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As Orthodox Union and other Jewish groups condemn settler rampage, many avoid mentioning Benjamin Netanyahu
WASHINGTON (JTA) — As American Jewish organizations responded to Sunday’s settler riot in the West Bank, most began with statements of condemnation.
One began with a question: “How can such a thing happen?”
“How could it come to this, that Jewish young men should ransack and burn homes and cars?” continued the statement from Rabbi Moshe Hauer, executive vice president of the Orthodox Union, who added that “we cannot understand or accept this.”
He concluded with a note of desperation: “What happened yesterday must never, ever happen again.”
Hauer’s anguish was all the more notable because it came from a group whose constituency, American Orthodox Jews, has historically sympathized with the movement to create Jewish settlements in the West Bank. And Hauer’s statement did something else that many other groups did not: It appeared to question the leadership of Israel’s prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu.
“Attacking a village does not deserve to be called ‘taking the law into your own hands,’” Hauer’s statement said. “This is not the law; this is undisciplined and random fury. Actions like these demonstrate the critical need for clear and strong leadership.”
While Hauer didn’t mention Netanyahu by name (and didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment) the implication was clear: On Sunday, in response to the riot in the town of Huwara, Netanyahu said, “I ask – even when the blood is boiling – not to take the law into one’s hands.”
The Orthodox Union has for years criticized U.S. pressure on Israel to accept a two-state solution to the conflict with the Palestinians or to share Jerusalem. In 2007 it stood out among Jewish groups leading criticism of the then Israeli government for contemplating a Palestinian role in Jerusalem.
Beyond the O.U, Jewish groups decried the actions of the settlers but mostly avoided mentioning the Israeli government or its leader. Instead, some looked to Israel’s president, Isaac Herzog, whose role is largely ceremonial but who has sought to broker compromise amid the current contentious government. He had issued a “forceful condemnation” of the rioting on Sunday, saying that security forces, not civilians “committing violence against innocents,” should respond to terrorism.
Affirming and quoting the Israeli prime minister was once a reflex for legacy groups when commenting on crises in Israel. But times have changed. Israel’s government includes far-right parties and ministers who are themselves settlers and have long advocated harsher measures in response to Palestinian terror.
One official, National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir, was once convicted of incitement to violence. And some coalition members have sympathized with the rioters in the wake of the rampage. Against that backdrop, Netanyahu did not feature in many American Jewish organizations’ statements. Others condemned the prime minister for his links to the far right or what they saw as his government’s tepid response.
“Though some Israeli leaders, including the prime minister, called for restraint, the government failed to prevent or quickly curtail this unacceptable violence,” Rabbi Rick Jacobs, president of the Union for Reform Judaism, said in an emailed statement. “Those responsible must be held accountable and safety and security for Jews and Palestinians alike must prevail.”
The Anti-Defamation League and American Jewish Committee both cited Herzog’s statement, and declared, respectively, their “outrage” and condemnation of “this violence in the strongest terms.”
The AJC declined further comment, and the ADL, asked to elaborate on its statement, condemned lawmakers who incite violence, while avoiding mentioning the fact that they are members of Israel’s governing coalition.
“There is also no excuse for the incitement to violence we heard from a few political leaders, including some Israeli Knesset Members,” a spokesman said in an email. “We join Israeli President Herzog’s call for a de-escalation of violence, and urge Israeli law enforcement to ensure that those involved in the Huwara violence are held accountable.”
Asked for a statement, William Daroff, the CEO of the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations, did not mention the government or Netanyahu. “I condemn without reservation the riots and violence in Hawara,” he said in an interview. “There is no excuse for lawless vigilantism.”
In a statement later, Daroff suggested that if Israeli politicians fail to condemn the settler violence, there could be consequences for the relationship with Jews overseas.
“These criminal acts of violence and vandalism harm Jewish sovereignty and Israel’s relationship with the global Jewish diaspora,” he said. “We urge Knesset members to speak out against these attacks while pursuing a peaceful resolution.”
The Jewish organizations approached for this story did not reply when asked what they planned to do if Netanyahu fails to take action. A number of regional Jewish organizations and rabbis have previously called for boycotts of far-right coalition members if and when they tour the United States.
Israeli authorities arrested a number of the rioters, and then let them go. No plans for prosecution have been reported yet.
The Conservative movement’s Rabbinical Assembly stood out for extending its condolences to both Jewish and Arab victims of violence on Sunday — an equivalence that is extremely rare in Jewish groups’ statements. The group’s message, written in English and Hebrew, mentions both the family of the two Israelis who were shot while driving through Huwara, and the family of the Palestinian who reportedly was shot dead while pleading with settlers to leave his village alone.
