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Battle lines deepen in bruising fight for control of Germany’s liberal Jewish institutions
BERLIN (JTA) — The fight over control of Germany’s Reform rabbinical school has taken a new twist — one that appears poised to shatter longstanding institutions within liberal Judaism here, and reforge them into something new.
The Central Council of Jews in Germany announced Thursday that it is bringing in an outside expert to help redesign the country’s Reform and Conservative rabbinical schools, to end the influence of a controversial Reform rabbi who stepped aside as rector amid allegations against him this spring but who remains enmeshed in the schools’ operations.
Gerhard Robbers, a professor emeritus of law and religion at the University of Trier, will consult with students and staff as he drafts the proposal, according to the Central Council, an umbrella group for all organized Jewish communities in Germany.
Robbers’ appointment came as the Union of Progressive Jews in Germany this week announced its own interim director for Abraham Geiger College, in what appeared to be a last-ditch effort to preserve control by Rabbi Walter Homolka over the seminary he founded in 1999.
The Central Council announced it could no longer work with the UPJ after the group’s move to install the new interim director, a striking fracture in an alliance that Homolka himself had pressed to create two decades ago.
At the same time, the UPJ could now splinter, with those who are loyal to Homolka facing off against those who believe change is needed.
“Some member communities are now considering leaving the UPJ and reorganizing under the Central Council. We feel we are not represented any more by the UPJ,” Rebecca Seidler, head of the liberal Jewish communities of Hanover and chair of the State Association of the Jewish Communities of Lower Saxony, told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency.
Rebecca Seidler, chairwoman of the Liberal Jewish Community of Hanover, Germany, sits in the synagogue there, Sept. 8 2020. (Julian Stratenschulte/picture alliance via Getty Images)
In a sign of how deeply the tensions are cutting within Germany’s small community of liberal Jews, Seidler and her mother have wound up on opposing sides of the divide. Rebecca Seidler is the daughter of Katarina Seidler, the attorney whom the UPJ named this week as new interim director of the seminary. Rebecca Seidler described the differences within her family as “very difficult.”
Sources tell JTA that there is talk of a new alliance of liberal, egalitarian communities under the Central Council’s aegis. Josef Schuster, the council’s president, confirmed as much on Thursday, telling JTA that his group is in talks with representatives from communities across Germany.
“Those that wish to step out of the UPJ will be supported intensively, and also we will support them in creating a worthy representation of liberal/progressive Judaism in Germany,“ Schuster said.
The latest developments mark a dramatic new phase in a saga that has been unfolding since May, when allegations of sexual harassment against Homolka’s husband and a possible coverup at the seminary hit the news. Ensuing investigations by the University of Potsdam, under whose auspices the rabbinical schools are organized, and by a law firm commissioned by the Central Council looked into a growing array of accusations of abuse of power by Homolka.
Rabbi Walter Homolka, rector of the Abraham Geiger College, in the Liberal Jewish community’s synagogue in Hanover, Germany in December 2016. (Julian Stratenschulte/picture alliance via Getty Images)
Both investigations concluded that there was indeed abuse of power — a finding that Homolka has vigorously denied, and that the UPJ has contested.
In a post on its website, the UPJ had officially announced that an investigation it had commissioned had concluded that there was no proof of abuse of power.
Schuster of the Central Council — which represents some 100,000 Jews in Germany, of which the UPJ says 5,000 are members of its congregations, and is responsible for distributing government subsidies and so-called “religion tax” monies to local Jewish communities — told JTA that the post had convinced him that the “the UPJ is not to be taken seriously.”
“There are two studies that actually show abuse of power, but this is an organization that continues to cover up,” he said. The post was removed Thursday.
Schuster’s frustration deepened on Tuesday, when the UPJ and seminary installed Katarina Seidler as the interim director of Geiger College, two days after an election in which allies of Homolka assumed leadership of the organization. (Homolka had announced only that day that he would not run.) Just that morning, the Central Council had been speaking with Gabriele Thöne, still Geiger College’s interim director, about a “face-saving solution” that would involve her resignation and replacement by someone without ties to Homolka.
