With Hezbollah reportedly rebuilding its military arsenal, the United States and Israel are intensifying pressure on the Lebanese government to disarm the terrorist group and establish a state monopoly on weapons, as tensions rise along Lebanon’s southern border and the risk of renewed conflict grows.

The Israel Defense Forces (IDF) said on Monday that it killed two Hezbollah operatives in separate precision strikes in southern Lebanon. The announcement came one day after the Israeli military said in a statement that it had eliminated four members of Hezbollah’s elite Radwan Force.

Last week, Israel launched airstrikes targeting Hezbollah terrorists and operatives responsible for the Islamist group’s logistical network in Lebanon, claiming they were working to rebuild Iran-backed Hezbollah’s terrorist infrastructure in the region. 

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu warned on Sunday that Hezbollah was seeking to rearm and that Israel would exercise its right to self-defense under last year’s ceasefire accord if Lebanon, which borders the Jewish state to the north, failed to disarm the Lebanese terrorist group.

“Hezbollah is constantly taking hits, but it’s also trying to rearm and recuperate,” Netanyahu said at the start of a weekly cabinet meeting,

“We expect the Lebanese government to uphold its commitments, namely, to disarm Hezbollah. But it’s clear that we’ll exercise our right to self-defense as stipulated in the ceasefire terms,” he said. “We won’t let Lebanon become a renewed front against us, and we’ll do what’s necessary.”

Israeli Defense Minister Israeli Katz expressed similar sentiments, specifically calling out Lebanon’s president.

“Hezbollah is playing with fire, and the president of Lebanon is dragging his feet,” Katz said in a statement. “The Lebanese government’s commitment to disarm Hezbollah and remove it from southern Lebanon must be implemented. Maximum enforcement will continue and even intensify – we will not allow any threat to the residents of the north.”

Lebanese President Joseph Aoun last week ordered the army to confront IDF incursions along the southern border, after accusing Israel of hindering prospects for negotiations by escalating its military operations inside the country.

“Lebanon is ready for negotiations to end the Israeli occupation, but any negotiation … requires mutual willingness, which is not the case,” Aoun said Friday during a joint press conference with German Foreign Minister Johann Wadephul in Beirut. 

Israel “is responding to this option by carrying out more attacks against Lebanon … and intensifying tensions,” the Lebanese leader continued.  

According to Hanin Ghaddar, a senior fellow at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, US and Israeli officials have sent a clear message: if Lebanon fails to properly implement the ceasefire agreement and take stronger action to disarm the Iran-backed terrorist group by the end of the year, Israel will continue to step up its operations along the southern border.

“Lebanon prefers to avoid confronting Hezbollah — essentially, it would rather let Israel do the job than have the Lebanese army face the group directly,” Ghaddar told The Algemeiner. 

She explained that the Lebanese government has reportedly considered a plan to disarm Hezbollah south of the Litani River, located roughly 15 miles from the Israeli border, and contain it to northern areas, but noted that such an approach is unlikely to succeed, as Israel will not tolerate the terrorist group’s presence anywhere in the country.

An Israeli official told the Saudi-owned Al Arabiya TV channel on Sunday that there are “serious estimations” Hezbollah is rebuilding its military capabilities and has smuggled hundreds of short-range missiles from Syria.

“Israel has relayed a message to the Lebanese side that it might again bomb Beirut’s southern suburbs if Hezbollah is not disarmed,” the official told Al Arabiya. “We will not allow the rebuilding of the Lebanese villages that lie directly on the northern border.”

The Israeli added that the IDF will continue occupying five Lebanese hilltop locations and has no plans to withdraw in the “foreseeable future.”

Amid rising tensions and increasing chances of renewed conflict with Jerusalem, new reports indicate that Hezbollah has been actively rebuilding its military capabilities, in violation of last year’s ceasefire agreement with the Jewish state.

On Friday, The Wall Street Journal reported that Hezbollah is restocking rockets, anti-tank missiles, and artillery, effectively rebuilding its armaments and battered ranks.

With support from Iran, Hezbollah is intensifying efforts to bolster its military power, including the production and repair of weapons, smuggling of arms and cash through seaports and Syrian routes, recruitment and training, and the use of civilian infrastructure as a base and cover for its operations.

