Uncategorized
Diaspora alarm over Israel: Your guide to what the critics are saying
(JTA) — I started reporting on North American Jews and Israel in the last century, and for years covered the debate over whether Jews in the Diaspora had a right to criticize the Israeli government in public. The debate sort of petered out in the early-1990s, when Israel itself began talking about a Palestinian state, and when right-wing groups then decided criticizing Israel was a mitzvah.
Nevertheless, while left-wing groups like J Street and T’ruah have long been comfortable criticizing the Israeli government or defending Palestinian rights, many in the centrist “mainstream” — pulpit clergy, leaders of federations and Hillels, average Jews nervous about spoiling a family get-together — have preferred to keep their concerns to themselves. Partly this is tactical: Few rabbis want to alienate any of their members over so divisive a topic, and in the face of an aggressive left, organizational leaders did not want to give fuel to Israel’s ideological enemies. (The glaring exception has been about Israeli policy toward non-Orthodox Judaism, which is seen as very much the Disapora’s business.)
In recent weeks, there has been an emerging literature of what I have come to think of as “reluctant dissent.” What these essays and sermons have in common, despite the different political persuasions of the authors, is a deep concern over Israel’s “democratic character.” They cite judicial reforms that would weaken checks and balances at the top, expansion of Jewish settlements that would make it impossible to separate from the Palestinians, and the Orthodox parties that want to strengthen their hold on religious affairs. As Abe Foxman, who as former director of the Anti-Defamation League rarely criticized Israel, told an interviewer, “If Israel ceases to be an open democracy, I won’t be able to support it.”
I read through the various ways Jewish leaders and writers here and in Israel are not just justifying Diaspora Jews who are protesting what is happening in Israel, but providing public permission for others to do the same. Here is what a few of them are saying (with a word from a defender of the government):
‘I didn’t sleep much last night’
Yehuda Kurtzer: Facebook, Feb. 8
Kurtzer is the president of the Shalom Hartman Institute of North America, the New York-based branch of the Israeli think tank that promotes a diverse, engaged relationship with Israel. In a recent blog post, he neatly describes the dilemma of Diaspora Zionists who aren’t sure what to do with their deep concerns about the direction of the Israel government, especially the concentration of power in a far-right legislative branch.
Centrist American Jews who care about Israel are caught between “those to our right who would see any expression of even uncertainty about Israel’s democratic character as disloyalty, [and] those on the other side who think that a conversation about Israeli democracy is already past its prime,” he writes. He is also concerned about the “widespread disengagement that we can expect among American Jews, what I fear will become the absent majority — those who decide that however the current crisis is resolved, all of this is just ‘not for them.’”
Kurtzer likens Israel to a palace, and Diaspora Jews as “passersby” who live beyond its walls. Nonetheless, he feels responsible for what happens there. “The palace is burning and the best we can do is to tell you,” he writes. “It is also how we will show you we love you, and how much we cherish the palace.”
An open letter to Israel’s friends in North America
Matti Friedman, Yossi Klein Halevi and Daniel Gordis: Times of Israel, Feb. 7
Three high-profile writers who moved to Israel from North America and who often defend Israel against its critics in the United States — Gordis, for one, has written a book arguing that American Jewish liberalism is incompatible with Israel’s “ethnic democracy” — now urge Diaspora Jews to speak out against the current Israeli government. They don’t mention the territories or religious pluralism. Instead, their trigger is the proposed effort to reform the Supreme Court, which they say will “eviscerate the independence of our judiciary and remake the country’s democratic identity.” Such a move will “threaten Israeli-American relations, and it will do grave damage to our relations with you, our sisters and brothers in the Diaspora,” concluding, “We need your voice to help us preserve Israel as a state both Jewish and democratic.”
