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How Germany’s Holocaust remembrance culture kicked off a democratic crisis
WEIMAR, Thuringia, Germany — Walking through Weimar, Germany, the legacy of the Holocaust seems inescapable. Stolpersteine — German for “stumbling blocks” — are placed outside the homes of people killed during the Shoah, essential evidence of Erinnerungskultur, or memory culture, a national commitment to memorializing, and learning from, the Nazis’ atrocities.
But this commitment is being challenged. Alan Bern, a Yiddish musician described to me as “the man who solved the Shoah,” had just returned from a press conference when I met him, where he spoke alongside local law enforcement officials about a 51-year-old man charged with the 33rd case of vandalism of the memorial stones in the Eastern German city this year.
Bern, 70, an American who came to Germany nearly 40 years ago and holds the nation’s highest civilian honor, said, “Attacks on Stolpersteine are not primarily attacks against Jews, but rather against society and, not least, against human dignity.”
Bern, a composer, founded a school called the Other Music Academy, where he and his colleagues are creating encounters critical to the fight against Jew-hatred in Germany.
They bring together Jews and the descendants of Nazis, Israelis and Palestinians, and Germans and Syrian migrants in an attempt to apply the lessons of the Holocaust forward to the issues facing Germany today. Democracy is in the center’s DNA both in ethos and architecture — the entrance to their dance hall is a 100 year-old door from the Deutsches Nationaltheater in Weimar, where Germany’s first constitution was written and ratified.
“I believe that the encounter with otherness,” Bern said, “is essential to transforming yourself and transforming society.”
Bern’s work helps extend Germany’s memory culture, applying its lessons beyond the Holocaust to address threats against democracy posed by the far-right, which is gaining popularity around the country.
Although not all incidents of antisemitism in Germany are coming from the right, the rise of the far-right Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) party has forced a new debate over Germany’s commitment to remembering the Holocaust and other Nazi atrocities. AfD holds a plurality in Thuringia’s state parliament, and, after this year’s February elections, became the main opposition party in Germany’s federal parliament. The party’s most radical wing says that memory culture is a “guilt cult” and calls for a “180 degree turnaround” in the nation’s approach to remembering its history.
And while many Jews are deeply concerned about the right’s desire to abandon memory culture, some Jews in Germany, particularly those on the left, feel that the societal commitment to preventing another Holocaust has caused the state to police their ability to act and think freely, particularly when critiquing Israel. Since Oct. 7, 2023, Jewish activists have lost awards and speaking engagements, and have even been labeled extremists and put under surveillance by Germany’s state intelligence service.
Memory culture is not just essential to Germans, however; it’s a key for Jews around the world, who take heritage trips to concentration camps and ancestral homes there as part of memorializing the Holocaust. And worldwide, memory culture is essential to remembering global atrocities — yet its tenets are under attack. The Trump administration has criticized the Smithsonian’s approach to slavery, while Turkey refuses to acknowledge the existence of the Armenian genocide.
I went to Germany to speak with both Jews and non-Jewish Germans who are doing the work of bringing memory culture to life, to see how their work is being impacted by these political shifts, and to find out: What is lost if Germany loses its memory?
A brief history of memory culture
After the Berlin Wall fell, in 1989, the newly reunited and democratic Germany defined its national identity as a state committed to learning from the atrocities it committed in the past, thus preventing them from ever happening again.
But this devotion to the Holocaust wasn’t always the case. At the end of World War II, fewer than 15,000 Jews remained in Germany, the majority of whom went to West Germany when the country was partitioned after World War II. West Germany largely avoided accepting responsibility for the Holocaust until 1970, when Chancellor Willy Brandt visited the Warsaw Ghetto, in Poland, and laid a wreath at its memorial.
Meanwhile, under East Germany’s Soviet-style system, Nazi crimes were stripped of their antisemitic motivations and recast as offenses to communism; the small Jewish community of less than 1,000 people who remained there continued to be persecuted by the Stasi for perceived opposition to socialist values.
After the Berlin Wall came down and Germany reunified the following year, Chancellor Helmut Kohl oversaw the immigration of some 200,000 Jews from the former Soviet Union. The majority of Germany’s new Jews moved to Berlin, but others repopulated Jewish communities in the former East.
With the formation of the new German republic, the government moved back to Berlin, and in 1999, voted to construct the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe in the heart of the city — next to Berlin’s famous Brandenburg Gate. They expanded concentration camp memorials to include details about the Holocaust and built a world-renowned Jewish museum designed by Daniel Libeskind. Visits to these sites became a regular part of German school curricula. A centralized national Jewish council — The Zentralrat der Juden in Deutschland, or the Central Council of Jews in Germany — today receives €22 million in government funding to serve as the official voice of Jewish people and to advocate against antisemitism across society.
