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Far-right Israeli minister urges loyalty as his US visit draws protests, boycotts and arrests
WASHINGTON (JTA) — For more than a week, American Jewish groups have debated how and whether to welcome Israel’s far-right finance minister, Bezalel Smotrich, as he visits Washington, D.C.
On Sunday night, that debate culminated in protests, arrests, boycotts — and a speech by Smotrich urging American Jews to remain loyal to the Jewish state.
Inside the Grand Hyatt Washington, Smotrich spoke to Israel Bonds, a U.S. organization that encourages investment in Israel. In the lobby of the hotel, left-wing groups protested, sang songs and, in some cases, were escorted out in handcuffs. And outside the hotel, in the cold rain, hundreds of liberal Jews gathered to declare their dedication to the Jewish community — and to protest Smotrich and Israel’s government.
“This is a moral emergency,” said Sheila Katz, CEO of the National Council of Jewish Women, in a speech at the protest. “We must name this deep pain that so many of us feel for what’s happening in Israel right now, a place that we love. It is with that love that we come here tonight, standing with our Israeli siblings, saying there is nothing normal, nothing acceptable about this moment.”
The Israeli government is advancing legislation that would transform Israel’s system of government and has drawn sweeping protests across the country as well as concern by foreign investors and financial watchdogs. But little sense of emergency was present in the remarks given by Smotrich, who called on his audience to stay the course. The event was closed to press.
“This moment in the history of Israel is a miracle,” he said in remarks released by his office. “And for more than 70 years, Israel Bonds investors like you have helped make our Jewish State a reality. But, there is still work to be done, so don’t stop investing!”
Outside the conference room where Smotrich spoke, the left-wing Jewish group IfNotNow protested by singing and reciting maariv, the Jewish evening prayers. The group said seven of its members were arrested by police. The anti-Zionist group Jewish Voice for Peace also protested.
The dueling speeches and actions on Sunday came at a time when even the staunchest advocates for Israel are publicly criticizing its government. They serve as the latest evidence that the coalition led by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is upending the Diaspora’s relationship with Israel like no government before it.
Much of the criticism has surrounded the government’s signature legislative effort, which would sap the Supreme Court of much of its power and independence. And a fresh round of criticism came this month after Smotrich called for a Palestinian village to be wiped out — a statement he has since walked back repeatedly and at length, including during his Israel Bonds address. In the past, Smotrich has also made statements denigrating LGBTQ people and Arabs.
Major Jewish establishment organizations and leaders, once loath to publicly criticize Israel, are expressing alarm about the judicial legislation as well as Smotrich’s incendiary rhetoric. They are watching as the country is roiled by frequent massive demonstrations that have brought hundreds of thousands of Israelis into the streets.
That criticism has manifested itself in a widespread boycott of Smotrich’s visit — a change of pace for Jewish organizations that are generally eager to meet with senior Israeli officials. The American Israel Public Affairs Committee is snubbing Smotrich, and so is the Biden administration. His only known quasi-governmental interaction this week will be a guided tour of the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum.
Aside from his Israel Bonds appearance, Smotrich is meeting with officials from just two Jewish organizations, the Orthodox Union and the right-wing Zionist Organization of America, one of the few U.S. groups to support the judicial reform.
“The hateful views long expressed by Minister Smotrich are abhorrent, are opposed by a majority of Israeli citizens, and run contrary to Jewish values,” the Jewish Community Relations Council of Greater Washington said in a statement. “No public servant should ever condone or incite hatred or hate-motivated violence, and when they do, they will be fiercely condemned by a wide swath of American Jewry.”
Those comments were echoed by the speakers at the protest outside the Grand Hyatt, which was organized by an array of progressive Jewish groups. Despite their attitude toward the Israeli official speaking inside the hotel, the event was suffused with patriotic fervor, with piles of Israeli flags for protesters to wave. It finished with a rendition of the Israeli national anthem, “Hatikvah.”
