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Jordan Reaffirms Commitment to Peace With Israel After Iran Attack, Says Ending Treaty Would Hurt Palestinians

Jordan’s Foreign Minister Ayman Al Safadi attends a press conference after a meeting on the Gaza situation in the government’s representation facility in Oslo, Norway, Dec. 15, 2023. Photo: NTB/Stian Lysberg Solum via REUTERS

Senior Jordanian officials recently reaffirmed the country’s commitment to maintaining peace with Israel, despite protests erupting across Jordan against their treaty amid the ongoing war in Gaza.

Pro-Hamas protesters have been actively campaigning to end the Israel-Jordan peace treaty, which the two countries signed in 1994 to end the state of war that had existed between them for decades and establish diplomatic relations. The treaty followed the signing of the Oslo Accords, a historic agreement between Israel and the Palestinians.

However, Jordanian Foreign Minister Ayman Al-Safadi said on Sunday that the peace deal was best for not only his country but also the Palestinians.

“The treaty actualized all our rights and served our interests. Revoking it would not be in Jordan’s or the Palestinians’ interest,” Al-Safadi told Jordan’s official news channel Al-Mamlaka in remarks flagged by the Middle East Media Research Institute (MEMRI). “If we thought even for a moment that revoking it would be in the interest of Jordan or of the Palestinians, we would have done so without hesitation.”

Revoking the peace treaty, he continued, would “harm both Jordan and Palestine and greatly limit our ability to continue fulfilling our main and primary role in providing aid to the Palestinian people … The peace treaty is a source of strength for us and allows us to continue our role of aiding the Palestinian people while protecting our interests.”

Al-Safadi’s comments came one day after Jordan — along with the US, Britain, and France — helped Israel repel an unprecedented direct attack by Iran against the Israeli homeland. Iran fired over 300 drones and missiles at the Jewish state, nearly all of which were shot out of the air. Only one injury was reported in Israel.

The chief diplomat’s defense of the peace treaty also came amid the ongoing Israel-Hamas war in Gaza, which has fueled anti-Israel animus across Jordan. Thousands of protesters have been routinely gathering for weeks to lambast Israel, express solidarity with Hamas, and call for an end to the peace treaty. Al-Safadi addressed such opposition in his comments.

“We respect Jordanian public opinion,” he said. “Back in 1994, when [the treaty] was signed, it protected our interests. We regained all our occupied lands, and the treaty enshrined Jordan’s special role in administrating the places holy to Islam and to Christianity in Jerusalem. Were it not for this role, there would have been a vacuum, and Israel would have exploited this to impose its own sovereignty and administration on the holy places rather than granting them to the Palestinians.”

Al-Safadi wasn’t the only official to recently articulate Jordan’s commitment to the peace treaty amid calls to revoke it and mass anti-Israel protests over the Gaza war.

Jordan’s government spokesman, Muhannad Mubaidin, told Sky News Arabia late last month that Hamas was inciting the Jordanian people against their leadership. The Palestinian terrorist group and its supporters in Jordan, he said, were trying “to force Jordan to choose different options,” but “peace is our strategic choice and the peace treaty [with Israel] is what allows us to fulfill our role of easing the pressures on the people in the West Bank.”

MEMRI was first to report Mubaidin’s comments in English.

The post Jordan Reaffirms Commitment to Peace With Israel After Iran Attack, Says Ending Treaty Would Hurt Palestinians first appeared on Algemeiner.com.

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Gal Gadot’s Hollywood Star Vandalized as Police Arrest Anti-Israel Protesters at Her London Film Set

Gal Gadot at the 82nd Annual Golden Globe Awards at the Beverly Hilton Hotel in Beverly Hills, California on Sunday, Jan. 5, 2025. Photo: Dan MacMedan-USA TODAY via Reuters Connect

Gal Gadot’s star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame in Los Angeles, California, has been defaced with antisemitic graffiti the same week that London’s Metropolitan Police arrested five anti-Israel protesters trying to disrupt the filming of her new movie in central London.

