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Visiting Jerusalem, Ron DeSantis tries out his Jewish stump speech
JERUSALEM (JTA) — Ron DeSantis may not have declared that he’s running for president yet, but his incipient campaign was on full display Thursday at a conference in Jerusalem, where he ran down a laundry list of issues relevant to Israel and American Jews.
Most of the Florida governor’s remarks reflected what has become Republican orthodoxy in the post-Donald Trump era: He supports Israeli West Bank settlements as well as keeping Jerusalem under full Israeli control. He wants the United States to be more aggressive toward Iran’s nuclear program. He vehemently opposes the movement to boycott Israel.
And he declined to take a position on the Israeli government’s effort to sap the Israeli Supreme Court of much of its power — which President Joe Biden has repeatedly criticized as a danger to Israeli democracy.
“We must also, in America, respect Israel’s right to make its own decisions about its own governance,” he said. “You’re a smart country. You figure it out. It shouldn’t be for us to butt into these important issues.”.
He also pushed back at claims that his legislation has led to the banning of Holocaust books in his state, calling them “fake narratives” (though multiple Holocaust books have been banned). And, at a press conference, he signed a bill that aims to penalize antisemitic harassment. He also touted a new bill that gives vouchers worth thousands of dollars to parents who send their children to private schools.
“We’ve really seen a historic migration of American Jews and Israeli Americans moving to southern Florida,” he said. “It’s really, really boomed, and I think Florida’s policies have really reinforced that.”
DeSantis, who landed in Israel yesterday, was the keynote speaker at a conference on Thursday hosted by the Jerusalem Post at the Museum of Tolerance here. He received multiple standing ovations and cheers throughout the morning. At a press conference after his speech, some of his supporters sat among the journalists and clapped at his responses.
Israel is the latest on a four-stop international trip by DeSantis, who is expected to announce later this year that he will challenge former President Donald Trump for the Republican presidential nomination. On the trip, he is meeting with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, President Isaac Herzog and other officials. His trip also includes stops in Japan, South Korea and the United Kingdom.
“If there’s any announcements, those will come at the appropriate time,” he said in response to a question about his potential candidacy.
In his speech, DeSantis described his past support for Israel, advocating for the 2018 move of the U.S. embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem and, in 2019, holding a Florida cabinet meeting in Jerusalem. He also told the crowd that he baptized his children with water from the Sea of Galilee and said he put a note in the Western Wall asking God to protect Florida from hurricane season.
An affinity for the Bible also played a role in DeSantis’ position on the West Bank, which he called “disputed” rather than “occupied.” He referred to the territory by the term “Judea and Samaria,” which is the Israeli government’s standard term for the area and also emphasizes its place in the Bible. He spoke of visits to the northern West Bank settlement of Ariel, as well as to the City of David, a Jewish neighborhood and archaeological site in eastern Jerusalem.
“We visited the Biblical heartland of Judea and Samaria,” he said during his speech regarding a previous trip. Later, at the press conference, he said, “Those are the most historic Jewish lands there are, going back thousands and thousands of years.”
He also came out staunchly in favor of continued Israeli control of eastern Jerusalem, claiming that it is the best way to ensure religious freedom in the city. Palestinians aspire for the city’s eastern area to be the capital of a future Palestinian state.
“With Israeli sovereignty over the city of Jerusalem, people have the ability to practice their religion freely,” he said. “They have the ability to visit their sites freely. That would just actually not be true if that were in other hands.”
Although his Israel policies dovetail with those of Trump, and even though Trump’s Israel ambassador, David Friedman, was at the conference, DeSantis avoided saying the former president’s name in his speech, instead referring to “the previous administration.” He did say Trump’s name once during the press conference.
Following his speech, DeSantis announced partnerships with Israeli firms to develop tech products, and portrayed his state as an inviting home for Jews. He said the state had invested millions of dollars into synagogue security as well as Holocaust education. And he signed a bill that bans projecting threatening images on buildings without permission, as well as littering with the intent to intimidate.
