(JTA) —

Allegations that Qatar secretly funded efforts to boost Arab voter turnout in Israel’s election have sparked a political firestorm, with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu declaring the vote “stolen” as his opponents accuse him of trying to undermine the results.

“The Ra’amgate affair is an earthquake,” Netanyahu’s Likud party said in a statement posted on the prime minister’s X account, referring to Ra’am, one of two Arab lists running in the election. “They stole the elections in Israel.” 

Elections officials were at pains to say that the allegations did not indicate widespread fraud, and even if they were substantiated, would not invalidate the election.

“The elections to the Knesset were conducted lawfully,” acting Central Elections Committee director-general Dean Livne wrote Thursday, adding that “to the best of our knowledge there is no basis for claims of systematic harm to the integrity of the elections.”

The Shin Bet, Israel’s internal security apparatus, also cautioned against jumping to conclusions. “The Shin Bet has not yet completed its investigation, and any statements concerning the substance or nature of the suspicions under investigation do not reflect the agency’s position,” the statement said. “Such statements should have been avoided.”

Opposition leaders welcomed any investigation and accused Netanyahu of fearmongering – and noted that figures in his office have been under investigation for months for alleged ties to Qatar. 

“I welcome the fact that Netanyahu is finally condemning Qatari involvement in the State of Israel,” said Gadi Eisenkot, whose Yashar Party is the largest in the opposition bloc. “It is serious when it happens in the Prime Minister’s Office and it is serious if it happens in the election system.”

Eisenkot accused Netanyahu of trying to change the rules after losing the game.

“What is already clear is that Likud and Netanyahu have embarked on an orchestrated and organized campaign to delegitimize the election results,” he said.

If the allegations are substantiated and found to have affected the results, a court could invalidate the election in whole or in part and order a new vote – though overturning an entire election is unprecedented in Israeli history.

The controversy erupted after Arab parties won a record 19 seats in Tuesday’s election, potentially giving them a decisive role in efforts to unseat Netanyahu. 

With counting complete, Netanyahu’s bloc has 53 seats and the opposition bloc led by Eisenkot has 48, leaving neither with the 61 seats needed for a majority. One potential path for Eisenkot is to form a government with Arab parties or a minority government with their support from outside the coalition.

In a letter Wednesday to Shin Bet chief David Zini, Supreme Court Justice Noam Sohlberg, chairman of the Central Elections Committee, called for an investigation into suspected foreign interference.

“Serious suspicions have been brought to my attention regarding improper influence on the elections through foreign funding by outside actors operating against Israeli interests,” Sohlberg wrote.

“I cannot attest to the nature of these suspicions,” he added, but said that because they involved foreign entities, “there is an obligation to investigate them thoroughly.”

Sohlberg instructed Zini to “uncover evidence to substantiate or refute the suspicions,” requesting findings within a week, ahead of the deadline for filing election appeals.

The letter did not identify Qatar or any Arab political party.

Likud alleged that foreign actors had sought to bring about an “Islamization of Israel” and overthrow the right-wing government. It urged other Zionist parties not to cooperate with Ra’am or the Joint List to replace the Knesset speaker or form a government reliant on Arab lawmakers.

Ra’am chairman Mansour Abbas denied any connection between his party and the suspected financing.

“Ra’am has no connection whatsoever to the affair in question or to any other such affairs,” Abbas said in a statement, pledging full cooperation with law enforcement.

He mocked Netanyahu by invoking the allegations that Netanyahu’s office has been infiltrated by Qatari agents and also by linking him to his son Yair, a provocateur who has been caught up in separate controversies.

“To Abu Yair [father of Yair], who employs Qatari agents in his office, we have one message in response to the campaign of incitement and delegitimization he is waging against Arab citizens: There will be nothing, because there is nothing,” he said.

Knesset Speaker Amir Ohana called the allegations the most serious in Israeli democratic history, while National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir urged the arrest of Arab party leaders suspected of involvement.