“Anybody who has authority in the community has to be ne’eman, to be faithful, has to be somebody who the community can trust like Moshe,” said Rabbi Jill Jacobs, CEO of the liberal rabbinic human rights group T’ruah, using the Hebrew name for Moses and quoting a rabbinic teaching.
Jacobs, who is a longtime proponent of curbing Americans’ giving to right-wing extremist groups in Israel, went on: “We’re here to say that the current leadership of Israel — including, of course, Bezalel Smotrich, speaking inside this hotel — they are not ne’eman, they are not people we can trust, they are not people who are leading Israel in the right direction.”
Israeli Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich addresses Israel Bonds in Washington D.C., March 12, 2023. (Office of the Finance Minister)
Smotrich emphasized the same themes — Jewish unity and mutual responsibility — but toward different ends. He thanked his audience of investors in Israel bonds “for the unquestionable connection between Israel and Diaspora Judaism.”
“We must not forget that we are brothers,” he said. “Despite all of the differences, despite the many colors that make up the Jewish mosaic, we are one.”
He also once again apologized for his call to “wipe out” Huwara, a Palestinian West Bank village where Israeli settlers rioted recently after a Palestinian gunman there killed two Israelis. He said his words “created a completely mistaken impression.”
“I want to say a few words about the elephant in the room,” Smotrich said. “I stand before you now as always committed to the security of the state of Israel, to our shared values, and to the highest moral commitment of our armed forces to protect every innocent life, Jew or Arab.”
If anyone is finding new allies, it is not Smotrich but his opponents, who run the gamut from the Jewish left to once-reliable mainstays of the right. Miriam Adelson, the widow of casino magnate, Republican kingmaker and pro-Israel donor Sheldon Adelson, said on Sunday that Netanyahu’s rush to enact judicial reform was “hasty, injudicious and irresponsible.”
Those changes galvanized the protesters. “We are the Jewish establishment!” Jacobs said.
Jacobs said later in an interview that the “grounds are shifting” among American Jews. “Some of us here and in Israel have been on the ground fighting against the occupation and the attacks on democracy for years and years, and now it’s becoming clear to more and more American Jews and Israeli Jews that that was the right message,” she said.
The issue of whether to raise Israel’s occupation of the West Bank has been a matter of debate amid the protests in Israel, where there have been reports that organizers have discouraged the display of Palestinian flags, fearing that Netanyahu will weaponize any sign of solidarity with the Palestinians.
The tension over whether the Palestinians should be mentioned played out before the protest in Washington as well, at a press conference featuring philanthropists and Israeli businessmen who said the judicial reforms were threatening Israel’s economic standing.
The event started with a rendition of “Oseh Shalom,” the Jewish prayer for peace, composed by the Israeli Jewish Renewal group Nava Tehila.
Susie Gelman, a philanthropist who chairs the Israel Policy Forum, which supports the establishment of a Palestinian state alongside Israel, said one of the key roles of the Israeli Supreme Court in recent years has been to protect some Palestinian rights and slow Israeli efforts to increase sovereignty in the West Bank.
“You can’t entirely separate judicial overhaul from the question of what’s happening with Palestinians in the West Bank in particular,” she said.
But Offir Gutelzon, a Silicon Valley tech entrepreneur who helped found UnXeptable, an anti-Netanyahu protest movement by Israelis living abroad, differed, saying the protesters’ top priority should be to save the courts’ independence. Achieving that goal, he said, required maintaining unity across the Israeli political spectrum.
“We have to save our Israeli democracy and then we can move on and talk about” the Palestinians, Gutelzon said.
Still, at the protest, speakers spoke of the occupation and its effect on the Palestinians, and there were no objections. Gutelzon led an Israeli contingent in registering cheers for every pronouncement by American liberals.
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The post Far-right Israeli minister urges loyalty as his US visit draws protests, boycotts and arrests appeared first on Jewish Telegraphic Agency.
