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Advocates for Netanyahu’s judicial reforms are increasingly pressing their case in English
(JTA) — The video gives a “Schoolhouse Rock” vibe: Cartoon figures climb the names of the three branches of the U.S. government — “legislature” at the base, “judiciary” at the top and “executive” sandwiched in the middle — as part of a lesson on governance.
But while the video is in English, the government it refers to is not American but Israeli. And the video was produced not by an educational television company but by the Kohelet Policy Forum, a think tank that is widely understood to have influenced the rightward shift within Israeli politics.
The video’s release on Twitter Wednesday appears to be part of a wave of efforts to sell one particularly controversial aspect of that shift — proposed reforms to Israel’s judiciary — to skeptical English speakers. While the many critics of the proposed changes say they would bring Israel out of line with other democracies, all of the English-language efforts press the case that the opposite is true.
“The reforms in progress will address the anomalies of the Israeli system and bring Israel just a few steps closer to the rest of the Western democracies,” concludes the Kohelet Forum video, which features a caped jurist superhero.
Israel’s judicial reform: strengthening democracy pic.twitter.com/k4rL88NlaU
— פורום קהלת Kohelet (@KoheletForum) January 25, 2023
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has forcefully defended the proposed changes, which include allowing the parliament to overrule the Supreme Court and would have the added benefit of insulating himself from his ongoing corruption prosecution. But he appears to have underestimated opposition to the reforms, which has come not just from liberal Israelis and American Jews but from traditionally nonpartisan think tanks, legal scholars and even right-leaning Americans.
Unlike some of the other changes called for by members of Netanyahu’s governing coalition, which includes far-right extremists and religious parties, the judicial changes are raising questions about core values held by most pro-Israel American conservatives: that Israel is a democratic oasis in the Middle East and that business savvy is an Israeli strength. Foreign investors and international credit agencies have both signaled that if the reforms go through, they will downgrade their estimation of the country.
“The conservative right was with [Netanyahu] and now he seems to be riding the tiger of the radical right,” David Makovsky, a fellow at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, said in December on the day the government was sworn in, before it had begun turning its ideas into policy proposals. “And I think that is bound to alienate the very people who counted on him being risk-averse and to focus on the economy.”
In a notable symbol of this shift, Bret Stephens, the New York Times columnist who has been a staunch defender of Netanyahu, publicly broke with him on Wednesday, writing that the judicial reforms convinced him that the prime minister had “moved along the current of illiberal democracy whose other champions include Hungary’s Viktor Orban and Brazil’s Jair Bolsonaro.” Meanwhile, Alan Dershowitz, the constitutional lawyer who is usually a stalwart supporter of Israel, has also criticized the reforms.
“It’s a high bar for conservatives in contemporary American politics to criticize Israel, but there have been some cracks,” said Scott Lasensky, who teaches on U.S.-Israel relations at the University of Maryland.
Whether the English-language defenses emanate from any kind of coordinated public relations strategy is unclear. But Lasensky said Netanyahu may feel that he needs to explain why he is dismantling the judiciary to American conservatives, who cherish a judicial system independent of the pressures of successive liberal Democratic administrations.
“American conservatives have a majority on their courts — they don’t want to change their courts,” he said.
It’s unlikely that the Kohelet video will reach an audience anywhere the size that Stephens has. But another defense of the judicial reforms released this week certainly can: that made by Ben Shapiro, the American Jewish right-wing pundit with more than 20 million followers across platforms, on his Daily Wire podcast, which says it has more than 1 million paid subscribers.
“They want the judges of the Supreme Court to be appointed by the prime minister and approved by the Knesset, which sounds like the system in the United States,” Shapiro said in the segment. “They want to ensure, because Israel does not have a constitution, that the Supreme Court will not be able to come up with a constitution in a move of judicial dictatorship. … It’s ridiculous.”
