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Israel’s Understanding of Time
Israeli flag. Photo: Eduardo Castro / Pixabay.
JNS.org – For Israel, it’s all about chronology. Time represents both the most critical determinant of Israel’s survival and the context within which such survival must be ensured. As with an individual human being, time is also the reciprocal of death. This vital relationship is currently most conspicuous regarding Hamas and Hezbollah, but it is most urgently meaningful regarding war with Iran.
For Israel, successful geopolitics will necessarily center on this impending war. Whether the expected conflict will be sudden or incremental, its consequences could prove existential. Of greatest significance for Israel will be avoiding a nuclear war. Inter alia, this objective will be contingent on Jerusalem’s “use of time.”
What can these ambiguous observations mean for Israel in operational terms? What might be learned about the estimable probabilities of an unmanageable war with Iran? Hezbollah’s fighting capacities are greater than those of all other jihadist terror organizations, singularly and cumulatively. These belligerent capacities present a strategic threat to Israel even apart from their Iranian backing.
A key question now arises for Israel: To what extent could a greater conceptual awareness of time generate calculable security advantages for the beleaguered Jewish state?
Though generally unrecognized, Hezbollah and Israel’s other principal terrorist adversaries define authentic victory from the bewildering standpoint of “power over death.” For all these recalcitrant foes, becoming a “martyr” (shahid) represents “power over time.” Accordingly, Jerusalem will need to think about how best to undermine such intangible but determinative notions of power.
In Jerusalem, “real-time” ought never to be interpreted solely in terms of clock measurements. But what would constitute a suitably personalized and policy-centered theory of time?
Whether explicit or implicit, Israeli security analyses should contain theory-based elements of chronology. Israel’s many-sided struggle against war and terror will need to be conducted with more intellectually determined and nuanced concepts of time. Though seemingly “impractical,” such “felt time” or “inner time” conceptualizations could sometimes reveal more about Israel’s core survival problem than any easily decipherable measurements of clocks.
The pertinent notion of “felt time” or “time-as-lived” has its origins in ancient Israel. By rejecting time as a simple linear progression, the early Hebrews approached chronology as a qualitative experience. Once it had been dismissed as something that could submit only to quantitative measures, time began to be understood by seminal Jewish thinkers as a distinctly subjective quality. This view identified time as inseparable from its personally infused content.
In terms of current threats from Iran, Israeli planners should consider chronology not only at the most obvious operational levels (e.g., how much “time” before Iran becomes nuclear?), but also at the level of individual Iranian decision-makers (e.g., what do authoritative leaders in Tehran think about time in shaping their nuclear plans vis-à-vis Israel?).
From its beginnings, the Jewish prophetic vision was one of a community living “in time.” In this formative view, political space or geography was palpably important, but not because of territoriality. Instead, the relevance of particular geographic spaces stemmed from certain unique events that had presumably taken place within their boundaries.
It’s time to return to expressly tactical and strategic issues. For Israel, security policy enhancements should include support for “escalation dominance.” When Israel and Iran are engaged in continuous direct warfare, each adversary can be expected to seek primacy during unprecedented episodes of escalation but to accomplish this objective without heightening the risks of an existential conflict. Among other things, any such expectation would require mutual assumptions of enemy rationality.
There will be multiple particulars. If it could be determined that Iran and/or Hezbollah accept a short time horizon in their search for tangible “victory” over Israel, any Israeli response to enemy aggressions would have to be “swift” in the traditional sense. If it would seem that the presumed enemy time horizon was calculably longer, Jerusalem’s expected response could still be more or less incremental. For Israel, this would mean relying more on the relatively passive dynamics of military deterrence and military defense than on any active strategies of nuclear war fighting.
In the final analysis, the worst case for Israel would be to face an irrational Iran. Moreover, this could happen simultaneously with the appearance of the Hezbollah suicide bomber in microcosm: the flesh-and-blood individual terrorist. Of special interest to Israel’s prime minister and general staff, therefore, should be the hidden time horizons of this jihadist suicide bomber. In essence, this self-defiling terror-criminal is so afraid of “not being” that any plan for “suicide” will be intended as personal death avoidance. Prima facie, such a plan is not “only” literal nonsense; it is also patent cowardice.
