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How a once-cautious Benjamin Netanyahu came to lead the most radical coalition in Israel’s history
(JTA) — Twenty-seven years have passed since Benjamin Netanyahu was first elected as Israel’s prime minister. Since 1996, he has headed six governments over a period of more than 15 years, more than any other prime minister. Unfortunately, his current coalition is one of the most radical-populist governments in Israel’s history. This government seeks to rapidly undermine Israel’s democracy by granting unlimited political power to the executive branch of government at the expense of the judiciary.
How can Netanyahu — a U.S.-educated and respected world leader who was cautious in his approach to building previous coalitions, and was once respectful of Israeli democratic institutions — support such a dangerous plan? Was the “writing on the wall” earlier on in his lengthy tenure?
A glimpse into Netanyahu’s years in office reveals that, indeed, signs of his being a populist leader — specializing in attacks against the so-called elite — could be detected long ago. As Likud leader in 1993, Netanyahu was blamed for ignoring the incitement by extremists that preceded the assignation of Yitzhak Rabin (a charge he vociferously denies). As early as 1997, during his first term as prime minister, he said that “the left has forgotten what it means to be Jewish.” Two years later, during an election campaign, he mocked the “leftist” press by saying “they are scared” (by the possibility of a right-wing victory). On Election Day in 2015, he posted a video urging Likud supporters to go out and vote by warning, “the Arabs are heading in droves to the polls.” That message led to accusations that the candidate was using racial dog whistles to motivate his followers.
However, Netanyahu’s populist discourse and his natural divide-and-conquer leadership style were balanced out, at least until 2015, by several factors. First, Netanyahu always sought to include centrist and even left-of-center parties in his coalition governments. Even when he could build a “pure” right-wing coalition (following the 2009 elections, for example), he preferred to invite partners from the opposing political side. His intention, he once said, was to provide a “wide and stable government that unites the people.”
Second, despite his hawkish image and his hardline discourse on security issues, Netanyahu wa considered to be an exceedingly cautious leader in that arena. Risk-averse, he tended to avoid involving Israel in major wars and was wary of acting in ways that would spark violence between Israelis and Palestinians.
Third, over his many years in office, he had demonstrated respect for the rules of the game — and towards Israel’s Supreme Court. He even blocked earlier initiatives that sought to undermine the power of the judicial branch. “I believe that in a democracy, a strong and independent Court is what enables the existence of all other democratic institutions,” he said in 2012. “Every time a law comes across my desk that threatens to impair the independence of the courts, we will take it down.”
The 2015 elections should probably be regarded as the turning point, after which these balancing factors quickly gave way to unabashed populism. The unexpected resounding victory in that year’s elections brought out the hubris in Netanyahu. He formed a right-wing coalition government (only slightly moderated by Moshe Kahlon’s centrist Kulanu party), personally held four ministerial positions in addition to the prime ministership, and gave his blessing to the hugely controversial Nation-State Bill. This legislation, which anchored in law Israel’s status as the “national home of the Jewish people,” strengthened the Jewish component of Israel’s dual “Jewish and democratic” identity without in turn strengthening its democratic component — explicitly and implicitly downgrading minority rights.
Furthermore, Netanyahu’s longtime obsession with controlling press coverage reached a new level. His insistence on personally heading the Ministry of Communications and his excessive involvement in media — for example, installing a close ally as director-general of the ministry, and targeting and strong-arming ostensibly “unfriendly” newspapers and broadcasters — served as the background for two of the three indictments for which he is currently on trial.
The investigations on corruption charges, and his subsequent trial, further pushed Netanyahu toward populist extremes. Following three rounds of elections between 2019 and 2020, which threw Israel into an unprecedented political crisis, Netanyahu was forced to form a unity government with former Gen. Benny Gantz’s centrist Blue & White party. Coincidentally, just a few hours after the government’s first meeting, Netanyahu’s trial began in the Jerusalem District Court. The prime minister arrived at the court on May 24, 2020, accompanied by several Likud Knesset members, and launched a fierce attack:
What is on trial today is an effort to frustrate the will of the people — the attempt to bring down me and the right-wing camp. For more than a decade, the left has failed to do this at the ballot box. So over the last few years, they have discovered a new method: some segments in the police and the prosecution have joined forces with the leftist media… to manufacture baseless and absurd charges against me.
