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At unusual counterprotest, right-wing demonstrators air grievances against Israel’s courts

JERUSALEM (JTA) — After three months of demonstrations dominated by detractors of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s judicial overhaul plan, supporters of the proposed reform took to the streets Monday, making their voice heard in Jerusalem and across Israel.

Gathered outside the Knesset, Israel’s parliament, thousands of pro-reform protesters, including settlers bused in from the West Bank, sought to back Netanyahu and Justice Minister Yariv Levin, even as the prime minister announced his intention to temporarily suspend the plan.

“We are trying to create counter-pressure to the demonstrations of the left,” said Yisrael Entman, who lives in the Kokhav HaShahar settlement and was accompanied by his wife and five children.

It was the first major demonstration by supporters of the Netanyahu government’s now-paused legislation to overhaul the country’s judiciary to sap the independence and power of the Supreme Court. Both proponents and critics of the legislation say it would benefit Israel’s right, which largely believes that the courts are out of step with mainstream sentiment. They also share the view that the dispute is not just about how Supreme Court justices are appointed but about what values will prevail in Israel.

“Israel cannot have a liberal approach devoid of Judaism,” Entman said. “If you destroy the Jewish character of Israel we have no justification for being here.”

He and others at the rally offered a laundry list of grievances against the court, including the way it has deployed the 1992 Basic Law on Human Freedom and Dignity, which the court has at times used to combat discrimination against minorities.

Thousands of Israeli right-wing protesters rally in support of Israeli government’s judicial overhaul bills out of the Israeli parliament, the Knesset, in Jerusalem on March 27, 2023. (Gili Yaari/Flash90)

Entman repeated the claim that the court had used the law to prevent the expulsion of African asylum seekers despite complaints from Israeli residents of south Tel Aviv. In fact, the court only limited the government’s ability to lock up asylum seekers in a Negev facility. It was Netanyahu who brokered a third-country expulsion agreement only to backtrack on it the next day.

Entman’s wife said bitterly that the court had “expelled settlers,” an apparent reference to court-ordered evacuation of Jewish settlers trespassing on private Palestinian property.

The massive demonstrations from right and left marked the culmination of a dramatic day in Israeli history, following Netanyahu’s firing of Defense Minister Yoav Galant after Galant urged a delay on the divisive judicial reform legislation, citing concerns about national security. The firing triggered an outpouring of public rage and ultimately led Netanyahu, for the first time since retaking office in December, to offer a compromise, promising to suspend legislation for several months and enter talks with opposition leaders.

The larger demonstrations were by critics of the government. But pro-reform organizers said more than 100,000 people attended demonstrations Monday across the country. In Jerusalem, more than a dozen cabinet ministers and Knesset members from coalition parties attended the rally, including Itamar Ben-Gvir, the head of the far-right Jewish Power party, and Bezalel Smotrich, leader of the Religious Zionism party. The men were reportedly among the last holdouts opposing the legislative pause, and each addressed the crowd.

The pro-government protests drew members of La Familia, a famously racist group of fans of the Beitar Jerusalem soccer club, alongside other right-wing activists. After the protest ended, several demonstrators made their way to Jerusalem’s Sacher Park where they clashed with police forces. In another incident in Jerusalem, protesters identifying as supporters of the judicial reform attacked an Arab taxi driver, injuring him and damaging his car.

A theme of the pro-government protest was that efforts to oppose the judicial reform legislation represent a form of election denial, a critique that government lawmakers had advanced, citing their majority after last November’s election. One man wore an Israeli flag as a cape and held up a sign that read, ”They are stealing the election.”

Yehiel Zadok, an 18-year-old from the Har Bracha settlement, who voted for Netanyahu’s Likud party, said, “The left lost the election and it’s time [for them] to admit it.” He argued that the battle over Supreme Court appointments is no more than an effort by the left to deny the right its ability to rule the country.

Zadok, who said he plans to study in a yeshiva before joining a military combat unit, offered a long list of grievances against the Supreme Court. “It harms settlement, ties the hands of the army and takes power that doesn’t belong to it.”

Israeli minister of national Security Itamar Ben-Gvir attends a rally of right-wing Israelis supporting the government’s planned judicial overhaul, in Jerusalem on March 27, 2023. (Erik Marmor/Flash90)

And while Zadok expressed support for Netanyahu’s decision to suspend the legislative drive and to enable dialogue, he warned that if the prime minister drops the plan altogether, he, for one, will abandon Likud in the next election and vote for Ben-Gvir’s Jewish Power party.

