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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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Trump urges Iran to make a deal after Iran fires missiles at Israel for first time in 2 months
(JTA) — Iran fired multiple barrages of missiles toward northern Israel on Sunday night local time, in the first direct fire from Iran on Israel since early April.
No one was immediately reported injured in the barrages, according to Israeli media, and the Israeli military said it shot down all the missiles aimed at the country on Sunday night.
The attack came hours after a stabbing attack by an Israeli Arab on Jews in central Israel killed one person and left several others injured.
The Iran salvo added to the turmoil for Israelis living in the north, who have been under constant fire from Iran’s proxy Hezbollah in Lebanon, and upsetting an uneasy quiet in the rest of the country. Schools across Israel will be closed on Monday.
Iranian officials said the barrage was a response to Israel’s strike earlier Sunday on a Hezbollah installation in the suburbs of Beirut, which the Israeli army said targeted a command center used to direct attacks on its troops.
Hezbollah last week rejected a U.S.-brokered ceasefire deal that would have halted Israeli strikes in Beirut, saying that it could not abide by terms that would have required it to exit southern Lebanon.
During a five-week war that Israel and the United States initiated against Iran on Feb. 28, at least two dozen Israelis were killed when Iran fired hundreds of missiles at the country in near-daily barrages. Active hostilities involving Israel ended when U.S. President Donald Trump initiated a ceasefire on April 8. He and Iran have not yet agreed to terms that would permanently end the war.
Trump said he was “not happy about” Israel’s strike in Beirut and signaled that he did not see Iranian barrage as an impediment to a future deal.
“It’s certainly not going to help negotiations,” he told Fox News. “We’re very close. I would say an agreement would be signed on Monday, Tuesday or Wednesday of this coming week. And now this takes place.”
Addressing Iran directly, Trump said, “You’ve shot your missiles, that’s enough. Get back to the table and make a deal.”
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu did not immediately respond publicly to the Iranian attack on Israel.
This article originally appeared on JTA.org.
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Maine Democrats are poised to nominate Graham Platner, as Jewish Democrats withhold support
Maine Democrats are poised to nominate Graham Platner on Tuesday to challenge incumbent Republican Sen. Susan Collins in one of the most important Senate races this year. But a series of recent domestic violence allegations and controversies surrounding Platner could become a major political problem for the party in its effort to regain control of the Senate.
The controversy extends beyond questions about electability. Jewish Democratic organizations have withheld support from Platner over his past Nazi-linked tattoo, criticism of Israel and rhetoric that some Jewish leaders view as troubling, even as top national Democrats rally behind his candidacy.
The primary was effectively decided weeks ago when former Gov. Janet Mills suspended her campaign after lagging in polls and struggling to raise money. Mills never formally withdrew from the ballot, leaving open the possibility that some Democrats will use Tuesday’s primary as a protest vote against Platner
The dilemma facing Democrats is unusually stark.
Maine, considered a purple state, is widely viewed as one of the party’s clearest opportunities to flip a Republican-held Senate seat. Collins, 73, is running for a sixth term, though critics argue her image as a political moderate has diminished in recent years. In her last reelection campaign in 2020, Collins defeated her Democratic challenger 51-42. Sara Gideon, who is married to a Jewish lawyer, ran a competitive race and drew support from Maine’s estimated 15,000 Jewish voters and outside Jewish Democratic groups.
The 41-year-old Platner, an oyster farmer and former Marine, appeared to be the kind of insurgent candidate Democrats dream about. He led Mills by a significant margin and consistently ran ahead of Collins in public polling.
But the past two weeks have left Democrats struggling with his candidacy.
Reports about explicit messages sent to women while married and allegations from former partners describing threatening and troubling behavior, along with scrutiny of past online posts, put the Platner campaign on defense.
For Jewish voters, Platner’s rise and the party’s embrace of him were already hard to swallow. Platner faced backlash last year after acknowledging that a black skull-and-crossbones tattoo on his chest resembled a Nazi symbol. He has since covered it up. In past posts on Reddit, Platner defended a man with a Nazi SS lightning bolt tattoo who impersonated a federal officer at a Black Lives Matter protest in Las Vegas in 2020.