Metropolitan Police said five people were arrested at a location in Westminster on Wednesday for targeting Gadot’s film set “solely because an actress involved in the production is Israeli.” Protesters have disrupted the filming of Gadot’s latest project in various locations across London in recent weeks, police added. The Israeli actress and mother of four is believed to currently be filming action thriller “The Runner.”

“The five people were arrested for harassment and offenses under Section 241 of the Trade Union and Labors Relations Act, which deals with wrongfully and unlawfully obstructing access to a workplace,” authorities said on Wednesday. Two of the arrests were related to incidents at previous protests while three arrests were connected to disruptions that took place on Wednesday. The arrested individuals remain in custody.

“While we absolutely acknowledge the importance of peaceful protest, we have a duty to intervene where it crosses the line into serious disruption or criminality,” said Superintendent Neil Holyoak. “We have been in discussions with the production company to understand the impact of the protests on their work and on any individuals involved. I hope today’s operation shows we will not tolerate the harassment of or unlawful interference with those trying to go about their legitimate professional work in London.”

The 40-year-old actress has expressed support for Israel amid the country’s ongoing war against Hamas terrorists who orchestrated the deadly attacks across southern Israel on Oct. 7, 2023. The native of Petah Tikva, in central Israel, has also called for the release of the hostages abducted by the US-designated terrorist organization during the Oct. 7 onslaught.

At a film set last week in London, Gadot, 40, was escorted away from the location as anti-Israel protesters waved flags and yelled “Stop bombing Palestine,” according to the Daily Mail.

Gadot stars in “The Runner” as a high-powered attorney who runs around London, following cryptic order of a mystery caller, while trying to save her abducted son, according to IMDb. The film, from Amazon MGM Studios, is directed by Kevin Macdonald with a script by Mark Gibson.

Anti-Israel protesters also tried to disrupt Gadot’s Hollywood Walk of Fame ceremony in March, when she became the first Israeli to be given a coveted star administered by the Hollywood Chamber of Commerce. Photos shared this week on social media showed that Gadot’s star was vandalized with “Baby Killer” written in black ink. Vandals also crossed out Gadot’s last name and replaced it with “Greestien” – a reference to her father’s former surname Greenstein – and attached a sticker that falsely claimed Israeli snipers “target children.” The graffiti was removed last night by two Israelis, according to a post shared on X.

During an interview for the March 2025 issue of Spanish Harper’s Bazaar, Gadot said she longs for the Israel-Hamas war to end with a “diplomatic agreement that allows all parts of the table to live a good and prosperous life.”

The post Gal Gadot’s Hollywood Star Vandalized as Police Arrest Anti-Israel Protesters at Her London Film Set first appeared on Algemeiner.com.

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Northwestern University Still Teems With Antisemitism, Parents and Students Say

Pro-Hamas protesters at the Deering Meadow section of Northwestern University’s campus in Evanston, Illinois, United States, on April 25, 2024. Photo: Kyle Mazza/NurPhoto via Reuters Connect.

Antisemitism remains palpable and severe at Northwestern University over one year after President Michael Schill signed the “Deering Meadow Agreement” which granted pro-Hamas demonstrators a windfall of concessions they had demanded in exchange for ending an unauthorized encampment, parents and students told The Algemeiner in a series of interviews.

The 2023-2024 academic year was unlike any seen in the history of American higher education since the 1960s. Following the Hamas-led Oct. 7, 2023, massacre across southern Israel, colleges across the US erupted with effusions of antisemitic activity, which included calling for the destruction of Israel, cheering Hamas’s sexual assaulting of women as an instrument of war, and several incidents of assault and harassment targeting Jews on campus.

This held true at Northwestern University, where the Jewish experience was remade by the forces of anti-Zionism and the administrators who allegedly yielded to it. On April 25, 2024, the Northwestern Divestment Coalition (NDC) — a group of pro-Hamas activists linked to National Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP) — commandeered the Deering Meadow section of campus and established what they called the “Northwester Liberated Zone.” For five days, over 1,000 students, professors, and non-Northwestern-affiliated persons fulminated against the world’s lone Jewish state.

