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This Israeli village on the Lebanon border was isolated for decades. Now it’s a tourist hotspot.
GHAJAR, Israel (JTA) – A group of 40 tourists filed into Khateb Sweets on a recent Sunday afternoon, bringing chatter — and their cash and credit cards — to what had been a quiet cafe in this equally sedate village in the Golan Heights.
They left after consuming pastries and hot tea spiced with ginger, anise and cinnamon, whereupon an Israeli Jewish couple came in, then an Israeli Arab family and three Canadians.
The steady foot traffic typifies the wave of tourists that since last fall has hit this community of 2,900 people, nearly all Alawites, an Islamic sect.
Ghajar (pronounced RA-zhar) had for decades been unusually cut off from the rest of Israel. Residents could come and go, but outsiders could visit only through prior arrangement with the Israel Defense Forces, which considered the village within a closed military area where Lebanon and Israel’s Galilee and Golan Heights regions intersect.
The IDF’s lifting of the restriction without explanation on Sept. 8 led to an immediate rush of visitors eager to explore Ghajar.
How immediate? Ahmad Khateb, a pastry chef who owns the eponymous cafe, was working that day at his consultancy job at a hotel in the Galilee town of Tzfat, when his employee called to report an unusual stream of tourists entering the shop. The following morning, Khateb resigned to work at his café full time.
People enjoy a food truck in a plaza in Ghajar, Oct. 14, 2022. (Yossi Aloni/Flash90)
Approximately 4,000 people visited Ghajar the day the town opened, he said. Another 6,000 visited the following day — briefly tripling the number of people in town. For day three, a Saturday, Ghajar turned a soccer field into a parking lot.
“It’s like a gift that fell from the sky,” Khateb said of the village’s opening and his subsequent increase in sales. He’s now considering expansion to other locations.
Ghajar possesses a Forbidden City-like attraction for Israelis, who travel extensively inside their own country because it requires a flight to visit others.
“You know why we came here? Because there aren’t a lot of places [in Israel] we haven’t been,” said Shmuel Browns, a Jerusalem-based tour guide accompanying his brother and sister-in-law visiting from his native Toronto. “We wanted to get a sense of what makes this village unique.”
It is also notable as the only Israeli community of Alawites, a Syria-based ethnic minority best known as the group that the country’s dictatorial rulers for the past 52 years — current president Bashar al-Assad and his late father, Hafez — are descended from. Bilal Khatib, who is Ghajar’s accountant and spokesman, said Alawites tend to be secular people who value a person’s character and are respectful of other Muslim sects and different religions. Ghajar contains no mosques, since, except on holy days, people pray individually at home.
People gather in front of a shop in Ghajar, Oct. 14, 2022. (Yossi Aloni/Flash90)
“It’s a way of life,” Khatib said. “We respect people as people. Our religion is to be a good person, love everyone and hold no hatred against anyone, be they Druze, Jew, Christian or Circassian.”
But most unusual is Ghajar’s provenance, on which outsiders tend to stumble. “Ghajar was part of Lebanon, right?” the Israeli couple at the cafe asked Khateb.
No, he responded.
So began a short primer that residents are wont to recite to visitors — a timeline of a village of just one-fifth of a square mile. (The fields on Ghajar’s outskirts constitute an additional five square miles, on which the village plans to expand.)
Israel captured the Golan Heights, including Ghajar, from Syria during 1967’s Six-Day War and officially annexed it in 1981. After Israel ended its 18-year war in Lebanon in 2000, the United Nations certified the IDF’s withdrawal and established the two countries’ border going through, rather than around, Ghajar. Israel later announced plans to withdraw below the U.N. line. That would have split the village into northern and southern sections. Residents protested, preferring to remain under Israeli sovereignty rather than be divided. Ultimately, Israel didn’t erect a barrier inside the village.
A man drives a golf kart in Ghajar, Sept. 7, 2022. (Jalaa Marey/AFP via Getty Images)
“It’s a headache,” Jamal Khatib, a physical education teacher at the village’s lone high school, said of the chronology.