Memory culture is palpable everywhere in Germany, whether in large memorials and historical sites like concentration camps, or the small plaques and reminders, like the stumbling blocks, about the Jews who once lived there.
For years, however, shame over the Holocaust has muted national pride. Many Germans avoided flying their flag for fear of invoking the kind of nationalism that led to the rise of the Nazi party. (Though in the past two decades, flags have become more common at German sporting matches and events.)
That has led some, such as the far-right AfD party, to claim that memory culture has harmed Germany. Former party leader Alexander Gauland referred in 2018 to the Nazi era as a speck of “bird shit” in an otherwise grand national history, a speck that was given outsize importance.
And more recently, memory culture has become complicated by modern political concerns. In 2008, Chancellor Angela Merkel declared that supporting Israel was Germany’s “reason of state,” and the government has consistently operated with an iron-clad support for Israel as a form of reparations for the Holocaust.
But as Israel’s actions have come under increasing international condemnation since Oct. 7, Germany’s memory culture too has come under broader criticism by Jews and non-Jews alike. Some Jews in Germany are concerned over what they see as Germany abandoning Israel after Chancellor Friedrich Merz halted weapons exports to the Jewish state in August to curb the supply that could be used in Gaza. Other Jews, meanwhile, feel unable to speak out against the war given the national devotion to Israel.
And the Central Council, the state Jewish voice, believes that AfD is taking advantage of the war to inflame tensions between a new wave of Muslim immigrants and Germany’s Jews — and, in turn, win Jewish support for their party, including their belief in dismantling memory culture. Before this year’s elections, the Council circulated a letter signed by the leaders of every Jewish state organization warning that the AfD “uses Jews as an excuse to spread its racist and anti-Muslim slogans.”
The right-wing critique of memory culture in Germany
The AfD was officially designated a ‘rightwing extremist’ force by Germany’s intelligence agency, a status the far-right party is contesting in court. Still, it is the largest party in Thuringia and is poised to take over at least one state in next year’s elections. This would give it control over the educational and cultural agencies that fund memory culture in Germany, agencies it hopes to defund. Clearly, the AfD is not a fringe group.
And it is gaining increasing influence nationally and visibility internationally. Prior to their strong showing in February’s elections, both vice president JD Vance and President Trump’s ally Elon Musk encouraged German voters to vote for AfD.
The official voice of the Jewish community in Germany unambiguously says that the AfD is a growing threat to German Jews, and Jews around the world. In their 2024 annual report, the Council called the AfD a “legitimizing bridge” between the political mainstream and extremist actors — like the man who livestreamed himself ranting about the Great Replacement Theory before trying and failing to break into the synagogue in Halle with a gun in 2019, killing two people outside its doors.
“There is a will in this party to change the remembrance and the memory of National Socialism in focusing on the positive parts of German history,” said Shila Erlbaum, the Council’s director of policy. “This is an attack on Jewish history and Jewish memory.”
But not all Jews agree the AfD is such a threat. In 2018, a group of Jewish party members founded the Federal Association of Jews in the AfD (JAfD), a small caucus within the party’s 70,000 members. Today, JAfD has only 25 members, along with another 80 supporters who are not full members.
Artur Abramovych, the JAfD’s 29-year-old chairman, told me that they established the caucus after anti-immigrant demonstrations broke out in the eastern city of Chemnitz, when two Kurdish immigrants stabbed and killed a man.
Like the party’s leaders, the JAfD believes, according to its website, that “the greatest threat to Europe in the 21st century is the growth of the Muslim population” and adds that “the rise of political Islam is also primarily a threat to Jews.” While party leaders’ statements contradict AfD’s official support for Israel, the JAfD is strongly and unequivocally pro-Israel.
In January 2024, the German investigative newsroom Correctiv reported that AfD members secretly met with neo-Nazis and wealthy businessmen to plan the mass deportation of immigrants from Germany in a plot called “remigration.” The news brought hundreds of thousands of Germans into the streets in protest.
AfD initially disputed what was discussed at the meeting, though eventually party leader Alice Weidel embraced remigration as the official party platform. Though the party is once again trying to distance itself from the controversial remigration concept to create a broader appeal among the mainstream electorate, JAfD still believes that the plan is essential. Abramovych himself is an immigrant — from Ukraine — but claimed that immigration is threatening German society due to Muslim fertility rates.
Like the party’s hardliners, JAfD is also critical of Germany’s memory culture. Abramovych said that it didn’t originally hurt Jewish people, but now does “because people are forcing German politics to keep the borders open and let millions of Jew haters into the country” due to the state’s Holocaust guilt.
