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A new book made me appreciate Jewish Sunday schools — and the volunteer women who have powered them
(JTA) — As a kid I went to Sunday school at our Reform synagogue. I didn’t hate it as much as my peers did, but let’s just say there were literally dozens of other things I would have preferred to do on a weekend morning.
As a Jewish adult, I had a vague understanding that Sunday school was a post-World War II invention, part of the assimilation and suburbanization of American Jews (my synagogue was actually called Suburban Temple). With our parents committed to public schools and having moved away from the dense urban enclaves where they were raised, our Jewish education was relegated to Sunday mornings and perhaps a weekday afternoon. The Protestant and Catholic kids went to their own religious supplementary schools, and we Jewish kids went to ours.
In her new book “Jewish Sunday Schools,” Laura Yares backdates this story by over a century. Subtitled “Teaching Religion in Nineteenth-Century America,” the book describes how Sunday schools were the invention of pioneering educators such as Rebecca Gratz, who founded the first Sunday school for Jewish children in Philadelphia in 1838. As such, they were responses by a tiny minority to distinctly 19th-century challenges — namely, how to raise their children to be Jews in a country dominated by a Protestant majority, and how to express their Judaism in a way compatible with America’s idea of religious freedom.
Although Sunday schools would become the “principal educational organization” of the Reform movement, Yares shows that the model was adopted by traditionalists as well. And she also argues that 20th-century historians, in focusing on the failures of Sunday schools to promote Jewish “continuity,” discounted the contributions of the mostly volunteer corps of women educators who made them run. Meanwhile, the supplementary school remains the dominant model for Jewish education among non-Orthodox American Jews, despite recent research showing its precipitous decline.
I picked up “Jewish Sunday Schools” hoping to find out who gets the blame for ruining my Sunday mornings. I came away with a new appreciation for the women whose “important and influential work,” Yares writes, “extended far beyond the classrooms in which they worked.”
Yares is assistant professor of Religious Studies at Michigan State University, with a joint appointment in the MSU Program for Jewish Studies. Raised in Birmingham, England, she has degrees from Oxford University and a doctorate from Georgetown University.
Our conversation was edited for length and clarity.
Tell me how your book came to be about the 19th century as opposed to the common 20th-century story of suburbanization.
There’s a real gap in American Jewish history when it comes to the 19th century, chiefly because so many American Jews today trace their origins back to the generation who arrived between 1881 and 1924, the mass migration of Jews from from Eastern Europe. So there’s a sense that that’s when American Jewish history began. Of course, that’s not true at all.
The American Jewish community dates back to the 17th century and there was much innovation that laid the foundations for what would become institutionalized in the 20th century.
Sunday school gets a very bad rap among most historians of American Judaism. If they’ve treated it at all, they tend to be dismissive — you know, there was no substance, they just taught kids the 10 Commandments, it was run by these unprofessional volunteer female teachers, so it was feminized and feminine.
But there’s also a lot of celebration of Rebecca Gratz, who founded the first Sunday school for Jewish children.
That’s the first indication I had that there might be more of a story here. Rebecca Gratz is lionized as being such a visionary and being so inventive in developing this incredible volunteer model for Jewish education for an immigrant generation that was mostly from Western Europe. And yet, by the beginning of the 20th century, [Jewish historians] say it has no value. So what’s the story there?
Two other things led me on the path to thinking that there was more of a story in this 19th-century moment. I did my Ph.D in Washington, D.C. And as I was searching through the holdings of the Library of Congress, there were tons and tons of Jewish catechisms.
“Sunday school gets a very bad rap among most historians of American Judaism,” says Dr. Laura Yares, author of the new book, “Jewish Sunday Schools.” (Courtesy of the author)
A catechism is a kind of creed, right? It’s a statement of religious beliefs. “These are things we believe as Jews.”
So Jewish catechisms had that, but they were also philosophical meditations in many ways. Typically, the first question of the catechism was, what is religion? And then the second question is, what is Jewish religion?
And then I started reading them. They were question-and-answer summaries of the whole of Judaism: belief, practices, holidays, Bible, you name it, that the children were expected to memorize. This idea that you’ve got to cram these kids with knowledge went against this historiographic dismissal of this period as being very thin and that kids were not really learning anything. The idea that children had a lot to learn is something that Sunday school educators actually really wrestle with during this period.