These statements made it clear that Netanyahu had crossed the Rubicon, setting the tone for his behavior ever since. He dispensed with the partnership with Gantz, sacrificing Israel’s economic and political interests along with it. In the build-up to the next elections, he legitimized extremist, racist politicians such as Bezalel Smotrich and Itamar Ben-Gvir, who are today members of his governing coalition. After failing to form a government in 2021 (having been ousted from power after more than 12 consecutive years), he violated fundamental parliamentary conventions and norms. For instance, he instructed his right-wing allies to boycott Knesset committees and refused to attend the customary “update meeting” the parliamentary opposition leader holds with the prime minister. His previous respect for the rules of the game and democratic institutions was a thing of the past.
In that sense, it is no wonder that the current government he has formed, following his victory in the 2022 elections, is relentlessly pushing the overhaul of the judicial system, with little regard to the dangers the legislation poses to Israel’s democracy. This is due to a combination of Netanyahu’s own self-interest regarding his trial and the interests and worldviews of his political partners — politicians who hold extreme views (Ben-Gvir, Smotrich) as well as those who have previous corruption charges hanging over their heads (Aryeh Deri, leader of the haredi Orthodox Shas party).
The “old Bibi” would have never coalesced with such radical forces and would have never so bluntly disregarded democratic norms. But hubris, an instinct for self-preservation and his high self-regard as the “indispensable man” of Israeli politics created a new Bibi – and a crisis unlike anything Israel has ever seen.
Ironically, Netanyahu finds himself in an unexpected position — as the moderating force in the most radical coalition in Israel’s history. He could tap the instincts that he once had and be the voice of reason, the one who plugs the dike with his finger. He has the chance to lead Israel to a major constitutional moment. Will he rise to this historical challenge?
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The post How a once-cautious Benjamin Netanyahu came to lead the most radical coalition in Israel’s history appeared first on Jewish Telegraphic Agency.
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In its first detailed response to ‘NAZA’ documentary, IDF claims ‘fundamental errors’
(JTA) — The IDF on Thursday issued its first detailed response to “NAZA” after viewing the full documentary alleging Israeli forces knowingly killed large numbers of civilians in the Gaza war, accusing the filmmakers of making fundamental errors about how civilian-casualty estimates, strike approvals and intelligence tools were used.
“The film’s narrative is based on substantial factual errors stemming from a misrepresented and manipulative depiction of reality,” the IDF said in a statement accompanying its findings. The film “presents a distorted, misleading and disingenuous picture of the IDF’s target planning and striking process,” the military said, arguing that it conflates preliminary intelligence work with the later operational and legal process used to decide whether and how a target can be struck.
The filmmakers, who are Israeli, have previously defended the film’s reporting, saying the identities of its anonymous sources and the cases they described were verified and that editors at the Guardian, which produced the film, had access to the underlying material.
The 10-page response came after an IDF representative attended a screening of “NAZA,” directed by filmmakers Yuval Abraham and Rachel Szor, in Bologna, Italy, allowing the military to assess the full film for the first time. The army had previously rejected the documentary’s allegations based on excerpts and publicly available material, saying at the time that the filmmakers had not provided it with a copy despite a request to do so.
The film is based on interviews with 24 Israeli soldiers, most of them intelligence personnel, who describe their roles in surveillance, target selection and strikes in Gaza. NAZA is the Hebrew acronym for collateral damage. The film, which won the Special Jury Prize at the Venice Film Festival last month, argues that the military accepted high civilian casualty estimates, relied heavily on AI tools to generate targets and weakened safeguards governing strikes.
The IDF in its response Thursday rejected one of the documentary’s most prominent claims, that a strike had been approved despite an estimated civilian death toll of about 500. The military said it had “never planned, approved or carried out” a strike in which 500 civilians, or “anything close to that number,” were expected to be killed.
The IDF also rejected the film’s claim that junior Hamas operatives could be approved for targeting with up to 20 expected civilian casualties, and that senior commanders could be targered with as many as 200. It said the film had confused thresholds requiring approval from more senior commanders, who could then reject the operation, with permission to kill a fixed number of civilians. The military said that no 200-casualty approval threshold had ever existed and that actual thresholds were “much lower,” without specifying what the thresholds were.
The IDF did acknowledge that several incidents involving civilian deaths near humanitarian aid distribution sites prompted operational reviews, changes to instructions and other measures in those areas. However, it disputed testimony that soldiers fired indiscriminately at civilians near the sites and said troops were permitted to fire only at militants or people posing an immediate threat.
Abraham has accused Israeli media of failing to seriously investigate civilian casualties and rules of engagement in Gaza during the war.
The IDF also rejected the film’s suggestion that civilians who remained in evacuation zones could then be treated as legitimate targets. It said evacuation orders did not change a civilian’s status and that every strike still required identification of a military target and a separate proportionality assessment.
When it came to the film’s portrayal of “Lavender” as an AI-powered list of targets approved for attack, the military said the production had misunderstood what the program was: a database used to cross-reference intelligence on members of militant groups which did not make someone in the database a target.
