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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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Syria Leads World in Improving Freedom, Report Says, Amid Concerns Over Regime’s Jihadist Links
Syrian President Ahmed al-Sharaa attends the Ministry of Awqaf conference titled “Unity of Islamic Discourse” at the Conference Palace in Damascus, Syria, Feb. 16, 2026. Photo: REUTERS/Khalil Ashawi
The same week that an influential survey of global freedom named Syria as the most improved country in the world, Syrian authorities announced a crackdown on alcohol sales in Damascus amid persecution for those failing to fast for a full day during Ramadan.
On Thursday, the nonprofit advocacy group Freedom House released its annual report reviewing the rise and fall of freedom around the world, rating countries based on their political rights and civil liberties. The organization offered a grim overall assessment, noting that freedom had fallen for the 20th consecutive year, with 54 nations declining in 2025. Today only 21 percent of human beings live in countries classified as free, a drop of 46 percent from 20 years ago, according to the report.
“Even as 2026 has brought new opportunities for those living under authoritarian rule from Venezuela to Iran, the last 20 years have been a dark period for global freedom,” Freedom House CEO Jamie Fly said in a statement. “Those who still enjoy the blessings of freedom must do more to counter authoritarianism and provide more effective support for the democratic aspirations of people standing up to repression around the world, or this persistent decline will continue.”
However, one Middle Eastern country in particular stood as a bright spot countering the trend.
“Syria received the world’s largest score improvement for the year, bringing cautious optimism to a region dominated by entrenched authoritarian rule,” the report stated.
Last year, “foreign and independent local media outlets were able to report critically from inside Syria, civil society organizations were able to register and operate more freely, and oppressive Assad-era legal restrictions started to be rolled back,” the report added, referring to long-time Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad, who was toppled in December 2024.
Ahmed al-Sharaa became Syria’s official president after leading the rebel campaign that ousted Assad — whose Iran-backed rule had strained ties with the Arab world during the nearly 14-year Syrian war — in an offensive spearheaded by al-Sharaa’s Islamist group, Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS), a former al Qaeda affiliate.
Since taking power, al-Sharaa has sought to depict himself as a moderate leader who wants to unify his country and attract foreign investment to rebuild it after years of civil war. Many foreign leaders and experts have been skeptical of him, however, questioning whether he is still a jihadist trying to disguise his extremism.
Incidents of sectarian violence — including the mass killing of pro-Assad Alawites — have deepened fears among minority groups about the rise of Islamist factions and drawn condemnation from global powers currently engaged in discussions on sanctions relief and humanitarian aid.
The US has moved to lift an array of sanctions previously imposed on Syria under Assad. Until recently, al-Sharaa was sanctioned by the US as a foreign terrorist with a $10 million bounty on his head.
However, Freedom House said it observed significant improvement for the freedom of Syrians, despite major challenges.
Freedom House described how in Syria today, “citizens and a transitional government face profound challenges in erecting a democratic system after more than half a century of dictatorship. The civil war that began in 2011 has devastated public institutions and infrastructure, while sectarian polarization and ongoing violence further complicate efforts to create credible transitional justice mechanisms and introduce the rule of law.”
An example of that sectarianism manifested on Monday evening, when the Damascus governorate announced a number of measures to restrict alcohol sales. The rules will require nightclubs and bars with liquor licenses to convert into cafe licenses. The city will only allow alcohol purchases with sealed bottles from stores in majority Christian places. This conflicts with Syrian law, which does not ban alcohol, as well as human rights treaties signed by Syrian protecting the right to drink alcohol.
The regulations also limit the locations of alcohol vendors, banning them from operating 75 meters from houses of worship and schools with only three months to comply. One unnamed bar owner told The Arab Weekly that he had anticipated the change and would close in response. He noted that he had seen a decline in his customers since the rise of l-Sharaa’s government last year. Other restaurants have reportedly adapted to the change by taking alcohol off of menus or shifting to serving drinks in teacups.
Syria’s leaders have opposed religious freedom in other ways recently, with The Arab Weekly citing reports of arrests and firings for those who break Ramadan fasts early.
Freedom House researchers offered additional insights into the depths of authoritarianism around the world and its hot spots. The states with the heaviest drop in rankings last year were Guinea-Bissau (−8), Tanzania (−7), Burkina Faso, (−5), Madagascar (−5), and El Salvador (−5).
The countries which received the worst overall scores were South Sudan (0), Sudan (1), and Turkmenistan (1) on the organization’s 100-point scale.