What was the other thing that led you to pursue this subject?
When I was beginning to research my dissertation, I was working as a Hebrew school teacher in a large Reform Hebrew school in Washington, D.C. And I remember very distinctively the rabbi coming in and addressing the teachers at the start of the school year. He said, “I don’t care if a student comes through this Hebrew school and they don’t remember anything that they learned. But I care that at the end of the year they feel like the temple is a place that they want to be, that they feel like they have relationships there and they have an (he didn’t use this word) ‘affective’ [emotional] connection.”
And so I’m sitting there by day at the Library of Congress, reading these catechisms that are saying, “Cram their heads with knowledge.” What is the relationship between Jewish education as a place where one is supposed to acquire knowledge and a place where one is supposed to feel something and to develop affective relationships? The swing between those two poles was happening as far back as the 19th century.
You write that owing to gaps in the archives, it was really hard to get an idea of the classroom experience. But to the degree that there’s a typical classroom experience in the 1860s, 1870s and you’re the daughter or grandchild of probably German-speaking Jewish immigrants, maybe working or lower middle class, what would Sunday school be like? I’m guessing the teacher would be a woman. Are you reading the Bible in English or Hebrew?
You are probably going for an hour or two on a Sunday morning. It’s a big room, and your particular class would have a corner of the room. It’s quite chaotic. Most of the teachers were female volunteers. They were either young and unmarried, or older women whose children had grown. Except for the students who are preparing for confirmation — the grand kind of graduation ritual for Sunday schools. Those classes were typically taught by the rabbi, if there was a rabbi associated with the school.
There would be a lot of reading out loud to the students with students being expected to repeat back what they had heard or write it down so they had a copy for themselves. Often the day would begin with prayers said in English, and often the reading of the Torah portion, typically in English, although in many Sunday schools, we do have children reporting they learned bits of Hebrew by rote memorization. Or they memorized the first chapters of the book of Genesis, for example, but I’m not sure that they quite understood what they memorized. “Ein Keloheinu” is a song that often children tell us [in archival materials] that they had memorized in Hebrew. They probably would have learned at least Hebrew script, and a little bit of Hebrew decoding. But it is fair to say that if they were reading the Bible, they were reading it mostly in English, because you have to remember that most of the women who were volunteering to teach in these schools came of age in a generation where Hebrew education wasn’t extended to women.
What’s the goal of these Sunday schools?
The Sunday school movement arose because there was a whole generation of immigrant children who did not have access to Jewish education, because their parents didn’t have either the economic capital or the social capital to become part of the established Jewish community. They couldn’t afford a seat in the synagogue, they couldn’t afford to send their children to congregational all-day or every-afternoon schools [which were among the few options for Jewish education when Gratz opened the Philadelphia Sunday school]. Sunday schools are really a very innovative solution to a problem of a lack of resources.
You also write that the founders of these supplementary schools want to defend children against “predatory evangelists.”
That was how Rebecca Gratz described her goal when she created the first Sunday school. She was very, very worried about the Jewish kids who were not receiving any kind of Hebrew school education. She talks about Protestant missionaries and teachers who would go out onto the street ringing the bell for Sunday school and offering various kinds of trinkets, and Jewish kids would get kind of swept into their Sunday schools. There was a very concrete need to give Jewish children somewhere else to go.
So Gratz and the people who created the first Hebrew Sunday school in Philadelphia looked at what the Protestants were doing and they saw that Protestant Sunday schools were providing very accessible places where kids could go and get a basic primer in their religious tradition.
The approach was to teach Judaism as a religion, as opposed to Judaism as a people or culture, to demonstrate that being Jewish was as compatible as Protestantism with being wholly American.
That is certainly part of it. It’s a demonstration that Judaism is compatible with American public life. But I think there’s actually a much bigger claim that the Sunday schools are making. The claim is not only that Judaism is as good as Protestantism, but that Judaism does religion better than Protestantism. These rabbis who were writing catechisms and teaching confirmation classes were saying that Judaism does liberal religion better than liberal Protestants, liberal Catholics and other kinds of liberal denominations. You see the same sentiment in the Pittsburgh Platform as well, which is the foundational platform of the Reform movement written in the 1880s. Sunday schools take that idea and bring it down to a grassroots level.