Katarina Seidler, then chair of the State Association of Jewish Communities in Lower Saxony, joined a session of the state parliament focused on antisemitism, Hanover, Germany, Oct. 23, 2019. (Sina Schuldt/picture alliance via Getty Images)
“Anyone who thinks they can just carry on providing a rabbinical education with the old followers of Homolka, with him continuing in the background of the entity that he — and not the UPJ — founded, with all its entanglements and dependencies, has not taken seriously in any way the results of the independent investigations of the University of Potsdam and the law firm Gercke Wollschläger,” Schuster said in a statement Wednesday.
Schuster told JTA that Geiger College is set up in such a way that Homolka has retained authority despite saying that he had stepped aside.
“It is not just a feeling that he is in control,” Schuster said. “It is the case on a purely legal basis.“
As yet, there has been no formal response from Abraham Geiger College to the Central Council’s withering condemnation. But Irith Michelsohn, the UPJ’s newly elected chair, told JTA in an email Thursday that her group would “definitely try to find a basis for discussion” with the Central Council.
“Perhaps this is difficult at the moment, but we will see what the new secular year will bring,” she said.
The UPJ move apparently also caught the World Union of Progressive Judaism unawares. The same day, the group had expressed support for Thöne along with “deep sadness and sorrow” following “the recent reports about the misconduct, and the hurt to individuals and their communities.”
In an open letter, WUPJ Chair Carole Sterling and President Rabbi Sergio Bergman set out a list of priorities and said they appreciated the ongoing commitment of federal and regional German ministries and the Central Council “to continue to fund Geiger College while new structures and leadership are put in place.” They also pledged their own assistance.
Support from the Central Council for Geiger College is likely to continue, sources say.
Gabriella Thone, interim director of Abraham Geiger College, in Berlin’s Rykestrasse Synagogue on the occasion of an ordination ceremony, Dec. 1, 2022. (Toby Axelrod)
All of the latest turmoil takes place days after the ordinations of four new rabbis and two cantors who studied at the Geiger College, which has become a symbol of the rebirth of Reform Judaism in the country of its founding. Held at the Rykestrasse Synagogue in former East Berlin, complete with organ music and a processional, the ceremony — which observers described as joyous — was likely the last before major changes to how the seminary operates.
Schuster said a new plan — with input from students, educators and rabbis, and in coordination with other major funders and the University of Potsdam — could be presented in the first quarter of 2023.
“Rabbinical training as a private business can no longer be an alternative in the future,” the statement concluded.
The announcement was welcomed by the International Masorti Movement, a partner and supporter of Zacharias Frankel College, the Conservative movement’s seminary, which like Geiger College is situated at the University of Potsdam. In a statement on Thursday, it called on all stakeholders “to listen to the voices of those who suffered from misconduct and to take the investigations of the University and of the law firm Gercke Wollschläger seriously, and work together for a new beginning, both regarding persons as well as structures.”
It is virtually assured that yet more slings and arrows will fly before all is said and done — and that Homolka continues to loom large in the organizations he built.
At the recent UPJ meeting where Homolka allies won election, “it became clear that there are two fronts in the UPJ,” Rebecca Seidler told JTA: “Those who support Homolka and want to separate from the Central Council, and those who are in favor of taking apart the existing structures, and who stand on the side of those affected.”
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The post Battle lines deepen in bruising fight for control of Germany’s liberal Jewish institutions appeared first on Jewish Telegraphic Agency.
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Why Trump’s new ‘Red Scare’ tactics could spell trouble for Jews
If a time traveler from late Weimar Germany materialized in America today, they would instantly recognize the spiteful rhetoric pouring from Donald Trump and his lieutenants — language that echoes what Adolf Hitler and the Nazis deployed a century ago.
“The radical left is actively trying to destroy our children’s future with the disaster known as (dramatic pause) communism,” according to Trump. “This isn’t a social democrat. These are communists by another name.”
Facing a possible fiasco in the November midterms, Trump and his allies have reached for one of the oldest scare tactics in the book: trying to persuade Americans that communists — perfidiously disguised as progressive Democrats — are plotting to destroy the country.
