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Israel’s ravaged kibbutzes have become museums of the macabre. Their former residents want to go home..
GAZA ENVELOPE, Israel (JTA) — For Ido Felus, returning to his home in Kfar Aza is not a choice but an imperative that has guided every decision he has made — including what to study in college — since Oct. 7.
“If we don’t come back, the terrorists will have won,” Felus, 24, told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency from outside his home, the corner house in a row of ravaged one-story structures in the devastated kibbutz. Before the attack, he planned to study psychology, but he is now pursuing a business degree, with one ambition only.
“I am making it my life’s mission to rehabilitate this place. It should also be Israel’s most important mission. This area should no longer be peripheral — it should be the center of everything. Israel’s high-tech scene should relocate here,” Felus said.
According to Felus, many of the kibbutz’s younger generation — especially those who are single — feel the same way. “Even those who at first said they can’t come back are now saying they can’t not come back,” he said.
Last week, as the 100-day mark since the attack neared, the first residents of Kfar Aza returned home. Ayelet Cohen and Shachar Shnurman, whose home was one of the few to remain intact during the onslaught, said they were tired of being refugees. Despite the noise of war happening over the border, the middle-aged couple said they were able to sleep much more soundly in the kibbutz.
“In Tel Aviv there is the noise from cars. Here it’s no different than it was in 2014 [during the war with Hamas]. The kibbutz is destroyed, but in terms of the noise, the echoes of the explosions from Gaza is the music we know,” Schnurman told the Israeli news website Ynet. “Some people tell us, good for you, but others say we’ve gone crazy. I can’t disagree with them.”
A month after the war broke out, destruction and rubble dominated the once-arcadian kibbutz. Two months later, the landscape remains starkly unchanged. A notable difference, however, is the volume of visitors, which has risen dramatically, turning the area into a museum of the macabre.
Celebrities and influencers including Jerry Seinfeld, Debra Messing, Montana Tucker, Scooter Braun, Michael Rapaport, Caroline D’Amore, Gregg Sulkin and Emily Austin have all headed to Israel to meet with hostage families and visit the sites of the Oct. 7 massacres. (Screenshots via Instagram, design by Jackie Hajdenberg)
For months, the visitors included volunteers with Zaka, the nonprofit that searching for and evacuating bodies and body parts as well as cleaning out burned vehicles, all according to the dictates of Jewish law. But after almost three months of daily work, Zaka said it has now finished its activities in the Gaza envelope, its spokesman, Moti Bukchin told JTA. Now, the organization is only being called to work in very specific cases, for example, if new rains reveal previously undiscovered body parts or blood.
Still, in every direction, groups of people can be seen milling around, wandering shell-shocked through the debris or listening to their guides — often former residents of the Kibbutz like Felus — recount the horrors they experienced on Oct. 7. Many of them are part of a growing cadre of solidarity mission participants from Jewish communities in the United States, sometimes including celebrities and social media influencers; the area remains a closed military zone, off-limits to civilian Israelis and under ongoing rocket fire from Gaza.
Samuel Hayek, the chairman of JNF-UK, was part of a tour of the decimated kibbutz led by Felus.
“There is only one word to describe what seeing this in real life is like: Devastating,” he said. “We will be there, as we have for years, to strengthen the periphery until their lives and their neighborhoods are restored.”
JNF-UK executive director Yonatan Galon told JTA that for the past decade, the organization has spent roughly $5 to $8 million annually on infrastructure, education, and welfare initiatives across southern Israeli communities. The group’s contributions span a wide range, including the development of leadership programs, parks, promenades, student villages and senior citizen centers in several Gaza border communities such as Nahal Oz, Kerem Shalom, Sderot and Nir Oz.
Six and a half miles away in Beeri, the largest and wealthiest of the Gaza border kibbutzim and in many ways the most brutally assaulted, the destruction immediately appears to be even more extreme in its scope than at Kfar Aza. With half of the houses destroyed beyond repair, the estimated cost of restoring Beeri is just under $80 million, according to estimates by the Tkuma, or Revival, Administration, the new body tasked with rehabilitating and developing the Gaza periphery. The government has allocated $4.8 billion to the administration to handle the affected communities’ short-, mid- and long-term needs.
