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White House says it will not meet with Israel’s Bezalel Smotrich when he visits the US
WASHINGTON (JTA) — Biden administration officials will not meet with Bezalel Smotrich, the Israeli finance minister who called for a Palestinian village to be “wiped out,” then backtracked, and who is visiting the U.S. next week to meet with leaders of Israel Bonds.
At least five liberal Jewish groups want the U.S. government to consider barring Smotrich from coming here. Ned Price, the department’s spokesman, said at Thursday’s daily briefing that questions on Israeli ministers’ travel should be referred to Israel, and that he does not comment on the eligibility of individuals to enter the United States.
The trip comes as Smotrich and his far-right allies in Israel’s governing coalition have upended traditions of comity between establishment U.S. Jewish groups and Israel. Those relationships have become even more strained in recent days, after Israeli West Bank settlers rioted in a Palestinian village. They also come amid raucous protests of the Israeli government’s plan to sap the power of the judiciary, which critics say endanger minority rights.
William Daroff, the CEO of the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations, said Smotrich’s remarks were “disgusting,” and a spokesman for the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, the powerful pro-Israel lobby, said the group would not be meeting with him.
Asked by the Jewish Telegraphic Agency whether the minister will meet with the White House, a National Security Council spokeswoman said, “No U.S. government meetings are planned for this trip.” That includes officials in the U.S. Treasury, the counterpart to Smotrich’s ministry, she said.
Smotrich is also responsible for civilian affairs in much of the West Bank. His call to “wipe out” the West Bank village of Huwara came after a settler rampage through the village following a shooting there that killed two Israeli brothers. At least one Palestinian in another village died amid the riots.
“I think the village of Huwara should be wiped out, I think that the state of Israel should do it,” he said in an interview on Wednesday. A few hours later, he walked back his statement: “To remove any doubt, in my words I did not mean wiping out the village of Huwara, but rather acting in a targeted way against terrorists and supporters of terror, and exacting a heavy price from them in order to return security to local residents.”
This week, the State Department’s annual report on terrorism recorded a “substantial rise” in settler attacks on Palestinian in 2021, the first time it had made such an assessment. On Wednesday, Price called Smotrich’s remarks about wiping out the village “disgusting” and “incitement to violence.”
“Just as we condemn Palestinian incitement to violence, we condemn these provocative remarks that also amount to incitement to violence,” Price said in his briefing that day. “We call on Prime Minister Netanyahu and other senior Israeli officials to publicly and clearly reject and disavow these comments.”
Netanyahu has yet to do so, and with Smotrich just days away from a visit stateside to give a speech to Israel Bonds in Washington D.C., five Jewish groups are saying the Biden administration should at least consider keeping him out and others will not sit down with him. AIPAC’s declining to meet with Smotrich is particularly noteworthy. It routinely meets with senior Israeli ministers.
“The administration should make clear that comments promoting grave violations of human rights, such as those made by Smotrich, are grounds for re-examination of a visa for entry to the United States,” J Street, the liberal Jewish Israel policy group, said in a statement.
Four other Jewish groups are saying outright that the Biden administration should keep Smotrich out, among them Americans for Peace Now, an affiliate off the Israeli left-wing group; the Israel Policy Forum, a group that advocates for an independent Palestinian state alongside Israel; T’ruah, a liberal rabbinic human rights group; and Jewish Voice for Peace, an anti-Zionist group.
The T’ruah statement referred to U.S. immigration law, which bans entry to those who have “incited terrorist activity with intent to cause serious bodily harm or death.” It said the threat Smotrich poses is especially acute since he assumed responsibility for administering civilian life in parts of the West Bank.
“Smotrich’s comments are even more dangerous now that Israel’s de jure annexation of the West Bank has made him effectively the governor of the territory, with broad oversight over most areas of civil administration,” the T’ruah statement said.
IPF, a group led by former lay leaders of mainstream pro-Israel organizations, also joined the calls. its policy director, Michael Koplow, told JTA, “We believe that there are sufficient grounds to deny Smotrich a visa.”
The Americans for Peace Now petition, addressed to Biden, garnered more than 1,100 signatures less than a day after it was posted.
“Smotrich wants to bring his hatred to US soil. He has plans to travel to the United States later this month. We’re here to say that he is not welcome,” the petition says. “We have seen how incitement in Israel-Palestine has led to devastating violence and we urge your administration to deny entry to Smotrich and his hateful rhetoric.”
A sixth U.S.-based liberal group, the New Israel Fund, which raises money for social justice organizations in Israel, said Jewish groups should make clear Smnotrich is unwanted here. “Our responsibility right now as American Jews is to say ‘take your hateful racism, your homophobia your plans for an apartheid Israel and get out. We do not want you here’,” it said in a statement. Smnotrich has called himself a “proud homophobe.”
