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Far-right Israeli minister finds enemy in JDC, the mainstream American Jewish aid group
(JTA) — An American Jewish group that has provided aid to Jewish communities in crisis for more than a century has become the target of one of Israel’s newly empowered far-right ministers.
Itamar Ben-Gvir, who serves as national security minister, said on Wednesday that he was shutting down a program dedicated to reducing violence in Arab Israeli towns. His reason: The program is operated by the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee, which he called a “leftist organization.”
“JDC is a nonpolitical organization and has been so since our founding in 1914,” Michael Geller, a spokesperson for JDC, told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency.
Ben-Gvir’s characterization baffled many across the Jewish communal world who know the JDC as a nonpartisan group with an extensive track record of providing humanitarian aid to Jews in distress.
To them, Ben-Gvir’s criticism of the group is the latest sign that the rupture of political norms in Israel extends beyond the judicial reforms advanced by the government, which have drawn unprecedented protests.
“To call the JDC a left-wing organization is a joke. It is not political in any way,” said Amnon Be’eri-Sulitzeanu, co-CEO of the Abraham Initiatives, a nonprofit that works toward an “equal and shared society” for Jewish and Arab Israelis.
Be’eri-Sulitzeanu, who is Jewish, said he anticipated changes by the right-wing government, which was inaugurated in December. But he was surprised by Ben-Gvir’s announcement.
“I could expect revisiting collaboration with organizations that are branded as civil rights or human rights or Israeli-Palestinian organizations,” he added. “But the JDC — it’s very strange.”
Founded in 1914 by the American Jewish banker Jacob Schiff to aid Jews living in Palestine, the “Joint” has distributed billions of dollars in assistance across 70 countries — including, over the last year, to 43,000 Ukrainian Jews amid the war there. It played a central role in aiding Holocaust survivors following World War II, as well as in the resettlement of Jews from the former Soviet Union.
Among its biggest sources of support are Jewish federations, the nonpartisan umbrella charities found in nearly every major North American Jewish community.
“JDC is an apolitical organization that has worked with every government since the establishment of the State of Israel, providing critical services to the elderly, youth-at-risk, people with disabilities and other underserved populations across all sectors, including Haredim and Arab-Israelis,” the Jewish Federations of North America said in a statement. “JDC’s activities are a living and breathing example of the Jewish values of tikkun olam and tzedakah that guide Jewish Federations’ work every day,” Hebrew phrases that connote the Jewish imperative to repair the world, as well as charity.
JDC staff packing matzahs and haggadahs for online seders in Odessa, Ukraine, April 7, 2022. (JDC)
In Israel, the group funds and operates efforts to help needy populations — including immigrants, the elderly, people with disabilities and people living in poverty. Those efforts often involve working with the government, which in 2007 gave the JDC Israel’s most prestigious prize for its work. This year, according to a spokesman, the group is spending $129 million on Israel initiatives.
The JDC’s government-funded programs include the anti-violence effort that Ben-Gvir is targeting. It was made possible last year due to nearly $1 billion in funding to curb crime in Arab communities by the previous governing coalition, which was centrist. The allocation followed lobbying by Arab and civil society organizations, including the Abraham Initiatives, which is now monitoring how the money is being used as well as its impact.
Arab citizens of Israel make up 84% of crime victims despite comprising just 20% of the population, according to government data released last year that showed a sharp rise in the proportion of Arab Israelis who had experienced violent crime.
Many in Arab communities have called for heightened law enforcement and have charged Israeli police with making inadequate efforts to keep their communities safe. This week, commenting on the shooting death of an Arab Israeli woman, Arab Israeli opposition lawmaker Ahmad Tibi accused Ben-Gvir of being “occupied with other matters,” such as clashes with the attorney general and police officials in Tel Aviv. “Maybe the time has come for senior officials to demonstrate responsibility when it comes to crime organizations and weapons running rampant,” Tibi said.