As at Kfar Aza, Beeri is bustling, but not just with people on guided tours. Some young adults have moved in to tend to the kibbutz in their neighbors’ absence. Farmers have returned to plant wheat in the hope that the harvest will be ready by the time the kibbutz is rebuilt. Busloads of employees of Beeri’s famous printing press arrive every day for work from their hotel near the Dead Sea — a daily commute of three-and-a-half hours. According to Uri Jelin, whose grandfather was one of the kibbutz’s founders, their desire to return to work stems more from the need to cope with their pain than from a commitment to sustaining Beeri’s economy.
The remains of the destruction caused by Hamas terrorists when they infiltrated Kibbutz Be’eri on October 7, 2023, near the Israeli-Gaza border, southern Israel, as seen on Jan. 4, 2024. (Chaim Goldberg/Flash90)
On Oct. 7, Ben Suchman, the CEO of the press, was on the phone with his mother when a terrorist entered her safe room. He heard the terrorist ask his mother to remove her ring, but it wouldn’t budge. The phone went silent. Days later, authorities handed the ring over to Suchman. His mother was dead.
Jelin pointed to a house that appears to have sustained no apparent damage. “You see this house? It looks innocent, yes? It is anything but. This is where the terrorists enjoyed themselves the most.” Jelin recounts what took place inside the house but asks that the details not be repeated, out of respect for the people who once lived there.
The intact house and close to 200 others like it are becoming a sticking point for plans to rebuild Beeri. Days earlier, officials from the fund for property tax compensation surveyed the houses and determined that many did not meet the criteria for demolition. But residents don’t want to move back into homes that were the sites of extreme violence, even if they are structurally sound.
“How can we talk about coming back when people are refusing to live in houses that their neighbors were murdered in?” said the kibbutz’s secretary, Gili Molcho. The plan, Molcho said, was to establish a request for proposals in the coming weeks for architects to design the village’s reconstruction in a way that helps mitigate the trauma.
Even in exile, the kibbutz makes all decisions as a collective. An offer to move into three new buildings in Jerusalem was turned down. Instead, members of the kibbutz voted to stay in their Dead Sea hotel until new dwellings would be ready in a temporary kibbutz adjacent to Hatzerim, close to Beersheba. Construction was already underway, and the kibbutz anticipated relocating there in six months, with plans to stay for at least an additional two years before returning to Beeri. But as Molcho was quick to point out, “the most certain thing we can say is that there is no certainty.”
An internal survey showed that virtually no Beeri residents — less than 1% — said they never wanted to return to Beeri, Molcho said. Twenty percent said they would return the minute they were given the green light while the rest said it would depend on various factors, the foremost being the security situation. Young families have expressed their refusal to return to an “Oct. 6” Beeri, he said, where “every week or two they launch a couple of missiles from Gaza and we have sirens and go into safe rooms.”
The older generation, along with the sandwich generation beneath them, will return under such conditions, having grown accustomed to them over nearly two decades. Those cohorts were pressing to move back to the areas of Beeri that remain intact as soon as possible, he said. But, he added, “no one got used to living with terrorist infiltrations,” which constituted a clear red line.
“I strongly believe that if there will be quiet over there [in Gaza] Beeri will return and thrive and be bigger and better than before,” Molcho said.
After his tour of Kfar Aza and Beeri, Hayek continued on to Carmei Gat, a new neighborhood in the southern Israeli town of Kiryat Gat, where JNF-UK has donated 13 apartments to residents of Nir Oz who were imminently set to move in. Like Beeri, one of the priorities for Nir Oz, which endured some of the worst of the Hamas attack with a quarter of its community either murdered or kidnapped, was to remain together. Carmei Gat, offering 130 available apartments, was one of the few places that could accommodate this need.
Samuel Hayek, chairman of JNF-UK, stands in an apartment in a new neighborhood, Carmei Gat, that his organization has rented for displaced residents of Kibbutz Nir Oz, January 2024. (Deborah Danan)
“I came to check that the safe rooms lock,” Hayek said, before touring a penthouse apartment. The apartments, initially earmarked for Ukrainian refugees fleeing the war with Russia, were repurposed for the victims of Oct. 7.