There are many, many fewer Jews in America in much of the 19th century, before the waves of Eastern European immigrants arrived beginning in the 1880s They didn’t really have strength in numbers, or the kind of self-confidence to have a system of day schools, yeshivas or heders, the elementary schools for all-day or every day Jewish instruction.
And this is also a community that has grown up at the same time as the birth of public education in America, independent of churches. That really emerged beginning on the East Coast in the 1840s.This generation of Americans really believes in the power of public education to craft an American public. It’s a project that 19th-century American Jews believe in and want to sustain. So Sunday schools don’t just become the preferred Jewish model because of lack of resources, but because American Jews really believe in the idea of public education.
What happens at the beginning of the 20th century, with the arrival of Eastern Europeans with different models for Jewish education?
A new generation tries to reform Jewish education, led by a young educator from Palestine named Samson Benderly, who leads the new New York Bureau of Jewish Education. He tries to change American Jewish education to make it more professionalized, but to bring more traditionally inclined Jews on board he has to convince them that he doesn’t want to make more Sunday schools, because Sunday schools by the end of the 20th century had become very much associated with the Reform movement in a way that they weren’t when they were founded and for much of the 19th century.
A painting of Philadelphia philanthropist and Jewish education activist Rebecca Gratz by Thomas Sully. (The Rosenbach of the Free Library of Philadelphia)
Benderly is surveying the scene of recent immigrants living in New York City [tenements] and other kinds of downtown environments, and his proposal is to create these community institutions for these dense communities, where children can be taught Hebrew in Hebrew. His disciples also created Jewish camps as a way to get children out of the inner cities and develop the muscular Zionist ideal of healthy bodies and a robust sense of Jewish collectivity.
You write that Benderly’s vision is a sort of masculine response to the “feminizing” perception of the Sunday schools.
These women teachers are recognizing that they’re being criticized for the kind of thinness of the Jewish education that they’re teaching in comparison to other models, but in periodicals like The American Jewess women are writing back and saying, “But you didn’t teach us Hebrew! I didn’t get that opportunity as a woman, so what do you expect?” It’s really important to note that the women did the best that they could in the time that they had available, and that they were the product of opportunities that were denied to them.
What lessons did you learn about Sunday school and Hebrew school education in the 20th century that relate to your research into the 19th century?
The move that is so decisive for shaping American Jewish education is suburbanization. Rather than having a large immigrant generation who are living in these tight ethnic enclaves, you have American Jewish children who are predominantly growing up in the suburbs, and socializing with children from all sorts of different backgrounds who are attending public schools. The place that you go to get your Jewish education is the synagogue supplemental school, which becomes the dominant model for American Jewish education up until today. Benderly might reflect that it looks a lot more like the Sunday school movement of the 19th century than his vision.
Today’s model is really a religious model. And by that I mean that students go to Hebrew school primarily to kind of check a religious box, to learn about the thing that makes them distinctive religiously, and to achieve a religious coming-of-age marker, which is the bar, bat or b mitzvah. Certainly the curriculum today is more diverse, embracing more aspects of traditional Judaism then you would have seen in a 19th-century Sunday school: more Hebrew, more of a sense of Jewish peoplehood, ethnic identity and Zionism of course. But the question that American Jews are increasingly asking themselves is, is this a model that they still want? So you may have seen that the Jewish Education Project published a report recently on supplemental schools, which saw that enrollment has really, really declined.
Sunday schools are based on a vision of Judaism as a set of a religious commitments that American Jews actualize through belonging to a synagogue and sending their children to a synagogue or a religious school, where they will learn primarily a set of religious skills: the ability to read from the Torah, the ability to decode Hebrew, the ability to navigate the siddur.
Is that still the vision that most American Jews have for what Judaism means to them? I think increasingly the answer seems to be no.
How else did experience in a Hebrew school classroom influence you? Did you access anything else when you were writing the book?
