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Israel at 75: How Israel’s political crisis took center stage at a major American Jewish conference
KIBBUTZ MAAGAN MICHAEL, Israel (JTA) — About a dozen Jewish leaders from North America and beyond clustered at the edges of a courtyard on this kibbutz by Israel’s northern coastline, standing silent as a two-minute siren rang out in memory of the country’s fallen.
Afterward, young Jews from around the world, some of whom will soon enter the Israeli military, read memorial passages and led the crowd in the singing of Israel’s national anthem. The scene, emblematic of Diaspora support for Israel, delivered the kind of feeling that the Jewish Federations of North America hoped to evoke when it held its marquee conference in Israel this week, and timed it for the country’s Memorial Day and 75th birthday.
It was also a stark contrast from the atmosphere at the conference a day earlier where — even as Jewish leaders emphasized unity in the face of adversity — it was hard to avoid the political strife over the Israeli government’s effort to significantly limit the Supreme Court’s power. A raucous session in the morning was filled with screaming, and other panels touched on hot-button issues such as Israel’s treatment of non-Orthodox Jews as well as human rights groups.
“We’re also living at a time of so many crises and so much painful brokenness,” Rabbi Marc Baker, CEO of the Boston area’s Jewish federation, said in a short address on Monday afternoon to the conference’s 2,000 attendees, while discussing the importance of Jewish learning. “It can feel like things are falling apart, like at best, as leaders, we’re just trying to hold things together.”
The drama did not exactly surprise organizers of the gathering, called the General Assembly, or GA, who had expected protesters to show up and even encouraged their cause. But it pointed to the challenge facing the Jewish Federations, which had hoped to put on a traditionally exuberant celebration of Israel despite the conflict rocking its streets.
Those traditional commemorations and festivities did happen, and sessions covered a range of issues, from racial diversity to philanthropy in Israel. But they were mixed in with anguish over the state of Israeli society, which some attendees and panelists portrayed in urgent terms.
“For the first time, at Israel’s 75th birthday, a government is trying to fundamentally alter the definition of a Jewish state,” Yohanan Plesner, president of the Israel Democracy Institute think tank, said at the tumultuous Monday morning panel, referring to efforts to restrict immigration to Israel and other proposals.
He added, “If this cluster of changes, the coalition agreements, would be implemented, I’m not sure that in the 80th year of our national birthday, the GA will decide again to conduct its event here.”
The departure from business-as-usual was evident from the get-go, when hundreds of protesters came to the gates of the conference to protest a planned speech on Sunday night by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu — who canceled in the face of the demonstrations. Israeli President Isaac Herzog did speak that night.
Julie Platt, the Jewish Federations’ board president, told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency that she found out about the cancellation earlier on Sunday. Netanyahu’s office told the staff of the Jewish Federations that day of the cancellation, and the news became public shortly afterward. Netanyahu did not reach out personally to Platt or to Eric Fingerhut, the Jewish Federations’ CEO, to let them know he would not be coming.
“We were preparing for weeks and months for the opportunity to have here the duly elected prime minister,” Platt said on Monday. “We were disappointed that he wasn’t part of our celebration.”
Tensions peaked on Monday morning during a session where anti-government protesters repeatedly interrupted far-right lawmaker Simcha Rothman with shouts and chants, and in which Rothman and Plesner verbally sparred onstage. Multiple protesters were removed by security personnel, and the panel took an unplanned five-minute break to cool tempers.
“They’re our brothers, they support us,” said Erez Elach, who protested Rothman at the event, regarding Diaspora Jews. Elach is a member of Brothers and Sisters in Arms, a group made up of military reservists opposed to the judicial overhaul.
Elach said he was protesting in order to honor Diaspora Jews who were killed while serving in the Israel Defense Forces. “We lost friends who served with us, who came from those same places,” he said.
Fingerhut told JTA that the protests of Rothman were “a taste of what’s happening in Israel today,” though he added, “I don’t think anyone benefits from that kind of disruption.”
“As the GA grew closer, we knew that the judicial reform issues and the divisions it’s creating in Israel would necessarily be a significant topic,” he said. “By time we were finalizing our plans, we expected it to be a major issue, and it was.”
But he said that he still felt the conference conveyed the importance of celebrating Israel and its ties to global Jewry. “On Sunday night and Monday, we focused on Israel’s history and our contribution to that history. That was not overshadowed,” he said. The battle over the judicial overhaul, he said, “added an agenda item, but it didn’t detract in any way.”
Former Israeli Prime Minister Yair Lapid speaks at the Jewish Federations of North America General Assembly in Tel Aviv on April 24, 2023. (Courtesy of JFNA/Amnon Gutman)
Yizhar Hess, the vice chair of the World Zionist Organization, also said on Monday that things were going well — because of the arguments, not despite them. Hess pointed to the three large gatherings of establishment Jewish groups — the General Assembly, the Jewish Agency for Israel Board of Governors’ meeting and the World Zionist Congress — each of which saw fierce debates or disruption stemming from the judicial overhaul fight.
