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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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University of California Rejects Ethnic Studies Admissions Requirement in Faculty Assembly Vote

Demonstrators holding a “Stand Up for Internationals” rally on the campus of the University of California, Berkeley, in Berkeley, California, US, April 17, 2025. Photo: Carlos Barria via Reuters Connect.
The University of California (UC) Faculty Assembly has rejected a proposal to establish passing ethnic studies in high school as a requirement for admission to its 10 taxpayer-funded schools for undergraduates.
As previously reported by The Algemeiner, the campaign for the measure — defeated overwhelmingly 29-12 with 12 abstaining — was spearheaded by Christine Hong, chair of the Critical Race and Ethnic Studies department at UC Santa Cruz. Hong believes that Zionism is a “colonial racial project” and that Israel is a “settler colonial state.” Moreover, she holds that anti-Zionism is “part and parcel” of the ethnic studies discipline.
Ethnic studies activists like Hong throughout the University of California system coveted the admissions requirement because it would have facilitated their aligning ethnic studies curricula at the K-12 level with “liberated ethnic studies,” an extreme revolutionary project that was rejected by California Gov. Gavin Newsom in 2023. Had the proposal been successful, school officials of both public and private schools would have been forced to comply with their standard of what constitutes ethnic studies to qualify their students for admission to UC.
Being indoctrinated into anti-Zionism and “hating Jews” would essentially have become a prerequisite for becoming a UC student had the Faculty Assembly approved the measure, Tammi Rossman-Benjamin, executive director of antisemitism watchdog AMCHA Initiative, told The Algemeiner on Friday. AMCHA Initiative first raised the alarm about the proposal in 2023, calling it “a deeply frightening prospect.”
“Ethnic studies never intended to be like any other discipline or subject. It was always intended to be a political project for fomenting revolution according to the dictates of however the activists behind the subject defined it,” Rossman-Benjamin explained. “And anti-Zionism has been at the core of the field, and this became especially clear after Oct. 7. Most of the anti-Zionist mania on campuses that day — the support for the encampments, the Faculty for Justice in Palestine chapters — it was a project of Ethnic Studies. At UC Santa Cruz, 60 percent of Faculty for Justice in Palestine members were pulled from the ethnic studies department.”
Founded in the 1960s to provide an alternative curriculum for beneficiaries of racial preferences whose retention rates lagged behind traditional college students, ethnic studies is based on anti-capitalist, anti-liberal, and anti-Western ideologies found in the writings of, among others, Franz Fanon, Huey Newton, Simone de Beauvoir, and Karl Marx. Its principal ideological target in the 20th century was the remains of European imperialism in Africa and the Middle East, but overtime it identified new “systems of oppression,” most notably the emergent superpower that was the US after World War II and the nation that became its closest ally in the Middle East: Israel.
UC Santa Cruz’s Critical Race and Ethnic Studies (CRES) department is a case study in how the ideology leads inexorably to anti-Zionist antisemitism, AMCHA Initiative argued in a 2024 study.
Following Hamas’s Oct. 7, 2023, massacre across southern Israel, CRES issued a statement rationalizing the terrorist group’s atrocities as political resistance. Additionally, the department days later participated in a “Call for a Global General Strike,” refusing to work because Israel mounted a military response to Hamas’s atrocities — an action CRES called “Israel’s genocidal attack on Gaza.” Later, the department held an event titled, “The Genocide in Gaza in our [sic] Classrooms: A Teaching Palestine Workshop,” in which professors and teaching assistants were trained in how to persuade students that Zionism is a racist and genocidal endeavor.
Imposing such noxious views on all California students would have been catastrophic, Rossman-Benjamin told The Algemeiner.
“The goal of admissions requirements is to make sure that students are adequately prepared for college,” she noted. “Their goal was to use their power to force students to take the kind of Critical Ethnic Studies that is taught at the university, with the goal of revolutionizing society. The idea should have been dead on arrival, being rejected on the grounds that there is no evidence that it is a worthwhile subject that should be required for admission to the University of California.”
Follow Dion J. Pierre @DionJPierre.