The encampment dwellers argued that Israel is committing a genocide of Palestinians in Gaza as retaliation for the Oct. 7 attacks while questioning the severity of Hamas’s atrocities — or denying them altogether. Northwestern University, they added, is complicit for holding investments in armaments and aerospace manufacturers which do business with Israel, a fact which they said necessitated that the school “boycott” and “divest” from the Jewish state.

“There were signs everywhere,” Lisa Fields, who was on campus at the time and founded the Coalition Against Antisemitism at Northwestern (CAAN), told The Algemeiner. Fields is the parent of a Northwestern student whose emotional phone call during the middle of the demonstration prompted her to fly from her home in New York City to the university’s campus in Evanston, Illinois. What she saw there disturbed her.

“There was a Hitler sign and another depicting Schill with horns, just to mention some of the antisemitic tropes on display there,” Fields recounted. “The protesters were loud, aggressive, and banging on things. It was impossible to walk through the campus. None of the student attending class could focus because you could hear everything inside the classrooms.”

Northwestern University police attempted to uproot the protesters, who had pitched tents on the Deering Meadow, after Schill placed an “interim addendum” in the code of conduct which proscribed setting up the temporary shelters on school property. They were unsuccessful, however, as the protesters, faculty included, formed a “human blockade” to block their advance into the space. An impasse followed for the next four days in which NDC raised $12,000 and students staged “artistic performances,” delivered speeches, and appealed to the public for more money and support.

Meanwhile, Schill and a group of NDC delegates were busy hammering out a settlement which would end the demonstration and restore a semblance of normalcy to campus. By the morning of April 29, they reached what would infamously be remembered as the “Deering Meadow Agreement” — a first of its kind accord which became a model for 42 other schools who emulated it. It committed Northwestern University to establishing a scholarship for Palestinian undergraduates, contacting potential employers of students who caused recent campus disruptions to insist on their being hired, hiring two Palestinian professors, and creating a segregated dormitory hall to be occupied exclusively by Middle Eastern and North African (MENA) and Muslim students. The university — after days of hearing the activists shout phrases such as “Kill the Jews!” — also agreed to form a new investment committee in which anti-Zionists students and faculty wield an outsized voice.

Not a year later, Northwestern claimed to have turned a corner. On March 31, amid US President Donald Trump’s confiscations of federal funds from higher education institutions deemed soft on antisemitism or excessively “woke,” the university issued a progress report containing a checklist of policies it said were enacted in response to Schill being upbraided by members of Congress over his handling of the Deering Meadow crisis.

Among other things, the university said that it had adopted the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA) definition of antisemitism, a reference tool which aids officials in determining what constitutes antisemitism, and began holding “mandatory antisemitism training” sessions which “all students, faculty, and staff” must attend. The so-called progress report’s most controversial assertion boasted that antisemitic incidents on the campus have fallen by 88 percent.

Geri Cohen, another Northwestern parent and member of CAAN, had heard it all before in a meeting with Schill that was held during move-in weekend 2024, the first time Cohen would drop off her daughter, who was then an incoming freshmen, at the university. During the meeting, she and other parents, many of whom are also CAAN members, were regaled with speeches proclaiming Northwestern’s regard for its Jewish community and its foolproof plans to prevent another surge of pro-Hamas activity.

According to Cohen, however, Schill was most comfortable engaging with parents when they refrained from asking tough questions. Cohen did not, and her inquiries perturbed him, as they proceeded from the premise that the Deering Meadow Agreement canceled out any policies the university might enact to plausibly claim that it is combating antisemitism.

“He is a profound legal mind, so he knew exactly what I was asking, and he was defensive about the line of questioning,” Cohen told The Algemeiner. “He just pointed to the mandatory antisemitism training, offering a veneer of a reasonable explanation which fell short of saying anything real. I pushed him a little bit, asking follow up questions when he insisted that there is no issue, but he deftly avoided being cornered.”