Orna Mizrahi, an analyst at the Tel Aviv-based Institute for National Security Studies, agrees with that characterization. As a member of the National Security Council, she briefed then-Prime Minister Ariel Sharon on Ghajar at what proved to be his last Cabinet meeting hours before he suffered a debilitating and ultimately fatal stroke in 2006.
As to why the IDF recently opened the town, Mizrahi cited the completion of a security fence around Ghajar, along with the lessened threat of cross-border attacks by the Hezbollah terrorist organization, due in large part to the recent maritime border agreement between Israel and Lebanon that incentivizes the government in Beirut to restrain Hezbollah.
“The security considerations are different. The situation in Lebanon is different,” she said.
Exactly why the United Nations associated the town with Lebanon, even though most of its residents are from a Syrian sect, is a point of confusion for many who visit. A 1965 Syrian map that Bilal Khatib printed offers an explanation: It shows Ghajar as an enclave completely inside Lebanon except for a narrow sliver connecting it to Syria proper.
Bilal Khatib (he, Jamal Khatib and Ahmad Khateb are unrelated) lives in the northern section and said he would not want his sister, who lives south of the U.N.’s 2000 demarcation, to be inaccessible.
The U.N.’s dividing point, known as the Blue Line, would be “splitting families,” he said. “We have to be united.” In practice, this line exists only on maps and has no impact on the life of Ghajar residents, who are fully under Israeli rule.
Ghajar residents tend to see themselves as Syrians holding Israeli citizenship. It’s a high-achieving population: According to Jamal Khatib, 400 Ghajar residents hold a college degree, making the town far more educated, on average, than Israeli Arabs overall. He said there are 50 physicians, 30 lawyers, 27 dentists and two professors, most commuting to jobs in the Galilee. Until Syria’s civil war began in 2011, Ghajar residents legally crossed at nearby Kuneitra to attend Syrian universities, he said.
An Israeli soldier secures a checkpoint at the entrance of Ghajar, Sept. 7, 2022. (Jalaa Marey/AFP via Getty Images)
“There’s no profession in Israel that’s not represented here,” he said.
Politically, Ghajar stands out for supporting mostly Jewish-majority parties. In the recent election, Benny Gantz’s centrist party got 24% of the 555 citizens who went to the polls in the village. The Arab party Raam got only 14% of the votes and the rest went to other Jewish lists, including the haredi Orthodox Shas party.
Ghajar puts a premium on livability. Fountains, parks and outdoor sculptures abound, landscaping and building façades are colorful and nary a speck of litter is evident. Homes are large and well-kept, on par with other upscale areas in Israel. Motorcycles and the honking of vehicles’ horns are prohibited. Visitors may not enter between 8 p.m. and 8 a.m., Jamal Khatib said, adding that Ghajar has long banned hotels and bed-and-breakfast inns and does not plan to change the rules in response to the flood of visitors.
Some visitors have littered and urinated in public, even entered residents’ homes without knocking, he said.
“A year ago, you wouldn’t have seen that,” said his son, Ryad, who works as Ghajar’s coordinator of volunteers, including handling traffic control on days when tourists abound.
Unlike many small towns in Israel, Ghajar operates its own sanitation service rather than linking up with other municipalities through a regional council. Doing so is an unusual expenditure, but it’s one that means visitors to the town may see Ghajar’s name on a garbage truck — a potentially powerful symbol.
Tourists explore the streets of Ghajar, Oct. 14, 2022. (Yossi Aloni/Flash90)
“We’re doing it not for you, but for ourselves,” Jamal Khatib said of the village’s quality-of-life values. “I like that people come, but they should respect the rules, respect our privacy.”
For its part, Ghajar projects respect for the wider society. Street signs and storefronts appear in Hebrew and Arabic. The Park of Peace includes a statue of the Virgin Mary, a sculpture of an open Koran, an Alawite sword symbol and a menorah.
“You and I believe in one God,” Jamal Khatib said. “Your deeds speak as to who you are.”
From his back porch a few moments later, a donkey’s braying could be clearly heard, hundreds of sheep observed and calls to prayer drifted over from a mosque – all in Aarab el Louaizeh, a village in Lebanon perhaps 100 yards away.