A New York Times story last week cited an ex-girlfriend who said Platner knew for years that the tattoo on his chest was associated with Nazi imagery, an allegation he has forcefully denied.
Also troubling to Jewish Democrats, Platner has accused Israel of committing genocide in Gaza and suggested the U.S. should cut off all aid to Israel. Last week, Platner accused Collins of taking money from AIPAC and being “bought and paid for by Benjamin Netanyahu, and she votes accordingly.”
Halie Soifer, head of the Jewish Democratic Council of America, said in an April interview that her group was not prepared to back Platner. JDCA had endorsed Mills in the primary before she suspended her campaign. On Sunday, Soifer said the group continues to stand by its endorsement of Mills, signaling that voters who remain uneasy about Platner still have the option of casting a vote for the former governor, whose name remains on the ballot.
“If he were running in Jersey, he’d either be thrown off the ballot or buried under the Meadowlands,” Rep. Josh Gottheimer, a Jewish Democrat from New Jersey, said on Friday.
Top Democratic strategists told Politico that Platner could face pressure to drop out of the race if Mills receives a significant amount of votes.
Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, the highest ranking Jewish elected official in the U.S., has so far continued to show support for Platner. After meeting with Platner last week in Washington, D.C., Schumer told reporters that defeating Collins remains a top priority for Democrats seeking to reclaim power in the Senate.
The likely result is a question Democrats increasingly cannot avoid: If Platner wins Tuesday as expected, how much longer can national Democrats continue treating him as their standard-bearer and excuse conduct they would condemn in a Republican candidate? Jewish Democratic organizations, having already distanced themselves from Platner, will also have to decide how to respond if he becomes the party’s nominee, as other nominees are also coming under scrutiny for past remarks and associations with antisemitic influencers.
House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries, in an interview Sunday on Fox News, was asked whether he’s concerned that his party “has an antisemitism problem,” citing Platner’s rhetoric and that of other Democratic candidates.
Platner is “going to have to speak for himself, and that’s what any candidate, particularly in a high-profile race, is going to be called upon to do,” Jeffries said. He added that the effort to crush antisemitism is an “American issue” and shouldn’t be a partisan issue. “It can’t be a red or blue issue. It’s a red, white, and blue issue.”
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Some Jewish Republicans say Tucker Carlson is no longer a threat. Others worry he’ll run for president.
(JTA) — At the Republican Jewish Coalition’s annual gala last November, much of the discussion centered around right-wing antisemitism. Texas Sen. Ted Cruz warned that there was “an existential crisis in our party” as figures such as Tucker Carlson, Candace Owens and Nick Fuentes built their online audiences, while right-wing firebrand Rep. Randy Fine of Florida slammed Carlson as an antisemite.
At the RJC’s “America 250” gala six months later, the mood was cheerier, and the cautionary words gave way to declarations that emerging antisemitism on the right was being dealt with properly.
Fine reminded the audience at the RJC event held in Manhattan on Sunday that in his speech to the RJC in November, he’d called Carlson “the most dangerous antisemite in America.” Now, he said, “I don’t know that that’s true anymore.”
Fine and other Republicans at the RJC gala told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency that enough Republicans had spoken out against Carlson – most significantly, President Donald Trump – and his ilk to damage their image and dampen the threat they might pose. They also pointed to major GOP critics of Israel who had lost their seats in recent months.
But others have warned that it’s a mistake to celebrate too soon, or think Carlson’s star has really faded, especially amid speculation that he might launch a presidential run as a Republican.
Fine told JTA in a text that he now believes the country’s “most dangerous antisemite” is Zohran Mamdani, New York City’s anti-Zionist mayor. In contrast, he said, Carlson’s impact had only plummeted in the past half-year.
“I think that brand has been destroyed [in] the last six months,” he wrote, attributing the change to politicians like himself calling Carlson out, as well as “the damage he has done to himself.”