Other initiatives have aimed to tackle the violence in ways that go beyond policing. The program that Ben-Gvir said he is shutting down is one of them. Called Stop the Bleeding, it involves multiple government ministries as well as local community groups and education efforts and has operated in seven cities with large Arab populations, including a Bedouin town and Lod, a city with significant Arab organized crime networks that also has a large Jewish population.
Be’eri-Sulitzeanu said the program was already starting to bear fruit and had contributed to a slowdown in a multi-year rise in murders. Canceling the program, he said, reflects the current government’s general approach to tackling Israel’s problems.
“It’s not about collaboration. It’s not about hearing the concerns and pain and hopes and needs of the Arab community,” he said. “It’s about doing everything unilaterally, and really without a lot of care for the lives of those people. I think that’s what we are watching.”
MK Ahmad Tibi attends a meeting at the Knesset in Jerusalem, Dec. 6, 2022. (Olivier Fitoussi/Flash90)
A year ago, around the time when the previous government awarded the Stop the Bleeding contract to the JDC, Bezalel Smotrich, a key Ben-Gvir ally who was then an opposition lawmaker and now serves alongside Ben-Gvir as finance minister, proposed that Israel create a “command center” of “all of the relevant entities” that provide humanitarian assistance to Ukrainian Jewish refugees. Included on his list, alongside the Israeli Foreign Ministry and Red Cross: the JDC.
The JDC is not the first mainstream group to be targeted by far-right members of Israel’s new right-wing government, whose signature legislative effort aims to sap the power and independence of the country’s judiciary. That legislation has given rise to a sweeping protest movement and to grave warnings about Israel’s future from a broad range of public figures — including elder statesmen, foreign governments and religious leaders.
Avi Maoz, the leader of the anti-LGBTQ Noam Party who briefly held a leadership role in Israel’s Education Ministry, compiled a list of American and British groups that he believes are trying to impose their liberal values on Israeli schoolchildren. “We must protect our people and our state from the infiltration of the alien bodies that arrive from foreign countries, foreign bodies, foreign foundations,” Maoz once said. Maoz has since resigned from that role, saying that he did not think he was being sufficiently empowered to fulfill his goals by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s government.
But Be’eri-Sulitzeanu said he remains concerned about civil-society programs, especially those falling under the purview of far-right ministers including Ben-Gvir or those funded by American Jews, whom some on the right perceive as universally liberal.
People who are paying attention to local governance in Israel expect further tensions around initiatives that do not match Ben-Gvir’s attitudes about harsh policing. Ben-Gvir wants officers to have the right to shoot Arabs who throw stones, has called for a crackdown on anti-government protesters and is increasingly clashing with police officials who believe his orders could jeopardize public safety. Multiple former police commissioners have called for his dismissal.
“Ben-Gvir has his own political agenda and he has his own ax to grind, and at the moment, I think he’s not keen on developing services of the Arab population, either in security or juvenile delinquency or education,” said Amos Avgar, who worked for the JDC in Israel, Russia and the United States for 30 years until 2010, including as chief programming officer.
Avgar emphasized that the JDC has always studiously avoided political activity. “If there’s one thing that the JDC is not, it is not political,” he said. “It always shied [away] from anything that had the smell of politics and never dealt with any project by political agenda.”
It’s unclear how quickly Ben-Gvir’s announcement, made during a government meeting and first reported by Israel’s public broadcaster, will ultimately translate into changes. Geller, the JDC spokesman, said the organization had learned about the criticism only from the media, not from Ben-Gvir’s office. Later, amid an outcry, Ben-Gvir’s office said the funding decision had followed a review of contracts that revealed missing documentation from the JDC, a charge that the JDC denied.
Amnon-Sulitzeanu said he didn’t have high hopes for the program’s future.
“I think the first [characterization] is unfortunately going to be the correct one — that he is actually intending to stop it, which is very unfortunate because it is among the more serious programs that are willing to deal with this catastrophe,” he said. “And it shows again that the current minister is not so much interested in saving lives of Arab citizens.”
