(JTA) — JERUSALEM — Jerusalem’s premier soccer team made an unusual announcement last week: It would give a new cafe free advertising on players’ uniforms for the coming season.

Cafe Basimta was facing harassment from haredi Orthodox protesters who wanted it to close on Shabbat, and Hapoel Jerusalem said it wanted to send the message that Jerusalem is “an open and diverse city, where there is room for everyone.”

But on Tuesday, Hapoel Jerusalem reversed course and retracted the offer, after learning via an inquiry from the Jewish Telegraphic Agency that Cafe Basimta is an official project of Jews for Jesus.

“Our original intention was simply to support a small business that was being denied its freedom of operation, and we still believe in that principle,” club spokesperson Matan Avrina told JTA. “However, we also realized that this specific story is more complex than we initially knew.”

For the secular Israelis who have flocked to Cafe Basimta in response to the protests, too, the revelation of the cafe’s ties to a Christian missionary organization is complicating what had seemed like a simple skirmish in the city’s culture war over businesses open on the Jewish day of rest.

“I don’t know if it changes my desire to drink their coffee, but it definitely complicates things,” Gabriel, an American studying in Jerusalem for the year, told JTA on Saturday from the cafe’s long line after learning about the Jews for Jesus connection, as protesters yelled. “It’s one layer deeper than I thought.”

Others say the cafe’s Christian character is irrelevant to their defense of Cafe Basimta.

“I understand they hate Jews for Jesus, and I understand what they hate them for,” said Jerusalem’s deputy mayor Adir Schwartz, who is a prominent defender of the city’s secular sector, in an interview. “My father was a rabbi abroad, and I get that they feel they are protecting Jewish continuity.But this is about belonging in our shared city.”

Yoel Ben David, the cafe’s operator as well as Jews for Jesus’ top official in Jerusalem, says the twin culture wars have been good for business.

“Even though financially, it’s great, me and the staff, we don’t love it,” he told JTA from his cafe on Saturday. “We’d all love it to just chill out.”

At first, the tensions over Cafe Basimta seemed straightforward: In a city where 46% of Jews are haredi, or ultra-Orthodox, and only 13% identify as secular, the inverse of Israel as a whole, here was a rare cafe willing to flout religious authorities and open on Shabbat. A handful of such cafes dot the city, but others have given up on Shabbat hours in the past over pressure from religious authorities.

Cafe Basimta, which means “cafe in the alley,” opened at the end of May in the Nahlaot neighborhood of central Jerusalem. The name refers to the neighborhood’s 19th century stone dwellings toppling into one another along tiny streets. Decades ago a center of the city’s bohemian culture, Nahlaot is now increasingly haredi and there are few if any establishments open on Shabbat.

On July 4, the first Saturday it drew protesters, dozens of haredi demonstrators, many of them reportedly minors, descended on the cafe in four separate waves, surrounding it, banging on its windows and overturning tables, according to cafe staff and footage circulated online.

At the time, the cafe’s ties to Jews for Jesus were not public. That changed in early July, when Or LeAchim, a haredi anti-missionary organization that helps Jews leave missionary groups and cults, exposed the connections and began organizing protests against Cafe Basimta.

The group has placed pashkevils, or public billboards, denouncing the cafe in the neighborhood. “The missionary-messianic influence operates all the more forcefully by winning over hearts through food and drink,” the placards say in Hebrew. “And as if that were not enough, they added sin upon crime and began operating the place on the holy Sabbath, with disgraceful Sabbath desecration in the heart of the holy city.”

The revelations surprised and deterred some who had been inclined to support the cafe. But they did not change the tenor of the demonstrations, which remain focused on Basimta’s Shabbat operations.

“People went to demonstrate because it was open on Shabbos. They did not know that it was a missionary place. The demonstration was not useful for us,” said Binyamin Klugger, who works with Or LeAchim as well as other anti-missionary groups, and who was concerned the aggression of the Haredi protesters would undercut his message about the cafe’s evangelizing mission. “People that continue to demonstrate are really not knowing that it is a missionary place,” he said,

During Saturday’s demonstration, cries of “Shabbos!” echoed off the stone alleyways as the line of Israelis waiting for cold coffees stretched into the courtyard.

Israeli police stepped in to cordon off the protesters, preventing them from approaching the cafe. Some secular Israelis yelled back, with a handful at one point breaking into “Shalom Aleichem,” the hymn traditionally sung at the Shabbat table.

