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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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Pacific Palisades Jews, displaced by fire, reopen their synagogue as part of returning home
(JTA) — Sixteen months after the fires that devastated the Pacific Palisades and uprooted hundreds of Jewish families, congregants of Kehillat Israel are returning to their synagogue.
On Friday, hundreds of congregants are carrying their Torah scrolls back into the building that became a symbol of the Los Angeles neighborhood that was devastated by fire in January 2025.
While the synagogue suffered significant smoke damage from the fires, the building, constructed in 1950, remained standing, providing desperately needed continuity for the roughly 250 congregants who lost their homes and 250 others who were temporarily displaced.
All three of the synagogue’s clergy members, including Rabbi Daniel Sher, lost their homes in the fires, a tragedy that Sher said imbued Friday’s reopening ceremony with mixed emotions.
“It’s a mixed blessing. I’m going to move back into my place of work before I break ground on my home,” Sher told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency. “But Judaism knows how to survive hardship, and so our job is to take this tradition and take 1000s of years of understanding that and put it into action.”
The reopening of the synagogue after months of repairs and renovations will also carry added weight as it coincides with a celebration honoring Cantor Chayim Frenkel and his wife, Marsi, for 40 years of service to the congregation.
“I feel very honored and proud,” Frenkel told JTA. “They’re dedicating the new ark to me and my wife, so that’ll be something in perpetuity that I’m honored to — if I’m blessed with grandchildren — to have them go in there and say, my daddy and my grandfather participated in working with others to create a very meaningful and a very loving and a very heimish shul filled with Yiddishkeit, a Zionistic, just a beautiful community.”
In the months after the fires, Kehillat Israel became what Frenkel jokingly called a “wandering” congregation, holding services in the Santa Monica mall while its religious school borrowed space from a Los Angeles public school. Clergy also held b’nai mitzvah services in neighboring synagogues, homes, hotels and even a restaurant.
“I can’t help but feel like it was this strangely entrepreneurial, energetic space in which this initial point of grief and loss very quickly manifested into a communal excitement and connection and has changed the way we will forever operate as a community, even once we’re back in our own sacred space,” Sher said.
Frenkel said that many of his congregants had told him that the “one of the main reasons they’re coming back to the Palisades to rebuild is because the synagogue did not burn.”
“That was a huge component for them to go through the rebuilding process, because they knew they had their synagogue,” Frenkel said.
As some congregants prepare to move back to the area, Sher said he had received hundreds of donated mezuzahs that clergy plan to distribute to families returning to rebuilt homes, helping them rededicate their spaces after months of displacement.
“For the families, the home is a mikdash me’at, it’s a small sanctuary, and I always tell our kids that there is an invisible bridge that leads from the synagogue directly to their home,” Frenkel said. “And now that their homes have burned or are being rebuilt, those bridges are being rebuilt, and that mezuzah is helping create that.”
But even as some of the congregation remains displaced around Los Angeles, Sher said the reopening ceremony was about much more than restoring a building. Instead, he said, it serves as a declaration that the community was “still here,” and that they had “never actually left.”
“For us as people who work there, but for congregants who have put a piece of their emotional connection into that building, they get something to still remain as home,” Sher said. “So our reopening isn’t just that statement, it’s saying, if you want home to be there still, it is.”
This article originally appeared on JTA.org.
The post Pacific Palisades Jews, displaced by fire, reopen their synagogue as part of returning home appeared first on The Forward.
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At Eurovision, Israel’s near triumph shows the limits of tolerance
VIENNA — A keffiyeh was blocking my view, and it bothered me less than I would have expected.
It was around 9:45 pm, and I was standing outside Vienna’s city hall, where the city had erected a “Eurovision village.” The pan-European singing competition was taking place in the former Habsburg capital, grand architecture framing massive public viewing screens.
Security was tight. Visitors weren’t allowed to bring bags inside the area, and we were patted down by two separate guards before we were allowed to enter. In August 2024, a foiled terror attack led to the cancellation of three Taylor Swift concerts, an international embarrassment authorities were keen not to repeat.
And then there were the protests over Israel’s participation.