I think about the number of college kids and graduate students and empty nesters who are either volunteering or earning minimum wage, working at Hebrew schools, all over the country. That’s the labor force of American Judaism. These people also bring so much to the table. There are a lot of skills, dispositions and knowledge that don’t tend to get taken very seriously because this is a workforce that just gets kind of put into the category of “oh, they’re part time.” That made me look really closely in the historical archives to see if I could find anything out about the women who are volunteering to teach in Sunday schools. And what I found out was that [many] were public school teachers. And they brought a lot to the table. It was women in fact who were really pushing to make the Sunday school curriculum more experiential and to move away from rote memorization.
As a historian formed by feminist methods, I find it really important to recognize that these women were giving over what they had, as opposed to critiquing them for not teaching in a more traditional way. I think we need to pay attention when women are being scapegoated for problems that are described as problems of Jewish continuity. It blinds us to the role that women’s volunteerism has played in American Jewish life. This whole Sunday school movement was possible only because these women volunteered their time and largely were not paid.
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Defining the Goals of the Iran War
US Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth holds a briefing with Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff General Dan Caine, amid the US-Israeli war on Iran, at the Pentagon in Washington, DC, US, March 19, 2026. Photo: REUTERS/Evan Vucci
Going after the unacceptable threat Iran posed to American, Israeli, Gulf Arab States, European, and Asian military and political interests — and understanding the destructive hand of China behind the mullahs — was not a mistake. It was recognition of the stakes for the civilized world.
But the US and Israel, indispensable allies at many levels, have to take account of their differences in threat level and capabilities, and forge a political as well as military path together.
Two points to make in wartime:
First — achievable goals are essential to ending a war. Corollary 1: It is easier to start a war than end one Corollary 2: Every war must end
Second — there are things you don’t know and won’t know (although in some cases, people knew, but people weren’t listening.
President Donald Trump said in his State of the Union address: “They [the Iranians] have already developed missiles that can threaten Europe and our bases overseas, and they’re working to build missiles that will soon reach the United States of America.”
He was right, but dismissed with a collective snicker.
My husband, security analyst Dr. Stephen Bryen, ran the statement through Google Gemini and found disparaging references to the President in The Washington Post, The Guardian, American Progress, PBS NewsHour, PolitiFact, The New York Times and CNN, among others.
He found “experts” who told us that the range of Iran’s ballistic missile arsenal was about 2,000 km, which made Israel and the Gulf States potential targets, but allowed the Europeans to claim immunity. In 2025, a Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) assessment posited that Iran was “years away” from possessing a viable ICBM.
They were wrong.
Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi told NBC News in February, “We are not developing long-range missiles … we have limited the range below 2,000 kilometers.”
He lied.
Trump was right. The range is closer to 4,000 km, technically putting Paris in range (about 4,200 km from Tehran).
[Aside: Rep. Ro Khanna (D-CA) said in a TV interview that Iran had enough uranium to make nuclear bombs, but there was no reason to do anything about it because Iran’s missiles couldn’t yet reach the US. Is he still sure?]
The unwillingness to see and understand threats is, in some ways, an admirable attempt to avoid war. War is terrible. No one wants war. War may kill the enemy, and surely it will also kill innocents. But the decades-old idea that one could negotiate with terrorists is a huge failing in the Western world.
The Oslo Accords were not peace. Temporary deals with Lebanon are not peace. Multiple Gaza ceasefires were not peace. Operations Rising Lion and Midnight Hammer were not peace. The return of the Israeli hostages was not peace.
Israel collected intelligence and built an extraordinary military force in cooperation with the United States, while the US built Massive Ordnance Penetrators (MOPS). But it also assumed that giving the people of Gaza a decent life, including work permits in Israel, would keep things calm.
It worked at some level until October 7, 2023.
After that, Israel’s determination to defend its citizens forced a reckoning. It would no longer ignore Iran. President Trump agreed. Last summer’s attack on Iranian assets was a masterpiece of coordination and cooperation.
But it wasn’t enough.
The attacks launched this year were designed not only to eliminate Iran’s weapons and weapons-producing capability, but to put in place a new strategic pattern for behavior.
