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Far-right Israeli minister finds enemy in JDC, the mainstream American Jewish aid group
(JTA) — An American Jewish group that has provided aid to Jewish communities in crisis for more than a century has become the target of one of Israel’s newly empowered far-right ministers.
Itamar Ben-Gvir, who serves as national security minister, said on Wednesday that he was shutting down a program dedicated to reducing violence in Arab Israeli towns. His reason: The program is operated by the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee, which he called a “leftist organization.”
“JDC is a nonpolitical organization and has been so since our founding in 1914,” Michael Geller, a spokesperson for JDC, told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency.
Ben-Gvir’s characterization baffled many across the Jewish communal world who know the JDC as a nonpartisan group with an extensive track record of providing humanitarian aid to Jews in distress.
To them, Ben-Gvir’s criticism of the group is the latest sign that the rupture of political norms in Israel extends beyond the judicial reforms advanced by the government, which have drawn unprecedented protests.
“To call the JDC a left-wing organization is a joke. It is not political in any way,” said Amnon Be’eri-Sulitzeanu, co-CEO of the Abraham Initiatives, a nonprofit that works toward an “equal and shared society” for Jewish and Arab Israelis.
Be’eri-Sulitzeanu, who is Jewish, said he anticipated changes by the right-wing government, which was inaugurated in December. But he was surprised by Ben-Gvir’s announcement.
“I could expect revisiting collaboration with organizations that are branded as civil rights or human rights or Israeli-Palestinian organizations,” he added. “But the JDC — it’s very strange.”
Founded in 1914 by the American Jewish banker Jacob Schiff to aid Jews living in Palestine, the “Joint” has distributed billions of dollars in assistance across 70 countries — including, over the last year, to 43,000 Ukrainian Jews amid the war there. It played a central role in aiding Holocaust survivors following World War II, as well as in the resettlement of Jews from the former Soviet Union.
Among its biggest sources of support are Jewish federations, the nonpartisan umbrella charities found in nearly every major North American Jewish community.
“JDC is an apolitical organization that has worked with every government since the establishment of the State of Israel, providing critical services to the elderly, youth-at-risk, people with disabilities and other underserved populations across all sectors, including Haredim and Arab-Israelis,” the Jewish Federations of North America said in a statement. “JDC’s activities are a living and breathing example of the Jewish values of tikkun olam and tzedakah that guide Jewish Federations’ work every day,” Hebrew phrases that connote the Jewish imperative to repair the world, as well as charity.
JDC staff packing matzahs and haggadahs for online seders in Odessa, Ukraine, April 7, 2022. (JDC)
In Israel, the group funds and operates efforts to help needy populations — including immigrants, the elderly, people with disabilities and people living in poverty. Those efforts often involve working with the government, which in 2007 gave the JDC Israel’s most prestigious prize for its work. This year, according to a spokesman, the group is spending $129 million on Israel initiatives.
The JDC’s government-funded programs include the anti-violence effort that Ben-Gvir is targeting. It was made possible last year due to nearly $1 billion in funding to curb crime in Arab communities by the previous governing coalition, which was centrist. The allocation followed lobbying by Arab and civil society organizations, including the Abraham Initiatives, which is now monitoring how the money is being used as well as its impact.
Arab citizens of Israel make up 84% of crime victims despite comprising just 20% of the population, according to government data released last year that showed a sharp rise in the proportion of Arab Israelis who had experienced violent crime.
Many in Arab communities have called for heightened law enforcement and have charged Israeli police with making inadequate efforts to keep their communities safe. This week, commenting on the shooting death of an Arab Israeli woman, Arab Israeli opposition lawmaker Ahmad Tibi accused Ben-Gvir of being “occupied with other matters,” such as clashes with the attorney general and police officials in Tel Aviv. “Maybe the time has come for senior officials to demonstrate responsibility when it comes to crime organizations and weapons running rampant,” Tibi said.