Daroff, of the Conference of Presidents, declined to comment to JTA on whether he would meet with Smotrich.But he tweeted his agreement with Price. “I agree. His statement seeking to ‘wipe out’ Huwara was, as Ned Price said, ‘irresponsible, repugnant and disgusting’,” he wrote.
Israel Bonds, which promotes investment in Israeli government bonds, said in a statement that because it works closely with the Finance Ministry, welcoming the sitting finance minister to its events was a matter of routine. Smotrich will speak to the group’s Washington, D.C. leadership meeting.
“As part of their long-established responsibilities, Israel’s finance ministers from across the political spectrum have historically, over Israel Bonds’ 72-year history, attended our events,” a spokesman said, replying to a JTA query. “One of the organization’s most unique and paramount attributes is that it remains unbiased with regard to any political party or affiliation.”
Hundreds of rabbis have said they would not welcome Smotrich or his allies into their synagogues and would encourage their communities to boycott him. The Presidents’ Conference did not invite ministers from Smotrich’s Religious Zionism party to address its annual colloquy in Israel last month, although they were invited to a luncheon for all Knesset members.
One group that backs settlements, the Zionist Organization of America, said not meeting with Religious Zionism leaders was a mistake.
‘Nobody has to agree with them or disagree with them,” Klein said. “But they should speak and whoever wants to challenge them, challenge them, criticize them, disagree with them.”
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The post White House says it will not meet with Israel’s Bezalel Smotrich when he visits the US appeared first on Jewish Telegraphic Agency.
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Why both sides are ducking settler violence ahead of Israel’s elections
(JTA) — For American Jews who follow Israel closely, one of the hardest things to understand about Israeli politics today is the gap between the severity of settler violence in Judea and Samaria, also known as the West Bank, and the relatively limited role it plays in the election campaign.
The phenomenon is not being ignored altogether. Israeli politicians across the political spectrum condemn acts of violence by Jewish extremists, and security experts have warned that Jewish terrorism and nationalist crime have become a serious threat to Israel’s security and democratic institutions. Yet the issue has not emerged as a major dividing line in the elections.
Why? Part of the answer is that Jewish violence in Judea and Samaria is politically inconvenient for both major blocs. On one side stands Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s coalition. On the other stands the loosely aligned “change bloc” seeking to replace it. That bloc includes parties with markedly different ideologies: Naftali Bennett’s B’Yachad, Avigdor Lieberman’s Yisrael Beiteinu, Gadi Eisenkot’s Yashar and Yair Golan’s Democrats. They agree on the need for political change, but they do not share a common position on the future of the settlements, Palestinian statehood or the long-term status of Judea and Samaria.
The reason settler violence has not become a defining campaign issue becomes even clearer once two different questions are separated. The first is straightforward: How should Israel deal with violence committed by Israeli Jews against Palestinians? The second is much broader: What should Israel do about the settlements, its control over Judea and Samaria and the long-term future of the territory? These are not the same question.
Distinguishing between these two lines of thought matters because the Israeli opposition may be united in its condemnation of settler violence, but it remains deeply divided over the settlements themselves. Yashar does not advocate for a general evacuation of settlements. B’Yachad supports Jewish settlement and opposes the establishment of a Palestinian state. Yisrael Beiteinu supports strengthening Jewish settlement and Israeli control in parts of Judea and Samaria. The Democrats take a substantially different position, including opposition to illegal settler outposts and an explicit commitment to fighting what they call “Jewish terrorism.”
There is, however, potentially a much broader consensus around law, order and state authority. That is where the political framing becomes important.
The Netanyahu camp does not entirely deny the existence of Jewish violence. After recent incidents in Samaria, Netanyahu condemned what he called a “handful of rioters” and called on law enforcement authorities to prosecute them. Foreign Minister Gideon Sa’ar described those responsible as criminals who should be dealt with severely.
This framing treats the problem primarily as one of law enforcement: Extremists are committing crimes, and the state must enforce the law against them.
That approach is also reflected in a significant proposal by Defense Minister Israel Katz. In August, Katz instructed the IDF to prepare a plan for transferring civilian enforcement involving Israelis in Judea and Samaria to the Israel Police, in part to reduce the military’s involvement in civilian law-and-order incidents.
This position is coherent: If Israel regards itself as sovereign over the territory, Israeli civilians who violate the law should be dealt with by the police, while the military should concentrate on security threats.
