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Oct. 7 nearly derailed Berlin’s famous Israeli-Palestinian restaurant. But it’s back in business.

(JTA) — On the morning of Oct. 7, as the horrors unfolding in southern Israel reverberated through mobile screens and live-streamed videos across the world, a hummus restaurant in Germany closed its doors.
Behind Kanaan, a restaurant in northeastern Berlin serving up hummus, salads and falafel, is a rare Israeli-Palestinian partnership. Oz Ben David grew up in Ariel, an Israeli settlement in the West Bank. His Palestinian co-owner Jalil Dabit comes from Ramle, a mixed city in central Israel, and has family in the West Bank and Gaza.
The restaurant has won a reputation for both its hummus — called by some “the best” in Berlin — and its message. It hosts belly dancing parties alongside employment programs for Syrian refugees and transgender Berliners. Ben David and Dabit frequently speak in public forums about coexistence.
But after Ben David’s family and friends were attacked by Hamas on Oct. 7, he could not imagine walking back into work. He called Dabit in a fit of anger.
“I felt full of rage, I felt like that’s it — it’s stupid, everything I’ve worked on in the past years is stupid,” recalled Ben David. “I was giving lectures nonstop and getting invited to talk about peace, and then I lost it, I just felt like it didn’t exist in me anymore.”
Dabit, who travels between Berlin and Ramle, was in Ramle when Hamas attacked. He cried on the phone as he heard Ben David’s voice distorted by pain and vengefulness.
“He was really not the Oz that I know,” Dabit told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency. “I let him talk — he wanted to close the restaurant, and let’s do this to Gaza, let’s do that, all the angry things that people say when they are in tough times.”
Dabit agreed to temporarily close the restaurant, but he called every day to check on his partner. As the only Palestinian child in an Israeli school during the Second Intifada, a violent Palestinian uprising in the early 2000s, he witnessed Hamas bombings of buses and targets in the middle of Israeli cities. He knew intimately the machinations of terror and how Israeli children were taught to hate an enemy. And he believed that if Ben David vented his anger, he would leave it behind.
“He had the tools to understand and believe that I would come back to myself,” said Ben David.
On Oct. 13, he reopened Kanaan. The restaurant has filled with customers showing support for the Israeli-Palestinian duo, some seeking an alternative to deep social rifts over the war in Israel and Gaza.
Those divisions have spilled into the world of food and turned hummus into a political weapon. Some groups accuse Israeli chefs of “colonizing” Palestinian food, while others argue that Israeli cuisine merges recipes from the Jewish diaspora with Middle Eastern influences. In the United States, nearly 900 chefs, food authors and farmers have signed a pledge to boycott Israel-based food businesses. Other groups, such as the Philly Palestine Coalition, have boycotted restaurants that are not Israeli-owned but claim to serve Israeli food.
When Ben David and Dabit started Kanaan, they were less interested in a peace mission than in bringing the best hummus to Berlin. They met through mutual friends in the city and discovered that many German food suppliers imported supplies neither from Israel nor the Palestinian territories, preferring to avoid the politically sensitive region altogether and get their tahini from Turkey. But to Ben David’s and Dabit’s minds, the best hummus came from the West Bank.
So they established Kanaan in 2015, billed as a vegan Middle Eastern restaurant. But they soon learned that their mere existence as Israeli-Palestinian partners was divisive. When they opened, thousands of Berliners protested the “normalization” of a Palestinian working with an Israeli, while thousands of others showed up to support their business.
“We understood we were creating something really special,” Ben David told JTA.
The two decided to leverage their platform. Over the past eight years, they have used the popular restaurant as a space to promote a peaceful political solution in their shared homeland. But that project was put to the test on Oct. 7.
Ben David and Dabit don’t agree on everything when it comes to politics — or even food. (Boaz Arad)
Some of Ben David’s family lives in Kibbutz Re’im, a secular farming community just a few miles from the Gaza Strip. As Hamas militants rampaged through the kibbutz on Oct. 7, killing five of its residents and 364 people at a nearby music festival, Ben David pieced together the news from his family members on WhatsApp.
“I’m literally talking with my cousins and my uncle that live in Kibbutz Re’im, and they said that they were locked in their security rooms and hearing the gunshots outside,” he said.
Ben David spent his childhood summers visiting his aunt and uncle at the kibbutz, playing in grass fields among the cows and goats, picking apples and peanuts. About 2,000 people lived in the three neighboring kibbutzes struck by Hamas — Re’im, Alumim and Be’eri — where at least 130 people were massacred. Many who live there represent Israel’s slim left-wing, peace-seeking bloc.
