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Blinken: US will judge Israeli government on its policies, not its politicians
WASHINGTON (JTA) — The Biden administration will base its relationship to Israel’s incoming government on the actions it takes, not the people installed in positions of power, U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken said during a speech Sunday.
Blinken’s speech, to the conference of the liberal Jewish Middle East policy group J Street, was notable because it offered the first official response to deepening questions about how the White House would work with a Israeli government that includes far-right parties. Until now, sources close to the administration had suggested that the White House could decline to meet with those parties’ leaders.
Blinken said the Biden administration would “continue to unequivocally oppose any acts that undermine the prospects of a two-state solution, including, but not limited to, settlement expansion; moves toward annexation of the West Bank; disruption to the historic status quo at holy sites; demolitions and evictions; and incitement to violence.”
The speech drew criticism from some J Street followers for stopping short of dealing firmly with an incoming Israeli government that they feel is taking aim at some of Israel’s core democratic principles.
“I had zero expectations for Blinken’s speech. And he couldn’t even meet those,” said Richard Goldwasser, a former J Street board member from Chicago, on Twitter. “Pablum on Xanax.”
The theme of J Street’s conference this year was battling anti-democratic forces in Israel and in the United States. Jeremy Ben-Ami, in his opening speech Saturday night, unveiled the group’s new motto, “Pro Israel, pro-peace, pro democracy”; the “pro-democracy” element was new. Ben-Ami drew a contrast with J Street’s main rival, the American Israel Public Affairs Committee.
AIPAC drew liberal Jewish criticism after its launch last year of political action committees that back an array of candidates, ranging from progressive to far right. It has also declined to comment on the likely inclusion in Netanyahu’s government of far right extremists, including Itamar Ben-Gvir, a disciple of the late racist rabbi Meir Kahane.
“So rather than focusing on defeating the white nationalists and the election deniers, with whom most of Jewish America has nothing in common, they instead are spending tens of millions of dollars to defeat liberal and progressive candidates who may or may not have once in their lives uttered a critical word about Israeli policy,” Ben-Ami said. “Organizations that failed to call out the Ben-Gvirs and the [Bezalel] Smotriches of Israel while endorsing the Jim Jordans, the Andy Biggs, the Scott Perrys here in the U.S. do not speak for us.”
Perry of Pennsylvania, Biggs of Arizona and Jordan of Ohio have all to varying degrees endorsed the election lies by President Donald Trump that spurred the deadly Jan. 6, 2021, insurrection at the U.S. Capitol.
J Street’s conference was focused on democracy in the United States at times to the exclusion of the issue that founded the organization in 2008, Israeli-Palestinian peace. In a 30-minute keynote speech Saturday night, Rep. Jamie Raskin, a Jewish Democratic congressman from Maryland known for his constitutional expertise, barely mentioned Israel.
“I know that you know what it means to be pro-Israel and pro-peace,” Raskin said. “And I want to just discuss for my time with you tonight what it means to be a pro-democracy American in 2022 in a rather frightful world where so many people have turned to propaganda and conspiracy theory and disinformation and fanaticism and authoritarianism.” He was interrupted multiple times by applause.
AIPAC mocked J Street for its absence of conventional pro-Israel content. “Not a word of praise for Israel,” the organization said in a tweet attached to a photo of Ben-Ami speaking at the conference. “Not a single recognition of Israel’s achievements or value. Not a single embrace of the Israeli people.”
Noa, the Israeli singer-songwriter, also appeared on Saturday night, singing songs that had been penned by Palestinian-Israelis. She likened the relationship of the Jewish Diaspora to Israel to that of a mother to a daughter, saying that mothers need to look out for the children, whatever tensions may arise.
“The Jewish people needs to help the maturing child,” she said, reflecting a theme that it repeated itself throughout the conference: that a voice like J Street was especially needed at a time of crisis in its democracy. “The worst thing we could do is walk away,” said Rabbi Jill Jacobs, the director of T’ruah, a rabbinic human rights group.
Blinken did speak about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, reflecting the pessimistic mood in the room but saying that he believed progress could still be achieved.
“I know that many people are disillusioned,” he said. “Many people are frustrated. We’ve been trying to get to a two-state solution for decades, and yet it seems that we’ve only gotten further away from that goal. But we cannot afford to give up hope. We cannot succumb to cynicism. We cannot give in to apathy. It’s precisely when times are difficult — when peace seems even further from reach — that we’ve simply got to work harder, that we must continue to pursue whatever openings we can to show that progress is still possible.”
