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Senators describe ‘optimism’ after Middle East tour, leaving questions on Israel’s extremist leaders unanswered
WASHINGTON (JTA) — Judging by her response to a question at a press briefing on Tuesday, Jackie Rosen had likely read the headlines involving Israel she had made over the past week. She was prepared to deflect.
Had she really nixed meetings with two government ministers in Israel’s extremist Religious Zionist bloc, as Axios had reported?
“Let’s focus on what these historic agreements mean,” the Nevada Democrat said, referring to the Abraham Accords, the 2020 normalization agreements with multiple Arab countries that edged Israel closer to its dream of peaceful coexistence with its neighbors. Rosen and six other U.S. senators last week toured four of the five signatories to the accords, including Israel — where Bezalel Smotrich and Itamar Ben-Gvir, who have incurred international criticism, currently hold powerful positions in Benjamin Netanyahu’s coalition.
“The real optimism between these countries for partnerships, for people to people relationships, things that benefit their people on the ground, like markets … energy, agriculture technology, and, just coming out of the global pandemic, healthcare,” Rosen added.
For all their optimism on Tuesday, however, the senators acknowledged, in guarded language, that plans by Smotrich to annex territories in the West Bank and Ben-Gvir’s provocative actions on Jerusalem’s Temple Mount could not only undercut the aim of their tour — to seek ways to expand the accords to other countries — but could also scuttle them entirely.
“We were very clear when we spoke with Prime Minister Netanyahu that it is important that they would maintain the status quo and they not do anything that would impede the progress of the Abraham accords and a negotiated two-state solution,” Rosen said. “I believe we were very clear.”
The United Arab Emirates threatened to pull out of the accords before they were formally launched in the summer of 2020, when Netanyahu sought then to advance partial annexation. Netanyahu retreated and the accords went ahead.
The only senator who spoke at length about the most fragile element of the effort — how to extend the peacemaking to the Palestinians — was Mark Kelly, an Arizona Democrat.
“A lot of us talked about the optimism, but there are also a lot of risks,” Kelly said. “The visit that we had with the Palestinian Authority highlighted to me that there is a lot more work to do, not just with the Abraham Accords, but the work needed to get to a resolution — the plight of the Palestinians in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, a two-state solution.”
The Palestinian Authority declined to be part of the Abraham Accords process, saying the deal, brokered under former President Donald Trump, ignores Palestinian national aspirations. The Biden administration hopes to bring the Palestinians in through economic incentives and by keeping the two-state outcome alive, although Netanyahu and his government have renounced it.
Rosen, who says she got her political chops as a synagogue president in suburban Las Vegas, never answered the question about whether she would have met with Smotrich, the finance minister who has a stake in the trade side of the accords, if he had asked for a meeting.
Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand, a New York Democrat, ran interference for Rosen.
“I would just add that Prime Minister Netanyahu was very clear that he spoke for his government, and that the meeting we had with him was the most important meeting to hear — what his strategy was and why the Abraham Accords was such a huge opportunity,” Gillibrand said.
The group of senators — which also included Dan Sullivan, an Alaska Republican; Ted Budd, a North Carolina Republican; and Michael Bennet, a Colorado Democrat — toured Bahrain, the United Arab Emirates, Morocco and Israel as well as the Palestinian areas. They did not tour Sudan, which is a party to the accords, but is currently in turmoil.
They described witnessing the benefits of the accords, but in a curiously one-sided way — noting the masses of Israeli tourists who have visited the UAE, Bahrain and Morocco, but not mentioning that there was little to no movement in the other direction.
Pressed by a reporter, the senators acknowledged that enthusiasm for the accords in the Arab countries was for now confined to the elites, and that support for the deals has yet to trickle own to the everyday citizen level.
“We’re outsiders stepping in, we’re meeting with leaders, we’re meeting with key people. We’re not interacting with everyone on the streets and doing polling in the streets,” said Sen. James Lankford, a Republican from Oklahoma.
Gillibrand said leaders admitted that they had to make the case for normalization with Israel to their peoples.
“Every head of state that we spoke to said ‘This is where I’m leading my people. I know it’s going to take time for people to understand why and why it’s so important, but I’m doing what it takes to lead my people for a safer security region, for greater economic ties, so that actually benefits [the people] over time’,’” she said. She described changes in education that the governments introduced to promote better understanding of Jews and others.
There was also talk of the benefits the senators hoped the accords would bring stateside. The senators from western states, including Kelly, Bennet and Rosen, spoke about Israeli and Emirati drought expertise they hoped to put to use at home.
“We hope to learn a lot about the work that’s being done to try to deal with drought and deal with the shortage of water in the region. We’re facing many similar challenges in the Rocky Mountain West,” Bennet said.
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This Israeli filmmaker harshly criticizes his country. Pro-Palestinian activists boycotted him anyway
(JTA) — Earlier this year Nadav Lapid, the award-winning Israeli dissident filmmaker, traveled with his son to Marseille for a screening of his latest film. He fell in love.