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Anti-Israel Michigan Senate Candidate Promoted Group Behind Holocaust Memorial Protests
Former Wayne County Health Director Abdul El-Sayed, a Democrat now running for US Senate in Michigan, speaks at a “Hands Off” protest at the state Capitol in Lansing, Michigan, on April 5, 2025. Photo: Andrew Roth/Sipa USA via Reuters Connect
Abdul El-Sayed, a Democratic candidate for US Senate in Michigan, is facing scrutiny over his past fundraising and public support for a political advocacy group whose affiliates organized anti-Israel protests at Holocaust memorial sites in Washington, DC, and the Detroit metro area.
El-Sayed previously recorded a fundraising video and appeared at multiple events in support of Justice, Education, Technology PAC (JET-PAC), an organization focused on expanding the political influence of Muslim Americans in US politics. In the video, posted online in 2018, El-Sayed urged viewers to donate to the group, praising its efforts to train Muslim Americans in civic engagement and advocacy.
JET-PAC later drew widespread condemnation after its medical advocacy arm, Doctors Against Genocide, helped organize protests outside the US Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington and the Zekelman Holocaust Center in Farmington Hills, Michigan. The demonstrations condemned Israel’s military campaign against the Palestinian terrorist group Hamas in Gaza and described the war as a “genocide,” language that Jewish leaders and Holocaust educators denounced as false, antisemitic, and deeply offensive.
Doctors Against Genocide (DAG) called on activists to obtain free tickets to the Holocaust Museum in Washington with the intention of protesting inside the facility before moving the demonstration to the White House. The planned protest sparked backlash from Jewish organizations and community leaders, who argued that targeting Holocaust memorial sites crossed a moral line.
The group ultimately canceled the demonstration.
“The goal of our event was to visit the Holocaust Museum to express our empathy for the horrors of that genocide. Additionally, we wanted to bring awareness to the ongoing genocide in Gaza,” the group said in a statement.
“Our initial communication did not sufficiently convey this, leading to misinterpretations and unfounded accusations,” it continued. “As DAG we stand against all hate of vulnerable people, whether that hate comes in the form of antisemitism, anti-Palestinianism, anti-Black hate, anti-White hate, or any other prejudice. Never again for all.”
In a later statement, the group apologized for a “lack of clarity” but continued to imply that the Holocaust is comparable to Israel’s military operations against Hamas, the Palestinian terrorist group that launched the war with its Oct. 7, 2023, invasion of and massacre across southern Israel.
Comparing Israel to Nazi Germany is antisemitic, according to the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA) definition of antisemitism, which has been adopted by dozens of governments and hundreds of civic institutions around the world.
Despite the backlash, DAG, which is a program of JET-PAC, later orchestrated a protest outside the Zekelman Holocaust Center in July 2024, once again sparking outrage from local Jewish community leaders.
Organizers of the protest explained that they targeted the museum over its purported positive portrayal of Israel and alleged unwillingness to elevate the historical displacement of Palestinian Arabs.
“The museum is not objective. They present the history that the right-wing will allow them to put on. The question we have for them is: How are you now going to portray the Nakba,” said Rene Lichtman, a Holocaust survivor and organizer of the demonstration.
“Nakba,” the Arabic term for “catastrophe,” is used by Palestinians and anti-Israel activists to refer to the establishment of the modern state of Israel in 1948.
“You end the story, and I know because I’ve been speaking here forever, with the happy ending of the Jews, the [Nazi concentration] camp survivors coming to Israel,” Lichtman continued. “But that is no longer the ending. We know that from the last eight months. What about the Palestinian people?”
Mark Jacobs, a lawyer, community activist, and co-director of the Coalition for Black and Jewish Unity, said protests at Holocaust centers amount to an attack on Jewish historical memory.
“I find it pretty grotesque that the protesters would select the Holocaust Center, a solemn and sacred place, to essentially call for the eradication of Israel, which was created as a safe harbor for the Jewish people after the world’s worst genocide,” Jacobs told Deadline Detroit in July, referring to the Zekelman protest. “But of course we have seen a steady stream of antisemitic protests, vandalism, and violence at various Jewish sites throughout the US and the world since the barbarism of Oct. 7.”