Residents stared down at the altercations from their balconies, the screams shattering an otherwise quiet Shabbat morning. Yael Levy, who moved to Israel from California and lives in the building directly beside Cafe Basimta, was handing out cookies to build goodwill.

“It’s very sad, especially during the Three Weeks,” she said, referring to the mourning period between the 17th of Tammuz and Tisha B’Av, when Jews commemorate the destruction of both Temples, a destruction rabbinic tradition attributes to baseless hatred among Jews. “This is just bad energy during a time that calls for positive energy.”

Outside, a long line of coffee fiends waited their turn to choose from an extensive drinks menu, as Ben David greeted customers and monitored the demonstration.

There were no visible signs of the cafe’s affiliation with Jews for Jesus. But Ben David confirmed that the organization owns the building and the cafe, which joins a growing network of similar outposts across the country. He said he is aiming to strike a balance between missionary work and just offering a pleasant place to work or meet.

“Everyone accuses us of that,” Ben David said about proselytizing. “The Jesus goal is not completely out, but it’s not front and center.”

Jews for Jesus is a flagship organization of the diffuse movement of Messianic Judaism, which believes in the divinity of Jesus while claiming to practice Judaism — an overlap that no denomination across the Jewish world accepts as compatible. While hard numbers about how many Israelis hold Messianic beliefs are scarce, both Messianic leaders and their critics believe the number is growing. Last year, one of the two Israeli embassy workers killed in an attack outside the Capital Jewish Museum in Washington, D.C., came from an Israeli Messianic family.

In 2024, Jews for Jesus appointed a member with an Israeli background as its CEO for the first time, and the Israeli branch of the global organization took in roughly $6 million in revenue that year, supporting a local staff of 60. On its website, it solicits donations for its Israel work, including, in one December 2025 appeal, $225,000 to launch a coffee shop and ministry center in Haifa, which it called a “welcoming space where Israelis can encounter the hope of Yeshua,” the Hebrew name for Jesus.

Ben David has worked with Jews for Jesus for more than two decades. He was born in Israel and came to believe in the divinity of Jesus as a young adult, together with his wife, around the time of his stint in the army, where he served as an Orthodox rabbi. He has a master’s degree from a Messianic seminary and once helmed training for missionary staff in Israel, according to Jews for Jesus’ website, which says he “now leads our work in Jerusalem, bringing the gospel back to the city where he first believed.”

Missionary activity is not illegal in Israel, with the exception of proselytizing to minors without their parents’ consent and offering religious conversions in exchange for a material gift. But many Israelis believe that it is, in a reflection of the deep cultural norms in Jewish communities.

Or LeAchim says it is planning a future protest that will focus more squarely on Cafe Basimta’s missionary ambitions.

“We are planning to hold a massive protest there soon — involving thousands of people — on a weekday,” said Rabbi Binyamin Vulcan, the group’s head of counter-missionary activities. “In the meantime, we are trying to get the place shut down through the municipality.”

Ben David said Jews for Jesus, anticipating such a response, bought Basimta’s building instead of renting it from a landlord who could be susceptible to a pressure campaign. At the same time, he insisted he didn’t understand the uproar.

“If Jesus is the Jewish Messiah,” Ben David said, “what could be more Jewish than believing in Jesus?” As for the missionary label, he insists the cafe is about more than just theology: “We don’t put crosses in our espresso,” he said.

Klugger said he is mystified about why the same secular Jerusalemites who are uncomfortable with the growing haredi character of the city are willing to buy coffee from someone who wants them to stop being Jewish altogether.

“If you don’t want haredim influencing your children,” he said, “you also can’t want missionaries influencing your children.”

Some Shabbat customers, meanwhile, say they have heard the warnings and aren’t swayed — for them, who owns the cafe is beside the point.

“I’m not going to convert because of the coffee, unless it’s really good coffee, then maybe,” said Lior Stern, who drove from the Tel Aviv area to support the cafe after hearing about the protests. “It could be Buddhist, it could be Muslim, it could be Jewish, it could be Christian. That’s not the point. The point is freedom.”

This article originally appeared on JTA.org.

The post A Jerusalem cafe became a symbol of secular defiance — until Israelis learned it was run by Jews for Jesus appeared first on The Forward.

(JTA) — “To be a liberal Zionist, it’s quite a lonely place,” said Amir Tibon, the Israeli journalist whose memoir “The Gates of Gaza” is one of the defining books of the Oct. 7, 2023, Hamas attack on Israel.