“Netanyahu needs to know that he is indebted to a huge number of people who voted for him and the reform,” said Zadok.

His friend, Yaakov Klein, who is also 18, said he was there not only to show support for the proposed judicial overhaul, but also for a greater cause.

“This is not just about the reform,” said Klein. “It is about control of the country, about whether the right can rule.” Like many other supporters of Netanyahu’s government, he feels sidelined in a society which, he claims, is dominated by the left.

“The left held on to centers of power like the army and the Histadrut,” he said, referring to Israel’s largest labor union, which joined a call for a general strike to protest the government on Monday. “Something has been exposed by the left’s protests: that when you take a little bit of cheese away from them, they burn down everything.

“The media,” Klein added, ”isn’t presenting the truth. It doesn’t show the other side.”


The post At unusual counterprotest, right-wing demonstrators air grievances against Israel’s courts appeared first on Jewish Telegraphic Agency.

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Could dementia be the key to saving endangered Jewish languages?

One day, when Sabrina Hakim was out for a walk with her father, he started speaking a language she could not understand.

Sabrina figured he must be speaking Judeo-Kashi, a variety of Judeo-Iranian. Her father spoke this language as a child in the Iranian city of Kashan before he moved to the capital, Tehran. Since Jewish people haven’t lived in Kashan in decades, at least not in large numbers, the language “faces possible extinction,” according to Rutgers University linguist Habib Borjian.

Sabrina felt that in order to best care for her father, she had to learn this language. “I would just ask him questions, like, how do you say ‘Are you hungry?’ How do you say ‘I’m tired?’” she told me. “I was asking questions about words or phrases that we could use in his care.”

A reader consults a Judeo-Kashani glossary. Photo by Lauren Hakimi

As time went by, her interest in Kashi evolved from purely practical to cultural. She started scrawling notes on the backs of receipts, and now, Sabrina says she has some 200 pages of notes from conversations with her dad, and she is helping to create a dictionary of the language.

Sabrina’s father, who died in February, is one example of someone whose dementia helped his descendants work with professional linguists to preserve a rare Jewish language. Since dementia affects shorter-term memory more than longer-term memory, it’s not unusual for multilingual people with dementia to begin speaking the language they learned first. As a 2009 study put it, “the language with the best recovery may be the earliest acquired language, the language of greater use, or the language spoken in the patient’s environment.”

Sarah Bunin Benor, a linguist and the director of the Jewish Language Project, said that, while she has long been aware of this phenomenon, she has noticed it most recently with speakers of Judeo-Iranian languages. Historically speaking, that makes sense: In the mid-20th century, when people who are now elderly were children or young adults, many Jews from small cities all across Iran moved to Tehran, oftentimes to avoid antisemitism or enhance economic opportunities.

In Tehran, these people might have spoken their hometown language with their families, but standard Farsi with pretty much everyone else. They had also studied Torah and knew some Hebrew. But even as their brains held room for three languages — and later, when they fled Iran altogether, for yet a fourth language in the country where they wound up — those hometown languages remained deeply rooted in their minds.

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Ashton, an 18-year-old from Great Neck, New York, had always been close with his grandmother, Mommy Po-Po, who began showing signs of dementia more than a year ago. (Ashton requested to be identified only by his first name so as to keep the details of his grandmother’s condition private)

Mommy Po-Po was born around 1939 in the small Iranian city of Tuyserkan in Hamadan province. Though she later moved to Tehran, she continued speaking Judeo-Tuyserkani, a language Borjian told me is at even greater risk of extinction than Judeo-Kashi.

Ashton’s aunt and Mommy Po-Po’s youngest child, Dina, told me that her mother usually speaks Judeo-Tuyserkani when she’s confused. In the last few months, Dina said, “whenever she talks to me, she feels that we live still in Tuyserkan, and I’m one of her sisters.”

Dina thinks memories of Tuyserkan comfort her mother. “I think she likes to go back there, when everything is OK, when my father was alive, when her father was alive, when she had her mother next to her,” she said. “I think she feels warmer when she thinks about back then.”