But this logic is not inherently a right-wing argument. It can serve the change bloc just as well. The change bloc can describe Jewish violence as evidence of governmental failure, loss of control and the erosion of state authority. That allows parties with very different views about the future of Judea and Samaria to agree on an immediate principle: The state must enforce its laws.
For politicians such as Bennett, Lieberman and Eisenkot, this is a much easier political proposition than making the future of the settlements and their legal status the central issue.
This is where Yair Golan, leader of the Democrats, stands out. Golan does not limit himself to terms such as “rioters,” “criminals,” “extremists” or “lawlessness.” He repeatedly uses the term “Jewish terrorism.” While the change bloc party leaders have on occasion used that phrase in English, they do not often use it in Hebrew. Golan is the one who uses the term repeatedly.
In August, Golan said explicitly: “What we are seeing today is Jewish terrorism that is receiving legitimacy from the Israeli government.” He has also presented the fight against Jewish terrorism as one of the issues on which he believes the change bloc can agree.
This choice of language is more consequential than it may initially appear. Once the phenomenon is called terrorism, difficult questions follow: If this is terrorism, should Israel not fight it with some of the tools it uses to fight other forms of terrorism? If Palestinian terrorism is understood as a national security threat requiring intelligence, organized investigation and preventive measures, what should happen when the perpetrators are Jewish Israelis?
Israel has developed extensive counterterrorism mechanisms for dealing with Palestinian terrorism: intelligence gathering, investigations by the Shin Bet internal security and counterintelligence service, administrative detention, military and security operations and other exceptional legal tools.
That does not mean those tools should automatically be applied identically to Israeli citizens. There are important legal and practical differences. But calling settler violence “Jewish terrorism” inevitably raises the question of whether it should be treated as more than ordinary criminality, and is important to harnessing the attention and power of the state to address it even as it labels it something that is an outlier.
The future of Judea and Samaria may be one of the most consequential questions facing Israel, but voters appear to be focusing more immediately on security, the economy, military service and Netanyahu’s political future. Here’s the dilemma all the parties are facing: The issue of settler violence can be important enough to condemn, but too politically complicated to campaign on.
For the Netanyahu bloc, emphasizing the systemic nature of settler extremism risks highlighting failures within a political constituency that is central to its coalition. For the change bloc, emphasizing it as a distinct political problem risks reopening the much larger argument over the settlements — an issue on which the change bloc itself remains divided.
Nevertheless, ahead of the elections, politicians can demand vigorous enforcement against violent settlers without supporting the dismantling of settlements. One can oppose illegal outposts without opposing the settlement enterprise as a whole. And one can regard Jewish violence primarily as a security, governance and even terrorism problem without having a position on the ultimate political status of Judea and Samaria, as important as that may be.
This article originally appeared on JTA.org.
The post Why both sides are ducking settler violence ahead of Israel’s elections appeared first on The Forward.
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How a Jewish play from 1908 enshrined the idea of America as a cultural ‘melting pot’
It’s long been unfashionable to refer to the United States as a “melting pot.” Identity politics and multiculturalism have undermined the ideal of an assimilation so complete that it obliterates ethnic distinctions. Now the persistence of difference is hailed, at least in some quarters, as enriching rather than estranging, even if the associated metaphors — “salad bowl,” “kaleidoscope,” “mosaic” — lack poetic vigor.
The first reference to the U.S. as a melting pot is said to date to J. Hector St. John de Crèvecoeur’s 1782 Letters from an American Framer, in which he wrote: “Here individuals of all nations are melted into a new race of men.” Similar notions surfaced in the writings of Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry James and the historian Frederick Jackson Turner. But it was Israel Zangwill’s 1908 play, The Melting Pot, that injected that industrial metaphor into the national consciousness.
Set in New York City, the play is a love story between a musically gifted Russian Jewish immigrant of Sephardic extraction and a gentile settlement house worker from the pogrom-wracked city that he fled. Its backdrop is the turmoil of an early 20th-century America trying to make sense of massive waves of Eastern European, and particularly Jewish, immigration. The playwright was an English Jew, a disillusioned Zionist who had begun looking to the U.S. as the promised land.
After its debut in Washington, where it was praised by President Theodore Roosevelt, The Melting Pot moved to Broadway in 1909 and has since enjoyed occasional revivals. Crescendoing debates around immigration, antisemitism and who deserves to be an American seem to lend it renewed currency.
So, at least, was the reasoning of Jesse Bernstein, producing artistic director of Philadelphia’s Theatre Ariel, whose focus is Jewish-themed work. Bernstein adapted and directed Zangwill’s play, and has teamed with the Philadelphia Artists’ Collective, which produces rarely seen classics, to mount it. Their streamlined, modern-dress version, part of the America250 celebration, opened Wednesday at Philadelphia’s historic Arch Street Meeting House.
