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The JTA conversation: Pogrom? Terrorism? What do we call what happened in Huwara?
(JTA) — On Sunday, after a Palestinian gunman shot and killed two Israeli brothers in the West Bank, Jewish settlers rioted in the nearby Palestinian town of Huwara, burning cars and buildings. A Palestinian was killed and dozens were injured.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu condemned the Jewish rioters for “taking the law in their own hands,” but many observers — including the top Israeli general in the West Bank and Abraham Foxman, director emeritus of the the Anti-Defamation League — used stronger language, calling the attacks a “pogrom.”
The use of the word, which most famously refers to a wave of anti-Jewish violence in the Russian empire beginning in the late 19th century, in turn became the subject of debate. Does using “pogrom” co-opt Jewish history unfairly and inaccurately by suggesting Jews are no better than their historical persecutors? Does avoiding the term mean Israel and its supporters are not taking sufficient responsibility for the actions of its Jewish citizens?
The debate is not just about language, but about controlling the narrative. Political speech can minimize or exaggerate events, put them in their proper context or distort them in ways that, per George Orwell, can “corrupt thought.”
We asked historians, linguists and activists to consider the word pogrom, and asked them what politicians, journalists and everyday people should call what happened at Huwara. Their responses are below.
Sidestepping the real issue
Dr. Jeffrey Shandler
Distinguished Professor, Department of Jewish Studies, Rutgers University
The meanings of the word “pogrom” in different languages are key here. In Russian, it means a massacre or raid, as it does in Yiddish; in neither language is it understood as specifically about violence against Jews. The Oxford English Dictionary concurs that pogrom means an “organized massacre… of any body or class,” but notes that, in the English-language press, it was first used mostly to refer to anti-Jewish attacks in Russia, citing examples from 1905-1906.
Therefore, though the association of pogrom with violence targeting Jews is widely familiar, its meaning is broader.
That said, because of English speakers’ widely familiar association of the term with Jews as victims, to use pogrom to describe violence perpetrated by Jews is provocative. As to whether it is appropriate to refer to recent attacks by Jewish settlers on Palestinians, it seems to me that this question sidesteps the more important question of whether the actions being called pogroms are appropriate.
Call it what it is: “settler terrorism”
Sara Yael Hirschhorn
’22-’23 Research Fellow at the Center for Antisemitism Research at the ADL, and author, “City on a Hilltop: American Jews and the Israeli Settler Movement”
Let me say first with a loud and clear conscience: What happened in Huwara was abhorrent, immoral, and unconscionable and certainly was not committed in my name.
But to paraphrase Raymond Carver’s famous formulation: How do we talk about it when we talk about Huwara? What kind of descriptive and analytical framework can adequately and contextually interpret that horrific event?
The shorthand of choice seems to be “pogrom” — but it isn’t clear that all who deploy the term are signifying the same thing. For some, pogrom is a synonym for pillage, rampage, fire, property damage and violence in the streets — a one-word general summary of brutal acts. For others, pogrom refers to vigilante justice, an abbreviated story of the non-state or non-institutional actors and their motivations.
More specifically, however, pogrom is seemingly being mobilized as a metaphor to Jewish history, juxtaposing the Jewish victims of yesterday to the Jewish-Israeli perpetrators of today, an implicit analogy to the prelude to the Shoah, recasting Zionists as organized bands of genocidaires (with or without regime sponsorship) like the Cossacks, the Nationalist Fronts or even the Einsatzgruppen. Some would use the word to incorporate all three meanings (and more).
As a historian, I am troubled by the haphazard and harmful use of terms that are attached to a specific time and place — such as the thousand-year history of Jews in the Rhinelands and Eastern Europe, with many layers of imperial, national, local, economic and religious forces that precipitated these events — in such an ahistorical manner. Nor do I find the parallels between Zionists and Nazis to be historically careful (if deliberately offensive) — the State of Israel is committing crimes in the West Bank, but not a genocide. The equivalence also all too easily and incorrectly grafts tropes of racism and white supremacy drawn from American history into the West Bank’s soil.
