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Protest tents spring up in Tel Aviv to push for hostages’ return
TEL AVIV (JTA) — For most of this year, Kaplan Street in the center of this city was known as the site of mass protests. Slogans and signs lined the avenue and, every Saturday night, tens or hundreds of thousands of Israelis would gather to demonstrate against the government.
Since Hamas’ Oct. 7 invasion of Israel, in which thousands were killed and wounded, and hundreds taken captive, those protests have ceased. But another one, smaller, more somber and subdued, has taken their place.
This new protest also opposes the government, but instead of calling for a change to the legislative agenda, it’s demanding that Israel’s leaders do more to free the over 200 hostages held by Hamas in Gaza. It is centered on two makeshift encampments on each side of the Kirya, Israel’s central military base and the seat of the top brass of the Israel Defense Forces. Dozens of protesters, including relatives of the hostages, stay there from 9 a.m. to 10 p.m. to push for the captives’ return.
“We are here opposite the people who need to release them,” said Itzik, 73, a history teacher who declined to share his full name and had been coming to Kaplan for a few days. He is a family friend of Liri Albag, an 18-year old soldier who was taken captive while on duty at Kibbutz Nahal Oz on the Gaza border.
“I do not have the strength to volunteer with all the physical efforts,” Itzik said. “But here I am able to give something by strengthening the families with my presence.”
In the wake of the massacre, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has become increasingly unpopular, with a recent poll showing that most Israelis want him to resign after the war. But following Oct. 7 and Israel’s ensuing war against Hamas in Gaza, Israelis have also described a newfound unity of purpose following years of deepening political divisions.
The protest on Kaplan is something of an exception: Some participants call on Netanyahu to resign now, not later, and get into shouting matches with his supporters. Others are less focused on the prime minister and hope to maintain a nonpartisan call for the release of the hostages, including calling for negotiations toward their freedom, possibly as part of a prisoner exchange.
“Bibi and his gang need to go,” said Miri Lahat, 73, who was at an anti-Netanyahu demonstration on Kaplan on Sunday and has been protesting against him for seven years. “The government betrayed us twice … by getting us into this situation and failing to release the hostages.”
Hundreds of posters line the busy street in Hebrew and English, similar to the ones now wallpapering major cities across the United States. They display the word “Kidnapped” in all capital letters along with the name and photo of a hostage, and some biographical details. Several signs read, “Free the hostages now!”
Other initiatives across Israel also aim to draw attention to the hostages. Just blocks away from the tents, at the Tel Aviv Museum of Art, a Shabbat table with 200 empty chairs symbolized the captive Israelis. Israeli tech workers have organized to help identify their missing fellow citizens. Family members of the hostages have held press conferences and met with the country’s leaders and other heads of state.
Itzik is one of dozens of volunteers who came to Kaplan to support the families of the hostages, in addition to hundreds of visitors who stopped by to tie yellow ribbons on their arms — an international symbol for the return of hostages. Countless cars honked to show support throughout the day.
A protester in Tel Aviv calling for the return of hostages. (Eliyahu Freedman)
Setting up a protest tent is something of a tradition in Israeli activism. The parents of Gilad Shalit, a soldier kidnapped by Hamas in 2006, set up a tent opposite the prime minister’s residence in Jerusalem and stayed there for 15 months until their son was freed in a prisoner exchange in 2011. That same year, Israelis camped out on Tel Aviv’s Rothschild Boulevard in protest of the country’s high cost of living. This year, opponents of Netayahu’s effort to weaken the judiciary briefly camped out near the country’s parliament in Jerusalem.
Dafna Sheer, a 70-year old Israeli living in Hofit, a coastal town about 25 miles north of the protest tents, said she came to Kaplan on Sunday because she is “heartbroken” by the thought that “it could have been my grandchild” who was taken captive. She also blames Netanyahu for the recent disaster and current response. “He must resign,” she said bluntly.
One of the protesters holding a sign opposite passersby was Tamar Bialik, 49, a Tel Aviv resident and member of Israel’s trance music community, which was devastated by a Hamas massacre at a rave near the Gaza border on Oct. 7. She said she went from “shiva to shiva” before arriving at the Kaplan tent to advocate for two friends who were abducted by Hamas terrorists at the music festival.
“Ilan Avraham, 56, was like a father for the Israeli trance community,” she said. “Since he was 16, he would go to trance parties every week while Moran Stela [Yanai] just had a jewelry shop at the Nova festival.”
She added that the country’s trance community has a history rooted in trauma. It blossomed, she said, to reflect “true love” after the assassination of Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin in 1995.
