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Netanyahu ally wants to stop Diaspora donors from funding pluralistic education in Israeli schools
(JTA) — In 2019, Israel’s Noam party drafted an internal report about an alleged plot by foreign forces to take control of the country’s schools in order to teach pluralistic values. At the time the party’s far-right leader, Avi Maoz, was a fringe politician with no authority to carry out the “cleansing” of which he dreamed.
Among the forces allegedly seeking to corrupt Israeli children, Maoz’s report named the European Union and the liberal New Israel Fund, both of which are longtime nemeses of the Israeli right.
But the plot to deny children what Noam considers a proper Jewish education doesn’t stop with the EU and NIF, according to the report. It also blamed many of the mainstream institutions of British and American Jewry, including the Reform movement’s Hebrew Union College, the Shalom Hartman Institute think tank, and U.S. donors to Israeli civil society organizations such as the Slifka and Mandel foundations.
“We must protect our people and our state from the infiltration of the alien bodies that arrive from foreign countries, foreign bodies, foreign foundations,” Maoz once said, according to Haaretz. “I would be very happy to have sufficient power to be appointed minister of education, to cleanse the entire education system of all foreign influences and to add Judaism, tradition, heritage and Zionism to the education system.”
Maoz hasn’t been appointed minister of education, but his dream of banishing these groups came a little closer to reality in December when Benjamin Netanyahu cut a deal with Maoz to form his government. In negotiations, Maoz had secured an appointment as a deputy minister in the Prime Minister’s Office under Netanyahu with control over extracurricular content in schools through a new department called the Jewish National Identity Authority. A few weeks later, Netanyahu’s cabinet took a critical step toward putting Maoz in charge.
Amid headlines about Maoz’s ascendance, someone leaked to the Israeli newspaper Yedioth Ahronoth the Noam party’s 2019 education memo along with other internal reports focused on perceived enemies in the Israeli military and Justice Ministry, and on LGBTQ individuals in general.
While the Israeli press referred to the reports as “blacklists,” the backlash to them has become subsumed in the general outcry over Israel’s new far-right government, including the anti-gay politics popular among many new members and the plan to strip Israel’s judicial branch of some of its powers.
Yet it’s in the area of education that the Noam party has the clearest path forward to accomplishing a specific political goal. And success for Noam could lead to a new type of rift between Israel and American Jews. The organizations he attacks are more than charities for Israeli school children — through their billions of dollars in donations, the institutions of American Jewry made themselves into partners in the very founding and development of the Jewish state.
In his new position, he would oversee funding and accreditation for external programs in Israeli schools. Each school can choose from thousands of approved programs, which range from sexual education and bar mitzvah preparation, to the types of pluralistic lesson plans — often meaning alternatives to the strictly religious or strictly secular options offered in Israeli schools — that Maoz has railed against.
For Yehuda Kurtzer, the president of the Shalom Hartman Institute of North America, whose Israeli branch was named in the Naom report, Maoz’s rhetoric betrays ignorance about the integral role of outside contributions in Israeli history.
“It’s not clear to me that these folks understand the depth of how Diaspora Jews have invested in the whole infrastructure of Israeli civil society since the founding of the State of Israel,” Kurtzer said. “So the portrayal of this as somehow Diaspora Jews are burrowing under the system — well, that is basically the whole story of how Zionism succeeded.”
Mark Charendoff, a longtime executive in Jewish philanthropy, also pushed back against Noam.
“There is a long and positive history of Diaspora Jewry’s involvement with education in Israel,” said Charendoff , who currently serves as the president of the Maimonides Fund, an increasingly influential New York-based charity. “The Israeli school system should certainly protect its integrity but even [the medieval sage] Maimonides found wisdom he could learn from among other cultures and used it to enrich our own.”