“This week has been dramatically successful particularly because it’s been so turbulent,” Hess said directly after the session with Rothman. “Zionism and the state of Israel are a subject that stirs up the Jewish people and is at the heart of the argument. That’s a good thing. … Zionism is more relevant than ever, particularly because Jews are fighting over its character.”
Bucking its usual practice of not commenting on internal Israeli politics, the Jewish Federations has made its position on the overhaul relatively clear. The group issued a statement objecting to one of the overhaul’s provisions, praised a decision to pause the legislation, said it was “awed” by the anti-overhaul protesters and organized a “fly-in” earlier this year, in which federation leaders traveled to Israel to share their concerns about the effort with Israeli officials.
Deborah Minkoff, an executive board member at the Madison, Wisconsin, Jewish federation, participated in the fly-in and said she had lobbied to exclude all politicians from the General Assembly stage. She attended sessions where anti-overhaul activists spoke and felt that being in Israel for the conference gave her an opportunity to stand with the protesters.
“I think it’s going to be easier to sell Israel to our community because of this fight for democracy,” she said. “As we articulate what it means to be a free, equitable, democratic society, I think it resonates with the community who has been critical of Israel in the past.”
Attendees gave a warm reception to Yair Lapid, the leader of the parliamentary opposition, whose easy manner suggested that he felt the crowd would be receptive to his words. “I’m happy to be here, unlike some others,” he said to laughter from the audience.
“Don’t give up on us,” Lapid told the crowd. “I know how many people here feel about this current government. I know it doesn’t represent your values. It doesn’t represent mine either. But this government isn’t all of Israel… Today, maybe more than ever, we need you to rally around us.”
But not everyone at the conference was keen to protest. Beto Guzman, a Jewish professional who came to the conference from Helsinki, said the Finnish Jewish community tends not to protest Israeli policies because, given its small size, its involved members value having a positive relationship with Israeli emissaries in the country and do not want to blame them for the government’s policies. He also objected to protesters disrupting conferences, though he said the issues at the heart of the debate should be discussed.
“In Helsinki we don’t really have any protests or anything like this, because the community is very small and everybody has their own relationship with Israel,” he said. “For us that connection is very different. We really like the people from the Jewish Agency, their emissaries, and the embassy, they are very nice to us. So for us to put what is going on in the government on them would be unfair.”
Sandi Seigel, the president of Naamat Canada, a branch of a global Jewish women’s rights organization, said she was troubled by raucous debate she saw at the World Zionist Congress, which had taken place at the end of the previous week. She particularly worries that young delegates to the congress, one of whom she recalled seeing crying, would leave disheartened by the fighting.
“It’s almost like people feel it’s an existential threat for Israel, and so you’re passionate,” she said. “But there used to be an ability to have healthy debate and say, ‘OK, we’re not going to agree on this, OK, but I respect your right to have your opinion. And I think some of that is gone.”
At the same time, Seigel does not feel that the General Assembly was too focused on the debate over the judicial overhaul, which she framed in existential terms.
“If you have something, and you don’t know, if this doesn’t get resolved, [whether] Israel will be Israel anymore, or it won’t be the Israel that I can live in — there are a lot of things to talk about, but if you don’t deal with that, you can’t talk about anything else,” she said. “Because there’s nothing left to talk about.”
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Trump Says US Will Sell F-35s to Saudi Arabia Ahead of White House Talks With Crown Prince
US President Donald Trump and Saudi Crown Prince and Prime Minister Mohammed Bin Salman shake hands during a Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) signing ceremony at the Royal Court in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, May 13, 2025. Photo: REUTERS/Brian Snyder
US President Donald Trump on Monday said he plans to approve the sale of US-made F-35 fighter jets to Saudi Arabia, announcing his intention one day before he hosts Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman at the White House in Washington, DC.
The high-stakes meeting comes as rumors swirl about the possibility of Israel and Saudi Arabia, long-time foes who in recent years have increasingly cooperated behind closed doors, normalizing ties under a US-brokered deal.
“They want to buy. They are a great ally. I will say that we will be doing that,” Trump told reporters in the Oval Office. “We will be selling them F-35s.”
Reuters reported earlier this month that Saudi Arabia has requested to buy as many as 48 F-35 fighter jets in a potential multibillion-dollar deal that cleared a key Pentagon hurdle.
Such a sale would be a policy shift for Washington, which primarily sells the F-35 to formal military allies, such as NATO members or Japan. Israel is the only country in the Middle East that has the elite fighter jets, in accordance with longstanding bipartisan policy for US administrations and the Congress to maintain Israel’s “qualitative military edge” in the region. Saudi Arabia’s acquiring them would at least somewhat change the military balance of power.
