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As trial begins in Tree of Life massacre, Pittsburgh’s Jews struggle with what to reveal and what to conceal
PITTSBURGH (JTA) — On Friday afternoon, Squirrel Hill was suffused with spring breezes and pink dogwoods, and alive with the movement that typifies the coming of Shabbat.
Toddlers scrambled up the jungle gym in the JCC playground, while the chatter in cafes was about a looming storm that could soak the walk to synagogue on Saturday. Murray Avenue Kosher was emptying out of challahs.
Barely present, at least on the surface, was any indication that Monday morning would hold a turning point in the community’s greatest trauma. That’s when jury selection was to begin in the trial of the man accused of shattering Shabbat on Oct. 27, 2018, with gunfire. His massacre of 11 worshipers, in a synagogue building a 10-minute stroll from the downtown of this leafy, heavily Jewish neighborhood, was the deadliest-ever attack on U.S. Jews.
But behind the scenes, there are clear signs that the trial’s proximity is being felt. Maggie Feinstein, the director of the 10/27 Healing Partnership, which provides post-traumatic therapy for the community, said that as the trial nears, requests for treatment have spiked.
“The trauma cues that for a while bothered us right after the shooting — for some people it might be ambulances, for other people it might be media, for some people it might be the sound of multiple police cars — you get to a place where they don’t bother you as much,” she said. “But the increased media attention and the increased awareness of this upcoming trial for a number of people is bringing back for them that maybe they didn’t do their own healing the first time around.”
A Starbucks in the Squirrel Hill neighborhood of Pittsburgh is decorated with a memorial for the victims of the 2018 massacre at the city’s Tree of Life synagogue, April 21, 2023. (Ron Kampeas)
There were three congregations in the building: Tree of Life and New Light, both affiliated with the Conservative movement, and Dor Hadash, which is Reconstructionist.
The 11 victims were brothers Cecil and David Rosenthal, couple Bernice and Sylvan Simon, Rose Malinger, Joyce Fienberg, Richard Gottfried, Jerry Rabinowitz, Daniel Stein, Melvin Wax and Irving Younger. Seven were from Tree of Life, three were from New Light and one was from Dor Hadash.
For their families, their friends, their congregations and their broader Jewish community, the legacy of the massacre is a deep-seated longing for control, a longing to never have to think again of the gunman and of the anguish he left in his wake, while grappling with tender memories of the dead, of the decades spent in celebration and in prayer in the building.
Who narrates this story, the gunman or his victims? That struggle now looms as the alleged gunman goes to trial. The community is wrestling with questions such as where and whether to put the bullet-riddled artifacts, whether to worship at the site, whether to even speak of the massacre and how and whether the gunman lives or dies.
”We believe strongly that this antisemitic attack should not stop people from practicing and being Jewish,” Feinsten said. “For a lot of people, that’s an active choice that they have to work at. It doesn’t come easily after feeling unsafe in that environment to then work to find safety in it. But a lot of people have chosen to do that.”
On Friday, Feinstein was organizing support services for families who would, if they so choose, be sequestered in a separate room in the court where they could view the trial. (Family members may also ask to be seated in the courtroom.) She assigned six therapists to be present with the families.
Compounding the revisited trauma of the event, the families are divided over whether the gunman, should he be convicted, deserves the death penalty. The accused has a lawyer, Judy Clarke, known as “the attorney for the damned” for her determination to keep her clients from execution.
What’s clear is that the Jews of Squirrel Hill are taking the trial on with their characteristic spirit of collaboration. The community has hired public relations specialists to handle media inquiries ahead of the trial, in part to safeguard locals from being pressed to answer questions that could harm them or shatter the sense of unity. Congregants reached by the Jewish Telegraphic Agency dutifully deferred to the list of approved contacts on a list distributed by a PR agency.
On Friday afternoon, signs of unity that flooded the city in the immediate aftermath of the shooting were still visible. In a tobacconist’s window a sign with the slogan “No place for hate/Stronger than hate,” which had proliferated throughout the neighborhood after the attack, remained propped up next to a flag and an ad for the lottery. A Starbucks had on its window white paint drawings depicting “love,” “kindness” and “hope” in English and in Hebrew, alongside symbols: the Star of David, a heart and a dove.