“Making this decision was a no-brainer. These people went through a holocaust. We need to do everything to help them,” he said.
The modern apartments had been furnished with thoughtful touches that even extended to milk in the fridge and pictures of bucolic kibbutz scenes, but they still resembled furniture-shop showrooms. They were a far cry from the homey bungalows of Nir Oz, which even in the residents’ absence still brim with character.
Days after Hayek’s visit, the residents of Nir Oz finally left their hotel in Eilat to move into the new apartments. A week after settling into his apartment, Jonathan Dekel-Chen has yet to acclimate to his new surroundings. “It was most definitely time for us to move on to a place where we could properly grieve, to the degree that we can grieve, because this is an ongoing saga,” Dekel-Chen, an American-born professor at the Hebrew University, told JTA.
Dekel-Chen’s son, Sagui, JNF-UK’s national project coordinator, is being held as a hostage in Gaza. Sagui’s wife, who just gave birth to the couple’s third child, is also living in a JNF-UK apartment. Sagui’s mother, Dekel-Chen’s ex-wife, was also injured and taken captive on Oct. 7, but managed to escape at the last moment.
“There are still weeks to go before we all really figure out again, individually and families, how we navigate this very new space with none of our actual property,” Dekel-Chen said.
Kibbutz Beeri as seen in January 2024, three months after it was the site of a Hamas massacre. (Deborah Danan)
He described the community’s adjustment to its new environment as an “out-of-body” experience.
“It’s foreign to everything we know. It’s foreign in terms of the landscape, it’s foreign in terms of living, you know, on multiple floors. We are used to living in nature and with the colors of nature, the feel of nature at our doorstep,” he said. “When I look out now, in my home, I’m on the fourth floor of a building, and all I can see are cars, asphalt, concrete and metal.”
Initially, the Nir Oz community had planned to stay in Carmei Gat for less than a year while a new community would be constructed for them, similar to the one being built for Beeri near Hatzerim. They had planned to relocate there for one to two years before contemplating a permanent move. But according to Dekel-Chen, that step was scrapped because none of the residents wanted to live in two temporary homes.
Right now, few members of the kibbutz are able to provide a definitive answer about making a permanent return to Nir Oz in the future. Most of those with younger children told JTA outright that they wouldn’t consider it. But where the community eventually ends up and whether it will be one place or several remains an open question, Dekel-Chen said. A tentative agreement had been drawn up with two or three kibbutzim that could accommodate large groups of Nir Oz members.
The mailboxes at Kibbutz Nir Oz are marked red for those who were murdered on Oct. 7, black for those taken hostage. (Deborah Danan)
Part of their eventual resettlement would rely on a negotiated deal with the Tkuma Administration, he said. The administration “thought everybody was going back to Nir Oz, but clearly that’s not going to happen. Young families and many of the older folks absolutely have no intention of ever going back there,” he said.
The contours of the administration’s ultimate efforts remain unknown. If the administration fails to support people who refused to move back to their original towns, it would be a “national outrage,” Dekel-Chen said.
For its part, the agency told JTA it would help those who did not wish to return to Nir Oz and likewise, in the meantime, if individuals decided to move out of Carmei Gat, it would continue to assist them with the financial and other aid they are currently receiving, including rent and furnishings. But the administration said it had no plans to build new settlements or expand existing ones for the Nir Oz community and maintained that based on conversations it had with residents, most wanted to eventually return.
Meanwhile, the approach to memorializing the massacres in each village has also become a point of debate, both within each community and outside. Tkuma said it was working with the Ministry of Heritage as well as local representatives from each village to find ways to honor the victims and preserve the memory of Oct. 7. Molcho envisioned transforming a small corner of the kibbutz into a commemoration area, but nothing more.
Uri Jelin stands atop wreckage at Kibbutz Beeri, founded by his grandfather, in January 2024. (Deborah Danan)
“Our goal is to restore this place for normal living as much as possible, and not turn it into a memorial site,” he said.
