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On Israel’s 75th Independence Day, its flag has taken on new meaning as a protest symbol
TEL AVIV (JTA) — Avigail Arnheim has been protesting Benjamin Netanyahu for years, starting with the demonstrations in Jerusalem that began in 2020, calling on him to resign as Israel’s prime minister.
When Netanyahu returned to office in December, Arnheim again took to the streets — this time to protest Netanyahu’s attempt to sap the Israeli Supreme Court of its power. And now, she comes armed with what she sees as a potent symbol: an Israeli flag emblazoned with the words of the country’s Declaration of Independence.
“I feel that the people of Israel woke up, and finally understands that life needs to come with values, with morals and with caring,” she said at a mass protest Tuesday night in Tel Aviv, as Israel began celebrating its 75th Independence Day. Arnheim believes those ideas are reflected in the declaration, which was signed on the day of Israel’s founding, traces the connection of the Jewish people to the land of Israel, and pledges democracy and human rights.
She added, “I think that the meaning of the flag has received a place in a society that wasn’t aware of it for a long time.”
Seeing the streets of Israel festooned with flags is one of the hallmarks of the country’s Independence Day, called Yom Haatzmaut in Hebrew. It’s common for flags to line streets and hang from balconies. A popular children’s song sung on the holiday begins, “The whole land is flags.”
But this year, Israel’s quintessential national symbol has taken on a different meaning for some, as the hundreds of thousands of anti-government protesters have, for months, made the flag the icon of their cause. The flag has become so associated with the protests that Zichron Yaakov, a city north of Tel Aviv, briefly banned the flag and images of the Declaration of Independence from its Independence Day parade.
Voices on the right have chafed against the idea that the flag now indicates opposition to the government. But there was little, if any, skepticism about that idea on the streets of Tel Aviv on Tuesday night, where protesters enthusiastically adapted a range of Independence Day traditions to express their opinions.
Thousands of Israeli protesters wave flags during a rally against the Israeli government’s judicial overhaul bills in Jerusalem, March 27, 2023. (Gili Yaari/Flash90)
Some protesters viewed their embrace of the flag as a corrective that now allows the flag to represent what they see as Israel’s founding aspirations, following years during which it was perceived as a symbol of Israel’s right wing. Before this year’s protests, another prominent political association for the flag was with religious nationalists who hold an annual “flag march” in Jerusalem’s Old City that has stoked Israeli-Palestinian tensions.
“It’s a symbol that had been hijacked for way too long by the right,” said Roy Rob, a graphic designer at the Tel Aviv rally who splits his time between Israel and Brooklyn. “It’s the same in the States: The American flag has really been hijacked and pigeonholed.”
Regarding the Israeli flag, he added, “Now it’s being democratized again. It makes sense that the people who really care about the origin of Israel, what Israel is all about, use the original symbols of it.”
Some right-wingers aren’t ready to yield Israel’s national symbols. Gideon Dokov, an editor at the right-leaning newspaper Makor Rishon, called the idea that the flag represents opposition to the judicial overhaul “absurd.”
“By mistake or intentionally, it seems that in recent months, there are those who are trying to take ownership of the national symbols — the flag and the Declaration of Independence — on behalf of the protests, just as they’re trying to take ownership of [the concept of] democracy,” Dokov wrote earlier this month. “Both are incorrect.”
In any case, flags were ubiquitous at Tuesday night’s protest. When asked where they got theirs, several protesters made a perplexed face that seemed to ask, “Where have you been all this time?”
The flags, they said, aren’t hard to get. Many were distributed for free at earlier protests, along with black T-shirts that read, “De-mo-cra-cy” in Hebrew block letters, copying the central chant of the demonstrations. Other shirts, like Rob’s, which read, “There’s no democracy with occupation,” were also distributed by activist groups at earlier protests. Many flags included the phrase “Free in our land,” which comes from Israel’s national anthem.
Others already had flags at home, and some bought them recently. At the protest, a man who was selling the flags and other assorted tchotchkes out of a stuffed shopping cart said the flag itself, without a pole, costs around $5.50. He said he bought his merchandise from stores and was reselling it, but would not provide further details.
A flag vendor stands with his wares during a Yom Haatzmaut celebration and anti-government protest in Tel Aviv, April 25, 2023. (Ben Sales)
The flags with the Declaration of Independence text, Arnheim said, went for about $13.75 and were sold by their creator via group chats used to organize the protests. Nati Hochberg, who traveled from a town north of Tel Aviv to demonstrate, said he bought his flag (with pole) for some $11 at a hardware store, after someone stole a previous flag of his from his motorcycle.
