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Netanyahu government advances judicial reforms as protests intensify to include IDF reservists
(JTA) — The ninth week of protests in Israel brought hundreds of thousands of opponents to judicial reform into the streets on Saturday night, but within hours Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s coalition advanced the legislation through the Knesset.
Protests against the reforms extended to areas of Israel’s establishment where political protest was once unthinkable, including among combat pilots and staff for the national airline, El Al.
The government is opening bids for other airlines to fly Netanyahu and his wife to Rome later this week after too few El Al employees signed up to work the trip. The airline denied that the worker shortage reflected a protest against the prime minister, who is scheduled to meet with Italy’s new right-wing leader, Giorgia Meloni.
But others are making clear that their refusal to show up to work represents a protest against Israel’s right-wing government, which is seeking to sap the judiciary of its power.
Thirty-seven of 40 combat pilots in the military reserves said they would skip the first day of a required week of training to “devote our time to discourse and thinking for the sake of democracy and the unity of the people, and therefore we will not report to reserve duty on this day, with the exception of operational activity,” according to a translation of the letter published by the Times of Israel. They would turn up as required for the rest of the week, they said.
Reserves pilots train multiple times a year, a regimen that is seen as critical to their effectiveness. Individual soldiers have refused to serve in the past, at times earning jail sentences, but a mass action by one of the most elite units is unheard of. The squadron in this case was responsible for destroying a nascent nuclear reactor in Syria in 2007.
The combat pilots joined a growing protest movement against legislation that would allow a simple majority of 61 Knesset members to overrule the Supreme Court and constrain the court in other ways. The Knesset’s Constitution, Law and Justice Committee on Sunday advanced the legislation, which has already passed the full Knesset on a first of the three required votes to become law, making only limited changes.
The opposition sees the reforms as gutting the independence of the judiciary, which has been a bulwark against the erosion of the rights of women, non-Orthodox Jews, and minorities including Arab and LGBTQ Israelis.
Netanyahu has said he is ready to negotiate on the judicial reforms, but the opposition wants him to first stop the legislative process; coalition lawmakers have said they want to pass the laws by Passover, at the beginning of April.
Organizers said 400,000 people turned out for the ninth weekly Saturday night protest, over 150,000 in Tel Aviv alone.
In his remarks opening his weekly Cabinet meeting on Sunday, Netanyahu said he understood “that many of the protesters are loyal citizens most of whom don’t understand the details of the reform at all.”
The protests had been peaceful until Thursday, when mounted police used water cannons against crowds in Tel Aviv gathered for a “Day of Disruption.” Another “Day of Disruption” is planned for this week.
How far that disruption extends within the armed forces remains to be seen. Opposition leaders urged reservists to show up as required. Benny Gantz, who leads the Blue and White party and who was the defense minister until December, called on reservists and regular troops “not to give in to refusal to serve, although you are in pain.”
In a letter leaked Friday, Tomer Bar, the general who commands the Air Force, appeals to reservists not to miss call-ups, while saying, “I am aware of and sensitive to the difficulties and challenges we are all facing these days.”
Netanyahu on Sunday tweeted a photograph of himself when he was young and serving in a commando unit. “When we are called to reserves, we always turn up,” he said.
Among the dozens of appeals to Netanyahu to stop the reforms a standout was from 10 of the troops who joined his older brother, Yonatan, in rescuing hostages held on a plane in Entebbe, Uganda, in 1976. Yonatan was killed during the raid, which is seen as emblematic of Israel’s refusal to deal with terrorists and willingness to go to extreme lengths to rescue Jews in peril. Benjamin Netanyahu has since made his brother his lodestar.
The 10 veterans were especially offended by Netanyahu’s likening of the protesters — whom they have joined — to the settlers who rampaged through a West Bank village last week, burning houses and cars and injured dozens.
“We did the impossible with our brothers in arms,” said the letter, posted Saturday on social media. “And you and your cohort are doing everything you can to undermine motivation and to crack up Israeli society.”
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The post Netanyahu government advances judicial reforms as protests intensify to include IDF reservists appeared first on Jewish Telegraphic Agency.
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251 hostages were taken to Gaza on Oct. 7. The bodies of these two remain there.
Hamas on Tuesday returned to Israel the body of Dror Or — a 48-year-old father from Kibbutz Be’eri who was abducted with his family on Oct. 7. The handover was mediated by the Red Cross and confirmed by Israeli forensic testing. Or’s wife was killed in the attack, and two of their children were later released during a previous ceasefire.
In exchange, Israel returned 15 Palestinian bodies, completing the latest exchange under the ceasefire as talks begin on advancing to the agreement’s second phase.
Hamas took more than 250 people hostage on the day of the attack. With only two captives now believed to remain in Gaza, the transfer marks a grim but significant step in resolving one of the central flashpoints of the current truce negotiations.
The bodies of one Israeli and one Thai national are still in Gaza.
- Ran Gvili, 24, was a member of a police counter-terror unit who was on medical leave with a broken shoulder when he heard about the attack. He rushed south and helped evacuate fleeing concertgoers at the Nova music festival. It was later determined that Gvili was shot and killed by Hamas on Oct. 7, his body dragged into Gaza.
- Sudthisak Rinthalak, a 43-year-old agricultural worker from northeastern Thailand, was killed in Kibbutz Be’eri during the attack, and his body was taken into Gaza. He had been working in Israeli agriculture since 2017, and was regularly sending money back home to support his parents.
Hamas said Wednesday it remained committed to the deal and intends to return both bodies.
Related: Jews around the world pinned yellow ribbons to their clothes and wore dog tag necklaces. How will they continue to mark Oct. 7 once all the hostages have been returned?