An aspiring suicide bomber opposing Israel sees himself or herself as a religious sacrificer. This signals a jihadist adversary’s desperate hope to escape from time that lacks any “sacred” meaning. The relevant jihadist adversary could be an individual Hezbollah terrorist, the sovereign state of Iran or both acting in tandem.
What should Israel do with all such informed understandings of its Islamist adversaries’ concept of time? Jerusalem’s immediate policy response should be to convince both aspiring Hezbollah suicide bombers and Iranian national leaders that their intended “sacrifices” could never elevate them or their societies above the immutably mortal limits of time. This will be an intellectual problem, not a political problem.
Israeli policy-makers will need to recognize certain dense problems of chronology as policy-relevant quandaries. They will also need to acknowledge to themselves that any plausible hopes for national security and “escalation dominance” should be informed by reason. In Jerusalem, all ordinary considerations of domestic politics and global geopolitics will need to be understood as both reflective and transient.
“As earthlings,” comments Hoosier author Kurt Vonnegut, “all have had to believe whatever clocks said.” As necessary fonts of national security decision-making, Israeli strategic thinkers now have it in their power to look beyond the simplifying hands of clocks and investigate more policy-purposeful meanings of time. For Jerusalem, exercising such latent intellectual power could offer a survival posture of potentially unimaginable value. In the final analysis, Israel must survive in a subjective time that is “felt” by its enemies while it is being measured by clocks.
The post Israel’s Understanding of Time first appeared on Algemeiner.com.
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Syria’s Sharaa Says Talks With Israel Could Yield Results ‘In Coming Days’
Syrian President Ahmed al-Sharaa speaks at the opening ceremony of the 62nd Damascus International Fair, the first edition held since the fall of Bashar al-Assad’s regime, in Damascus, Syria, Aug. 27, 2025. Photo: REUTERS/Khalil Ashawi
Syria’s President Ahmed al-Sharaa said on Wednesday that ongoing negotiations with Israel to reach a security pact could lead to results “in the coming days.”
He told reporters in Damascus the security pact was a “necessity” and that it would need to respect Syria’s airspace and territorial unity and be monitored by the United Nations.
Syria and Israel are in talks to reach an agreement that Damascus hopes will secure a halt to Israeli airstrikes and the withdrawal of Israeli troops who have pushed into southern Syria.
Reuters reported this week that Washington was pressuring Syria to reach a deal before world leaders gather next week for the UN General Assembly in New York.
But Sharaa, in a briefing with journalists including Reuters ahead of his expected trip to New York to attend the meeting, denied the US was putting any pressure on Syria and said instead that it was playing a mediating role.
He said Israel had carried out more than 1,000 strikes on Syria and conducted more than 400 ground incursions since Dec. 8, when the rebel offensive he led toppled former Syrian leader Bashar al-Assad.
Sharaa said Israel’s actions were contradicting the stated American policy of a stable and unified Syria, which he said was “very dangerous.”
He said Damascus was seeking a deal similar to a 1974 disengagement agreement between Israel and Syria that created a demilitarized zone between the two countries.
He said Syria sought the withdrawal of Israeli troops but that Israel wanted to remain at strategic locations it seized after Dec. 8, including Mount Hermon. Israeli ministers have publicly said Israel intends to keep control of the sites.
He said if the security pact succeeds, other agreements could be reached. He did not provide details, but said a peace agreement or normalization deal like the US-mediated Abraham Accords, under which several Muslim-majority countries agreed to normalize diplomatic ties with Israel, was not currently on the table.
He also said it was too early to discuss the fate of the Golan Heights because it was “a big deal.”
Reuters reported this week that Israel had ruled out handing back the zone, which Donald Trump unilaterally recognized as Israeli during his first term as US president.