Iran saw a fall by one point, reaching a score of 10 total points, with Freedom House explaining that authorities arrested more than 21,000 people “as part of a crackdown on alleged espionage and collaboration following the regime’s 12-day war with Israel in June” and that the regime had expelled “some 1.8 million Afghan migrants and refugees without regard for their basic rights.”
Russia and China maintained their scores of 12 and 9, respectively, with Freedom House stating that “Russian authorities took further steps to suppress antiwar speech and independent journalism, while Chinese officials cracked down on small but multiplying protests.”
The report noted numerous military coups in Africa, identifying nine since 2019 with Madagascar the most recent.
“Mali provides just one example of the lasting damage done by military coups. Conditions in several countries, including Burkina Faso and Niger, continued to deteriorate in 2025 after a wave of military coups beginning in 2019 toppled governments across the Sahel and West Africa,” the report stated. “In both countries, freedom continued to decline in the years following the coups, as the junta leaders acted unilaterally to consolidate power and used increasingly violent methods to suppress dissent.”
In Burkina Faso, the military indefinitely suspended elections, while in Niger the junta dissolved all political parties.
“We continue to see that the desire for freedom is universal,” said Yana Gorokhovskaia, who co-authored the report and works as Freedom House’s research director. “From Belarus to Zimbabwe, people around the world are taking great personal risks to stand up and defend their fundamental rights.”
Gorokhovskaia said that to reverse the global decline in freedom, “democratic governments and societies must demonstrate their solidarity with those seeking freedom, in part through funding and diplomatic support for frontline human rights defenders and nongovernmental organizations.”
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College Republicans Chapter Sues University of Florida for Deactivating Group Over Nazi Salutes
Members of University of Florida’s College Republicans chapter. Photo: Screenshot
The University of Florida’s College Republicans chapter has teamed up with a local far-right lawyer to sue the school for closing the student club after learning that two of its leaders photographed themselves pantomiming the Nazi salute.
“The University of Florida punitively deactivated and shut down the [University of Florida College Republicans] in response to alleged viewpoints expressed by a member … and in an effort to silence the club and chill its future free speech,” said the lawyer, Anthony Sabatini, who was seemingly enlisted to defend the student club’s right to support Nazism. “No university policy, rule, or law provides UF a lawful basis for the deactivation. We are seeking an emergency preliminary injunction.”
Sabatini is an alumnus of the University of Florida and was once a “Lincoln Fellow” selected by the Claremont Institute, a think tank in California known for its rejection of the so-called “east coast” wing of the conservative movement and advocacy of “post-liberalism.” Sabatini’s social media activity includes reposts of material by Tucker Carlson and Ann Coulter, as well as his denouncing Republicans such as US Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) and White House chief of staff Susan Wiles as “piece[s] of s–t.” He has also endorsed James Fishback, a candidate for governor of Florida who built his reputation by criticizing Israel and refusing to condemn antisemitic podcaster Nicholas Fuentes.
On March 8, Sabatini tweeted, “I hated Mark Levin before it was cool,” an allusion to the Jewish political commentator’s feuds with far-right provocateurs who have attempted to foster suspicion around his membership in the conservative movement.
As previously reported by The Algemeiner, the University of Florida said last week it would shutter its College Republicans chapter at the request of the Florida Federation of College Republicans (FFCR), which disbanded the group.
Since then, members of the student club have alleged that the Florida Federation lacks jurisdiction over the organization, insisting that it is registered with the College Republicans of America group. There are several contending “College Republican” groups, including the original College Republican National Committee founded in 1892, College Republicans United, the National Federation of College Republicans (NFCR), and College Republicans.
Regardless of the outcome of the legal dispute, the incident marked the second time this month that conservative youth were publicly outed for indulging Nazism and the white supremacist movement.
Earlier this month, leaked texts revealed dozens of antisemitic and racist texts exchanged by young Republicans in Miami-Dade County, Florida, some of which fantasized about engaging in onanism in an all-white country.
As first reported by The Miami Herald, the group chat, created on WhatsApp, was described by its members as “Nazi heaven” for the daily barrage of extremist comments contributed to it. Individuals affiliated with the Miami-Dade Country Republicans, Turning Point USA, and College Republicans casually said “ni—er,” denounced women as “whores,” and spoke rapturously about Adolf Hitler.
Dariel Gonzalez, according to the Herald, was one of the chat’s most prolific contributors, bandying about comments regarding “color professors” and telling members that “You can f–k all the k—kes you want. Just don’t marry them and procreate.”