At the protest outside the Zekelman Holocaust Center, speakers accused Israel of war crimes and criticized what they described as the influence of “Israel’s lobbyists.” Dr. Nadal Jboor, a featured speaker and member of Doctors Against Genocide, said Israel’s military actions should be stopped through international pressure, calling a ceasefire a “medical intervention.”
JET-PAC, founded by former Cambridge, Massachusetts city councilor Nadeem Mazen, has described its mission as empowering Muslim Americans politically. El-Sayed appeared at JET-PAC galas and panels alongside the group’s leadership and promoted the organization on social media over multiple years, calling it “amazing.”
In the 2018 fundraising video, El-Sayed said JET-PAC was “incredibly important for engagement, political engagement for the Muslim community,” adding that the group helped people “fight for and advocate for a more just, more equitable, more sustainable society.”
El-Sayed’s support for the organization raises questions about his policies toward the Jewish community and combating extremism in the wake of the Holocaust memorial protests, which occurred amid a historic rise in antisemitic hate crimes across the US following Hamas’s Oct. 7, 2023, massacre across southern Israel.
El-Sayed’s campaign did not respond to a request for comment for this story.
The controversy has unfolded as El-Sayed and another Michigan Senate candidate, state Sen. Mallory McMorrow, have both publicly accused Israel of committing genocide, positions that have alienated some Jewish voters in the battleground state.
Just days before the anniversary of the Oct. 7 atrocities, McMorrow called Israel’s response in Gaza a “moral abomination,” saying it was “just as horrendous” as the attack carried out by Hamas-led Palestinian terrorists, who perpetrated the deadliest massacre of Jews since the Holocaust.
However, McMorrow has since softened her stance on the Israel-Hamas war, recently lamenting in an interview that the term “genocide” has become a “purity test” for many progressive Democrats.
Detroit-based community activist and philanthropist Lisa Mark Lis said McMorrow’s comments echoed antisemitic tropes and amounted to political pandering.
Detroit-based community activist Lisa Mark Lis wrote in a Facebook post that McMorrow’s comment “feeds into the Jew-hatred tropes and is a lie.”
El-Sayed has not publicly addressed the Holocaust museum protests directly, but his past fundraising and advocacy for JET-PAC have drawn new attention as Jewish leaders warn that invoking genocide rhetoric at Holocaust memorials represents a dangerous normalization of antisemitism.
Jewish organizations have repeatedly stressed that criticism of Israeli policy does not justify protests at institutions dedicated to memorializing the murder of six million Jews, arguing that such actions exploit Holocaust memory and inflame anti-Jewish hostility.
The progressive champion was a prominent supporter of the “Uncommitted movement,” a coalition of Democratic officials which refused to support the 2024 Kamala Harris presidential campaign over what they characterized as her support for Israel. However, El-Sayed later clarified that he would support Harris over Donald Trump in the general election.
El-Sayed has been especially critical of Israel’s war in Gaza. On Oct. 21, 2023, two weeks after the Hamas-led slaughter of 1,200 people and kidnapping of 251 hostages in southern Israel, the progressive politician accused Israel of “genocide.” The comment came before the Israeli military launched its ground campaign in Gaza.
He also compared Israel’s defensive military operations to the Hamas terrorist group’s conduct on Oct. 7, writing, “You can both condemn Hamas terrorism AND Israel’s murder since.”
In comments to Politico, El-Sayed criticized Democrats’ handling of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, arguing that they should become the “party of peace and justice” and said that they “ought not to be the party sending bombs and money to foreign militaries to drop bombs on other people’s kids in their schools and their hospitals.” He called on Democrats to stop supporting military aid for Israel, saying, “We should be spending that money here at home.”
Recent polling has shown El-Sayed trailing both McMorrow and Democratic primary frontrunner US Rep. Haley Stevens among voters.
