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‘A battle of Jews against Jews’? Arab Israelis debate whether and how to join Israel’s democracy protests
TAYIBE, Israel (JTA) — Prominent figures among Israel’s Arab minority are calling on its members to join the mass protests against the Netanyahu government’s judicial overhaul plan, arguing that Arabs will be the first victims of any weakening of the Supreme Court.
“If the government succeeds it will make our chances for equality and a just peace more remote,” said Suheil Diab, former deputy mayor of Nazareth, Israel’s largest Arab city, and one of the organizers of a nonpartisan push to get Arabs to demonstrate alongside their Jewish counterparts.
“If we don’t repel the attack on the judiciary, we can’t go forward with our agenda,” Diab went on. “I want Arabs to participate and to know that participating is in their interest.”
The proposed reforms would give the Knesset — now controlled by a right-wing coalition — the power to override Israel’s Supreme Court, in a move that proponents say is needed because, in their view, the court has grown too liberal and out of step with popular sentiment. Leaders of some of the parties in the coalition have called for curbing rights of LGBTQ Israelis, non-Orthodox Jews and Arab Israelis. At least one of them has openly suggested that Arab citizens who are “disloyal” should be deported.
Diab and other Arab leaders fear that without the protection of the Supreme Court, the Arab minority might face measures limiting funding, access to jobs and opportunities and even their political representation. Even expulsion feels like a realistic concern given the far-right influence in the government, he said.
”We need to convince a distinct share of the Jewish majority that both of us are threatened,” Diab told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency. “The only way is a shared Jewish-Arab struggle.”
But while massive protests including tech entrepreneurs, army reservists, academics and others have shown the extent of determination among Jews to stop the government’s bid to legislate what it terms “judicial reform,” Arab Israelis, who make up one-fifth of the population, have hardly turned out.
This dynamic has been true in the Knesset as well as in the streets. Mansour Abbas, the leader of the Arab Ra’am Party, has said he opposes the changes, but when he was invited to participate in a press conference with other leaders of the political opposition, he declined.
Palestinian flags were seen at some of the early pro-democracy protests in Israel, such as at this one in Tel Aviv Jan. 14, 2023, but have appeared less frequently since. (Gili Yaari/NurPhoto via Getty Images)
A push to get Arabs to participate in the protests began Friday with publication of a petition calling for public activism, inked by more than 200 Arab personalities, including retired judges. A gathering here on Saturday sought to work through thorny questions about what Arab participation might look like, and what demands it might make.
Getting Israeli Arabs to the protests that have become a recurring feature of life in cities across Israel every Saturday night won’t necessarily be easy. The push is likely to run up against perceived disenfranchisement on the part of Arab Israelis, whose political parties have rarely been part of governing coalitions and whose participation in electoral politics has been portrayed in the past as illegitimate by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his allies.
Another likely obstacle is a narrow focus for the protest organizers, almost all Jewish.
In the first weeks of the protests in January, Palestinian flags raised by protesters drew criticism from right-wing and pro-government pundits. National Security minister Itamar Ben-Gvir called for a ban on the flag in public and warned that those waving Palestinian flags in future demonstrations would be arrested. Fewer Palestinian flags were seen in the following weeks, and issues relating to the Israeli occupation of the West Bank or to the new government’s attitude toward the Israeli-Palestinian conflict were all but dropped from the agenda. An Israeli activist who asked to carry a Palestinian flag while speaking was declined.
The organizers do not seem interested thus far in broadening the agenda, and only a few Arab speakers have been featured in the demonstrations. Just hours after the Tayibe meeting on Saturday, Reem Hazzan, a leader of the predominantly Arab Hadash party in Haifa, was told by organizers who reviewed a copy of her planned speech to make changes to it. She refused and there was no Arab speaker.
Haaretz quoted unidentified organizers as saying the problem was that Hazzan refused to call in her speech for the Arab public to turn out for the protests. But Hazzan, in remarks to JTA, said she sees a deeper problem.