Other initiatives have aimed to tackle the violence in ways that go beyond policing. The program that Ben-Gvir said he is shutting down is one of them. Called Stop the Bleeding, it involves multiple government ministries as well as local community groups and education efforts and has operated in seven cities with large Arab populations, including a Bedouin town and Lod, a city with significant Arab organized crime networks that also has a large Jewish population.
Be’eri-Sulitzeanu said the program was already starting to bear fruit and had contributed to a slowdown in a multi-year rise in murders. Canceling the program, he said, reflects the current government’s general approach to tackling Israel’s problems.
“It’s not about collaboration. It’s not about hearing the concerns and pain and hopes and needs of the Arab community,” he said. “It’s about doing everything unilaterally, and really without a lot of care for the lives of those people. I think that’s what we are watching.”
MK Ahmad Tibi attends a meeting at the Knesset in Jerusalem, Dec. 6, 2022. (Olivier Fitoussi/Flash90)
A year ago, around the time when the previous government awarded the Stop the Bleeding contract to the JDC, Bezalel Smotrich, a key Ben-Gvir ally who was then an opposition lawmaker and now serves alongside Ben-Gvir as finance minister, proposed that Israel create a “command center” of “all of the relevant entities” that provide humanitarian assistance to Ukrainian Jewish refugees. Included on his list, alongside the Israeli Foreign Ministry and Red Cross: the JDC.
The JDC is not the first mainstream group to be targeted by far-right members of Israel’s new right-wing government, whose signature legislative effort aims to sap the power and independence of the country’s judiciary. That legislation has given rise to a sweeping protest movement and to grave warnings about Israel’s future from a broad range of public figures — including elder statesmen, foreign governments and religious leaders.
Avi Maoz, the leader of the anti-LGBTQ Noam Party who briefly held a leadership role in Israel’s Education Ministry, compiled a list of American and British groups that he believes are trying to impose their liberal values on Israeli schoolchildren. “We must protect our people and our state from the infiltration of the alien bodies that arrive from foreign countries, foreign bodies, foreign foundations,” Maoz once said. Maoz has since resigned from that role, saying that he did not think he was being sufficiently empowered to fulfill his goals by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s government.
But Be’eri-Sulitzeanu said he remains concerned about civil-society programs, especially those falling under the purview of far-right ministers including Ben-Gvir or those funded by American Jews, whom some on the right perceive as universally liberal.
People who are paying attention to local governance in Israel expect further tensions around initiatives that do not match Ben-Gvir’s attitudes about harsh policing. Ben-Gvir wants officers to have the right to shoot Arabs who throw stones, has called for a crackdown on anti-government protesters and is increasingly clashing with police officials who believe his orders could jeopardize public safety. Multiple former police commissioners have called for his dismissal.
“Ben-Gvir has his own political agenda and he has his own ax to grind, and at the moment, I think he’s not keen on developing services of the Arab population, either in security or juvenile delinquency or education,” said Amos Avgar, who worked for the JDC in Israel, Russia and the United States for 30 years until 2010, including as chief programming officer.
Avgar emphasized that the JDC has always studiously avoided political activity. “If there’s one thing that the JDC is not, it is not political,” he said. “It always shied [away] from anything that had the smell of politics and never dealt with any project by political agenda.”
It’s unclear how quickly Ben-Gvir’s announcement, made during a government meeting and first reported by Israel’s public broadcaster, will ultimately translate into changes. Geller, the JDC spokesman, said the organization had learned about the criticism only from the media, not from Ben-Gvir’s office. Later, amid an outcry, Ben-Gvir’s office said the funding decision had followed a review of contracts that revealed missing documentation from the JDC, a charge that the JDC denied.
Amnon-Sulitzeanu said he didn’t have high hopes for the program’s future.
“I think the first [characterization] is unfortunately going to be the correct one — that he is actually intending to stop it, which is very unfortunate because it is among the more serious programs that are willing to deal with this catastrophe,” he said. “And it shows again that the current minister is not so much interested in saving lives of Arab citizens.”