Netanyahu briefly shared a video of Shapiro’s comments on Twitter before his tweet was removed. The version that Netanyahu shared features Hebrew subtitles as well as a message from the person who made it suggesting that Shapiro — who spoke in Israel for the first time last summer — can convince Israelis and Americans alike: “Ben Shapiro supports the judicial reform and not just that he explains why. Watch and join in.”
In yet another English-language defense of the proposed judicial reforms, Tablet, the online Jewish magazine that is known for airing conservative and often inflammatory ideas, published an essay by Gadi Taub, a prominent Israeli conservative.
“The press has got it backwards. Yariv Levin, Netanyahu’s new justice minister, is not out to destroy democracy,” Taub wrote in the essay published Wednesday. “He is out to restore it.”
The English-language defenses are particularly notable given Netanyahu’s longtime boast that he does not care about winning over Americans to his domestic agenda. But Josh Block, a former spokesman for the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, said Netanyahu is interested in having Americans be convinced that he is driving changes, not the extremists with whom he is aligned in government.
“He clearly feels the need to try to reassure people across the political spectrum in the United States, that he’s in charge of his government,” said Block, who is now a fellow at the conservative Hudson Institute. “That the decisions that will be made rest with him and not with people who are subordinate to him, who may have ideas that are anathema to some of us in the United States.”
Netanyahu may be sensitive to a major criticism of his immediate predecessors, Naftali Bennet and Yair Lapid, who accused the current prime minister of alienating Israel’s most important ally, said a former senior U.S. official who dealt with Israel policy.
“It cuts against one of the arguments of the opposition that these reforms, or this plan, will weaken Israel’s standing in the community of democracies, including its relationship with the United States,” said the official, who asked for anonymity to speak candidly. “‘Well, look, there are Americans who are endorsing it and saying good things about it,’ Bibi can say.”
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Romanians Stabbed Journalist in London at Behest of Iran, UK Court Told
People walk past a mural depicting the late leader of the Islamic Revolution, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, and the late Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, in Tehran, Iran. Photo: Majid Asgaripour/WANA (West Asia News Agency) via REUTERS
A team of Romanian men, acting as proxies for the Iranian government, carried out a knife attack on a journalist working for a Persian-language media organization in London, prosecutors told a British court on Monday.
Pouria Zaratifoukolaei, known as Pouria Zeraati, a British journalist of Iranian origin who works for Iran International, was stabbed in the leg three times as he was attacked near his home in Wimbledon, southwest London, in March 2024.
At the start of the trial of two of the three men accused of carrying out the stabbing, prosecutor Duncan Atkinson said they had targeted Zeraati, whose Saudi-funded TV employer is critical of Iran‘s government and has been designated a terrorist organization by Tehran.
‘DELIBERATE, PLANNED VIOLENCE’
“This was no robbery, no fight that got out of control, it was deliberate, planned violence to achieve what it did, that is serious injury to its target,” Atkinson told London‘s Woolwich Crown Court.
They had “committed a planned attack preceded by reconnaissance, and which was ordered by a third party acting on behalf of the Iranian state,” the prosecutor said.
Iran has denied any involvement in the incident.
Nandito Badea, 21, and George Stana, 25, both deny charges of wounding with intent and unlawful wounding. The third man accused of involvement, David Andrei, was arrested in Romania but is not involved in the trial.
Atkinson said Zeraati was an “obvious and readily identifiable target for violence to be inflicted by proxies” acting for Iran. He said posters had been put up in Tehran in November 2022 featuring pictures of journalists including Zeraati, under the heading “Wanted: dead or alive.”
“In recent years, since 2005, the Islamic Republic has turned less to its own operatives and increasingly to use proxies such as criminal gangs to meet their threatened violence on their behalf,” Atkinson said.
“That has included attacks on persons in this country who have become targets of Iranian intimidation and, effectively, terror.”
Atkinson said Zeraati had been subject to “extensive reconnaissance,” and a year before Stana had been arrested in the garden of his apartment with another man, in possession of latex gloves, scissors, and a mask.