“Going to many shivas is the first time I learned where my friends live and what they do,” she said. “These details are not relevant for the trance community, which is about complete freedom.”
A group of visitors last week represented Israel’s Masorti movement, the country’s version of Conservative Judaism, and included several American rabbis who led prayers at the site. Since their visit, the 5 p.m. afternoon prayer service has become a part of the daily ritual at the camp.
“Last Tuesday, I was invited to come be with the Masorti movement, to come here and listen to people,” said Israeli-American Rabbi Amichai Lau-Lavie, who leads Lab/Shul in New York and was part of the group that visited on Tuesday. “We created a circle and sang songs and did a prayer for the healing and captives — then we invited anyone who wanted to do Mincha to join.”
The prayer service was one stop on Lau-Lavie’s extended trip around the country to provide pastoral care for traumatized Israelis, including a visit to a hotel where members of his own family have relocated after their kibbutz was attacked on Oct. 7.
As painful as the current moment is, Lau-Lavie said Jews throughout history have joined together to call for the return of captives.
“People need to stand together and in the absence of words, or singing, people need to know that they are not alone” he said. “The fact that we have in our archive a 2,000-year-old prayer for the release of captives shows that we have been here before.”
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Israel Declares Start of Gaza Ground Operations, No Progress Seen in Talks
Palestinians inspect the damage at the site of an Israeli strike on a tent camp sheltering displaced people, in Khan Younis, southern Gaza Strip, May 18, 2025. Photo: REUTERS/Hatem Khaled
The Israeli military said on Sunday it had begun “extensive ground operations” in northern and southern Gaza, stepping up a new campaign in the enclave.
Israel made its announcement after sources on both sides said there had been no progress in a new round of indirect talks between Israel and the Palestinian terrorist group Hamas in Qatar.
The office of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said the latest Doha talks included discussions on a truce and hostage deal as well as a proposal to end the war in return for the exile of Hamas militants and the demilitarization of the enclave – terms Hamas has previously rejected.
The substance of the statement was in line with previous declarations from Israel, but the timing, as negotiators meet, offered some prospect of flexibility in Israel’s position. A senior Israeli official said there had been no progress in the talks so far.
Israel’s military said it conducted a preliminary wave of strikes on more than 670 Hamas targets in Gaza over the past week to support its ground operation, dubbed “Gideon’s Chariots.”
It said it killed dozens of Hamas fighters. Palestinian health authorities say hundreds of people have been killed including many women and children.
Asked about the Doha talks, a Hamas official told Reuters: “Israel’s position remains unchanged, they want to release the prisoners (hostages) without a commitment to end the war.”
He reiterated that Hamas was proposing releasing all Israeli hostages in return for an end to the war, the pull-out of Israeli troops, an end to a blockade on aid for Gaza, and the release of Palestinian prisoners.
Israel’s declared goal in Gaza is the elimination of the military and governmental capabilities of Hamas, which attacked Israeli communities on October 7, 2023, killing about 1,200 people and seizing about 250 hostages.
The Israeli military campaign has devastated the enclave, pushing nearly all residents from their homes and killing more than 53,000 people, according to Gaza health authorities.
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Pope Leo Urges Unity for Divided Church, Vows Not To Be ‘Autocrat’
Pope Leo XIV waves to the faithful from the popemobile ahead of his inaugural Mass in Saint Peter’s Square, at the Vatican, May 18, 2025. Photo: REUTERS/Alessandro Garofalo
Pope Leo XIV formally began his reign on Sunday by reaching out to conservatives who felt orphaned under his predecessor, calling for unity, vowing to preserve the Catholic Church’s heritage and not rule like “an autocrat.”
After a first ride in the popemobile through an estimated crowd of up to 200,000 in St. Peter’s Square and surrounding streets, Leo was officially installed as the 267th pontiff of the Roman Catholic Church at an outdoor Mass.
Well-wishers waved US and Peruvian flags, with people from both countries claiming him as the first pope from their nations. Born in Chicago, the 69-year-old pontiff spent many years as a missionary in Peru and also has Peruvian citizenship.
Robert Prevost, a relative unknown on the world stage who only became a cardinal two years ago, was elected pope on May 8 after a short conclave of cardinals that lasted barely 24 hours.
He succeeded Francis, an Argentine, who died on April 21 after leading the Church for 12 often turbulent years during which he battled with traditionalists and championed the poor and marginalized.
In his sermon, read in fluent Italian, Leo said that as leader of the world’s 1.4 billion Roman Catholics, he would continue Francis’ legacy on social issues such as combating poverty and protecting the environment.