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Why Orthodox Jews are pushing back against permanent daylight saving time
(JTA) — For many Orthodox Jews, a typical winter weekday begins early: head to synagogue, gather in a minyan for morning prayers, then rush off to work.
Orthodox Jewish groups say a bill that would make daylight saving time permanent could upend that routine by pushing winter sunrises — and the earliest permissible time for some prayers — an hour later.
Agudath Israel of America is among the groups urging the Senate to reject legislation that would make daylight saving time permanent nationwide, arguing that the change would create both public safety risks and significant challenges for Orthodox Jewish religious life.
The House passed the Sunshine Protection Act on Tuesday by a wide bipartisan margin. In a statement issued after the vote, Agudath Israel said it understood the appeal of ending the twice-yearly clock changes but opposed making daylight saving time permanent.
The Orthodox advocacy organization warned that permanent daylight saving time would push winter sunrises past 9 a.m. in some parts of the country, forcing many children to travel to school before dawn. It also said the later sunrise would make it difficult for observant Jews to attend morning synagogue services and still arrive at work or school on time, because Jewish law prohibits reciting key morning prayers before prescribed times tied to sunrise.
“The extension of DST will create an extreme hardship on observant Jews,” the organization said. “It would be extraordinarily difficult — if not impossible — to arrive on time for a job and will affect the start time of our schools.”
The Orthodox Union and the Coalition for Jewish Values have also come out against the measure.
In a column for Chabad.org that didn’t take a position on the bill, Menachem Posner also wrote that the change would present a challenge in parts of the country for morning minyan, the 10-person prayer quorum. But he also noted an upside to the extension of daylight saving: a later start time for Shabbat on short winter Fridays.
Shabbat begins at sundown, which during the winter can fall before 4:00 p.m. in parts of the country. “With DST, however, this will be shifted one hour later, so that even on the darkest day of winter, Jews will have one more hour to prepare for Shabbat,” Posner wrote.
Orthodox parties in Israel have also made an issue of changes to the daylight saving calendar. In 2011, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s cabinet unanimously approved extending daylight saving time until the first Sunday after Oct. 1, despite objections from haredi parties. The change brought Israel’s clock closer to European practice while still acknowledging Orthodox concerns about morning prayer and a later start time to Yom Kippur that they argued would make the fast more difficult.
This week Agudath Israel also pointed to the brief U.S. experiment with year-round daylight saving time during the 1970s energy crisis, when Congress repealed the policy after widespread public dissatisfaction over dark winter mornings.
The organization said it hoped the Senate would weigh the broader consequences of permanent daylight saving time, including alternatives such as permanent standard time or retaining the current system of seasonal clock changes.
This article originally appeared on JTA.org.
The post Why Orthodox Jews are pushing back against permanent daylight saving time appeared first on The Forward.
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Colombia and Slovenia recently recognized a Palestinian state. Now they’re moving their embassies to Jerusalem.
(JTA) — JERUSALEM — Colombia, the world’s second most populous Spanish-speaking nation after Mexico, has little in common with landlocked Slovenia, the second-smallest of the six republics that once comprised Yugoslavia.
But when it comes to their stance on Israel, the parallels are hard to ignore.
Within one month of each other, leftist, pro-Palestine governments in both countries were voted out of office and replaced by right-wing leaders who vowed not only to restore full diplomatic relations with Israel but also inaugurate embassies in Jerusalem.
In fact, Colombia’s next foreign minister, Omar Bola Escobar, promised exactly that Wednesday during a meeting in Washington, D.C., with his Israeli counterpart, Gideon Saar. That followed a declaration by President-elect Abelardo de la Espriella that Colombia would establish relations “like never before” with Israel once he takes the oath of office on Aug. 7.
In June 2024, the parliament of Slovenia — an Alpine republic of 2.1 million — voted to recognize a Palestinian state only a week after Spain, Ireland and Norway had done the same thing. But half a year later, it went further. Slovenian public broadcaster RTV, citing the ongoing war in Gaza, became the first in Europe to demand Israel’s exclusion from the 2025 Eurovision Song Contest.