On the day of the attack, Badea and Andrei confronted Zeraati as he crossed the street from his home to his car, the prosecutor said. Andrei held him, while Badea stabbed him at the top of his thigh before they fled to a getaway car driven by Stana, the prosecutor added.
The men, who were motivated by money, dumped the car and some clothing, and then took a taxi to Heathrow Airport from where they flew to Geneva, Atkinson said.
The trial, which is expected to last more than two weeks, continues.
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‘Beyond Ironic’: Mamdani’s ‘Nakba’ Video Features Non-Arab Woman Critics Say Has European Roots
New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani (D) speaking with the press in the Bronx, New York City, May 18, 2026. Photo: Michael Brochstein/ZUMA Press Wire via Reuters Connect
New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani marked the Palestinian “Nakba” with an official City Hall video featuring a woman presented as a survivor of Israel’s founding war, but critics quickly identified her family as “European settlers” from Bosnia who left Arab-controlled territory.
The backlash came as leaders of mainstream Jewish groups said they would reject invitations to Mamdani’s “Jewish Heritage” celebration at Gracie Mansion on Monday evening.
The video, posted on Friday, features New York resident Inea Bushnaq, identified as a “Nakba survivor,” recounting her family’s departure from their home because, as she termed it, “the Zionists were coming into Jerusalem.”
Nakba is Arabic for “catastrophe,” a term Palestinians use for Israel’s founding and the displacement of hundreds of thousands of Arabs during Israel’s 1948 War of Independence. The Palestinian demand for a “right of return” for the refugees’ millions of descendants is viewed by many Israelis and Jews as a call that would end Israel’s existence by demographic means. Critics said the video’s assertion that the Nakba “continues to this day” echoed that position.
Text in the video says the Nakba refers to the “expulsion and displacement of more than 700,000 Palestinians between 1947 and 1949 during the creation of the State of Israel” and says Israel’s pre-state militaries, “the Haganah, Irgun, and Lehi militias, among others, destroyed more than 400 Palestinian villages and cities, killing thousands of Palestinians and carrying out dozens of massacres.”
“May 15 is the annual commemoration of the Nakba. For Palestinians, their displacement and the Nakba continue to this day,” the video text reads.
The video makes no mention of Arab attacks on Jews before and during the 1948 war, the invasion by Arab armies after Israel’s declaration of independence meant to eradicate the nascent state, the rejection of the UN partition plan that would have created a Jewish and an Arab state, or the expulsion of Jews from parts of Jerusalem that came under Jordanian control.
Speaking in a British accent in the video, Bushnaq, who is described as Palestinian-American, explains how keys have become a Palestinian symbol of the right to return. “You have the key but not the house,” she says.
Tom Gross, a Middle East expert, noted that the video omitted the expulsion of Jews from Arab countries while relying on what he called a flawed account of Palestinian history.
“Not only does Mamdani’s video fail to mention the numerically greater 850,000 Jews driven out of their homes in the Arab world; he can’t even get his narrative right regarding the so-called Palestinian Nakba,” he told The Algemeiner.
In a post shared widely on social media, Gross cited research by the historian and influencer who posts as J0sh_a to challenge Bushnaq’s portrayal as a Palestinian refugee.
“It turns out that the ‘Nakba Survivor’ who stars in Mayor Mamdani’s official NY City Hall Palestinian propaganda video yesterday, is literally a ‘European settler,’” the post said.
Bushnaq’s grandparents were Muslim Bosnians who left Bosnia for Ottoman Syria in the late 19th century after Austria-Hungary took control of Bosnia. The family later moved to Tulkarem, which came under Jordanian control after 1948, not Israeli control. Bushnaq was born in Jerusalem because of the city’s medical facilities, but her family remained based in Tulkarem, the post said.
Bushnaq’s father worked in England in the 1930s, returned to what was then known as Mandatory Palestine under British administration, and then in 1948 the family chose to go back to England.
