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Far-right Israeli minister urges loyalty as his US visit draws protests, boycotts and arrests
WASHINGTON (JTA) — For more than a week, American Jewish groups have debated how and whether to welcome Israel’s far-right finance minister, Bezalel Smotrich, as he visits Washington, D.C.
On Sunday night, that debate culminated in protests, arrests, boycotts — and a speech by Smotrich urging American Jews to remain loyal to the Jewish state.
Inside the Grand Hyatt Washington, Smotrich spoke to Israel Bonds, a U.S. organization that encourages investment in Israel. In the lobby of the hotel, left-wing groups protested, sang songs and, in some cases, were escorted out in handcuffs. And outside the hotel, in the cold rain, hundreds of liberal Jews gathered to declare their dedication to the Jewish community — and to protest Smotrich and Israel’s government.
“This is a moral emergency,” said Sheila Katz, CEO of the National Council of Jewish Women, in a speech at the protest. “We must name this deep pain that so many of us feel for what’s happening in Israel right now, a place that we love. It is with that love that we come here tonight, standing with our Israeli siblings, saying there is nothing normal, nothing acceptable about this moment.”
The Israeli government is advancing legislation that would transform Israel’s system of government and has drawn sweeping protests across the country as well as concern by foreign investors and financial watchdogs. But little sense of emergency was present in the remarks given by Smotrich, who called on his audience to stay the course. The event was closed to press.
“This moment in the history of Israel is a miracle,” he said in remarks released by his office. “And for more than 70 years, Israel Bonds investors like you have helped make our Jewish State a reality. But, there is still work to be done, so don’t stop investing!”
Outside the conference room where Smotrich spoke, the left-wing Jewish group IfNotNow protested by singing and reciting maariv, the Jewish evening prayers. The group said seven of its members were arrested by police. The anti-Zionist group Jewish Voice for Peace also protested.
The dueling speeches and actions on Sunday came at a time when even the staunchest advocates for Israel are publicly criticizing its government. They serve as the latest evidence that the coalition led by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is upending the Diaspora’s relationship with Israel like no government before it.
Much of the criticism has surrounded the government’s signature legislative effort, which would sap the Supreme Court of much of its power and independence. And a fresh round of criticism came this month after Smotrich called for a Palestinian village to be wiped out — a statement he has since walked back repeatedly and at length, including during his Israel Bonds address. In the past, Smotrich has also made statements denigrating LGBTQ people and Arabs.
Major Jewish establishment organizations and leaders, once loath to publicly criticize Israel, are expressing alarm about the judicial legislation as well as Smotrich’s incendiary rhetoric. They are watching as the country is roiled by frequent massive demonstrations that have brought hundreds of thousands of Israelis into the streets.
That criticism has manifested itself in a widespread boycott of Smotrich’s visit — a change of pace for Jewish organizations that are generally eager to meet with senior Israeli officials. The American Israel Public Affairs Committee is snubbing Smotrich, and so is the Biden administration. His only known quasi-governmental interaction this week will be a guided tour of the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum.
Aside from his Israel Bonds appearance, Smotrich is meeting with officials from just two Jewish organizations, the Orthodox Union and the right-wing Zionist Organization of America, one of the few U.S. groups to support the judicial reform.
“The hateful views long expressed by Minister Smotrich are abhorrent, are opposed by a majority of Israeli citizens, and run contrary to Jewish values,” the Jewish Community Relations Council of Greater Washington said in a statement. “No public servant should ever condone or incite hatred or hate-motivated violence, and when they do, they will be fiercely condemned by a wide swath of American Jewry.”
Those comments were echoed by the speakers at the protest outside the Grand Hyatt, which was organized by an array of progressive Jewish groups. Despite their attitude toward the Israeli official speaking inside the hotel, the event was suffused with patriotic fervor, with piles of Israeli flags for protesters to wave. It finished with a rendition of the Israeli national anthem, “Hatikvah.”
“Anybody who has authority in the community has to be ne’eman, to be faithful, has to be somebody who the community can trust like Moshe,” said Rabbi Jill Jacobs, CEO of the liberal rabbinic human rights group T’ruah, using the Hebrew name for Moses and quoting a rabbinic teaching.
Jacobs, who is a longtime proponent of curbing Americans’ giving to right-wing extremist groups in Israel, went on: “We’re here to say that the current leadership of Israel — including, of course, Bezalel Smotrich, speaking inside this hotel — they are not ne’eman, they are not people we can trust, they are not people who are leading Israel in the right direction.”