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IDF Reports Steep Drop in Palestinian Terrorism but Threat of West Bank Violence Remains High
Israeli soldiers walk during an operation in Tubas, in the West Bank, Nov. 26, 2025. Photo: REUTERS/Mohamad Torokman
Terror attacks in the West Bank — and the number of Israelis killed by Palestinian terrorists — fell sharply in 2025 compared with the previous two years, according to a new Israel Defense Forces (IDF) report, even as security officials warn the threat remains volatile.
The IDF’s Central Command on Monday released an annual security assessment showing Palestinian-perpetrated terrorist activity in the West Bank fell significantly in 2025, with overall incidents — including stone-throwing and firebomb attacks — down 78 percent from the previous year.
According to the data, Palestinian terrorist activity spiked in 2023 with 847 attacks that killed 41 Israelis, declined in 2024 to 258 incidents with a death toll of 35, and then fell sharply in 2025 to just 57 attacks resulting in 20 Israeli fatalities.
These latest figures mark the lowest level of West Bank Palestinian terrorist attacks and fatalities since the war with Hamas began, even though violence remains far higher than in 2021, when just three Israelis were killed.
As Israeli intelligence and security forces intensified operations across the West Bank, the military said the drop in attacks followed the launch of Operation Iron Wall — a large-scale January 2025 campaign aimed at dismantling terrorist infrastructure — along with continuous operations throughout the year, including a sustained IDF presence in the Jenin and Tulkarm refugee camps.
According to the newly released report, Israeli forces confiscated over 17 million shekels intended for terrorist activity, seized more than eight tons of dual-use materials, shut down 17 weapons-manufacturing sites, and confiscated 1,370 weapons components.
During a major operation last year, the IDF dismantled a Hamas network in Hebron that was preparing attacks across the West Bank and Israel, with members trained in weapons use, improvised explosive device fabrication, and intelligence gathering on potential Israeli targets.
Even while noting positive trends, however, the military cautioned that it remains on high alert under a “war tomorrow” scenario, warning that terrorist groups could attempt to trigger a wider uprising in the West Bank.
Last month, the IDF raised alarm bells over a growing terrorist threat in the West Bank, warning that Iranian-supplied weapons in the hands of Palestinian militants could enable an Oct. 7-style attack and prompting Israeli intelligence and security forces to intensify operations across the territory.
According to Joe Truzman, a senior research analyst at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies (FDD), a Washington, DC-based think tank, Israeli officials should be closely monitoring the West Bank as the Palestinian terrorist group Hamas regroups and rearms in the Gaza Strip after two years of war.
“Hamas and its allied factions understand that igniting violence in the territory would divert Israel’s attention during a critical time of rebuilding the group’s infrastructure in Gaza,” Truzman said last month.
“The release of convicted terrorists to the West Bank under the ceasefire agreement may be a factor in the resurgence of organized violence in the territory,” he continued.
The latest IDF report also highlights a surge in attacks by Jewish extremists against Palestinians in 2025, recording around 870 incidents — a roughly 27 percent increase from the previous year, with a notable rise in serious cases.
In the wake of this surge in violence, the Israeli government has formed a joint task force — comprising the IDF, police, Border Police, and Shin Bet intelligence agency — to prevent and investigate attacks against Palestinians and the wider Muslim community.
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Qatari Money Corrupting Georgetown University, New Report Says
Students, faculty, and others at Georgetown University on March 23, 2025. Photo: ZUMA Press Wire via Reuters Connect
Georgetown University’s suspect relationship with the country of Qatar is the subject of another report which raises concerns about what the Hamas-friendly monarchy is getting in exchange for the hundreds of millions of dollars it spends on the institution for ostensibly philanthropic reasons.
Titled, “Qatar’s Multidimensional Takeover of Georgetown University,” the new report, by the Middle East Forum, describes how Qatar has allegedly exploited and manipulated Georgetown since 2005 by hooking the school on money that buys influence, promotes Islamism, and degrades the curricula of one of the most recognized names in American higher education.
“The unchecked funds provided by Qatar demonstrate how foreign countries can shape scholarship, faculty recruitment, and teaching in our universities to reflect their preferences,” the report says. “At Georgetown, courses and research show growing ideological drift toward post-colonial scholarship, anti-Western critiques, and anti-Israel advocacy, with some faculty engaged in political activism related to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict or anti-Western interventionism.”