He vowed to face up to “the questions, concerns and challenges of today’s world” and, in a nod to conservatives, he promised to preserve “the rich heritage of the Christian faith,” repeatedly calling for unity.
Crowds chanted “Viva il Papa” (Long Live the Pope) and “Papa Leone,” his name in Italian, as he waved from the open-topped popemobile ahead of his inaugural Mass, which was attended by dozens of world leaders.
US Vice President JD Vance, a Catholic convert who clashed with Francis over the White House’s hardline immigration policies, led a US delegation alongside Secretary of State Marco Rubio, who is also Catholic.
Vance briefly shook hands with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky at the start of the ceremony. The two men last met in February in the White House, when they clashed fiercely in front of the world’s media.
Zelensky and Leo were to have a private meeting later on Sunday, while Vance was expected to see the pope on Monday.
In a brief appeal at the end of the Mass, Leo addressed several global conflicts. He said Ukraine was being “martyred,” a phrase often used by Francis, and called for a “just and lasting peace” there.
He also mentioned the humanitarian situation in Gaza, saying people in the Palestinian enclave were being “reduced to starvation.”
Among those in the crowds on Sunday were many pilgrims from the US and Peru.
Dominic Venditti, from Seattle, said he was “extremely excited” by the new pope. “I like how emotional and kind he is,” he said. “I love his background.”
APPEAL FOR UNITY
Since becoming pope, Leo has already signaled some key priorities for his papacy, including a warning about the dangers posed by artificial intelligence and the importance of bringing peace to the world and to the Church itself.
Francis’ papacy left a divided Church, with conservatives accusing him of sowing confusion, particularly with his extemporaneous remarks on issues of sexual morality such as same-sex unions.
Saying he was taking up his mission “with fear and trembling,” Leo used the words “unity” or “united” seven times on Sunday and the word “harmony” four times.
“It is never a question of capturing others by force, by religious propaganda or by means of power. Instead, it is always and only a question of loving, as Jesus did,” he said, in apparent reference to a war of words between Catholics who define themselves as conservative or progressive.
Conservatives also accused Francis of ruling in a heavy-handed way and lamented that he belittled their concerns and did not consult widely before making decisions.
Referring to St. Peter, the 1st century Christian apostle from whom popes derive their authority, Leo said: “Peter must shepherd the flock without ever yielding to the temptation to be an autocrat, lording it over those entrusted to him. On the contrary, he is called to serve the faith of his brothers and sisters, and to walk alongside them.”
Many world leaders attended the ceremony, including the presidents of Israel, Peru and Nigeria, the prime ministers of Italy, Canada and Australia, German Chancellor Friedrich Merz and European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen.
European royals also took their place in the VIP seats near the main altar, including Spanish King Felipe and Queen Letizia.
Leo shook many of their hands at the end of the ceremony, and hugged his brother Louis, who had traveled from Florida.
As part of the ceremony, Leo received two symbolic items: a liturgical vestment known as a pallium, a sash of lambswool representing his role as a shepherd, and the “fisherman’s ring,” recalling St. Peter, who was a fisherman.
The ceremonial gold signet ring is specially cast for each new pope and can be used by Leo to seal documents, although this purpose has fallen out of use in modern times.
It shows St. Peter holding the keys to Heaven and will be broken after his death or resignation.
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The ‘Nakba’ Is Not Our Problem
Pro-Palestinian demonstrators during a protest against Israel to mark the 77th anniversary of the “Nakba” or catastrophe, in Berlin, Germany, May 15, 2025. REUTERS/Axel Schmidt
JNS.org – A smattering of Arabic words has entered the English language in recent years, the direct result of more than a century of conflict between the Zionist movement and Arab regimes determined to prevent the Jews from exercising self-determination in their historic homeland.
These words include fedayeen, which refers to the armed Palestinian factions; intifada, which denotes successive violent Palestinian uprisings against Israel; and naksa, which pertains to the defeat sustained by the Arab armies in their failed bid to destroy Israel during the June 1967 war.
At the top of this list, however, is nakba, the word in Arabic for “disaster” or “catastrophe.” The emergence of the Palestinian refugee question following Israel’s 1948-49 War of Independence is now widely described as “The Nakba,” and the term has become a stick wielded by anti-Zionists to beat Israel and, increasingly, Jews outside.