So what to say about Huwara? Israel — for reasons both political and lexiconographical — has failed to consistently adopt a term for such attacks. (Often the euphemism of “errant weeds” who are “taking matters into their own hands” is the choice of Knesset politicians.) To my mind, the best term is “settler terrorism,” which puts Jewish-Israeli acts on par with Palestinian terrorism. It should also mean that these actions merit the same consequences under the occupation like trial, imprisonment, home demolition and other deterrents enforced against all those who choose the path of violence.
Last but not least, a pogrom was historically an unpunished crime against humanity that led only to war and annihilation. Don’t we aspire for more in Israel/Palestine?
Palestinians call it “ethnic cleansing”
Ibrahim Eid Dalalsha
Director, Horizon Center for Political Studies and Media Outreach, Ramallah, and member of Israel Policy Forum’s Critical Neighbors task force
Palestinians generally view and describe what happened during Sunday’s Huwara attacks as “racist hate crimes seeking to destroy and dispossess the Palestinian people of their homes and properties.” While no specific term has been used to describe these attacks, it was likened to the barbaric and savage invasion of Baghdad by Hulagu, the 13th-century Mongol commander.
Palestinian intellectuals tend to use “ethnic cleansing,” savage and barbaric ethnically motivated violence against innocent civilians, as another way of referring to these attacks. When such events include killing, Palestinian politicians and intellectuals tend to use the term massacre, or “majzara,” to underline the irrational and indiscriminate violence against defenseless civilians. I don’t think the term “pogrom” and its historic connotation are widely known to most people here. From a Palestinian perspective, using such terms, including “Holocaust,” is not considered a mistake. In fact, even using “Holocaust“ to describe violence against Palestinian civilians in and around 1948 was not considered a mistake until very recently when it caused such a saga for Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas in Germany.
View of cars burned by Jewish settlers during riots in Huwara, in the West Bank, near Nablus, Feb. 27, 2023. (Nasser Ishtayeh/Flash90)
In the name of historical accuracy
Rukhl Schaechter
Yiddish Editor, The Forward
The recent attacks by Israeli settlers on Palestinians in Huwara are abhorrent. I commend those in Israel calling them peulot teror, “actions of terror,” and I trust that the perpetrators will be brought to justice. But these riots were not pogroms.
The word pogrom refers to one of the many violent riots and subsequent massacres of Jews in Eastern Europe between the 17th and 20th centuries. These attacks were committed by local non-Jewish, often peasant populations. They were instigated by rabble-rousers like Bogdan Chmielnicki, who led a Cossack and peasant uprising against Polish rule in Ukraine in 1648 and ended up destroying hundreds of Jewish communities. According to eyewitnesses, the attackers also committed atrocities on pregnant women.
Note that the massacres of Jews carried out by the Nazis, and the murders of Armenians by the Turkish government at the turn of the 20th century — as horrific as they were — were never called pogroms because in both cases, there was a government behind it. In the name of historic accuracy, let’s continue to use the word pogrom solely for mob attacks on and massacres of Jews.
When the Poles banned “pogrom”
Samuel D. Kassow
Professor of History, Trinity College, Hartford, Connecticut
In Poland in the late 1930s, altercations between a Jew and a Pole sometimes ended with either the Jew or the Pole getting badly hurt or even killed. When the victim was a Pole, mobs of Poles rampaged through Jewish neighborhoods smashing windows, looting shops and often beating or even killing Jews. Poles often held Jews collectively responsible for the death of one of their own. This happened in Przytyk, Minsk-Mazowieck, Grodno and other places. Jews called these riots “pogroms,” which they were. But the Polish government banned use of the term in the press. After all, “pogrom” was a Russian word, and “pogroms” happened only in a place characterized by barbarism and ignorance. Since Poland was not Russia, and since Poles were eminently civilized, logically speaking, pogroms simply did not take place in Poland. What happened in these towns were to be called “excesses” (zajscia). But certainly not pogroms!