Georgetown is hardly the only school to receive Qatari money. Indeed, Qatar is the single largest foreign source of funding to American colleges and universities, according to a newly launched public database from the US Department of Education that reveals the scope of overseas influence in US higher education.
The federal dashboard shows Qatar has provided $6.6 billion in gifts and contracts to US universities, more than any other foreign government or entity. Of the schools that received Qatari money, Cornell University topped the list with $2.3 billion, followed by Carnegie Mellon University ($1 billion), Texas A&M University ($992.8 million), and Georgetown ($971.1 million).
“Qatar has proved highly adept at compromising individuals and institutions with cold hard cash,” MEF Campus Watch director Winfield Myers said in a statement. “But with Georgetown, it found a recipient already eager to do Doha’s bidding to advance Islamist goals at home and abroad. It was a natural fit.”
MEF executive director Gregg Roman added, “Georgetown is Ground Zero for foreign influence peddling in American higher education. It has not only abandoned its mission to educate future generations of diplomat and scholars to represent US interests at home and abroad, but is working actively to undermine the foundations of American government and policy. No doubt they’re eager to get the money, but at base this evinces an ideological hostility to Western civilization.”
Georgetown’s ties to Qatar’s have aroused suspicion before.
In June, the Institute for the Study of Global Antisemitism Policy (ISGAP) released a report titled, “Foreign Infiltration: Georgetown University, Qatar, and the Muslim Brotherhood” a 132-page document which revealed dozens of examples of ways in which Georgetown’s interests are allegedly conflicted, having been divided between its foreign benefactors, the country in which it was founded in 1789, and even its Catholic heritage.
According to the report, the trouble began with Washington, DC-based Georgetown’s decision to establish a campus on Qatari soil in 2005, the GU-Q located in the country’s Doha Metropolitan Area. The campus has “become a feeder school for the Qatari bureaucracy,” the report explained, enabling a government that has disappeared dissidents, imprisoned sexual minorities without due process, and facilitated the spread of radical jihadist ideologies.
In the US, meanwhile, Georgetown’s Center for Contemporary Arab Studies and the Prince Alwaleed Bin Talal Center for Muslim-Christian Understanding “minimize the threat of Islamist extremism” while priming students to be amenable to the claims of the anti-Zionist movement, according to ISGAP. The ideological force behind this pedagogy is the Muslim Brotherhood, to which the Qatari government has supplied logistic and financial support.
Another recent Middle East Forum (MEF) report raised concerns about Northwestern University’s Qatar campus (NU-Q), accusing it of having undermined the school’s mission to foster academic excellence by functioning as a “pipeline” for the next generation of a foreign monarchy’s leadership class.
MEF found that 19 percent of NU-Q graduates carry the surnames of “either the Al-Thani family or other elite Qatari families.” Additionally, graduates from the House of Thani, the country’s royal family, are overrepresented in NU-Q by a factor of five despite being only 2 percent of the population.
The report also said that NU-Q uses its immense wealth, which includes a whopping $700 million in funding from Qatar, to influence the Evanston campus in Illinois, Northwestern’s flagship institution. “Endowed chairs, faculty exchanges, and governance links” reportedly purchase opinions which are palatable to the Qatari elite instead of investments in new NU-Q campus facilities and programs.
“The financial flows raise concerns about whether the Doha campus is a facade and whether the funding is in effect underwriting access and institutional influence rather than solely supporting the overseas campus,” the report continued. “The pattern at NU-Q mirrors the dynamic uncovered by the US Department of Justice in the 2019 Varsity Blues Case, where federal prosecutors exposed how a small group of privileged families exploited side-doors into elite universities through fraudulent athletic recruiting and exam manipulation. While the tactics differ, the structural similarity is clear: insiders repeatedly securing access that ordinary applicants could never obtain.”
Follow Dion J. Pierre @DionJPierre.