The Noam party memos, at least one of which Maoz has endorsed as a blueprint for his tenure, were obtained by Israeli journalist Nadav Eyal, and recently shared with the Jewish Telegraphic Agency. Here are the American Jewish charities named in the memo and which of their programs were targeted:
The Cleveland-based Mandel Foundation is singled out for the leadership training it offers education professionals. The report says Mandel has spent more than $58 million on this effort and is accused of harboring a liberal agenda. Mandel programs have included training for educators from across the denominational spectrum.
The Abraham Initiatives, which is based in the United States, the United Kingdom and Israel and promotes equal rights for Israel’s Jewish and Arab citizens, is described as a Jewish-Arab left-wing group. The report also singles out the programs, schools and teacher trainings aimed at supporting reconciliation and coexistence between Jews and Arabs.
The Shalom Hartman Institute, with offices in Jerusalem and New York City, earns a mention in the memo thanks to its Be’eri Program for Pluralistic Jewish-Israeli Identity, which is dedicated to enhancing Jewish and democratic values among secondary school educators and their students in Israel.
American Judaism’s Conservative movement is implicated through the Schechter Institutes which it sponsors and the affiliated Tali Education Fund. Dozens of schools throughout Israel receive curriculum materials related to pluralistic Jewish culture and heritage from Tali.
The U.S.-based Reform movement makes the list thanks to the training offered to Jewish education teachers as part of a program run jointly by the Reform-affiliated Hebrew Union College and Hebrew University.
The New York City-based Alan B. Slifka Foundation is named in the memo as a supporter of the Abraham Initiatives and the Shalom Hartman Institute.
The Russell Berrie Foundation, which is headquartered in Teaneck, New Jersey, is included because of its contributions to the New Israel Fund and the Shalom Hartman Institute.
With offices in Israel and Silicon Valley, Israel Venture Network makes the list over its support for an independent program that trains all administrators in the Israeli school system.
Headquartered in New York City, the New Israel Fund is described as one of the main organs in the alleged conspiracy. “The New Israel Fund and funds affiliated with it have set out to take control of the education system,” read the first line of the report.
The organizations are named as “examples” in the memo, suggesting that the list is not exhaustive. Guilt by association with any of these groups would implicate a wide swath of American Jewry. IVN, or Israel Venture Network, for example, receives funding from the Jewish federations of multiple American cities and the Weinberg Foundation. The Abraham Initiatives lists numerous mainstream Jewish donors including the Klarman Family Foundation and late Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg.
Kurtzer said the leaked memos didn’t come as much of a shock to him. Any organization that is “pro-democracy, pro-pluralism, and believes in strong relationships between Israel and the diaspora” is familiar with being targeted in this way, he said.
“Some of the elements of the far right have built a whole industry on classifying anybody who has commitments to any of these values and branding them as anti-democratic and anti-Jewish, anti-Zionist,” Kurtzer said. “It hasn’t really stopped our work in Israel, though, sometimes it makes it unpleasant and uncomfortable to have to fend off some of these accusations.”
One of the largest donors to Shalom Hartman Institute goes unmentioned in Noam’s report: the Claws Foundation, which has given the institute millions of dollars. It would be hard to condemn this particular foundation as a liberal interloper: Claws is run by Jeff Yass and Arthur Dantchik, a pair of American Wall Street billionaires and prominent libertarians who are reviled by the Israeli left. In 2021, Haaretz revealed that Yass and Dantchik are major donors to the Kohelet Policy Forum, an influential Israeli think tank behind many of the recent landmark initiatives of the right.
Maoz’s politics also fit awkwardly with those of his own political predecessors, said Eitan Cooper, executive vice president of the Schechter Institutes of Jewish Studies. Cooper helps run one of the programs targeted by Maoz, the Tali Education Fund, which provides a non-Orthodox Jewish curriculum to about 80 secular Israeli schools.
Cooper recalled how the Tali program got started in the 1980s with the help of Zevulun Hammer, who served as Israel’s education minister for many years while helping lead the National Religious Party. Noam is one of the offshoots to have emerged after the National Religious Party’s dissolution in 2008.