The post University of California Rejects Ethnic Studies Admissions Requirement in Faculty Assembly Vote first appeared on Algemeiner.com.
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Israeli FM Praises Paraguay Decision to Label Iran’s IRGC, Proxies Hamas and Hezbollah as Terrorist Organizations

Paraguayan President Santiago Peña praying at the Western Wall in Jerusalem on Dec. 12, 2024. Photo: The Western Wall Heritage Foundation
Israeli Foreign Minister Gideon Sa’ar praised Paraguay’s decision to designate Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) as a terrorist organization, and to broaden the country’s previous designation to include all factions of Hamas and Hezbollah.
The top Israeli diplomat congratulated the South American country and described President Santiago Peña’s decision as a “landmark move” in addressing security challenges and fostering international peace.
“Iran is the world’s leading exporter of terrorism and extremism, and together with its terror proxies, it threatens regional stability and global peace,” Sa’ar wrote in a post on X. “More countries should follow suit and join the fight against Iranian aggression and terrorism.”
I commend Paraguay and @SantiPenap for the landmark decision to designate the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps, Hamas, and Hezbollah as terrorist organizations.
Iran is the world’s leading exporter of terrorism and extremism, and together with its terror proxies, it threatens… https://t.co/OzWACbWcno— Gideon Sa’ar | גדעון סער (@gidonsaar) April 24, 2025
On Thursday, Peña issued an executive order designating the IRGC as a terrorist organization “for its systematic violations of peace, human rights, and the security of the international community.”
The executive order also expanded Paraguay’s 2019 proscription of the armed wings of the Palestinian terrorist group Hamas, the al-Qassam Brigades, and Hezbollah, the Iran-backed terrorist group in Lebanon, to encompass the entirety of both organizations, including their political wings.
“With this decision, Paraguay reaffirms its unwavering commitment to peace, international security, and the unconditional respect for human rights, solidifying its position within the international community as a country firmly opposed to all forms of terrorism and strengthening its relations with allied nations in this fight,” Peña wrote in a post on X, emphasizing the country’s strategic relationship with the United States and Israel.
Iran is the chief international backer of Hamas and Hezbollah, providing the Islamist terror groups with weapons, funding, and training. According to media reports based on documents seized by the Israeli military in Gaza last year, Iran had been informed about Hamas’s plan to launch the Oct. 7 attack months in advance.
Last year, Peña reopened Paraguay’s embassy in Jerusalem, making it the sixth nation — after the US, Guatemala, Honduras, Kosovo, and Papua New Guinea — to establish its embassy in the Israeli capital. During the same visit, he condemned the Hamas-led massacre across southern Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, calling the perpetrators “criminals” in a speech at the Knesset, the Israeli parliament.
The Trump administration also praised Paraguay’s decision to officially label the IRGC as a terrorist organization, describing it as a major blow to Iran’s terror network in the Western Hemisphere.
“Iran remains the leading state sponsor of terrorism in the world and has financed and directed numerous terrorist attacks and activities globally, through its IRGC-Qods Force and proxies such as Hezbollah and Hamas,” US State Department spokesperson Tammy Bruce said in a statement.
The US official said Paraguay’s action will help disrupt Iran’s ability to finance terrorism and operate in Latin America — particularly in the Tri-Border Area, where Paraguay borders Argentina and Brazil, a region long regarded as a financial hub for Hezbollah-linked operatives.
“The important steps Paraguay has taken will help cut off the ability of the Iranian regime and its proxies to plot terrorist attacks and raise money for its malignant and destabilizing activity,” the statement read.
“The United States will continue to work with partners such as Paraguay to confront global security threats,” Bruce added. “We call on all countries to hold the Iranian regime accountable and prevent its operatives, recruiters, financiers, and proxies from operating in their territories.”
During his first administration, Trump designated the IRGC as a foreign terrorist organization (FTO), citing the Iranian regime’s use of the IRGC to “engage in terrorist activities since its inception 40 years ago.”
At the time, Trump said this designation “recognizes the reality that Iran is not only a state sponsor of terrorism, but that the IRGC actively participates in, finances, and promotes terrorism as a tool of statecraft.”