“It’s a difficult case – you have negotiations between a Damascene and a Jew,” Sharaa told reporters, smiling.
SECURITY PACT DERAILED IN JULY
Sharaa also said Syria and Israel had been just “four to five days” away from reaching the basis of a security pact in July, but that developments in the southern province of Sweida had derailed those discussions.
Syrian troops were deployed to Sweida in July to quell fighting between Druze armed factions and Bedouin fighters. But the violence worsened, with Syrian forces accused of execution-style killings and Israel striking southern Syria, the defense ministry in Damascus and near the presidential palace.
Sharaa on Wednesday described the strikes near the presidential palace as “not a message, but a declaration of war,” and said Syria had still refrained from responding militarily to preserve the negotiations.
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Anti-Israel Activists Gear Up to ‘Flood’ UN General Assembly
US Capitol Police and NYPD officers clash with anti-Israel demonstrators, on the day Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu addresses a joint meeting of Congress, on Capitol Hill, in Washington, DC, July 24, 2024. Photo: REUTERS/Umit Bektas
Anti-Israel groups are planning a wave of raucous protests in New York City during the United Nations General Assembly (UNGA) over the next several days, prompting concerns that the demonstrations could descend into antisemitic rhetoric and intimidation.
A coalition of anti-Israel activists is organizing the protests in and around UN headquarters to coincide with speeches from Middle Eastern leaders and appearances by US President Donald Trump and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. The demonstrations are expected to draw large crowds and feature prominent pro-Palestinian voices, some of whom have been criticized for trafficking in antisemitic tropes, in addition to calling for the destruction of Israe.
Organizers of the demonstrations have promoted the coordinated events on social media as an opportunity to pressure world leaders to hold Israel accountable for its military campaign against Hamas in Gaza, with some messaging framed in sharply hostile terms.
On Sunday, for example, activists shouted at Israel’s Ambassador to the UN Danny Danon.
“Zionism is terrorism. All you guys are terrorists committing ethnic cleansing and genocide in Gaza and Palestine. Shame on you, Zionist animals,” they shouted.
BREAKING: PRO-PALESTINE PROTESTORS CONFRONT “ISRAELI” AMBASSADOR DANNY DANON AT THE UNITED NATIONS
1/5 pic.twitter.com/4G1VYEMGzV
— Within Our Lifetime (@WOLPalestine) September 14, 2025
The Combat Antisemitism Movement (CAM), warned on its website that the scale and tone of the planned demonstrations risk crossing the line from political protest into hate speech, arguing that anti-Israel activists are attempting to hijack the UN gathering to spread antisemitism and delegitimize the Jewish state’s right to exist.
Outside the UN last week, masked protesters belonging to the activist group INDECLINE kicked a realistic replica of Netanyahu’s decapitated head as though it were a soccer ball.
US activist group plays soccer with Bibi’s mock decapitated HEAD right outside NYC UN HQ
Peep shot at 00:40
Footage posted by INDECLINE collective just as UN General Assembly about to kick off
‘Following the game, ball was donated to Palestinian Genocide Museum’ pic.twitter.com/TQ84sgZhKr
— RT (@RT_com) September 9, 2025
Within Our Lifetime (WOL), a radical anti-Israel activist group, has vowed to “flood” the UNGA on behalf of the pro-Palestine movement.
WOL, one of the most prolific anti-Israel activist groups, came under immense fire after it organized a protest against an exhibition to honor the victims of the Oct. 7 massacre at the Nova Music Festival in southern Israel. During the event, the group chanted “resistance is justified when people are occupied!” and “Israel, go to hell!”
“We will be there to confront them with the truth: Their silence and inaction enable genocide. The world cannot continue as if Gaza does not exist,” WOL said of its planned demonstrations in New York. “This is the time to make our voices impossible to ignore. Come to New York by any means necessary, to stand, to march, to demand the UN act and end the siege.”