The group chat’s exposure comes at a time when, according to recent polling, young Republicans have increasingly embraced antisemitism and conspiracy theories.
Right-wing antisemitism is surging in popularity among conservative youth, seemingly in part due to the influence of online commentators such as Nick Fuentes, Candace Owens, and Tucker Carlson.
In September, a conservative magazine at Harvard University published an opinion piece which bore likeness to key tenets of Nazi doctrine, as first articulated in 1925 in Hitler’s autobiographical manifesto Mein Kampf, or My Struggle, and later in a blitzkrieg of speeches he delivered throughout the Nazi era to justify his genocide of European Jews.
Written by David F.X. Army, the article chillingly echoed a January 1939 Reichstag speech in which Hitler portended mass killings of Jews as the outcome of Germany’s inexorable march toward war with France and Great Britain. Whereas Hitler said, “France to the French, England to the English, America to the Americans, and Germany to the Germans,” Army wrote, “Germany belongs to the Germans, France to the French, Britain to the British, America to the Americans.”
Army also called for the adoption of notions of “blood, soil, language, and love of one’s own” in response to concerns over large-scale migration of Muslims into Europe.
In Nazi ideology, “blood and soil,” or Blut und Boden, encapsulated the party’s belief in eugenics and racial purity; the German “Aryans’” right to expand into Eastern Europe to amass new Lebensraum, or “living space”; and the transformation of the German peasantry into an agricultural class which stood in contrasts to Jews, many of whom lived in cities.
Meanwhile, antisemitic hate crimes have spiked to record levels across the US.
In January, Stephen Pittman, 19, allegedly ignited a catastrophic fire which decimated the Beth Israel Congregation synagogue in Jackson, Mississippi. After being arrested, Pittman confessed and told US federal investigators that he targeted the institution over its “Jewish ties,” according to court filings.
Follow Dion J. Pierre @DionJPierre.
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‘I’m alive!’: Netanyahu speaks in-person amid ongoing online rumors claiming he’s dead
“I am alive — and you are all witnesses,” Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said Thursday, opening a rare in-person news conference with foreign reporters in Jerusalem.
Netanyahu was addressing a viral online rumor that he had been killed in an Iranian missile strike on March 8. The false claims gained traction after a Sunday press conference in which he appeared via Zoom, taking questions from Israeli journalists without disclosing his location amid ongoing Iranian ballistic missile attacks and following the assassination of senior regime figures.
The low-quality video he later posted on X fueled further speculation, as some users pointed to what they claimed was a six-fingered hand as evidence that it had been AI-generated to conceal his death.
In an effort to put the rumors to rest, Netanyahu released a video of himself ordering coffee on the outskirts of Jerusalem. But the clip took on a life of its own online. Much of the attention shifted to the barista, a young woman behind the counter whose warm smile went viral.
“I have got to ask you a question the entire internet is dying to hear the answer on: Is Benjamin Netanyahu dead?” media personality Mehdi Hasan asked Sen. Chris Van Hollen, a Democrat from Maryland who is a member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, in an interview on Wednesday. Van Hollen, a fierce Netanyahu critic, was unequivocal. “No,” he said. “He is not dead.”
Netanyahu at start of press conference with foreign press:
“First of all, I just want to say I’m alive — and you’re all witnesses.” pic.twitter.com/B1ogphOTTD
— Jacob N. Kornbluh (@jacobkornbluh) March 19, 2026
Netanyahu’s appearance on Thursday was not only meant to show proof of life. It was also an attempt to counter criticism from some in the MAGA movement that Israel dragged the U.S. into an endless war with Tehran, and as U.S public opinion is turning against the joint U.S.-Israeli military campaign against Iran.
On Tuesday, a senior intelligence official resigned to protest the administration’s approach. Joe Kent, who had been director of the federal National Counterterrorism Center, claimed that Israeli officials had used lies to convince President Donald Trump to start the war.
The isolationist wing of the conservative movement — associated with antisemitic influencers like Candace Owens, Tucker Carlson and Nick Fuentes — amplified those claims, adding further conspiracy theories, including claiming Israeli involvement in the assassination of conservative activist Charlie Kirk last year.
“Does anyone really think that someone can tell President Trump what to do?” Netanyahu asked rhetorically. “Come on. President Trump always makes his decisions on what he thinks is good for America, and may I add, what is also good for future generations.”
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