I take it that since we Jews are so civilized, we too are incapable of pogroms. So should we label what these settlers did “‘excesses”? Or perhaps we should take a deep breath and call them pogroms?
A Jewish, but not exclusive, history
Henry Abramson
Historian
The word “pogrom” is rooted in time and place, although the type of violence it describes is as old as human history. It is a Russian word, but it entered the English language in the late 19th century through the medium of Yiddish-speakers, outraged at the wave of antisemitic disturbances that surged under rule of the last tsar of the Russian Empire, Nicholas II. Russians themselves used a variety of words for the ugly phenomenon, with translations like “riot” or “persecution,” but the term “pogrom” proved the most evocative: the Slavic prefix “po” suggests a directed attack, and the root “grom” is the word for “thunder.” A pogrom, therefore, meant a focused point where a great deal of energy was dissipated in a single dramatic act of violence.
The focused point, in the context of that dark history, was the civilian Jewish population in the tiny shtetls that dotted the Pale of Settlement. In this regard the word could be used to encompass attacks on Jewish populations from as long ago as the year 38 in Alexandria, Egypt. It does not, however, have any specific designation to indicate that Jews are the victims.
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The post The JTA conversation: Pogrom? Terrorism? What do we call what happened in Huwara? appeared first on Jewish Telegraphic Agency.
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Israel Exposes Iranian Terror Network as IRGC-Linked Cells Expand Attacks Across Europe
Charred remains of ambulances belonging to Hatzola, a Jewish community organization, which were set on fire in an incident that the police say is being treated as an antisemitic hate crime, in northwest London, Britain, March 23, 2026. Photo: REUTERS/Hannah McKay
Israel has exposed a far-reaching Iranian-backed terrorist network targeting Israeli officials and overseas assets, as the Islamist regime intensifies a widening campaign of attacks against Jewish and Israeli targets across Europe through proxy groups.
On Monday, Israel’s foreign intelligence agency the Mossad, the Israel Defense Forces, and the country’s domestic security agency the Shin Bet released a joint statement confirming that authorities had uncovered and dismantled an Iranian-backed network after several of its members were arrested in Azerbaijan last month.
Following the onset of the US-Israeli war against Iran, the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), the regime’s elite military force responsible for overseas terrorist operations and the coordination of proxy groups, has escalated efforts to establish cells abroad and carry out attacks, widening what officials describe as a sustained campaign of destabilization beyond the Middle East.
According to Israeli intelligence, members of the cell had smuggled explosive drones into Azerbaijan while gathering intelligence on potential targets under direct instructions from Iranian operatives as part of an organized effort to lay the groundwork for planned attacks.
With the arrest of the cell’s members, authorities were able to expose the broader terrorist network and its chain of command, including several senior operatives who were later killed during the US-Israeli campaign against Iran that began on Feb. 28.
Among those killed was Rahman Moqadam, head of the Special Operations Division within IRGC intelligence and the senior commander overseeing the network.
Moqadam allegedly recruited and trained operatives both inside and outside Iran to gather intelligence on Israeli political leaders, security officials, Israeli and Western military facilities, ports, and Israeli shipping routes worldwide.
Last month, Azerbaijan foiled a series of planned attacks linked to Iranian operatives on its territory, including plots targeting the Israeli embassy in Baku, a synagogue, and Jewish community leaders, as well as the Baku–Tbilisi–Ceyhan pipeline, which runs through Georgia and Turkey and supplies roughly a third of Israel’s oil imports.
Police arrested at least seven Azeri nationals in connection with the investigation.
At the time, government authorities said law enforcement “prevented terrorist acts and intelligence operations in Azerbaijan organized by Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC).”
According to Israeli security officials, Mahdi Yekeh-Dehghan was identified as the network’s regional commander in Azerbaijan after Turkish authorities arrested six suspects, including an Iranian national, in January during coordinated raids across five provinces on charges of political and military espionage for Iran.