Jewish Voice for Peace (JVP) and Palestinian Youth Movement (PYM), two other anti-Israel organizations that have helped organize widespread demonstrations against the Jewish state during the war in Gaza, also announced they are planning a march from Times Square to the UN headquarters on Friday.
“The time is now for each and every UN member state to uphold their duty under international law: sanction Israel and end the genocide,” the groups said in a statement.
JVP, an organization that purports to fight for “Palestinian liberation,” has positioned itself as a staunch adversary of the Jewish state. The group argued in a 2021 booklet that Jews should not write Hebrew liturgy because hearing the language would be “deeply traumatizing” to Palestinians. JVP has repeatedly defended the Oct. 7 massacre of roughly 1,200 people in southern Israel by Hamas as a justified “resistance.” Chapters of the organization have urged other self-described “progressives” to throw their support behind Hamas and other terrorist groups against Israel
Similarly, PYM, another radical anti-Israel group, has repeatedly defended terrorism and violence against the Jewish state. PYM has organized many anti-Israel protests in the two years following the Oct. 7 attacks in the Jewish state. Recently, Sen. Tom Cotton (R-AK) called for a federal investigation into the organization after Aisha Nizar, one of the group’s leaders, urged supporters to sabotage the US supply chain for the F-35 fighter jet, one of the most advanced US military assets and a critical component of Israel’s defense.
The UN General Assembly has historically been a flashpoint for heated debate over the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Previous gatherings have seen dueling demonstrations outside the Manhattan venue, with pro-Israel and pro-Palestinian groups both seeking to influence the international spotlight.
While warning about the demonstrations, CAM noted it recently launched a new mobile app, Report It, that allows users worldwide to quickly and securely report antisemitic incidents in real time.
RSS
Nina Davidson Presses Universities to Back Words With Action as Jewish Students Return to Campus Amid Antisemitism Crisis
Nina Davidson on The Algemeiner’s ‘J100’ podcast. Photo: Screenshot
Philanthropist Nina Davidson, who served on the board of Barnard College, has called on universities to pair tough rhetoric on combatting antisemitism with enforcement as Jewish students returned to campuses for the new academic year.
“Years ago, The Algemeiner had published a list ranking the most antisemitic colleges in the country. And number one was Columbia,” Davidson recalled on a recent episode of The Algemeiner‘s “J100” podcast. “As a board member and as someone who was representing the institution, it really upset me … At the board meeting, I brought it up and I said, ‘What are we going to do about this?’”
Host David Cohen, chief executive officer of The Algemeiner, explained he had revisited Davidson’s remarks while she was being honored for her work at The Algemeiner‘s 8th annual J100 gala, held in October 2021, noting their continued relevance.
“It could have been the same speech in 2025,” he said, underscoring how longstanding concerns about campus antisemitism, while having intensified in the aftermath of Hamas’s Oct. 7, 2023, massacre across southern Israel, are not new.
Davidson argued that universities already possess the tools to protect students – codes of conduct, time-place-manner rules, and consequences for threats or targeted harassment – but too often fail to apply them evenly. “Statements are not enough,” she said, arguing that institutions need to enforce their rules and set a precedent that there will be consequences for individuals who refuse to follow them.
She also said that stakeholders – alumni, parents, and donors – are reassessing their relationships with schools that, in their view, have not safeguarded Jewish students. While supportive of open debate, Davidson distinguished between protest and intimidation, calling for leadership that protects expression while ensuring campus safety.
The episode surveyed specific pressure points that administrators will face this fall: repeat anti-Israel encampments, disruptions of Jewish programming, and the challenge of distinguishing political speech from conduct that violates university rules. “Unless schools draw those lines now,” Davidson warned, “they’ll be scrambling once the next crisis hits.”
Cohen closed by framing the discussion as a test of institutional credibility, asking whether universities will “turn policy into protection” in real time. Davidson agreed, pointing to students who “need to know the rules aren’t just on paper.”
The full conversation is available on The Algemeiner’s “J100” podcast.