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The post Blinken: US will judge Israeli government on its policies, not its politicians appeared first on Jewish Telegraphic Agency.
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A Historic Moment, and the Covenant Ahead
A general view shows the plenum at the Knesset, Israel’s parliament, in Jerusalem. Photo: REUTERS/Ronen Zvulun
Over the last few weeks, something truly historic happened in Israel, and many may have missed it.
It had nothing to do with Iran or coalition politics. Instead, it touched the heart of the most sacred contract the Jewish state makes with its citizens: how it treats the families of those who gave their lives for its existence.
The Knesset has passed a series of long overdue legislative amendments that together mark the most significant expansion of support for bereaved IDF families in decades.
One of these reforms ends a painful injustice toward IDF widows and widowers. Survivor pensions will no longer be revoked upon remarriage or reduced through arbitrary caps and exclusions that punished bereaved spouses for trying to rebuild their lives.
The financial impact will be significant, and for many families, life changing. But the moral statement is even greater. Israel has affirmed that love, partnership, and hope should never come at the cost of security for those left behind.
To grasp the weight of this moment, we must look back more than fifty years, to the aftermath of the Yom Kippur War. Thousands of young widows navigated loss in a traumatized nation.
The widow of a fallen soldier was treated with reverence. The actual widow was not.
Many were discouraged, implicitly and explicitly, from remarrying or moving forward. Too often, widows were forced to choose between emotional healing and economic survival.
That injustice helped give rise to the IDF Widows and Orphans Organization, created to ensure that bereaved families would not be forgotten once war faded from public view.
Today, Israel faces such a moment again. Since October 7, more than 900 service members have been killed, leaving over 350 new widows and nearly 900 children, 250 of them under the age of five.
This new legislative package represents a break from the past. It signals that Israel will not ask this generation to carry grief quietly, or to sacrifice a second time in order to survive.
As if this were not historic enough, a second legislative reform passed alongside it is even more financially significant than the remarriage provision alone. This legislation expands not only moral recognition, but the actual material support that bereaved families will receive for decades. Adult orphans are formally recognized for the first time well into adulthood, unlocking monthly payments across age brackets that were previously invisible in law. Widows receive compensation reflecting real loss of earning capacity rather than symbolic recognition. Housing grants are expanded and decoupled from outdated marital conditions. Education, rehabilitation, fertility treatment, childcare, and emotional support are addressed as integrated needs rather than fragmented entitlements.
This is not incremental policy tinkering. It is a billion-shekel commitment that will translate into far more direct aid, far more stability, and far more dignity for thousands of families whose lives were irreversibly altered in service of the country. It corrects injustices that accumulated quietly over generations, often borne by adult orphans who were expected to stand on their own simply because time had passed.
And yet, even as we recognize the significance of this moment, we must acknowledge what remains unfinished. Significant groups, including adult orphans from earlier wars, still stand outside formal frameworks of support. Their loss did not change. Only the calendar did.
History is not only made on battlefields or in war rooms. Sometimes it is made quietly, in committee hearings and plenary votes, when a nation decides what it owes to those who paid the highest price.
Last week, Israel made history, not only by passing laws, but by reaffirming its covenant with the families of the fallen. Now it must complete that covenant, until no widow, no widower, and no orphan is ever left behind.
The author is the Executive Director of IDF Widows and Orphans USA.
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UpScrolled: The New Social Media App for Haters and Antisemites
Henri Philipe Pétain meeting Nazi Germany Chancellor in Montoire, just months after signing an armistice agreement that surrendered more than half of France’s territory to the Nazis. Photo: Wikimedia Commons.
There’s a new app on the market that’s promising users a social media experience like none other: a user experience that doesn’t include shadow bans, censorship, or deceptive algorithms. A social media app where you can feel free to say what you want without fear on a litany of topics.
So, naturally, it has become a cesspool of antisemitism, anti-Zionism, racism, and conspiracy theories.
This new app is called “UpScrolled” and became one of the top downloaded apps in the United States, the United Kingdom, and Australia in the last week of January 2026.
Let’s take an in-depth look at the origins of UpScrolled, what it claims to do, and its development since becoming one of the fastest-growing social media platforms of 2026.
What is UpScrolled?
UpScrolled is the brainchild of Palestinian-Jordanian-Australian developer Issam Hijazi, who has a background in working for top tech companies.