“We’ve taken back what belongs to us,” Hochberg said of the flag. His friend Tal Vardi, who traveled with him and has had his flag for years, added, “This population for many years ceded these symbols and now it’s taking them back. … I don’t know if it happened coincidentally, but it’s a feeling that it also belongs to us.”
That the flag has turned into a protest symbol, said one woman from northern Israel who declined to give her name, elicits a mixture of “pride and sadness” regarding the political conflict raging in the country.
“It’s clearly preferable for this not to be,” she said while holding a flag identical to Arnheim’s. “But if it is like this, at least the flag should have meaning.”
The protesters didn’t shy away from adapting other Independence Day pastimes, either. A white, foamy spray traditionally blasted by children on the holiday was being rebranded at the protest as “democracy snow” (one big can for about $2.75).
At a less crowded area of the protest, someone used the spray to spell out “democracy” in large letters on the ground. On a nearby bicycle path, the word “Leave,” used as a chant against Netanyahu, was also written in the spray. A cyclist stopped short before running it over.
A Tel Aviv protest at the start of Yom Haatzmaut, Israel’s Independence Day, featured a sea of flags, April 25, 2023. (Ben Sales)
Soft plastic hammers, another holiday mainstay, were also visible throughout the crowd. And a DJ blasted classic Israeli dance music in the middle of the demonstration, including the American Jewish summer camp favorite “Zodiac,” sung by Yaron Hadad.
In general, signs of the protests freckle Tel Aviv, which has been the nerve center of the demonstrations and the bastion of Israel’s left-wing minority. Municipal bus stops bear signs playing on the words of the national anthem and implying that the protests will keep Israel “Free from racism,” “Free from repression of women” and more. Graffiti supporting the protests — such as “Bibi is a traitor” — also isn’t hard to find, though there is also a smattering of pro-overhaul graffiti such as one message calling Israel’s Supreme Court a dictatorship.
Some paraphernalia at the demonstration trumpeted specific causes, like an LGBTQ pride flag, a flag that spelled out “democracy” in the colors of the Israeli and Palestinian flags, or a T-shirt, given out by an self-styled “moderate majority” activist group, that read “I [heart] Bagatz,” the Hebrew acronym for the Supreme Court.
Some participants got more creative. At a table in a sparse area, a few people offered free alcohol to passersby while a young man using a megaphone sang “Democracy and arak” to the tune of the famous riff from the White Stripes’ “Seven Nation Army.”
The idea, his colleague Ron said, was to give people free drinks to celebrate the country and the protests — which they hope will preserve the possibility for young people to get an education and find dignified work.
“In general, this is our last shot to save democracy, so everyone who wants to save democracy gets a shot as a gift from us,” said Ron, 23, who declined to give his last name. ”We love everyone, and we love democracy.”
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At a Georgetown College Republicans event, member of Germany’s far-right party tells students the Holocaust is ‘used as a weapon’
Marc Bernhard, a member of Germany’s far-right AfD party, told Georgetown students Monday night at an event hosted by the university’s College Republicans that the Holocaust is “used as a weapon against Germany.”
The Forward obtained recordings of parts of the event, which was billed as Bernhard presenting about “mass migration and the future of the West.”
The event followed the AfD’s historic victory in a German state election last month, with party leaders campaigning on the promise of mass deportations and a rejection of the country’s culture of Holocaust remembrance.
During the Q&A period, an audience member asked Bernhard about the AfD’s “opinion on the Holocaust.”
“Our opinion? It’s a very, very large party,” Bernhard responded.
“Do you think German education overcompensates or you know, like, overapologizes?” the audience member followed up.
Bernhard said that over the last decade, accusations of Nazism had become “inflationary, because everyone who does not have the opinion of the government is a Nazi. So nobody takes this serious anymore, because it’s a joke.”
The “Holocaust is also used as a weapon against Germany,” Bernhard told the crowd of about 40. “Why is Poland telling us we need to pay reparations and things like this?”
He blamed anti-Jewish sentiment on “anti-fascists,” saying left-wing antisemitism was “why a lot of Jews leave Germany or a lot of Jews leave France, because they don’t feel secure anymore, especially in Berlin.”
Bernhard, meanwhile, has faced an antisemitism controversy of his own. Last January, he led a campaign to place tens of thousands of fake deportation plane tickets in voters’ mailboxes. The fake tickets read “ILLEGAL IMMIGRANT” in place of a passenger’s name.
The campaign drew comparisons to Nazi-era propaganda that used mock travel documents to encourage Jews to leave Germany, including one that read “free ticket to Jerusalem … never to return.”
Asked about the parallels by PBS FRONTLINE in November 2025, Bernhard said he was unaware of that history.