“The Iranians are much more involved in Lebanon today since Nasrallah was killed, because there is no clear leadership,” Ghaddar told The Algemeiner, referring to Hezbollah’s longtime leader Hassan Nasrallah, who was killed during last year’s war with Israel.

“It’s more of an Iranian occupation now, not just a proxy influence,” she continued. “The stronger Hezbollah becomes, the weaker Lebanon gets, and the prospects for disarmament and peace will continue to diminish.”

At a conference in Bahrain on Saturday, US Special Envoy Thomas Barrack warned that Hezbollah maintains an estimated 40,000 fighters in the country, along with 15,000 to 20,000 rockets and missiles. He also described Lebanon as a “failed state” and said it probably won’t be able to comply with the US demand that it disarms Hezbollah.

In recent weeks, Israel has conducted strikes targeting Hezbollah’s rearmament efforts, particularly south of the Litani River, where the group’s operatives have historically been most active against the Jewish state.

For years, Israel has demanded that Hezbollah be barred from carrying out activities south of the Litani.

According to Ghaddar, Jerusalem is considering further escalation in Lebanon, but what form that might take remains unclear.

She explained that a new conflict could involve continued strikes against Hezbollah’s arsenal and personnel, or expand to residential areas where the group is hiding strategic weapons.

“Israel has more opportunity to act now because Hezbollah is at its weakest. The terror group is trying to rearm but hasn’t succeeded yet,” Ghaddar told The Algemeiner. “If Israel waits, Hezbollah will only grow stronger.”

Even though the US is giving the Lebanese army until the end of the year to finish operations south of the Litani River and begin moving north, Ghaddar warned that if the government does not start the second phase immediately, Washington could give Israel the green light to take military action.

For the Lebanese government, the challenge is not just stepping up efforts to meet the ceasefire deadline to disarm Hezbollah but also preventing the country from plunging into a civil war.

Hezbollah has repeatedly defied international calls to disarm, even threatening protests and civil unrest if the government tries to enforce control over its weapons.

Last week, Hezbollah chief Naim Qassem once again refused to lay down the group’s arms, insisting that its military arsenal is a “legitimate tool for resisting Israel’s occupation and threats.”

Earlier this year, Lebanese officials agreed to a US-backed disarmament plan, which called for the terrorist group to be fully disarmed within four months — by November — in exchange for Israel halting airstrikes and withdrawing troops from the five occupied positions in the country’s southern region.

According to Ghaddar, the main problem is that the Lebanese forces’ plan to disarm Hezbollah lacks a clear timeline. 

So far, they have only set a deadline to complete operations south of the Litani River by the end of the year, with the next phase moving north of the river and eventually covering the rest of the country.

“It is definitely unrealistic for the Lebanese army to achieve full disarmament by the end of the year,” Ghaddar said, noting that the subsequent phases, for which they refuse to provide a timeline, could take months or even years. 

“The goal should be to reach a better agreement now. The ceasefire was a good start, but it lacked a clear timeline, and Hezbollah is using this period to rearm and rebuild itself militarily, financially, and politically,” she continued. 

Ghaddar also said any new agreement should require Lebanon to engage in direct peace negotiations in order to politically weaken Hezbollah and secure an end to the conflict through a negotiated settlement.

In these efforts, she argued that the US could play a central role by pressuring the Lebanese government through sanctions, intensified diplomatic efforts, and conditional support for the Lebanese army to ensure meaningful progress.

You had to have been born in the 1980s or earlier to have a firsthand memory of the night Yitzhak Rabin was shot 30 years ago this week. For most young adults, Rabin’s assassination is something they learned about in history class, at a day school assembly or from their parents. 

That gap — between an event as personal experience and an event as historical memory — is particularly pronounced this year. With the peace process that Rabin championed seemingly more remote than ever and with a ceasefire in Gaza barely holding, parents, teachers, artists and activists may be struggling to explain why the death of an Israeli prime minister in the Clinton years even matters. 

“This is an event that cannot be something that only a generation remembers, but it has to be an event that is cemented not only Israeli history but in Jewish history,” said Barak Sella, 40, who served as spokesperson for the National Memorial Rally for Rabin in Israel and is a founder of the Stand for Democracy coalition, which promotes Rabin’s legacy in the United States.