A tobacconist window includes a poster of the “No Place for Hate” slogan that proliferated after the Tree of Life Massacre in 2018, in Pittsburgh, April 21, 2023. (Ron Kampeas)
Representatives of the community talk about “doing Jewish” as a means of coping, including redoubling the very activities — allying with the city’s Black minority and advocating for immigration, refugees and gun control — that fueled the rage of the alleged attacker.
The attacker allegedly was driven in part by the partnership between Dor Hadash and HIAS, the Jewish refugee aid group, and the congregation’s sponsorship of refugee families.
“We have, if anything, doubled down on our commitment to immigrants and refugees,” said Dana Kellerman, the chair of the communications committee at Dor Hadash. “We are currently coming up on the end of our first year working with a new resettlement program to resettle a Congolese immigrant family in Pittsburgh, and we have every intention of when the year commitment is up of working with a second family.”
Kellerman said the shooting had “honestly become part of the background of our existence at this point.” In keeping with her congregation’s rules aimed at protecting their community, Kellerman declined to talk about the day of the massacre, the death penalty or about details of the trial. But she was open about the ways in which her congregation has leaned into the values it has long held, and that the gunman so reviled.
“We have become louder and more public about practicing our Judaism,” she said. Now, she said, the congregation incorporates advocacy for refugees into its service, with liturgical readings on immigration.
There are other changes. “We even have hats now! We have baseball caps!” Kellerman said with a smile, unearthing a photo of herself in a white cap with “Dor Hadash” and a stylized Magen David in blue, standing alongside gun control advocates.
“Previously we all would have shown up as our individual selves, and now we show up in our Dor Hadash baseball caps,” she said. “Mine kept blowing off.”
Steve Cohen, the co-president of New Light, said the congregation’s relationship with Black churches in the city has reached new intensity since the massacre. The congregation’s rabbi and congregants who know Hebrew partner with the churches to analyze sacred texts in the original.
“We would bring our Tanachs [Hebrew Bibles], and the Christian congregation would bring their Bible and then we would talk about the Proverbs and go through it, not just what the intention of the author was, but how different ways the same words can be translated in order to imply different things,” he said. “And so we went through the whole Book of Proverbs with the Rodman Street Baptist Church, and this past winter, we did the selected Psalms with the faith and Destiny Church on the north side.”
The interior of the new sanctuary of the New Light congregation, four and half years after a gunman massacred three of its congregants, in Pittsburgh, April 21, 2023. (Ron Kampeas)
New Light took its cue from survivors of the 2015 attack on the Emanuel Church in Charleston, South Carolina, in which a white supremacist murdered nine Black worshipers, Cohen said. Leaders of New Light traveled to the church and heard from its elders that it was not enough to tend to the traumatized individuals, but to the community; they emphasized outreach, bringing congregants back in.
“That’s a lot of the reason why we have an outpouring of members who never attended shul now attending shul,” he said.
Feinstein, too, said she had an intensification of religious and ritual observance among her clients: more frequent attendance at Shabbat services, forming a daily minyan, finding a study partner for daily Talmud study.
Kellerman said the community has become closer; she sees it in congregants who linger. “It shows up in things like people showing up for Friday night services, and hanging out to chat or getting on a little early to chat,” she said.
A rendition of architect Daniel Libeskind’s plans for the interior of the new Tree of Life synagogue. (Tree of Life)
In the days leading up to the trial, the community bid farewell to the most salient relic of that painful day: the hulking synagogue building on the corner of Wilkins and Shady that has stood empty since then. All three congregations have decamped to nearby synagogues, leaving behind the chain-link fence draped with paintings from children across the country wishing for strength.
“Nobody has been meeting in the synagogue since the day of the shooting,” said Carole Zawatsky, the Tree of Life CEO who is overseeing the plans to replace the building. The only people to have been inside at all, she said, were survivors and “special friends” — donors to the rebuilding and politicians.
Zawatsky said it is wrenching to even contemplate returning for some. “You can walk through the building and see where the gunman was destructive,” she said. “You can see where the gunman was apprehended, where the gunman opened fire. It’s devastating to witness.”
But some intend to: Tree of Life lost seven congregants but plans on returning once the building is rebuilt as a museum and education center focused on the dangers of extremism.
On Sunday, the Tree of Life congregation had an outdoor ceremony to say “L’hitraot,” Hebrew for “until we meet again,” to the building as it has existed up to now.