“Hammer was the one who adopted Tali as education minister,” Cooper said. “He thought it was great and in fact, he gave Tali its name.”
But Cooper also said that there had always been fringe members of Hammer’s circle who looked at Tali with skepticism because of its non-Orthodox orientation. Some even alleged that the program was run by covert Christian missionaries.
Prior experience has steeled Cooper for this moment, and he said he’s not particularly concerned that Maoz’s threats will pan out.
“This kind of negative response to what we do has always existed,” Cooper said. “The educational ministry continues on, it sets the criteria for the programs that are accepted. I really don’t know what he is positioned to do. He hasn’t done anything yet.”
He believes that the demand for Tali’s content ensures the program will carry on.
“Our target audience is still out there,” he said.
Nachum Blass, who chairs the education policy program at the Taub Center for Social Policy Studies in Israel, regards it as inevitable that Maoz will secure authority over external programs at schools. And Blass said that Maoz could proceed to cancel programs he didn’t like or block new programs.
“There are thousands of programs,” Blass said. “If Maoz wants to review every program and decide which to cancel, it’s a very long process, and he will face lawsuits and petition to the Supreme Court.”
But the bigger worry for Blass is the chilling effect of Maoz’s rhetoric.
“The real danger,” he said, “is that schools will censor themselves and not pick certain programs because they worry they doesn’t fit the spirit of the times.”
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The post Netanyahu ally wants to stop Diaspora donors from funding pluralistic education in Israeli schools appeared first on Jewish Telegraphic Agency.
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New Jewish-Arab political party debuts in Israel, aiming to topple Netanyahu
A newly established Jewish-Arab political party debuted Tuesday and is joining the crowded field vying to take down Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s ruling coalition in Israel’s next election, slated for October.
Makom Lekulanu, which translates to A Place for Us All, ( is led by Rula Daood and Alon-Lee Green, co-founders of the Israeli-Palestinian coexistence organizing group. Other Standing Together leaders will also join the party, including Haifa City Council member Sally Abed; Ghadir Hani, a Palestinian peace and women’s rights activist; Itamar Avneri, a Tel Aviv-Jaffa city council member; and Yonatan Zeigen, whose mother, well-known peace activist Vivian Silver, was killed by Hamas on Oct. 7, 2023, in her home at Kibbutz Be’eri.
According to Daood and others who spoke at a press conference in Nazareth publicly launching the new party, Makom Lekulanu’s platform will focus on many of the same issues that Standing Together has organized around for years: peace, social justice, soaring violence and crime in Arab communities, the cost of living and climate justice.
Party leaders say they are running not only to oppose Netanyahu and his coalition, which currently includes far-right extremists National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir and Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich, but to offer a fundamentally different vision.
“We are doing this because this is the last moment to save our society,” Daood told the modest crowd, many of whom were clad in the telltale purple that has become synonymous with Standing Together. “We are being abandoned, murdered; our future is going up in flames. And I know that in order to repair things, it is not enough to say only what we oppose. We also have to say what we support.”
“So today I am saying: no to Netanyahu, to Ben-Gvir, to Smotrich,” she continued, to enthusiastic applause. “But I am also saying yes. Yes to Israeli-Palestinian peace, yes to national and civil equality, yes to social justice.”The press conference took place at the scenic Rose Cafe in Nazareth, a choice that underscored the message its founders are trying to send. This is not, they insisted, a Jewish party with token Palestinian representation or an Arab party with a couple of Jewish allies, but what Daood called “a truly shared party, one of genuine partnership between Jews and Arabs.”
According to Abed, this means tearing down the arbitrary dividers that have been built around Jewish and Arab leadership.
“I have always been told, ‘You will be responsible for Arab society, and we will be responsible for Jewish society,’” she said. “But I want to lead and take responsibility for all of society, together with my Jewish partners.”