“This new fixation on the word communist is an effort to save himself in the mid-terms by creating an emergency. Basically he’s trying to revive the old red scare tactics of the 1950s,” author Gil Duran said on a recent episode of NPR’s On The Media titled “The Red Scare, but Dumber.”
“It’s not clear that it’ll work. But they’re certainly trying,” said Duran, founder of the newsletter The Nerd Reich.
It is a dangerous strategy — one that figuratively paints targets on the backs of Democrats, especially those belonging to the Democratic Socialists of America. It also has the potential to imperil Jews by rebooting what historian Paul Hanebrink calls the Judeo-Bolshevism myth.
“Nationalist extremists and far-right movements on both sides of the Atlantic have made the idea of Judeo-Bolshevism — the belief that Communism was a Jewish plot — a prominent element in their worldview,” Hanebrink wrote in his 2018 book A Specter Haunting Europe: The Myth of Judeo-Bolshevism.
The seeds of this are visible in Trump’s America — in the alarming rise of antisemitism, in attacks on synagogues and individuals, in killings, and in fascist manifestos like Unhumans: The Secret History of Communist Revolutions (and How to Crush Them).
Hanebrink’s book chillingly documents how the Judeo-Bolshevism myth fueled mass deportations, pogroms, and massacres from World War I through the interwar period — from Tsarist Russia’s expulsions to the White Army’s slaughter of Ukrainian Jews.
Rhetoric and propaganda from those times can sound remarkably like slogans in use by today’s extremists, including in the U.S.
“Bolshevism is striding toward conquest of the world. Bolshevism is truly the living embodiment and manifestation of the Antichrist on earth,” Poland’s Catholic bishops wrote in a globally distributed letter in 1920.
Hanebrink tells of the Judeo-Bolshevism myth being carried west by White Army soldiers fleeing the Red Army, and its influence on Adolf Hitler. “Judeo-Bolshevism made Adolf Hitler,” Hanebrink writes. “Hitler believed it was the German people’s historic calling to protect the world from Judeo-Bolshevik evil.”
Another historian, Omar Bartov, has pointed out the pivotal role of Hitler’s genocidal hatred of Jews in the Nazi leader’s decision to invade the Soviet Union in 1941.
“Popular memory tends to separate the Holocaust and the German war against the Soviet Union, but for the Nazi regime they were two faces of the same undertaking,” Bartov writes in the latest issue of The New York Review of Books. “It was a few weeks after the invasion of the USSR in late June that the mass murder of Jews began” with Einsatzgruppen “murdering entire communities from the Baltic states to Ukraine,” according to Bartov.
The myth didn’t die with the Nazis. It resurfaced in postwar America during the Red Scare, when Sen. Joe McCarthy and the House Un-American Activities Committee pursued communists — and, not incidentally, Jews. Of the 10 Hollywood screenwriters and directors who were jailed after refusing to answer questioning before HUAC, six were Jews.
“The hearings that took place in Los Angeles and in Washington between 1947 and the mid-’50s were as much (some would say more) antisemitic as anti-Communist,” Michael Freedland wrote for The Jewish Chronicle in 2009.
“Hollywood was chosen for the attack because of the great publicity value the movie capital offered. It was also a great opportunity to get at the Jews of Hollywood,” wrote Freedland, author of Witch Hunt in Hollywood.
So where does Donald Trump’s efforts to foment a new red scare in America fit into this long and heinous tradition?
Trump insists he is not antisemitic — and points to his Jewish family members — yet he has repeatedly shown little willingness to confront the frightening rise in antisemitic violence. He has pardoned Jan. 6 rioters, including known white supremacists. He dined with Hitler admirer Nick Fuentes at Mar-a-Lago in 2022, later claiming he didn’t know who Fuentes was. In 2017, after the violence in Charlottesville, Va., he declined to condemn the white supremacists responsible and instead spoke of violence “on many sides.” He has tolerated officials accused of antisemitism, and he has used antisemitic terminology, including invoking the centuries-old trope of Jews as greedy moneylenders.
The greater danger to American Jews likely comes not from Trump, but from the vast, fetid cesspool of extremists whose growing influence imperils Jews not just in the United States but around the globe.