A number of speakers at the RJC who lauded Republicans’ response to antisemitism in the party also pointed to the recent primary defeat of outspoken Israel critic Kentucky Rep. Thomas Massie. Brooks said to loud applause that the group spent $5 million in that race, and called the effort “a fight worth having and a victory worth celebrating.”
Speakers also recounted the resignation from Congress of Marjorie Taylor Greene in January, maintaining that the Republican Party is squashing its anti-Israel voices, while the Democratic Party is electing them.
“Being anti-Israel in today’s Republican Party is not — unlike the Democratic Party — a path to success,” said RJC CEO Matt Brooks during his remarks. Brooks later told JTA that Carlson, Owens and Fuentes’ “influence and credibility is less than it’s ever been” and that “they don’t represent” the mainstream of the MAGA movement.
But the Anti-Defamation League warned that it would be a mistake not to see the audience and impact of Carlson in particular as worthy of continued concern.
Oren Segal, the ADL’s vice president of counterextremism and intelligence, said in an interview with JTA that his organization’s biggest worry regarding Carlson is “not merely his relationship with any conservative or elected officials” but also the “normalization” of his views.
Segal pointed to the accusation that an Israeli attack on an American spy ship during the 1967 Six-Day War was intentional — used by conspiracy theorists as proof that the Jewish state cannot be trusted — despite U.S. investigations determining that it was a mistake.
“No one’s been a bigger boon to the USS Liberty Conspiracy of late than Tucker Carlson,” he said.
Segal added that it would be “absurd” to count out anyone as a potential presidential contender, while several political observers have speculated that Carlson may be weighing a run.
New York University professor Scott Galloway recently said on his New York Magazine podcast “Pivot” that the former Fox News host could be a serious contender. There is an “enormous lane,” he assessed, for a candidate who, like Carlson, has “very conservative values, an enormous media platform, an enormous army of acolytes that he could weaponize right away, and is anti-Trump and anti-the war on Iran.”
Some of Carlson’s allies are gunning for a campaign. Speaking Thursday on Russian state television during a trip to St. Petersburg, Owens said she personally did not plan to run for office but said Carlson would be a great candidate for president.
“I would love for him to run,” she said, adding, “I would gratefully get behind someone like Tucker Carlson.”
Back in March, TV host Piers Morgan asked Carlson whether he has White House ambitions. Carlson said that politics is “not what I do,” adding, “The whole idea of, ‘I’ve been a successful cable news host, I should be president!’ — that whole way of thinking is disgusting to me.”
Asked about the possibility of Carlson running for president, Brooks told JTA in a statement that the RJC would continue to push back against Carlson and similar anti-Israel figures.
“There is only one party where American Jews can be proudly pro-Israel, and it is the Republican Party — and those who imperil that will have to come through the RJC first,” Brooks said.
Others who attended Sunday’s RJC gathering felt the possibility of a Carlson candidacy was overblown. Shabbos Kestenbaum, a prominent Jewish conservative activist who sued Harvard University over alleged antisemitism, dismissed concerns that Carlson could be a serious presidential candidate.
In an interview, he pointed out that Carlson’s support of Massie and Ohio gubernatorial candidate Casey Putsch did not yield electoral success. Putsch, who has a history of dog whistling to neo-Nazis, received 17.5% of the vote in Ohio’s Republican gubernatorial primary. Unlike Massie, Carlson did not issue an endorsement for Putsch, but he did host Putsch on his podcast last year.
“His endorsements mean absolutely nothing, and outside of the ‘Podcastistan’ universe, his words carry very little weight,” Kestenbaum said of Carlson.
Brooks said in an interview with JTA that he feels “very pleased” with how the party has responded to voices like Carlson’s. President Donald Trump has publicly cast Carlson aside since his former ally sharpened his objections to the administration’s war in Iran.
“It’s been marginalized,” Brooks said of the party’s anti-Israel wing. “They tried to hijack the term MAGA. Groups like ours, but equally important, the president, has made it clear they are not MAGA.”
Asked about Vice President JD Vance, who has not offered a condemnation of Carlson to some Jewish Republicans’ chagrin, Brooks said, “When you have the president speaking, that’s the voice that matters right now.”
This article originally appeared on JTA.org.
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