“We want to change the rules of the game, not just preserve what exists. What exists is not good,” she said. “We need to speak about the occupation and about discrimination. If you want Arabs to participate you must take into account that Arabs have an agenda.”
Exactly what that agenda should be was under debate during the gathering in Tayibe, a sprawling town in central Israel that like many Arab municipalities suffers from spiraling crime and violence.
“People say it’s a battle of Jews against Jews; others say they don’t want us there so why should we go and others point to times when the court sided against us,” said Mohammed Ali Taha, 82, former head of the Arab Writers Association, who spoke at the Tayibe gathering.
Arab Israelis cast their vote at a voting station in Tayibe, Nov. 1, 2022. (Jamal Awad/Flash90)
“It’s all true,” he continued. “But still we must join the protests because we will be the primary losers. When the far right rises, it strikes against the weak. We are the weak.”
With no constitution, Israel lacks any explicit guarantee of equality for all its citizens. Some laws, including those ensuring the right for immigration, advantage Jews. To the extent that Arabs have been able to challenge discrimination in recent decades, it has been largely through the Supreme Court inferring equality on them based on liberal legislation such as the Basic Law: Human Dignity and Freedom, passed in 1992, which specifies, “Every human being is entitled to protection of his life, body and dignity.” Critics of the proposed reforms warn that they could result in the rollback of that basic law.
The court has also at times ruled against Arab Israeli interests, such as when it refused to consider petitions against the 2018 Nation State Law, which enshrines Jewish settlement as a national value, declares that national self-determination in the state of Israel is “unique to the Jewish people” and demotes Arabic from an official language.
Tayibe’s deputy mayor, Malik Azzem, said that despite its mixed record, an independent Supreme Court is essential for Israeli Arabs.
“The High Court is our last defense for our rights as a minority,” he said. “The struggle for our rights is not separate from this struggle. We need to mobilize the public.”
He added that as an elected official, he fears that without the court’s oversight, the government would simply cut the budgets of Arab municipalities.
”People need to raise their voices and join,” Azzem said. “We should be at the center of the demonstrations. We are already late in dealing with this.”
Taha, the writer, whose works often focus on the Nakba, an Arabic term meaning catastrophe that is used to describe the plight of Palestinians after Israel’s 1948 War of Independence and which he lived through as a child, told the gathering: ”Without Jewish-Arab cooperation we cannot achieve anything. This is an opportunity for cooperation.”
He said he believes Arab Israelis are today more vulnerable than they have been at any time since the period that they lived under military rule, from 1948 to 1966. At that time they were so restricted that they could not travel within Israel without permits. The danger today, he says, is due to the clout of far-right ministers Ben-Gvir and Bezalel Smotrich, who have expressed anti-Arab views and, in Ben-Gvir’s case, even called for the expulsion of “disloyal” citizens.
“If they succeed it will be worse for us than military rule was,” Taha said. To avert this, he argued, Arabs need to join the protests alongside Jews even if it means not raising Palestinian flags.
”It’s not the time and place for a protest about a Palestinian state,” he said. “This could cause conflict among the protesters.”
But to others, the idea of protesting without highlighting the need to end both the occupation and inequality is akin to denying one’s very identity.
“I’m against participating in any demonstration that is embarrassed to talk about context and the occupation. I support something broader,” said Sondos Saleh, a former member of Knesset for the Arab Ta’al party.
Sondos Saleh, an Arab Israeli politician then on the Joint List Party candidate list, speaks during a press conference in Tel Aviv, Feb. 23, 2021. (Miriam Alster/Flash90)
Merav Ben-Ari, a legislator for the largest opposition party, Yesh Atid, told JTA she would welcome greater Arab participation in the protests. ”Anything that strengthens the protests is excellent,” she said.
But she showed little enthusiasm for talking about many of the topics that animate Israeli Arabs in the political sphere, including the core one that liberal critics of the protest movement say is being given short shrift.
“How is the occupation connected?” Ben-Ari asked. “What is needed is to talk about the reform. Everyone who loves the country and cares about it has to fight against the reform and the harm to the Supreme Court.”