An example of this is the aforementioned book Unhumans, in which the authors, Jack Posobiec and Joshua Lisec, essentially argue that leftists are plotting a communist takeover and do not deserve to be treated like human beings.
It should be noted that the word “unhuman” is close to the word “subhuman,” a Nazi epithet for Jews and Slavs.
“The unhumans want you dead,” Posobiec told his far-right fans on Real America’s Voice two years ago. “They want your way of life dead. They want to see your children lobotomized and converted to their mindless, lawless and godless ways. “
The words could have come from another century, another continent — and they are just as dangerous now as they were then.
The post Why Trump’s new ‘Red Scare’ tactics could spell trouble for Jews appeared first on The Forward.
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Here I’m the boss
צווישן די סיבות פֿאַר וואָס אַ מענטש פֿילט אַנגסט און דעפּרעסיע זענען אָפֿט מאָל אָבסעסיווע מחשבֿות. ווער עס לײַדט דערפֿון, אָדער קען עמעצן וואָס לײַדט דערפֿון, דאַרף נישט קיין סך דערקלערונגען כּדי צו פֿאַרשטיין וויפֿל דאָס קען פֿאַרקריפּלען אַ מענטשן. ווי אַזוי קען מען זיך באַפֿרײַען פֿון אָבסעסיווע מחשבֿות וואָס פּאַראַליזירן דעם מענטש?
פֿאַרשטייט זיך, אויב עס האַנדלט זיך וועגן ערנסטע פּראָבלעמען אינעם לעבן דאַרף מען זיי נישט איגנאָרירן; מע דאַרף זיך טאַקע אָפּגעבן מיט זיי. דאָ רעדן מיר וועגן אַזעלכע מחשבֿות וואָס פֿירן נישט צו קיין שום לייזונג, וואָס פֿארדרייען דעם קאָפּ און לאָזן נישט לעבן.
מען דערציילט וועגן אַ געוויסן חסיד וואָס האָט זיך געמוטשעט מיט אַזוינע אײַנדרינגלעכע נעגאַטיווע מחשבֿות. ער איז געגאַנגען זיך באַראַטן מיטן אַלטן רבי׳ן, דעם גרינדער פֿון חב״ד. דער רבי האָט אים געשיקט זיך באַראַטן מיט אַן עלטערן, דערפֿאַרענעם האָלצהעקער וואָס האָט געוווינט אין אַ נאָענטן וואַלד.
„ער וועט דיר קענען העלפֿן פֿאַרשטיין ווי אַזוי מען קען קאָנטראָלירן אומגעוווּנטשענע מחשבֿות,“ האָט דער רבי געזאָגט.
דער חסיד, אָנגעפֿילט מיט האָפֿענונג, איז גלײַך אַרויסגעגאַנגען צום הויז פֿון דעם אַלטן האָלצהעקער. ווען ער איז אָנגעקומען, איז די טיר געווען פֿאַרשלאָסן, כאָטש ער האָט געזען אַז אינעווייניק ברענט אַ ליכט.
האָט ער אָנגעהויבן קלאַפּן אין דער טיר, אָבער קיינער האָט נישט געעפֿנט. האָט ער געקלאַפּט נאָך שטאַרקער. גאָרנישט. האָט ער גענומען שרײַען: „עפֿנט מיר די טיר! איך פֿאַרפֿריר דאָ!“
גאָרנישט.
נישט האָבנדיק קיין אַנדער ברירה, האָט ער זיך אַוועקגעלייגט אין אַ ווינקל צו שלאָפֿן.
אין דער פֿרי האָט דער בעל־הבית געעפֿנט די טיר און באַגריסט דעם חסיד.
„וואָס ברענגט אײַך צו מײַן הויז?“ האָט ער געפֿרעגט.
