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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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What Iran’s Internet Blackout and the Patagonia Fires Revealed About Global Disinformation
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
The lie that raced across social media during Argentina’s recent Patagonia wildfires was not just grotesque. It was revealing.
Within hours, recycled images and viral posts blamed Israelis for igniting the fires. The language was familiar: vague references to “foreign states,” insinuations of coordination, and the ritual refrain that “the media” was covering it up. Argentine journalists documented how quickly the fires became a vehicle for antisemitic conspiracy theories, including false claims involving an “IDF grenade” in Patagonia.
Days later, a seemingly unrelated anomaly appeared in Europe. A cluster of pro-Scottish independence accounts on X, previously prolific, fell abruptly silent. Their disappearance coincided precisely with Iran’s imposition of a nationwide Internet shutdown amid domestic anti-regime protests. British reporting and independent researchers had already identified many of these accounts as part of an Iranian-linked influence operation masquerading as Scottish voices. When Tehran pulled the plug at home, the “Scots” abroad went quiet too.
Two continents. Two narratives. One underlying mechanism.
Authoritarian regimes — and the ecosystem of state media, proxy outlets, and cutout accounts they cultivate — are pushing democratic societies along their fault lines. Increasingly, Israel is authoritarian regimes’ accelerant of choice.
Influence operations are often exposed by sloppy tradecraft: recycled phrasing, unnatural engagement patterns, or accounts created in batches. But recent platform transparency has added a more revealing diagnostic: origin.
As researchers gained better tools to determine where accounts actually operate, a striking pattern emerged. Accounts branding themselves as “MAGA,” hyper-focused on American culture-war issues, were frequently traced to Bangladesh. Accounts claiming to post from Gaza — offering supposedly raw, on-the-ground testimony during the war — were often operating from Pakistan or Indonesia.
This matters because it punctures a central illusion of the online age: that what feels like organic, local outrage usually isn’t. Much of it is, in fact, geographically divorced from the societies it claims to represent.
Iran’s January 2026 Internet shutdown and its cyber iron curtain made this impossible to ignore. When Tehran cut connectivity nationwide, clusters of supposedly local voices in Western democracies stopped posting. The blackout did not merely suppress dissent inside Iran; it exposed the scaffolding of external influence operations. When the lights go out at headquarters, the field offices go dark too.
Once you see the pattern, the choice of disguises stops looking random.
Democracies argue in public. That is not a flaw. It is the point, and it is precisely what authoritarian systems exploit.
Separatist politics, immigration debates, populist movements, and foreign conflicts provide ready-made content pipelines. Operators do not need to invent controversies; they need only to impersonate participants and intensify the most divisive frames through distortion, omission, and outright falsehood.
The Scottish case is illustrative, not exceptional. The same architecture animates accounts posing as Midwestern Americans furious about election integrity, or as desperate Gazans posting emotionally fluent English from thousands of miles away. The objective is not persuasion in any classical sense. It is erosion — of trust, cohesion, and confidence that democratic disagreement reflects real people rather than staged performance.
So why did an environmental disaster in Argentina metastasize so quickly into an “Israeli plot”?
Because Israel is uniquely useful to anti-Western authoritarians.
Israel sits at the convergence of several propaganda imperatives. It is framed as a Western-aligned democracy in a region hostile to that model — making it a proxy target for liberal democracy itself. It allows classic antisemitic conspiracies — hidden power, omnipresent influence, coordinated deception — to be laundered through the more respectable language of “anti-Zionism.” And it offers moral intoxication: if Israel is cast as a singular source of global evil, then every crisis, anywhere, can be folded into a pre-existing narrative of resistance to that evil.
Coverage of the Patagonia fires demonstrated this dynamic precisely. Israel was inserted reflexively into an unrelated catastrophe because audiences had already been conditioned to accept Israel-blame as plausible background noise. The speed was the point.
These narratives are not born on social media alone. They move through a supply chain.
At one end are state broadcasters and aligned outlets — Tehran, Moscow, Doha, Beijing — each with its own tone but a shared objective: undermine trust in Western institutions and normalize cynicism or outright hostility toward democratic governance. At the other end are social platforms, where content is stripped of provenance and redistributed as “what ordinary people are saying.”
These regimes often fit a familiar pattern: control information distribution at home, and export confusion abroad. When regimes clamp down domestically, they often compensate by escalating external information warfare. Destabilizing other societies becomes a way to offset internal fragility.
If the volume of Israel-related falsehoods feels overwhelming, that sensation is intentional.
The Scottish accounts that vanished, the Bangladesh-based “MAGA” profiles, the Pakistan- and Indonesia-based “Gaza voices,” and the Patagonia wildfire conspiracy are not separate scandals. They are iterations of the same method: impersonation, amplification, moral outrage, repeat.
The temptation is to treat each viral lie as a discrete incident: debunk it, move on.
But the pattern is systemic.
Israel is not merely a target in this ecosystem. It is a tool — the tip of the spear in a broader campaign designed to erode confidence not only in Israel, but in the legitimacy of democratic societies themselves.
Israel is the test case — but free societies are the ultimate target.
Micha Danzig is an attorney, former IDF soldier, and former NYPD officer. He writes widely on Israel, Zionism, antisemitism, and Jewish history. He serves on the board of Herut North America.
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Unreported: Palestinian Authority Supports China’s Plan to Seize Taiwan
Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesperson Lin Jian attends a press conference in Beijing, China, April 10, 2025. Photo: REUTERS/Tingshu Wang
Just one day after China defied and alarmed the US and the West by surrounding Taiwan with a military air and sea blockade simulation, including threats that the “reunification” of Taiwan and China is “inevitable,” the Palestinian Authority (PA) again showed its allegiance to the anti-US axis by declaring its support for the “One China policy”:
The State of Palestine re-emphasized its full commitment to the One China policy … to maintain its [China’s] territorial unity and also emphasized its opposition to [America/Western] interference in China’s internal affairs.