Schill’s equivocations, Cohen said, primed her for news that was revealed earlier this month by the Washington Free Beacon. Per the Deering Meadow Agreement, Northwestern University hired at least one Palestinian professor, Mkhaimar Abusada — but, as reported by the Free Beacon, Abusada holds ties to both Hamas and the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP) through his memberships in two groups which cooperate with the US-designated terrorist organizations and award their fighters leadership positions.

“At the end of the day, we all knew that they made the deal and that they were hiring these professors,” Cohen said, commenting on the report. “I’m not surprised whatsoever about who they hire, what they believe, who funds them, what other organizations to which they are linked — all of that was already in my head when I decided to let my daughter make her own decision about where she was going to go in this world.”

Fields concurred.

“The problems at Northwestern are deep. Deep and institutional,” she said. “And what makes it so interesting a case study in campus antisemitism is that it isn’t a calm campus like Vanderbilt, but it also did not see the fires which raged at Columbia, Harvard, and UCLA. But what happened there was unique and worse because of the precedent that was set and the lesson Northwestern taught the community when it decided to surrender to the radical people who took over the Deering Meadow everything they wanted. And Schill would do it again. He is proud of that deal.”

Northwestern University students also tell a story that is at odds with what the institution believes about itself.

“The university has done a great job covering up the actions of its students, and that is my perspective as a Christian and a student leader. I personally have not seen a reduction in antisemitic incidents,” pre-law student Jeanine Yuen told The Algemeiner. “One example I can think of is a Jewish student who was punished for peacefully counter-protesting a pro-Palestinian walkout and picket on the anniversary of Oct. 7. The university said he violated time and place policies, but none of the pro-Palestinian protesters who did so too were punished, and the university blamed the inconsistency on its being unable to identify the protesters, who were masked.”

Additionally, according to a new Spring Campus Poll conducted by The Daily Northwestern, the school’s official campus newspaper, 58 percent of Jewish students reported being subjected to antisemitism or knowing someone who has. An even higher 63.1 percent said antisemitism remains a “somewhat or very serious problem.” Only weeks earlier, during the Jewish holiday of Passover, someone graffitied Kregse Hall and University Hall with hateful speech calling for “Death to Israel” and an “Intifada,” alluding to two prolonged periods of Palestinian terrorism during which hundreds of Israeli Jews were murdered. The vandals also spray-painted an inverted triangle, a symbol used to express support for the terrorist group Hamas and its atrocities.

In April, the Trump administration expressed its skepticism of a quick turnaround at Northwestern by impounding $790 million of its federal funds. As of the publication of this article, they have not been given back.

“We have received 98 stop-word orders, mostly for Department of Defense-funded research projects, in addition to 51 grant terminations that were mostly received prior to the news of the funding freeze. In addition, we have not received payments for National Institutes of Health grants since March. These now appear to be frozen,” Schill said in a May 1 statement addressing the government’s funding cuts. “This is deeply troubling, and we are working in many ways to advocate on behalf of the university and to resolve the situation.”

Northwestern University did not respond to a request for comment for this story.

Follow Dion J. Pierre @DionJPierre.

The post Northwestern University Still Teems With Antisemitism, Parents and Students Say first appeared on Algemeiner.com.

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Netanyahu Says Israel Accepts Witkoff’s New Gaza Truce Proposal: Israeli Media

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu speaks during a press conference, in Jerusalem, May 21, 2025. Photo: REUTERS/Ronen Zvulun/Pool

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has told families of hostages held in Gaza that Israel has accepted a new ceasefire proposal presented by US President Donald Trump’s Middle East envoy Steve Witkoff, Israeli media reported on Thursday.

Palestinian terrorist group Hamas said earlier that it had received the new proposal from mediators and was studying it.

The post Netanyahu Says Israel Accepts Witkoff’s New Gaza Truce Proposal: Israeli Media first appeared on Algemeiner.com.

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