Much of the Arab world has come to his thinking. UAE, Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Iraq and even Qatar, seeing that they are targets for Iran, not allies, have stepped up. Azerbaijan, too. Syria is silent and Lebanon is trying to figure out how to get rid of Hezbollah. In Europe, the Czech Republic and Estonia defied the EU resolution on the war.
In the past few days, Japan and several European countries appear to have awakened to the fact that their future, their security, and their people are on the firing line.
The late Fred Iklé, a defense strategist and official in the Reagan administration, wrote a book entitled Every War Must End. He was writing primarily, but not only, about American wars. For Iklé, who passed away in 2011, the essential lesson was that it is much easier to start a war than to successfully conclude one. Having achievable aims — both military and political — and stopping when they have been met — is the key to success.
The alternative is to slog along with grinding casualties until the conflict peters out ignominiously when public opinion no longer supports the effort. The French, he pointed out, were the military victors in Algeria — as were the Americans in Vietnam — but in both cases, the Western power withdrew without a political victory, and public disillusionment hampered the government at home and abroad for years after.
The Russians left Afghanistan when it produced unacceptable grumbling at home. More recently, the US left Afghanistan and northern Syria.
In none of those cases was the war over; in each case, people continued to die on the ground when we went home.
But Israel is home. Israel needs victory to ensure peace — how you define that between allies is precisely the point. And America and Israel must find a definition of victory that works for each.
Shoshana Bryen is Senior Director of the Jewish Policy Center and Editor of inFOCUS Quarterly magazine.
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When a Jewish Landmark Disappears, So Does Jewish Presence
The Contemporary Jewish Museum. Photo: screenshot.
Another major Jewish institution has collapsed – and the implications reach far beyond San Francisco.
The Contemporary Jewish Museum (CJM) has closed and is selling its building. What was once a bold, architecturally striking institution in the heart of downtown will soon be something else entirely. Another civic space repurposed. Another cultural anchor lost.
I loved seeing that building. Designed by Daniel Libeskind, it was bold, unmistakable, and confident – right off Yerba Buena Gardens in the heart of the city. It stood prominently, not tucked away or obscured, but fully visible. It sent a simple but powerful message: Jewish life belongs in the civic fabric. For me, it was a symbol of pride.
And now it is gone.
The explanations offered are familiar. Attendance declined by roughly 50 percent from 2019 to 2023–2024. Revenue fell. In the fiscal year ending June 2024, expenses outpaced revenue by more than $5.9 million. Leadership acknowledged that the building itself had become “beyond our capacity” to maintain.
All of that may be true. But it is not sufficient.
Institutions do not simply collapse because conditions change. They collapse because they fail to respond to changing conditions with clarity, discipline, and purpose. And when a flagship Jewish cultural institution disappears in one of the wealthiest and most philanthropic regions in the country, it is worth asking not only what happened, but what it says about us.
At one level, this is a story of institutional failure. The museum expanded into a large and expensive footprint – a 63,000-square-foot facility completed in 2008 at a cost of $47 million in a city already becoming more difficult to sustain. It relied on a fragile mix of philanthropy and foot traffic in a downtown that was hollowing out even before COVID accelerated the trend. The museum was still carrying roughly $27 million in outstanding construction debt. When those pressures intensified, there appears to have been no clear plan to right-size the institution, refocus its mission, or rethink its role in a changing cultural landscape.
Instead, the result was a slow drift toward insolvency – followed by closure.
But the deeper problem is not simply managerial. It is cultural. And it was visible in the year before the closure, when the museum found itself caught in an episode that illustrated just how far it had drifted from its core identity.
In spring 2024, the museum mounted its first major open-call exhibition of California Jewish artists. Seven of the accepted artists withdrew their work in a coordinated protest, demanding that the museum commit to BDS – the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions movement against Israel – and divest from all funding associated with the Jewish state. The museum rejected those demands. But rather than confidently reaffirming its identity as a Jewish cultural institution, it hesitated publicly, left blank spaces on its walls where the withdrawn works would have hung, and framed the episode as a “complicated moment.” It was a moment that revealed an institution uncertain of what it stood for.