Bernstein said in an interview that he pruned as much as half an hour from the original (it now runs about 95 intermission-less minutes) with an ear to modern sensibilities. He also has made some additions that undercut the play’s triumphalism. The Melting Pot nonetheless remains an odd fusion of melodrama and polemic, interesting mostly as an historical curiosity.
Bernstein’s direction does the piece no favors with a stiff, presentational style, in which characters frequently address the audience rather than one another. On the other hand, when they turn away, the meeting house’s unfavorable acoustics make them more difficult, sometimes impossible, to hear. Offstage characters sit in chairs behind the action awaiting their cues. Meghan Jones’s spare set, representing both the Quixano family home and different locations within the settlement house, is draped with oriental rugs and strewn with steamer trunks and valises.
The protagonist, David Quixano, played with endearing sensitivity by Adam Galloway, survived the infamous 1903 Kishinev pogrom, in which all his immediate family were murdered and he himself was shot and left for dead. After that trauma, America has become both his dream and his salvation. In New York, he lives with his cynical uncle, Mendel, also a musician; his Yiddish-speaking grandmother; and an Irish American housemaid, Kathleen (Jessy Gruver), who wrestles comically with Jewish customs and dietary laws.
Through a violin concert, David meets and falls for the lovely Vera (Lexi Thammavong), a former Russian “revolutionist” who now combats poverty through settlement house work. David is composing an American symphony that will convey his rapturous views of his adopted homeland. He finds a ready admirer in the German conductor Herr Pappelmeister (Adam Pelta-Pauls, speaking convincing German).
Standing in David’s way, personally and professionally, are two villains — the wealthy, unscrupulous nativist Quincy Davenport (Eli Lynn), a married man who lusts after Vera, and Vera’s estranged father, Baron Ravendal (Brian McCann), a reactionary Russian military commander who turns up unexpectedly. McCann brings a strangely mannered intensity to a role that is already a caricature.
Zangwill’s characters represent a spectrum of early 20th-century attitudes. Ravendal and Davenport, brutal in different ways, both give free rein to their antisemitism. Frau Quixano (played by a bewigged McCann) and Mendel Quixano (J Hernandez, appropriately world-weary) reflect the resistance of older immigrants to assimilation — and especially to its culmination in interfaith romance.
The Melting Pot is deadly serious at times, larded with apocalyptic symbolism and images of Jewish suffering. But it also has its share of comedy, including the maid Kathleen’s gradual embrace of Jewish traditions and some playful digs directed at critics.
It is up to David, the musical prodigy, to articulate the famous message at the play’s core. Early on, he declares his fealty to a new American ideal:
America is God’s Crucible, the great Melting-Pot where all the races of Europe are melting and re-forming! …A fig for your feuds and vendettas! Germans and Frenchmen, Irishmen and Englishmen, Jews and Russians—into the Crucible with you all! God is making the American. The real American has not yet arrived. He is only in the Crucible, I tell you — he will be the fusion of all races, perhaps the coming superman.
David returns repeatedly to this soaring rhetoric, lauding American greatness born of industrial-grade homogenization, and seeking to embody it in his symphony.
The original play ended exuberantly, with both love and David’s melting pot vision of “the glory of America” conquering all. Bernstein’s adaptation, with its insistence on relevance, duly complicates that vision. He wraps the action with supporting characters challenging David’s view of American harmony, and with the future of the betrothed couple clouded in doubt.
The Melting Pot runs at the Arch Street Meeting House, 320 Arch St., Philadelphia, through Nov. 8.
The post How a Jewish play from 1908 enshrined the idea of America as a cultural ‘melting pot’ appeared first on The Forward.
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‘I wanna blow up a synagogue’: Online posts lead to hate crime charge against Utah man
(JTA) — A Utah man accused of possessing explosive devices, searching online for nearby synagogues and making online threats to kill Jews is due in court Friday to face charges including attempting to commit a hate crime.
A federal grand jury indicted Skyler AJ Rose, 22, on Wednesday, the Department of Justice said in a release.
Rose allegedly made threats on social media, including “I wanna blow up a synagogue,” leading the FBI to join the Ogden City Police Department in a search of his home, where they allegedly discovered six pipe bombs, two rifles and ammunition.
A review of a cellphone seized from the home allegedly showed that Rose had searched online for a nearby synagogue, according to the Department of Justice.
The charges Rose faces include possession of an unregistered destructive device, threats to kill and injure people and to destroy a building, and attempting to commit a hate crime.
This article originally appeared on JTA.org.
The post ‘I wanna blow up a synagogue’: Online posts lead to hate crime charge against Utah man appeared first on The Forward.