“Yeah, well, I’m not familiar with these actions,” Bernhard told FRONTLINE at the time. “To be honest, I don’t know them, nor was I aware of them.”
In a statement provided to the Forward, Georgetown College Republicans stood by its invitation to Bernhard, writing that “The AfD is currently leading national polls, and its growing support deserves serious engagement. Just as Republicans reject the American left’s efforts to dismiss our positions as extreme, we too reject the German Socialist Government’s labelling of AfD as extremist.”
The club added that “allegations of antisemitism are totally baseless.”
This wasn’t the first time Georgetown College Republicans hosted a member of the AfD: In 2025, the club hosted the party’s deputy leader, Markus Frohnmai.
The club also drew controversy in March for an X post from the club’s account saying “Let’s Be Honest: Muslims have no place in American society. Their religion is incompatible with our Christian Nation.” Georgetown Republicans said on Instagram that the post was “inconsistent with the values of our organization” and “promptly deleted.”
At Georgetown, Bernhard also engaged in anti-Muslim rhetoric: “We have this problem with people who are not with our culture or with our tradition,” Bernhard said. “Always, where you see problems it’s with Muslims. We don’t have problems with Ukrainians. We don’t have problems with Polish.”
Bernhard’s remarks drew frequent interruptions. The Georgetown Voice, the campus student-run magazine, reported that members of The Georgetown Heckler, Georgetown’s satirical publication, staged a coordinated ringtone prank, with 15 people each setting their ringtones to “funny noises” that went off as Bernhard spoke.
The Jewish Caucus of the College Democrats of America and Georgetown College Democrats also issued a joint statement condemning the College Republican’s decision to host Bernhard.
“We want Georgetown to put the safety of Jewish students above a platform for a foreign politician whose ideology is steeped in antisemitism and Holocaust revisionism,” Leo Auerbach, a senior at Georgetown and vice chair of the Jewish Caucus of College Democrats, told the Forward. “I think that antisemitism has to be called out, no matter who it comes from, whether it’s politically convenient or not.”
The post At a Georgetown College Republicans event, member of Germany’s far-right party tells students the Holocaust is ‘used as a weapon’ appeared first on The Forward.
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In Israel’s elections, where are the women?
On Oct. 27, Israelis will go to the polls at one of the most consequential moments in the country’s history. After years of war, trauma and political division, the next Knesset and government will face decisions that will shape Israel’s future for years to come.
But one question deserves significant attention: Where are the women?
Israel has long celebrated its history of women’s leadership. Golda Meir became one of the world’s first women prime ministers. Generations of Israeli women have built institutions, led social movements and fought to advance equality and democracy.
Yet despite this history, women have never achieved equal representation in Israel’s highest political institutions. Their representation has declined in key positions, and when Israel formed its war cabinet following Oct. 7, 2023, no women were included in its core membership. Women have also remained significantly underrepresented in high-level diplomatic and totally absent in peace negotiations.
For example, the senior Israeli delegation to the hostage deal negotiations in Doha in January 2025 consisted of four men, with no women among its publicly identified members. Similarly, men dominated the leadership of diplomatic negotiations concerning arrangements in Lebanon and coordination meetings regarding Iran’s nuclear program.
The numbers tell an important story.
According to a March 2026 analysis by the Israel Democracy Institute, only 31 of Israel’s 120 Knesset members were women—approximately 26 percent, below the global average of 27.5 percent. Israel’s international ranking for women’s parliamentary representation has fallen sharply, from 61st in 2022 to 92nd out of 181 countries in April 2026.
Women held just five of 24 cabinet positions, fewer than 21 percent, a substantial decline from the previous government, when women occupied approximately one-third of ministerial positions.
For more than 17 years, no woman has held any of Israel’s four most senior political positions: prime minister, foreign minister, defense minister or finance minister.
The disparity extends beyond elected office. A Knesset research report found that women accounted for 64 percent of Israel’s civil servants in 2024, yet held only 9 percent of the highest-ranking positions.
These figures are particularly troubling because, throughout Israel’s recent crises, women have demonstrated their indispensable leadership.
Since the Oct. 7 Hamas attacks on Israel, women have mobilized emergency responses, supported displaced families and kept civil society organizations functioning under extraordinary circumstances. Many have done so while confronting fear, grief and uncertainty in their own families.
Women who lead nonprofit organizations, advocacy movements and social-change initiatives develop expertise directly relevant to government. They understand how policies affect people, how institutions function, how to mobilize resources and how to bring communities together around shared challenges.
These are precisely the skills needed in public leadership.
But at the very moment Israel has depended on women’s leadership, women have had too little influence over the decisions shaping its future.