Yekeh-Dehghan is said to have directed the cell’s operations, including efforts to smuggle explosive drones from Iran through Turkey to Cyprus and to collect intelligence on US forces at Incirlik Air Base in southern Turkey.
Since the start of the war, European governments have tightened domestic security amid mounting fears that Iran could, in retaliation, activate proxy networks across the continent against Israeli and Western interests.
But even with increased security and heightened intelligence monitoring, Europe has seen a string of attacks targeting Jewish and Israeli institutions, several of them claimed by Harakat Ashab al-Yamin al-Islamiya, a newly emerged Iran-linked terror organization.
Just in April, the group claimed responsibility for a wave of attacks across the UK, Germany, North Macedonia, and the Netherlands, many of them concentrated in London.
Since emerging in early March, it has taken credit for at least 15 attacks against Jewish and Western targets across Europe.
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University of Michigan regents race turns into Israel litmus test for Democrats
A Republican businesswoman from a well-known Jewish family who narrowly lost a bid for the University of Michigan Board of Regents in 2022 suggested on Monday that Democrats may have handed her a second chance by nominating a candidate who is facing backlash for past praise of Hezbollah.
In an interview, Lena Epstein said the choice creates a “clear contrast” in a race that could be shaped by campus antisemitism and wars in the Middle East.
The Michigan Democratic convention on Sunday nominated civil rights attorney Amir Makled to run for the eight-member board tasked with governing the state’s university in the general election over incumbent regent Jordan Acker, who is Jewish. Acker had drawn criticism from pro-Palestinian students and activists over the university’s response to protests following the Oct. 7, 2023, Hamas attack and the war in Gaza.
Makled, who legally represented some demonstrators and backed calls for divestment from Israel, has since faced scrutiny over past social media posts viewed as pro-Hezbollah and antisemitic. He called Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah a “martyr” after he was killed by Israeli strikes in 2024.
The controversy led the Service Employees International Union last week to rescind its endorsement of Makled. The posts were later deleted.
“Eyes are open, chills are going down people’s spines, terrified at the prospect of Makled representing their families at the University of Michigan Board of Regents,” said Epstein, a 2008 graduate of the University of Michigan’s Stephen M. Ross School of Business.
Epstein said she is now reaching out to Jewish Democrats who previously opposed her, framing the race as a nonpartisan effort to confront antisemitism and tensions over Israel on campus. Epstein lost her 2022 bid by just 0.7 percentage points in an election year when Democrats swept every statewide office. Democrats currently hold six seats on the regents board.
The Republican Party nominated Epstein last month alongside Michael Schostak, who is also Jewish and running for another open seat against incumbent Paul Brown. “When it comes to Israel and combating antisemitism on campus, there will be no greater regent than me,” Epstein said.
Epstein’s past controversies
Epstein is a third-generation owner and the chief executive of Vesco Oil Corporation, the business her grandfather Eugene Epstein founded in Southfield, Michigan, in 1947. Her mother’s family founded Winkelman’s department store in Detroit.
She is no stranger to controversy.
Epstein, who served as the Trump campaign co-chair in Michigan in 2016, made headlines after a country club her family had belonged to for generations canceled a scheduled fundraiser for her when she ran for Congress in 2018.
That year, days before she lost her bid for a U.S. House seat to Rep. Haley Stevens, who is now running in a Democratic primary for an open Senate seat, Epstein caused an uproar by inviting a Messianic rabbi to offer a prayer for the victims of the Pittsburgh Tree of Life synagogue massacre.
In 2023, Epstein faced scrutiny during her bid for chair of the Michigan Republican Party after saying she considered herself a “Jewish Messianic believer of Christ.” Mainstream Judaism does not accept Messianic Jews because they believe in the divinity of Christ and try to convert Jews to Christianity. Epstein later withdrew from the race.