In a ravine below, soldiers of the United Nations and the Lebanese army in their separate posts walked outside. The U.N. soldiers entered two vehicles and began their twice-daily patrol of the border. Alongside the border road is the Hatzbani River, where Khatib fished as a young man. At his property line, a separate fence on Ghajar’s northern perimeter is nearly complete.
But the fence wasn’t erected to divide people or demarcate boundaries: It’s to keep boars, jackals and porcupines from scaling the slope and entering the village, Khatib said. He soon received an alert on his phone.
“The notification says there are cows on the road,” he explained. “It’s dark. Be careful.”
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Whistleblower claims Trump’s campus antisemitism crackdown was a cash grab
A new whistleblower report alleges that the Trump Administration’s investigations into campus antisemitism were merely efforts to extract millions from universities, under the pretense of rooting out hate.
The report, written by the Washington, D.C.-based Government Accountability Project on behalf of former Department of Justice Attorney Haley Van Erem, alleges that the administration’s antisemitism task force carried out “politically motivated” investigations that were “unsupported by facts and contrary to law.” The investigations did not follow proper Title VI procedure, she said, adding that they were opened with predetermined outcomes, and did not respect the First Amendment.
The report has prompted Jewish U.S. Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-Maryland) to initiate an investigation into the allegations. The Nexus Foundation, a watchdog organization dedicated to combating antisemitism and protecting free speech, released a statement supporting Raskin and Van Erem.
This is not the first time Raskin or Nexus have criticized the administration’s antisemitism task force. Many left-leaning Jewish organizations have long criticized Trump’s efforts, with Raskin describing them as “weaponizing, distorting and exploiting the reality of antisemitism to attack academic freedom.”
In a statement to the Forward, the DOJ denied that Van Erem worked on university investigations. “And for all matters, the Department stands behind the integrity of these investigations,” a spokesperson wrote.
According to the report, Van Erem was involuntarily re-assigned from her role as a DOJ Civil Rights attorney to the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services in order to investigate alleged antisemitism at medical schools — a probe prompted by a single New York Post article about protesters shouting “Free Palestine” and wearing Palestinian flags or keffiyehs at a medical school graduation.
Unable to find enough evidence of antisemitism at medical schools, Van Erem said, the task force soon expanded its probe to entire universities to increase the chances of finding it.
“This was one of the first major indications to the DOJ assignees that the investigations were not grounded in law or fact,” the report reads.
HHS did not immediately respond to request to comment.
Van Erem also criticized the administration for breaking the protocol of Title VI investigations, pursuing enforcement before first issuing a finding and allowing universities to resolve issues voluntarily. That enforcement: withholding funds.
To restrict funds, the administration used a separate legal mechanism that allows them to do so “for convenience” and for “not satisfying purpose.”
“The funding suspensions were meant to be coercive irrespective of investigative findings,” according to the report.
Van Erem and colleagues found no evidence at Brown of “deliberate indifference” to antisemitic incidents, the report said. But a supervisor allegedly discouraged sending Brown a closure letter stating those findings. According to the report, the administration settled with Columbia before an investigation was finished. Harvard sued the Trump administration, before its own investigation was complete, claiming the funding freeze was unlawful.
Van Erem said she observed findings of discrimination that she believed were actually “protected First Amendment activity” and believed that the task force’s settlement “content-based conditions” violated free expression.
Brown and Columbia both settled with the administration to restore federal funding, with Columbia paying the government $200 million and Brown agreeing to pay $50 million to Rhode Island workforce development organizations. A federal judge recently dismissed the Trump administration’s antisemitism lawsuit against Harvard, saying antisemitic incidents were “too isolated and episodic” to constitute a Title VI violation.
The post Whistleblower claims Trump’s campus antisemitism crackdown was a cash grab appeared first on The Forward.
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An influential book of a Nazi leader’s confessions is now available in English
(JTA) — Jürgen Stroop, the Nazi commander who led the killing of more than 50,000 Jews, was sitting in a cell in Warsaw awaiting his own execution.
Before he met the gallows, Stroop described in unrepentant detail his ascent as a Nazi, his destruction of the Warsaw Ghetto and his daily prosecution of mass murder. He gave his account to Kazimierz Moczarski, the journalist, Polish resistance leader and veteran of the Warsaw Uprising who shared Stroop’s cell in Mokotów Prison for 255 days in 1949.