However, Axios reported over the weekend that Israel does not oppose the US sale of F-35s to Saudi Arabia, the world’s top oil producer — as long as it’s conditioned on Riyadh normalizing relations with Jerusalem.
“We told the Trump administration that the supply of F-35s to Saudi Arabia needs to be subject to Saudi normalization with Israel,” an anonymous Israeli official told the news outlet, adding that giving the fighter jets without getting any significant diplomatic progress would be “a mistake and counterproductive.”
It has been widely reported that Israel and Saudi Arabia were on the verge of a deal to establish formal diplomatic ties until the discussions were derailed by Hamas’s Oct. 7, 2023, massacre across southern Israel and the ensuing war in Gaza. Saudi officials have said that they will only agree to a normalization deal if Israel commits to a path toward a Palestinian state.
Saudi Arabia’s close partners Bahrain and the United Arab Emirates were among the Arab states to normalize ties with Israel in 2020 as part of the Trump-brokered Abraham Accords. Trump has said he is intent on expanding the accords to include other countries, above all Saudi Arabia.
“I hope that Saudi Arabia will be going into the Abraham Accords fairly shortly,” Trump told reporters on Friday.
The F-35 deal and possible Israeli-Saudi normalization are expected to be central to the agenda when bin Salman, widely known by his initials MBS, meets Trump.
It will be the crown prince’s first trip to the US since the death of prominent Saudi critic Jamal Khashoggi by Saudi agents in Istanbul in 2018. US intelligence concluded that bin Salman approved the capture or killing of Khashoggi, although Saudi Arabia’s de facto leader has denied ordering the operation.
Seven years later, Washington and Riyadh, longtime strategic partners, are looking forward, with bin Salman set to receive full ceremonial honors at the White House. Their meeting comes six months after Trump secured a $600 billion commitment from Saudi Arabia to invest in the United States.
Beyond investment, Riyadh has been eager to reach a security agreement with Washington expanding arms sales such as advanced missile-defense systems and drones, and deeper military training partnerships. Most importantly for Riyadh, however, is the US offering certain guarantees ensuring the kingdom’s security. Many observers have suggested that such a defense deal could be part of a broader arrangement to broker Saudi-Israel normalization.
Trump and bin Salman are also expected to discuss broadening ties in commerce, technology, and potentially nuclear energy.
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Catholic Church in Berlin Condemns Antisemitism as Anti-Israel Agitators Vandalize Historic Crucifix
Illustrative: Hamas supporters at a rally in Cologne, Germany, on Oct. 22, 2023. Photo: Reuters/Ying Tang
As antisemitic incidents continue to rise in Germany, the Catholic Church in Berlin has taken a firmer stance against anti-Jewish hatred by issuing new guidelines prohibiting its members from expressing racist, antisemitic, or extremist views.
On Saturday, the Archdiocese of Berlin, the governing body of the city’s Catholic Church, announced that all candidates for leadership positions must sign a special declaration rejecting racism, antisemitism, and extremist views.
“With this decision, responsibility falls where it belongs. Anyone seeking to serve on the diocesan committees and run in the elections must actively uphold the values of our Church,” Karlies Abmeier, president of the Diocesan Council, said in a statement.
The Catholic Church’s latest move aims to ensure that anyone seeking a leadership role within the institution commits to rejecting “racism, antisemitism, ethnic nationalism, and hostility toward democracy.”
“It is crucial for us that such statements never come from those in positions of power within our Church,” Marcel Hoyer, executive director of the committee, told the German Press Agency.
Candidates would also be prohibited from belonging to any party or organization that the German Office for the Protection of the Constitution has designated as extremist.
The archdiocese’s announcement comes amid a climate of rising hostility and radicalization in Germany, where the local Jewish community has increasingly become a target.
Last week, anti-Israel protesters vandalized a church with paint in the Vogelsberg district of Hesse in central Germany.
According to local media reports, a crucifix was vandalized with antisemitic graffiti, including the slogans “Free Palestine” and “Jesus is Palestinian,” and the church walls were also defaced with red paint.
Pastor Ingmar Bartsch denounced the incident, describing himself as “angry and bewildered.”
“What affects me most is that it’s a historic depiction of Jesus, at least 200 to 300 years old, and truly one of a kind,” Bartsch told the German newspaper Bild.
He explained that the crucifix will require a professional restoration, with initial damage estimates reaching into the thousands of dollars.
Local police have launched an investigation into the incident as a case of property damage, noting that the items involved hold religious significance.
As the restoration process begins, Bartsch said the church will remain closed for now, reopening only for religious services.