In the interview on Monday, Epstein said she “never was” a Messianic Jew and apologized to anyone offended by it, calling it “nothing more than a blip.”
Epstein said she remains “very, very proud” of her Jewish identity and said she is actively involved in the community, including membership at Temple Beth El in Bloomfield Hills, a Reform congregation, where she said her eight-year-old daughter attends religious school, and participation in family milestones such as a recent bar mitzvah at Adat Shalom Synagogue, a Conservative congregation in Farmington Hills. She said she studies the Torah every Tuesday night with her mother and with a Chabad rabbi.
“I’m 100% Jewish,” she continued. “I apologize if any of that discussion offended anybody. But I definitely want to be very, very clear that my existence as a Jew, my love of Judaism, my commitment and passion for Judaism have never been stronger, and it’s been a lifelong pursuit.”
A test of Democrats’ Israel divide
Michigan is one of a few states in which voters play a direct role in choosing university overseers.
Makled’s nomination comes at a fraught moment for the Democratic Party, testing its coalition and approach to Israel policy amid the wars in Gaza and Iran. Michigan, home to the largest concentration of Arab Americans in the United States, was also the birthplace of the 2024 Uncommitted movement, which protested the Biden administration’s support for Israel in the war against Hamas that led more than 100,000 voters in Michigan to leave their primary ballots blank.
Anonymous text messages to state Democratic Party donors claimed that Acker, who met with Israeli President Isaac Herzog in January, would “put Israel first.” Acker’s home was vandalized in 2024 by pro-Palestinian protesters, some of whose homes were later raided by federal authorities.
Days before the convention, The Guardian reported that Acker had allegedly made “lewd” comments about a Democratic strategist in a private group chat. A lawyer for Acker said he had “doubts about the authenticity” of the evidence.
Makled is an ally of Abdul El-Sayed, a progressive U.S. Senate candidate from Michigan rising in the polls. El-Sayed, the son of Egyptian immigrants and a critic of Israel, faced backlash for appearing alongside streamer Hasan Piker, who has been accused of antisemitic rhetoric. In an interview with CNN aired Sunday, El-Sayed said that the Israeli government is “evil” like Hamas. “Killing tens of thousands of people makes you pretty damn evil,” El-Sayed said. “It’s not how evil is this one versus that one — Hamas: Evil, Israeli government: Evil. We can say both.”
Appearing at the El-Sayed campaign rally with Piker earlier this month, Makled told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency that he stood by his defense of the pro-Palestinian encampment while condemning the attack on Acker’s home.
At the Democratic convention on Sunday, Stevens, who is perceived as the preferred candidate of pro-Israel voters, was booed by delegates.
JTA contributed to this report.
The post University of Michigan regents race turns into Israel litmus test for Democrats appeared first on The Forward.
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Child Pregnancies Surge in Gaza Amid Reports of Hamas Fighters Demanding Sex From ‘Wives of Martyrs’ for Food
Hamas gunmen stand guard on the day that hostages held in Gaza since the deadly Oct. 7, 2023, attack, are handed over to the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC), as part of a ceasefire and hostages-prisoners swap deal between Hamas and Israel, in Khan Younis, southern Gaza Strip, Oct. 13, 2025. Photo: REUTERS/Ramadan Abed
The sexual depravity that Hamas proudly broadcast to the world during its Oct. 7, 2023, rampage across southern Israel has now show up in Gaza, with video testimonies emerging of pervasive abuse, coercion for food, and an increase in both child marriages and child pregnancies.
In a new bombshell report, the Daily Mail presented findings from both the United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA) into rising child marriages and an anonymous journalist at Jusoor News who filmed Gaza residents reporting on the exploitation of women.
According to the UNFPA, while pre-war numbers of child brides fell to 11 percent in 2022, a decrease from 26 percent in 2009, marriage records from 2025 showed that at least 400 girls between 14 and 16 had become wives. This number likely only counts a fraction of the total as many such religious ceremonies to theologically justify child abuse go unreported.