“This city reminded me of Tel Aviv, in a way, with the beach and everything,” he recounted Wednesday to the Jewish Telegraphic Agency — referring to the city he no longer lives in, having built a career with movies that take sharp aim at what he calls the “moral abyss” of Israeli society. When a Marseille film festival then invited him to serve on its jury for its upcoming installment in July, he readily accepted.
Then the boycotts started. Last month around a dozen pro-Palestinian filmmakers threatened to pull out of the upcoming Marseille International Film Festival over Lapid’s planned participation because, they said, he had accepted funding from the Israeli government to support his work. (Lapid’s movies, including his latest, have received funding from Israel’s film fund.) Following this, according to the accounts of both Lapid and the festival’s director, the festival had second thoughts about him serving on the jury.
While the festival offered him the opportunity to participate in a public master class instead, Lapid said, the protesters hadn’t relented: “It’s not enough for these people.”
Frustrated, the director earlier this week decided to pull out of the festival altogether. He’s not happy about it.
“To make people like myself the enemy when the actual state of things is so terrible, it’s insanity. It’s stupidity,” he told JTA. “For them, the highest triumph of the Palestinian cause is if they will cancel my master class in Marseille? I think it’s pathetic.”
Lapid has received a groundswell of support this week: Natalie Portman and hundreds of other film-industry figures have signed open letters criticizing the boycotts against him. While he’s uncomfortable with being in the spotlight for reasons unrelated to his films, Lapid said he’s pleased with this outcome.
“You could have composed an unbelievable cinematic program from only the filmmakers that texted me during the last hour,” he said.
Even so, the filmmaker says, he’s now unsure if he is still welcome in France as a dissident Israeli.
“I asked myself whether they would like me to stop doing movies, or to leave France,” he told JTA. Elsewhere, he’s described himself as “homeless.”
It’s the latest unspooling of painful dynamics around artistic boycotts of artists and institutions seen by the left as normalizing Israel. Last month another French cultural figure, the Jewish comics artist Joann Sfar (“The Rabbi’s Cat”), faced calls to boycott his presence at a literary festival, also in Marseille. In its justification, a pro-Palestinian artist collective, pushing an Instagram post reading “Zionists out of our city,” cited Sfar’s signing of an open letter last year that argued a Palestinian state should not be recognized unless Hamas could be disarmed and Gaza’s Israeli hostages freed.
In recent months, in addition to broader boycotts of the Israeli film and TV industry, several leading cultural critics of Israel — both Jewish and not — have been targeted as well. Those include bestselling author Sally Rooney for publishing a Hebrew-language translation of her novel with a left-wing Israeli publisher (some prominent activists accused her of exploiting a “loophole” in the Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions movement against Israel); Jewish Currents editor Peter Beinart for speaking at Tel Aviv University; and Jewish author Joshua Leifer for associating with a “Zionist” rabbi at a book event.
In Lapid’s case, the group organizing against him, La Palestine Sauvera Le Cinéma, argued that “Nadav Lapid is not being targeted because of his Israeli nationality.”
Instead, the collective asserted, their objection was due to Lapid having accepted funding from Israel to complete his latest film, “Yes!”; the fact that the film premiered at the Cannes Film Festival as an Israeli co-production and competed for Israel’s highest film awards; and Lapid’s past participation in an Israeli film festival in Paris.
“The cultural boycott does not target artists because of their nationality or personal opinions,” the filmmakers wrote, in French, in a blog post. “What is at issue here is the reality of their integration into the institutional and political structures of the Israeli state.”
For Lapid, whose new movie follows Israeli musicians hired to write an openly genocidal post-Oct. 7 anthem for their nation, this argument doesn’t hold water. Lapid has long been critical of cultural boycotts, including BDS. Such measures, he told JTA, are a form of “dogmatic Stalinism” and don’t “move one piece of sand” in Israel.
“I became a test case of purity,” he mused.
Others agree. More than 350 entertainment industry figures signed the first of two open letters in the French newspaper Le Monde backing him, which was published Sunday.
“Inviting an artist to a festival does not make them a cultural ambassador,” the letter reads, in French, decrying a “campaign of intimidation” against Lapid while also noting what the signatories said was the “genocidal logic” of Israel’s campaign in Gaza.
Among this letter’s signatories were Justine Triet and Arthur Harari, the Oscar-winning team behind “Anatomy of a Fall”; Harari is Jewish and a critic of Israel himself. Arnaud Desplechin, a French filmmaker who often features Jewish characters in his work, also signed. Other signers include acclaimed directors Claire Denis, Mati Diop, and Kleber Mendonça Filho; Romanian director Radu Jude, whose films have explored his country’s complicity in the Holocaust; and Palestinian historian Elias Sanbar.
A second open letter, published on Monday, calls the campaign against Lapid an “intellectual failure” and states, “No matter what crimes a state may commit, no one should be reduced to a passport.” It was signed by a smaller cohort of 10 names, including Portman; French-Jewish director Rebecca Zlotowski; and Oscar-winning filmmakers Jacques Audiard and Michel Hazanavicius.