“That’s what A Place for Us All will be: taking responsibility for all of society, together, on the path to ending the occupation, to peace and to real equality.”
A decade organizing
The party grew directly out of Standing Together, the Jewish-Arab grassroots movement founded in 2015. Since the Oct. 7 attack, and the ensuing wars in Gaza, Lebanon and Iran, Standing Together has become one of Israel’s most visible anti-war and anti-occupation organizations, growing its membership more than tenfold and emerging as a prominent voice on the international stage as well.
Inside Israel, the movement has organized ceasefire protests and rallies calling for a hostage deal, protected aid convoys headed for Gaza from right-wing attacks, raised funds for bomb shelters in Bedouin communities and provided protective presence for Palestinians facing settler violence in the West Bank.
For Zeigen, the decision to join the slate is rooted in personal loss as well as political conviction.
“For years, I worked with people battling poverty, marginalization and trauma — the overwhelming majority of them as a result of institutional abandonment,” he said at the press conference. “On Oct. 7, I experienced that abandonment firsthand. My mother, Vivian Silver, did not survive the massacre at her kibbutz.”
“Out of the devastation of losing her, I made a decision,” he continued. “I left my job as a social worker, and since then I have dedicated my life to one thing: Israeli-Palestinian peace.”
Zeigen described his grief now intermingling with another emotion: fear for the future his children will inherit.
“That is why I insist on turning despair into action,” he said. “Because I refuse to accept bereavement as fate — not for Jews and not for Arabs, not for Israelis and not for Palestinians.”
The new party’s leaders have been careful to stress that Standing Together is a separate entity from A Place for Us All. In a joint statement issued ahead of the launch, Daood and Green said the movement would remain active and independent, with a “full and substantive separation — organizational, legal, financial and political” between Standing Together and A Place for Us All. Both Daood and Green said they will take unpaid leave from their leadership roles in the movement in order to run.
Daood said the move into electoral politics is a natural progression of what she and Green have helped create over the last decade.
“For 10 years now, we have been effecting change right where it was needed most. We know how to build this kind of power on the ground,” Daood told the Forward. “Now we want to take that power and translate it into votes so that we can effect change from within the Knesset.”
While rumors of a political run have swirled around Standing Together for months, Green said he and Daood felt they had finally reached a now-or-never moment.
“I truly believe we are at a critical juncture,” Green explained. “This is the point where the Israeli people either keep going down this path of ethnic cleansing and endless war and occupation and terrible quality of life, for both Palestinians and Jews living here — or we can turn around, right now, and go in the other direction, in the direction of life and peace and security for all.”
“The right wing in Israel very much understands we are at this juncture,” he added. “And they have been very clear about what they are offering. I could not live with myself if I didn’t offer an alternative to Israeli voters.”
Seeking an edge
A Place for Us All will face an uphill battle from the start.
Any party led by Standing Together’s founders is likely to intensify the criticism the movement already faces from right-wing Israelis who have branded them as traitors for speaking out against the occupation and the suffering in Gaza. Posters featuring images of Gazan children have been torn down, and activists, Green included, have been harassed by right-wing agitators, in some cases outside their own homes.
A Place for Us All is also already drawing criticism from within the Israeli left, where some fear that the addition of a new party could split an already fragile anti-Netanyahu camp. In Israel’s electoral system, any party that fails to cross the electoral threshold — currently set at just over 3% of the vote — receives no seats, meaning it cannot take part in the post-election negotiations that determine who will build the 61-seat coalition needed to form the next government.
Green strongly rejects this concern.
“Every poll makes clear that winning without Jewish-Arab partnership is impossible,” he argued. “The only path to replacing Netanyahu is to maximize turnout among Jewish and Palestinian citizens and ensure that they vote for the same political bloc.”
According to Green, only one in four Palestinian citizens between the ages of 18 and 24 is currently planning to vote. “But with our party running, that statistic jumps up to two out of four,” he said.