Felus had a different take, believing that the entire 100-yard strip of Kfar Aza known as the “younger generation” zone, where not a single house survived, should be cordoned off and preserved in its current state of ruin as a historical testament for future generations. He said he understood the potential trauma that such a memorial might evoke for some — in part because it’s one he experiences all the time.
“All I do is remember. Every step I take in this kibbutz I think, this friend was murdered here, that one was taken hostage there,” he said. “There’s no getting away from it anyway.”
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US House Passes ICC Sanctions Bill Following Netanyahu Arrest Warrant
US House Speaker Mike Johnson speaks to members of the media at the Capitol building, April 20, 2024. Photo: REUTERS/Ken Cedeno
The US House of Representatives on Thursday passed legislation that would sanction members of the International Criminal Court (ICC) over its issuing of arrest warrants for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his former defense minister, Yoav Gallant.
The Illegitimate Court Counteraction Act (HR 23) calls for the warrants against the Israeli officials to be “condemned in the strongest possible terms,” labeling them as “illegitimate and baseless” actions that “create a damaging precedent that threatens the United States, Israel, and all United States partners who have not submitted to the ICC’s jurisdiction.”
The ICC has no jurisdiction over Israel as it is not a signatory to the Rome Statute, which established the court. Other countries including the US have similarly not signed the ICC charter. However, the ICC has asserted jurisdiction by accepting “Palestine” as a signatory in 2015, despite no such state being recognized under international law.
Beyond condemning the arrest warrants, the bill would also impose sanctions on any officials with the ICC, or entities supporting the court, who seek to investigate, arrest, detain, or prosecute “any protected person of the United States and its allies.”
The bill easily passed by a margin of 243-140. House Republicans overwhelmingly backed the bill, with 198 voting in favor, zero voting against, one voting “present,” and 20 abstaining from voting. House Democrats were more divided on the bill, with 45 voting in favor, 140 voting against, and 30 abstaining from voting.
The proposed sanctions would target individuals “directly engaged in or otherwise aided any effort by the ICC to investigate, arrest, detain, or prosecute a protected person.” In addition, the legislation would freeze assets and ban visas of sanctioned individuals and allow the sitting president to waive individual sanctions if the waiver is considered critical to US national security interests.
US Rep. Brian Mast (R-FL), a stalwart ally of Israel and co-sponsor of the bill, condemned the ICC on the floor of the House of Representatives.
“Israel is the tip of the spear in bringing the fight to an enemy that currently holds and has killed our fellow Americans,” said Mast, chair of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, referring to Israel’s military campaign against the Palestinian terrorist group Hamas.
Rep. Chip Roy (R-TX), another co-sponsor of the bill, lambasted the ICC for taking an “unprecedented action” against Israel, arguing that the court’s actions are undermining the Jewish state’s ability to defend itself against Hamas terrorism.
Roy decried the arrest warrants against Netanyahu and Gallant as a “politicized witch hunt” and claimed that the ICC “doesn’t have any jurisdiction” over the defensive military operations of the Jewish state.
Rep. Ritchie Torres (D-NY) issued a statement endorsing the bill.
“The ICC’s decision to issue arrest warrants against the leadership of Israel represents the weaponization of international law at its most egregious,” Torres said. “The ICC has set a precedent for criminalizing self-defense: any country daring to defend itself against an enemy that exploits civilians as human shields will face persecution posing as prosecution.”
Immediately after the vote, pro-Israel organizations issued statements applauding the House for advancing legislation to sanction the ICC.
The American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), the foremost pro-Israel lobbying group in the US, praised the passage of HR 23.
“AIPAC commends the House for adopting the Illegitimate Court Counteraction Act, which imposes sanctions on foreign persons aiding the International Criminal Court’s (ICC) morally bankrupt and legally baseless attack against Israel,” AIPAC said in a statement.
The Republican Jewish Coalition (RJC) also celebrated the passage of the legislation, lauding Republican leadership in helping advance the bill through the House of Representatives.