Florida has seen an uptick recently in white supremacist activity. The Goyim Defense League, a far-right antisemitic group, relocated there last year. In October, several public spaces in Jacksonville displayed messages promoting the antisemitic ideas of rapper Kanye West. Neo-Nazis intimidated attendees at an Orlando-area Chabad center in February, and last week, police arrested a man for a March attack on a different Florida Chabad center.
“This is going to be able to provide more tools to be able to combat antisemitic activity,” DeSantis said. ״If you have a synagogue and someone shines a swastika-like image on that, they have a right to do the image for themselves, but putting it on someone else’s property, they’re defining that in this bill as a trespass.”
The signing of that bill, and DeSantis’ contention that he supports Holocaust education, comes as legislation he signed has enabled parents in the state to pursue bans of Holocaust literature. A South Florida school district library removed a Holocaust-themed novel by Jodi Picoult in March, and this month, a high school in the state removed a graphic novel adaptation of Anne Frank’s diary from its shelves.
Despite those instances and other bans parents are seeking, DeSantis claimed that there was no significant campaign to ban Holocaust books. He called that allegation the “book ban hoax.”
“Those are all fake narratives,” he said. “We’ve provided curriculum transparency for parents, to make sure that the curriculum used in school is transparent and to make sure everything is age appropriate and is not conflicting with Florida standards. And so, what parents have identified unfortunately are pornographic images in books.”
The legislation, which has targeted books about sexuality and gender, is at the center of DeSantis’ campaign to limit or ban discussion of those topics in schools. The law, called the “Parental Rights in Education” bill and dubbed by critics as the “Don’t say gay” bill, also bans discussion of LGBTQ topics between kindergarten and third grade, among other measures. It is one of a series of recent state laws limiting transgender rights.
That law is also at the center of DeSantis’ feud with Disney, the state’s largest employer, which just sued the governor for allegedly punishing the company for its criticism of the law. At the press conference, DeSantis said the suit is about Disney wanting “to be able to control things without proper oversight.”
DeSantis did not refer specifically to the Anne Frank graphic novel in his remarks, and said Florida had “beefed up” Holocaust education in the state. But a Jewish ally of his who accompanied him on the trip, Republican state Rep. Randy Fine, defended banning the book, which he called the “Anne Frank pornography book.”
“I read the diary of Anne Frank many times as a kid and I don’t remember any of that stuff that they put in that graphic novel,” Fine told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency. “And frankly that graphic novel is antisemitic. To sexualize the diary of Anne Frank in that sort of inappropriate way, it is antisemitic.”
When told that the passages, which are authentic and relate to Frank’s attraction to another girl as well as a description of her own genitalia, have been included in the diary for decades, Fine said that the graphic novel was inappropriate regardless because it depicted the passages in an image.
“It wasn’t just that the passages were in the book,” he said. “It was how they were visualized.”
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The post Visiting Jerusalem, Ron DeSantis tries out his Jewish stump speech appeared first on Jewish Telegraphic Agency.
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A Super Bowl Ad Against Antisemitism with No Consequence Misses the Mark
Robert Kraft. Photo: New England Patriots/Wikimedia Commons
I greatly respect Patriots owner Robert Kraft and his efforts to warn about the dangers of antisemitism. The Jewish community has largely failed in fighting this disease, for which there is no cure.
Some will also say that no ad will stop antisemitism, and argue that it’s a waste of money to run advertisements at all. But I strongly disagree.
There are a range of people in America, including some who have hatred in their hearts but have not yet acted on it, or some who don’t even know Jews personally. In a world where millions are listening to Tucker Carlson, Candace Owens, and laughing at Kanye West’s “Heil Hitler,” it would be useful to have some persuasive media strategy against antisemitism.
I’m not sure how many Americans watch Douglas Murray, Ben Shapiro, or follow Hillel Fuld online, but more than 100 million watch the Super Bowl annually.
It is a fantastic decision to spend money on an ad against antisemitism if it can get people’s attention, be emotionally impactful, show consequences for a perpetrator of hate, and make people think for a second.
Many tools must be used in the fight against antisemitism, and there is no reason why ads can’t be one of them. While they won’t likely change the mind of people planning to assault Jews, they might change the minds of others. I have a friend whose son was called a dirty Jew in school. The student likely called him that because he figured there would be no consequence.