In a statement Thursday, the Shin Bet said the intelligence originated from its own operations and “did not come from any political party or political entity on either side of the political spectrum.”

The agency stressed that the investigation was narrowly focused and “does not cast suspicion on, or accuse, an entire sector of society that went out to vote democratically and legally.”

Qatar rejected the allegations, calling them “ridiculous and dangerous.”

“We categorically deny allegations that Qatar has interfered in Israeli elections or funded any activities intended to influence their outcome,” Foreign Ministry spokesman Majed Al Ansari said in a statement.

Al Ansari accused Israeli politicians of attempting to use Qatar as a scapegoat for their electoral setbacks, pointing to what he described as contradictory accusations that Doha had bought Netanyahu’s loyalty, financed Israel’s left and now manipulated Arab voters.

Experts on Israel’s Arabs said the massive turnout was organic.

Rami Zeedan, a professor of Israel studies and author of a book on Arab political participation in Israel, said he observed extensive grassroots mobilization during three months of fieldwork in Israel this summer. Many Arab voters viewed Netanyahu’s government as particularly hostile to their community and were determined to replace it, believing that almost any alternative would treat them more equitably as Israeli citizens, he said.

“The exceptional turnout was therefore not inexplicable,” Zeedan told JTA. “It reflected a genuine and highly visible effort to remove Netanyahu and his government.”

Zeedan said Likud and the Israeli right have long sought to delegitimize Arab political participation. He warned that the allegations could be used to cast doubt on the entire Arab vote or justify calls for a new election.

“The danger is that an investigation into specific financial or criminal allegations will be transformed into a sweeping claim that the Arab vote itself was fraudulent,” he said.

Joint List leader Yousef Jabareen accused Netanyahu of attempting to delegitimize Arab voters and prevent the new Knesset from being sworn in on schedule.

“Netanyahu was defeated at the ballot box. No incitement campaign will change the voters’ decision,” Jabareen wrote on X.

Knesset member Ahmad Tibi, also from the Joint List, fired back after the prime minister questioned why he had visited Qatar four days before the election.

“I told Al Jazeera in Doha that we very much want to bring you down,” Tibi wrote on X, quoting Netanyahu’s post. 

“Meanwhile, according to Israeli police, the only ones who received Qatari money are those in your own office. Lots of money,” he added, referring to the investigation into allegations that Netanyahu’s aides received payments to promote the Gulf state’s interests.

Anwar Mhajne, a political scientist originally from Umm al-Fahm, said she was not surprised by the Arab voter turnout, saying she witnessed “sophisticated social media mobilization by journalists, influencers, activists,” who made a compelling case for voting.

Mhajne argued that Netanyahu was using the allegations to discourage opposition parties from partnering with Ra’am and the Joint List.

“The allegations risk achieving Netanyahu’s objective before the investigation concludes: making cooperation with Arab representatives appear illegitimate and closing off a possible route to replacing his government,” she said in an email to JTA.

President Isaac Herzog called for the allegations to be thoroughly investigated but warned against casting suspicion on Arab voters collectively.

“Even at a moment like this, we must not tarnish an entire community that sought to exercise its right to vote and take an active part in democracy,” Herzog said Thursday.

The post Did Qatar meddle in the Israeli Arab vote? Election officials reject Netanyahu’s claim of widespread fraud appeared first on The Forward.

”It’s a detective story,” Moisés Kaufman said. “It focuses on an archivist at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum who is offered a mysterious album. The person offering the album claims that it is photographs of Auschwitz.”

Kaufman is talking about Here There Are Blueberries, the play about those photographs and that archivist. Kaufman conceived and directed the play, which he co-wrote with Amanda Gronich of the Tectonic Theater Project. It was a finalist for the 2024 Pulitzer Prize. The archivist — Rebecca Erbelding — “is very skeptical because there are very few photographs of Auschwitz in existence,” Kaufman, Tectonic’s founder and artistic director, told me over Zoom. “The Nazis did not want any photographs or records of what they were doing there.”