“We thank [House Speaker Mike Johnson] and the [House Republican] majority for their leadership and prioritizing this critical legislation in week one of the 119th Congress,” the RJC wrote on X/Twitter.
In November, the ICC issued arrest warrants for Netanyahu, Gallant, and Hamas terror leader Ibrahim al-Masri (better known as Mohammed Deif) for alleged war crimes and crimes against humanity in the Gaza conflict. The ICC said there were reasonable grounds to believe Netanyahu and Gallant were criminally responsible for starvation in Gaza and the persecution of Palestinians — charges vehemently denied by Israel, which has provided significant humanitarian aid into the war-torn enclave throughout the war.
US and Israeli officials issued blistering condemnations of the ICC move, decrying the court for drawing a moral equivalence between Israel’s democratically elected leaders and the heads of Hamas, the Palestinian terrorist group that launched the ongoing war in Gaza with its massacre across southern Israel last Oct. 7.
The ICC’s chief prosecutor, Karim Khan, initially made his surprise demand for arrest warrants for Netanyahu and Gallant on the same day in May that he suddenly canceled a long-planned visit to both Gaza and Israel to collect evidence of alleged war crimes. The last-second cancellation infuriated US and British leaders, according to Reuters, which reported that the trip would have offered Israeli leaders a first opportunity to present their position and outline any action they were taking to respond to the war crime allegations.
Following the official issuing of arrest warrants in November, a slew of US lawmakers vowed to seek retribution against the ICC after President-elect Donald Trump takes office later this month.
Incoming US Senate Majority Leader John Thune (R-SD) has also threatened to push legislation imposing sanctions on the ICC if it does not halt its efforts to pursue arrest warrants against Israeli officials.
The post US House Passes ICC Sanctions Bill Following Netanyahu Arrest Warrant first appeared on Algemeiner.com.
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California College Sued for Punishing Jewish Professor Over Conversation on Israeli-Palestinian Conflict
California College of the Arts in San Francisco. Photo: Edward H. Blake via Wikimedia Commons
A Jewish professor is suing the California College of the Arts (CCA) in San Francisco for allegedly violating her rights by punishing her because she disagreed with students about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
According to court documents shared with The Algemeiner by the Deborah Project, a legal nonprofit which defends the civil rights of Jewish educators, Professor Karen Fiss’s tribulations began on Oct. 23, 2023, when she exchanged remarks with several members of the terrorist-linked Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP) group who summoned her to an anti-Zionist display and asked that she support the campaign for a ceasefire in Gaza.
Fiss scanned their materials — which included a sign that proclaimed the anti-Israel genocidal slogan “From the river to the sea,” artwork, and quick response (QR) codes promoting their cause — and initiated a dialogue with the students, asking what the slogan meant and what news sources they read. Offended by Fiss’s signaling she was not an anti-Zionist, one of the students tore down the “from the river to the sea sign” and began arguing that reports of the Palestinian terrorist group Hamas’s atrocities in southern Israel on Oct. 7, 2023 were fabricated.
The conversation reached the fateful moment which precipitated Fiss’s lawsuit when one of the students, Maryiam Alwael, asserted that her knowledge of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict was superior because she was a native of Kuwait, to which Fiss responded by asking the student if she was aware of the Kuwaiti government’s expulsion of 300,000 Palestinians in 1991. Fiss then argued for a more nuanced narrative of the Middle Eastern conflict, noting that not all Middle Easterners are anti-Israel and many oppose Hamas and disapprove of Iran’s backing of it. She ended by counseling the young women to avoid ideological echo chambers. Alwael said she liked her own views.
While both sides made sharp points, the conversation remained civil, according to court documents. However, the students interpreted Fiss’s comments as an attack on their identities and filed a complaint which accused her of being “harassing and discriminatory.” With little due process, Fiss was ultimately found guilty of the allegation and forced to submit to a series of “diversity, equity, and inclusion” trainings — a form of political rehabilitation in which subjects are forced to denounce key values of Western civilization such as the meritocracy and the sovereignty of the individual.