All Israel Is Responsible for Each Other
Rabbi Angela Buchdahl: Sermon, Jan. 27
Buchdahl, the senior rabbi of New York City’s Reform Central Synagogue, isn’t looking to Israeli writers for permission to weigh in on Israel’s political scene. In a sermon that takes its name from a rabbinic statement of Jewish interdependence, she asserts without question that Jews everywhere have a stake in the future of Israel and have a right to speak up for “civil society and democracy and religious pluralism and human rights” there. She focuses on the religious parties who are convinced that “Reform Jews are ruining Israel,” as you might expect, but ends the sermon with a call to recognize the rights of all Israeli citizens, Jewish and non-Jewish, “and also those living under Israel’s military control.” Of those Palestinians, she says, “We can’t feel comfortable sitting in the light of sovereignty next to a community living in darkness and expect to have peace.”
And like Kurtzer, she worries that concerned American Jews will simply turn away from Israel in despair or embarrassment, and urges congregants to support the Israeli and American organizations that share their pluralistic vision for Israel.
On That Distant Day
Hillel Halkin: Jewish Review of Books, Winter 2023
In his 1977 book “Letters to an American Jewish Friend: A Zionist Polemic,” the translator and author Hillel Halkin made a distinction similar to Kurtzer’s image of Israel as a palace and the Diaspora as passersby: Jews who don’t emigrate to Israel are dooming themselves to irrelevance, while immigrants like him are living on the stage where the Jewish future would play out. His mournful essay doesn’t address the Diaspora, per se, although it creates a permission structure for Zionists abroad to criticize the government. Halkin sees the new government as a coalition of two types of religious zealots: the haredi Orthodox who want to consolidate their control of religious life (and funding) in Israel, and a “knit-skullcap electorate [that] is hypernationalist and Jewish supremacist in its attitude toward Arabs.” (A knit skullcap is a symbol for what an American might call the “Modern Orthodox.”) Together, these growing and powerful constituents represent “the end of an Israeli consensus about what is and is not permissible in a democracy — and once the rules are no longer agreed on, political chaos is not far away. Israel has never been in such a place before.”
Halkin does talk about Israeli expansion in the West Bank, saying he long favored Jewish settlement in the territories, while believing that the “only feasible solution” would be a two-state solution with Arabs living in the Jewish state and Jews living in the Arab one. Instead, Israel has reached a point where there is “too much recrimination, too much distrust, too much hatred, too much blind conviction, too much disdain for the notion of a shared humanity, for such a solution to be possible… We’re over the cliff and falling, and no one knows how far down the ground is.”
Method to Our Madness: A Response to Hillel Halkin
Ze’ev Maghen: Jewish Review of Books, Jan. 10, 2023
Ze’ev Maghen, chair of the department of Middle East studies at Bar-Ilan University, is hardly a dissenter; instead, his response to Halkin helpfully represents the views of those who voted for the current government. Maghen says the new coalition represents a more honest expression of Zionism than those who support a “liberal, democratic, egalitarian, inclusive, individualist, environmentally conscious, economically prosperous, globally connected, etc., etc., society.” The new government he writes, will defend Israel’s “Jewish nationalist raison d’être, and keep at bay those universalist, Western-based notions that are geared by definition to undermine nationalism in all its forms.” As for the Palestinian issue, he writes, “I’d rather have a fierce, hawkish Zionist in the cockpit than a progressive, Westernized wimp for whom this land, and the people who have returned to it after two millennia of incomparable suffering, don’t mean all that much.”
The Tears of Zion
Rabbi Sharon Brous: Sermon, Feb. 4, 2023
Brous, rabbi of the liberal Ikar community in Los Angeles, doesn’t just defend the right of Diaspora Jews to speak out in defense of Israeli democracy and Palestinian rights, but castigates Jewish leaders and communities who have been reluctant to criticize Israel in the past. “No, this government is not an electoral accident, and it is not an anomaly,” she says. “This moment of extremism has been a long time in the making and our silence has made us complicit.”
—
The post Diaspora alarm over Israel: Your guide to what the critics are saying appeared first on Jewish Telegraphic Agency.
Uncategorized
Trump’s new Gaza plan marks a radical break from Israeli policy — can it succeed?