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Netanyahu Says US Deal with Iran Must Dismantle Nuclear Infrastructure
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu speaks during a press conference at the Prime Minister’s office in Jerusalem, Aug. 10, 2025. Photo: ABIR SULTAN/Pool via REUTERS
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said on Sunday he told US President Donald Trump last week that any US deal with Iran must include the dismantling of Iran’s nuclear infrastructure, not just stopping the enrichment process.
Speaking at the annual Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations, Netanyahu also said Israel still needs to “complete the job” of destroying all tunnels in Gaza. Israel, he said, has already dismantled 150 km (93 miles) of an estimated 500 km.
A second round of talks between the US and Iran are slated for this week. Iran is pursuing a nuclear agreement with the US that delivers economic benefits for both sides, an Iranian diplomat was reported as saying on Sunday.
Netanyahu said he is skeptical of a deal but it must include enriched material leaving Iran. “There shall be no enrichment capability – not stopping the enrichment process, but dismantling the equipment and the infrastructure that allows you to enrich in the first place,” he said.
Iran and the US renewed negotiations earlier this month to tackle their decades-long dispute over Tehran’s nuclear program and avert a new military confrontation. The US has dispatched a second aircraft carrier to the region and is preparing for the possibility of a sustained military campaign if the talks do not succeed, US officials have told Reuters.
Netanyahu also said that he aimed to end US military aid to Israel within the next 10 years, after the current 10-year deal of receiving $3.8 billion a year – which is largely spent in the United States on equipment – ends in 2028.
Due to a thriving economy, “we can afford to phase out the financial component of the military aid that we’re receiving, and I propose a 10-year draw down to zero. Now, in the three years that remain in the present memorandum of understanding and another seven years draw it down to zero,” Netanyahu said.
“We want to move with the United States from aid to partnership,” he said.
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Muslim and Sephardic Jewish college students are connecting over shared heritage
Joseph Pool, a senior at Rollins College in Florida, grew up hearing his Moroccan-born grandparents describe Mimouna, a traditional Moroccan Jewish celebration marking the return to eating chametz after Passover. Because Jewish families had cleared their homes of chametz for the holiday, Muslim neighbors would bring over fresh flour, butter, and milk, and together they would enjoy a chametz-filled meal.
Amid rising campus tensions after October 7, Pool decided to host a Mimouna event of his own at Rollins College, and Muslim students showed up in droves.
“I spent years sleeping over at my grandparents’ house and hearing stories about the connection Muslims and Jews shared in Morocco,” Pool said. Seeing Muslim classmates embrace the celebration, he recalled thinking: “Wow, this is still the case today. There is still this connection ability here.”
At a moment when Jewish-Muslim tensions have intensified on campuses nationwide, some Sephardic and Muslim students say shared cultural heritage, rather than formal interfaith programming, is opening unexpected space for connection.
SAMi (Sephardic American Mizrahi Initiative) hosts Sephardic cultural programming on 16 college campuses across the country, including Persian music karaoke nights, hamsa painting events, and Mimouna celebrations. According to Manashe Khaimov, SAMi’s founder and CEO, roughly 10% of the 6,000 students the organization has engaged are Muslim.
The events are not intended to be spaces for interfaith dialogue, and that is a big part of their appeal. “Students don’t want to show up to an interfaith event unless [they’re] interested in political dialogue,” said Khaimov. Rather, students who are just looking for a place to engage with their culture show up to listen to the kind of music they grew up with, eat familiar foods, and hear Arabic or Farsi spoken.
For many Muslim students, SAMi events “smell the way it smells at home” as opposed to many Jewish spaces on college campuses that can feel “foreign” or “alienating,” said Khaimov. “For most of the Muslim students,” he said, “this is the first time even walking into Hillel spaces.”
Emily Nisimov, a Bukharian student from Queens College who organized Sephardic heritage events on her campus with SAMi, said, “The point of the events originally was to spread love and intimacy between Jewish students.” To her surprise, Muslim students started showing up. “Maybe they did just come for the food,” she said, “but the fact is that they stayed and they interacted with us and they tried to find a middle ground, which I was really impressed and shocked by.”