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Joe Kent Suggests Israel Behind Charlie Kirk Assassination, Controls US Foreign Policy in Tucker Carlson Interview
National Counterterrorism Center Director Joseph Kent attends a House Homeland Security hearing entitled “Worldwide Threats to the Homeland,” on Capitol Hill in Washington, DC, US, Dec. 11, 2025. Photo: REUTERS/Elizabeth Frantz
After Joe Kent, director of the US National Counterterrorism Center, resigned in protest of President Donald Trump’s military campaign against Iran, he appeared on Tucker Carlson’s podcast on Wednesday.
While on the podcast, Kent, who resigned from his position on Tuesday, argued that Israel dragged the US into the war against the Iranian regime, suggested that Israel may have been involved in the murder of conservative activist Charlie Kirk, claimed that Iran posed no imminent threat to the United States, and said that Iran was not pursuing a nuclear weapon.
Themes of Israel controlling US policy and conspiracy theories about Kirk’s assassination have become commonplace on Carlson’s podcast in recent months.
“We don’t know what happened with Charlie Kirk. I’m not saying the Israelis did this — I’m saying there are a lot of unanswered questions there, and there’s enough data to say there’s a good chance that President Trump feels he is under threat,” Kent said.
“The last time I saw Charlie Kirk on this earth was in June, in the West Wing stairway,” Kent said on Carlson’s podcast. “And he said very loudly to me … ‘Joe, stop us from getting into a war with Iran.’ Very loudly. He was single-minded.”
“So, when one of President Trump’s closest advisers who was vocally advocating against a war with Iran is suddenly publicly assassinated, and we’re not allowed to ask questions about that — it’s a data point. A data point that we need to look into,” Kent said, suggesting that Israel may have something to do with the assassination.
There has been no evidence to support claims of Israeli involvement in Kirk’s assassination. Tyler Robinson, 22, has been charged for murdering Kirk and potentially faces the death penalty. He was romantically involved with his transgender roommate, and prosecutors have reportedly argued that Kirk’s anti-trans rhetoric was a key factor that allegedly led him to shoot the Turning Point USA founder.
Kent also argued that the US is not really in charge of its own foreign policy: “Who is in charge of our policy in the Middle East? Who is in charge of when we decide to go to war or not?” he asked.
Ther former counterterrorism chief argued that Israel forced Washington’s hand by saying it would attack Iran and that the US would be forced to be caught up in Iran’s inevitable retaliation.
“The Israelis felt emboldened that no matter what they did, no matter what situation they put us in, they could go ahead and take this action, and we would just have to react. That speaks to the relationship — but also it just shows there was a lobby pushing for us to go to war,” Kent said.
In addition to claiming Israel was driving US foreign policy, he also claimed Iran was not close to achieving, or even pursuing, a nuclear-weapons capability. “No, they weren’t [on the verge of getting a nuclear weapon] — not three weeks ago when this started, and not in June [2025] either,” Kent said, referring to last year’s 12-day war between Iran and Israel
“The Iranians have had a religious ruling — a fatwa — against actually developing a nuclear weapon since 2004. That’s been in place since 2004. That’s available in the public sphere. But we also had no intelligence to indicate that that fatwa was being disobeyed or was on the cusp of being lifted,” Kent added.
Experts on Iran have widely dismissed the Iranian regime’s so-called fatwa against having nuclear weapons, noting Tehran has repeatedly lied about and tried to hide aspects of its nuclear program.
The interview occurred one day after Kent resigned from his senior intelligence position, saying he could not support the war and arguing Tehran posed “no imminent threat” to the United States. But it was Kent’s broader assertion, that pressure from Israel and pro-Israel voices influenced the decision to go to war, that especially drew swift pushback from the White House and national security experts.
In his resignation, Kent also drew parallels to the Iraq War, suggesting that similar dynamics shaped both conflicts by arguing that Israel pushed the US into the war.
“Iran posed no imminent threat to our nation, and it is clear that we started this war due to pressure from Israel and its powerful American lobby,” Kent wrote in his resignation letter.