Like Lapid, Portman — an Israeli-American actress who is one of the most prominent Jews in Hollywood — is a longtime critic of the Israeli government and opponent of the BDS movement.
Creative Community For Peace, a pro-Israel entertainment group, said Wednesday its members also oppose the boycott of Lapid, adding that Israel “funds, screens, and honors films that challenge its leaders, criticize its society, and engage openly with its most difficult debates.”
Unusually, the Marseille festival’s own director, Tsveta Dobreva, also signed one of the open letters in support of Lapid after she appeared to acquiesce to the earlier demands to pull him from the jury.
In an email, Dobreva told JTA her festival “fully supports Nadav Lapid,” saying that she had removed him from the jury out of concern he would be targeted at the event. She did not believe she had “agreed to the boycotters’ demands,” she said.
“Few festivals or cultural institutions in our days have the courage to extend invitations that may provoke controversy, and we stand with Nadav in believing that this form of self-censorship must be resisted, as it only contributes to the problem,” Dobreva wrote.
Lapid intends his next movie to be a follow-up to “Synonyms,” his 2019 film about an Israeli expat in Paris that won the top prize at the Berlin Film Festival. The Marseille festival is scheduled for July, but he says now he has no intention of going: “I’ll find other beaches.”
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Trump is imagining an Israel after Netanyahu. So are many Israelis. Netanyahu isn’t biting.
(JTA) — The party of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has rejected speculation that he might not run in Israel’s election this fall, following an offhand comment by U.S. President Donald Trump.
On Tuesday, ABC correspondent Jonathan Karl tweeted that Trump had told him he was unsure if Netanyahu wanted to press forward in the elections.
“He’s had an amazing career,” Trump said, according to Karl. “Does he want to continue? Because, you know, he’s a wartime prime minister. We will very shortly win the war one way or the other, and you know he’s a wartime prime minister.”
Netanyahu has been prime minister for more than 15 of the last 17 years, losing power only briefly in 2021 and 2022. Israel’s current wars began on Oct. 7, 2023, when Hamas attacked Israel, triggering regional conflict that has grown to include a joint U.S.-Israeli war with Iran.
Trump’s reported comments left some wondering whether he knew something they did not, amid polling suggesting that Netanyahu will struggle to secure enough votes to put together a governing coalition after elections this fall. Could Trump know that Netanyahu is considering suspending his already-active campaign? Or could Trump, who this week told the BBC that Netanyahu does anything the U.S. president tells him to, be planning to order his Israeli counterpart to stand down amid growing anti-Israel sentiment in the United States?
Netanyahu’s Likud party soon demolished the idea. “Prime Minister Netanyahu will run in the upcoming elections — and with God’s help, he will win,” the party posted Wednesday on X.
Only a minority of Israelis were primed to appreciate the declaration, according to a poll released this week by the Israel Democracy Institute. It found that 61% of Israelis, including 27% of Likud members, do not want to see Netanyahu run again this fall. The same proportion said they want to see Israel adopt a two-term limit for prime ministers in the future.
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Spain reports 86% rise in antisemitic incidents, as interior minister takes aim at ‘xenophobia’
(JTA) — Antisemitic offenses in Spain rose 86% last year amid the country’s highest total hate incidents on record, according to a report from the Spanish government.
Jews were targeted in 69 hate crimes and incidents in 2025, up from 37 in 2024, according to a report released last week by Spain’s Interior Ministry. Islamophobic attacks also increased from 15 to 35 incidents.
Interior Minister Fernando Grande-Marlaska said in a video posted on Facebook that his office documented 2,417 total hate incidents last year, the highest figure since it began recording in 2014. Spain is home to about 70,000 Jews, according to the Federation of Jewish Communities of Spain.
The ministry defined antisemitism as any act of hatred, violence or discrimination directed against Jews or “nationals of the State of Israel.”
Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez has become one of Europe’s sharpest critics of Israel and its military action in Gaza, which he says constitutes genocide. Spain imposed a total arms embargo on Israel in 2025 and permanently withdrew its ambassador in March, following Israel’s withdrawal of its ambassador to Spain in 2024.
The Interior Ministry said hate crimes motivated by racism and xenophobia accounted for the largest number of offenses at 934. Grande-Marlaska called out “public officials” for rhetoric and policies that he said inflamed xenophobic sentiment.
Grande-Marlaska released his report as Spain’s far-right, anti-immigration Vox party advocates for a “national priority” policy that favors Spaniards over others in access to public aid and benefits, such as subsidized housing and healthcare. Vox recently struck deals with the conservative People’s Party to insert the “national priority” clause into coalition agreements in the regions of Extremadura, Aragón and Castile and León.
“The national priority is xenophobia,” Grande-Marlaska said. “It is institutionalized xenophobia, protected and promoted by public officials who legitimize and amplify hate speech that, in the past, would have been condemned when it entered the public sphere.”
Vox is strongly supportive of Israel, whose government has allied with the party despite a history of neo-Nazis in its ranks. Vox leader Santiago Abascal visited Israel in 2024 to show his support for Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu after Sánchez recognized a Palestinian state.
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