Ben David’s family survived, but a friend of his was killed at the Tribe of Nova music festival.
Dabit has stayed with his wife and children in Ramle since the war broke out, sheltering day and night from Hamas rockets. He lost contact with his family members in Gaza weeks ago.
On his mother’s side, Dabit’s family has lived in Ramle for hundreds of years. His paternal grandfather Abu Fuzi arrived from Jaffa in 1942 and opened the famed hummus restaurant Samir. In the 1948 Arab-Israeli War, Abu Fuzi was the only member of his family who did not flee to Jordan.
“One Jewish soldier knew him from the restaurant and told him not to go, because if he ran then he would not have a place to come back to,” said Dabit. “So he decided to stay.” The business was passed down to Dabit’s father Samir and then to Dabit, who still runs the restaurant in addition to Kanaan.
As their families at home are ravaged by war, Ben David and Dabit have faced down a fraught debate about mounting antisemitism and free speech in Germany. Berlin has seen a surge of antisemitic incidents since the Israel-Hamas war broke out, from Molotov cocktails thrown at a synagogue to Stars of David painted on apartment buildings.
German authorities have responded by cracking down on demonstrations of solidarity with Palestinians, including the more than 14,000 that the Hamas-run Gaza health ministry has reported killed by Israeli airstrikes. Cities such as Hamburg have blocked pro-Palestinian rallies, while Berlin’s education senator authorized schools to forbid the keffiyeh scarf and the phrase “Free Palestine.”
Josef Schuster, president of the Central Council of Jews in Germany, has called these bans a “justified” measure against “anti-Israel, aggressive and antisemitic” threats. But some opponents of the clampdown are Jews. One group of more than 100 Jewish Berlin writers, scholars and artists denounced the measures in an open letter that said, “If this is an attempt to atone for German history, its effect is to risk repeating it.”
In a meeting with German President Frank-Walter Steinmeier on Nov. 8, Ben David and Dabit offered Kanaan’s menu as an example for German society — an ideal in which all people can be heard without taking away from each other.
“We take German Kartoffelpuffer [potato pancakes] with Israeli salad and Palestinian hummus, and we create this dish that’s called Hummus Kartoffelpuffer,” said Ben David. “It’s a one-of-a-kind combination of flavors and taste, and everyone donates something to the plate — this is how German society needs to be.”
The duo often disagrees about food, business and politics. Ben David describes his political views as more right-wing than Dabit’s; for example, he believes in a peace agreement that would allow Jewish settlers to remain in the settlements of Hebron and Ariel. But there is nothing they won’t talk about.
“After time we agree, and sometimes we agree not to agree,” said Dabit. “But life is more important, and making things is better than breaking things, and building things makes them harder to destroy. So we’re building something, and we don’t want to destroy it because we don’t agree about this or that — the idea and the vision, it’s more important.”
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The post Oct. 7 nearly derailed Berlin’s famous Israeli-Palestinian restaurant. But it’s back in business. appeared first on Jewish Telegraphic Agency.
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Australia’s Spy Chief Warns Surge in Antisemitism Across Country Has ‘Not Yet Plateaued’

Southern Sydney Synagogue in the suburb of Allawah, Australia, was vandalized with antisemitic graffiti on Jan. 10, 2024. Photo: Screenshot
The head of Australia’s domestic intelligence agency has revealed that five major terrorist plots were prevented over the past year, amid a wave of antisemitic incidents in recent months that has alarmed the country’s Jewish community.
Mike Burgess, director-general of the Australian Security Intelligence Organization (ASIO), delivered his annual threat assessment on Wednesday, warning that Australia has never faced so many serious national security threats at once. The agency declassified its security outlook for the next five years, raising concerns about the increasing threat of state-sanctioned murder.
Burgess disclosed that his organization had identified “at least three” countries plotting to “physically harm people” living in Australia over the past 12 months.
“It goes without saying that plots like these are repugnant,” he said. “They not only involve plans to hurt people — obviously bad enough — they are shocking assaults on Australian sovereignty and the freedoms we hold dear.”
Based on the agency’s predictions, the coming years will be more volatile and dangerous as countries like Russia and Iran become increasingly aggressive, the spy chief asserted.
“Over the next five years, a complex, challenging, and changing security environment will become more dynamic, more diverse, and more degraded,” Burgess said during his speech at ASIO headquarters in Canberra on Wednesday night.