“We are in pain and join the condolences to the families of those killed, among them the Yaniv family and the Al-Aqtash family and wish a speedy and full recovery to all who were injured,” the group said, referring to the Israeli and Palestinian victims, respectively. “We expect our government, the IDF, and the police, to act to prevent harm to people and to property, and to try any person who has chosen to harm another person.”
Americans for Peace Now and J Street both called on the Biden administration to use its leverage to get Netanyahu to take action.
“Netanyahu’s extremist coalition is demonstrating that it will not be stopped by polite protestations or vague agreements,” J Street said. “Only by setting clear redlines and tangible consequences can the US hope to deter this government.”
Americans for Peace Now similarly called on Biden to “hold the government of Israel accountable for both its unrestrained settlement activity and its enabling of settler violence,” while the liberal rabbinic human rights group T’ruah said the Israeli government “has fueled the incitement that led to this attack.”
The Israel Policy Forum, a group that backs a two-state outcome, decried the lack of accountability for the rioters for the attacks on the Hawara residents. “Their only crimes were being Palestinians living in proximity to a spot where a different Palestinian committed a terrorist attack, and the settlers who rampaged through their homes and streets unimpeded, without any real consequences, represent the daily injustice that Palestinians face as non-citizens on their land with no recourse to any responsible higher authority,” it said in a statement.
Some organizations praised Netanyahu’s government for speaking out against the riot. The Jewish Federations of North America commended “the Government of Israel for speaking out quickly to lower tensions.” And the American Israel Public Affairs Committee appeared to tie the settlers’ vigilantism to Palestinian terrorism.
“As Israel’s Prime Minister and President clearly indicated, vigilante action cannot be tolerated,” its spokesman said. “Terrorism will not decline as long as the Palestinian leadership continues incitement, rewards terrorism with payments to terrorists and their families, and encourages the public celebration of Israeli fatalities.”
At least one organizational leader echoed the sentiments of Israeli officials who sympathized with the rioters. Morton Klein, CEO of the Zionist Organization of America, said in an interview that he condemned the rioters, but also understood what drove them.
“I don’t believe that civilians should be taking the law into their own hands,” he said. “I oppose civilians taking on their own hands, that’s for sure, but you know, after constant murder of people, you know, people lose control.”
Klein said Israel needed to “put enormous pressure in every way you can” on Palestinians in order to quell violence in the West Bank. Asked whether Israel also deserved pressure to bring the settler rioters to justice, Klein said that was not a concern of his.
“Arabs care more about Arabs than they do about non-Arabs and Jews care more about Jews than they do about non-Jews,” said Klein, who met in person with Ben-Gvir last week in Israel. “It’s a natural human trait.”
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Bob Dylan is changing his lyrics and his set list; what is he trying to tell us?
Nobel Prize-winning rock poet Bob Dylan once famously wrote, “You don’t need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows” (in his 1965 song “Subterranean Homesick Blues”). That may have formerly been the case, but it didn’t stop Dylan from kicking off his “Lights of Autumn Tour” in Oslo on Saturday, Oct. 17, with a setlist chock full of warnings about floods and extreme weather — a veritable apocalypse of natural disasters. He even rewrote some lines in one of his most famous and beloved songs, “Tangled Up in Blue,” to make the weather a new character in the song.
Playing “Tangled Up in Blue” in concert for the first time since 2018, Dylan revised a few verses. Where he originally sang “I had a job in the great north woods working as a cook for a spell” to kick off the third verse, Dylan instead sang “Way up in the frozen woods, teardrops touch the sky / The leaves are falling one by one, and the moments passing by,” in keeping with the “Lights of Autumn” theme. (It should be noted that Dylan has been rewriting and changing the lyrics to “Tangled” at least since 1984, when he also included the song on his opening concert of a European tour.) “Way up in the frozen woods” may also refer to Dylan’s hometown of Hibbing, Minnesota, which is so far north that you can practically see Canada from there.
On Saturday, Dylan continued to rewrite that third verse with the line “Sometimes I get so tired, sometimes I’m getting away / Lucky you found another, tomorrow’s another day.” In a clever twist, Dylan inserts the new word “lucky” into the number, which recalls the phrase “I can’t help it if I’m lucky” from the song “Idiot Wind,” also found on the 1975 album Blood on the Tracks where “Tangled Up in Blue” originated. “Lucky” also resurfaced as a cryptic moniker for Dylan himself when, in the superstar group the Traveling Wilburys that included George Harrison, Tom Petty, and Roy Orbison — all of whom took new names ending in “Wilbury” — Dylan opted for “Lucky Wilbury.” He can’t help it, indeed!