Germany’s immigration politics have moved to the right since Oct. 7, 2023. In an interview with Der Spiegel after the Hamas attack, former Chancellor Olaf Scholz told the magazine, “We have to deport people more often and faster.” Earlier this year, Merz’s government tightened border controls, and in October the Bundestag, analogous to the U.S. House of Representatives, voted to revoke a fast-track to citizenship law passed by Scholz.
While he smoked handrolled cigarettes and drank a cup of black coffee outside of a Ukrainian cafe in Berlin’s Friedrichshain-Kreuzberg neighborhood, I asked Abramovych if he was concerned that Jewish immigrants like himself could be deported from Germany in the future if the AfD gained power and remigration became government policy.
“What? Who would deport the Jews? That’s ridiculous,” Abramovych said.
An alternative critique of memory culture from the left
AfD had its first electoral win in the Bundestag, Germany’s lower parliamentary house, in 2017, becoming the third-largest party in the parliament. Shortly after, poet and political scientist Max Czollek published the best-selling De-Integrate!: A Jewish Survival Guide for the 21st Century, a polemic about Jewish assimilation into German culture. As a result of his edgy take on memory culture in Germany, Czollek has become something of a celebrity, and a bit of a pariah.
For Czollek, AfD is the symptom of a greater problem in Germany where the nation’s guilt over the Holocaust creates a “theater of memory” — a term borrowed from the late sociologist Y. Michal Bodemann — in which Jews play out their dutiful role on the national stage, held up by the state as model minorities, but are subject to losing its protection if they deviate from accepted norms.
Thuringian AfD leader Bjorn Höcke gained infamy when he called Berlin’s Holocaust memorial a “monument of shame,” but Czollek wrote that the idea was not new; in 1998, famed German left-wing intellectual Martin Walser called Germany’s Holocaust remembrance culture “monumentalization of shame” in his acceptance speech for the Peace Prize of the German Publishers’ Association.
To Czollek, AfD is just the latest step in a proud German tradition of tacitly accepting Nazism, albeit by a different name, in the East.
Behind Balenciaga sunglasses outside of a Kreuzberg cafe, Czollek described his family’s life in the former East Germany, part of a very small community of Jews who stayed after the war instead of departing for West Germany, America or Israel.
“The Jewish rituals I grew up with when my father started to reconnect to this tradition is more like the old, dark, empty synagogue singing of 20 people,” he explained. “And it’s like, ‘Why are there no people?’”
Czollek was born just before the Berlin wall came down, but for his family in East Germany, the Shoah was ever present in the absence of Jews. And it was magnified by what he described as a betrayal by the communist government that took over, which declared itself, its state and all of its citizens to be anti-Nazi — even if they had previously been active members of the Nazi party.
A report by the CIA in 1959 identified over 150 former high-ranking Nazi officials then working in positions of power within the communist East German government, and called it “doubtful” that they were sincere in the “change of political thinking.”
“You have this first generation of Jewish communists who came to Germany to build a better Germany and build up on this idea of anti-fascism as a proper fighting position,” he explained. “Suddenly, a lot of former Nazis were declared anti-fascist. So this is where the memory work fails.”
After the wall came down, Czollek argues that memory culture became a branding tool for Germany to prove itself as a democracy on the international stage — a tool that never offered anything meaningful to the few East German Jews like him, and that has proved ineffective at preventing the revival of a new ethno-nationalist right.
“Memory culture has become a tool in legitimizing and justifying the pride in Germany,” he said. But, he noted, memory culture is a relatively young part of German life; its widespread adoption came, ironically, during the “Years of the Baseball Bat” in the ‘90s, when neo-Nazi violence against migrants escalated severely.
After Oct. 7, Czollek believes that memory culture warped into something else entirely; today, anyone who speaks out against Israel’s response to the attacks in Gaza faces cancellation, disinvitation or even arrest.
“Memory culture used to be a pretty self-centered process of German self-improvement and reinvention,” Czollek said. “By now, it has become a tool of dominance and hegemony.”
“It’s almost like we have done the worst, and we have remembered the best,” he continued, opining that Holocaust and concentration camp memorials boost Germany’s national self-esteem and identity as a moral actor. Then, “you can start accusing migrants of not being as good as you are.”
And Jews who criticize the government’s version of memory culture risk losing state protection.
“There’s a tempting quality to playing along with the theater of memory, because being Jewish is rewarded if you do it in a specific way,” he continued. “Being a non-aligned Jew comes with a price.”
