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Embracing go-bags and gallows humor, Israelis live in limbo as Trump teases war with Iran
(JTA) — TEL AVIV — Natalie Silverlieb’s go-bag looks a little different from the last time she ran to the bomb shelter with Iranian missiles incoming. Since last summer, she has had a baby, so she now has packed diapers and wipes alongside passports and water.
But apart from that, she hasn’t done much else to get ready for a possible war, even as U.S. President Donald Trump has amassed his forces in the region and threatened to strike Iran, a move sure to trigger a counterattack on Israel.
“There’s no preparing,” Silverlieb said. “What does that even mean?” The New Jersey native added, “If anything, we probably should be preparing to get the hell out of the country.”
Katie Silver, too, has made some tweaks since the war last summer. Now, she’s not stockpiling toilet paper or canned tuna — but she’s been buying art supplies to while away potential hours in the shelter.
Silver said she’s become “jaded” and not particularly bothered by the idea of another round of conflict with Iran, and she said she wouldn’t mind a few days off from her job as a pilates instructor. Still, she admitted that being alone during sirens is scary. This time, she said, she will make sure to be with friends, or even better, hunkering down in the bomb shelter with the “tall, dark, handsome Moroccan” who still eludes her, the one she has in the past pictured marrying “before a rocket lands on my head.”
As tensions around the possible war simmered this week, fear wasn’t her first response. “It’s rather exciting, isn’t it?” Silver said.
And the “Law and Order: SVU” actress Diane Neal, who moved from the United States to Israel in 2023 and now works as an “aliyah ambassador” promoting the move to others, said she was drawing on her experience across multiple disasters — earthquakes, hurricanes, 9/11 — to encourage Israelis not to run to bomb shelters in flip flops.
“My real things to suggest are the sturdiest shoes because you’re always walking over debris, some sort of light or headlamp … and then a sturdy pair of gloves, because you’ve got to get things out of the way,” she said. She also joked that she had imported a giant container of melatonin from Costco to hand out to neighbors in their shared shelter to help them relax despite the danger.
“There’s nothing worse than being around a bunch of stressed out people when there’s nothing you can do,” Neal said.
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Beyond considering their shelter plans, some Israelis have been making plans to leave — to Europe, to the United States, even to Eilat — before flights are canceled again. Others are doing the opposite, scrapping trips abroad, afraid of getting stuck outside the country if the airspace closes.
For those with no plans to leave Israel, even getting out of its population centers, which sustained multiple direct hits the last time, feels like a good idea.
“Nobody wants to be in this city again when bombs are dropping,” said Tzvi, a Tel Aviv resident who declined to give his last name.
Iranian strikes on Israel killed 28 people last summer, including four women in an Arab town in northern Israel; a Ukrainian family that had come for cancer treatment for their daughter; and an activist at her home in Beersheba. Many others lost their homes. Buildings in Tel Aviv were reduced to rubble.
That was during a 12-day war that Israel initiated by striking Iranian nuclear facilities. Reports suggest that U.S. officials believe a new campaign could be longer — and that Iran has many more missiles now than it did at the beginning of June last year. What’s more, support from Israel’s neighbors, including the right to use their airspace for missile defense, is less assured. And if Trump seeks to topple the Islamic Republic regime or kill its supreme leader, the Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, Hezbollah says it would join the fight, reopening a front on Israel’s north.
The result is a complex assessment for many Israelis: A war could result in regime change for one of their country’s most devoted enemies, but the cost is likely to be steep.
For now, though, there is just the waiting. Three weeks ago, Tzvi noted, everyone was saying that war was imminent. The next week, it wasn’t. A week after that, it was imminent again. Now, with Purim approaching, U.S. and Iranian officials offering frequent bread crumbs and high-stakes negotiations taking place in Geneva, the sense is that a conflict could begin any moment. Or not.
“It’s like constantly living in a state of limbo,” Tzvi said. “You are supposed to go on with your life because bombs aren’t dropping, but you can’t go on with your life because you always have in the back of your mind that there might be a war next week.”