The post 251 hostages were taken to Gaza on Oct. 7. The bodies of these two remain there. appeared first on The Forward.
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Boston’s unfinished Holocaust museum hoists boxcar into exhibit space overlooking Boston Common
(JTA) — Traffic on Tremont Street in downtown Boston came to a standstill Tuesday morning as a crane lifted a historic 12-ton railcar onto the fourth floor of the city’s upcoming Holocaust museum.
The museum, the first of its kind in New England, was launched by the The Holocaust Legacy Foundation in 2022, which was founded by couple Jody Kipnis and Todd Ruderman following a 2018 March of the Living trip to Auschwitz.
While construction on the site, which rests on the city’s Freedom Trail near the Boston Common, remains ongoing, the installation of the 20th-century railcar, believed to be the same type used by the Nazis to transport Jews to extermination camps, marked a major milestone for the museum’s creation.
The railcar, which measures 30 feet long, 12 feet high, and nearly 9 feet wide, was lifted into the new museum structure by a 173-foot tower crane before construction continues around it.
A group of supporters, Massachusetts officials, civic leaders, Jewish community representatives and Boston-area partners looked on as the railcar was installed, according to the museum.
“The hardest truth this railcar forces us to confront is this: the Holocaust was not carried out by the Nazis alone. It was carried out by people, ordinary people, who kept the trains running, who stamped the papers, who followed schedules, who chose silence over courage,” said Kipnis, the co-founder and CEO of Holocaust Museum Boston, in a statement. “This railcar will stand at the heart of the Holocaust Museum Boston to confront that truth.”
After the museum opens in late 2026, the railcar will rest in a protruding bay window on the museum’s fourth floor so that pedestrians will be able to see visitors enter the railcar but not exit, a choice the museum said it intended to symbolize “the millions who never returned and the freedoms that were stripped away.”
The railcar was donated to the museum by Sonia Breslow, a Phoenix resident whose father was deported to the Treblinka concentration camp on a railcar of the same kind. Breslow’s father, who later moved to Massachusetts, was among fewer than 100 survivors of Treblinka, where 900,000 Jews were murdered.
The railcar was first discovered in a Macedonian junkyard in 2012, according to the museum, and later transported to Massachusetts, where conservator Josh Craine of Daedalus Art Conservation spent the past six months restoring it for exhibition.
“Seeing this railcar lifted into its new home took my breath away,” said Breslow. “My father survived a transport to Treblinka in a car just like this. Most who were taken there did not survive. For this railcar to be in Massachusetts, a place where he rebuilt his life, is deeply personal. It ensures that his story, and the stories of millions, will never be forgotten.”
The post Boston’s unfinished Holocaust museum hoists boxcar into exhibit space overlooking Boston Common appeared first on The Forward.
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Peter Beinart is speaking in Israel. Cue the criticism from both the left and the right.
(JTA) — Progressive Jewish author Peter Beinart drew a volley of criticism on Tuesday from the boycott Israel movement as well as a right-wing Israeli group over an appearance at Tel Aviv University.
Beinart, who is an outspoken critic of Israel and a journalism professor at the City University of New York, spoke Tuesday evening in Tel Aviv with Yoav Fromer, a senior faculty member at TAU’s English department, in an event titled “Trump, Israel and the Future of American Democracy.”
A founding member of the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement, or BDS, publicly called on Beinart to cancel his visit after saying it had privately urged him to do so. The Palestinian Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel is the BDS movement’s cultural arm and a leading advocate for boycotts of Israeli academic institutions.
“Palestinians condemn Peter Beinart’s event at complicit Tel Aviv University in the midst of Israel’s genocide in Gaza,” PACBI said in a post on X. “Whitewashing genocide can never be reconciled with any claim to humanism or moral consistency.”
In a press release, PACBI accused the university of being “deeply complicit in enabling and trying to whitewash Israel’s US-armed and funded genocide as well as its decades old regime of settler-colonialism, military occupation and apartheid.”
Beinart declined to comment to the Jewish Telegraphic Agency. But he responded to the criticism on social media, where said he supports a boycott of Israeli academic institutions as well as a right of return for Palestinians and an end to Israel’s occupation of the West Bank — all principles of the BDS movement to which he has long subscribed.
At the same time, he said, while he supports “many forms of boycott, divestment and sanction against Israel and Israeli institutions,” he believes there is “value in speaking to Israelis about Israel’s crimes” by speaking at universities.
“I do so because I want to reach Jews who disagree with me—because I believe that by trying to convince Jews to rethink their support for Israel’s oppression of Palestinians, I can contribute, in some very small way, to the struggle for freedom and justice,” Beinart wrote.
The author of several books including “Being Jewish After the Destruction of Gaza,” published earlier this year, Beinart is also scheduled to speak at Hebrew University later this week, according to Haaretz.
Beinart also wrote that “right-wing Israeli organizations have pressured Tel Aviv University to cancel my talk,” adding that he felt he should “take advantage of this opportunity to say in Israel what I’ve been saying elsewhere for the last two years.”
Matan Jerafi, the CEO of the right-wing Israeli activist group Im Tirtzu, sent a letter to Tel Aviv University’s president, Ariel Porat, on Tuesday urging him to cancel the event, according to Israel National News.
“Why is he hosting someone on his campus who does not recognize the State of Israel and calls for sanctions against Israel?” wrote Jerafi. “We call on Mr. Porat to cancel this absurd event. Stop tarnishing the reputation of Israeli academia. This is not Columbia University.”
The post Peter Beinart is speaking in Israel. Cue the criticism from both the left and the right. appeared first on The Forward.