According to Hijazi, he had the idea to develop a new social media app after allegedly noticing that certain pro-Palestinian posts were being shadow-banned and censored on social media.
Two of UpScrolled’s key partners are Tech For Palestine and Watermelon Pictures, organizations that are at the forefront of crafting the pro-Palestinian/anti-Israel narrative online.
Tech For Palestine was one of the groups associated with the mass editing of Israel-related entries on Wikipedia, spreading misinformation and passing it off as established fact. Watermelon Pictures is a film production and distribution company that focuses on spreading Palestinian-related content online and in theaters. It has been involved in such films as The Voice of Hind Rajab, All That’s Left of You, and Palestine 36.
Oscar-nominated The Voice of Hind Rajab uses real audio from a child’s final pleas — raw, devastating truth.
But it dramatizes the rest, blurring fact and fiction, and leaving out context. Viewers stop watching a story, and believe they’re seeing the truth. Moral judgments are… pic.twitter.com/udzCbxy6vA
— HonestReporting (@HonestReporting) January 25, 2026
UpScrolled was launched in June 2025 but only really took off in January 2026, largely thanks to the acquisition of a majority stake in the TikTok video app by an American venture.
Some users became annoyed with TikTok due to lags and other issues that developed soon after the ownership change, while others alleged that the word “Epstein” was being erased from direct messages, alleging a possible censorship issue with the app’s new owners.
Anti-Israel/pro-Palestinian activists noted that one of TikTok’s new major stakeholders was Larry Ellison, a pro-Israel businessman, and claimed that he would clamp down on pro-Palestinian speech on the app.
The combination of technical issues, claims about censorship, and baseless allegations of TikTok silencing pro-Palestinian voices led to the rise of social media users downloading UpScrolled. Its rapid growth was a result of the pro-Palestinian nature of the app’s development as well as the attractiveness of what it claims to stand for: No censorship and no outside interests influencing what users see on the app.
All of the worst people you know are flocking to the new anti-American propaganda platform UpScrolled.
Odds it turns into a psychosis-inducing echo chamber for terror-supporting lunatics seem pretty high. https://t.co/xVfpTL2Nhb pic.twitter.com/B3XWQoTLnF
— Israel War Room (@IsraelWarRoom) January 26, 2026
What Issam Hijazi and fans of the new app claim sets UpScrolled apart from other social media platforms is no censorship, no shadow banning (users don’t see what you post), no billionaires dictating what you see, and no deceptive algorithms.
Sounds like a libertarian’s dream, where you can say the craziest things you want with no consequences on the platform.
Of course, there’s more than meets the eye. Behind the claim of “no censorship” lies a list of items that are not allowed on the app. This includes such no-brainers as child exploitation, violence, sexual content, and self-harm.
Even a “free speech” app needs some parameters in order not to turn into a den of darkness and illegality.
But here’s where things get interesting.
UpScrolled was created as a pro-Palestinian alternative to traditional social media platforms. Many of its most vocal supporters are pro-Palestinian activists who see the app as a means of airing their anti-Israel views, some of which are downright supportive of terror groups and anti-Israel violence.
What happens when the “free speech” app being touted by the anti-Israel online community as a grand marketplace for like-minded individuals has to face its own rules and regulations?
It’s one thing to claim that there are certain regulations on the site. It’s another thing to actually enforce them.
— UpScrolled (@realUpScrolled) January 29, 2026
UpScrolled’s Platforming of Hate
Given the app’s selling points, it is no wonder that in the one week that it has topped the charts for app downloads, UpScrolled has become a veritable free-for-all of anti-Israel and antisemitic posts.
Some of these posts celebrate Hamas and its slaughter of October 7, 2023, a direct contravention of the regulation that forbids support for violent and terrorist groups.
Other posts compare Israel to the Nazis, claim that Israel controls the United States government, and justify violence against Israelis.
It’s not only UpScrolled’s users that are anti-Israel and deny the Jewish State’s right to exist — the app, itself, refuses to let you identify your geographic location as Israel, only giving you the option of “Occupied territories of Palestine.”
Alongside the usual anti-Israel rhetoric that you can (unfortunately) find on most social media apps, UpScrolled has seen a deluge of antisemitic, racist, and neo-Nazi posts.
These include vile caricatures of Jewish people, posts celebrating Adolf Hitler, Holocaust denial, and posts blaming Jews and African-Americans for the ills of society.
Screenshot
While the app’s developers claim that they are intent on removing content that “clearly violates our guidelines,” it appears that they are in no rush to tackle the whirlwind of Hamas support and antisemitic content that has enveloped UpScrolled.