This year’s ad — which follows ads in 2024 and 2025 — featured a Jewish boy who is pushed. We see a post-it calling him a “Dirty Jew.” An African-American student puts a blue square on it, and notes that Black people have experienced similar hatred.
The ad is a failure because it doesn’t grab your attention, shows no perpetrator, and more importantly — shows no consequences.
It is a slight improvement over last year’s ad with Tom Brady and Snoop Dogg, as that had zero authenticity. This ad has some authenticity, but by showing no perpetrator, it actually normalizes antisemitism — as if we should expect students to write “Dirty Jew” on the backpacks and lockers of students. We should have seen the student writing it, and seen some repercussions — be it a suspension, students looking at them as losers, or something of that sort.
There should be funds allocated to making meaningful ads about Jew-hatred both on regular TV and online. It is inexplicable that this is not being done, and there are so many Jewish celebrities that could be involved. I just wished Kraft’s ad had done a much better job.
The author is a writer based in New York.
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Beyond the Bunker and the Billboard: A New Approach to Fighting Antisemitism
Tens of thousands joined the National March Against Antisemitism in London, Nov. 26, 2023. Photo: Tayfun Salci/ZUMA Press Wire via Reuters Connect
Earlier this month, Bret Stephens delivered the “State of World Jewry” address. At the risk of oversimplifying his speech, Stephens’ message was a somber pivot: the millions of dollars spent fighting antisemitism are largely wasted. We cannot “cure” the world of this hatred. Instead, we should spend those resources strengthening Jewish identity — funding Jewish day schools, summer camps, and building a fortress of internal resilience.
On Sunday, Robert Kraft’s Foundation to Combat Antisemitism continued their diametrically opposite approach. During the Super Bowl, they ran an ad featuring a Black student showing allyship to a Jewish student who is being bullied. The message is optimistic: Education, awareness, and cross-cultural empathy can win the day.
One strategy is retreat and fortify; the other is reach out and persuade.
I believe both are destined to fail.
Stephens is right that we cannot logic our way out of hate, but his solution surrenders the public square. Kraft is noble in his pursuit of allyship, but his solution relies on empathy that simply may not exist in large enough quantities.
There is a third path. It does not rely on Jewish introspection, nor does it beg for non-Jewish affection. It relies on universal enforcement.
The Failure of “Particularism”
If you poll Americans on how they feel about “antisemitism” (or its modern fraternal twin, “anti-Zionism,” which is a label that now mostly serves as a cover for Jew-hatred), the results are messy. Resistance to these specific bigotries is not universal; it is partisan, generational, and fraught with “context.”
However, if you poll Americans on the universal moral taboos — overt bigotry, dehumanization, and the endorsement of violence — the consensus is overwhelming. Even in our divided era, I am certain that more than 90% of the country agrees that persecuting a racial or religious group or celebrating violence is socially unacceptable.
This is the strategic flaw in both the Stephens and Kraft approaches: They treat antisemitism as a unique problem requiring a unique solution.
But we don’t need a “Jewish” solution. We need a universal solution, and fortunately one already exists.
The most effective way to protect the Jewish community is to stop asking society to protect Jews specifically, and start demanding society protect civilization generally and all of its people equally.
We must broaden the fight. We recruit the entire country not to defend Jews against Jew-hatred, but to defend the core American value that all overt hatred is an inadmissible taboo.
When we make the standard universal, we strip away the “exceptions.” If society agrees that “dehumanization is a firing offense,” then a person dehumanizing a Zionist must be fired the same as if they dehumanized Black or gay Americans — not because the employer loves Zionists or Black or LGBT people, but because the employer fears tolerating and normalizing these taboos of hate regardless of the group being targeted.
To do this, we must re-acquaint the mainstream with the concept of moral taboos.
As Jonathan Haidt explored in The Righteous Mind, true moral taboos are not intellectual; they are visceral. We don’t debate whether incest is wrong; we recoil from it. We need to restore that same visceral recoil to bigotry and the endorsement of violence, which largely exists, but then we must re-familiarize society with the mechanism for enforcing taboos: social consequences.