The United States has in effect broken with Israeli policy, cleverly engineering the Palestinian Authority’s return to Gaza.
President Donald Trump’s plan for the second stage of the Gaza ceasefire, the launch of which was announced Wednesday, involves the creation of a transitional Palestinian technocratic authority with strong ties to the PA. This collapses fictions Israel has sustained for years: that Gaza can be stabilized without the PA, which was ousted from the territory by Hamas in 2007; that the PA is no better than Hamas; and even that Palestinian governance itself is illegitimate, a belief held by the most extreme Israeli nationalists.
Reality has finally prevailed, and that reality is that the PA, flawed though it is, remains the only Palestinian political body capable of replacing Hamas in Gaza.
The logic expressed by those, like Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who aim to keep the PA out of Gaza, has brought Israel to the brink. Splitting Palestinian governance between Hamas and the PA, long Netanyahu’s strategy, led to unmitigated disaster, and public anger is at a boil.
Which means that the PA must return to Gaza not only for the sake of Palestinians, but also for Israelis. The Zionist project must be steered away from permanent war, international isolation and internal decay. That means finding a way to work toward a sustainable future with the Palestinians — which almost certainly means, in turn, accepting the PA as their legitimate government.
Decades of misleading rhetoric
Since the establishment of a ceasefire, brokered by Trump’s administration, in September, Hamas has reasserted control over large parts of Gaza. Militarily weakened, it survived politically — because Israel still refused to empower any viable Palestinian alternative.
That return to the status quo in many ways serves Netanyahu’s agenda. Keeping Hamas in power allows for a state of permanent emergency and despair about the chances for peace — the very forces that Netanyahu has, for decades, successfully turned into political capital. “There is no difference between the PA and Hamas” became a mantra — as if a political bureaucracy and a theocratic militia that massacres civilians and rejects coexistence on principle could be legitimately compared.
Now, as long as Hamas rules Gaza, its very presence constitutes an emergency narrative that Netanyahu can use to delay the accountability over his responsibility for Oct. 7: Wartime is no time for politics.
The Palestinian Authority, by contrast, has been treated as dangerous because it represents a measure of pragmatism.
The PA, ineffective as it has been, could be the basis of a functional political framework that would force Israel to confront the need for separation from the Palestinians, real borders, and eventual Palestinian statehood. That’s especially true because there’s the potential for actual peace with a Palestine run by the PA, which already coordinates with Israel at enormous political cost in the West Bank, where its security forces arrest militants and dismantle extremist cells.
New governance for Gaza
The technocratic committee put forward to govern Gaza under Trump’s second phase plan is formally nonpartisan, but its personnel and legitimacy are largely drawn from the ranks of the PA, with Ali Shaath, a former PA deputy minister, set to lead the effort. Others come from the same institutional ecosystem, because there is simply no other reservoir of Palestinian administrative experience. The PA has publicly endorsed the framework. Israel must now also meet its own obligations under the Trump plan — no matter how distasteful its leaders might find the plan’s endorsement of the PA to be.
That means, chiefly, that Israel must declare clearly that once Gaza is stabilized by the technocratic committee, it is prepared to enter negotiations toward a Palestinian state, with final borders to be determined later. Israel can openly state its intention to retain major settlement blocs in the West Bank and seek long-term security arrangements in the Jordan Valley. But it should also affirm in principle its readiness to recognize a Palestinian state and guarantee access arrangements in Jerusalem.
These statements would not resolve the conflict, by any means. But they would go some way toward restoring credibility.
To get there, Hamas must surrender its weapons in Gaza, with an international stabilization force present to keep the peace. The best chance for disarmament is if the weapons are handed to Palestinians. By default, the PA security forces will be the best candidates for the job, as the new technocratic government lacks a security arm. Hamas’s senior leadership should probably be allowed to exit into exile.
To build a Palestinian consensus in this direction, regional powers — Qatar, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, and Turkey — must make reconstruction conditional on disarmament. The choice must be unmistakable: real recovery without any trace of a Hamas militia – or years in tent cities.