„איך בין געקומען אײַך עפּעס פֿרעגן,“ האָט דער חסיד געענטפֿערט. „אָבער איידער איך שטעל מײַן שאלה, וויל איך וויסן פֿאַרוואָס איר האָט מיר נעכטן בײַ נאַכט נישט געעפֿנט די טיר. איך האָב לאַנג געקלאַפּט און געשריגן. וווּ איז אײַער מיטגעפֿיל און הכנסת־אורחים?“
„זעט,“ האָט דער האָלצהעקער געענטפֿערט, „דאָס איז מײַן הויז, און אין מײַן הויז בין איך דער בעל־הבית. איך באַשליס וועמען אַרײַנצולאָזן און ווען. עס אינטערעסירט מיר נישט וויפֿל מען שרײַט, קלאַפּט אָדער מאַכט אַ גאַנצן טומל. אין מײַן הויז באַפֿעל איך. נו, וואָס איז אײַער שאלה?“
„אַ דאַנק. איר האָט מיר שוין געגעבן דעם ענטפֿער וואָס איך האָב געזוכט,“ האָט דער חסיד געזאָגט, בשעת דער האָלצהעקער האָט אים אָנגעקוקט מיט פֿאַרוווּנדערונג.
די סדרה פֿון דער וואָך, שופטים, הייבט זיך אָן מיטן ג־טלעכן באַפֿעל:
„שופטים ושוטרים תתן לך בכל שעריך“ — „ריכטער און פּאָליציאַנטן זאָלסטו שטעלן אין אַלע דײַנע טויערן.“
לויטן פּשוטן באַדײַט רעדט זיך וועגן דעם אַחריות פֿון דער קהילה צו שטעלן ריכטער בײַ די טויערן פֿון די שטעט, כּדי צו באַשטימען וואָס איז דער ריכטיקער אויפֿפֿירונגס־וועג, און פּאָליציאַנטן, וועמענס אויפֿגאַבע איז צו פֿאַרזיכערן אַז מע פֿאָלגט די פּסקים פֿונעם בית־דין.
אונדזערע חכמים דערקלערן אַז דער באַפֿעל האָט אויך אַ פּערזענלעכן באַדײַט און אַן אָנווענדונג אין יעדנס לעבן. דער מענטש איז ווי אַ קליינע שטאָט. די זיבן „טויערן“, דורך וועלכע זאַכן קומען אַרײַן אין דער פּערזענלעכער „שטאָט“ און גייען אַרויס פֿון איר, זענען די צוויי אויגן, צוויי אויערן, צוויי נאָזלעכער און דאָס מויל.
עס איז אונדזער אַחריות צו שטעלן „ריכטער און פּאָליציאַנטן“ בײַ די דאָזיקע טויערן. מיר דאַרפֿן באַשטימען וואָס מיר וועלן דערלויבן אַרײַנצוקומען אין אונדזער „שטאָט“ און וואָס מיר וועלן דערלויבן אַרויסצוגיין פֿון איר.
דערפֿאַר דאַרף מען צוויי זאַכן: „ריכטער“, כּדי צו באַשטימען וואָס מען טאָר און וואָס מען טאָר נישט זען, הערן און עסן, און וואָס מען זאָל אָדער זאָל נישט אַרויסלאָזן פֿונעם מויל; און „פּאָליציאַנטן“, כּדי צו פֿאַרזיכערן אַז די באַשלוסן פֿון די ריכטער ווערן טאַקע דורכגעפֿירט.
עס איז נישט אַזוי שווער צו באַשטימען וואָס איז ריכטיק אין יעדער סיטואַציע. דערפֿאַר דאַרף מען פּשוט אַרײַנקוקן אין שולחן־ערוך אָדער זיך באַראַטן מיט אַ קאָמפּעטענטן רב. די שוועריקייט איז דורכצופֿירן דאָס וואָס מיר ווייסן אַז מיר דאַרפֿן טאָן. יעדער איינער וואָס האָט אַמאָל אָנגעהויבן אַ נײַע דיעטע ווייסט גוט דעם מרחק צווישן וויסן און טאָן.
ווי אַזוי ברענגען מיר אין דער פּראַקטיק די מסקנות פֿון אונדזערע „ריכטער“?
מיר דאַרפֿן פּאָליציי.