RSS
Israel’s Understanding of Time
Israeli flag. Photo: Eduardo Castro / Pixabay.
JNS.org – For Israel, it’s all about chronology. Time represents both the most critical determinant of Israel’s survival and the context within which such survival must be ensured. As with an individual human being, time is also the reciprocal of death. This vital relationship is currently most conspicuous regarding Hamas and Hezbollah, but it is most urgently meaningful regarding war with Iran.
For Israel, successful geopolitics will necessarily center on this impending war. Whether the expected conflict will be sudden or incremental, its consequences could prove existential. Of greatest significance for Israel will be avoiding a nuclear war. Inter alia, this objective will be contingent on Jerusalem’s “use of time.”
What can these ambiguous observations mean for Israel in operational terms? What might be learned about the estimable probabilities of an unmanageable war with Iran? Hezbollah’s fighting capacities are greater than those of all other jihadist terror organizations, singularly and cumulatively. These belligerent capacities present a strategic threat to Israel even apart from their Iranian backing.
A key question now arises for Israel: To what extent could a greater conceptual awareness of time generate calculable security advantages for the beleaguered Jewish state?
Though generally unrecognized, Hezbollah and Israel’s other principal terrorist adversaries define authentic victory from the bewildering standpoint of “power over death.” For all these recalcitrant foes, becoming a “martyr” (shahid) represents “power over time.” Accordingly, Jerusalem will need to think about how best to undermine such intangible but determinative notions of power.
In Jerusalem, “real-time” ought never to be interpreted solely in terms of clock measurements. But what would constitute a suitably personalized and policy-centered theory of time?
Whether explicit or implicit, Israeli security analyses should contain theory-based elements of chronology. Israel’s many-sided struggle against war and terror will need to be conducted with more intellectually determined and nuanced concepts of time. Though seemingly “impractical,” such “felt time” or “inner time” conceptualizations could sometimes reveal more about Israel’s core survival problem than any easily decipherable measurements of clocks.
The pertinent notion of “felt time” or “time-as-lived” has its origins in ancient Israel. By rejecting time as a simple linear progression, the early Hebrews approached chronology as a qualitative experience. Once it had been dismissed as something that could submit only to quantitative measures, time began to be understood by seminal Jewish thinkers as a distinctly subjective quality. This view identified time as inseparable from its personally infused content.
In terms of current threats from Iran, Israeli planners should consider chronology not only at the most obvious operational levels (e.g., how much “time” before Iran becomes nuclear?), but also at the level of individual Iranian decision-makers (e.g., what do authoritative leaders in Tehran think about time in shaping their nuclear plans vis-à-vis Israel?).
From its beginnings, the Jewish prophetic vision was one of a community living “in time.” In this formative view, political space or geography was palpably important, but not because of territoriality. Instead, the relevance of particular geographic spaces stemmed from certain unique events that had presumably taken place within their boundaries.
It’s time to return to expressly tactical and strategic issues. For Israel, security policy enhancements should include support for “escalation dominance.” When Israel and Iran are engaged in continuous direct warfare, each adversary can be expected to seek primacy during unprecedented episodes of escalation but to accomplish this objective without heightening the risks of an existential conflict. Among other things, any such expectation would require mutual assumptions of enemy rationality.
There will be multiple particulars. If it could be determined that Iran and/or Hezbollah accept a short time horizon in their search for tangible “victory” over Israel, any Israeli response to enemy aggressions would have to be “swift” in the traditional sense. If it would seem that the presumed enemy time horizon was calculably longer, Jerusalem’s expected response could still be more or less incremental. For Israel, this would mean relying more on the relatively passive dynamics of military deterrence and military defense than on any active strategies of nuclear war fighting.
In the final analysis, the worst case for Israel would be to face an irrational Iran. Moreover, this could happen simultaneously with the appearance of the Hezbollah suicide bomber in microcosm: the flesh-and-blood individual terrorist. Of special interest to Israel’s prime minister and general staff, therefore, should be the hidden time horizons of this jihadist suicide bomber. In essence, this self-defiling terror-criminal is so afraid of “not being” that any plan for “suicide” will be intended as personal death avoidance. Prima facie, such a plan is not “only” literal nonsense; it is also patent cowardice.