“They were not expelled, and no one forced them to move to England. In any case, Tulkarem, and the old city of Jerusalem remained under Jordanian Arab control. No Arabs were forced to leave from Tulkarem in 1948,” Gross wrote.
“So, in summary, this is a European with no strong roots in the land of Israel, whose family made the decision to immigrate back to the continent of their grandparents instead of remaining under Arab control in what was part of Jordan after 1948.”
Critics also pointed to a poster seen on Bushnaq’s wall in the video. The “Visit Palestine” image was not Palestinian nationalist artwork, they said, but a Zionist-era tourism poster designed by Jewish artist Franz Kraus to encourage travel to the Holy Land.
“It is beyond ironic that the only person featured to represent Palestinian Arabs in his video appears to be someone from a recently arrived European settler family – from Bosnia – and not Arab at all,” he told The Algemeiner.
Gross also argued that Bushnaq’s family story pointed to a wider part of the history often left out of Palestinian nationalist accounts, saying many Arab families in the land in 1948 had arrived within a generation or two, drawn by British rule or by economic opportunities created by Jewish development. He cited surnames such as Al-Masri and Masarwa, both linked to Egypt, Fayumi, from Fayum in Egypt, Ismaili, from Ismailia, Al-Horani, from Hauran in Syria, Sidawi, from Sidon in Lebanon, and Al-Hijazi, from the Hijaz in Saudi Arabia.
Jewish groups, leaders and members of Congress slammed the post.
The UJA-Federation of New York accused Mamdani of leaving out critical context, writing on X that “the refugees you post about exist because 22 Arab states launched a war to destroy Israel,” after rejecting the UN plan that also called for a Palestinian state.
Mayor Mamdani: the refugees you post about exist because 22 Arab states launched a war to destroy Israel on May 15, 1948—rejecting the UN plan that also called for a Palestinian state. In its aftermath, 800,000 Jews were expelled from Arab lands. Your post mentions none of this. https://t.co/Fn1aY788Tc
— UJA-Federation of New York (@UJAfedNY) May 15, 2026
Referencing the translation of Nakba, US Sen. Rick Scott (R-FL) wrote on X, “The only catastrophe here is a mayor of New York who lets antisemitic mobs run wild to terrorize law-abiding Jewish New Yorkers while he spreads anti-Israel propaganda.”
“Rewriting history to portray the existence of Israel itself as the original sin is not education or remembrance. It is propaganda,” said New York Assemblymember Sam Berger. “This mayor constantly tries to market himself as an ally to the Jewish community while amplifying narratives that fuel hatred against the Jewish people.”
New York State Assembly member Simcha Eisenstein wrote, “Still wondering why hatred against Jews is so high in NYC? We have a mayor who is using government resources to disseminate a narrative and incite hostile propaganda.”
Still wondering why hatred against Jews is so high in NYC? We have a mayor who is using government resources to disseminate a narrative and incite hostile propaganda.
Mr. International Law guy forgot to include the fact that the Arab world rejected the UN’s partition plan to… https://t.co/TFgqRvqLqE
— Simcha Eichenstein (@SEichenstein) May 15, 2026
The post came the same day as anti-Zionist demonstrators gathered in Manhattan for Nakba Day rallies, with footage showing protesters carrying a Hezbollah flag, stepping on Israeli flags, shouting for Israel’s destruction, and confronting police.
The timing also contrasted with Mamdani’s own statement days earlier praising law enforcement for arresting a man accused of planning an Iran-backed attack on a New York synagogue. Mamdani had said the arrest “comes amid an alarming rise in antisemitism across the country.”
“Let me be clear: Antisemitism, violent extremism, and terrorism have no place in our city. This kind of hate is despicable,” he said.
The UJA-Federation later said it would not attend Monday night’s Jewish American Heritage Month celebration at Gracie Mansion because it was being hosted by a mayor who “denies a core pillar of our heritage — the State of Israel as the homeland of the Jewish people,” according to a statement carried by the New York Post.