Then last year, Slovenia under Prime Minister Robert Golob banned all imports from Jewish settlements in the West Bank as well as all weapons trade with Israel — the first member of the European Union to do so. And this past June, RTV not only boycotted Eurovision altogether but aired films about Palestine instead.
That anti-Israel campaign made life uncomfortable for the country’s 100 or so Jews, said Robert Waltl, president of the Ljubljana-based Liberal Jewish Community of Slovenia.
But on May 22, Janez Jansa — leader of the Slovenian Democratic Party and an admirer of U.S. President Donald Trump — formed a winning coalition with other right-wing parties following the country’s parliamentary elections, clearing the way for Jansa to replace Golob as prime minister.
In a striking about-face, Janza immediately announced that Slovenia would cancel its previous recognition of Palestine and move its embassy in Israel from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem. That would make it the first country in the 27-member EU to take that step (though not the first country in Europe: Kosovo already has an embassy in Jerusalem).
Likewise, Israel will open an embassy in Ljubljana for the first time.
“That’s an important and welcome milestone — and something many of us have hoped to see for a long time,” Waltl explained in an email. “That said, I still feel it’s too early for me to draw broader conclusions about what this will mean in practice for bilateral relations, or for the Jewish community. I’d rather judge by actions than by first impressions.”
Ernest Herzog, executive director for operations at the World Jewish Congress, said Slovenia’s new direction is a lot more than a foreign policy adjustment; it carries huge historic significance.
“Israel was among the first countries to recognize Slovenia’s independence in 1991” following the breakup of Yugoslavia, he said. Opening an embassy in Jerusalem “would send a clear signal that Slovenia views Israel not only as a key regional partner but also as an important ally in defending the rules-based democratic order at a time of growing geopolitical instability.”
In Colombia, the shift is even more dramatic. Famous for world-class coffee, salsa dancing, beautiful beaches and biodiversity, it’s home to maybe 5,000 Jews out of 54 million inhabitants.
President Gustavo Petro — Colombia’s first left-wing leader in recent memory — is a former M-19 guerrilla leader. He became mayor of Bogotá in 2011 and president in 2022. On May 2, 2024, in the midst of worsening conditions in Gaza, Petro severed diplomatic relations with Israel and stopped lucrative exports of coal to Israel, as well as all weapons deals.
Margarita Manjarrez, Colombia’s first female ambassador to Israel, stayed on until June 30 of that year, at which point she closed the embassy in Tel Aviv (though consular services remain open).
Petro, constitutionally limited to one term, backed Iván Cepeda as his successor. But Cepeda lost to right-wing businessman Abelardo de la Espriella by the narrowest margin in Colombian election history.
Widely supported by Colombia’s small but wealthy Jewish community, the new president will be sworn in Aug. 7. One of his first acts, he said, will be to open an embassy in Jerusalem. That would make it the ninth embassy in Israel’s capital, along with those of the United States, Guatemala, Honduras, Kosovo, Papua New Guinea, Paraguay, Fiji and Argentina.
Manjarrez, now Bogotá’s ambassador to Singapore, declined to comment. But Harry Toledo, the Israeli-based director of Fuente Latina — an NGO that provides pro-Israel Middle East coverage for Spanish-language media in the United States and Latin America — says he’s not surprised by any of this.
“I don’t think the issue was Israel,” said Toledo, who is originally from Medellín but has spent the last 24 years living in Tel Aviv. “As we’ve seen in recent years, all these governments are taking advantage of the situation here to distract from their problems at home. In Spain, we clearly saw that Sánchez is using the Palestinians to dispel criticism of his own government. Petro in Colombia did the same thing.”
Toledo, one of thousands of Colombians living in Israel, noted that the Trump administration revoked Petro’s U.S. visa last year, and then later added him, his wife, his son and his interior minister to its Specially Designated Nationals list due to their alleged illicit drug trafficking.