Around the same time that his grandmother’s illness was worsening, Ashton got in touch with Borjian, who was studying Judeo-Tuyserkani but didn’t know anyone who actually spoke it. “He gave me a huge list of words, and he said please translate all these” into Tuyserkani, Ashton said. He worked with his great-aunts, who still live in Iran, to get the words translated.

Now, Ashton, like Sabrina, is creating a dictionary. He has also started recording interviews with Mommy Po-Po, which he hopes to use in a documentary. Ashton “speaks better than me in Farsi and Tuyserkani,” Dina said.

Sabrina has also gotten praise from her family about her new language skills.

At first, when she started speaking Kashi with him, he might respond in Farsi, “een chert-o-perta chiye?” What’s all this gibberish? “My accent was so bad,” Sabrina said. But as time went by, her Kashi became more and more comprehensible. “Maybe about a month before he passed, one time I was saying something, and he said, ‘where did you learn to speak Kashi? You’ve never been to Kashan.’”

Of course, he’s the one who taught it to her.

The post Could dementia be the key to saving endangered Jewish languages? appeared first on The Forward.

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I know exactly why leftists aren’t celebrating this ceasefire

“We can’t hear you, Zohran,” read one New York Post headline this week: “Pro-Hamas crowd goes quiet on Trump’s Gaza peace deal.”

“It seems awfully curious that the people who have made Gazans a central political cause do not seem at all relieved that there’s at least a temporary cessation of violence…Why aren’t there widespread celebrations across Western cities and college campuses today?” the article asked.

The Post wasn’t alone in voicing that question. A spokesperson for the Republican Jewish Coalition posted on X that “The silence from the ‘ceasefire now’ crowd is shameful and deafening.” Others went so far as to imply that the protesters had been lying and never actually wanted a ceasefire — because what they really wanted wasn’t freedom and security for Palestinians, but the ability to blame Israel. If pro-Palestinian voices had really wanted a ceasefire, the thinking went, they would be celebrating.

I read these various posts and articles and thought of Rania Abu Anza.

I have thought of her every day since I first read her story in early March 2024. Anza spent a decade trying to have a child through in vitro fertilization. When her twins, a boy and a girl, were five months old, an Israeli strike killed them. It also killed her husband and 11 other members of her family.

A year and a half later, a ceasefire cannot bring her children, her husband, or her 11 family members back. They were killed. They will stay dead. What is there to celebrate?

This does not mean that the ceasefire is not welcome, or that it is not a relief. On the contrary: It is both. Of course it’s a relief that the families of hostages don’t need to live one more day in torment and anguish. Of course it’s a relief that more bombs will not fall on Gaza.

But celebration implies, to me anyway, that this is a positive without caveats. And in this situation, there are so many caveats.

The families of the surviving hostages will still have spent years apart from their loved ones, in no small part because their own government did not treat the hostages’ return as the single highest priority. The families of those hostages who were killed in the war will never again sit down to dinner with their loved ones, who could have been saved. And it is difficult to fathom what’s been taken from the hostages themselves: time spent out exploring the world, or with family and friends, or at home doing nothing much at all but sitting safely in quiet contemplation.

And a ceasefire alone will not heal Israeli society, or return trust to the people in their government. It will not fix some of the deep societal problems this war uncovered. A Chatham House report this August found that, “Israeli television ignores the suffering of Palestinians in Gaza, while the rhetoric is often aggressive. Critical voices, from inside Israel or abroad, are attacked or silenced.” If the country is ever going to find its way back from Oct. 7 and this war, a ceasefire is a necessary precondition, but not a route in and of itself.

In Gaza, Palestinian health authorities have said that about 67,000 people — not distinguishing between combatants and civilians — have been killed by Israel’s campaign in response to Oct. 7. A full third of those killed were under the age of 18. The ceasefire cannot bring those children back to life.

It cannot turn back time and make it such that Israel admitted more than minimal aid to the embattled strip. It will not undo the damage that has been done to the people of Gaza who were denied enough to eat and drink and proper medical care. It will not give children back their parents, or parents back their children. It will not heal the disabled, or make it so that they were never wounded.

It will not change that all of this happened with the backing of the United States government. (This is to say nothing of the West Bank, which has seen a dramatic expansion of Israeli settlements and escalation of settler violence over the course of the war). And as American Jewish groups put out statements cheering the ceasefire, we should also remember that it does not reverse the reality that too many American Jews were cheerleaders for all this death.