The Trump administration forcefully disputed Kent’s claims, maintaining that the decision to strike Iran was based on credible intelligence about threats to US forces and interests in the region. Trump dismissed Kent as “weak on security,” defending the operation as necessary to deter Iranian aggression and protect American personnel and allies.
“When I read the statement, I realized that it’s a good thing that he’s out, because he said that Iran was not a threat,” Trump said. “Iran was a threat.”
Kent himself previously described Iran as a major threat that needed to be addressed.
In a September 2024 post on X, for example, he wrote that “Iran has been after Trump since January of 2020 after he ordered the targeted killing of the terrorist Qasem Soleimani. This isn’t a new threat.”
White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt lambasted Kent’s resignation letter as inaccurate.
“The absurd allegation that President Trump made this decision based on the influence of others, even foreign countries, is both insulting and laughable. President Trump has been remarkably consistent and has said for DECADES that Iran can NEVER possess a nuclear weapon,” she posted on social media.
Kent previously faced scrutiny during his US congressional runs in Washington state over links to far-right, antisemitic, and white nationalist figures, including Nick Fuentes.
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Brandeis Center Reaches Settlement With UC Berkeley in Antisemitism Lawsuit
Students attend a protest encampment in support of Palestinians at University of California, Berkeley during the ongoing conflict between Israel and the Palestinian Islamist group Hamas, in Berkeley, US, April 23, 2024. Photo: Carlos Barria via Reuters Connect
The Louis D. Brandeis Center for Human Rights Under Law has reached a major agreement to settle a lawsuit it filed against the University of California, Berkeley in 2023 over its allegedly failing to address a series of incidents of campus antisemitism which culminated in anti-Zionist students establishing “Jewish-free zones” where pro-Israel advocates were barred from speaking.
As previously reported by The Algemeiner, the complaint provided several examples of alleged antisemitic harassment and exclusion on campus, including a bylaw banning Zionists speakers that 23 Berkeley Law groups adopted in September 2021, campus groups Women of Berkeley Law and the Queer Caucus requiring support for the boycott, divestment, and sanctions (BDS) movement against Israel to join its ranks, and the Berkeley Journal of Gender, Law, and Justice banning Zionists from submitting articles and speaking at its events.
The campus environment worsened after Hamas’s Oct. 7, 2023, onslaught across southern Israel, in which the Palestinian terrorist group murdered over 1,200 people, mostly civilians, and took more than 250 hostages to Gaza, according to the complaint. Indeed, the suit alleged that hate mail and death threats have been sent to Jewish students, that Jewish students have opted not to attend class because walking through campus risked encountering angry pro-Palestinian supporters, and that an anti-Israel demonstrator bashed a Jewish student draped in an Israeli flag over the head with a metal water bottle.
“As a UC Berkeley alumnus, I am glad that we can finally resolve this long battle with a victory for Jewish American students and for all Americans who care about free speech and fairness,” Kenneth Marcus, chairman of the Brandeis Center and former US assistant secretary of education for civil rights, said in a statement on Thursday. “What began as a ban on Zionist Jewish voices, regardless of the subjects they wished to address, and mushroomed into a widespread hostile environment will no longer be tolerated.”
He continued, “What happened at Berkeley is a cautionary tale. Universities, corporations, and political parties cannot create an anti-Zionist exception to their conduct codes. They cannot silence Jewish Americans on the pretext of advancing their own political agendas.”
The details of the settlement are disclosed. They call for Berkeley’s using the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA) definition of antisemitism as a reference tool, stating a “reaffirmation” of antisemitism as a violation of the code of conduct, conducting an annual survey of the Jewish student body, and appointing an official to manage the school’s compliance with Title VI of the Civil Rights Act, which prohibits discrimination at universities receiving taxpayer money to fund research and other operations. UC Berkeley will also pay the Brandeis Center $1 million as reimbursement for “outside attorneys’ fees and costs incurred” during litigation of the suit.