Israeli Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich addresses Israel Bonds in Washington D.C., March 12, 2023. (Office of the Finance Minister)
Smotrich emphasized the same themes — Jewish unity and mutual responsibility — but toward different ends. He thanked his audience of investors in Israel bonds “for the unquestionable connection between Israel and Diaspora Judaism.”
“We must not forget that we are brothers,” he said. “Despite all of the differences, despite the many colors that make up the Jewish mosaic, we are one.”
He also once again apologized for his call to “wipe out” Huwara, a Palestinian West Bank village where Israeli settlers rioted recently after a Palestinian gunman there killed two Israelis. He said his words “created a completely mistaken impression.”
“I want to say a few words about the elephant in the room,” Smotrich said. “I stand before you now as always committed to the security of the state of Israel, to our shared values, and to the highest moral commitment of our armed forces to protect every innocent life, Jew or Arab.”
If anyone is finding new allies, it is not Smotrich but his opponents, who run the gamut from the Jewish left to once-reliable mainstays of the right. Miriam Adelson, the widow of casino magnate, Republican kingmaker and pro-Israel donor Sheldon Adelson, said on Sunday that Netanyahu’s rush to enact judicial reform was “hasty, injudicious and irresponsible.”
Those changes galvanized the protesters. “We are the Jewish establishment!” Jacobs said.
Jacobs said later in an interview that the “grounds are shifting” among American Jews. “Some of us here and in Israel have been on the ground fighting against the occupation and the attacks on democracy for years and years, and now it’s becoming clear to more and more American Jews and Israeli Jews that that was the right message,” she said.
The issue of whether to raise Israel’s occupation of the West Bank has been a matter of debate amid the protests in Israel, where there have been reports that organizers have discouraged the display of Palestinian flags, fearing that Netanyahu will weaponize any sign of solidarity with the Palestinians.
The tension over whether the Palestinians should be mentioned played out before the protest in Washington as well, at a press conference featuring philanthropists and Israeli businessmen who said the judicial reforms were threatening Israel’s economic standing.
The event started with a rendition of “Oseh Shalom,” the Jewish prayer for peace, composed by the Israeli Jewish Renewal group Nava Tehila.
Susie Gelman, a philanthropist who chairs the Israel Policy Forum, which supports the establishment of a Palestinian state alongside Israel, said one of the key roles of the Israeli Supreme Court in recent years has been to protect some Palestinian rights and slow Israeli efforts to increase sovereignty in the West Bank.
“You can’t entirely separate judicial overhaul from the question of what’s happening with Palestinians in the West Bank in particular,” she said.
But Offir Gutelzon, a Silicon Valley tech entrepreneur who helped found UnXeptable, an anti-Netanyahu protest movement by Israelis living abroad, differed, saying the protesters’ top priority should be to save the courts’ independence. Achieving that goal, he said, required maintaining unity across the Israeli political spectrum.
“We have to save our Israeli democracy and then we can move on and talk about” the Palestinians, Gutelzon said.
Still, at the protest, speakers spoke of the occupation and its effect on the Palestinians, and there were no objections. Gutelzon led an Israeli contingent in registering cheers for every pronouncement by American liberals.
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Trump Says US Will Sell F-35s to Saudi Arabia Ahead of White House Talks With Crown Prince
US President Donald Trump and Saudi Crown Prince and Prime Minister Mohammed Bin Salman shake hands during a Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) signing ceremony at the Royal Court in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, May 13, 2025. Photo: REUTERS/Brian Snyder
US President Donald Trump on Monday said he plans to approve the sale of US-made F-35 fighter jets to Saudi Arabia, announcing his intention one day before he hosts Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman at the White House in Washington, DC.
The high-stakes meeting comes as rumors swirl about the possibility of Israel and Saudi Arabia, long-time foes who in recent years have increasingly cooperated behind closed doors, normalizing ties under a US-brokered deal.
“They want to buy. They are a great ally. I will say that we will be doing that,” Trump told reporters in the Oval Office. “We will be selling them F-35s.”
Reuters reported earlier this month that Saudi Arabia has requested to buy as many as 48 F-35 fighter jets in a potential multibillion-dollar deal that cleared a key Pentagon hurdle.
Such a sale would be a policy shift for Washington, which primarily sells the F-35 to formal military allies, such as NATO members or Japan. Israel is the only country in the Middle East that has the elite fighter jets, in accordance with longstanding bipartisan policy for US administrations and the Congress to maintain Israel’s “qualitative military edge” in the region. Saudi Arabia’s acquiring them would at least somewhat change the military balance of power.
However, Axios reported over the weekend that Israel does not oppose the US sale of F-35s to Saudi Arabia, the world’s top oil producer — as long as it’s conditioned on Riyadh normalizing relations with Jerusalem.