Last Thursday, a date which the U.N. General Assembly has named for an annual “Nakba Day,” workers at a cluster of Jewish-owned businesses in the English city of Manchester arrived at the building housing their offices to find that it had been badly vandalized overnight. The front of the building, located in a neighborhood with a significant Jewish community, was splattered with red paint. An external wall displayed the crudely painted words “Happy Nakba Day.”
The culprits were a group called Palestine Action, a pro-Hamas collective of activists whose sole mission is to intimidate the Jewish community in the United Kingdom in much the same way as Sir Oswald Mosley’s British Union of Fascists did back in the 1930s. Its equivalents in the United States are groups like Within Our Lifetime and Students for Justice in Palestine, who have shown themselves equally enthused when it comes to intimidating Jewish communities by conducting loud, sometimes violent, demonstrations outside synagogues and other communal facilities, all too frequently showering Jews with the kind of abuse that was once the preserve of neo-Nazis. These thugs, cosplaying with keffiyehs instead of swastika armbands, can reasonably be described as the neo-neo-Nazis.
The overarching point here is that ideological constructs like nakba play a key role in enabling the intimidation they practice. It allows them to diminish the historic victimhood of the Jews, born of centuries of stateless disempowerment, with dimwitted formulas equating the nakba with the Nazi Holocaust. It also enables them to camouflage hate speech and hate crimes as human-rights advocacy—a key reason why law enforcement, in the United States as well as in Canada, Australia and most of Europe, has been found sorely wanting when it comes to dealing with the surge of antisemitism globally.
Part of the response needs to be legislative. That means clamping down on both sides of the Atlantic on groups that glorify designated terrorist organizations by preventing them from fundraising; policing their access to social media; and restricting their demonstrations to static events in a specific location with a predetermined limit on attendees, rather than a march that anyone can join, along with an outright ban on any such events in the environs of Jewish community buildings.
These are not independent civil society organizations, as they pretend to be, but rather extensions of terrorist organizations like Hamas and—in the case of Samidoun, another group describing itself as a “solidarity” organization—the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine. If we cannot ban them outright, we need to contain them much more effectively. We can start by framing the issue as a national security challenge and worry less about their “freedom of speech.”
But this is also a fight that takes us into the realm of ideas and arguments. We need to stop thinking about the nakba as a Palestinian narrative of pain deserving of empathy by exposing it for what it is—another tool in the arsenal of groups whose goal is to bring about the elimination of Israel as a Jewish state.
When it was originally introduced in the late 1940s, the word nakba had nothing to do with the plight of the Palestinian refugees or their dubious claim to be the uninterrupted, indigenous inhabitants of a land seized by dispossessing foreign colonists. Popularized by the late Syrian writer Constantine Zureik in a 1948 book titled The Meaning of Disaster, the nakba described therein was, as the Israeli scholar Shany Mor has crisply pointed out, simply “the failure of the Arabs to defeat the Jews.”
Zureik was agonized by this defeat, calling it “one of the harshest of the trials and tribulations with which the Arabs have been inflicted throughout their long history.” His story is fundamentally a story of national humiliation and wounded pride. Yet there is absolutely no reason why Jews should be remotely troubled by the neurosis it projects. Their defeat was our victory and our liberation, and we should unreservedly rejoice in that fact.
The only aspect of the nakba that we should worry about is the impact it has on us as a community, as well as on the status of Israel as a sovereign member of the international society of states. As Mizrahi Jews know well (my own family among them), the nakba assembled in Zureik’s imagination really was a “catastrophe”— for us. Resoundingly defeated on the battlefield by the superior courage and tactical nous of the nascent Israeli Defense Forces, the Arabs compensated by turning on the defenseless Jews in their midst. From Libya to Iraq, ancient and established Jewish communities were the victims of a cowardly, spiteful policy of expropriation, mob violence and expulsion.
The inheritors of that policy are the various groups that compose the Palestinian solidarity movement today. Apoplectic at the realization that they have been unable to dislodge the “Zionists”—and knowing now that the main consequence of the Oct. 7, 2023 pogrom in Israel has been the destruction of Gaza—they, too, have turned on the Jews in their midst.
They have done so with one major advantage that the original neo-Nazis never had: sympathy and endorsement from academics, celebrities, politicians and even the United Nations. Indeed, the world body hosted a two-day seminar on “Ending the Nakba” at its New York headquarters at the same time that pro-Hamas fanatics were causing havoc just a few blocks downtown. Even so, we should take heart at the knowledge that nakba is not so much a symbol of resistance as it is defeat. Just as the rejectionists and eliminationists have lost previous wars through a combination of political stupidity, diplomatic ineptitude and military flimsiness, so, too, can they lose this one.
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