In explaining its guilty verdict, the college accused Fiss of being culturally insensitive and imposing her “power” on the women, who are ethnic minorities of color. Fiss, it said, “began explaining the history of Alwael’s country to her,” and “caused the students to reasonably believe” that Fiss was “using [her] positional power as a professor to get the outcome [she] sought, which was for the students to agree with [her] point of view.”
The college reached these findings but declined to apply the same logic to an earlier complaint Fiss had filed about the Critical Ethnic Studies program’s issuing a statement — “DECOLONIZATION IS NOT A DINNER PARTY,” it said — which justified Hamas’s violence and implied that Jews are not indigenous to their own homeland. This is because, the Deborah Project says, CCA rules are in place to protect left-wing anti-Zionism and punish Jews who oppose it.
“Because Dr. Fiss’s beliefs do not align with the creed mandated and enforced by the college, she has suffered repeated and severe adverse treatment by CCA, which has dramatically impeded her ability to function as a scholar,” the Deborah Project said in its complaint. “As part of its policy of enforcing ideological conformity about Israel, CCA has threatened Dr. Fiss with dismissal for two reasons: (1) her refusal to comply with student demands to contact her congressional representatives to pressure Israel — a sovereign nation — to cease its military response to an ongoing threat; and (2) for respectfully challenging this monopolization of discourse and reaffirming the principles of open dialogue and open debate within CCA.”
According to Lori Lowenthal Marcus, legal director of the Deborah Project, the college ignored Fiss’s concerns about widespread support for Hamas’s atrocities in Israel last Oct. 7, arguing they were simply expressions of free speech.
“Karen Fiss, a fully-tenured professor at CCA was told that her pain, intimidation, and horror upon learning that a huge number of not only students at CCA but her fellow faculty members, the department chairs, and members of the administration not only justified, but supported the wanton rape, torture, and murder of her co-religionists on Oct. 7 was not problematic as far as CCA was concerned because those positions were protected by free speech,” Lowenthal Marcus told The Algemeiner.
She added that CCA “accorded no such academic freedom to Dr. Fiss, who was disciplined for a single conversation that all parties agree was civil.”
“For this actual exercise of academic freedom,” Lowenthal Marcus concluded, “CCA found that Dr. Fiss’s speech constituted harassment of the Kuwaiti student. It was also found to be bullying, on the theory that Dr. Fiss was found to have used her position as a faculty member to pressure the students to adopt Dr. Fiss’s view — when it is undisputed that, throughout the conversation, the students did not even know Dr. Fiss was a professor. For this, Dr. Fiss’s file was permanently marked, and she was warned that if such a thing were to occur again, Fiss would suffer additional punishment, up to and including termination.
Now, with her reputation blighted by scandal and the college threatening revoke her tenure, Fiss is fighting for both her right to exist as a proud Jew at work as well as her right to free speech. She is suing CCA for discriminating against her for being Jewish, a violation of Titles VI and VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, and breach of contract, offenses which caused her “substantial damages” and other trauma.
Follow Dion J. Pierre @DionJPierre.
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Jewish Voice for Peace’s ‘Extremist’ Anti-Israel Agenda, Terror Group Ties Highlighted in Report
Anti-Israel protesters take part in a demonstration hosted by the Democratic Socialists of America, IfNotNow Movement, and Jewish Voice for Peace that turned violent in Washington, DC, Nov. 15, 2023. Photo: REUTERS/Leah Millis
A pro-Israel nonprofit has published a new bombshell booklet detailing the inner workings and funding of Jewish Voice for Peace (JVP), a controversial and prominent anti-Zionist group that has helped organize widespread demonstrations against the Jewish state during the war in Gaza.
StandWithUs (SWU), an organization which promotes a mission of “supporting Israel and fighting antisemitism,” released the report examining how the far-left JVP — which defended the Palestinian terrorist group Hamas’s invasion of southern Israel last Oct. 7 — “promotes antisemitic conspiracy theories” and even partners with terrorist organizations to achieve its “primary goal” of “dismantling the State of Israel.”
According to the report, JVP weaponizes the plight of Palestinians to advance an “extremist” agenda which promotes the destruction of Israel and whitewashes terrorism, receiving money from organizations that have ties to Middle Eastern countries such as Iran.