Once Erbelding gets the album, she discovers that the photos are authentic, but there are no photos of victims, only Nazis, including Josef Mengele. “The play,” Kaufman said. “is a detective story of her trying to figure out what these photos tell us.”

The album, which consisted of more than 100 photos taken between May and December 1944 and put together by Karl-Friedrich Höcker, a Nazi SS officer, was front page news in 2007 when Erbelding and the museum revealed it. “It’s something we didn’t know,” Kaufman said. “When you think Auschwitz, what do you think? Gas chambers, crematoria, you think barracks. And this is not that. We had never seen these photos before.”

Höcker “was a very high-up guy,” Kaufman continued. “That’s one of the reasons why the album is so important. Because he was very close to the center of operations. We’re looking at how the people who were running the camp behaved, and how they lived their daily lives.”

Kaufman decided he needed to turn those photos and that story into a play.

“I come from a Holocaust survivor family,” he said. “My father was a Holocaust survivor, and I knew that … I would at one point in my life have to write about this. But I kept postponing it because, as you probably know, the Holocaust is the one historical event that has been most written about. Many movies have been made about it. It’s like the historical event that has been most chronicled in art. So I thought, ‘What else is there to say?’ And yet, when I saw these photographs, I thought, this is something we didn’t know. I want to write a play about that.”

The play uses the photos, projected on the stage as the story is told.

“The Tectonic Theater Project is an experimental theater company,” Kaufman said. “And the kind of formal question for us was, ‘Can you write a play from an album of photographs? Can the photographs carry part of that narrative?’ Every play we do has a new form. We try to never repeat ourselves.”

Kaufman, 62, grew up in Caracas, Venezuela, and immigrated to New York City in 1987. He was nominated for a Tony Award for directing I Am My Own Wife and for writing 33 Variations. Blueberries previously played at the La Jolla Playhouse in California, the Shakespeare Theatre Company in Washington DC and Off Broadway at New York Theater Workshop.

The play’s title is taken from a picture in the album. “There’s a photograph in the album where they are eating blueberries,” Kaufman said — the title is a caption that the album’s owner had written. “I don’t want to give too much away,” Kaufman said, “but the location where this photograph is taken was something that few people knew about — that this location existed. And to me, it kind of encapsulates the spirit of the photos, which is a spirit of, a quotidian, a casual, the how do we live life in a moment like this?”

“What is happening outside the frame is that they’re killing 1.1 million people. Right outside the frame,” Kaufman continued. “And it poses questions about who we are as human beings.”

“We talk a lot about, what is the distance between culpability, complicity, and complacency?” said Kaufman. “And where do each one of us fall in that continuum?”

Why would  someone knowing what’s happening in the camp take these photos and make an album of them?

“I think he thought the Reich was going to last a thousand years,” Kaufman said. “I thought that, in part, he wanted to chronicle his contribution to it.”

Kaufman said that although the play deals with what happened more than 80 years ago, it has a key relevance to today. “I think at a moment in time where so many governments around the world are turning towards authoritarianism, this play holds a mirror up to us. Who do we want to be?” he said.

What does he want audiences to get from this play after seeing it? What does he hope they are thinking as they leave the theater or afterwards?

“Number one,  they’re going to see photographs that they’ve never seen before, and they’re going to see images that they’ve never seen before. Hopefully, the images will elicit new ideas, and hopefully, the conversation that they’re having when they exit the theater is different from the conversation they were having when they entered.”

The photo album, Kaufman said, “chronicles the life of everyone who runs the camp — people who worked in the kitchen, secretaries, high command, the people who drove the buses, the people who run the offices, the people who run the gas chamber. Everybody is portrayed. And I think that it invites the audience to think about not only how are humans capable of such a thing, but how are we all capable of such a thing?  And what do we have to do in order to prevent ourselves from doing such a thing?”

‘Here There Are Blueberries’ begins performances Nov. 2 at Broadway’s Barrymore Theater and runs through Jan. 10.  