Mark Treyger, CEO of the Jewish Community Relations Council, said he would also skip the event. His group organizes the Israel Day Parade at the end of the month, which Mamdani has said he will not attend, breaking with past mayoral practice.
New Yorkers “expect leadership that lowers the temperature, brings people together, and makes every community feel seen, respected, and safe, including Jewish New Yorkers,” Treyger wrote in an X post criticizing Mamdani’s Nakba Day video.
New York is home to the largest Jewish community outside of Israel. For the overwhelming majority of Jewish New Yorkers, the connection to Israel is not political or social media theater. It is ancestral, spiritual, historic, and deeply personal.
At a moment of rising… https://t.co/UbyOX52Ded
— Mark Treyger
(@MarkTreyger718) May 15, 2026
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Pakistan Sends New Iranian Peace Proposal to US
A woman walks past an anti-US billboard depicting US President Donald Trump and the Strait of Hormuz, in Tehran, Iran, May 17, 2026. Photo: Majid Asgaripour/WANA (West Asia News Agency) via REUTERS
Iran sent a new peace proposal to the United States with terms that appeared similar to offers Washington has previously rejected, although a senior Iranian official told Reuters on Monday that the US had softened positions on some issues.
A Pakistani source confirmed that Islamabad, which has conveyed messages between the sides in the war in the Middle East since hosting the only round of peace talks last month, had shared the latest proposal with Washington. But the source suggested progress had been difficult.
The sides “keep changing their goalposts,” the Pakistani source said, adding: “We don’t have much time.”
Iranian Foreign Ministry spokesperson Esmaeil Baghaei confirmed that Tehran’s views had been “conveyed to the American side through Pakistan” but gave no details. Washington did not immediately comment.
The Iranian proposal, as described by the senior Iranian source, appeared similar in many respects to Iran’s previous offer, which US President Donald Trump rejected last week as “garbage.”
It would focus first on securing an end to the war, reopening the Strait of Hormuz – a major oil supply route that Iran has effectively blockaded – and lifting maritime sanctions.
Contentious issues around Iran’s nuclear program and uranium enrichment would be deferred to later rounds of talks, the source said.
However, in an apparent softening of Washington’s stance, the senior Iranian source said the United States had agreed to release a quarter of Iran’s frozen funds – totaling tens of billions of dollars – held in foreign banks. Iran wants all the assets released.
The Iranian source also said Washington had shown more flexibility in agreeing to let Iran continue some peaceful nuclear activity under supervision of the International Atomic Energy Agency.
Iran’s Tasnim news agency separately quoted an unidentified source as saying the US had agreed to waive oil sanctions on Iran while negotiations were under way.
Iranian officials did not immediately comment on Tasnim’s report, which a US official, who declined to be named, said was false.
FRAGILE CEASEFIRE
A fragile ceasefire is in place after six weeks of war that followed US-Israeli airstrikes on Iran. But talks mediated by Pakistan have stalled and Trump has said the ceasefire is “on life support.”
Washington has previously demanded Tehran dismantle its nuclear program and reopen the Strait of Hormuz, which normally carries one-fifth of the world’s seaborne oil and liquefied natural gas supply.
Iran has been demanding compensation for war damage, an end to a US blockade of Iranian ports and a halt to fighting on all fronts, including in Lebanon, where Israel is battling the Iran-backed Hezbollah terrorist group.
Trump said in a post on Truth Social at the weekend that “the Clock is Ticking” for Iran, adding that “they better get moving, FAST, or there won’t be anything left of them. TIME IS OF THE ESSENCE!”
Trump is expected to meet top national security advisers on Tuesday to discuss options for resuming military action, Axios reported.
Baghaei said Tehran was prepared for all scenarios.
“As for their threats, rest assured that we are fully aware of how to respond appropriately to even the smallest mistake from the opposing side,” he told a televised weekly press conference.