Israel’s electoral system places considerable importance on the composition of political party lists. Voters choose parties, and the placement of candidates on those lists affects who ultimately enters the Knesset. Some parties have adopted gender-balanced lists, while others have included far fewer women in positions with realistic prospects of election.
Efforts are emerging to change that. Seventeen women make up a majority of the slate for Beyachad (Together) — the merger of Naftali Bennett’s previously unnamed faction with Yair Lapid’s Yesh Atid. Meanwhile, even though ultra-Orthodox parties do not allow women to be their candidates to the Knesset, a new party called Haredi Public has included two women on their slate.
Two women whose candidacies have been particularly meaningful to me are Moran Zer Katzenstein and Moria Rodal Silfen, whose leadership I have had the privilege of witnessing firsthand through The Collective, Elluminate’s leadership advancement program. Through a Jewish and feminist lens, we invest in, train, connect and elevate women leaders advancing social change. Both women have demonstrated extraordinary courage and leadership in confronting some of Israel’s most pressing challenges.
Katzenstein, founder of Bonot Alternativa, a nonpartisan women’s organization advocating for women’s rights and
democracy, is running with The Democrats, led by Yair Golan. Her organization gained international recognition in 2023 when women dressed in the iconic red robes and white bonnets of The Handmaid’s Tale staged silent protests against Israel’s judicial reforms, becoming a powerful symbol of the pro-democracy movement.
Silfen, CEO of the Task Force on Human Trafficking and Prostitution (TFHT), was running with Benny Gantz’s Blue and White party until his decision Monday to withdraw from the race. For more than a decade, Silfen has led efforts to combat human trafficking and sexual exploitation in Israel, advancing legislative reforms and protections for vulnerable women.
Both women have been pursuing different political paths, but their candidacies illustrate a shared truth: Israel has an extraordinary reservoir of experienced women leaders ready to bring their expertise from civil society into national decision-making.
Their candidacies demonstrate what becomes possible when women move from influencing public policy through civil society to seeking a direct role in making it. But the issue goes beyond numbers on a ballot.
Representation matters because who participates in decision-making influences which experiences are heard, which questions are asked, which problems receive attention and which solutions are considered.
Consider the challenges Israel faces: rebuilding communities devastated by war, responding to trauma, strengthening democratic institutions, addressing economic pressures, supporting families and restoring trust across a deeply divided society.
Women bring essential expertise to every one of these challenges—as professionals, public servants, community leaders, researchers, entrepreneurs, advocates and members of families and communities affected by the war.
The goal is not simply to increase the number of women in office, but to ensure that Israel’s institutions benefit from the full range of leadership and expertise available in its society. What they need are opportunities, investment, visibility and access to the institutions where decisions are made. For this reason, we should continue to invest in women-led civil society organizations and the relationships that help them succeed.
These organizations are not peripheral to Israel’s future. They are developing solutions to pressing social challenges, supporting vulnerable populations, strengthening communities and creating opportunities for public participation. When women leaders connect across issues and sectors, they exchange expertise.
Whatever its political composition, Israel’s next government will confront enormous challenges. Meeting them will require the knowledge, experience and leadership of the entire population.
Golda Meir’s legacy should not simply be something Israel celebrates. It should remind us that women’s leadership belongs at the center of national decision-making.
The women who have sustained the state throughout years of crisis have demonstrated their capacity to lead. They should not have to prove it again.
The post In Israel’s elections, where are the women? appeared first on The Forward.
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Vance declines to endorse Netanyahu, a day after Trump backs prime minister
(JTA) — Vice President JD Vance has refused to endorse Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, just a day after President Donald Trump announced his support for the incumbent Israeli leader.
“I’m not anti-endorsing. I’m not pro-endorsing,” Vance told journalist Mark Halperin in a Monday interview. “I’m not getting involved in the Israeli elections.”
“I endorse American candidates,” the vice president added, noting that he is focused on the U.S. midterms.
Trump declared his support for Netanyahu, who is running for reelection, in a Sunday Truth Social post in which he deemed the Israeli leader “a Great Warrior Prime Minister” and a vital partner in removing the Iranian threat. Recent polls show Netanyahu closely trailing former IDF chief-of-staff Gadi Eisenkot in the election, which will take place on Oct. 27.
Liberal Middle East policy advocates, including J Street, have blasted Trump’s decision to back Netanyahu, arguing that he’s acting against the interests of U.S. taxpayers.
While Vance declined to endorse the Israeli prime minister, he has previously involved himself in international elections. In April Vance joined Trump in backing then Prime Minister Viktor Orbán in Hungary, although that support did not end in victory.
Last year, the vice president also met with the leader of the far-right Alternative for German political party, AfD, in Munich but he did not issue an official endorsement for that candidate.
This article originally appeared on JTA.org.
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