If all this is achieved, the real work begins. Areas under the new authority must visibly improve. Adequate housing, electricity, water, education, employment, and free movement must return in ways Palestinians can measure. The comparison with Hamas rule must be obvious.
Reformations in the PA — and Israel
Such a process with the PA should also be made conditional.
As existing U.S. proposals suggest, the PA must be required to undertake concrete reforms, including by overhauling educational materials that appear to condone violence against Israelis and ending payments to the families of imprisoned militants.
Senior PA officials have already signaled willingness to move on both fronts. These are achievable changes,
The payoff would be immense, potentially including normalization with Saudi Arabia, broader reconciliation of Israel the Arab and Muslim worlds, the gradual erosion of the global delegitimization campaign against Israel, and renewed international cooperation — especially in confronting Iran’s nuclear program, ballistic missiles, and regional militias. In time, Zionism would once again be seen as a serious national project capable of difficult, mature decisions.
The catch: Little of this is likely to happen under the current Israeli government.
That is the central truth of 2026, an election year: a change of leadership in Israel is not optional for anyone who wants a better future. The disaster of the Oct. 7, 2023 attack was the culmination of years of strategic failure, ideological paralysis, and the reckless empowerment of Hamas. This is what happens when complacent societies repeatedly elevate unfit leadership in the face of existential danger.
So Israelis must decide: will they support a government that thrives on permanent conflict, or endorse the possibility of peace?
The post Trump’s new Gaza plan marks a radical break from Israeli policy — can it succeed? appeared first on The Forward.
Uncategorized
California’s Gavin Newsom Proposes Budget Increase for State Universities Amid Federal Funding Threats
California Gov. Gavin Newsom in Sacramento, California, US, on Aug. 8, 2025. Photo: REUTERS/Carlos Barria
California Gov. Gavin Newsom, a rumored potential candidate for US president in 2028, has proposed hundreds of millions of dollars in new funds for state universities amid the Trump administration’s policy of canceling federal grants and contracts held by institutions which it accuses of failing to combat campus antisemitism.
Newsom previously sought to cut funding to the University of California (UC) and California State University (CSU) by 8 percent during the 2025-2025 fiscal year (FY), before dropping that figure to 3 percent. Then on Friday, the governor proposed a new budget which would increase next year’s appropriation by $350.6 million for UC and $365.7 million for CSU, raising the state’s general fund for the schools to $5.3 billion and $5.6 billion, respectively.
“The budget introduced today by Gov. Newsom continues to provide critical support for the university and our students,” UC president James B. Milliken said in a statement responding to the news. “State support is more important than ever, as we face tremendous financial pressures stemming from rising costs and unprecedented federal actions. UC campuses rely on funding stability to serve students and maintain the academic and research excellence that has made UC the world’s greatest research university.”
He added, “An investment in UC is an investment in California’s future. I look forward to our ongoing partnership with Gov. Newsom and the legislature to ensure that our students have what they need to succeed at UC and beyond.”
The move, even as it defers $129.7 million for UC and $143.8 million for CSU to a later date, gives the schools breathing room as they fear the Trump’s administration’s confiscation of funds. Last year, for example, the administration impounded $250 million from the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA).
US President Donald Trump ordered the money canceled in August after determining that the school exposed Jewish students to discrimination by refusing to intervene when civil rights violations transpired or failing to correct a hostile environment after the fact. He ordered the move even after UCLA agreed to donate $2.33 million to a consortium of Jewish civil rights organizations to resolve an antisemitism complaint filed by three students and an employee.
UCLA was sued and excoriated by the public over its handling of a “Gaza Solidarity Encampment” that an anti-Zionist student group established on campus in the final weeks of the 2024 spring semester. Witnesses said that it was a source of antisemitism from the moment it became active, and according to the lawsuits, students there chanted “death to the Jews,” set up illegal checkpoints through which no one could pass unless they denounced Israel, and ordered campus security assigned there by the university to ensure that no Jews entered it.