Although solidarity between Germany’s minorities — particularly Jews and Muslims — has become strained post-Oct. 7, exacerbated by the AfD, Czollek believes it’s the only way through the crisis brought about by memory culture and the rise of the far-right.
That’s why Czollek’s new book is called Alles auf Anfang — or, Everything Back to the Beginning. It’s a search for a new culture of remembrance in German life that includes not just Jews, but recognition of other migrant victims in German society.
Currently, much of Germany’s memory culture, exemplified in memorials like the Buchenwald concentration camp, keep their focus firmly in the past. But Czollek believes that, to address the current era, Germany needs to also find ways to commemorate violence perpetrated against its other minority groups.
“If you want to have memory culture as a living, active and productive thing today, it has to be updated every generation,” he said. “Sadness or grief is not a limited resource. We can all grieve together.”
The weaponization of memory culture against Jews
Immediately after Oct. 7, Wieland Hoban, a Jewish German living in Frankfurt am Main, began demonstrating against Germany’s support for Israel, and was arrested multiple times — the first time for wearing a shirt displaying a revolutionary fist logo, which is associated with the pro-Palestinian and anti-Israel organization Samidoun that was banned in Germany a few days following the attack.
The next month, Hoban gave a speech where he said, “Germany can’t wash away its Holocaust guilt with the blood of Palestinians.” Afterwards, he was taken aside by police and charged on suspicion of Volksverhetzung — “incitement to hatred” — a charge that has been used by the German government to prosecute neo-Nazis and far-right extremists, and carries a sentence of up to five years in prison.
In Hoban’s view, memory culture had extended past its logical limits to charge him, a Jew, with a violation of the German criminal code for invoking his own history.
“They explained to me that I had mentioned the Holocaust and that in Germany, they take the Holocaust very seriously,” Hoban said. “This was a bit surreal.”
Hoban, a composer and translator, has been chairman of Jüdische Stimme für gerechten Frieden in Nahost (Jewish Voice for Just Peace in the Middle East) since 2021. He told me that, like many artists in Germany, the cause of Palestinian self-determination has been important to him.
“This occupation of Judaism, through Zionism, had just pushed me away from any identification with Jewishness,” Hoban said. But joining Jüdische Stimme helped him resolve “an inner contradiction” he felt in being Jewish and also supporting Palestinians.
This June, Hoban received a text from a journalist asking him if he’d seen the latest report from the BfV, Germany’s domestic intelligence agency, on extremist groups in Germany. He hadn’t, but when he looked it up, Hoban learned that his organization had been labeled as a “foreign-related extremist” group.
While AfD is using the courts in an attempt to clear their domestic extremist label, Jüdische Stimme is not pushing back. Hoban doesn’t dispute the reasons for the label — he does criticize Israel and Germany’s memory culture — so his group sees no way to clear its name.
“I wish more people would just have the balls to say, ‘I don’t care if you call me antisemitic, I’m sticking to my guns here,’” Hoban said.
With the BfV’s extremist designation, Jüdische Stimme is now vulnerable to surveillance by the intelligence agency, as well as infiltration by informants.
But while the state is adamantly opposed to their cause, Hoban believes that public opinion is changing. The week that we spoke in September, a poll showed that 62% of all German voters believe Israel is committing genocide in Gaza, including a majority of both Christian Democratic Union and AfD voters. A report by the International Federation for Human Rights also found in October that Germany, among other nations, has weaponized the fight against antisemitism to suppress dissent.
And, over a year after Hoban was charged with incitement to hatred, he received a letter from the public prosecutor’s office informing him that the charge against him had been dropped.
A concentration camp gets political
The Buchenwald Memorial was established in 1958 on the site of the former concentration camp by the government of East Germany to commemorate communist resistance fighters; it did not memorialize the dead Jews. But after reunification, the Memorial’s focus expanded to include the more than 56,000 people killed and 280,000 who were imprisoned at the site, becoming a centerpiece in Germany’s tapestry of memory.
Today, Buchenwald — one of the centerpieces of Germany’s memory culture — finds itself caught in the middle of the debate over how to remember the Holocaust. It’s using its mission to confront its dark history in a new way: fighting back against politicians who distort the Holocaust.
When an AfD member ran for mayor of Nordhausen, a city in Thuringia, in 2023, the Memorial’s official social media pages called him out online for dog whistling to right-wing extremists, invoking a false Holocaust-distorting conspiracy theory. The post changed the course of the election; in the first round of elections, the candidate had more than 45% of the vote, but after the Memorial’s statement, he failed to win in the second round.
“Many older inhabitants of Nordhausen who had not voted for many years said, ‘No, we don’t want to have a Holocaust denier as a mayor,’” the memorial’s director, Jens-Christian Wagner, said in an interview.