Too many institutions in recent years have confused relevance with purpose. In an effort to remain current, they have chased trends, embraced fashionable programming, and diluted the very identity that made them distinctive. In doing so, they have weakened the case for their own existence – both to the public and to their donors.
Jewish institutions are not immune to this drift. When they lose clarity about who they are and what they are meant to do, they risk becoming interchangeable with any number of other cultural organizations. And interchangeable institutions are far easier to abandon.
The museum’s collapse also raises uncomfortable questions about the direction of Jewish giving. The Jewish Federation Bay Area manages more than $2 billion in assets and provided millions in grants in fiscal year 2023 alone. The Bay Area is home to some of the most generous Jewish philanthropists in America. If a flagship institution like this cannot be sustained in that environment, the problem is not a lack of resources. It is a question of priorities.
Much contemporary giving is directed toward causes, programs, and initiatives – often important ones. But less attention is paid to sustaining the shared institutions that give Jewish life visibility, continuity, and public meaning. Museums, cultural centers, and communal spaces do not always produce immediate or measurable outcomes. But they create something more enduring: a sense of presence.
The board chair told reporters that the building “does not define the museum.” And perhaps he is right, technically. The executive director expressed optimism about a smaller, reimagined future. That deserves acknowledgment. But what has been lost in the interim – the physical presence, the civic statement, the visibility – cannot simply be reimagined back into existence. Presence is not just programmatic. It is architectural. It is spatial. It is the fact of a building that stands in the middle of a great city and says: we are here.
Places like the Contemporary Jewish Museum did something rare. They connected past and present, insiders and outsiders, tradition and creativity. They offered a space where Jewish life could be explored without precondition – neither purely religious nor purely academic, but deeply cultural and civic at once. They were not simply museums. They were part of the infrastructure of Jewish public life.
The disappearance of such institutions is especially troubling given what is happening in the broader culture. The ADL recorded 9,354 antisemitic incidents in 2024, the highest level since tracking began in 1979 – a staggering 893 percent increase over the past decade. The FBI simultaneously recorded the highest number of anti-Jewish hate crimes since it began reporting data in 1991. A majority of American Jewish college students report feeling uncomfortable or unsafe on campus because they are Jewish.
At a moment like this, the disappearance of visible Jewish institutions sends precisely the wrong signal. It suggests contraction when presence is needed. It risks normalizing a quieter, less visible Jewish public life.
It is also worth noting that the CJM’s collapse is part of a wider pattern in San Francisco’s struggling cultural sector – the Mission Cultural Center for Latino Arts, California College of the Arts, and the nearby Mexican Museum have all faced severe financial distress in recent years. This context matters. The CJM did not fail in a vacuum. But it is not exculpatory, either. What distinguishes the institutions that endure is usually not better luck. It is clearer purpose and stronger accountability.
When an institution like this collapses in a wealthy and engaged community, it is rarely because no one cared. It is because no one felt ultimately responsible for ensuring that it endured. Not the board. Not the donors. Not the broader community.
Everyone assumes someone else will step in. And no one does.
That is the accountability failure. And it is correctable – if the community chooses to correct it.
The sale of the Contemporary Jewish Museum should not be treated as a local story or an isolated failure. It is a signal, one that should prompt concrete action.
Jewish philanthropists and federations should dedicate a meaningful portion of their giving specifically to sustaining cultural institutions – not just causes and programs, but the physical and civic infrastructure of Jewish life. Boards of Jewish institutions should be held to explicit accountability for institutional survival, not just programmatic innovation. And Jewish communities in every major city should ask, right now, whether their flagship cultural institutions are financially sound – and what they would do if they were not.
If the CJM survives in some smaller, reimagined form, that would be welcome. But the larger lesson stands regardless: Jewish presence in American public life is not self-sustaining. It requires deliberate investment, disciplined governance, and a community willing to prioritize endurance over the fashions of the moment.
Some institutions are easy to replace. Others are not.
The Contemporary Jewish Museum was more than a museum. It was a statement.
And its disappearance should force us to ask whether we are still willing to make such statements – or whether, slowly and quietly, we are allowing them to disappear.
Samuel J. Abrams is a professor of politics at Sarah Lawrence College and a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute.