Protesters calling for a ceasefire have regularly been denounced as hateful toward Jews or callous toward the plight of Israelis; American Jews who called for one were called somehow un-Jewish. (Yes, some pro-Palestinian protesters also shared hate toward Jews; the much greater majority did not.) The charge of antisemitism — toward those calling for a ceasefire, those calling for a free Palestine, and those who called attention to Israel’s abuses during this war — was used to silence criticism of Israel and of U.S. foreign policy. Some American Jews went so far as to call for the deportation of students protesting the war.

A ceasefire doesn’t change any of that. It can’t.

I have hopes for this ceasefire. At best, it will allow people — Israelis and Palestinians and, yes, diaspora Jews — to chart a new, better course going forward. But it almost certainly will not do that if we delude ourselves into thinking of this as a victory or a kind of tabula rasa, as though the lives lost and hate spewed are all behind us, forgotten, atoned for. The last two years will never not have happened. What happens next depends on all of us fully appreciating that.

The post I know exactly why leftists aren’t celebrating this ceasefire appeared first on The Forward.

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University of Sydney Suspends Staff Member After Viral Video Shows Verbal Assault on Jewish Students During Sukkot

University of Sydney staff member verbally assaulting Jewish students during a Sukkot celebration on campus. Photo: Screenshot

The University of Sydney has suspended a staff member after a viral video showed her verbally assaulting Jewish students and teachers during an on-campus holiday celebration, sparking public outrage over one of Australia’s latest antisemitic incidents.

In a video widely circulated on social media, a university staff member — reportedly of Palestinian Arab background — is seen approaching a group of Jewish students and teachers during a campus holiday celebration, shouting antisemitic insults at them.

The incident has sparked public condemnation and renewed calls for stronger action against rising antisemitism on college campuses, as the local Jewish community faces an increasingly hostile climate and a surge in targeted attacks across the country.

During a Sukkot celebration organized by the Australian Union of Jewish Students (AUJS) on campus, attendees — including students, teachers, and the university’s rabbi — were approached by a woman who asked them, “Are you Zionists?” while they gathered to participate in the annual Jewish festival.

“A Zionist is the lowest form of rubbish. Zionists are the most disgusting thing that has ever walked this earth,” the university staff member can be heard saying.

She then identifies as an “Indigenous Palestinian” and continues hurling antisemitic insults at the group, calling them “child killers.”

“You are a filthy Zionist,” she said. “You colonized us.”

University security personnel tried to intervene as the incident escalated, but the staff member refused to leave and continued filming the group.

The woman is then seen in the video pointing at the group and shouting to a security officer: “Look at this rubbish, look at these parasites.”

University of Sydney Vice-Chancellor Mark Scott announced that the staff member had been suspended pending further investigation and offered a personal apology to the affected Jewish students and staff.

“We’re disturbed and appalled by the vision that depicts verbal abuse and harassment on campus,” Scott said in a statement. “Such conduct is utterly unacceptable, and we are taking immediate action under our codes of conduct, including suspending a staff member involved pending further assessment.”

“Hate speech, antisemitism, and verbal harassment have no place on campus, online, or in our wider community,” he continued. “We deeply apologize to any staff, students, or visitors who are distressed or impacted by this incident in any way.”

University officials referred the incident to New South Wales Police, who have opened an investigation into the matter.

The Executive Council of Australian Jewry (ECAJ) strongly condemned the incident, calling for swift action and prompt intervention by the authorities.

“This is the real face of antisemitism in Australia today. It hides behind an anti-Zionist mask,” the statement read. “This woman aimed to intimidate, threaten, offend, and humiliate a group of Jewish students just because they were Jewish.”

Antisemitism spiked to record levels in Australia — especially in Sydney and Melbourne, which are home to some 85 percent of the country’s Jewish population — following the Hamas-led invasion of and massacre across southern Israel on Oct. 7, 2023.

According to a report from ECAJ, the country’s Jewish community experienced over 2,000 antisemitic incidents between October 2023 and September 2024, a significant increase from 495 in the prior 12 months.

The number of antisemitic physical assaults in Australia rose from 11 in 2023 to 65 in 2024. The level of antisemitism for the past year was six times the average of the preceding 10 years.

Since the Oct. 7 atrocities, the local Jewish community has faced a wave of targeted attacks, with several Jewish sites across Australia subjected to vandalism and even arson amid an increasingly hostile climate.

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