Last year, Wagner pursued a more extensive outreach with 300,000 letters mailed to seniors in Thuringia ahead of the state’s elections. The letters warned of the ways in which AfD party leaders have used Nazi language and distorted history.
The AfD fought back, taking the Memorial to court and accusing the Memorial of interfering in “political decision-making.” They lost.
“The court says explicitly that we can’t be neutral against any kind of Holocaust distortion,” Wagner explained to me.
With that mandate, Wagner now considers it his duty and the mission of the Memorial to combat Holocaust distortion, especially when it might affect elections. The Memorial has a particular interest; it’s located in Thuringia, where the AfD is gaining power, and it could lose its funding if the party wins control.
“With our interventions, we don’t think that we can change the positions of the AfD,” Wagner said. “We want to reach all these people who are not specifically voting for the AfD, who are in the gray zone, who can be rescued for democracy.”
Looking towards Germany’s future generations
The AfD has lately focused on reaching youth voters, spending heavily on digital outreach. As a result, young people in Germany are becoming increasingly anti-migrant, embracing far-right political ideas that were once verboten in Germany for being too close to Nazism.
Despite the Memorial’s successful interventions to deter adults from voting for AfD, Wagner is concerned about the rightward shift of younger generations, who are less likely to treat information from a Holocaust memorial with reverence — or even respect its history.
The director described young people who visit the Memorial on school trips displaying the Hitler salute, shouting “Sieg Heil” and photographing each other in front of crematory ovens.
“There were some right-wing young people in every school class for years, but these were only one or two, and the majority was against them, and this has completely changed,” Wagner said. “Now, spreading Holocaust distortion, being right-wing, is common sense in these school classes, and it’s very, very difficult for our educators to have a discourse with them.”
The Memorial has been attempting to revise their educational programming to make visits longer and more in-depth, and even built a youth hostel on the site so that school groups can stay and have extended experiences that they hope will make a lasting impact.
Alan Bern, of the Other Music Academy, also is also worried about the younger generations; he sees resonating with Germany’s youth as one of his most urgent and important challenges.
“Young people in Weimar have almost no real relationship to what it is that we’re doing,” Bern said. “So when they’re told ‘You shouldn’t be antisemitic,’ it’s just some adult telling them ‘Don’t do this.’”
Like at Buchenwald, where the education department has placed its hopes for the future into its youth hostel, Bern wants to transform the former youth prison next to Other Music Academy into a dormitory of sorts where young people can stay for several days. The dichotomy of the prison’s barbed wire courtyard and its painted exterior wall, which artists have covered with colorful Keith Haring murals, pose a striking question about the direction of Germany’s future: Which way?
Pointing towards the floor and then to the prison across the driveway, Bern said, jokingly: “It’s either this or that.”
Challenged from both the left and the right, it’s unclear what is next for Germany’s memory culture. For now, the younger generations are caught in the middle.
While waiting at the bus stop to head back from Buchenwald, I found myself unexpectedly sandwiched in the middle of a high school tour group as they posed for a class photo. After we all boarded the bus, about half of them sat quietly — maybe contemplating the horrors they’d just seen, maybe dozing off. But as we drove down the hill toward Weimar, the bus also filled with the sound of laughter.
The future of memory culture, ultimately, will be up to them.
The post How Germany’s Holocaust remembrance culture kicked off a democratic crisis appeared first on The Forward.
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Hamas Tightens Grip in Gaza as Trump Pushes Peace Plan
A Hamas Police officer directs traffic in Gaza City, Jan. 28, 2026. Photo: REUTERS/Stringer
Hamas is cementing its hold over Gaza by placing loyalists in key government roles, collecting taxes, and paying salaries, according to an Israeli military assessment seen by Reuters and sources in the Palestinian enclave.
Hamas’s continuing influence over key Gaza power structures has fueled widespread skepticism about the prospects of US President Donald Trump’s peace plan, which requires the terrorist group to give up its weapons in exchange for an Israeli military withdrawal from the territory.
Trump‘s international Board of Peace, which is meant to supervise Gaza‘s transitional governance, held its inaugural meeting in Washington on Thursday.
“Hamas is advancing steps on the ground meant to preserve its influence and grip in the Gaza Strip ‘from the bottom up’ by means of integrating its supporters in government offices, security apparatuses, and local authorities,” the military said in a document presented to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in late January.
Hamas says it is ready to hand over administration of the enclave to a US-backed committee of Palestinian technocrats headed by Ali Shaath, a former Palestinian Authority official in the West Bank. But it says Israel has not yet allowed committee members to enter Gaza to assume their responsibilities.