If the scene outside the cafe was any indication, the party’s message may already be resonating with at least some of the young people it hopes to bring into politics. As the press conference unfolded, groups of teenagers passing by stopped to cheer on the speakers.
Inside, excitement was also running high. At one point, activist Galit Mass-Ader openly wept as she embraced Ghadir Hani who is joining the party’s list.
“For me, this is a decision that has been years in the making. I’ve been working for peace and coexistence nearly my whole life,” Hani told the Forward. “But since October 7, there have been so many difficult moments of pain and despair.”
“This party is the exact opposite of that,” she said. “It is the embodiment of hope — hope that belongs to both Jews and Palestinians, and to all those who are ready to reject the old, stale politics in favor of a new, shared political system.”
The post New Jewish-Arab political party debuts in Israel, aiming to topple Netanyahu appeared first on The Forward.
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Trump says Syria would do a ‘better job’ of fighting Hezbollah than Israel
(JTA) — Syria would be better at tackling Hezbollah in Lebanon, U.S. President Donald Trump said Tuesday, as Israel’s presence in Lebanon continued to be an Achilles’ heel in the fledgling U.S.-Iran deal set to be formally signed in Geneva on Friday.
Trump said Syrian President Ahmed al-Sharaa, a former leader of an al Qaeda-affiliated group who has fashioned himself as a modern statesman after taking power in 2024, could be more effective and less destructive than Israel has been.
“If Israel can’t do the job without killing everyone else, he will do the job, Syria will do the job,” Trump said in Evian, France, on the sidelines of the G7 Summit.
Trump accused Israel of taking too long to oust the Iranian proxy group from Lebanon, just one day after he said that he himself might intervene by speaking directly with Hezbollah.
Trump also said Tuesday that “regime change” had never been the goal of the war with Iran and described Iran’s current leadership as “rational,” “smart” and “strong.” The president said the deal would prevent Iran from acquiring, building or developing a nuclear weapon.
The Iran deal to end months of hostilities between Washington and Tehran was digitally signed on Sunday, according to Trump’s vice president, JD Vance. Its terms have not been published, but officials have said that it also includes an end to hostilities between Israel and Hezbollah, even though Israel is not a party to the agreement. Separate talks have been held in Washington between Lebanese and Israeli officials toward a peace deal that Hezbollah has so far rejected.
Israel has insisted that its army will remain in southern Lebanon to prevent Hezbollah attacks against communities in northern Israel. Iran’s Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi told reporters in Tehran on Tuesday that the deal with Washington was contingent on an Israeli withdrawal from Lebanese territory and a halt to the fighting, according to the state-affiliated Press TV.
Trump addressed the issue of Hezbollah on Tuesday in France during a meeting with Qatar’s Emir Sheikh Tamim bin Hamad Al Thani, whose country has been among those playing a mediating role between the U.S. and Iran.
“Israel is fighting Hezbollah too long, and too many people are being killed, and you do not have to knock down an apartment house every time you are looking for someone,” Trump said.
“There are a lot of people in those apartment houses, and they are not all Hezbollah, and I suggested to Israel that Syria should take care of Hezbollah, and to be honest with you, I think they will do a better job at it,” he stated.
Trump downplayed any tension between himself and his ally in Israel, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, even though he admitted that he had been upset by Netanyahu’s decision to attack Hezbollah in Beirut on Sunday just hours before the Iran deal was announced.
At one point in his remarks Tuesday Trump described the relationship as “unbelievable” and “effective,” and when asked if there was tension between the two leaders, responded “no,” even as he gave examples of how Netanyahu’s handling of Lebanon has frustrated him.
“I didn’t like that two hours before we were signing the agreement … that there was an attack in Lebanon, it was right in Beirut. I did not like it, I let them [Israel] know it,” Trump said, adding that the Hezbollah drone attack on Israel that prompted Israel’s retaliation was minor.