At the moment, UpScrolled is growing its user base. While it seems that mainstream organizations and personalities have yet to open accounts (aside from a few notable exceptions, such as a number of European sports teams), the usual suspects have fled there.
Currently, the usership of UpScrolled seems to be largely made up of anti-Israel activists, advocates for far-left politics, a smattering of normal social media users (foodies, travelogues, etc), and bots.
If more non-political users join the app, then perhaps the platform’s proliferating hate will be diluted. However, as it currently stands, UpScrolled has become a den of hatred and vulgarity. If it continues this way, it will ultimately have a limited user base, serving as an echo chamber for those who are okay with whitewashing Hamas, Nazi symbols, and blaming all of society’s problems on racial and religious minorities.
The author is a contributor to HonestReporting, a Jerusalem-based media watchdog with a focus on antisemitism and anti-Israel bias — where a version of this article first appeared.
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Tucker Carlson to interview Mike Huckabee, U.S. Ambassador to Israel
(JTA) — Right-wing pundit Tucker Carlson and Mike Huckabee, the U.S. Ambassador to Israel, said they will conduct an interview after Carlson published a video from the Middle East that included harsh criticism of Huckabee.
The planned sit-down, hashed out over social media, comes as Carlson has troubled the Jewish world and fractured the conservative movement by using his influential podcast to increasingly entertain antisemites and conspiracy theories about Israel. He has reserved his particular ire for “Christian Zionists,” of which Huckabee, a Baptist minister who aligns himself with the pro-Israel hard right, is a leading figurehead.
“Instead of talking ABOUT me, why don’t you come talk TO me?” the ambassador, and Carlson’s former Fox News colleague, wrote on X early Thursday in response to a Carlson video filmed in Israel and Jordan that purports to reveal how Israel treats Christians and declares that “Huckabee fails Jerusalem’s Christians.”
Huckabee added, “You seem to be generating a lot of heat about the Middle East. Why be afraid of the light?”
When Carlson agreed to an interview an hour later (“I’d love to”), Huckabee responded, “Look forward to the conversation[.]”
Huckabee, a key evangelical Trump ally and stalwart Israel backer, is reaching out to Carlson at a notable moment. Carlson has recently emerged both as the right’s harshest Israel critic and as the source of its larger divide over antisemitism, particularly since his friendly interview last fall with avowed white nationalist and Holocaust denier Nick Fuentes.
Many conservative leaders, including Sen. Ted Cruz (who’s faced harsh grilling from Carlson over his own support for Israel) and Orthodox Jewish pundit Ben Shapiro, have called on the GOP to distance itself from Carlson. Yet he maintains good relationships with President Donald Trump and Vice President JD Vance, and has sway over right-wing powerbrokers such as the Heritage Foundation and Turning Point USA. He has also forged close ties with Qatar.
Carlson’s latest video, framed around the treatment of Christians in Israel, calls for American Christians — long a key pro-Israel constituency — to stop supporting Israel. He also accuses Huckabee of ignoring such concerns.
“Why not go ahead and talk to Christians and find out their side of the story?” Carlson muses. “Why aren’t American Christian leaders like Mike Huckabee or Ted Cruz, people who invoke the Christian Bible to justify what they’re doing, why haven’t they done this?”
Huckabee has in fact spoken out against what he says is persecution of Christians in Israel since his appointment.
Carlson then interviews the Anglican archbishop of Jerusalem, who suggests that Christian Zionism is “a trap” for Jews “because they’re all supposed to convert to Christianity or die.” Much of Carlson’s report focuses on the treatment of Palestinian Christians by Israelis, including settlers who have raided Christian villages in the occupied West Bank. He also mentions Israeli military strikes on Christian holy sites and a Christian hospital in Gaza. (Palestinian Christians remain a minority in the heavily Muslim territories, and the brunt of Israeli attacks have fallen on Muslim residents and sites.)
“It’s a story of Christians being oppressed in Jerusalem by a government that American Christians pay for,” Carlson says. His report is heavily sympathetic to Jordan, where he claims Christians live more freely than in Israel.
If the interview goes through, Huckabee would be the first sitting member of the Trump administration to appear on Carlson’s show since the controversy over his Fuentes interview. He has visited the White House multiple times so far this year.
The post Tucker Carlson to interview Mike Huckabee, U.S. Ambassador to Israel appeared first on The Forward.