Dylan kicked off another rewritten verse with the phrase, “Things were gettin’ to cost too much,” leaving one to wonder if this was a pre-midterm election reference to the state of the U.S. economy and therefore an implicit criticism of the MAGA leader and his acolytes. Dylan also revised the music somewhat, slowing the tempo of what was once a mid-tempo rocker to a rubato ballad; he also inserted a minor chord that doesn’t exist in the original.
As noted, Dylan’s 19-song setlist included copious references to weather disasters. “The Man in the Long Black Coast” opens with the line “Crickets are chirpin’, the water is high,” and refers to trees that are “bent over backwards from a hurricane breeze.” The aptly titled “Crash on the Levee (Down in the Flood),” which he performed for the first time in over two decades, includes the lines:
Crash on the levee, mama
Water’s gonna overflow
Swamp’s gonna rise
No boat’s gonna row….
If you go down in the flood
It’s gonna be your own fault…”
Even Dylan’s choice of cover tunes seemed oriented toward the apocalyptic theme. For the first time ever, Dylan sang a Randy Newman song in concert. Keeping with the flood theme, he chose Newman’s “Louisiana 1927,” which recounts one of the worst floods ever to strike the U.S.
What’s happened down here is that the wind have changed
Clouds roll in from the north, and it starts to rain
Rained real hard, it rained for a real long time
Six feet of water in the streets of Evangeline
River rose all day, the river rose all night
Some people got lost in the flood, some people got away all right
Dylan also covered “Share Your Love” — originally recorded by Bobby “Blue” Bland in 1963 but also recorded and performed by Dylan’s former backup group, The Band — which kicks off with the line “Well, it’s an ill wind that blows no good.”
But Dylan didn’t have to go far from his own catalog to rack up mentions of climate insanity. He performed “Tryin’ to Get to Heaven,” which includes the lines “The air is getting hotter, there’s a rumbling in the skies / I’ve been wading through the high muddy water, with the heat rising in my eyes.” In “You Ain’t Goin’ Nowhere,” Dylan sang, “Clouds so swift, rain won’t lift / Gate won’t close, railings froze / Get your mind off wintertime, you ain’t goin’ nowhere.” And on “I’ve Made Up My Mind to Give Myself to You,” the seasonally appropriate narrator says, “I saw the first fall of snow, I saw the flowers come and go.”
Dylan’s tour continues tonight (Oct. 19) in Gothenburg, Sweden, before making its way through Denmark, Germany, Belgium, Switzerland, Italy, Slovenia, and Austria, and concluding in the UK in November and early December. The forecast for Sweden tonight is clear, but later in the week, the weather report says there’s a chance of a hard rain.
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Argentina’s Jewish gauchos museum vows to stay open amid leadership feud
(JTA) — BUENOS AIRES – A museum dedicated to the history of Argentinian Jewish ranchers, farmers and the cowboys known as gauchos remains open and operating despite months of tension between its former director and the local government, the head of the Entre Ríos Jewish community confirmed to the Jewish Telegraphic Agency,
The Villa Domínguez Jewish Museum about the Jewish Colonies drew international attention late last year after visitors reported water damage affecting walls, documents and historical objects. The concerns arose months after the resignation of Osvaldo Quiroga, the local historian who had led the museum for nearly 40 years and was widely associated with its preservation.
In an interview, community head Marina Garber acknowledged the tensions that led to Quiroga’s resignation in January 2025, and that since then a successor has not been named.
“We are resolving the situation with an agreement in which the building belongs to the municipality, while the Jewish community is in charge of safeguarding the objects. The museum is still operating,” Garber told JTA, and the partnership between the local municipality and Jewish community would continue.
Villa Domínguez is a rural town of around 2,000 inhabitants located 225 miles north of Buenos Aires, where international tourism centered on the country’s earliest Jewish agricultural colonies brings considerable visibility to the area.
The fate of the museum matters far beyond Villa Domínguez’s nine remaining Jews. The Jewish agricultural colonies of Entre Ríos are a defining chapter in Argentine Jewish history, tracing how immigrants from Eastern Europe built new lives as farmers and gauchos. Its future is a test of whether a legacy that belongs to Argentine Jewry as a whole can be safeguarded.
Although its director was a municipal employee, the museum itself belongs to the Jewish community. This hybrid arrangement, with no clear responsibilities divided between the two, created tensions when the images of damage were spread online. Suggestions that the Jewish museum had fallen into a state of neglect circulated online as far as Europe.