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Palestinian Authority: Mossad Behind Iranian Attacks on Gulf States
Smoke rises after reported Iranian missile attacks, following United States and Israel strikes on Iran, as seen from Doha, Qatar, March 1, 2026. Photo: REUTERS/Mohammed Salem
No matter how clear it is who is to blame for a problem, the Palestinian Authority (PA) is always ready to blame Israel for any disaster, death, or disagreement.
As a Palestinian Authority (PA) TV preacher once taught: “If a fish in the sea fights with another fish, I am sure the Jews are behind it.”
When Iranian missiles hit Gulf states or fall on Turkey, Oman, and Kuwait, the situation is no different.
Obviously, Israel must be guilty, and an Israeli Arab journalist found the perfect frame for the blame: Those missiles were “coordinated” by the Mossad and the US:
Israeli Arab journalist Suheil Diab:“So far, in at least three proven cases, it has become clear that several [Iranian] missile attacks on Turkey and Oman, as well as some of the missiles that were launched towards Kuwait, were coordinated with the Israeli Mossad with the knowledge of the US to create tension and conflict between the Iranians and the Gulf states.” [emphasis added]
[Official PA TV, March 16, 2026]
Similarly, a regular columnist writing for the official PA daily claimed Iran and Israel have “overlapping goals” to “weaken the Arab states.”:
… the overlapping goals that Israel and Iran seek to achieve through this war will not materialize. Both are interested in weakening the Arab states, casting doubt on their ability to maintain their sovereignty, and harming the strategic Arab depth components of the Palestinian people and of the central cause of the Arab nation: the cause of Palestine. [emphasis added]
[Official PA daily Al-Hayat Al-Jadida, March 15, 2026]
In the beginning of the current war, Palestinian Media Watch reported on the PA’s sole concern for the “Palestinian cause.”
The PA daily columnist accused Netanyahu of seeking to unify and make alliances with the very Arab states he is supposedly seeking to weaken.
Netanyahu was said to need them in his war against Iran, and by mobilizing them he would be able to erase the “pan-Arab national struggle” against “the international Zionist colonialist project,” and expand into “Greater Israel… between the Nile River and the Euphrates River”:
At the same time, he [Netanyahu] will exploit the hostility and desire for revenge … to achieve his goal: to make the Arab states that are in [Iran’s] sights (the Arab Gulf states) [parentheses in source] be in one united front with Israel against Iran, meaning to erase the truth and trends in the Arab-Zionist conflict, as a Palestinian and pan-Arab national struggle against an existential threat, which is embodied by the international Zionist colonialist project.
[This threat] unabashedly expresses the policy of the state of occupation and settlement colonialism (Israel) [parentheses in source], which still believes that the borders of Greater Israel are between the Nile River and the Euphrates River.
The columnist conveniently tied his imagined alliance between Israel and Iran to another libel that is part of the PA’s regular arsenal of libels and has been exposed by Palestinian Media Watch, and has also been repeated heavily by the PA during the current war. According to the libel, Israel is using the war to realize its “plot” to conquer the surrounding Arab states — Lebanon, Syria, Iraq, and Saudi Arabia — and create “Greater Israel.”
A PLO official likewise lashed out and accused the US of wanting to “subjugate Iran, Pakistan, Malaysia, Indonesia, and Turkey,” while using Israel as the region’s “bad cop”:
Palestinian National Council Committee for Foreign and Parliamentary Affairs member Fawzi Al-Samhouri: “The second goal of the American plan after taking control of Iran’s oil resources is to continue afterwards to Pakistan …
They also want to subjugate the region by integrating Israel into the heart of the Arab homeland to impose it as the bad cop in the region. At the same time, the US is now subjugating this region – the region of the Arab homeland and the large Islamic states surrounding it such as Iran, Pakistan, Malaysia, Indonesia, and Turkey. Turkey, despite it being a NATO member, is also part of the American plan.
The US wants first to weaken Hezbollah and then also to fully control Turkey due to its geographical location.” [emphasis added]
[Fatah-run Awdah TV, Facebook page, March 16, 2026]
The author is a contributor to Palestinian Media Watch, where a version of this story first appeared.