With all the waiting, naturally, come the bets, as people hedge on when the United States will strike — if at all. Many are putting their money on Purim, because, as the writer Sarah Tuttle-Singer succinctly put it in a Facebook post, “Duh.”
“Why miss the opportunity to invoke ancient Persia while pointing at modern Iran? Why waste a perfectly good holiday of existential threat and theatrical reversal?” she wrote, invoking the Purim story in which a plot to destroy the Jews is overturned at the last moment — and the regime that permitted the threat is destroyed.
Arguing that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is the kind of politician who would want the timing to land with maximum symbolism, she went on, “Yes I know ultimately it’s Ahashverosh — Uh, I mean, Trump’s call — when the US strikes, but let’s be real. The President and prime minister Netanyahu will be fully aligned.”
She added, “From ancient Shushan to contemporary Tehran. From Haman to the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps. You can almost hear the cadence warming up in the teleprompter.”
Tuttle-Singer is not the only Israeli to make the Purim connection. One Orthodox rabbi promised: “The ancient secrets of the Book of Esther are coming to life before our eyes.”
For many, the response to the looming threat is less spiritual than practical. But on a social media post asking Israeli women what they were doing to prepare, the answers were a mixed bag.
A handful answered that they were preparing in earnest, packing everything from portable radios to multiple flashlights, and prompting one commenter to wryly ask whether they were “preparing for the apocalypse.”
One woman, posting anonymously, said she was pregnant after three previous losses and terrified her husband would be called up to the army again. Without family nearby and with little Hebrew proficiency, she wrote, she was scared the stress would hurt what she called their “miracle baby,” and that she was ready to put her family first.
Many responded with some version of the same thing. They were taking it day by day.
“I think I’m more worried about things being cancelled than actually getting bombed,” one woman wrote, noting that she had several paid gigs cancelled last June. “Worrying about dying is just too big, I guess.”
Another noted that she was “not thinking about it,” and went on to say she was “too exhausted from the last two years.”
A third said she wasn’t doing anything special except “enjoying life while we have not-war days” by going into nature.
“We’ll have enough time to be anxious and sit at home later. I’m saving and accumulating my energy,” she wrote.
Others said they were focusing on threats they felt they could control. Dani Sarusi bought a steam cleaner. “If my two kids are going to be home I need to maintain whatever is left of my sanity and at least have a clean floor,” she wrote.
Roxy Esther Reinstein prepared for the selfie that might outlive her. “I got my hair done cause no damn way Iran is having me looking bad. If I go down, I go down looking pretty,” she said.
Some women took the opportunity to vent that in their case, any attempt at war prep began with a negotiation with a skeptical husband.
“I keep refilling the mamad with survival stuff like water, dry food etc. And he keeps taking it out of the mamad saying it’s all ‘fake news’ and the war is over,” one woman wrote, referencing the safe room that many apartments have.
The rooms are not designed to protect against missiles of the type Iran shoots. Another chimed in that her husband subscribed to the view that there was “no need to take precautions because nothing will help if in the statistically unlikely instance the [missile] has your name on it.”
Not all husbands were dismissive. Hannah said hers had taken the time to work out that the couple and their children could “each survive on five dates a day,” and had stocked the shelter accordingly, with a couple of crates of the dried fruit. She said by text that her Sudanese husband’s great-grandmother had told him that eating soaked dates had helped her and others survive starvation in Darfur.
Sam, who moved to Israel in January, said she has been training her cats to seek shelter under the bed in the safe room using a WiFi-connected treat dispenser and an audio cue on her phone.
A cat belonging to a more veteran immigrant would do no such thing, its owner replied. “She’s so over sirens,” the owner wrote.
The post Embracing go-bags and gallows humor, Israelis live in limbo as Trump teases war with Iran appeared first on The Forward.
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With anti-Arab campaign ad, Netanyahu stoops to new moral and political lows
Israeli election campaigns have often been ugly. They have featured exaggeration, fearmongering and outright deception. But even by those standards, the first major campaign advertisement by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s Likud party, posted on Netanyahu’s X account on Tuesday, managed to shock much of the country.