According to some sources, tensions appear to stem from a combination of the government’s limited attention to the site and the apparent resentment by some government officials that Quiroga had received inordinate media attention.
The Jewish colonies of Entre Ríos, established in the late 1890s by Jewish immigrants mostly from Eastern Europe, represent one of the largest waves of Jewish agricultural settlement in the Americas.
The Jewish Colonies Museum was founded in October 1985 to safeguard the region’s documentary and material heritage. Since 1996, it has been housed in the town’s former pharmacy building.
The museum attracts Argentine and international visitors interested in the stories of the Jewish gauchos — the immigrants who blended their Jewish and Eastern European roots with Argentine ranching culture. Heritage tours, family-history trips, academic researchers and Jewish community groups contribute to a steady flow of visitors exploring the landscapes where the Jewish gauchos built their rural lives, a journey that began more than a century ago.
For the descendants of the gauchos — many now scattered across Argentina, Israel and beyond — the institution serves as a touchstone for genealogical research and family history. Its stability is also of concern to Jewish communal organizations and Argentine officials who have promoted the Jewish colonies circuit as a pillar of religious and cultural tourism in the province.
The first ship carrying Jewish immigrants from Europe to Argentina, the SS Weser, arrived in 1889 after sailing from Hamburg to Buenos Aires. Its arrival inspired Baron Maurice de Hirsch, a German Jewish financier and philanthropist, to recognize the potential of agricultural migration and, in 1891, to create the Jewish Colonization Association (JCA) to institutionalize, fund and organize the colonies.
A tourist trail linking the various Jewish settlements has been operating for more than 20 years, made up of four communities: Basavilbaso, Villa Domínguez, Villa Clara and Villaguay. Two- and three-day tours of the area’s main Jewish sites include visits to synagogues, cemeteries, cooperatives, and local museums. Villa Clara — or simply Clara — is a small town founded in 1892 and named after Hirsch’s wife. Its Jewish museum is located inside an old railway station. Another settlement, Lucienville, is named after the couple’s son, Lucien.
The last agricultural colony founded in Entre Ríos by the JCA is Colonia Avigdor, visited regularly by students of Fundación Judaica, a major Buenos Aires network of schools and synagogues, which brings groups there for educational programs, supports local schools, and works on community development.
The national government includes the tourist trail as part of a religious tourism program, and the Buenos Aires Jewish center AMIA has a site dedicated to the colonies’ history in Entre Rios, including Villa Domínguez.
The national government and some local municipalities also include the Jewish colonies among their cultural offerings.
According to Pablo Soskin, the representative in Entre Ríos of the Argentine Jewish political umbrella organization DAIA, the museum’s director stepped down on Jan. 24, but municipal officials initially declined to accept his resignation. He subsequently took an extended leave to use up a large balance of accrued vacation days, with the municipality’s approval. When that time ran out, he was reassigned within the museum to a different, non-directorial role. The director position has remained vacant since then.
“We maintain a close relationship with the government, which has expressed its commitment to making the museum and the Jewish circuit part of the province’s tourist attractions for locals and foreigners,” Soskin told JTA. “We will continue to coordinate community, public, and private mechanisms to ensure the preservation of our heritage sites.
“This is key to understanding the contributions that the Jewish community has made to Argentina,” he added.
This article originally appeared on JTA.org.
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Israeli police arrest suspects in Washington Post journalist attack
(JTA) — JERUSALEM – Israel Police arrested 10 people on Monday on suspicion of involvement in violent acts over the weekend against journalists, foreign diplomats and Palestinians in the West Bank during the annual olive harvest.
The arrests came after international condemnation of the attacks, including by U.S. Ambassador to Israel Mike Huckabee, who is generally supportive of the current Israeli government. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has insisted it is just a handful of individuals and not representative of Israelis who live in the West Bank settlements.
“Following reports of acts of violence over the weekend, including the suspected assault of a foreign journalist and the suspected assault of foreign diplomats, the Judea and Samaria District and the Israel Security Agency (ISA) carried out a pre-dawn arrest operation as part of the ongoing investigation,” the police said in a statement, referring to the West Bank by its biblical name.
The statement said the suspects were arrested during a special pre-dawn operation conducted by the district’s Central Investigations Unit and transferred to police stations in the area for questioning.
“Following questioning, and subject to the findings of the investigation, they will be brought before a court for a hearing,” the police statement said.