“Lonely” is relative, of course. Tibon’s story of how he, his wife Miri and their young daughters hunkered in a safe room as Hamas gunmen overran their kibbutz in southern Israel, and how his parents — Maj. Gen. (ret.) Noam Tivon and Dr. Gali Mir-Tibon — rushed into the war zone on a mission to save them, has made him one of the best-known survivors of the carnage.

In an interview, he described the outpouring of support his family received from fellow Israelis and American Jews, and the letters he gets weekly from people inspired by his book.

But Tibon, the opinion editor for the left-wing Israeli daily Haaretz, was speaking about a political reality. In the 33 months since Oct. 7, Israeli society has moved to the right, while the global left has turned Israel, its government, its people and its supporters into pariahs. That makes Tibon an inconvenient figure in both camps: too left for the Zionists, too Zionist for the left, and an eyewitness to events — acts of butchery on one side, security lapses on the other — that both would rather forget.

Meanwhile, even as he feels like a beleaguered minority, he remains committed to a vision of coexistence. “The one thing that is not changing: In this land, you have about 50% Palestinians or Arabs — some of them civilian citizens of Israel — and 50% Jews,” he said. “What do we do? How do we live together in this land? I think that question is not going anywhere.”

On July 28, at the National Library of Israel in Jerusalem, Tibon will receive the 2026 Sami Rohr Prize for Jewish Literature for his memoir, subtitled “A Story of Betrayal, Survival, and Hope in Israel’s Borderlands.” The $100,000 award, established 20 years ago by the family of the late American real estate developer, philanthropist and Holocaust survivor, is presented annually to an emerging author “who demonstrates the potential to make ongoing contributions to Jewish literature.”

In “The Gates of Gaza,” published in the fall of 2024, Tibon weaves his family’s rescue story with a wider history of Kibbutz Nahal Oz and the Gaza border communities and an account of the intelligence and policy failures that left them undefended. The book has also won the National Jewish Book Award, the Wingate Prize and the Bernstein Prize, and has been translated into Hebrew, German, French, Romanian, Italian and Hungarian, with a Spanish edition on the way.

The Rohr prize, Tibon said, arrives at a moment when he feels a duty to keep Oct. 7 in view. “It means that we are not forgetting Oct. 7,” he said of the prize. “We are not allowing anyone to minimize, deny, justify or otherwise just ignore that day and its place in history. There are very powerful forces that are trying to shift the conversation away from that day for various reasons. And by choosing this book, I think the judging panel is doing the opposite: It’s once again putting a spotlight on that day, and on everything that has changed because of it.

Since the attack, Tibon and his family have lived as evacuees in Kibbutz Mishmar HaEmek in northern Israel. In August, nearly three years after the invasion, they and other evacuees plan to move back home to Nahal Oz and join those who have already come back. Fifteen civilians from the kibbutz were killed on Oct. 7, and eight were taken to Gaza as hostages. More than 50 Israeli soldiers and security personnel were killed in the battle for the kibbutz and at the adjacent army base.

The return, he said, is “still a difficult, complicated situation on many levels — security, resources and just kind of the mental part of it.”

Counting his family, roughly two-thirds of the community who lived there before the attacks will soon be living there.

“I’m not sure everybody who is returning is definitely going to stay,” he said. “I think this is a test we still have to see — how is life going to look for families, what’s going to be the security situation, how much the education and health care and transportation and other government services are going to be high quality. These are all open questions. But we’ll see about all of these things.”

His daughters, Galia, 6, and Carmel, four and a half, have absorbed more in the last three years than any child should. “The kids here grow up too fast,” he said. “They understand a lot of what has happened — Oct. 7, the war with Gaza, the experience of having to leave your home, and then the subsequent Hezbollah and Iran wars. Unfortunately they understand pretty much everything.”

Between the book and a 2025 documentary based on his story, “The Road Between Us: The Ultimate Rescue,” Tibon has become one of the most recognizable faces of Oct. 7 — a status he wears uneasily.

“I don’t see myself as a spokesperson for anyone,” he said, pointing to others whose books have resonated widely, including the former hostage Eli Sharabi and Rachel Goldberg-Polin, Her son, Hersh Goldberg-Polin, was abducted by Hamas from the Supernova music festival on Oct. 7. Hersh was slain by his captors after surviving for nearly 11 months in captivity.

Even within his own tiny community, Tibon said, “every story is different.” Nahal Oz has 450 residents. “Each family has its own story from that day.”