“The IRGC is the Iranian government’s primary means of directing and implementing its global terrorist campaign,” he continued.
The post Israeli FM Praises Paraguay Decision to Label Iran’s IRGC, Proxies Hamas and Hezbollah as Terrorist Organizations first appeared on Algemeiner.com.
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Yale’s Silence Is Allowing Blatant Campus Antisemitism — and Betraying the Promise of ‘Never Again’

Yale University students at the corner of Grove and College Streets in New Haven, Connecticut, U.S., April 22, 2024. Photo: Melanie Stengel via Reuters Connect.
As darkness fell over Yale University on Wednesday evening, Jewish students faced intimidation that echoed history’s darkest chapters. The following day, as the sun rose on Holocaust Remembrance Day, the world solemnly reflected on the devastating consequences of unchecked hatred.
Yet, disturbingly, at Yale, the shadows of that same hatred linger once again.
For several nights now, radical anti-Israel activists, primarily organized by “Yalies for Palestine,” an anti-Israel hate group, have targeted Jewish students at Yale — in many cases, based solely on their outwardly Jewish appearance.
On Wednesday, protestors blocked walkways, physically intimidated Jewish students, and hurled bottles and sprayed liquids at them — all while campus police stood by and did nothing.
One Jewish student described her chilling encounter with the protesters the night before, on Tuesday: “When I tried to get through, they blocked me, ignored my requests to pass, and handed out masks to those obstructing me. Yale security told me they couldn’t help.”
The immediate trigger for this harassment is the invitation extended by Shabtai, a Yale Jewish society, to Itamar Ben-Gvir, an Israeli government minister. Whether one supports or opposes Ben-Gvir’s politics is beside the point. Notably, Naftali Bennett, a former Israeli prime minister, was also protested and disrupted during a separate campus event in February, underscoring a broader trend of hostility toward Israeli speakers regardless of their political affiliation.
These events signal more than isolated protests; they constitute a redux of hatred that historically escalates when met with institutional silence or indifference.
Yale’s administration, under President Maurie McInnis and Dean Pericles Lewis, has failed to adequately respond. Though Yale revoked official recognition from Yalies for Palestine, its tepid actions have not halted the dangerous slide toward overt hostility. The silence — from both the university and the Slifka Center, Yale’s center for Jewish life — is deafening.
This isn’t the first troubling instance at Yale. A year ago, similar demonstrators disrupted campus life with vitriolic anti-Israel rhetoric, silencing dialogue and fostering an atmosphere hostile to Jewish students.
Earlier this year, CAMERA on Campus documented Yale’s Slifka Center pressuring students to erase evidence of anti-Jewish harassment during a pro-Israel event, effectively whitewashing antisemitism and emboldening extremists.
As CAMERA’s Ricki Hollander has powerfully documented, the rhetoric of anti-Zionism today often revives the antisemitic patterns of the past, particularly those propagated by the Nazi regime in the 1930s. These tactics, she explains, echo Nazi-era propaganda that portrayed Jews as subhuman, sinister, and uniquely malevolent — a narrative used to justify marginalization and, ultimately, genocide.
These dynamics — scapegoating, dehumanizing, and ostracizing Jews under the guise of “anti-Zionism” — are not relics of history. They are alive and active across elite American campuses. And now, unmistakably, they have taken root at Yale.
McInnis must break the silence and condemn the open harassment and assault of Jewish students. She must also hold the perpetrators of the heinous actions and those responsible for the safety of students accountable for their inaction.
This week has revealed a grave failure of moral and institutional duty on many fronts. When law enforcement stands by as Jewish students face intimidation and assault, it sends a chilling message: their safety matters less.
We must demand a full investigation and real accountability. Condemnations of antisemitism are not enough. Policies must be changed to ensure Jewish students and organizations can freely exercise their right to free expression without being subject to harassment and assault. Anything less would betray Yale’s stated values — and the promise of “never again.”
Douglas Sandoval is the Managing Director for CAMERA on Campus.
The post Yale’s Silence Is Allowing Blatant Campus Antisemitism — and Betraying the Promise of ‘Never Again’ first appeared on Algemeiner.com.
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