“Petro was a criminal and a genocidal guerrilla. He was a real antisemite who even posted ‘Heil Hitler’ online,” said Toledo. “It’s not like he was hiding his position against Jews.”
Michael Shifter, former president of the Inter-American Dialogue — a D.C. think tank — noted that 12 of Latin America’s last 15 elections have been won by right-wing candidates. Voters in only Brazil, Mexico and Uruguay elected leftists.
Shifter said it’s not so much an ideological conservative turn that’s fueling this wave — but more a profound desire for change.
“The recent electoral swings are better understood as a reflection of widespread frustration with governments of different political stripes that have failed to address persistent economic, security and governance challenges,” he said.
Shifter is no stranger to the region. In the early 1980s, when the Dialogue was founded, Latin America’s biggest economies — Argentina, Brazil and Mexico — were cash-strapped, debt-ridden and beholden to the IMF. And the United States under President Ronald Reagan was actively supporting the government of El Salvador in its bloody war against leftist insurgents, while at the same time secretly funding contras hoping to overthrow Marxist Sandinistas in neighboring Nicaragua.
The only country doing well at the time was energy-rich Venezuela — which today is considered a failed state.
Mike Skol, a former U.S. ambassador to Venezuela who has extensive business ties in Colombia, said de la Espriella’s election is certainly part of that Latin rightward shift against socialism.
The question, he poses, is whether he’ll behave more like Argentina’s Javier Milei, a libertarian who is an outspoken supporter of Israel, or El Salvador’s Nayib Bukele — a hugely popular president of Palestinian origin who has on more than one occasion called himself “the world’s coolest dictator.”
“The White House is looking for outspoken allies — on Venezuela, on Cuba, on Israel, and on oil,” Skol said in an email. “Expect Colombia to be unequivocal in all. The payoff will be an important pillar of regime success.”
Ultimately, the real prize for Israel would be a full restoration of ties with oil-rich Venezuela, which were broken by Hugo Chávez in 2009 following an Israel incursion into Gaza that year. After Trump’s ousting of former president Nicolás Maduro last year and his tacit support for Maduro’s successor, Delcy Rodríguez, anything appears possible.
Just last week, Rodríguez was photographed in a once-unthinkable meeting with uniformed IDF brass overseeing Israeli rescue efforts in the wake of two powerful earthquakes that have devastated Venezuela’s coastal region. The 30-member team’s efforts mark a rare diplomatic thaw following years of official Venezuelan hostility toward Israel.
This raises the inevitable question: Could the Israeli flag one day flutter from an embassy in Caracas?
“Yes, I think it is very possible that Venezuela under Delcy will restore relations with Israel,” Skol said, noting that the U.S. secretary of state is seen as running the show in Venezuela since Maduro’s ouster. “All Marco Rubio has to do is ask.”
This article originally appeared on JTA.org.
The post Colombia and Slovenia recently recognized a Palestinian state. Now they’re moving their embassies to Jerusalem. appeared first on The Forward.
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He organized World Cup viewings in Gaza. Then an Israeli airstrike killed him
Soccer is a universal language. Billions of people around the world watch the game, which means that soccer fans everywhere can appreciate someone like Mohammed al-Wahidi, who enabled others to participate in that shared global experience.
Al-Wahidi was a Palestinian aid worker who organized public screenings of the FIFA World Cup in Gaza. He’s emerged from anonymity for the worst reason: An Israeli airstrike killed him last week, while he was on his way to watch a screening of the knockout stage match between Argentina and Egypt.
With the world’s attention focused on the World Cup in North America, al-Wahidi’s killing briefly brought Gaza back into the global frame.
For the people of Gaza who attended the screenings organized by al-Wahidi, World Cup matches offer a brief respite from the daily struggle to survive, the loss of loved ones, and the absence of any political horizon of hope. Cheering for Egypt against Argentina could not end Gazans’ suffering, but it provided a much-needed moment of escape. Until it didn’t.