Sella is also the editor of a newly translated collection of Hebrew poetry, “Class of 95,” that wrestles with the trauma of the assassination and its relevance to the moment. It and a new musical play being staged in Washington, D.C., “November 4,” use different media to convey a similar, pressing idea: Remembering Rabin and what he stood for in life and death is essential for closing festering wounds and imagining a way forward for Israel and its supporters. 

“The Rabin assassination symbolizes a failing point of our democracy, and something that we need to turn into a symbol if we want to be able to have the ability to be a Jewish sovereign nation,” said Sella. “Jews have an ability to have very strong memories of events that happened very far in our past, even traumatic memories, and turn them into symbols of growth.”

For the creators of the anthology and the play, Rabin’s killing at the hands of a Jewish extremist represents not only a mortal blow to peace between Israelis and Palestinians, but a shocking example of internal Jewish strife. And while these mostly left-leaning artists acknowledge the profound disagreements over Oslo, they say he represented the kind of inspired thinking Israel can use in the wake of Oct. 7.

“Rabin had vision and moral imagination — things in short supply today,” said Danny Paller, who wrote the music and lyrics for “November 4.” “That’s what makes this story relevant now. We need to ask: where do we get hope from? How can we build a future?”

Paller, who has lived in Jerusalem since 1986, recalls being at his office the night Rabin was killed — just five days after his first daughter was born. “It was this rush of joy, despair, anger, disbelief,” he said. “Our family changed that week. Our country changed that week.”

“November 4” premiered in 2022 in Israel in a stripped-down cabaret version translated from English to Hebrew. Four women played every role, occasionally stepping out of character to share their own memories of the assassination. “It was profoundly Israeli,” says Paller. “They felt they had just experienced something deeply personal — but in a very different artistic language.”

The new U.S. production, presented by Voices Festival Productions and running Nov. 1-Dec. 7 at Universalist National Memorial Church in Washington, includes characters playing Rabin, his wife Leah, and his assassin, Yigal Amir. Rabin, a hero of Israel’s war of independence who once threatened to “break the bones” of Palestinian rioters, shook hands with the Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat on Sept. 13, 1993. The prospect of territorial compromise with the Palestinians after decades of bloody conflict enraged the Israeli right. Amir, a devout religious Zionist and ultranationalist, sings in the play, “We have a mission/To save our nation/That is the highest height.”

“I don’t have empathy for [Amir],” said Myra Noveck, the Jerusalem-based reporter and researcher for the New York Times who wrote the book for the musical. “But you have to understand the other side — even when they are wrong — without dismissing them as crazy or incompetent.”

By focusing on Israel’s bitter debate about the Oslo Accords and even on Rabin’s flaws as a politician who often dismissed the concerns and fears of his opponents, she said she wanted to retrieve the late prime minister from a “death cult” that treats him as a martyr while ignoring what he stood for. 

“We have to preserve ideas, not just mourn people,” she said, lamenting a right-wing government that includes far-right figures like Itamar Ben-Gvir, a leader of the protests that some say inspired Rabin’s killer. “Rabin foresaw that holding onto the territories would infect the rest of Israel — that you can’t deny rights to others and still maintain a democracy. That’s what we’re seeing now.”

“We realized there was a straight line from Rabin’s moment to the crisis we are witnessing now,” said Paller, referring to the Oct. 7 attacks, the war that followed and the bloodshed Rabin was trying to avert. “The play reminds us that hope and moral courage are never irrelevant. They are urgently needed.”

The 40 poems in “Class of 95” offer an even wider lens on the assassination and the overheated political climate then and now. Ronny Someck’s “Kings of Israel Square, The Day After” was written on Nov. 6, 1995, and remembers the makeshift memorials put up by mourners at the site of the shooting. Yudit Shahat’s poem, “God’s Terrible Garden,” is dedicated to a Canadian-Palestinian physician whose daughters were killed in the Gaza War of January 2009. And in “Proper Rest,” Shoshana Karbasi imagines Rabin’s funeral as an occasion for national healing — “because there is one pain shared by all.”

When asked what he thinks may be lost in translation between Hebrew and English — and what Diaspora Jews may not understand about Israelis — Sella replied that in Israel the assassination remains an “open wound.” 

“The trauma has not been processed,” said Sella. “Rabin’s assassination affected people’s self-confidence in our democracy and the ability to strive for peace. We don’t talk enough about the fact that Rabin was killed by an Israeli citizen, and that brings up the question of what we actually want as a people.”