“We are grateful to God for the thousands of blessings that have passed through these doors,” Rabbi Jeffrey Myers, the rabbi who sheltered congregants and alerted police, said at the ceremony. “We cannot, we must not, permit one day … to define us, nor outweigh all the good.”
The new center is being designed by Daniel Libeskind, the architect who designed the master plan for the World Trade Center site reconstruction in New York and the Jewish Museum in Berlin.
But Dor Hadash and New Light decided their moves were permanent in part because families of their victims swore never to return to the building.
New Light is now ensconced in what once was a secondary chapel at the Beth Shalom synagogue, as if it has been there for decades: Plaques honoring past donors and presidents adorn the walls of the sanctuary. The only signs of the massacre are the 1,000 paper cranes Pittsburgh’s Japanese community gave the congregation, reflecting a Japanese tradition that folding cranes will make a wish come true. They hang at the entrance to the sanctuary, unexplained by any plaque. There is a stained glass monument to the three victims at the cemetery where they are buried.
Even with Tree of Life’s commitment to return, many questions remain about what that will look like. The congregation has yet to decide what objects will stay in the sanctuary, what will stay in storage and what will be part of a separate exhibit, Zawatsky said.
“The first work that’s had to be done for the synagogue is ‘What are the things that need to be saved and go into storage during construction?’” she said.
In some ways, she indicated, the work of rebuilding could bear some resemblance to the balancing act that the community will have to navigate during the alleged shooter’s trial.
“We are thinking deeply about how you exhibit some of these materials,” Zaslavsky said, “in ways that are both teachable moments and don’t retraumatize.”
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The post As trial begins in Tree of Life massacre, Pittsburgh’s Jews struggle with what to reveal and what to conceal appeared first on Jewish Telegraphic Agency.
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The Situation at Colleges and K-12 Schools Is as Bad as It Has Ever Been for Jewish Students
Demonstrators march in support of Palestinians, amid a ceasefire between Israel and Hamas, at the University of Washington in Seattle, Washington, US, Feb. 5, 2025. Photo: REUTERS/David Ryder
University administrations continue to grapple with legal challenges to their handling of antisemitic protests. A series of lawsuits filed by the higher education industrial complex seek to reverse all the Trump administration’s initiatives to control costs, limit foreign students with radical pasts, and protect Jewish students.
University presidents are also being pressured to reverse the trend of institutional neutrality and to resume making statements on political issues. The lawsuits and the renaming and hiding of DEI initiatives indicate that universities are simply waiting out the current administration, but the structural changes being forced by economic conditions including Federal funding and broader demographics will be more enduring.
Reports indicate that the Trump administration is reworking its “compact with higher education” to make it acceptable to more universities, but in the meantime, a number of Federal investigations are ongoing. The University of Pennsylvania, however, has balked at a demand for employee records from the Equal Opportunity Employment Commission as part of an investigation into discrimination aimed at Jewish employees.
The US Department of Education has also chosen not to challenge a Federal court ruling that prohibits it from requiring universities to remove all race based curriculum, student aid, and student services or risk losing funding. The move was represented by DEI advocates as a victory and reflects the industry’s efforts to wait out the Trump administration before restoring DEI as its central pillar.
Data from a new Department of Education website has again showed that Qatar is the leading funder of American universities with $6.6 billion in contracts and gifts. Cornell University received $2.3 billion, while $1 billion was given to Carnegie Mellon University, and more that $900 million each to Texas A&M University and Georgetown. Overall 1223 individual transactions involving Qatar are recorded, pointing to that country’s vast influence buying within the higher education industrial complex.
The influence of foreign funding has always been disputed by universities. A new lawsuit, however, alleges that Qatari funding directly shaped Carnegie Mellon’s neglect of antisemitism and discrimination directed at a Jewish faculty member.
In that case, the school was required to consult with the Qatar Foundation International before hiring the assistant vice provost for DEI and Title IX coordinator, while other DEI officials visited Qatar as part of their work. This pattern of support and collusion with Qatar through DEI is likely replicated across a vast scale across the higher education industry.
A new report has again detailed the manner in which the City University of New York systematically purged all Jews from its leadership and dramatically reduced the number of Jewish students. The university’s move appears to be a deliberate, top down marketing strategy focusing on New York’s Muslim community rather than Jews, which privileged partnerships with CAIR and endorsed BDS supporters within the faculty union.
Finally, in a significant move, the United Arab Emirates has banned scholarships for students studying in Britain. The stated rationale was fear of radicalization by the Muslim Brotherhood, which dominates British campuses.