It’s common to hear that “politics has no place in sports” — although frequently the governments and sporting institutions that make this claim, while recognizing soccer’s symbolic power, are really arguing that sports should not be used to advance political goals they oppose.
Al-Wahidi’s death made headlines because that refrain simply isn’t true. In fact, it’s both legitimate and necessary to politicize al-Wahidi’s death even further.
In reporting on al-Wahidi’s death, mainstream media outlets — including the BBC, The New York Times, and The Los Angeles Times — situated it within its broader context. They reminded readers that he was only one of more than 1,000 Palestinians killed by Israel since a ceasefire was announced 10 months ago. His death became an opportunity to highlight that, for Palestinians in Gaza, the so-called ceasefire has amounted to little more than a reduction in the scale of daily killing and ongoing dispossession.
At the same time, some Israeli officials have openly declared their intention to promote what they call the “voluntary migration” of Palestinians from Gaza. Violence against Palestinians — including the killing of al-Wahidi — is a central mechanism for creating the conditions under which such migration becomes possible.
The politics of soccer
The chronology of state violence and the chronology of soccer usually unfold independently, but at times they intersect. When they do, that intersection reveals soccer’s symbolic power, which manifests itself in diverse — and sometimes contradictory — ways.
In 2024, an Israeli airstrike killed Hani al-Masdar, an assistant coach of the Palestinian men’s Olympic national football team, earning an outpouring of international mourning. Both al-Wahidi and al-Masdar were humanized because of their publicly visible connection to soccer. Unlike most Palestinian victims, they had their names and faces shared broadly in Western media, and their deaths briefly resonated far beyond Gaza.
But they’re among more than 900 Palestinian athletes and coaches killed by Israel since October, 2023. The fact that most of us have only heard two of their names, at most, is a tragedy.
Israel has long turned to soccer as a public relations instrument, a way to divert international attention from the long-term process of Palestinian dispossession.
As one senior Israeli minister said after inviting the Argentine team, with star Lionel Messi, to play in Israel in 2018: “When we fight over moving embassies to Jerusalem, there is no question. One of the most popular players in the world, who has billions of followers—surely, it is the right thing to see him playing in Jerusalem. What better public relations tool do we have?” (The match was eventually cancelled, after pushback from pro-Palestinian parties.)
FIFA has occasionally lent credibility to these efforts. Despite the fact that official United Nations bodies have described Israel’s actions in Gaza as genocide, and that Israeli and international human rights organizations have documented systematic abuses against Palestinians, FIFA has declined to apply the same standard to Israel as it has to other countries, like Russia, which it suspended in 2022 following the full-scale invasion of Ukraine. In doing so, it has contributed to the normalization of violence against Palestinians.
In an awkward attempt to appease critics, FIFA even proposed that an under-15 match between Israel and Palestine serve as the opening fixture of a new global youth tournament in the United States this September — a proposal that many Palestinians regarded as adding insult to injury.
Palestinian activists, by contrast, have made calls for soccer-related sanctions against Israel an important component of efforts to raise international awareness of the Palestinian struggle for justice. One of their most notable successes came in 2018, when they persuaded Argentina to cancel that planned friendly match against Israel in Jerusalem. Although repeated attempts to suspend Israel from international soccer have so far failed, such efforts are likely to continue.
The possibility of sporting sanctions
Israel has faced few meaningful consequences for these policies, and without sustained international pressure, like in South Africa decades ago. they are unlikely to change. One possible form of such pressure is the imposition of sporting sanctions — a prospect that, for understandable reasons, Israeli officials have worked hard to prevent.
But as long as it doesn’t seriously consider those sanctions, the international sporting community sends the message that there is no meaningful price for the continuous and systematic violation of Palestinian human rights.
Al-Wahidi dedicated himself to bringing the world’s game to Gaza. The symbolic significance of his death should now help bring the world’s attention to Gaza — and to the question of whether Israel should continue to enjoy the privileges of international sport while denying Palestinians their most basic rights.
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