Many antisemitic incidents occurred at UCLA before the institution was ultimately sued and placed it in the crosshairs of the Trump administration.
Just five days after Hamas’s Oct. 7, 2023, massacre across southern Israel, as previously reported by The Algemeiner, anti-Zionist protesters chanted “Itbah El Yahud” at Bruin Plaza, which means “slaughter the Jews” in Arabic. Other incidents included someone’s tearing a chapter page out of Philip Roth’s 2004 novel The Plot Against America, titled “Loudmouth Jew,” and leaving it outside the home of a UCLA faculty member, as well as Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP) staging a disturbing demonstration in which its members cudgeled a piñata, to which a picture of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s face was glued, while shouting “beat the Jew.”
On the same day that UCLA settled the suit, the US Department of Justice’s Civil Rights Division ruled that UCLA’s response to antisemitic incidents constituted violations of the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment of the US Constitution and Title VI of the Civil Rights Act.
“Our investigation into the University of California system has found concerning evidence of systemic antisemitism at UCLA that demands severe accountability from the institution,” Attorney General Pamela Bondi said in a statement at the time. “This disgusting breach of civil rights against students will not stand: the [Department of Justice] will force UCLA to pay a heavy price for putting Jewish Americans at risk and continue our ongoing investigations into other campuses in the UC system.”
Newsom has positioned himself as an ally of higher education throughout its clash with Trump. In August, he demanded that Harvard University president Alan Garber resign rather than reach a deal with the Trump administration that would restore federal funding to Harvard in exchange for the school’s agreeing to conservative demands for addressing campus antisemitism and shuttering diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) programs.
“You don’t work with Donald Trump — only FOR Donald Trump,” Newsom protested, writing on the X social media platform. “Looks like Harvard has chosen to surrender. Alan Garber must resign. An absolute failure of leadership that will have demonstrable impacts to higher education across our country. He should be ashamed.”
He added, “California will never bend the knee.”
Newsom had days earlier criticized Trump’s effort to combat antisemitism and reform higher education, denouncing it as “disgusting political extortion.”
Follow Dion J. Pierre @DionJPierre.
Uncategorized
Ex-Yale Law School Professor Dismisses Iran Protests Over ‘Zionist’ Backing, Justifies Regime Oppression
Protesters march in downtown Tehran, Iran, Dec. 29, 2025. Photo: Screenshot
A former Yale University professor who was fired over her connection to a fundraising front for the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, a US-designated terrorist organization, has drawn scrutiny again for dismissing anti-regime protests in Iran due to “Zionist endorsement,” defending Tehran’s crackdown on dissent, and castigating US law enforcement.
“In the imperial countries, the police function as the domestic arm of the empire,” Helyeh Doutaghi wrote in an essay published by the far-left Progressive International on Jan. 6. “They suppress dissent, criminalize resistance, and enforce accumulation through violence particularly against Black, Indigenous, and other Peoples of Color.”
Doutaghi then claimed that law enforcement in New Haven, Connecticut, the location of Yale, is “trained by the Israeli military” and that “policing is inseparable from imperial colonial violence.”
In contrast, she argued, Iran’s “Law Enforcement Command,” notorious for atrocities such as killing a young woman who was in custody for not wearing a head covering in accordance with the country’s Islamic dress code, “exists within a radically difference context,” having faced “sustained attempts at regime change operations and color revolution tactics.”
Doutaghi appears to see Jewish maneuvering behind the Iranian people’s efforts to resist their government’s theocratic, authoritarian rule. She argued that the “Woman, Life, Freedom” protests of 2022, which erupted in the wake of the regime’s killing of 22-year-old Mahsa Amini, were commandeered by “Zionist endorsement, coordinated diasporic networks, and sustained media warfare” to achieve “regime change.”
The article came out as the Iranian regime began cracking down on a new round of anti-government protests with an unprecedented scale of violence, reportedly killing thousands of demonstrators over the past two weeks.