These connections are not limited to organized programming. Across campuses, Muslim students say friendships with Sephardic and Mizrahi peers have reshaped their understanding of Judaism, and Jewish students say the friendships have changed them, too.
Ali Mohsin Bozdar, a Muslim student at Springfield College who met Sephardic students through Interfaith America’s BRAID fellowship, said, “Jewish people from Middle Eastern backgrounds — most of the culture is similar. The food, the music, the language. I found that really fascinating,” he said. “It automatically binds you.”
Yishmael Columna, a Moroccan Jewish student and SAMi organizer at Florida International University, said the exchange has been mutual. “After Oct. 7”, he said, “it’s easy to give in to hate.” But getting to know Muslim peers complicated that instinct. “I wouldn’t be able to form opinions on many things as well as I do now if I didn’t have these conversations with them,” he said.
Sofia Houir, a Moroccan Muslim senior at Columbia University, said she had never met a Jewish person before attending college. Forming close friendships with Sephardic students on Columbia’s campus changed that. “Having friends who are Middle Eastern Jews definitely made Judaism more personal to me,” she said. “You can read about Judaism, you can study it, but talking to friends about how they grew up made me realize that, regardless of our religion, we’re all North African or Middle Eastern.”
Sofia formed a particularly close bond with an Iraqi Israeli student, Orpaz Zamir, during her time at Columbia, which she says deeply influenced her decision to travel to Israel for the first time. “Orpaz played a huge role in me going to Israel, just because I’m super close to him. And I really, really wanted to discover his culture, and to discover his country,” she said.
But that decision came with consequences.
Sofia said that her friendships with Jewish and Israeli students as well as her decision to travel to Israel caused peers in the Muslim and Arab communities on campus to stop speaking to her.
“I had some heated arguments with people who basically argued with me as if I was representing the Israeli government,” she said. “The frustrating thing was that they never had a conversation with me about it. They just presumed that me going was me validating Netanyahu’s politics or betraying the Palestinians.”
Nisimov said campus tensions at Queens College, part of New York City’s public university system, have not disappeared simply because of a heightened awareness of shared culture.
After October 7, she said, “A lot of claims were made that we should go back to where we came from.” “We tried to explain to them — just like you, we came from the same spot — but they didn’t want to listen.”
Even so, she said, her personal friendships have endured outside the realm of discourse on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. “My Muslim friend and I, we’re not really on the political level of conversation,” she said. “But we have plenty of conversations about our cultures and our religions and the differences and similarities.”
Rethinking Jewish Whiteness
For some students, these relationships have also challenged assumptions about Jewish identity and, thus, the tenor of political conversations.
Mian Muhammad Abdul Hamid, a Muslim student from Syracuse University, told the Forward that he “thinks the majority” of Muslim students on his college campus believe Jews only come from Europe. “When people think Jewish, the first thing that pops up is European.”
Bozdar agreed. “When I met these people, it confirmed for me that there are Jews from the Middle East,” he said. “Until you meet people, nothing is for sure.”
Columna recalled participating in a tabling event about Israel shortly after Oct. 7, when a Muslim student approached him to talk. The two later became friends. Weeks later, Columna asked why he had approached him rather than the other nearby Jewish students.
“He told me, ‘I decided to talk to you because, in contrast to the Ashkenazi Jews nearby, you were the only one who looked brown,” Columna said.
“I feel that sometimes the reason why these conversations do not work is because Muslim students don’t feel that Jews are even part of the Middle East,” said Columna. “Once you break that wall, and you find a common ground,” he said, “it becomes a more productive conversation.”
Zamir, an Iraqi Jewish student at Columbia University, described a similar experience. Though initially nervous about enrolling amid campus tensions, he said, “I never felt I was being attacked for my views.”
A Muslim friend later told him it was because he was seen as “from the region.”
“If you are Mizrahi,” Zamir said, “Muslim students respect what you say a bit more because if you’re from the region, you’re entitled to be there.”
But that dynamic also raises uncomfortable questions about which Jewish students are seen as having legitimate perspectives on campus.