An aspiring suicide bomber opposing Israel sees himself or herself as a religious sacrificer. This signals a jihadist adversary’s desperate hope to escape from time that lacks any “sacred” meaning. The relevant jihadist adversary could be an individual Hezbollah terrorist, the sovereign state of Iran or both acting in tandem.
What should Israel do with all such informed understandings of its Islamist adversaries’ concept of time? Jerusalem’s immediate policy response should be to convince both aspiring Hezbollah suicide bombers and Iranian national leaders that their intended “sacrifices” could never elevate them or their societies above the immutably mortal limits of time. This will be an intellectual problem, not a political problem.
Israeli policy-makers will need to recognize certain dense problems of chronology as policy-relevant quandaries. They will also need to acknowledge to themselves that any plausible hopes for national security and “escalation dominance” should be informed by reason. In Jerusalem, all ordinary considerations of domestic politics and global geopolitics will need to be understood as both reflective and transient.
“As earthlings,” comments Hoosier author Kurt Vonnegut, “all have had to believe whatever clocks said.” As necessary fonts of national security decision-making, Israeli strategic thinkers now have it in their power to look beyond the simplifying hands of clocks and investigate more policy-purposeful meanings of time. For Jerusalem, exercising such latent intellectual power could offer a survival posture of potentially unimaginable value. In the final analysis, Israel must survive in a subjective time that is “felt” by its enemies while it is being measured by clocks.
The post Israel’s Understanding of Time first appeared on Algemeiner.com.
RSS
Syria’s Sharaa Says Talks With Israel Could Yield Results ‘In Coming Days’
Syrian President Ahmed al-Sharaa speaks at the opening ceremony of the 62nd Damascus International Fair, the first edition held since the fall of Bashar al-Assad’s regime, in Damascus, Syria, Aug. 27, 2025. Photo: REUTERS/Khalil Ashawi
Syria’s President Ahmed al-Sharaa said on Wednesday that ongoing negotiations with Israel to reach a security pact could lead to results “in the coming days.”
He told reporters in Damascus the security pact was a “necessity” and that it would need to respect Syria’s airspace and territorial unity and be monitored by the United Nations.
Syria and Israel are in talks to reach an agreement that Damascus hopes will secure a halt to Israeli airstrikes and the withdrawal of Israeli troops who have pushed into southern Syria.
Reuters reported this week that Washington was pressuring Syria to reach a deal before world leaders gather next week for the UN General Assembly in New York.
But Sharaa, in a briefing with journalists including Reuters ahead of his expected trip to New York to attend the meeting, denied the US was putting any pressure on Syria and said instead that it was playing a mediating role.
He said Israel had carried out more than 1,000 strikes on Syria and conducted more than 400 ground incursions since Dec. 8, when the rebel offensive he led toppled former Syrian leader Bashar al-Assad.
Sharaa said Israel’s actions were contradicting the stated American policy of a stable and unified Syria, which he said was “very dangerous.”
He said Damascus was seeking a deal similar to a 1974 disengagement agreement between Israel and Syria that created a demilitarized zone between the two countries.
He said Syria sought the withdrawal of Israeli troops but that Israel wanted to remain at strategic locations it seized after Dec. 8, including Mount Hermon. Israeli ministers have publicly said Israel intends to keep control of the sites.
He said if the security pact succeeds, other agreements could be reached. He did not provide details, but said a peace agreement or normalization deal like the US-mediated Abraham Accords, under which several Muslim-majority countries agreed to normalize diplomatic ties with Israel, was not currently on the table.
He also said it was too early to discuss the fate of the Golan Heights because it was “a big deal.”
Reuters reported this week that Israel had ruled out handing back the zone, which Donald Trump unilaterally recognized as Israeli during his first term as US president.