Netanyahu did not respond to Reuters’ questions about Hamas‘s control over Gaza. An Israeli government official, speaking on condition of anonymity, dismissed any notion of a future role for the group as “twisted fantasy,” saying, “Hamas is finished as a governing authority in the Gaza Strip.”
The Israeli military declined to comment on Hamas‘s assertions.
Israeli military officials say Hamas, which refuses to disarm, has been taking advantage of an October ceasefire to reassert control in areas vacated by Israeli troops. Israel still holds over half of Gaza, but nearly all its 2 million people are in Hamas-held areas.
Reuters could not determine the full scope of Hamas‘s appointments and attempts to replenish its coffers.
NEW GOVERNORS
Hamas has named five district governors, all of them with links to its armed al-Qassam Brigades, according to two Palestinian sources with direct knowledge of its operations. It has also replaced senior officials in Gaza‘s economy and interior ministries, which manage taxation and security, the sources said.
And a new deputy health minister was shown touring Gaza hospitals in a ministry video released this month.
“Shaath may have the key to the car, and he may even be allowed to drive, but it is a Hamas car,” one of the sources told Reuters.
Israel’s military appears to have reached a similar conclusion.
“Looking ahead, without Hamas disarmament and under the auspices of the technocrat committee, Hamas will succeed, in our view, to preserve influence and control in the Gaza Strip,” it said in its assessment, which was first reported by Israel’s Channel 13 news. This is the most complete account of the document’s contents.
Ismail al-Thawabta, director of the Hamas-controlled government’s media office, denied these were new appointments, saying temporary replacements had been found for posts left vacant during the war to “prevent any administrative vacuum” and ensure residents receive vital services while negotiations continue over next steps in the peace process.
The US State Department and Shaath’s National Committee for the Administration of Gaza (NCAG) did not immediately respond to requests for comment.
A source close to the 15-member NCAG said it was aware of Hamas‘s actions and was not happy about them.
On Saturday, the committee issued a statement urging international mediators to step up efforts to resolve outstanding issues, saying it would not be able to carry out its responsibilities “without the full administrative, civilian, and police powers necessary to implement its mandate effectively.”
TRUMP‘S BOARD OF PEACE HOLDS FIRST MEETING
The appointment of Shaath’s committee in January marked the start of the next phase of Trump‘s plan to end the war in Gaza, even as key elements of the first phase – including a complete cessation of hostilities between Israel and Hamas – remain unfulfilled.
The Board of Peace is expected to receive reports on the committee’s work on Thursday.
Trump is also expected to announce countries that will commit personnel for a UN-authorized stabilization force and help train a new Palestinian police force, which the NCAG is expected to manage.
Hamas is looking to incorporate 10,000 of its police officers in the new force, Reuters reported in January. They include hundreds of members of its powerful internal security service, which has merged with the police, two sources in Gaza said.
Hamas‘s Thawabta dismissed the reports of a merger between the two forces as “entirely unfounded,” saying, “There has been no change whatsoever in their work or the scope of responsibilities of either one.”
Asked whether Israel would raise concerns about Hamas‘s entrenchment in Gaza at Thursday’s meeting, Netanyahu’s office did not comment.
Israel has said repeatedly it opposes any role for Hamas in Gaza after it attacked southern Israel in October 2023, killing more than 1,200 people and kidnapping 251 hostages. Israel responded with a military campaign aimed at freeing the hostages and dismantling Hamas’s military and governing capabilities in Gaza.
The group seized control of the territory in a brief civil war with its political rival, Fatah, in 2007. Since then, appointments to government ministries and municipal offices there have been decided by Hamas‘s political wing. It also set up its own civil service, which employs tens of thousands of people.
At least 14 of Gaza‘s 17 ministries are now operating, compared with five at the height of the war, according to the Israeli military document. At least 13 of its 25 municipalities have also resumed operations, it says.
Thawabta said “this relative recovery” was not a product of “political considerations.”
“The organizational measures taken during the past period were necessary to prevent the collapse of the service system and do not conflict with any future arrangements agreed upon,” he said in a statement to Reuters.
According to the two sources, Hamas appointed the five governors along with four mayors to replace people killed or dismissed during the war. The selection of people with ties to its armed wing for the governors’ roles was to crack down on armed gangs, they said, adding some had received weapons and financing from Israel.
Netanyahu acknowledged Israeli backing for anti-Hamas clans in June, though Israel has provided few details.