“There’s this extreme position that Ashkenazi Jews shouldn’t be there or shouldn’t have this view because they’re ‘colonizers,’ but you’re okay because you’re part of the region,” he said.
“Unfortunately, this is the case, but it also makes my interactions with them easier,” he added.
While several students said their conversations about their shared background remain at the cultural level rather than getting political, Pool believes shared meals can create space for conversations that lean on these shared identities.
“If you share a meal with someone, you start with something in common,” he said. “You have the same food, maybe then you have the same family tradition of how to cook this food. And then suddenly, when you’re talking about politics, you can talk about just a political issue versus it being your entire identity.”
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The one Jewish value everyone should hold dear in the age of AI
As friends, relatives and even colleagues dive headlong into our AI future, I’ve been stuck nervously on the platform’s edge. I’m not a skeptic of technology by nature, but by experience. I’ve watched too many shiny new toys come along, promising to make society smarter or better connected, only to become superspreaders of confusion, alienation and disenfranchisement.
So when you tell me a machine can summarize any book, draw any picture or write any email, my first thought is going to be, What could possibly go wrong?
This, too, was the reaction of the Haredi rabbis who declared a communal fast over AI last month.
“If at the push of a button, I can get a hold of a d’var torah for my Shabbos meal from AI, to us, that’s a problem,” a Haredi leader told me at the time. “No, no — I want you to open the book and read it and come up with a question and come up with an answer. That’s part of what’s holy about learning Torah. It’s not just end result. It’s the process.”
Curious about their logic, I spent some time tracking down Lakewood’s gedolim to learn more. This was no straightforward task — I found it easier to get a hold of their wives than the great rabbis themselves. Even at dinner hour, these titans of Torah study were still in the beit midrash. But eventually I got through to three — thanks to my cousin Jeffrey, who knew a rav who knew a rav — and that was fortunate, because I came away with the Jewish skeleton key to our brave new world.
That key is the Jewish value of עֲמֵילוּת (ameilut), or toil. As far as Jewish values go, ameilut is an obscure one. It lacks the celebrity swagger of its better-known peers like chesed and tzedakah or the political power of tikkun olam. It was never associated with a biblical matriarch or carved into a golem’s forehead. Yet I believe it is just as crucial. Yes, toiling is a mitzvah. And in the age of AI, ameilut can be a human road map.
The word’s root appears a couple dozen times in the Hebrew Bible — unsurprisingly, it’s a recurring theme in Job — but its salience comes not from the Torah but from commentary on Leviticus 26:3, which establishes ameilut as a sacred endeavor. When God implores Israel to “walk with” the commandments, Rashi, an 11th century rabbi whose commentaries are considered authoritative, reinterpreted this to mean that God wants Jews to be ameilim b’torah — toiling in Torah study. He is reinterpreting God’s command that we walk and move forward to also mean that we should take time to stand still, turn over (and over) the same words to find new meaning and view getting stuck as a sign of progress.
For Haredim — who pronounce it ameilus — the notion that struggle can be its own reward underpins a life spent poring over sefarim in the beit midrash (and missing phone calls from the Jewish press). It follows that ChatGPT, which transforms knowledge from something developed to something consumed, is anathema to their approach. They’ve realized that making learning easy has actually made learning hard.
To be sure, the goals of the Haredi world are not exactly the same as mine. Those communities are famously insular, wary of the internet and especially cognizant of secular society’s pernicious influence. I’m basically the opposite: I love to mix it up (including with Haredi Jews) and am extremely online. A little narishkeit is good for the soul, as far as I can tell.
But I’ve found that ameilut-maxxing translates pretty well to non-religious life, too. It’s an imperative to embrace the challenge. As a notoriously limited chef, I’m now toiling in cookbooks; as a writer, I can cherish the blank page. Reframing the hard part as the good part, then, is a reminder that the toil is actually our divine right. Because ameilut is something AI can’t experience, replicate or understand. It is the very essence of what it means to be alive.
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