“JVP and its allies slander and dehumanize Israelis as privileged, powerful, and racist white European colonizers,” the report says. “They promote dangerous conspiracy theories tying Israelis to injustices against various communities” around the world.
The booklet points out that JVP pushes a misleading history of Jewish presence in the Middle East, ignoring that Jews “faced systemic discrimination at best and brutal violence at worst under Muslim and Arab rule, until almost all of them fled or were expelled in the 20th century.” SWU also notes that JVP has routinely labeled Jews as “racist” for expressing fear about the prospect of living as minorities in Israel.
“JVP simply refuses to acknowledge that most Jews genuinely see efforts to eliminate the world’s only Jewish state as a form of hate,” the report reads.
In addition, the report alleges that JVP advances “antisemitic conspiracy theories,” such as the notion that American police are trained by Israeli forces. This narrative suggests that Israel exacerbates alleged police brutality in the United States through training law enforcement to brutalize black people. Prominent anti-Israel pundits such as Marc Lamont Hill and Linda Sarsour have cited this misleading information in various public statements.
StandWithUs also alleges that JVP harbors deep connections and support for international terrorist groups, highlighting JVP’s record of support for the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP), an internationally designated terrorist organization with the stated goal of dismantling Israel and replacing it with a Palestinian state.
“JVP has campaigned in support of PFLP terrorists, hosted PFLP members at events, and partnered with groups that openly support PFLP and other terrorist organizations,” the report reads.
In addition, the report states that JVP has collaborated with anti-Israel entities such as Samidoun, which identifies itself as a “Palestinian prisoner solidarity network, to hold rallies. Samidoun described Hamas’s Oct. 7 atrocities in Israel as “a brave and heroic operation.” The United States and Canada each imposed sanctions on Samidoun in October, labeling the organization a “sham charity” and accusing it of fundraising for terrorist groups such as PFLP. The US Treasury Department said that PFLP “uses Samidoun to maintain fundraising operations in both Europe and North America.”
“Organizations like Samidoun masquerade as charitable actors that claim to provide humanitarian support to those in need, yet in reality divert funds for much-needed assistance to support terrorist groups,” Bradley Smith, the US Treasury Department’s acting under secretary for terrorism and financial intelligence, said in a statement at the time.
The SWU report also says that JVP has ties to “extremist” anti-Israel groups such as Within Our Lifetime (WOL) and the Palestinian Youth Movement (PYM). Leadership for these groups have repeatedly expressed support for violence against Israel and terrorist groups. JVP has worked alongside these groups to hold anti-Israel demonstrations and marches.
According to the new report, JVP has received substantial financial assistance from organizations tied to Lebanon and Iran. For example, the Maximum Difference Foundation, which has been accused of maintaining ties with Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), an internationally designated terrorist organization, donated $65,000 to JVP.
JVP has also received hundreds of thousands of dollars from the Rockefeller Brothers Fund, which according to SWU has funded other anti-Israel organizations, including Palestinian organizations linked with the PFLP.
The report additionally noted that JVP received $200,000 from The Quitiplas Foundation, which has allegedly donated to other organizations connected to Samidoun.
“JVP’s harmful rhetoric and alliances make it clear they are not a voice for peace,” StandWithUs CEO Roz Rothstein said in a statement accompanying the report’s release. “This organization fuels hate and shields extremists from accountability while doing nothing to bring about peaceful coexistence.”
“To help fight rising antisemitism, the public, media, and leaders across our society must finally recognize JVP’s dangerous agenda and reject it,” she said.
The Algemeiner has previously reported that JVP argued in a recently resurfaced 2021 booklet that Jews should not write Hebrew liturgy because hearing the language would be “deeply traumatizing” to Palestinians.
In June, the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) filed a complaint with the US Federal Election Commission accusing JVP’s political fundraising arm of misrepresenting its spending and receiving unlawful donations from corporate entities, citing “discrepancies” in the organization’s income and expense reports.
The post Jewish Voice for Peace’s ‘Extremist’ Anti-Israel Agenda, Terror Group Ties Highlighted in Report first appeared on Algemeiner.com.
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