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Columbia University Rejects Latest Israel Divestment Proposal
Columbia University on Sept. 2, 2025. Photo: REUTERS/Ryan Murphy
Columbia University said on Friday that it will not divest from Israel and other corporations which anti-Zionist activists denounced for selling materials to the Israeli military.
The university’s Advisory Committee on Socially Responsible Investing (ACSRI) stated its position on the matter as a response to a group which submitted three proposals calling for the policy in December 2024, when the institution’s campus was being roiled by anti-Israel protests and a deluge of antisemitic incidents. The group had charged that Israel is guilty of “human rights violations” and “war crimes.”
Israel argued it went to unprecedented lengths to try and avoid civilian casualties during the latest war in Gaza, noting its efforts to evacuate areas before it targeted them and to warn residents of impending military operations with leaflets, text messages, and other forms of communication. It noted that Hamas, the Palestinian terrorist group it was targeting, embedded its fighters within Gaza’s civilian population and commandeered civilian facilities like hospitals, schools, and mosques to run operations and direct attacks.
In three separate statements, Columbia said that the group behind the boycott proposals lacks consensus support on campus and has reduced one of the most complex geopolitical conflicts in the world history to “vague and excessively broad” categories, sewing partisan division and confusion where a university would, ideally, aim to promote clarity and sober analysis of fact.
Additionally, ASCRI said that the group’s proposals are of “similar … substance” to other ideas put forth by the notorious Columbia University Apartheid Divest (CUAD) group, a spinoff of Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP) which Columbia resolved neither to recognize nor correspond with due to its culpability in antisemitic assaults, hate speech, and a slew of illegal occupations of campus property.
“As noted in the ASCRI’s decision on the CUAD proposal last year, members of the university have a wide range of views on contentious issues,” ASCRI wrote. “Hence, it will be difficult or unprecedented for the university, with such diverse views, to sponsor shareholder proposals of the kind this proposal envisages.”
It added, “There is significant opposition in the Columbia University community to divesting from companies that are involved in Israel, as evidenced by the actions of many students, faculty, and alumni.”
Columbia University has begun implementing a series of reforms it says will address campus antisemitism.
In a statement issued in July, university president Claire Shipman said the institution will hire new coordinators to oversee complaints alleging civil rights violations; facilitate “deeper education on antisemitism” by creating new training programs for students, faculty, and staff; and adopt the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA) definition of antisemitism — a tool that advocates say is necessary for identifying what constitutes antisemitic conduct and speech.
Shipman also announced new partnerships with the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) and other Jewish groups while delivering a major blow to the anti-Zionist movement on campus by vowing never to “recognize or meet with” CUAD, a pro-Hamas campus group which has serially disrupted academic life with unauthorized, surprise demonstrations attended by non-students.
“I would also add that making these announcements in no way suggests we are finished with the work,” Shipman continued. “In a recent discussion, a faculty member and I agreed that antisemitism at this institution has existed, perhaps less overtly, for a long while, and the work of dismantling it, especially through education and understanding will take time. It will likely require more reform. But I’m hopeful that in doing this work, as we consider and even debate it, we will start to promote healing and to chart our path forward.”
Columbia University had, until that point, yielded some of the most indelible examples of anti-Jewish hatred in higher education since Hamas’s Oct. 7, 2023, massacre in southern Israel set off explosions of anti-Zionist activity at colleges and universities across the US. Such incidents included a student who proclaimed that Zionist Jews deserve to be murdered and are lucky he is not doing so himself and administrative officials who, outraged at the notion that Jews organized to resist anti-Zionism, participated in a group chat in which each member took turns sharing antisemitic tropes that described Jews as privileged and grafting.
Amid these incidents, the university struggled to contain CUAD, which in late January committed infrastructural sabotage by flooding the toilets of the Columbia School of International and Public Affairs (SIPA) with concrete. Numerous reports indicate the attack may have been the premeditated result of planning sessions which took place many months ago at an event held by Alpha Delta Phi (ADP) — a literary society, according to the Washington Free Beacon. During the event, ADP reportedly distributed literature dedicated to “aspiring revolutionaries” who wish to commit seditious acts. Additionally, a presentation was given in which complete instructions for the exact kind of attack which struck Columbia were shared with students.
Columbia has since paid over $200 million to settle claims that it exposed Jewish students, faculty, and staff to antisemitic discrimination and harassment — a deal which secures the release of over $1 billion dollars the Trump administration impounded to pressure the institution to address the issue.
“Columbia’s reforms are a roadmap for elite universities that wish to retain the confidence of the American public by renting their commitment to truth-seeking, merit, and civil debate,” US Education Secretary Linda McMahon McMahon said at the time. “I believe they will ripple across the higher education sector and change the course of campus culture for years to come.”
Follow Dion J. Pierre @DionJPierre.