The arrests come after Heidi Levine, a veteran photojournalist for The Washington Post, was attacked on Friday while photographing Palestinians harvesting their olive trees in the West Bank, an annual event that often sees violent clashes between Palestinian farmers and Israeli settlers who have increasingly moved into the same areas.
Video footage from the scene shows a group of masked settlers surrounding and attacking Levine before ripping off her camera and other personal gear. Palestinians can also be seen throwing stones at the settlers before another journalist arrives to help Levine leave the area.
The photographer was taken to a Palestinian hospital near Ramallah and later transferred to Beilinson Hospital near Tel Aviv, which reported that she was in moderate condition with lacerations across her body, a broken rib and four broken vertebrae. She also underwent surgery on her finger, the hospital said.
On Saturday, European diplomats from France, Belgium and Poland came under assault by masked settlers who forced their convoy off the road in the area of Taybeh, near Ramallah. Bernard Baudoux, a leftist mayor of Aulnoye-Aymeries, a town in northern France, was beaten, according to witnesses who spoke to international media.
Data collected by Israeli human rights organization Yesh Din and published on Sunday showed some 538 alleged incidents of settler and soldier violence over the 20-day period from Sept. 27 to Oct. 16, across 181 Palestinian communities in the West Bank. Some 269 of the incidents were directly related to the olive harvest, the organization said.
Israeli right-wing legal-aid organization Honenu confirmed the arrests on Monday and said its criminal law department would be providing the suspects with “initial legal assistance.”
“At this stage, it is unclear what the detainees are suspected of,” the organization said in a statement.
The Israel Police said that “items linking the suspects to the alleged offenses were seized, and several vehicles were confiscated.”
“The law in Judea and Samaria applies to everyone, regardless of identity or affiliation. The Israel Police is committed to professional, equal, and impartial law enforcement, based on evidence and in accordance with the law,” Israel Police Commissioner Daniel Levy said in the statement.
The issue of settler violence in the West Bank falls into a gray area of law enforcement between the Israel Police and the Israeli military, the latter of which is responsible for civilian matters in parts of the territory that are not legally under Israeli sovereignty. Israel’s police force is under the authority of the National Security Ministry headed by Itamar Ben-Gvir, a far-right nationalist who has not made clamping down on settler violence a priority.
Levy said that the ambiguity over which agency is responsible for what must be addressed.
“At the same time, a distinction must be made between responsibility for preventing incidents in the field and responsibility for investigating and enforcing the law after they occur,” Levy said.
“We will continue to coordinate with all security agencies to strengthen security and the rule of law and ensure that anyone found to have violated the law is brought to justice,” he added.
Huckabee on Saturday called for a full investigation into the attack against Levine and for the perpetrators to be prosecuted “to the fullest extent of the law.”
“Attacking a female photographer is a despicable act of terror carried out by masked cowards. Dishonorable act of senseless violence,” he wrote on X.
Israeli President Isaac Herzog also condemned the “shocking violence” and said he had called Levine to apologize.
“I expressed my deepest sorrow to Heidi and apologized for what she went through. The despicable behavior of the perpetrators of this attack does not represent the citizens or the values of the State of Israel,” he said in a statement.
Netanyahu, who is in the midst of a closely contested election campaign to retain power, condemned violence generally, but also stated that the circumstances of the attack “remain unclear.”
“We will not allow disputed incidents to be exploited to demonize the hundreds of thousands of law-abiding Jewish residents of Judea and Samaria,” he said in a statement, using the biblical names for the West Bank.
Israel’s Ambassador to the U.S. Yechiel Leiter, however, stated on CNN on Friday “unambiguously and unequivocally, that gratuitous violence perpetrated by anyone, be they Jews or Arabs, is completely unacceptable.”
He added, “If we have not yet reached a passing grade to bring Jewish vigilantes to justice, then we’ve got to do a better job. But I’m convinced that we are going to do it. I’ve been in government meetings. I’ve heard the prime minister speak emphatically about putting a stop to this.”
In a statement Monday following the arrests, Defense Minister Israel Katz said that it was time for the Israeli police to handle such crimes.
“The IDF should not and cannot be engaged in civilian law enforcement. Its role is to fight Palestinian terrorism and defend the country’s borders and the Jewish communities in Judea and Samaria and along the seam line,” he said, adding that he was preparing, in coordination with the prime minister, “a comprehensive plan to regulate civilian law enforcement activities in Judea and Samaria.”
“The plan distinguishes between the IDF’s authority in the field and the transfer of responsibility for carrying out civilian law enforcement in practice to the Israel Police’s Judea and Samaria District,” Katz said.
This article originally appeared on JTA.org.
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