“It’s a difficult case – you have negotiations between a Damascene and a Jew,” Sharaa told reporters, smiling.
SECURITY PACT DERAILED IN JULY
Sharaa also said Syria and Israel had been just “four to five days” away from reaching the basis of a security pact in July, but that developments in the southern province of Sweida had derailed those discussions.
Syrian troops were deployed to Sweida in July to quell fighting between Druze armed factions and Bedouin fighters. But the violence worsened, with Syrian forces accused of execution-style killings and Israel striking southern Syria, the defense ministry in Damascus and near the presidential palace.
Sharaa on Wednesday described the strikes near the presidential palace as “not a message, but a declaration of war,” and said Syria had still refrained from responding militarily to preserve the negotiations.
RSS
Anti-Israel Activists Gear Up to ‘Flood’ UN General Assembly
US Capitol Police and NYPD officers clash with anti-Israel demonstrators, on the day Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu addresses a joint meeting of Congress, on Capitol Hill, in Washington, DC, July 24, 2024. Photo: REUTERS/Umit Bektas
Anti-Israel groups are planning a wave of raucous protests in New York City during the United Nations General Assembly (UNGA) over the next several days, prompting concerns that the demonstrations could descend into antisemitic rhetoric and intimidation.
A coalition of anti-Israel activists is organizing the protests in and around UN headquarters to coincide with speeches from Middle Eastern leaders and appearances by US President Donald Trump and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. The demonstrations are expected to draw large crowds and feature prominent pro-Palestinian voices, some of whom have been criticized for trafficking in antisemitic tropes, in addition to calling for the destruction of Israe.
Organizers of the demonstrations have promoted the coordinated events on social media as an opportunity to pressure world leaders to hold Israel accountable for its military campaign against Hamas in Gaza, with some messaging framed in sharply hostile terms.
On Sunday, for example, activists shouted at Israel’s Ambassador to the UN Danny Danon.
“Zionism is terrorism. All you guys are terrorists committing ethnic cleansing and genocide in Gaza and Palestine. Shame on you, Zionist animals,” they shouted.
BREAKING: PRO-PALESTINE PROTESTORS CONFRONT “ISRAELI” AMBASSADOR DANNY DANON AT THE UNITED NATIONS
1/5 pic.twitter.com/4G1VYEMGzV
— Within Our Lifetime (@WOLPalestine) September 14, 2025
The Combat Antisemitism Movement (CAM), warned on its website that the scale and tone of the planned demonstrations risk crossing the line from political protest into hate speech, arguing that anti-Israel activists are attempting to hijack the UN gathering to spread antisemitism and delegitimize the Jewish state’s right to exist.
Outside the UN last week, masked protesters belonging to the activist group INDECLINE kicked a realistic replica of Netanyahu’s decapitated head as though it were a soccer ball.
US activist group plays soccer with Bibi’s mock decapitated HEAD right outside NYC UN HQ
Peep shot at 00:40
Footage posted by INDECLINE collective just as UN General Assembly about to kick off
‘Following the game, ball was donated to Palestinian Genocide Museum’ pic.twitter.com/TQ84sgZhKr
— RT (@RT_com) September 9, 2025
Within Our Lifetime (WOL), a radical anti-Israel activist group, has vowed to “flood” the UNGA on behalf of the pro-Palestine movement.
WOL, one of the most prolific anti-Israel activist groups, came under immense fire after it organized a protest against an exhibition to honor the victims of the Oct. 7 massacre at the Nova Music Festival in southern Israel. During the event, the group chanted “resistance is justified when people are occupied!” and “Israel, go to hell!”
“We will be there to confront them with the truth: Their silence and inaction enable genocide. The world cannot continue as if Gaza does not exist,” WOL said of its planned demonstrations in New York. “This is the time to make our voices impossible to ignore. Come to New York by any means necessary, to stand, to march, to demand the UN act and end the siege.”