But the reception for the book means he has had an impact on how people remember and discuss Oct. 7.”Tens of thousands of people around the world have read this book,” he said, and he still hears from readers weekly. “Most of them are very supportive and uplifting, but there’s also criticism, and I’m happy for that as well.”

Some of that criticism comes from the left, from those who feel his story of Israeli suffering crowds out attention that should be focused on the tens of thousands of Gazans killed in the war and the million-plus who have been displaced. Tibon doesn’t flinch from the argument that the war has been catastrophic for Palestinians — he has said so in print, repeatedly. And he remains a harsh critic of the Netanyahu government, which he feels has extended the war in part to keep its hold on power.

But he insists that Hamas’ culpability for all that followed cannot be erased: “This war never would have started without Oct. 7. That’s just a fact,” he said. “And that day, it was a catastrophe for Israelis, and it was just as much a calamity for the Palestinians.”

Tibon said he is less worried about the activist left’s hostility toward Israel than he is about the mainstream turn in U.S. public opinion. “Today 60% of Americans have a negative view of the country,” he said, “and nobody is going to convince me that 60% of Americans is antisemitic and supports BDS.”

The Netanyahu government, he said, has been “a godsend, a gift from the heavens, for the far left in America,” which prefers to point to Netanyahu and his far-right ministers, Itamar Ben-Gvir and Bezalel Smotrich, rather than Israelis like Tibon’s family and the other residents of Nahal Oz who still yearn for peace.

But he warns fellow supporters of Israel against making the opposite mistake, and defending the Israeli government from justified criticism. “If you’re saying Netanyahu is immune from criticism and cannot be separated from Israel, you just made Zohran Mamdani’s day,” he said, referring to the anti-Israel New York City mayor.

Tibon is blunt about what he sees as an Israeli government strategy of trying to move on from Oct. 7. “The government would very much like to erase Oct. 7 from public memory,” he said, “or at least to frame it in terms that are very favorable for them, and make it smaller than the war writ large.”

Given the security failures on that day, Tibon remains flabbergasted that Netanyahu’s government has survived the almost three years since.

He argues Israel abandoned its founding doctrine of short, decisive wars for long, inconclusive ones in Gaza, Lebanon and Iran that served the coalition’s survival more than the country’s security: “They did not defeat Hamas. They did not defeat Hezbollah. They did not defeat Iran. But they managed to survive a full term,” he said.

Not everyone who lived through what Tibon’s family did has landed where he has politically. But while acknowledging the sharp political shift to the right in Israel since Oct. 7, he says it’s not just the left that remains “disgusted” with the government. Friends across the spectrum who served hundreds of days in reserve duty are appalled, for example, by legislation sheltering approximately 72,000 haredi Orthodox yeshiva students from the draft.

That contradiction, he said, is why figures like Avigdor Liberman, Naftali Bennett and Gadi Eisenkot — politicians critical of Netanyahu but hardly doves — are “ascendant right now.”

Asked if he’s changed his own mind about anything since Oct. 7, Tibon didn’t hesitate: “I’ve become more pessimistic.” Then, he catches himself. “If we succumb to total pessimism, then what’s the point of being here at all?”

If there is hope, he said, it has come from community, family and routine. He calls Mishmar HaEmek “a wonderful kibbutz” that “opened their hearts and their home.” Miri resumed her work with autistic children, now in Afula, a city in northern Israel. He went back to Haaretz and wrote the book. “It gives you a sense of purpose and meaning and something to get up for in the morning,” he said. He has also found purpose over the past three years in visiting the families of soldiers who died defending Nahal Oz or fell later in Gaza or Lebanon — “many dozens” by now. “I keep in touch with many of them,” he said. “There is no release from this.”

He is also grateful to the American Jewish organizations and synagogues, many from the Washington, D.C.-area where he and Miri once lived, for an outpouring of support that began on Oct. 8 and hasn’t let up.

“I also find a lot of reasons for hope within my own family — to see my daughters, how they’re growing and overcoming this trauma and becoming independent and strong every day — and to see my community, the people of Nahal Oz, who are doing a little bit every day to make things better and to overcome what happened.

“And I want to be optimistic that just as we are able to rebuild Nahal Oz now, and rebuild our life over there, we will also rebuild the country and put it on the right track.”

This article originally appeared on JTA.org.

The post Prize-winning journalist Amir Tibon is moving back to the kibbutz where he and his family survived Oct. 7 appeared first on The Forward.

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.