UC Berkeley saw some of the most shocking antisemitic incidents in recent memory in the months which followed the Hamas-led Oct. 7 massacre across southern Israel, as previously reported by The Algemeiner.
In February 2024, a mob of hundreds of pro-Palestinian students and non-students shut down an event at UC Berkeley featuring an Israeli soldier, forcing Jewish students to flee to a secret safe room as the protesters overwhelmed campus police.
Footage of the incident showed a frenzied mass of anti-Zionist agitators banging on the doors of Zellerbach Hall while an event featuring Israeli reservist Ran Bar-Yoshafat — who visited the university to discuss his military service during Hamas’s Oct. 7 invasion — took place inside. The mob then stormed the building — breaking glass windows in the process, according to reports in the Daily Wire — and precipitated school officials’ decision to evacuate the area.
During the infiltration of Zellerbach, a member of the mob — which was recruited by Bears for Palestine, which had earlier proclaimed its intention to cancel the event — spit on a Jewish student and called him a “Jew,” pejoratively.
“You know what I was screamed at? ‘Jew, you Jew, you Jew,’ literally right to my face,” the student who was attacked said to a friend. “Some woman — then she spit at me.”
In July, the chancellor of UC Berkeley described a professor who cheered Hamas’s Oct. 7 atrocities as a “fine scholar” during a congressional hearing held at Capitol Hill.
Richard Lyons, who assumed the chancellorship in July 2024, issued the unmitigated praise while being questioned by members of the US House Committee on Education and the Workforce, which summoned him and the chief administrators of two other major universities to interrogate their handling of the campus antisemitism crisis.
Lyons stumbled into the statement while being questioned by Rep. Lisa McClain (R-MI), who asked the chancellor to describe the extent of his relationship and correspondence with Professor Ussama Makdisi, who tweeted in February 2024 that he “could have been one of those who broke through the siege on Oct. 7.”
In Thursday’s statement, Marcus implored the Jewish community to be unrelenting in its fight against antisemitism.
“As we have now seen time and time again, if left unaddressed, antisemitic bigotry, whether or not masked as anti-Zionism, only continues to expand. We will fight this bigotry wherever and whenever we find it, and we will win.”
Follow Dion J. Pierre @DionJPierre.
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Ukraine Leverages Drone Defense Expertise to Aid Gulf, Strengthen Strategic Role Amid Iran War
Fire ignited at the impact site following an Iranian missile strike, amid the US-Israeli conflict with Iran, in central Israel, March 13, 2026. Photo: REUTERS/Gideon Markowicz
As the US-Israeli war with Iran reshapes regional security dynamics, Ukraine is leveraging its battlefield-honed drone defense expertise to assist US allies in the Gulf, potentially strengthening its diplomatic standing and shifting the balance of power, experts say.
Earlier this week, a team of around 200 Ukrainian military experts arrived in the Middle East to provide both “expertise” and “practical support” in countering Iranian drones.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy confirmed that specialized units have already been deployed in the United Arab Emirates, Qatar, and Saudi Arabia, with additional personnel en route to Kuwait, as Kyiv strengthens coordination with countries across the region.
Since the start of the war last month, Ukraine has actively offered its technology and personnel to Middle Eastern partners to assist the United States and its allies in countering Iranian drones, positioning itself as a key strategic player amid conflict and shifting diplomatic alliances.
Zelenskyy stressed that he had instructed government officials “to present options for assisting the relevant countries” in a way that safeguards Ukraine’s own critical defense needs amid the ongoing war with Russia and its relentless missile and drone attacks.
“Ukrainian experts will operate on-site, and teams are already coordinating these efforts,” Zelenskyy said in a statement.
Among a delegation of military, intelligence, and defense officials traveling to the Gulf was National Security and Defense Council Secretary Rustem Umerov, as the group worked to finalize what was described as “concrete agreements.”
“Ukraine has the greatest experience in the world in countering attack drones,” Zelensky said. “Without our experience, it will be very difficult for the Gulf region, the entire Middle East, and partners in Europe and America to build strong protection.”