TAXES ON SMUGGLED CIGARETTES, PHONES
Since a violent campaign against its opponents in the first weeks of the truce, Hamas has focused on maintaining public order and collecting taxes in its side of the “yellow line” agreed to demarcate Israeli- and Hamas-controlled areas, according to Israeli military officials and Gaza sources.
“There is no opposition to Hamas within the yellow line now, and it is taking over all economic aspects of daily life,” an Israeli military official told Reuters.
Mustafa Ibrahim, a political commentator in Gaza, said looting and robbery had stopped.
“Hamas is trying to organize markets and streets through the traffic police,” Ibrahim said. “Police stations have reopened … The tax department and economy ministry are working and collecting.”
Hamas collects taxes mainly from the private sector, the Israeli military document says. They include fees levied on Gaza merchants bringing in smuggled goods, such as cigarettes, batteries, solar panels, and mobile phones, according to three other sources, including a merchant.
Hamas has earned hundreds of millions of shekels by taxing smuggled cigarettes since the war began, according to an Israeli indictment filed this month against a suspected smuggling ring, which includes Israeli reservists serving in Gaza.
Hamas has also continued to pay salaries to public servants and fighters, which average around 1,500 shekels (around $500) a month, according to at least four Hamas sources.
“Every moment of delay in allowing the technocratic committee to enter the Gaza Strip leads to the imposition of a de facto reality,” said Reham Owda, a Palestinian political analyst, “increasing the administrative and security control of the Hamas government in Gaza.”
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Trump Presses Iran to Make ‘Meaningful’ Deal, Appears to Set 10-Day Deadline
An Iranian newspaper with a cover photo of an Iranian missile, in Tehran, Iran, Feb. 19, 2026. Photo: Majid Asgaripour/WANA (West Asia News Agency) via REUTERS
US President Donald Trump warned Iran on Thursday that it must reach a deal over its nuclear program or “bad things” will happen, and appeared to set a 10–day deadline before the US might take action.
Amid a massive US military buildup in the Middle East that has fueled fears of a wider war, Trump said negotiations with Iran were going well but insisted Tehran has to reach a “meaningful” agreement.
“Otherwise bad things happen,” Trump, who has repeatedly threatened to attack Iran, told the first meeting of his Board of Peace in Washington.
Trump spoke of the US airstrikes carried out in June, saying Iran‘s nuclear potential had been “decimated,” adding “we may have to take it a step further or we may not.”
“You’ll be finding out over the next probably 10 days,” he said, without elaborating.
‘GOOD TALKS’: TRUMP
US threats to bomb Iran, with the two sides far apart in talks on Tehran’s nuclear program, have pushed up oil prices, and a Russian corvette warship on Thursday joined planned Iranian naval drills in the Gulf of Oman, a vital sea route for global energy.
Iranian and US negotiators met on Tuesday and Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araqchi said they had agreed on “guiding principles.” White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt said on Wednesday, however, that the two sides remained apart on some issues.
Trump said “good talks are being had,” and a senior US official said Iran would make a written proposal on how to address US concerns.
Trump called on Tehran to join the US on the “path to peace.”
“They can’t have a nuclear weapon, it’s very simple,” he said. “You can’t have peace in the Middle East if they have a nuclear weapon.”
Iran has resisted making major concessions on its nuclear program, though insisting it is for peaceful purposes. The US and Israel in the past have accused Tehran of trying to develop a nuclear bomb.
Earlier on Thursday, Russia warned against an “unprecedented escalation of tension” around Iran on Thursday and urged restraint amid the US military buildup in the region, which a senior American official said should be complete by mid-March.
THREAT OF WAR
Trump has sent aircraft carriers, warships, and jets to the region, raising the prospect of another attack on the Islamic Republic.
The United States and Israel bombed Iran‘s nuclear facilities and some military sites last June. US Secretary of State Marco Rubio will meet Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to discuss Iran on Feb. 28, the senior US official said.
Washington wants Iran to entirely give up uranium enrichment, a process used to create fuel for atomic power plants but that can also provide material for a warhead.
The US and ally Israel also want Iran to give up long-range ballistic missiles, stop supporting terrorist groups around the Middle East, and stop using force to quell internal protests.
Iran says it refuses to discuss issues beyond the atomic file, calling efforts to limit its missile arsenal a red line.
Satellite pictures have tracked both Iranian work to repair and fortify sites since last summer, showing work at both nuclear and missile sites, as well as preparations at US bases across the Middle East over the past month.
Iran‘s joint exercise with Russia came days into an extended series of Iranian naval drills in the Gulf of Oman, with Iranian state television showing special forces units deployed on helicopters and ships.
In a sign of growing concern over the increased tensions, Poland on Thursday became the latest European country to urge its citizens to leave Iran, with Prime Minister Donald Tusk saying Poles may only have hours to evacuate.