“You can do too much also,” Trump said, explaining that he “was not happy” with how Israel conducted itself in Lebanon, where it should have been “able to do the job faster. It just goes on and on [in a way that] throws a negative light on the big deal.”
Still, Trump said he did not think that Lebanon would derail the agreement with Tehran, describing it as a “minor war.”
Lebanon aside, Israel is concerned that the Iran deal strengthens the Islamic Republic, which it had hoped would be overthrown as a result of the war, and that the deal would allow it to continue to pursue a nuclear and ballistic missile weapons program. That the deal allows for more money to flow to the heavily sanctioned regime has only fueled that concern.
“This deal is a wall to a nuclear weapon,” Trump said, rejecting the idea that U.S. funding was a part of the agreement. “We are not investing any money. We have no obligation to invest any money in Iran,” he said.
Trump underscored the danger to the region and to Israel should Iran become a nuclear power and said the war and this deal prevented that. Echoing comments he has made before, he said, “Without me, Israel would not exist right now.”
This article originally appeared on JTA.org.
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In new book, JD Vance says Charlie Kirk warned him about antisemitism on the right
Vice President JD Vance acknowledges a growing strain of anti-Israel sentiment on the American right that has at times slid into outright antisemitism, writing in his new memoir released on Tuesday.
In Communion: Finding My Way Back to Faith, Vance recounts a conversation with conservative activist Charlie Kirk months before he was fatally shot, in which they spoke about two trends Kirk was observing among young conservatives.
“The first was that they were very angry about Israeli influence in American politics,” Vance writes about the phone call in the summer of 2025. “The second was that some were going from legitimate disagreement with the Israeli government to antisemitism.”
According to Vance, Kirk told him that many younger conservatives believed the United States was allowing Israel too much sway over American foreign policy. Vance quotes Kirk as saying that for some, “that concern is turning to anger, and even Jew hatred.”
The passage offers a revealing glimpse into the debate that has intensified inside President Donald Trump’s MAGA movement since the Oct. 7, 2023, Hamas attack and the war in Gaza. While support for Israel remains strong among Republican voters, a growing faction of younger Republicans has become more skeptical of foreign intervention generally and increasingly critical of U.S. support for Israel. A recent Politico poll found that 32% of Trump voters below the age of 35 say the U.S. is too closely aligned with Israel’s government, and nearly half of the president’s voters ages 18 to 34 say there should be distance between the two countries.
Vance, who first gained prominence in 2016 with his best-selling memoir Hillbilly Elegy, has often taken a complicated position in that conversation. A supporter of Israel’s right to defend itself, he has also repeatedly said that the U.S. should define its Middle East policy primarily through an “America First” lens.
During the 2024 presidential campaign and after he was elected vice president, Vance said that the interests of the U.S. are “not always identical.” In recent days, amid disagreements between the U.S. and Israel over a deal to end hostilities with Iran, Vance said in interviews with the media, “Even when we’ve been close partners, sometimes we have interests that are perfectly aligned and sometimes we have interests that are misaligned.”
Vance’s associations with right-wing influencers who have trafficked in antisemitism, and his reluctance to disavow them, have also made some American Jews uncomfortable.
On Tuesday, he is expected to appear on a program hosted by Megyn Kelly, the former Fox News host who is among conservative figures, including Tucker Carson, Candace Owens, Joe Kent and Nick Fuentes, who accuse “Israel-first” advocates of pushing the United States into war with Iran. “Mark Levin wanted it, it’s his war, Ben Shapiro, Lindsey Graham, Miriam Adelson — that’s obvious,” she said in March. “They are the ones who’ve been pushing us into it.” Vance’s expected appearance drew criticism.
In the memoir, Vance writes that Kirk was working to prevent criticism of Israel from developing into bigotry. “He knew the situation was delicate and complicated, and he treated it with genuine care, appealing to the better angels in all of us,” Vance writes. “He did so in his conversations with the president and me, but also in the ways he engaged his massive following.”
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