“Artificial intelligence does not determine whether an object or a person is designated as a target, nor whether a target is struck,” the IDF said, adding that those decisions are made by human analysts and commanders.
The IDF also argued that many of the anonymous soldiers featured in “NAZA” were describing only “limited, initial stages” of the targeting process. “Such testimonies therefore cannot be treated as a complete account of the policies at hand, the decisions made and what ultimately happened,” the military said.
A Guardian News & Media spokesperson, in a statement sent to the Jewish Telegraphic Agency, said the Guardian “stands fully behind the film,” which it said was based on three years of reporting by the outlet and its partners and interviews with more than 100 sources familiar with IDF systems used in Gaza, including senior commanders involved in authorizing strikes.
The Guardian also rejected what it described as the IDF’s attempt to portray the film’s interviewees as “junior-ranking officers involved only in the early stages of the targeting process.”
“They include officers and soldiers who were involved in multiple stages of the targeting process in Gaza, including intelligence, operations and the final authorization process,” the statement said.
The military did not describe all 24 participants as junior personnel and said only that the testimony of the soldiers interviewed in the film “generally” focused on “limited, initial stages” of the targeting process.
The Guardian said the “process of assessing the credibility of the testimonies was rigorous” and included “leaked classified documents, detailed verification of specific strikes and corroboration via a wider pool of confidential journalistic sources who did not appear on camera in the film.”
The Guardian also said the New York Times, Washington Post and Associated Press had “confirmed the IDF’s use of AI-driven systems in the Gaza offensive and the loosening of safeguards to protect civilians.”
The IDF disputed the film’s suggestion that it did not examine civilian casualties after attacks. Several units tracked strike outcomes and civilian-casualty reports and hundreds of incidents had been reviewed during the war, the military said, arguing that intelligence personnel interviewed in “NAZA” do not appear to belong to those units and “are not positioned to testify on this matter.”
The IDF rejected the film’s criticism that its collateral-damage estimates did not distinguish between adults and children. It said international law treats all civilians as protected regardless of age, adding that when commanders knew children were present, that information “led commanders to cancel, postpone or replan strikes.”
It also pushed back on an interviewee’s claim that the IDF believed there were “no uninvolved civilians in Gaza,” saying that may have reflected the soldier’s personal views but did not represent military policy or orders. It also rejected the film’s genocide allegations, saying the interviewees were not in positions to establish genocidal intent by senior commanders or political leaders.
The IDF also criticized the filmmakers’ reporting methods, saying they provided no dates, locations or other identifying details for alleged strikes and did not put their specific allegations to the military before the film’s release. “The filmmakers could have identified and avoided the substantial errors apparent in the film had they conducted adequate verification and corroboration in good faith. The end result shows they did not,” the military said.
The Guardian statement did not say whether the filmmakers solicited detailed responses from the IDF, and why if they did not..
The military said “NAZA” also gave insufficient weight to the Oct. 7 Hamas attack, the group’s use of civilian areas for military activity and measures Israel says it took to reduce civilian casualties, including warnings, changes to strike plans and the cancellation of attacks.
This article originally appeared on JTA.org.
The post In its first detailed response to ‘NAZA’ documentary, IDF claims ‘fundamental errors’ appeared first on The Forward.
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Zara removes Halloween costume likened to concentration camp uniform
(JTA) — Spanish fashion retailer Zara removed a children’s Halloween costume from its website on Wednesday after social media users noted that the gray-and-blue striped outfit resembled prison garb worn by inmates in Nazi concentration camps.
Zara described the ensemble as “Kids costume featuring vertical stripes with decorative topstitching, a lapel flower and a distressed effect. Includes a cardigan and shorts. Gray / Blue.”
The post was visible via a Google search that continued to display an indexed version of the Zara product page after the listing itself had been removed.
The costume resembles the suit worn by Michael Keaton’s title character in the 1988 horror-comedy “Beetlejuice” and its 2024 sequel, “Beetlejuice Beetlejuice.” Even so, social media users said the vertical stripes and shiny crisscrosses, which some media outlets described as “fake stitched scars,” resembled concentration camp uniforms and the barbed wire visible in many World War II photos.
Priced at $59.90 in the U.S., according to another indexed version of the listing, the costume drew criticism online in Europe on Tuesday. It gained wider attention Wednesday after Israeli journalist Dov Gil-Har, activist Hen Mazzig and others shared images of it on X.
The listing was no longer accessible by Wednesday afternoon. It was unclear exactly when Zara removed it. No reason was given for its removal, and Zara has not made any public statements regarding the controversy, nor has it responded to the Jewish Telegraphic Agency’s request for comment.