Though he is now remembered as a hero for fighting the Nazi occupation, Moczarski was villainized by Poland’s postwar Communist regime, which viewed his resistance group as a threat to their monopoly on power. His unlikely imprisonment alongside a former Nazi officer he’d once tried to assassinate gave Moczarski the chance to document Stroop’s confessions in an influential book, “Conversations with an Executioner.”
This book, despite being censored for years by the Polish government, proved revelatory about the psychology and motivations behind Nazi ideology. After decades of being translated into over 15 languages and adapted for the stage and screen, “Conversations with an Executioner” was published Tuesday for the first time in an uncensored English translation by Steerforth, an imprint of Pushkin Press.
The book’s champions say it’s about time.
“On the one hand, this book is a central historical source for this really important event in the modern history of the world,” Sean Casper Bye, the book’s English translator, told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency. “And at the same time, it’s one that has continually struggled to get fully into publication.”
The book’s revelations about Stroop, the rise of Nazism and the psychology of genocide is reaching English readers after a long deferral. Moczarski made many unsuccessful attempts to publish “Conversations with an Executioner” after his release, but found little interest from publishers in Communist Poland.
The book did not align with Communist ideological narratives about the Holocaust, which deemphasized tragedy in favor of total victory over the Nazis. And the government’s crackdown on Polish resistance members — which led to Moczarski’s imprisonment with Stroop — remained a taboo subject.
A serialized version of the book first appeared in the Polish magazine Odra from 1972 to 1974, and Moczarski died the following year at age 68. He never saw the first censored edition in 1977, which removed references to the reasons behind his own incarceration. Nor did he see the publication of “Conversations with an Executioner” as an uncensored book in 1992, after the fall of Communism, when it became a bestseller.
Now, the book has “canonical status” in Poland, said Bye. It has been included for years on required school reading lists, shaping how generations of Polish people remember the Holocaust.
Moczarski’s account also faced an uphill battle to reach English readers. During the Cold War, censorship, disrupted communication and closed archives in Eastern Europe made it difficult to publish books from Poland in English, said Bye. That lowered the focus on Eastern European sources and languages for years in Holocaust scholarship across English-speaking countries.
The new English translation was championed by Clare Bullock, the book’s editor in the United Kingdom, who has Polish Jewish heritage. She spent years pushing for it to appear in English at multiple publishing houses, said Bye.
Moczarski and Stroop’s fates were intertwined long before they shared a cell. During World War II, Moczarski joined the Home Army, the main Polish resistance force, where he worked for the Office of Information and Propaganda.
Identifying local Nazi officials and collaborators as targets, Moczarski and his associates assassinated Stroop’s predecessor, Franz Kutschera, nicknamed the “Butcher of Warsaw” for his mass executions of Polish civilians. They also made a failed attempt to kill Stroop, detailed by Moczarski in their cell.
Though he was not Jewish, Moczarski supported and liaised with the Jewish Fighting Organization, known in Polish as ŻOB. The Home Army provided ŻOB leaders with weapons and technical instructions for the 1943 Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, the largest Jewish revolt against the Nazis.
A year later, Moczarski fought in the Home Army’s citywide Warsaw Uprising. The Nazis also brutally crushed this revolt, which led to the deaths of over 160,000 Poles, including some 17,000 Polish Jews who took part in the fighting or were discovered in hiding.
Instead of being rewarded after the war, Moczarski was arrested in 1945 as the Communists consolidated their power in the aftermath of Nazi rule. The new regime baselessly declared the Home Army a quasi-fascist organization, claiming they had collaborated with the Nazis rather than fighting against them. Moczarski spent 11 years in prison, where, he would later recount, he endured 49 methods of torture.
His confinement with Stroop made for another form of torture, according to Bye, who said it was “symbolically equating him, a brave Polish patriot, with a Nazi war criminal.”
The men had a third cellmate: Gustav Schielke, a German former policeman turned low-ranking SS officer who resented the police’s subordination to the Nazis, but did not resist them. In prison, these enemies lived under a code that required equality and confidentiality for survival. They slept on the floor together on three pallets, and Moczarski spent nights huddled between Stroop and Schielke to stay warm.
Moczarski made it his mission to understand the war criminals.