Nestor Owomuhangi, whose official title is “UNFPA Representative to Palestine,” explained that war and collapsing humanitarian conditions had exacerbated this regression.
“We are witnessing the dismantling of a generation’s future,” Owomuhangi said.
Multiple men told Jusoor News they had seen or heard of Hamas members abusing women, with one reporting that a Hamas charity organization had blackmailed his neighbor and sought to become her pimp. “They wanted her to whore herself in exchange for a food parcel, or an aid voucher, or 100 shekels,” he said.
Exchange rates on Monday placed 100 shekels as equal to $33.48.
A fighter in Hamas’s military wing, the Qassam Brigades, confirmed the sex crimes, saying that Hamas members took advantage of the “wives of martyrs” in a tent in the Gharabli area in Deir al-Balah. He was told to say nothing but chose to tear down the tent, declaring, “We told them it was an insult to our honor and dignity.”
Another anonymous man in Gaza said “we were contacted by the wife of a friend. She had asked a Qassam Brigades commander to help her, but he took advantage of her. His behavior is disgraceful. We investigated the matter and found her in a tent in the Gharabli area where a bunch of Qassam members were taking advantage of her.”
He also reported that “we informed the leadership, but we were told we had to keep silent about it.”
An unnamed woman said she had experienced sexual harassment from a man at a Hamas charity who appeared religious when she sought help. “I asked him how he could talk to me like that. And he should be ashamed,” she said. “I told him I would expose him. He said, ‘You cannot expose me; I am the government here.’”
One anonymous elderly woman said that “one charity in Gaza is unfortunately the biggest perpetrator. From its chairman all the way down to its doorman, it’s being done by all their employees and members, as though it’s an organization set up for sexual harassment, psychological abuse, and harassing young women.”
Reports of rising sexual abuse against girls and widows come as Hamas continues to resist pressure to disarm in accordance with the US-backed ceasefire and peace plan for Gaza.
On Sunday, the New York Times reported that two Hamas officials had said the Palestinian terrorist group planned to surrender thousands of automatic rifles and small weapons which belonged to Gaza police and other internal security organizations. However, this would not entail full disarmament, which according to the peace plan is a key prerequisite for beginning major reconstruction of Gaza and for Israel, whose military currently controls 53 percent of the enclave, to further withdraw its force.
According to several reports, Hamas recently rejected the Board of Peace’s eight-month phased plan for the terrorist group to disarm. US President Donald Trump proposed the Board of Peace in September to oversee his plan to end the Israel-Hamas war in Gaza, subsequently saying it would address other conflicts.
Meanwhile, Hamas is further tightening its grip on the nearly half of Gazan territory it still controls, where the vast majority of the population lives.
Since the initial ceasefire took effect in October, Hamas has imposed a brutal crackdown, sparking clashes with rival militias as it seeks to eliminate any opposition.
The Meir Amit Intelligence and Terrorism Information Center (ITIC) — an Israel-based research institute — released a report last month explaining how the US-Israeli war against the Islamic regime in Iran had disrupted the second phase of the ceasefire agreement in Gaza, which required Hamas to disarm in order for Israeli troops to withdraw.
Earlier this month, Hamas demanded that the Israel Defense Forces exit first before giving up weapons.
ITIC’s analysts warned that this delay could enable Hamas — which still controls approximately 47 percent of Gaza — to rearm. The Islamist terrorists are reportedly smuggling in guns from Egypt and creating weapons internally.
In late March, Turkey reaffirmed its longstanding support for Hamas when the terrorist group’s senior negotiator Khalil Al-Khaya and its political bureau delegation met with Turkish intelligence chief Ibrahim Kalın. Kalın had also met with senior Hamas leaders in Istanbul the previous week.
According to the Middle East Monitor, the Hamas delegation “expressed its appreciation to President Recep Tayyip Erdogan for Turkey’s efforts to achieve peace in Gaza.”