“If the spy game has a rule book, it is being rewritten. If there are red lines, they are being blurred — or deliberately rubbed out.”
When speaking about the shocking surge in antisemitic attacks that have been spreading across Australia since the beginning of the war in Gaza in October 2023, Burgess warned these incidents might only get worse as extremists are increasingly self-radicalizing and “choosing their own adventure” toward potential terrorist activity.
“Threats transitioned from harassment and intimidation to specific targeting of Jewish communities, places of worship, and prominent figures,” he said. “I am concerned these attacks have not yet plateaued.”
Several Jewish sites in Australia have been targeted with vandalism and even arson in recent months, continuing a rise in antisemitism that began with the Palestinian terrorist group Hamas’s Oct. 7, 2023, invasion of and massacre across southern Israel, amid the ensuing war in Gaza. A recent report from the Executive Council of Australian Jewry (ECAJ) found that antisemitism in Australia quadrupled to record levels following the outbreak of the Gaza war, with Australian Jews experiencing more than 2,000 antisemitic incidents between October 2023 and September 2024.
Burgess described how narratives originally centered on “freeing Palestine” have expanded to include incitements to “kill the Jews.”
Last week, Australia experienced its latest scandal in which two nurses were caught on video vowing to kill Israeli patients, prompting outrage from authorities.
At Bankstown Hospital in Sydney, two nurses, Ahmad Nadir and Sarah Abu Lebdeh, were seen making inflammatory statements in a video that surfaced online, during a night-shift discussion with Israeli social media personality Max Veifer.
The footage featured Lebdeh stating she would refuse to treat an Israeli patient and would instead kill them, while Nadir used a throat-slitting gesture when he confessed to having already killed many.
“It’s Palestine’s country, not your country, you piece of s—t,” Lebdeh told Veifer. “One day your time will come, and you will die the most disgusting death.”
After the video went viral, both nurses were suspended and permanently barred from employment within the New South Wales state health system.
Following the incident, the health minister of the state of Victoria, Mary-Anne Thomas, directed health-care facilities across the state to remove anti-Israel and pro-Palestinian badges and markings, declaring that political displays in hospitals are “unacceptable” and “will not be tolerated.”
Jews in Australia have questioned their safety at hospitals across the country amid a flurry of anti-Israel and even anti-Jewish animus coming from health-care facilities.
Last year, ASIO raised the national terror threat level from possible to probable and warned Australian defense personnel about being targeted by foreign spies.
“Australia has entered a period of strategic surprise and security fragility,” Burgess said on Wednesday.
As the country’s federal elections approach in the coming months, the federal government warned foreign embassies about attempts to interfere, including planting news stories about candidates or instructing people on how to protest.
Burgess warned that “high-impact sabotage,” such as attacks on nuclear-powered submarines or major cyberattacks, is becoming more likely, along with “state-sponsored or state-supported terrorism.” He singled out Russia, which could target Australia due to its support for Ukraine, and Iran as potential threats to Australia and its allies.
“A small number of authoritarian regimes are behaving more aggressively, more recklessly, more dangerously,” he said. “More willing to engage in what we call ‘high-harm’ activities.”
Burgess’s comments came after law enforcement in Australia last month started an investigation into the origins behind the spree of recent antisemitic crimes, announcing they suspect individuals outside the country have coordinated the campaign of hate.
Burgess also revealed that cyber units from at least one nation-state “routinely try to explore and exploit Australia’s critical infrastructure networks, almost certainly mapping systems so they can lay down malware or maintain access in the future.”
The post Australia’s Spy Chief Warns Surge in Antisemitism Across Country Has ‘Not Yet Plateaued’ first appeared on Algemeiner.com.
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Israeli Singer Noa Kirel Leads New Rom-Com Series With Argentine Pop Star Agustin Bernasconi

Agustín Bernasconi and Noa Kirel co-star in the new series “NOA.” Photo: Provided
Israeli singer Noa Kirel is starring alongside Argentine actor and fellow pop singer Agustín Bernasconi in a new music-centered romantic comedy series that will begin filming in March, The Algemeiner has learned.
The 25-episode series “NOA,” which will be filmed entirely in Argentina, is a global co-production from Argentina’s FAM Contenidos and Israel’s entertainment studio Sipur.
In the series, Noa (Kirel) travels to Argentina to meet her boyfriend, after months of having a long-distance relationship, but things don’t turn out the way she thought they would. She then meets Tomy (Bernasconi), “a young man who tries to reconcile with his past and forge a new life away from music, all while Noa begins a journey of discovery in search of her musical identity, while dealing with pressure from her parents and her new reality in Buenos Aires,” according to a provided synopsis.