“If I succeed, I have the chance — if only to a certain extent — to answer my own question,” he wrote. “What historical, psychological, sociological mechanism led some Germans to come together into a gang of mass murderers who governed the Reich and did their utmost to introduce their ‘Ordnung’ — their Order — in Europe and the world?”
He unraveled in Stroop an average German middle-class man of his time, with a low level of education, a drive to rise through military ranks, a reverence for order and obedience and a penchant for parroting Nazi ideology.
As his defenses wore down, Stroop gave Moczarski a day-by-day account of his orders to crush the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising in 1943. Over nearly a month, his forces battled Jewish guerilla fighters and eventually burned down the ghetto block by block. He referred to the operations as “neutralizing” Jews or “cleansing” the Warsaw Ghetto of “subhumans.”
When Moczarski asked Stroop whether he pitied the women fighters whom he captured and killed, he said the commander responded, after a long and “worked up” silence, with Nazi clichés.
“Finally, the general straightens up, smooths down the hair at his temples and replies, in a chanting rhythm,” Moczarski wrote. “‘Anyone wishing to be a true man in those days, meaning a strong one, had to act as I did. Gelobt sei was hart macht!’” The German phrase by Nietzsche, meaning “Praised be what hardens,” was taken from Nazi propaganda.
In this portrait of Stroop, Bye saw a man who was motivated primarily by moving up the Nazi Party hierarchy. While Stroop repeated Nazi tropes and adapted his beliefs accordingly — upon becoming an SS officer, he broke with the Roman Catholic Church and declared himself “Gottgläubig,” a Nazi religious term — much of his testimony amounted to a boastful account of personal victories.
“This was a type of Nazi,” said Bye. “Not everybody was a completely 100% committed idealogue. There were lots of people who were just ambitious and unscrupulous, and that was part of the engine that kept the Nazi machine going.”
The idea that the Holocaust could have been willingly committed by everyday, career-minded people, not just Nazi ideologues and sadists, has been echoed in other landmark works of scholarship and culture, from Hannah Arendt’s 1963 “Eichmann in Jerusalem” to the 2023 film “The Zone of Interest.”
“Conversations with an Executioner” has been challenged as an authentic document, since Moczarski had no materials to take notes in the cell, yet recounted years of dialogue in vivid detail. Moczarski claimed that he honed an exceptional memory in prison and could write the book in his mind. After being released in 1956, he verified facts by obtaining Stroop’s reports from the Polish Commission for Researching Nazi War Crimes and information from the U.S. Pentagon archives.
The limitations of the book as a firsthand account also make it a precious resource, said Bye. Stroop’s destruction of the Warsaw Ghetto was so effective that “Conversations with an Executioner” provided a rare surviving window into what occurred.
Bye said that voices like Moczarski’s are becoming ever more crucial as the last generation of survivors die out and the Holocaust fades from living memory. He hopes the new English translation will give readers a counterweight to current-day narratives about the Holocaust, emerging in politics and elsewhere, that mold the past to fit ideological messages.
“There are so many people who have a vested interest in getting us to look at the Holocaust in a particular way, who want to instrumentalize the Holocaust as this hugely emotionally weighty event for their own purposes,” he said. “One of the ways that we can keep in touch with the reality of the Holocaust is by going back to primary sources like this — going back to the people who did see it with their own eyes and who wrote about it themselves.”
This article originally appeared on JTA.org.
The post An influential book of a Nazi leader’s confessions is now available in English appeared first on The Forward.
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California Democratic primary pits AIPAC-backed candidate against progressive Israel critic
(JTA) — AIPAC and its allies have poured millions of dollars into a California special election, transforming a race between two Democrats into a battleground over the pro-Israel group’s place in Democratic politics.
The spending in the Bay Area’s 14th congressional district is aimed at boosting Melissa Hernandez, a moderate Democrat and president of the Bay Area Rapid Transit Board, over Aisha Wahab, a progressive state senator who supports ending U.S. military aid to Israel.
Wahab replied “yes” during an April debate when asked whether Israel’s war in Gaza constituted a genocide. In contrast, Hernandez declined to give a yes-or-no answer, instead saying that Israel had a right to defend itself following the Oct. 7, 2023, attacks, but that the “destruction into Gaza has gone too far.”