The AI-generated video depicts former military chief Gadi Eisenkot, who has become the standard-bearer for the opposition, walking through a sunlit field toward a young Jewish man before passing him by to embrace Mansour Abbas of Ra’am, the United Arab List, instead.
The young man looks strikingly like Eisenkot’s son, Gal, who was killed fighting in Gaza in late 2023 — although Likud insists he isn’t meant to. Strictly speaking, there is enough difference to sustain the protestations. The young man has longer, wavier hair than Gal Eisenkot did — just enough, perhaps, to preserve plausible deniability. Yet almost everyone I know believed they were watching a father joyfully approaching his slain son, seemingly restored to life, only to ignore him in favor of an Arab political leader at a time when Arab political participation in Israel is particularly contentious.
The only possible explanation: Likud wants their campaign to be as mean as possible. Or perhaps that they believe that anything that creates a buzz — and therefore distracts from the governing coalition’s disastrous and controversial policies, including a wildly unpopular recent legislative blitz — is a good thing.
And buzz there is. The perception that a father’s personal loss had been weaponized for electoral gain struck many as a line that simply should not be crossed. “This is Netanyahu, and this is his machine of incitement”, wrote Einav Zangauker, whose son was held hostage in Gaza by Hamas, on social media. “This isn’t politics,” Zangauker added, but rather “an attack on a bereaved father and an assault on his dignity. It is the lowest of the low.”
“I turn to elected representatives, activists, and all candidates from all parties, and demand that you do not cross red lines. Do not turn rivals into enemies,” Israeli President Isaac Herzog said. “I call on the people of Israel, in a clear voice: Remember that elections are not a civil war.”
But even if one puts aside the controversy surrounding the young man altogether, the advertisement remains deeply troubling. It is, at its core, an exercise in incitement against Ra’am — and, by extension, against the very idea that Arab citizens may legitimately participate in governing Israel.
Abbas himself accused Netanyahu of “trying to incite between different parts of society”; about a fifth of Israelis are Arab, and the ad was obviously trying to delegitimize collaboration with the parties who generally represent them.
From Likud’s perspective, that too is logical — so long as they ignore the goal of Israel remaining a democratic country in which component ethnic groups live in harmony. It’s logical because Arab parties have always been part of the opposition to Likud and the chances are high that Eisenkot might need them, even passively, to successfully craft a coalition after the Oct. 27 election.
This isn’t just dangerous. It ignores the essential role that Arab parties have played in building toward a strong Israeli future.
Ra’am, under Abbas, has been the most integrationist Arab party Israel has ever seen. Abbas broke with decades of Arab political orthodoxy by arguing that Arab citizens should seek influence through practical cooperation with whichever Zionist government Israelis elected. He has repeatedly recognized Israel as the nation-state of the Jewish people while demanding full equality for its Arab citizens.
Whatever one thinks of his politics, these choices have represented one of the boldest experiments in Jewish-Arab partnership since the state’s founding.
That experiment briefly succeeded. Ra’am joined Naftali Bennett and Yair Lapid’s coalition in 2021 and demonstrated that Arab participation in government could become something ordinary rather than revolutionary.
More awkward still for Likud, Netanyahu himself spent some weeks after the 2021 election attempting to persuade Abbas to support — or even participate in — his own coalition. Those negotiations failed for one principal reason: Far-right firebrand Bezalel Smotrich — now Netanyahu’s finance minister — refused to countenance a government dependent on an Arab party. Without Ra’am, Netanyahu lacked a majority.
It is therefore surreal to portray Eisenkot’s willingness to work with Ra’am as somehow beyond the democratic pale, when not so long ago, Netanyahu himself tried to do precisely the same thing.
Nor should anyone pretend that Arab parties suddenly became relevant because of Eisenkot. Since the emergence of today’s political blocs, Arab parties have almost invariably belonged to the anti-Likud camp. Any center-left coalition aspiring to govern has depended, directly or indirectly, on their parliamentary support. That is not a distortion of Israeli democracy. It is one of its enduring structural realities.