Sella and the creators of “November 4” also insist on the power of art to open up conversations in a way that journalists and historians can’t.

“People don’t read op-eds if they don’t already agree with them,” said Noveck. “Theater talks to the gut. It lets you peel back the layers — the walls people build around themselves — and get to the onion.”

Yehuda Kurtzer, president of the Shalom Hartman Institute, makes a similar point in a foreword to the poetry collection, writing that trauma “needs poetry.” Kurtzer will be one of the speakers at a Rabin memorial event and book launch of “Class of 95” at Temple Emanu-El in New York on Tuesday. 

The Emanu-El event is one of a number of programs marking the anniversary on Tuesday. UCLA’s Y&S Nazarian Center for Israel Studies is holding a webinar with Itamar Rabinovich, one of Rabin’s biographers. New Jewish Narrative will mark the anniversary with a webinar about how Rabin’s murder reshaped American Jewish politics, identity and engagement with Israel. 

Like Sella, Kurtzer also warns that memories of Rabin and the hope he embodied are fading. He cites a poem in the collection by Daniel Baumgarten, which asks, “Dear students / please raise your hands / what does it feel like to have peace / within reach?” The answer is the poem’s title: “Silence.” 

“I worry for American Jews that in forgetting him, all we see are the inevitabilities of what has gone wrong in Israel over the past several decades, and not the availabilities of alternative endings to this story that once presented themselves and could, with the benefit of our imagination, inspire us again,” Kurtzer writes.

Sella, who splits his time between Tel Aviv and Boston where he is a research fellow at Harvard’s Kennedy School, was just 10 years old when Rabin was killed. Born in the United States and newly arrived in Israel, he experienced the assassination as a formative event. “In many ways, my parents came to Israel because Rabin came into power,” he recalled. “It seemed like a moment of hope. The assassination was a shock, but also an early lesson in what it meant to be part of Israeli society and to engage with its democracy.”

But he notes a worrying gap: The generation that did not live through the assassination lacks the tools and context to understand its meaning. “We’re at a moment where this is no longer personal memory but historical memory,” he said. “If we don’t create spaces for the next generation to engage with this event, they won’t have the language to talk about it, to understand its significance, or to see it as a lesson for the future.”

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(JTA) — The man who is likely to be New York City’s top finance watchdog under Zohran Mamdani — assuming they both win their races on Tuesday — has said he does not believe Mamdani could divest the city’s pension funds of their investments in Israel.

“Just doesn’t have the votes for that,” Mark Levine, the likely next comptroller, told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency in September.

But in fact, Mamdani would be able to stack the boards of two of the city’s five pension funds such that divestment from Israel could be on the table, according to a JTA analysis — and some of Mamdani’s supporters say they are optimistic.

“We have hope in a Mamdani administration,” said Leah Plasse, a school-based social worker who has been lobbying for two years for the Teachers’ Retirement System to divest from Israeli assets.

As the election draws close and Mamdani maintains his lead in the polls, Jewish New Yorkers are wondering about how a mayor who is a longstanding supporter of the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement against Israel could enact his vision in New York City. 

Mamdani has stated his intention not to invest city funds in Israel bonds, in keeping with the current comptroller’s decision not to reinvest when $39 million in bonds matured in 2023. 

But the city’s pension funds hold Israel investments beyond Israel bonds, which are issued by the Israeli government. The BDS movement calls for divesting from “all Israeli and international companies that sustain Israeli apartheid” — expanding targets to include most Israeli companies as well as non-Israeli companies that do business with the Israeli government. 

The Teachers’ Retirement System’s Israeli investments include military technology companies — which Plasse and the group NYC Educators for Palestine have honed in on — as well as a variety of businesses like energy companies, food manufacturers and fuel companies.

Altogether, the city’s five public pension funds contain approximately $315 million in Israeli assets, according to the comptroller’s office. Mamdani has not indicated an intention to push for full divestment, but he also has not denied the possibility when asked.

Asked about doing so in a JTA questionnaire last week, Mamdani responded, “I support the approach of the current comptroller, Brad Lander, to end the practice of purchasing Israel bonds in our pension funds, which we do not do for any other nation.” He also did not specifically respond to part of that question which asked how else he might advance the cause of BDS as mayor. 