Wahab remains the favorite heading into Tuesday’s election to replace former Rep. Eric Swalwell, a reliable supporter of Israel in Congress who resigned in April amid sexual misconduct allegations that he has denied. Wahab finished ahead of Hernandez in the election’s June 16 special primary, receiving 42.8% of the vote compared to Hernandez’s 16.8%.
The United Democracy Project, AIPAC’s main super PAC, has poured close to $2.5 million into boosting Hernandez and attacking Wahab this election cycle, while Bold America, another group that has received funding from the United Democracy Project, has spent roughly $1.8 million, according to The Hill.
When asked about the AIPAC spending in the race by the Pleasanton Weekly, Hernandez replied, “I have no say over independent expenditures. That is the law, and I see them when you do.” She added: “I have thousands of donors and not one of them sets my agenda.”
But while the Bay Area race has become one of the the latest focuses of the pro-Israel lobby, following a costly defeat by Abdul El-Sayed in Michigan’s Democratic Senate primary, Israel has hardly been a defining issue in the contest, and Wahab has not neatly fit the mold of other progressive candidates the group has targeted this election cycle.
Wahab, who is the child of Afghan refugees, has centered her campaign on affordability issues and civil rights. While her campaign website calls for “No More Wars!” it does not specifically reference the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Citing the civilian toll in U.S. military operations in Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria and Libya, her site reads, “We cannot bomb our way to lasting peace.”
Hernandez, who previously served as the mayor of Dublin, California, has focused her campaign on lowering costs and her commitments to fighting crime and increasing public safety.
Wahab, 39, has drawn endorsements from a host of labor unions, the California Democratic Party and Our Revolution, the group formed by Sen. Bernie Sanders to advance the progressive movement. Hernandez, 51, meanwhile, has received endorsements from several police and fire unions, as well as Democratic Jewish Reps. Lois Frankel of Florida and Brad Schneider of Illinois.
During a Thursday appearance on the livestream of Hasan Piker, who has faced accusations of antisemitism, Wahab said that she would have voted for the Stop the Bombs Act and supported ending all U.S. aid to Israel, though she stipulated that “humanitarian aid is important to me too.”
During the livestream, Wahab also touted a September 2025 resolution she co-authored with Jewish state Senator Scott Wiener, which called for the “end to the humanitarian catastrophe in Gaza and the immediate release of all hostages.” The resolution was also signed by members of the California Legislative Jewish Caucus.
In 2021, Wahab also collaborated with local Jewish leaders on a fundraiser for Afghan refugee resettlement in the aftermath of the U.S. pullout from the country.
“I work well with the Jewish community. I’m very proud to support them. They’re my constituents,” Wahab said on the livestream.
“As an Afghan, you know, I really deeply want to ensure that all people feel welcomed and safe and secure in this nation. And we know that there’s a rise in antisemitism. We know all of that,” Wahab continued. “But that doesn’t mean you can’t criticize a foreign nation. You can’t criticize their leadership.”
Wahab attributed the volume of AIPAC spending in the race to “pure racism and prejudice,” saying that her “Jewish Senate colleagues are literally confused as to why they are spending this much money against me.”
As Wahab pushes back on the attack ads, she has also garnered $200,000 in support from American Priorities, a pro-Palestinian PAC that formed as a counterweight to AIPAC.
The liberal pro-Israel lobby J Street Action Fund also announced Thursday that it was spending $100,000 to support Wahab.
Tali deGroot, the group’s vice president of political and digital strategy, said in a statement that AIPAC’s spending against her marked another “cynical attempt” to “defeat a candidate who won’t rubber-stamp their agenda.”
“AIPAC’s super PAC has failed time and again this cycle, and we expect this latest attempt to take Republican billionaire dollars and buy a Democratic primary to fail as well,” said deGroot. “Voters in the 14th deserve better, and they deserve a Member of Congress who will bring the kind of clear-eyed, nuanced and compassionate leadership that Dr. Wahab has shown throughout her career.”
This article originally appeared on JTA.org.
The post California Democratic primary pits AIPAC-backed candidate against progressive Israel critic appeared first on The Forward.