In an interesting rhetorical shift, Harvard president Alan Garber blamed “faculty activism” in the classroom for chilling free speech on campus. He also stated that “there is real movement to restore balance in teaching and to bring back the idea that you really need to be objective in the classroom.”
The incorporation of explicitly anti-Israel terms such as “Israel Occupation Forces,” “Apartheid Wall,” and “Zionist regime” into academic papers has expanded immensely since 2019 and has created a self-reinforcing web of citations that gives the additional appearance of legitimacy to anti-Israel standpoints.
As has long been the case, this new guise conveniently aligns with broader left-wing opposition to the West, capitalism, and whiteness.
Faculty also continue to organize conferences on campus that emphasize anti-Israel activism, often without a guise of scholarship or pedagogy.
In one recent example, a conference at the University of Washington was reported to have promoted pro-Hamas activism and included faculty members and activists who defended Hamas, Iran, and campus property destruction. The university recently lifted suspensions on students who had caused over $1 million in damages to an engineering building during a pro-Hamas takeover.
In another example, Georgetown University’s Center for Contemporary Arab Studies will host a Gaza Lecture Series featuring a number of prominent defenders of Hamas and other terrorist groups, as well as deniers of October 7th sexual violence.
Institutionally, academic associations continue to be besieged by anti-Israel members. In January the executive council of the American Historical Association vetoed a resolution accusing Israel of scholasticide and the silencing of protests regarding “the U.S.-sponsored genocide perpetrated by Israel in Gaza.”
The council stated, “As worded the two resolutions fall outside the scope of the American Historical Association’s chartered mission,” adding that “Approving them on behalf of the entire association would present institutional risk and have long-term implications for the discipline and the organization.” Supporters of the resolution complained the move reflected anti-Palestinian bias. The Modern Language Association also approved a similar resolution.
In the first month of the new semester, job fairs and individual corporations were be targeted by pro-Hamas protestors. In one example, the Stanford Students for Justice in Palestine chapter organized a walkout to demand the university sever ties with Palantir, which it accuses of “enabling genocide” and profiting from “ICE raids, police violence, and mass surveillance at home.”
The Yale University “Endowment Justice Collective” also demanded that the university divest from investments in Palantir and other firms. The university rejected the demands. The University of Alabama SJP chapter made similar divestment demands.
Student sponsored events in support of Hamas and other Palestinian terror organizations also continue to be held. The University of Virginia Law School hosted International Solidarity Movement co-founder Huwaida Arraf for a “conversation” about Gaza. In another, the University of Chicago’s pro-Hamas groups promoted an International Week of Action to secure the release of Ahmad Sa’adat, the imprisoned general secretary of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine.
At the University of Washington, the presence of the Tariq El-Tahrir Student Network, “an international network of Palestinian, Arab, and Internationalist youth, students and organizations,” associated with terrorist organizations including the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, has provided the local pro-Hamas SUPER UW (Students United for Palestinian Equality and Return at University of Washington) group with continuing support. This includes webinar series featuring terror supporters from Samidoun and other groups. SUPER UW remains banned on campus but the Tariq El-Tahrir provides them with an effective alter ego.
Finally, in a move that demonstrated how the Holocaust is being actively divorced from and turned against Jews, the University of California at Irvine student government passed a motion commemorating International Holocaust Remembrance Day but stripped it of all reference to modern antisemitism and Holocaust denial.
The K-12 sector continues to be manipulated by anti-American and pro-Hamas teachers unions and infiltrated by foreign influence operations. Pro-Hamas pedagogy inside and outside the classroom have now become commonplace, often piggybacked on holidays and commemorations.
In one example, pro-Hamas teachers held a NYC Educators For Palestine MLK Day Teach-In. The organizers are among the leaders of the American Federation of Teachers and the United Federation of Teachers. A number of participants are also linked to pro-Hamas welfare organizations such as the Palestinian Children’s Welfare Fund and ANERA. Teach-ins for “Palestine” were also held on Martin Luther King Day for students in Philadelphia and for teachers in Oakland.
Teachers and parents from the Berkeley Families for Collective Liberation were involved in organizing a student walkout at Berkeley High School to participate in a pro-Palestinian teach-out held on International Holocaust Remembrance Day. Organizers claimed the timing was purely coincidental. Speakers also criticized California’s new law addressing antisemitism in public schools.