The post Beyond the frame, thousands are being murdered in Auschwitz but here, there are blueberries appeared first on The Forward.

Israeli cellphones have been pretty busy lately, given Tuesday’s monumental national election. There were the constant robocalls and daily text surveys leading up to Election Day. And with the scramble to form a coalition now underway, Israelis are glued to their phones, waiting for news alerts and debating every possible scenario in various group chats. But around Tel Aviv, hundreds of parents have an extra WhatsApp group to manage: the one dedicated to their neighborhood’s trick-or-treat event, set to take place this Saturday night.

“Can we change the date for Sabbath observers?” one mother asks.

“Halloween is always October 31st,” someone responds.

“I don’t think anyone here cares about the actual date,” another chimes in.

There are dozens of questions about where to buy candy in bulk, along with frantic costume emergencies. “Our order won’t make it! Does anyone have a witch costume for an 8-year-old?”

“We are so excited,” one parent writes. “This is our first time. Can someone explain how it works?”

Over the last decade, Halloween in Israel has grown from a small gathering of American immigrants into neighborhood-wide celebrations across Tel Aviv and other big cities. Bars and clubs now host annual spooky soirées, and costume shops that once depended almost entirely on Purim sales have added a second busy season in late October. And on Saturday night, thousands of children are expected to take to the streets for some classic trick-or-treating — with an Israeli twist.

The birthplace of Halloween b’Aretz remains its epicenter: Tel Aviv’s Old North neighborhood. The area has long been an enclave of both young families and English-speaking immigrants, a combination that helped transform the unfamiliar Halloween ritual into an annual local tradition.

The first trick-or-treat event was organized in 2015 by expat mothers Smadar Barak and Eliza Duenow, whose children were missing an American Halloween. It began with just 10 families spread out across the Old North. Within four years, that number had jumped to more than 100. And it was no longer just English speakers. Israeli friends and classmates had begun asking if they could join “American Purim.” Participation exploded as other neighborhoods began hosting their own Halloween-themed events.

But over time, many of the original families, including both organizers, returned to the States. The whole thing might have fizzled out completely had it not been for Noa Rudik, a young mother on extended maternity leave, who often ran Jewish holiday events for neighborhood families.

“A community candle-lighting for Chanukah. A kibbutz-style Shavuot celebration in the park. I saw that families, like mine, were hungry for opportunities to be together,” Rudik says.

Somehow, she ended up on an email list from Duenow, who was organizing a group pumpkin order and carving activity. Born and raised in Israel, Rudik had very little exposure to Halloween, but she was immediately enchanted. After taking her kids to the pumpkin carving, they eventually joined the trick-or-treaters. “In those early years, we didn’t have access to all of the Halloween supplies, so everything was very homemade — the costumes, the decorations, which I love. Plus, what kid doesn’t want to run around all night collecting candy?”

Beyond her own family’s enjoyment, Rudik understood the holiday’s potential for community building. “It doesn’t get any more communal than Halloween,” she points out. “Rosh Hashanah. Passover. You can celebrate those holidays just within your own family. Many people do. But for trick-or-treating, you literally cannot do it without your neighbors.”

Rudik and a few others eventually took over for Barak and Duenow and opened it up to the entire community. Today, the original WhatsApp group has close to 1,000 members, and nearly every Tel Aviv neighborhood hosts its own event. While the early trick-or-treaters sometimes had to endure strange looks as they traipsed from house to house in their costumes, these days you can feel the spirit of Halloween across the city, as the sidewalks fill with pint-sized ghosts and goblins.

Not everyone is on board with the Pagan-rooted holiday, though. Last year, Israeli pop star Miri Mesika sparked a public debate over Halloween and Jewish identity when she pointedly told an interviewer that her daughters would be waiting until Purim to dress in costume. Rudik has also sensed some reluctance on the part of the Tel Aviv municipality to support trick-or-treating, even though it typically helps fund her other events. Efforts to promote the activity through local schools were also met with objections from some parent representatives, leading to a compromise: each could decide whether to pass the invitation along to their class.