Which brings us to the larger significance of this episode.
Many Israelis have long predicted that this Likud campaign would barely concern policy at all. They expected, instead, an effort to delegitimize any prospective change government by portraying it as illegitimate because it relied on Arab parties. They expected renewed attempts to cast Arab political participation as inherently suspect. They expected emotional manipulation to substitute for argument and personal attacks to eclipse serious debate. Some feared renewed efforts to discourage Arab turnout and disqualify Arab parties from the ballot.
That appears to be exactly what they’re getting.
The remarkable thing is not merely that Likud produced this advertisement, but that doing so was effectively its first act of the campaign, which kicked off after the Knesset recently went into recess.
Before voters had heard competing visions for Israel’s economy, security or diplomacy, the country’s governing party chose to launch its campaign by inflaming fears about Arab political participation while employing imagery that countless Israelis immediately interpreted as mocking one father’s unbearable personal loss.
By the next day, competing ads using a similar aesthetic were put out by opponents of Netanyahu. One depicted Netanyahu on a similar field running past a soldier to hug a Haredi politician holding a sign that says — as many Haredi anti-draft protesters chant — “we’d rather die than serve.”
One reason AI is so attractive to political strategists is because it blurs responsibility. Images can be carefully engineered to evoke a conclusion while remaining just different enough to deny that such a conclusion was ever the intention. The technology offers something every spin doctor craves: emotional impact coupled with plausible deniability.
“I do not think we can allow this to continue,” lamented David Lau, a former chief rabbi of Israel, who has served in the military. “We must stop all these disputes, all this talk, and all these behaviors. This path does not lead to building anything. It does not lead to peace. It is a bad path, and I am even more concerned about the next generation.”
It is entirely possible that this advertisement will prove to have established the moral tone of the campaign. Israel deserves better.
The post With anti-Arab campaign ad, Netanyahu stoops to new moral and political lows appeared first on The Forward.
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Reed College agrees to sweeping reforms as part of Title VI antisemitism settlement
(JTA) — Reed College has agreed to a host of far-reaching institutional changes, including asserting that targeting Jewish Zionists will be considered discriminatory, in order to settle multiple federal antisemitism investigations, parties to the complaint announced Wednesday.
The settlement was announced by the Anti-Defamation League and the Brandeis Center for Human Rights Under Law, which jointly filed the complaint, under Title VI of the Civil Rights Act, which prohibits discrimination at any institution receiving federal funds. It comes as campuses across the country, facing threats of losing federal funding under the Trump administration, have demonstrated willingness to negotiate new antisemitism protections.
As part of the agreement, the private Portland, Oregon, liberal arts school says it will insert language into its discrimination policy asserting that “for many Jewish people, Zionism is integral to their religious, ancestral and/or ethnic Jewish identity,” and that “targeting Jews on the basis of their Zionist identity” will be considered discriminatory.
The school will also contract a third-party consultant to monitor and report on its effectiveness in adhering to antisemitism protections, role that is unusual in similar Title VI agreements. The agreement says Reed will “consider” the International Holocaust Remembrance Association’s working definition of antisemitism, which includes some criticisms of Israel, and implement antisemitism training for faculty and staff.
“We take concerns about antisemitism, and all forms of unlawful discrimination, seriously, and we will continue to support the well-being, safety, and success of every member of our community,” a Reed College spokesperson told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency in a statement acknowledging the agreement. Reed declined to comment further.
ADL CEO Jonathan Greenblatt and Brandeis Center officials praised the agreement in a release as a potential model for other colleges.
“We believe it should serve as a model for other schools,” Denise Katz-Prober, director of legal initiatives at the Brandeis Center, told JTA about the agreement. The required language in Reed’s discrimination guidelines, she said, is “very clear about what constitutes anti-Zionist conduct in violation of civil rights and in violation of the policy.”
“This outcome demonstrates how the Title VI process can work to effectively protect Jewish students,” Greenblatt said in his own statement.