בשעת אַ „ריכטער“ שטעלט פֿאָר שׂכל, טענות און לאָגיק, שטעלט דער „פּאָליציאַנט“ פֿאָר פּונקט דאָס פאַרקערטע: אַ צווינגענדיקע דורכפֿירונג, אָן טענות. אין דעם פּערזענלעכן לעבן מיינט דאָס דיסציפּלין: זיך מחייבֿ צו זײַן זיך אויפֿצופֿירן לויט דעם וועג וואָס מען פֿאַרשטייט ווי ריכטיק — לויט דער אָביעקטיווקייט פֿון דער הלכה — אַפֿילו ווען די אינסטינקטן און געפֿילן, די אייגענע סוביעקטיוויטעט, שטעלן זיך אַנטקעגן.
„איך בין דער בעל־הבית פֿון מײַן הויז, און איך באַשליס ווער און וואָס מעג אַרײַנקומען.“
עס בלײַבט נאָך צו דערקלערן ווי אַזוי מיר אידענטיפֿיצירן דעם „איך“, דעם בעל־הבית, און זײַן אמתן ווילן. אָבער דאָס איז שוין אַן אַנדער טעמע…
צום סוף וויל איך מיטטיילן דעם בליק פֿונעם ליובאַוויטשער רבי׳ן — זכותו יגן עלינו — וועגן נעגאַטיווע מחשבֿות.
אין אַ סך פֿאַלן, ווען מענטשן האָבן זיך געווענדט צום רבי׳ן וועגן דעם ענין, האָט דער רבי געראָטן אַז דער בעסטער אופֿן זיך אַן עצה צו געבן מיט די מחשבֿות איז דורך אַריבערפֿירן דעם געדאַנק צו אַן אַנדער זאַך און זיי נישט אַרײַנלאָזן. דער אופֿן הייסט „היסח הדעת“, דאָס הייסט אָפּצולענקען דעם באַוווּסטזײַן אין אַן אַנדער ריכטונג.
דאָס איז אַ גאָר אַנדער צוגאַנג ווי אַרײַנצוקריכן אָן אַ סוף אין די נעגאַטיווע געדאַנקען און אין זייערע מעגלעכע סיבות — אַ זאַך וואָס זייער אָפֿט פֿאַרשטאַרקט זיי נאָר און גיט זיי נאָך מער שעדלעכע באַטײַטונג אין אונדזער לעבן.
תכלית גערעדט:
ווען אָבסעסיווע מחשבֿות קלאַפּן אין דער טיר, דאַרף מען געדענקען אַז דער מענטש איז דער בעל־הבית און קען „אַרײַנלאָזן“ וועמען ער וויל. ווען מע קלײַבט אויס אָנצופֿילן דעם קאָפּ מיט אַ פּאָזיטיוון געדאַנק, בלײַבט במילא נישט קיין אָרט פֿאַרן נעגאַטיוון.
The post Here I’m the boss appeared first on The Forward.
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Netanyahu should have said yes to Trump’s Gaza exit plan
Israel has every reason to distrust Hamas. The massacre of October 7, 2023, settled any lingering question about the organization’s intentions, and the possibility that Hamas might exploit a ceasefire, conceal weapons or rebuild its military capacity belongs at the center of Israeli security planning.
That is an argument for vigilance, for verification, for demanding that Hamas actually disarm rather than merely announce that it is willing to do so. It is a very poor argument for Netanyahu’s categorical rejection, over the weekend, of the new 15-point Gaza plan from President Donald Trump’s Board of Peace.
Netanyahu likes to speak directly to his voters, sidestepping any journalists who might possess critical thinking, and anyone listening to him might imagine that Trump is asking Israel to withdraw from Gaza and trust Hamas to disarm afterward. But the plan says something quite different.
Under Trump’s proposal, Hamas’s heavy weapons, weapons factories, depots and tunnels are to be decommissioned through a “gradual, sequential and time-bound” process, monitored by an International Verification Committee and supported by an international stabilization force. Each phase depends upon verified completion of the previous phase. Israeli withdrawal is linked to that process and proceeds in stages alongside it — and essentially the details remain to be set.