The day before, an anti-Israel solidarity concert had featured a video call with Unorthodox author Deborah Feldman, who said she was protesting the “whitewashing” of a genocide. A separate “song protest” reportedly escalated from chants of “One love” to “Death, death IDF.” Earlier that day, demonstrators had marched along Vienna’s main shopping boulevard. By the time evening rolled around, a group of clowns had gathered outside the parliament, practicing creepy, Joker-like laughs and holding signs that said “United by Genocide,” a play on the Eurovision Song Contest’s slogan. “United by Music.”
For a contest that insists on being apolitical, Eurovision had become unmistakably political.
I didn’t care much for the music, but world events were unfolding here in Vienna, and I wanted to see them up close.
Israeli singer Noam Bettan was the third to perform. As he got on stage and started singing “Michelle,” a couple of people in the crowd I was standing in started shouting “Free Palestine” at the screen. The chants weren’t loud enough to drown out the performance
Then, someone in front of me raised a keffiyeh, stretching it between both hands and waving it in the air. It blocked my view. I considered asking him to lower it. But did I really want to risk a confrontation? Instead, I stepped sideways – slightly annoyed, but telling myself this was the price of tolerance.
Only later that night did I begin to wonder whether tolerance was, in fact, a shared value.
Back home, I watched the voting. Just before 1 a.m. the audience vote catapulted the Israeli act into the lead. In the previous two years, Israeli entries had also performed strongly with viewers, placing first and second in the public vote without winning overall. The reasons have been debated: diaspora support, savvy promotion, or simply songs that fit the Eurovision formula — catchy, theatrical, sung with a powerful voice. (Israel has won the competition four times, most recently in 2018.)
Israel’s promotional efforts have drawn criticism, but no evidence of manipulation has emerged, and the public broadcaster KAN has responded quickly to European Broadcasting Union reprimands.
It didn’t matter. Social media filled with accusations that Israel had cheated. In the arena, just before Bulgaria’s points were announced, the booing aimed at Israel’s entry grew so loud it was clearly audible on the broadcast.
Bulgaria won, Israel came in second, and I felt something close to relief. At a time when several countries had already stayed away and others were wavering, it seemed less like a celebration than a breaking point. I wouldn’t want to witness what would happen if Eurovision were to be held in Israel next year.
It had been easy to move when the keffiyeh blocked my view. One step to the side, and the problem was gone. However, there was no stepping aside from what came later. Freedom of speech is about making space, but it can also be used to close it.
The post At Eurovision, Israel’s near triumph shows the limits of tolerance appeared first on The Forward.
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Israel’s Noam Bettan takes 2nd at Eurovision, buoyed by scrutinized public vote
(JTA) — The Israeli contestant in the Eurovision Song Contest won second place for the second year in a row, drawing a strong public vote despite protests over Israel’s inclusion in the contest.
Noam Bettan and his song “Michelle” ranked third in the public vote and eighth in the jury vote, which combined to give him second place behind the entry from Bulgaria, which won the contest for the first time.
Bettan thanked his fans in a post on Instagram after leaving the stage.
“I’m still processing everything and trying to find the words for this incredible journey. You guys are amazing and this is all because of you. I love every single one of you!” he wrote. “This is just the beginning, there are so many amazing things in the way! 🤍Am Israel Chai!!!”
Five countries boycotted the contest this year over Israel’s inclusion, citing Israel’s military operations in Gaza. After the competition, a spokesperson for VRT, Belgium’s national broadcaster, said the country was unlikely to participate next year unless the European Broadcasting Union, which runs the contest, makes “a clear statement against war and violence and for respect for human rights.” Belgium came in 21st of 25 competitors in the final.
Bettan faced a smattering of boos both during the semifinal on Tuesday and during the final on Saturday in Vienna, as well as when Israel briefly led the leaderboard during the announcement of the audience votes. He told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency ahead of the final that he believed he had more fans than detractors and that he would focus on them.
Israel scored 220 points in the public vote after drawing a formal warning from the EBU for its campaign urging supporters to send all 10 of their votes to Bettan. Israel’s broadcaster called off the campaign after being told it was “not in line with our rules nor the spirit of the competition.”
Israel also drew 123 points from national juries, more than twice what it earned last year when 22 countries awarded Israel no points at all in a result seen as driven in part by political tensions.
This article originally appeared on JTA.org.
The post Israel’s Noam Bettan takes 2nd at Eurovision, buoyed by scrutinized public vote appeared first on The Forward.