“We are ready to help those who help us,” the Ukrainian leader continued. “The regimes in Russia and Iran are brothers in hatred and that is why they are brothers in weapons. And we want regimes built on hatred, to never, never win in anything. And we want no such regime to threaten Europe or our partners.”
According to John Hardie, deputy director of the Russia Program at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, a Washington, DC-based think tank, Ukraine has “unmatched experience” in developing and scaling cost-effective systems that can detect and neutralize the one-way attack drones widely used by Iran.
The Iranian regime has been supplying Russia with drones throughout the war in Ukraine, and Moscoe has been reportedly supplying Tehran with intelligence, satellite imagery, and drone technology to target US forces.
“With Russia working to help Iran kill American servicemembers, that’s all the reason for the United States and its Middle East allies to take advantage of Ukraine’s hard-won expertise,” Hardie told The Algemeiner.
“Replicating Ukrainian solutions at scale won’t happen overnight, but Ukrainian deployments to the Middle East could offer a taste of some of the Ukrainian technology, namely interceptor drone systems,” he continued.
Hardie argued that this expertise could help Ukraine “cultivate closer security cooperation” with the United States and its Arab allies, while also opening opportunities for Kyiv to expand its defense industry exports and strengthen its role as a key security partner in the region.
When the United States and Israel launched coordinated airstrikes on Iran on Feb. 28, Tehran struck back quickly, firing missiles and long‑range drones at military and civilian targets in neighboring countries — repeatedly hitting infrastructure and population centers even as it claimed to be focusing solely on US military assets.
In just the first few days of the conflict, Iran launched more than 500 ballistic missiles and over 2,000 unmanned aerial systems (UAS) — remotely operated or autonomous aircraft commonly used for surveillance and strike missions.
Even though the regime’s ballistic missile launches have dropped sharply since then due to US and Israeli strikes on its launchers and broader missile program, its drone attacks are, while also down significantly, proving more difficult to stop with air defenses, threatening key military targets as well as civilian areas.
Some regional countries struggle to defend against Iranian drones because these low-cost systems consistently evade fighter jets and conventional air defenses. They have struck a wide range of targets — from diplomatic and economic sites to residential areas — including Dubai International Airport and Saudi oil facilities.
According to Jason Campbell, senior fellow at the Middle East Institute, a Washington, DC-based think tank, Ukraine has revolutionized counter-drone warfare over the past three years through cost-effective, easily reproducible technologies and adaptive battlefield tactics.
“The Gulf states have invested heavily in high-end and highly capable missile defenses, but the Iran war has demonstrated the need for solutions that can better confront their comparatively inexpensive and easily reproduceable Shahed drones,” Campbell told The Algemeiner, referring to the Iranian-made drones.
After Russia invaded Ukraine in 2022, the Islamist regime in Iran began supplying drones to Moscow, providing a relatively inexpensive way to expand its long-range strike capabilities, which Russia later advanced by producing modified variants domestically and in greater quantities.
Over more than four years of war, Ukraine has dramatically improved its counter-drone strategy, increasingly relying on interceptor drones — low-cost unmanned aerial systems that detect, track, and destroy incoming drones identified by radar — offering a highly effective and economically sustainable alternative to traditional air defenses.
“I would say that this capability has already elevated Ukraine’s (and Ukrainian companies’) status throughout the Gulf,” Campbell told The Algemeiner.
According to multiple media reports, Saudi Arabia is planning a major contract with Ukrainian companies to purchase interceptor drones.
Zelenskyy has also suggested that Ukraine could “exchange” interceptor drones for Patriot air defense missiles, a US-made system designed to detect, track, and intercept incoming ballistic missiles, aircraft, and drones.
“Russia probably is not very excited about the prospect of Ukraine bolstering its air defenses and demonstrating its utility to an array of deep-pocketed clients,” Campbell explained.
“This is a win for US interests and could provide more impetus behind efforts to provide necessary assistance to help Ukraine in its ongoing war with Russia,” he continued. “One thing to watch, however, will be the near-term availability of higher end air defenses which remain in high demand now in multiple theaters.”