“We told the Trump administration that the supply of F-35s to Saudi Arabia needs to be subject to Saudi normalization with Israel,” an anonymous Israeli official told the news outlet, adding that giving the fighter jets without getting any significant diplomatic progress would be “a mistake and counterproductive.”
It has been widely reported that Israel and Saudi Arabia were on the verge of a deal to establish formal diplomatic ties until the discussions were derailed by Hamas’s Oct. 7, 2023, massacre across southern Israel and the ensuing war in Gaza. Saudi officials have said that they will only agree to a normalization deal if Israel commits to a path toward a Palestinian state.
Saudi Arabia’s close partners Bahrain and the United Arab Emirates were among the Arab states to normalize ties with Israel in 2020 as part of the Trump-brokered Abraham Accords. Trump has said he is intent on expanding the accords to include other countries, above all Saudi Arabia.
“I hope that Saudi Arabia will be going into the Abraham Accords fairly shortly,” Trump told reporters on Friday.
The F-35 deal and possible Israeli-Saudi normalization are expected to be central to the agenda when bin Salman, widely known by his initials MBS, meets Trump.
It will be the crown prince’s first trip to the US since the death of prominent Saudi critic Jamal Khashoggi by Saudi agents in Istanbul in 2018. US intelligence concluded that bin Salman approved the capture or killing of Khashoggi, although Saudi Arabia’s de facto leader has denied ordering the operation.
Seven years later, Washington and Riyadh, longtime strategic partners, are looking forward, with bin Salman set to receive full ceremonial honors at the White House. Their meeting comes six months after Trump secured a $600 billion commitment from Saudi Arabia to invest in the United States.
Beyond investment, Riyadh has been eager to reach a security agreement with Washington expanding arms sales such as advanced missile-defense systems and drones, and deeper military training partnerships. Most importantly for Riyadh, however, is the US offering certain guarantees ensuring the kingdom’s security. Many observers have suggested that such a defense deal could be part of a broader arrangement to broker Saudi-Israel normalization.
Trump and bin Salman are also expected to discuss broadening ties in commerce, technology, and potentially nuclear energy.
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Catholic Church in Berlin Condemns Antisemitism as Anti-Israel Agitators Vandalize Historic Crucifix
Illustrative: Hamas supporters at a rally in Cologne, Germany, on Oct. 22, 2023. Photo: Reuters/Ying Tang
As antisemitic incidents continue to rise in Germany, the Catholic Church in Berlin has taken a firmer stance against anti-Jewish hatred by issuing new guidelines prohibiting its members from expressing racist, antisemitic, or extremist views.
On Saturday, the Archdiocese of Berlin, the governing body of the city’s Catholic Church, announced that all candidates for leadership positions must sign a special declaration rejecting racism, antisemitism, and extremist views.
“With this decision, responsibility falls where it belongs. Anyone seeking to serve on the diocesan committees and run in the elections must actively uphold the values of our Church,” Karlies Abmeier, president of the Diocesan Council, said in a statement.
The Catholic Church’s latest move aims to ensure that anyone seeking a leadership role within the institution commits to rejecting “racism, antisemitism, ethnic nationalism, and hostility toward democracy.”
“It is crucial for us that such statements never come from those in positions of power within our Church,” Marcel Hoyer, executive director of the committee, told the German Press Agency.
Candidates would also be prohibited from belonging to any party or organization that the German Office for the Protection of the Constitution has designated as extremist.
The archdiocese’s announcement comes amid a climate of rising hostility and radicalization in Germany, where the local Jewish community has increasingly become a target.
Last week, anti-Israel protesters vandalized a church with paint in the Vogelsberg district of Hesse in central Germany.
According to local media reports, a crucifix was vandalized with antisemitic graffiti, including the slogans “Free Palestine” and “Jesus is Palestinian,” and the church walls were also defaced with red paint.
Pastor Ingmar Bartsch denounced the incident, describing himself as “angry and bewildered.”
“What affects me most is that it’s a historic depiction of Jesus, at least 200 to 300 years old, and truly one of a kind,” Bartsch told the German newspaper Bild.
He explained that the crucifix will require a professional restoration, with initial damage estimates reaching into the thousands of dollars.
Local police have launched an investigation into the incident as a case of property damage, noting that the items involved hold religious significance.
As the restoration process begins, Bartsch said the church will remain closed for now, reopening only for religious services.
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Columbia University Rejects Latest Israel Divestment Proposal
Columbia University on Sept. 2, 2025. Photo: REUTERS/Ryan Murphy
Columbia University said on Friday that it will not divest from Israel and other corporations which anti-Zionist activists denounced for selling materials to the Israeli military.