The complicity of school administrators in permitting and organizing pro-Hamas events inside and outside classrooms is well documented. One recent example is the decision by the Michigan Department of Education to accept teachers’ participation in a professional development seminar about “how to teach about Palestine” organized by the Arab American National Museum, in association with Rethinking Schools, and Visualizing Palestine.
New evidence continues to emerge regarding foreign influence operations, including initiatives by the Qatar Foundation International to insert Arabic language and social justice curriculums into Georgia schools. Both the language and social justice materials are deeply suffused with anti-Israel and antisemitic themes.
British primary and secondary schools provide a roadmap to how teachers and foreign powers reshape curriculum and how demographic change among students have made antisemitism and anti-Israel bias foundational.
British teachers unions are resolutely anti-Israel and have adopted numerous resolutions of condemnation. This has translated into classroom hostility towards Israel, as well as towards Jewish students and teachers, some of whom are told by colleagues that Israel simply does not exist, which is amplified by the growing number of Muslim students.
In one recent case, a school barred a Jewish Member of Parliament from visiting after protests from teachers. The educational oversight authority Ofsted later cleared the school of wrongdoing without speaking to the Member of Parliament. In contrast, reports indicate that Hussein Zomlot, head of the Palestinian Mission to the UK, routinely tours British schools.
The Holocaust has also been co-opted and inverted as an anti-Israel and antisemitic tool. British teachers have begun presenting Israeli actions in Gaza as “genocide” and inverting Holocaust memory into an anti-Jewish concept. Reports also indicate that half of British schools have stopped marking Holocaust Memorial Day for fear of offending Muslim students.
The author is a contributor to SPME, where a different version of this article appeared.
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Israeli-Palestinian restaurant shutters in Berlin, though a TV show will continue its story
(JTA) — An Israeli-Palestinian restaurant in Berlin that became internationally known for its “Make hummus not war” message is closing after 10 years — but a new TV series will extend its story.
Kanaan, a hummus bar run by Oz Ben David, an Israeli, and Jalil Dabit, a Palestinian, has announced it will shutter in March. The partners evolved their restaurant into a platform for promoting peace and dialogue, but in recent years, they fought a string of economic challenges along with local tensions emanating from the Gaza war.
“Running a daily restaurant became too heavy,” they said in a post on Instagram. “The pandemic, the wars and the economic situation, all of those were too much.”
Now, the German production company Traumfabrik Babelsberg says it’s making a new dramedy series based on the Israeli-Palestinian duo. The show called “Breaking the Binary” was announced at a launch party in January, where the creators said they joined Ben David and Dabit over “a shared meal as a symbol of exchange and encounter.”
Ben David and Dabit are contributing to the writing and character development of the series. It will feature Mirna Funk, a German-Jewish author and journalist, as well as Yousef Sweid, a Palestinian citizen of Israel who appeared in the acclaimed Netflix series “Unorthodox” and HBO’s “Game of Thrones.”
The partners briefly closed Kanaan after the Oct. 7 Hamas attack on Israel, battling doubts about the credibility of their anti-war message. Six days later, they reopened with the determination to leverage their restaurant as a symbol of hope.
They organized free educational programs on cooking and prejudice, joining Palestinian refugees from Gaza with members of Berlin’s Israeli community. In November, they published a cookbook titled “Kochen ohne Grenzen,” or “Cooking Without Borders,” compiling their recipes together with those of rabbis, imams and priests in Berlin.
But while these projects won international recognition, Kanaan was battered by economic uncertainty and a fraught political environment. Far-left and far-right activists protested the “normalization” of an Israeli and a Palestinian working together. Meanwhile, many customers surveyed by the restaurant said they were fatigued by conversations about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and they preferred to unwind with a night of sushi or Italian food.
“‘We don’t understand if you are pro-Israel or pro-Palestine.’ That’s something that we heard a lot,” Ben David said last year.
In 2024, Kanaan was ransacked after hosting a Jewish-Muslim brunch. Months later, an Israeli woman was assaulted by four people while wearing Kanaan’s signature pin, which depicts a heart divided between the Israeli and Palestinian flags.
Ben David and Dabit said they will continue to share their food through other formats, including pop-ups, catering, educational projects and collaborations.
“This chapter is coming to an end — but Kanaan is not,” they said.
The post Israeli-Palestinian restaurant shutters in Berlin, though a TV show will continue its story appeared first on The Forward.