In a viral post, Paul Mason, contributing editor for The New World, said Doutaghi’s essay represents the “logic of decolonization’ theory,” in which, he added, “Western cops bad; Iranian cops good. Woman rights good — but not if it leads to revolution in Iran.”
Yale Law School (YLS) fired Doutaghi in March after independently verifying a report by Jewish Onliner which exposed her membership in Samidoun, which identifies itself as a “Palestinian prisoner solidarity network.”
Founded in 2011 in the Canadian province of British Columbia, Samidoun is a “front group” for the PFLP — which gained infamy in the 20th century for perpetrating a series of airplane hijackings — according to the US and Canadian governments. The US and Canada each imposed sanctions on Samidoun in October 2024, labeling the organization a “sham charity” and accusing it of fundraising for designated terrorist groups such as PFLP.
Samidoun also described the Palestinian terrorist group Hamas’s Oct. 7, 2023, invasion of and massacre across southern Israel as “a brave and heroic operation.”
Yale noted that Doutaghi was publicly listed on Samidoun’s website as a member.
Doutaghi denounced the inculpatory facts uncovered by the university as “fabricated claims” and lodged counteraccusations which blamed her being outed on Zionists.
“Yale has engaged in bad faith throughout this ‘process,” she wrote in a statement posted on X after being placed on leave. “YLS’s singular concern with maintaining the approval of the Zionist backers who bankroll their complicity in genocide led the organization to pressure me into an interrogation that I had every reason to believe was designed not to uncover the truth, but to justify a predetermined outcome.”
She continued, “What is clear is that YLS actions constitute a blatant act of retaliation against Palestinian solidarity — a violation of my constitutional rights, free speech, academic freedom, and fundamental due process rights. I am being targeted for one reason alone: for speaking the truth about the genocide of the Palestinian people that Yale University is complicit in.”
Doutaghi is another example of the higher education establishment’s embrace of scholars who promote anti-Israel animus, an issue that is driving the campus antisemitism crisis, according to a recent survey conducted by the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) and the Academic Engagement Network (AEN).
Fifty percent of survey respondents said that anti-Zionist faculty have established de facto, or “shadow,” boycotts of Israel on campus even in the absence of formal declaration or recognition of one by the administration. Among those who reported the presence of such a boycott, 55 percent noted that departments avoid co-sponsoring events with Jewish or pro-Israel groups and 29.5 percent said this policy is also subtly enacted by sabotaging negotiations for partnerships with Israeli institutions. All the while, such faculty fostered an environment in which Jewish professors were “maligned, professionally isolated, and in severe cases, doxxed or harassed” as they assumed the right to determine for their Jewish colleagues what constitutes antisemitism.
Meanwhile, the faculty’s activism provided an academic pretext for the relentless wave of antisemitic incidents of discrimination and harassment which pro-Hamas activists perpetrated against Jewish and Israeli members of campus communities following the Hamas-led Oct. 7, 2023, massacre across southern Israel, the groups said.
Another faculty source of campus antisemitism is the Faculty and Staff for Justice (FSJP) group.
FSJP is a spinoff of Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP), a group with links to Islamist terrorist organizations. FSJP chapters have been cropping up at colleges since the Oct. 7 atrocities, and throughout the 2023-2024 academic year, its members, which include faculty employed by the most elite US colleges, fostered campus unrest, circulated antisemitic cartoons, and advocated severing ties with Israeli companies and institutions of higher education.
In September 2024, AMCHA Initiative, a higher education watchdog, published a study offering evidence that FSJP inspired antisemitic hate crimes, anti-Israel divestment measures, and the collapse of discipline and order on college campuses. Using data analysis, AMCHA found a correlation between a school’s hosting an FSJP chapter and anti-Zionist and antisemitic activity. For example, the researchers found that the presence of FSJP on college campuses increased by seven times “the likelihood of physical assaults and Jewish students” and increased by three times the chance that a Jewish student would be subject to threats of violence and death.
Follow Dion J. Pierre @DionJPierre.