Kirel is a singer, rapper, songwriter, dancer, and actress. She competed on behalf of Israel in the Eurovision Song Contest in 2023 and finished third with her song “Unicorn.” She was also formerly a judge on “Israel’s Got Talent.”
Bernasconi is an Argentine actor, singer, composer, and musician, with over 100 million views on YouTube.
“It will be a great experience to star in the series with Noa,” said Bernasconi. “She is an exceptional artist, and we complement each other very well.”
“NOA” producer and Dori Media Group founder Yair Dori, who originated the series, said: “I am very proud to be part of this great project, which I believe will have a very solid performance worldwide.”
Sipur CEO Emilio Schenker added: “NOA marks the beginning of our co-financing and co-producing major IP franchises globally. I can’t think of a better team or first project to invest in outside of Israel. It fits perfectly with our mandate to bring high-quality fiction, documentary, and unscripted projects to the world through high-level strategic partnerships and the support of powerful investors.”
Sipur’s latest projects include the Hebrew-language scripted drama series “Bad Boy,” from original “Euphoria” creator and Academy Award-nominated screenwriter Ron Leshem and Hagar Ben-Asher. Netflix acquired streaming rights for “Bad Boy” in November 2024. Sipur’s recent works also include the medical thriller series “Heart of a Killer,” starring “Tehran” lead actress Niv Sultan, the documentary “We Will Dance Again,” “The Devil’s Confession: The Lost Eichmann Tapes,” and the documentary series “Munich ’72” about the Palestinian terrorist attack on Israeli athletes at the 1972 Olympic Games in Munich, Germany.
The showrunners for “NOA” are Alejandro Cacetta and Mili Roque Pitt, and the director is Mauro Scandolari.
The post Israeli Singer Noa Kirel Leads New Rom-Com Series With Argentine Pop Star Agustin Bernasconi first appeared on Algemeiner.com.
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Freed Hamas Hostage Agam Berger Begs Trump to Help Get Israeli Captives Home: ‘Don’t Stop Until All Are Back’

Released Israeli hostage, Agam Berger, a soldier who was seized from her army base in southern Israel during the deadly Oct. 7, 2023 attack by Hamas, is reunited with her parents following her release, in a handout photo obtained by Reuters on Jan. 30, 2025. Photo: Israel Defense Forces/Handout via REUTERS
Former Hamas hostage Agam Berger urged US President Donald Trump to continue pushing for the release of the remaining Israeli hostages in a Hebrew-language video message that the president shared on his Truth Social app on Monday night.
A soldier in the Israel Defense Forces, Berger, 20, also thanked Trump for helping to secure her release from Hamas captivity in Gaza last month.
“I want to take this chance to say to you, President Trump: Thank you from the bottom of my heart for everything you’ve done and continue to do for the hostages,” Berger said in the clip. “Thanks to you, we’re home. But we must remember there are still people who truly depend on you and are waiting for you to save them. They’re waiting for your help and you have the power to do it.”
Berger was kidnapped from the IDF’s Nahal Oz military base on Oct. 7, 2023, along with four other Israeli soldiers. Dozens of IDF soldiers were murdered at the military outpost. Berger was released from Hamas captivity in January a week after four of her fellow IDF soldiers, as part of a ceasefire agreement between Israel and the US-designated terrorist organization.
The ceasefire deal took effect the day before Trump entered office last month and it put a pause to the 15-month war in Gaza. The agreement was mediated by the outgoing Biden and incoming Trump administrations, and the framework of the agreement was agreed upon last year.
“I beg you, don’t stop until all the hostages, both living and deceased, are brought back as quickly as possible,” Berger also told Trump in her video message. She then talked about her time in Hamas captivity, saying: “I went through many hardships there. The days didn’t pass. They stood still. Every night and day felt eternity. That’s how those [hostages] still feel there.”
“We must act fast to bring everyone home. They’re just waiting to be rescued,” she added.
Monday marked 500 days since Hamas-led Palestinian terrorists infiltrated southern Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, slaughtered 1,200 people, and took 251 hostages back to the Gaza Strip. Seventy-three men, women, and children remain in Hamas captivity. The bodies of four deceased hostages will be returned to Israel on Thursday, two days before the next round of living hostages will be released.
The post Freed Hamas Hostage Agam Berger Begs Trump to Help Get Israeli Captives Home: ‘Don’t Stop Until All Are Back’ first appeared on Algemeiner.com.
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