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‘Blue Wave’: Israel Expands Diplomatic, Security Ties Across Latin America Amid Shifting Regional Politics
Argentine President Javier Milei speaks during a Plenum session of the Knesset, Israel’s Parliament, in Jerusalem, June 11, 2025. Photo: REUTERS/Ronen Zvulun
A new wave of diplomacy in Latin America has seen several governments adopt a friendlier, more supportive stance toward Israel, deepening bilateral ties that Jerusalem is now leveraging on the global stage while signaling a potential shift in regional political alignments.
In a new interview with Israel’s Channel 12, Amir Ofek, deputy director for Latin America at Israel’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs, explained that the country is undergoing a major shift in its diplomatic engagement across the region, marked by a series of significant developments.
“There have been shifts in countries that were once our allies, and we have faced periods under very critical and challenging governments,” Ofek said. “We respond quickly to these changes, stay in close contact, and we are now beginning to make real progress.”
In a significant regional breakthrough, Israel and Bolivia formally restored diplomatic relations late last year, ending a two-year rupture sparked by the war in Gaza and reopening channels of official dialogue between the two countries.
In December, Bolivian Foreign Minister Fernando Armayo also announced that the country will lift visa requirements for Israeli travelers, a move that Israeli Foreign Minister Gideon Saar praised as helping to “strengthen the human bridge between our peoples.”
Chile and Honduras are also leading the way among other Latin American nations making a striking turn toward Israel
Last year, Chile elected far-right President José Antonio Kast, who promised to reshape the country’s foreign policy toward the Jewish state, overturning the stance of a previously hostile administration.
This year, Honduras also chose a far-right candidate, President Nasry Asfura, who expressed hopes for a “new era” in bilateral relations and stronger ties with Jerusalem.
“The shift in Honduras is part of a broader regional trend: a ‘blue wave’ across Latin American countries that embrace freedom and democracy and align closely with US policy in the region,” Nadav Goren, Israel’s ambassador to Honduras, told Channel 12. “We are in a very optimistic period for Latin America.”
With the official launch of the Isaac Accords by Argentina’s President Javier Milei last year, Israel has been working to expand its diplomatic and security ties across the region, in an effort designed to promote government cooperation and fight antisemitism and terrorism.
Modeled after the Abraham Accords, a series of historic US-brokered normalization agreements between Israel and several Arab countries, this new initiative aims to strengthen political, economic, and cultural cooperation between the Jewish state and Latin American governments.
“Israel offers globally recognized expertise that meets the needs of many countries, covering areas such as agricultural technology, water management, food security, cybersecurity, and innovation. Partners understand that Israel can help propel them forward, even in the context of internal security,” Ofek said.
The first phase of the Isaac Accords will focus on Uruguay, Panama, and Costa Rica, where potential projects in technology, security, and economic development are already taking shape as this framework seeks to deepen cooperation in innovation, commerce, and cultural exchange.
The Isaac Accords will also aim to encourage partner countries to move their embassies to Jerusalem, formally recognize Hamas and Hezbollah as terrorist organizations, and shift longstanding anti-Israel voting patterns at the United Nations.
Less than a year after the Hamas-led invasion of and massacre across southern Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, Argentina became the first Latin American country to designate the Palestinian Islamist group as a terrorist organization, with Paraguay following suit last year.
Building on a deepening partnership, Saar and Paraguay’s President Santiago Peña also signed a landmark security cooperation memorandum, as the two countries continue to expand their relationship following Paraguay’s move to relocate its embassy to Israel’s capital of Jerusalem in 2024.
“Over the past two very difficult years, our friendship has shown its strength through international forums, mutual cooperation, official visits, and measures against Iran. We have expressed our friendship in meaningful, if sometimes implicit, ways,” Ofek told Channel 12, referring to the country’s growing ties with Paraguay.
In recent years, Latin America has gained strategic importance for Israel as a frontline in countering Iran and its Lebanese proxy Hezbollah, whose growing influence and criminal networks in the region — especially in Venezuela and Cuba — have prompted Jerusalem to expand its diplomatic, security, and intelligence presence.
“For us, this is a circle of allies that recognizes the same threat we face from Iran’s growing influence in the region, and it is only natural to cooperate to halt its expansion,” Ofek said. “We have seen firsthand how damaging this is, particularly in the context of attacks on Israeli and Jewish targets.”