Jewish Voice for Peace (JVP) and Palestinian Youth Movement (PYM), two other anti-Israel organizations that have helped organize widespread demonstrations against the Jewish state during the war in Gaza, also announced they are planning a march from Times Square to the UN headquarters on Friday.
“The time is now for each and every UN member state to uphold their duty under international law: sanction Israel and end the genocide,” the groups said in a statement.
JVP, an organization that purports to fight for “Palestinian liberation,” has positioned itself as a staunch adversary of the Jewish state. The group argued in a 2021 booklet that Jews should not write Hebrew liturgy because hearing the language would be “deeply traumatizing” to Palestinians. JVP has repeatedly defended the Oct. 7 massacre of roughly 1,200 people in southern Israel by Hamas as a justified “resistance.” Chapters of the organization have urged other self-described “progressives” to throw their support behind Hamas and other terrorist groups against Israel
Similarly, PYM, another radical anti-Israel group, has repeatedly defended terrorism and violence against the Jewish state. PYM has organized many anti-Israel protests in the two years following the Oct. 7 attacks in the Jewish state. Recently, Sen. Tom Cotton (R-AK) called for a federal investigation into the organization after Aisha Nizar, one of the group’s leaders, urged supporters to sabotage the US supply chain for the F-35 fighter jet, one of the most advanced US military assets and a critical component of Israel’s defense.
The UN General Assembly has historically been a flashpoint for heated debate over the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Previous gatherings have seen dueling demonstrations outside the Manhattan venue, with pro-Israel and pro-Palestinian groups both seeking to influence the international spotlight.
While warning about the demonstrations, CAM noted it recently launched a new mobile app, Report It, that allows users worldwide to quickly and securely report antisemitic incidents in real time.
RSS
Nina Davidson Presses Universities to Back Words With Action as Jewish Students Return to Campus Amid Antisemitism Crisis
Nina Davidson on The Algemeiner’s ‘J100’ podcast. Photo: Screenshot
Philanthropist Nina Davidson, who served on the board of Barnard College, has called on universities to pair tough rhetoric on combatting antisemitism with enforcement as Jewish students returned to campuses for the new academic year.
“Years ago, The Algemeiner had published a list ranking the most antisemitic colleges in the country. And number one was Columbia,” Davidson recalled on a recent episode of The Algemeiner‘s “J100” podcast. “As a board member and as someone who was representing the institution, it really upset me … At the board meeting, I brought it up and I said, ‘What are we going to do about this?’”
Host David Cohen, chief executive officer of The Algemeiner, explained he had revisited Davidson’s remarks while she was being honored for her work at The Algemeiner‘s 8th annual J100 gala, held in October 2021, noting their continued relevance.
“It could have been the same speech in 2025,” he said, underscoring how longstanding concerns about campus antisemitism, while having intensified in the aftermath of Hamas’s Oct. 7, 2023, massacre across southern Israel, are not new.
Davidson argued that universities already possess the tools to protect students – codes of conduct, time-place-manner rules, and consequences for threats or targeted harassment – but too often fail to apply them evenly. “Statements are not enough,” she said, arguing that institutions need to enforce their rules and set a precedent that there will be consequences for individuals who refuse to follow them.
She also said that stakeholders – alumni, parents, and donors – are reassessing their relationships with schools that, in their view, have not safeguarded Jewish students. While supportive of open debate, Davidson distinguished between protest and intimidation, calling for leadership that protects expression while ensuring campus safety.
The episode surveyed specific pressure points that administrators will face this fall: repeat anti-Israel encampments, disruptions of Jewish programming, and the challenge of distinguishing political speech from conduct that violates university rules. “Unless schools draw those lines now,” Davidson warned, “they’ll be scrambling once the next crisis hits.”
Cohen closed by framing the discussion as a test of institutional credibility, asking whether universities will “turn policy into protection” in real time. Davidson agreed, pointing to students who “need to know the rules aren’t just on paper.”
The full conversation is available on The Algemeiner’s “J100” podcast.