewish influencer Laura Loomer called the effort a “national security threat.”

Several of the passengers on the South Africa flights told the Associated Press that they were unaware of who was behind the flights, but said they did not care and were more concerned with leaving the besieged territory. (Six Palestinians who spoke to the outlet said they paid up to $2,000 per person for the transportation.)

“There was famine, and we had no options. My children were almost killed,” said a 37-year-old Palestinian who arrived in South Africa in November. “Death and destruction was everywhere, all day, for two years, and nobody came to the rescue.”

In a statement to the Associated Press, Ach rejected South Africa’s allegations that the evacuations amounted to ethnic cleansing and decried the “profound hypocrisy” of countries unwilling to accept Palestinian refugees.

“Their continued presence in Gaza, under dire conditions, serves as a tool to pressure Israel internationally and allows Hamas to maintain its rule over this suffering population,” Ach said.

While it was unclear if Ach had coordinated with the Israeli government to facilitate the evacuations, Muayad Saidam, a Palestinian identified on the group’s website as its Gaza humanitarian project manager, told the outlet that travel arrangements for Palestinians must be made with Israeli authorities.

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