One Instagram commenter wrote “@zara how many levels of approval did this go though (sic)? Who is working for you?” A Facebook user said “It’s supposed to be a groom costume. It does somewhat resemble a (sic) Auschwitz uniform. With all the anti-semitism on the rise I am not surprised.” Another Instagram user asked, “What were they claiming it was meant to be?”
Zara has in the past faced similar controversies over clothing that evoked Nazi or Holocaust imagery. In 2007, it withdrew a handbag from its stores after a customer discovered a swastika embroidered on it; Inditex, Zara’s parent company, said the symbol had not appeared on the design Zara had approved.
In 2014 Zara apologized for selling a blue-and-white-striped shirt with six-pointed yellow-star badges on the chest. The Zara Israel website identified it as a “striped sheriff t-shirt” and the word sheriff was cut out in small letters on the star. The likeness to concentration camp uniforms and the yellow Star of David badges Jews were forced to wear under Nazi rule led Zara to stop selling the shirts and destroy the remaining inventory.
When reached for comment, the Conference on Jewish Material Claims Against Germany, which represents Holocaust survivors in compensation negotiations, said the repeated incidents underscore the need for Holocaust education.
“This is not the first time this has happened and it once again makes abundantly clear: The glaring absence of Holocaust knowledge is pervasive,” Gideon Taylor, Claims Conference president, wrote in an email to JTA. “It shouldn’t take the risk of a Shoah survivor opening their door and seeing children that look like they are in concentration camp uniforms for us to see where we have to do better. This should serve as a message to us all of why Holocaust education is so important.”
This article originally appeared on JTA.org.
The post Zara removes Halloween costume likened to concentration camp uniform appeared first on The Forward.
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Jewish groups hail California law making it the first state to list ‘Jewish’ as an ethnicity
(JTA) — California is now the first state in the nation to deem “Jewish” an ethnic and racial identity, rather than just a religious affiliation.
Democratic Gov. Gavin Newsom on Wednesday signed SB 1387, a bill that expands California’s legal definition of ethnicity “to include Jewish identity” in demographic data collection. As of Jan. 1, 2029, forms distributed by public entities like schools and prisons will need to include a “Jewish” category when asking for voluntary disclosures of ethnicity or race.
David Bocarsly, CEO of Jewish California, a group that lobbies on behalf of a number of Jewish organizations in the state, described the signing in a statement as “a historic step for the Jewish community.”
“Under the shadow of Nazi race theory, American Jewish leaders asked the government to count us only as a religion,” he said, noting that this approach “didn’t work” and led to exclusion from data that shapes policy.
“Now hate crime, health, poverty, and education data will reflect who Jewish Californians actually are so we can ensure the best support for our community,” Bocarsly added. “Most importantly, it allows us to be seen as the diverse, complex people we are.”
The legislation was a priority among many Jewish groups across the Gold Rush state, who believe that Jewish peoplehood should be connected to more than just religion — and that the law should reflect this relationship.
Newsom, however, expressed some reservations in signing the bill into law.
“I strongly support this bill’s goal: accurate data leads to better understanding to inform policy,” Newsom, who is considering a presidential run in 2028, wrote in a signing statement. But he said he was concerned that the bill’s strictures would make it hard for state agencies to comply with the new law and with federal laws, and recommended revisiting the bill.
In addition to signing SB 1387 on Wednesday — the final day on which he could approve or veto bills in this year’s legislative session — Newsom also authorized AB 395, which will prohibit public meetings and graduations from being scheduled on major cultural and religious holidays.
“Californians of all faiths and backgrounds should be able to fully participate in public life,” the bill’s author, Democratic Assemblymember Jesse Gabriel, said in a statement.
“For too long members of our religious communities have been forced to choose between observing their faith and participating in important public events and academic milestones,” added Gabriel, who chairs the California Legislative Jewish Caucus.
Also on Wednesday, Newsom approved AB 1763, which will include religious holiday observance as a type of excused absence in schools without requiring a written request from a parent or guardian.
Newsom signed other bills relevant to the Jewish community in the past few days, including AB 2664, which will establish 100-foot protective zones around entrances to houses of worship.
Another new law is AB 1836, which will close a gap in California’s nonprofit security grant structure by extending funds to off-site religious events like Hanukkah menorah lightings. The governor also approved AB 1853, enacting a ban on including misleading or threatening information, like hate speech, in California voter guides.
This article originally appeared on JTA.org.
The post Jewish groups hail California law making it the first state to list ‘Jewish’ as an ethnicity appeared first on The Forward.