What’s clear is that if Mamdani chose to make divestment a priority, pathways exist within the city’s pension fund management where headway could be possible.

For each of the city’s five pension funds to make any investment decisions, its board of trustees must vote in favor. Those boards vary in size, but typically consist of the comptroller, an appointee by the mayor and a number of labor representatives. Recommendations are made to those boards by the comptroller’s in-house Bureau of Asset Management.

Levine emphasized that a mayor could not “singlehandedly” overrule the comptroller’s recommendations to divest from Israel. But on boards where the mayor has more influence over the makeup of the trustees, the mayor could do so with the help of his or her appointees.

The Board of Education Retirement System, for example, has a 28-person board of trustees — a 15-person majority of whom are appointed by the mayor. Of those 15 mayoral appointees, one is the schools chancellor, one is an independent appointee, and the other 13 are the mayoral appointees on the city’s Panel for Educational Policy. (Mamdani has said he wants to reduce the influence of the mayor on the PEP.) The number of votes required to pass a resolution in the BERS is 15, though that figure must include one of the board’s two employee-elected members.

The board of the Teachers’ Retirement System, meanwhile, consists of seven members, and requires four votes to pass a resolution. Three of the members are mayoral appointees, one represents the city comptroller, and the other three are elected by the teachers on staggered three-year terms. 

The three teacher members on the board now are all drawn from the teachers union’s leadership caucus. The union, the United Federation of Teachers, endorsed Mamdani.

The other three pension funds — for police, firefighters and city employees — are less susceptible to mayoral influence because the mayor appoints a smaller proportion of members.

While the movement to boycott Israel has called for divestment since 2005, advocacy has ramped up in many places in the last two years during the Israel-Hamas war in Gaza. In New York City, pro-Palestinian advocacy groups have gained little traction under an Eric Adams mayoral administration that is not sympathetic to their activism. 

In fact, the Teachers’ Retirement System board has been resistant to advocacy for divestment, according to Plasse, who noted that the board “voted to close the public comment period after 1.5 years of us coming to speak about divesting our pension.” 

Plasse said she was told this change was made for the sake of consistency, as no other pension funds’ board meetings include public comment periods. But she said it felt “quite clear” the real reasoning was to stifle her and her group’s “continued advocacy.”

Indeed, groups such as NYC Educators for Palestine and Workers for Palestine have regularly sent representatives to the public meetings of the pension boards. In public comments, the activists have pointed to examples like the city’s divestment from South African businesses in the 1980s, and more recently, the funds’ unilateral decision to divest from Russian securities in 2022, to show a precedent.

“And just on a personal note, before the holidays, as a Jew, before Hanukkah begins, I truly believe in tikkun olam, which is the repairing of the world,” Plasse said in the public comment period of a December 2024 board meeting of the Teachers’ Retirement System, according to meeting minutes. “We are funding genocide. That is against my faith.”

Any effort to divest from Israel would likely butt up against Levine, who is expected to win the race for comptroller. Levine, who is Jewish, endorsed Mamdani but has said he wants the city to resume investing in Israel bonds. NYC Educators for Palestine joined the anti-Zionist group Jewish Voice for Peace outside Levine’s office last week for a protest they named “Break the Bonds,” calling his intention to invest in Israel bonds one that puts “deadly politics over the interests of working New Yorkers.”

Levine, however, says he isn’t motivated by pro-Israel sentiment. The investments, he notes, have always been sound for the city. (Levine’s campaign did not respond to requests for a follow-up interview.)

That means the issue of Israeli investments — which, according to Levine, are a sturdy piece of an investment portfolio that serves more than 750,000 New Yorkers — could bring some of Mamdani’s deeply held values into conflict. In response to JTA’s question on divestment, he emphasized the central promises of his campaign. 

“My priority as mayor will be to deliver on the affordability agenda I ran on: freezing the rent, universal childcare, and fast and free buses,” Mamdani answered. “That will always be the core of my administration.”

And advocates for divestment say they won’t stop pushing the case before the pension boards. At October’s Teachers’ Retirement System board meeting, Plasse handed out a written statement calling for an investment analysis and declaring that her group would be undeterred by the board’s repeated denials. 

“I am more than open to meet with anyone about anything that has been discussed here today,” the statement read. “But please know, we are only becoming more embolden [sic] to demand this change. This is our money and the time will come.”

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