In other words, Israel is being asked to trade verified steps toward Hamas’s disarmament for phased withdrawals. Netanyahu wants Hamas completely disarmed before Israel relinquishes any further territory. His position offers a certain intuitive appeal after Oct. 7. It also risks making a workable agreement impossible by demanding the final result before the reciprocal process designed to produce that result can begin. There is nothing sacrosanct or critical for security in the exact positions held by the IDF, which currently controls over 60% of Gaza, an area that has mostly been depopulated.
Israel should have said yes — coupled with an insistence on rigorous verification, clearly defined benchmarks and an immediate response to violations. That would protect Israeli security while beginning the desperately needed transition from war to something resembling a future.
There is a moral imperative here that Israel should embrace rather than evade. Gaza has been devastated. Its people need homes, hospitals, schools, electricity, water and an economy. Reconstruction should begin as quickly as security permits. The plan provides for that, under a new technocratic Palestinian administration rather than Hamas, with the Board of Peace supervising reconstruction and international financing.
There is also an Israeli interest in reconstruction. Israel cannot benefit from having two million people on its border living indefinitely amid ruins, poverty, rage and hopelessness. Every apartment rebuilt, every functioning business and every family with something tangible to lose creates at least the possibility of diminishing the reservoir of hatred from which Hamas and its successors recruit. Palestinians need a stake in what comes next. Israelis should want them to have one.
Israel also needs to reckon with the catastrophic deterioration of its international standing. Some of the condemnation has been grotesquely one-sided, and some of it stems from outright hostility toward Israel itself — even, in my view, classic antisemitism. That makes the underlying strategic problem no less real: Israel has spent enormous diplomatic capital during this war, and accepting an American plan that removes Hamas from power, disarms its militias, introduces international security guarantees and begins reconstruction would allow Israel to demonstrate that its objective is security rather than permanent occupation or endless conflict.
Netanyahu instead compounded the damage by coupling his rejection of the plan with another declaration: “As long as I am prime minister, no Palestinian state will be established — not in Gaza and not in the West Bank.”
This is especially cynical because the original 20-point Trump plan, unveiled in September 2025, explicitly envisioned the possibility of Palestinian statehood. Israel accepted that plan, because Trump proved more powerful than Netanyahu’s far-right coalition allies, who preferred continuing the war, sacrificing hostages and resettling Gaza with Jews.
That plan, indeed, said that as Gaza was redeveloped and the Palestinian Authority reformed, conditions could emerge for “a credible pathway to Palestinian self-determination and statehood.” Netanyahu accepted Trump’s plan at the time. The new 15-point roadmap carries the same concept forward, adding nothing.
This requires some honesty. Israel controls millions of Palestinians in the West Bank and cannot indefinitely combine permanent control of the territory with both democracy and a Jewish majority. Eventually, the choices converge on partition or some form of binational reality. The details of partition can be negotiated, conditioned and secured. The Palestinian leadership can be required to reform. Palestine, under any borders, should be demilitarized. Israel can demand extraordinary security arrangements after Oct. 7. But pretending the underlying demographic and political equation has disappeared is denial as strategy.
Netanyahu understands the politics perfectly well. Israelis understandably fear that a Palestinian state in the West Bank could become another platform for an Oct. 7-style attack, this time overlooking Israel’s population centers. By declaring Palestinian statehood permanently impossible, Netanyahu can try to force his domestic opponents into the politically poisonous position of appearing to champion it during an election campaign. They will presumably be too smart to accept the bait.
That is precisely the problem. A decision of enormous strategic consequence is being folded into Netanyahu’s electoral survival.
Israel needs a government capable of distinguishing between legitimate security fears and the political exploitation of those fears. It needs leaders capable of recognizing an imperfect opportunity and improving it rather than destroying it.
Netanyahu has instead reached instinctively for the categorical no.
If current political trends hold, Israeli voters will turn him out when they vote on Oct. 27. He appears determined to leave office much as he has governed in recent years: recklessly, irresponsibly and without a coherent strategy for Israel’s future. Trump should stop indulging him and lay down the law: negotiate the safeguards, enforce every provision, hold Hamas ruthlessly to its commitments — and get on with the deal.
The post Netanyahu should have said yes to Trump’s Gaza exit plan appeared first on The Forward.