Around 100 students at Reed College are Jewish, or about 7% of the total student body, according to estimates from Hillel International. A request for comment to the director of PDX Hillel, which serves Jewish students at Reed and others in the region, was not immediately returned.
The resolution stems from two anonymous Title VI antisemitism complaints from Jewish former Reed students, both filed in 2024 under the Biden administration. One of those cases related to a student whose dorm-room mezuzah was vandalized, and who herself was later pelted with rocks, during a pro-Palestinian demonstration in spring 2024. The student later left the school out of concern for her safety.
Both of the described acts would have already been considered violations of school policy for reasons unrelated to the student’s Jewish or Zionist identity. Brandeis’s Katz-Prober argued both should have also been considered in the context of her targeting by anti-Zionist activists.
“It might be difficult for someone to, at first glance, understand whether it was simply an assault or an assault motivated by bias,” she said. The case, she said, demonstrated how in some cases, “‘Zionist’ is merely a codeword for Jew.”
Katz-Prober also touted the agreement’s mandate that the school bring on a third-party compliance consultant, separate from its Title VI coordinator. While she insisted that such a role would be “independent” and free of bias, she noted that both the ADL and the Brandeis Center would have a role in their selection.
“Both sides get a say,” she said.
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Arizona Rep. Andy Biggs cruises to GOP nomination for governor amid allegations of antisemitism
(JTA) — Arizona Rep. Andy Biggs, who has drawn criticism for ties to white nationalist figures, will officially be the Republican nominee for Arizona governor, after winning the primary on Tuesday night.
Biggs, who is backed by President Donald Trump, has drawn criticism for encouraging Stew Peters, an internet personality, and appearing on his show. Peters has labeled Judaism a “death cult” and has called for a “final solution” that involves the deportation of American Jews, and multiple watchdogs identify him as promoting antisemitism.
“Keep preaching,” Biggs told Peters at the end of his June 2023 appearance on the show, during which they discussed government corruption and Biggs agreed with Peters that the FBI should be abolished.
Biggs, 67, who won handily with 73.4% of votes according to multiple media outlets, will challenge Democratic Gov. Katie Hobbs in what is expected to be a competitive race in November. Biggs has represented Arizona’s 5th Congressional District, which is outside of Phoenix, since 2017.
His opponent in the GOP primary, Rep. David Schweikert, had put out a campaign mailer in March tying Biggs to white supremacy and antisemitism. The mailer featured mentions of Biggs’ interview with Peters as well as Biggs’ endorsement of Texas GOP candidate Brandon Herrera, who owned a copy of “Mein Kampf.”
Biggs’ campaign did not respond to the Jewish Telegraphic Agency’s request for comment, but in a local TV interview last month he called the accusations politically motivated and said, “This notion that I am antisemitic is absolutely one of the most ludicrous, insane arguments ever.”
In 2024, Biggs opposed the bipartisan Antisemitism Awareness Act, which passed in the House of Representatives. Biggs wrote that he opposes antisemitism and that the “pro-Hamas, pro-genocide, anti-Israel events happening across the nation are sickening.” He rejected the legislation, he said, because it was “so poorly drafted that it violates the Constitution and could have serious ramifications for the Christian community.” Right wing Republicans objected especially to the bill citing a definition of antisemitism that included as an example the claim that the Jews killed Jesus.
That same year, Biggs attended a rally co-sponsored by the Proud Boys, an extremist militia style group. In 2019, he spoke at a “Patriotism over Socialism” rally in Arizona, which watchdogs warned would draw extremist groups.
Media Matters, a group that mostly monitors right-wing groups, in 2023 wrote that “the links between Biggs and far-right extremists have been well-documented,” citing among other things his ties to another far-right group, the Oath Keepers.
The Republican Jewish Coalition did not respond to a question over whether it would support Biggs’ run for governor.
At a campaign event on Tuesday, Hobbs skewered Biggs for his denial of Trump’s 2020 election loss, and for not acknowledging Hobbs’ narrow 2022 gubernatorial victory over Republican Kari Lake.
This article originally appeared on JTA.org.
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