[WAFA, official PA news agency, Dec. 31, 2025]
China’s drills simulated a blockade of key ports and airspace control, involving army, navy, air force, and rocket units with live-fire as a rehearsal for isolating Taiwan in a conflict scenario.
Taiwan’s independence is not just a minor American interest, but is critical for the West. Taiwan’s semiconductor industry is vital to Western economic and technological security. Taiwan produces over 60% of the world’s semiconductors and more than 90% of the most advanced chips, and manufactures the vast majority of leading edge logic chips that power today’s AI data centers.
The West’s ability to survive and advance technologically is dependent on Taiwan remaining free. China, on the other hand, pledges to seize the free and democratic island and subjugate its people under its dictatorial Communist rule. This would enable China to appropriate its technology and achieve the global economic and military supremacy it seeks.
Incredibly, even while the US and the West’s billions of dollars in funding have kept the PA viable, the PA, as a consistent policy, has turned its back on its supporters to embrace China’s goal of seizing Taiwan.
Just a week after the PA’s statement above, Mahmoud Abbas received China’s Special Envoy to the Middle East, Zhai Jun, and repeated the anti-Western policy:
The president re-emphasized the State of Palestine’s support for the “One China” policy adopted by the People’s Republic of China in maintaining its territorial integrity and its opposition to interference in China’s internal affairs.
[Official PA daily Al-Hayat Al-Jadida, Jan. 8, 2026]
The PA has supported what it called “reunification” for years:
Reaffirming its commitment to the one-China principle, the Palestinian Presidency underlined the significance of preserving China’s territorial integrity, including the status of Taiwan … The Presidency further voiced its firm support for China’s right to defend its sovereignty and territorial integrity, endorsing the reunification of the entire land of China, which includes Taiwan.” [emphasis added]
[WAFA, official PA news agency, English edition, Jan. 13, 2024]
President Mahmoud Abbas and his Chinese counterpart Xi Jinping [met] today … [Abbas] reiterated Palestine’s unwavering support to the one-China policy, recognizing Taiwan as an integral part of China. [emphasis added]
[WAFA, official PA news agency, English edition, June 14, 2023]
Abbas Zaki, PLO/Fatah Commissioner for Relations with Arab States and China:
I express the stable and well-rooted position of Fatah in its support for the People’s Republic of China against Taiwan, which we consider an integral part of the united Chinese lands. [emphasis added]
[Fatah Central Committee member Abbas Zaki, Facebook page, Jan. 8, 2023]
This is part of a long-term PA policy of identifying with and embracing goals of the anti-American axis.
Were China to successfully invade Taiwan, it would have near total control of global computing components. It would literally control the West’s source of Taiwan’s technological manufacturing capabilities, potentially leading to a crippling of the supply of technology components.
The PA’s backing of China’s goals for Taiwan — as part of the global anti-American axis — should convince the US and Western countries that the PA is not an ally, and that were a Palestinian state to be created, it would be aligned with the adversaries of the West.
Itamar Marcus is the Founder and Director of Palestinian Media Watch (PMW). Ahron Shapiro is a contributor to PMW, where a version of this article first appeared.
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Shekel’s Gains Represent Strong Fundamentals, Says Bank of Israel
New Israeli Shekel banknotes are seen in this picture illustration taken Nov. 9, 2021. Photo: REUTERS/Nir Elias/Illustration
The shekel’s rise to around four-year highs against the dollar reflects the resilience of the Israeli economy and comes amid solid export performance, Bank of Israel Governor Amir Yaron said on Wednesday.
Speaking to Reuters on the sidelines of the World Economic Forum in Davos, Yaron said the Israeli currency’s strength was also acting as a tailwind that was moderating inflation.
“The appreciation of the shekel represents a lot of the positive fundamentals in terms of geopolitical developments and certainly post the ceasefire,” he said of the October 2025 ceasefire in Gaza.
“We understand the appreciation makes it difficult for exports. But we’ve seen exports of both goods and services rise in the last two readings,” he added of the roughly 12% rise in the shekel against the dollar since the start of 2025.
Asked at what point the central bank would consider intervention to lower the level of the shekel, Yaron said: “The FX tool is part of the toolbox of the Bank of Israel. We have many tools for facilitating our policies.”
In the past, the central bank had bought tens of billions of dollars to keep the shekel from appreciating too fast and harming exporters. It sold $8.5 billion of foreign currency at the outset of the Gaza war in October 2023 to defend the shekel, but it has largely stayed out of the market since.
The Bank of Israel unexpectedly cut its interest rate by 25 basis points earlier this month, a second successive cut after lowering it in November for the first time in nearly two years.
It cited the shekel’s strength and an improving inflation environment after the ceasefire, which led to an easing of the supply constraints that emerged during the two-year war. The inflation rate currently stands at 2.6%, within an official 1-3% target range.
Yaron underlined that demand in the Israeli economy had remained robust during the conflict and that the bank had not so far seen it surge further as a result of the ceasefire.
“We haven’t seen demand erupt the way it did post-COVID,” he said.
He noted that the bank‘s research department had identified a baseline scenario of a further 50 basis points of cuts down to an official rate of 3.5% by the end of this year, notwithstanding the high level of uncertainty facing all central banks.
“We will have to see how much demand picks up, how much supply constraints are mitigating, what is happening with the tailwind from the shekel,” he said.