Occasionally, Rudik hears from more traditional families who are hesitant or have decided not to participate. “But otherwise, the response has been overwhelmingly positive,” she reports. “Most people do not even think about the religious aspect or the fact that it’s not ‘our holiday.’ They just see it as an opportunity to be creative, to spend time with friends, and to come together as a community.”

All of which involves some pretty complicated logistics. Even with the holiday’s growth in popularity, most residents don’t hand out treats, so America’s door-to-door model won’t work. In the early years, participants shared addresses, apartment numbers and even door codes with each other. But as the group grew, the prospect of giving hundreds of strangers access to their buildings became less appealing. Some families moved their candy stations downstairs; others divided up, with one parent taking the children around while the other stayed home to distribute candy, as they often do in the States. For years, families navigated with a Google map of participating homes. Last year, a tech-savvy neighborhood parent designed a custom trick-or-treating app that will now be available across the city.

“Start-up Nation does Halloween,” Rudik jokes.

The guiding principle is that anyone collecting candy should also help provide it. Some families put up elaborate decorations and stick around to distribute treats; others leave a simple help-yourself bowl by the door. Those who can’t host typically arrange to buy candy for someone else’s house, which gets coordinated through the Whatsapp group the week before.

“We go by the honor system,” Rudik says. “We trust people to figure out a way to contribute. And there is always plenty of candy for everyone.”

But just in case, Rudik spends much of the night manning a centrally located emergency candy station, dispatching reinforcements to households that are running low.

After more than a decade, the festivities usually run pretty smoothly, though the growing number of Israelis has brought with it a learning curve.

“I really love that this started with Americans,” Rudik says. “I think it lends a legitimacy that would not necessarily be there if a bunch of Israelis just decided to start trick-or-treating. But it has definitely changed shape over the years.”

“Halloween meets Israeli chutzpah,” she calls it. Like any cultural tradition, trick-or-treating comes with its own etiquette that isn’t necessarily obvious to newcomers.

“Usually parents would be responsible for making sure their kids follow the rules. But we realized parents themselves didn’t necessarily know the ins and outs. Most of us didn’t grow up on this,” she points out.

One year, after families complained that older children had emptied their unattended candy bowls, Rudik and her fellow organizers visited neighborhood schools to talk to the kids and sent parents reminders on WhatsApp.

“In the days before Halloween, we really urge everyone to review the rules with their children: just take one candy, leave enough for others. Be good neighbors.”

This year’s turnout is expected to be their biggest yet, Rudik says, with several hundred families registered in the Old North alone. It follows a string of quieter celebrations, beginning in 2020, when the pandemic kept everyone inside.

“I think we did something over Zoom,” Rudik says, rolling her eyes.

Then came the quietest year of all: 2023. Less than three weeks before Halloween, on Oct. 7, Hamas terrorists infiltrated Israel’s southern border, killing more than 1,200 people and taking another 251 hostage.

“It wasn’t even a question,” Rudik recalls. “It was just obvious to everyone it would be cancelled. Nor was it specific to Halloween. No one was in the mood to celebrate anything. We were just engulfed in grief.”

The following year, the organizers went ahead with a toned-down version.

“The war wasn’t over, there were still hostages in Gaza,” she says, “but we also felt like we wanted to give the children some sense of normalcy. We asked people not to do anything too gory or scary — no blood or body parts or skeletons — and everyone really respected that. It was a pretty muted night.”

Last year, Israeli Halloween was back in full force, with one new addition: an adults only party, which Rudik also co-organized and will be bringing back this year as well. “Most of us didn’t get to celebrate Halloween as kids,” she says, with a smile. “So we are just making up for lost time.”

The post ‘Halloween meets Israeli chutzpah,’ as holiday grows beyond American expats in the Jewish state appeared first on The Forward.