The university’s Advisory Committee on Socially Responsible Investing (ACSRI) stated its position on the matter as a response to a group which submitted three proposals calling for the policy in December 2024, when the institution’s campus was being roiled by anti-Israel protests and a deluge of antisemitic incidents. The group had charged that Israel is guilty of “human rights violations” and “war crimes.”
Israel argued it went to unprecedented lengths to try and avoid civilian casualties during the latest war in Gaza, noting its efforts to evacuate areas before it targeted them and to warn residents of impending military operations with leaflets, text messages, and other forms of communication. It noted that Hamas, the Palestinian terrorist group it was targeting, embedded its fighters within Gaza’s civilian population and commandeered civilian facilities like hospitals, schools, and mosques to run operations and direct attacks.
In three separate statements, Columbia said that the group behind the boycott proposals lacks consensus support on campus and has reduced one of the most complex geopolitical conflicts in the world history to “vague and excessively broad” categories, sewing partisan division and confusion where a university would, ideally, aim to promote clarity and sober analysis of fact.
Additionally, ASCRI said that the group’s proposals are of “similar … substance” to other ideas put forth by the notorious Columbia University Apartheid Divest (CUAD) group, a spinoff of Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP) which Columbia resolved neither to recognize nor correspond with due to its culpability in antisemitic assaults, hate speech, and a slew of illegal occupations of campus property.
“As noted in the ASCRI’s decision on the CUAD proposal last year, members of the university have a wide range of views on contentious issues,” ASCRI wrote. “Hence, it will be difficult or unprecedented for the university, with such diverse views, to sponsor shareholder proposals of the kind this proposal envisages.”
It added, “There is significant opposition in the Columbia University community to divesting from companies that are involved in Israel, as evidenced by the actions of many students, faculty, and alumni.”
Columbia University has begun implementing a series of reforms it says will address campus antisemitism.
In a statement issued in July, university president Claire Shipman said the institution will hire new coordinators to oversee complaints alleging civil rights violations; facilitate “deeper education on antisemitism” by creating new training programs for students, faculty, and staff; and adopt the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA) definition of antisemitism — a tool that advocates say is necessary for identifying what constitutes antisemitic conduct and speech.
Shipman also announced new partnerships with the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) and other Jewish groups while delivering a major blow to the anti-Zionist movement on campus by vowing never to “recognize or meet with” CUAD, a pro-Hamas campus group which has serially disrupted academic life with unauthorized, surprise demonstrations attended by non-students.
“I would also add that making these announcements in no way suggests we are finished with the work,” Shipman continued. “In a recent discussion, a faculty member and I agreed that antisemitism at this institution has existed, perhaps less overtly, for a long while, and the work of dismantling it, especially through education and understanding will take time. It will likely require more reform. But I’m hopeful that in doing this work, as we consider and even debate it, we will start to promote healing and to chart our path forward.”
Columbia University had, until that point, yielded some of the most indelible examples of anti-Jewish hatred in higher education since Hamas’s Oct. 7, 2023, massacre in southern Israel set off explosions of anti-Zionist activity at colleges and universities across the US. Such incidents included a student who proclaimed that Zionist Jews deserve to be murdered and are lucky he is not doing so himself and administrative officials who, outraged at the notion that Jews organized to resist anti-Zionism, participated in a group chat in which each member took turns sharing antisemitic tropes that described Jews as privileged and grafting.
Amid these incidents, the university struggled to contain CUAD, which in late January committed infrastructural sabotage by flooding the toilets of the Columbia School of International and Public Affairs (SIPA) with concrete. Numerous reports indicate the attack may have been the premeditated result of planning sessions which took place many months ago at an event held by Alpha Delta Phi (ADP) — a literary society, according to the Washington Free Beacon. During the event, ADP reportedly distributed literature dedicated to “aspiring revolutionaries” who wish to commit seditious acts. Additionally, a presentation was given in which complete instructions for the exact kind of attack which struck Columbia were shared with students.
Columbia has since paid over $200 million to settle claims that it exposed Jewish students, faculty, and staff to antisemitic discrimination and harassment — a deal which secures the release of over $1 billion dollars the Trump administration impounded to pressure the institution to address the issue.
“Columbia’s reforms are a roadmap for elite universities that wish to retain the confidence of the American public by renting their commitment to truth-seeking, merit, and civil debate,” US Education Secretary Linda McMahon McMahon said at the time. “I believe they will ripple across the higher education sector and change the course of campus culture for years to come.”
Follow Dion J. Pierre @DionJPierre.