Stephens gives up on the outer world. Kraft tries to persuade it with carrots. The Third Path uses the stick of social ostracism. Social consequences are society’s immune response. When the immune system is working, a “Rejoicer” who cheers for violence is expelled from the body politic — not by law, but by consensus.
The Binary Choice
While restoring these taboos sounds like a generational challenge, the alternative makes the choice obvious.
We are either going to restore these universal guardrails — punishing those who egregiously violate them, just as we did to the KKK — or we will allow hate to be normalized until it spills over into political violence that no amount of Jewish Day Schools or Super Bowl ads can stop.
We don’t need to beg the world for its affection, nor should we retreat into a fortress. We need to remind the world that the taboos which protect us are the same ones that hold civilization together. If we lead the fight to restore those universal standards, we won’t just be securing a future for the Jews — we’ll be saving the country from itself.
Erez Levin is an advertising technologist trying to effect big pro-social changes in that industry and the world at large, currently focused on restoring society’s essential moral taboos against overt hatred. He writes on this topic at elevin11.substack.com.
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How the Palestinian Authority Hides ‘Pay-for-Slay’
Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas visiting the West Bank city of Jenin. Photo: Reuters/Mohamad Torokman
On Feb. 10, 2025, under intense pressure from Western countries, Palestinian Authority (PA) leader Mahmoud Abbas announced the cancellation of the PA Commission of Prisoners’ terror rewards program known as “Pay-for-Slay,” saying that the payments to terrorist prisoners and so-called Martyrs’ families would be moved to the Palestinian National Economic Empowerment Institution (PNEEI) and be based on social welfare criteria.
While many Western leaders have praised the PA for promising to stop paying terrorists in prison, the PA has another huge terror rewards program for released terrorist prisoners with more than 10,000 hidden Pay-for-Slay recipients receiving more than $230 million a year. And the PA has no intention of disclosing it or stopping it.
The PA enlarged this already existing program in 2021, when it took nearly 7,500 released prisoners who were receiving payments and moved them from the PA Commission of Prisoners into other frameworks. In addition, there are more than 13,500 families of Martyrs and injured living outside the PA areas who are receiving over $86 million a year.
The PA Prisoners and Released Prisoners Law requires the PA to reward terrorists who were imprisoned for more than five years with lifetime salaries. After Palestinian Media Watch (PMW) exposed in 2020 that there were at least 7,500 released prisoners to whom the PA was paying monthly terror reward salaries, the PA was condemned by the donor countries.
As the PA explained: “Europe, the US, and Israel” did not accept that the PA paid released terrorists merely because “they killed.”
The PA acted quickly. In early 2021, Mahmoud Abbas issued a Presidential Order to “integrate” all the thousands of released terrorists receiving Pay-for-Slay salaries into government and PA Security Forces (PASF) jobs, and he changed PA pension laws to enable thousands of ineligible terrorists to receive PA pensions.
The PA set up a special committee to work continuously, “even on vacation days,” to hide these recipients. By the end of 2021, all 7,500 recipients of terror salaries were erased from the Commission of Prisoners lists and, although unqualified, were granted jobs and pensions to receive their hidden Pay-for-Slay without Western scrutiny.
These recipients are so well hidden that some Western donor countries, to avoid funding Pay-for-Slay, have been designating their support specifically to pay civil servants or PASF salaries and pensions — the very places that the PA has hidden its terrorists.
With this terror reward program below the West’s radar, the PA is not planning to stop these terror payouts to released terrorist prisoners. PMW estimates that with these two programs, at least 23,500 terrorists received hidden Pay-for-Slay payments in 2025, amounting to $315 million in hidden Pay-for-Slay.
Part 3 of our recent report includes transcribed conversations between recipients of Pay-for-Slay in the first months of 2026, confirming that the PA is expanding its Pay-for-Slay by at least 6,000 recipients. The PA is intentionally lying to the US, the EU, France, and other Western countries, while working continuously to find ways to secretly reward Palestinian terrorists.
The author is the Founder and Director of Palestinian Media Watch, where a version of this article first appeared.