Trump began threatening strikes on Iran again in January as Iranian authorities crushed widespread protests with deadly violence that left thousands dead across the country.
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Confronting art and love as the Nazis close in
The New York theater world has been enriched in recent years by small companies of artists who are Russian-born and work from a Russian sensibility, though often in the English language.
In an interview, Roman Freud, a playwright, actor, and co-founder of the Five Evenings Company, pointed out that many of the Russian theater artists now in New York, including himself, are Jewish, which cannot help but color some of their presentations.
In Freud’s newest play Beneath the Ice of the Vistula, the plot is simple but arresting. It’s Warsaw, 1939. Jewish composer Adam (played on alternate nights by Freud himself) is holed up in his apartment, demanding total solitude so he can concentrate on finishing his master work for cello.
As the Nazis’ round-up of Jews accelerates right outside his window, he develops a loving relationship with his Polish cook Lydia (played with total conviction and charm by Cady McClain), who begs him to escape to her Polish village. Their scenes together are wholly believable. Suspense builds. Will he complete his composition and thus have the will to escape? Will they make a life together? Looking back from 2026, we know the terrible odds against them.
But while the cook, who is also an artist (albeit in the kitchen), is aware of danger and anchors the story in real-world Polish history, and as their relationship becomes sweeter and yet more intense, Adam turns increasingly inward. We see this in scenes of his fantasies, memories and dreams, which pop up as Russian-inflected vaudeville moments.
Suddenly, for example, the living room furniture is transformed into a shower, and Adam joins Lydia under “water” made of cellophane. The sound of Lydia’s clashing saucepans drowns out dark passages of his solo cello. The impressionist composer Maurice Ravel, whom Adam reveres, appears in a rowboat, glowering in a string-mop wig. Occasionally, such drastic shifts between the realistic and the absurd seem confusing on the stage and could use a more secure overall vision of the whole as well as some smoother transitions.
However, the concept is strong. While Lydia sees Warsaw without illusion, Adam’s mad, even suicidal, determination seems titanic but lunatic. In this way, Freud presents us with two ways of experiencing life, utilizing two theatrical techniques — the Realistic and the Absurdist. This deeply serious plot flirts with an absurdist way of looking at life. To sensible people like the Polish cook, Adam’s nonsensical determination is indeed absurd. Although, to be fair, rounding up Jews is an absurd obsession as well.
Roman Freud said the theme of his play is the nature of art: the artist as an ordinary “regular” person who nevertheless is a vessel for creative purpose. Adam is noble in his way. But the audience can’t help but ask: Is his music actually great art? The sonorous notes of his cello (playing a composition composed and performed especially for this production), rising above Lydia’s clashing pots and pans, have a powerful effect. Yet it’s difficult to believe in his higher calling as purely as he believes in it himself, and sometimes, I’m afraid, especially at the end, it’s hard to sympathize with him as much as we should. You might even ask: Is even great art worth dying for?
Jews and Jewishness are not Freud’s only subjects. He’s written a play about Napoleon, for example, but he says it’s “natural” that Jewishness is important to him, and in fact considers this play a tribute to his family and to the Jewish culture silenced in the Holocaust.
The Nazis outside the window and Adam’s Jewish upbringing are basic to the play. He is bitterly angry at his family and community for forcing him to choose between them and the music he loves. A passage from the Song of Songs chanted offstage in traditional mode as Adam crouches under a twisted prayer shawl seems meant to evoke his ambivalence about his heritage.
It’s interesting to compare Beneath the Ice of the Vistula with Singing Windmills, another play by Freud, presented by the PM Theater company in 2021. Singing Windmills portrayed Solomon Mikhoels, the great Yiddish actor and beloved leader of the Russian Jewish cultural community, murdered by Stalin in 1948. Both plays explore what it means to be a great artist, the power of theater and the fate of the Jews.
New York is lucky to have small idealistic theater groups like Five Evenings Theater, New Wave Arts, and Eventmuze, which collaborated to bring Beneath the Ice of the Vistula to the stage. Most programs show headshots of the actors, and possibly the director. This show’s program has a photo of every member — stage manager, lighting and sound designers and so on — indicating their shared sense of idealism and commitment.
It takes courage to create, especially in theater, which demands a huge outlay in time and money simply to mount a production. So New York audiences must be courageous in turn, and try productions by unfamiliar artists in unfamiliar venues, in order to be rewarded by interesting, even memorable, theatergoing experiences such as this.
Beneath the Ice of the Vistula, directed by Eduard Tolokonnikov, plays through February 28 in the West End Theatre in Manhattan.
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