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In Israel’s missile war, some families run to shelters. Others have nowhere to go.
(JTA) — JERUSALEM — Walking with her children in Pisgat Zeev, a leafy neighborhood in Jerusalem, on Monday afternoon, Rivka recalled the missile that flew nearby the day before.
An impact could be felt as the family hunkered in their private “mamad” or safe room, required in all new homes in the Jewish neighborhood. Those who live in older homes or were far from their residence found their nearest public shelter.
When her children started to cry, Rivka said, she reassured them that the walls of the shelter are strong enough to withstand anything Iran could send toward Israel. “We feel safe in our shelters,” she said.
Just a few miles south, in the east Jerusalem neighborhood of Sheikh Jarrah, father of three Abed Abu Sharif recalled how he was driving his taxi on Sunday when he heard the unmistakable sound of an air raid alert.
Israeli authorities advise anyone driving when a warning siren sounds to exit their vehicle and look for the nearest public shelter. Abu Sharif knew he would not find one.
“Where am I to go? What am I to do? There is no shelter for me near here,” he said. “I continue driving because I have to provide for my family.”
The disparate experiences point to longstanding gaps in shelter access that are being thrown into stark relief once again by war.
The access gaps exist both geographically — with residents of the country’s dense center more protected — and between Jewish and Arab Israelis.
A Knesset hearing on Monday took aim at the significant number of Israelis who do not have ready access to shelters near their home, with lawmakers expressing frustration over the lack of support for shelter construction despite the constant threat of war since Oct. 7, 2023.
“In my view, this situation is abandonment of human life. Nothing less,” Oded Forer of the Yisrael Beiteinu party said during the hearing. “And it is happening right now, as people try to run to safe rooms, but they don’t have them.”
The hearing only briefly discussed disparities between Jewish and Arab Israeli communities in shelter access, citing statistics from the Israel Defense Forces’ Home Front Command. The statistics — revealed publicly last week — show that only 37 of 11,775 public shelters in Israel, or roughly 0.3%, are located in Arab municipalities, even though Arabs make up about 15% of Israel’s population.
That information dates to January 2025, before last year’s war with Iran. While both the Home Front Command and Israel’s comptroller told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency that a newer accounting was not available, Ori Narov, who leads the legal department of the Israel Religious Action Center, said he had received government data showing that roughly a third of the 1,500 shelters installed last year in Israel’s north went to Arab municipalities — a development that he cited as a rare sign of progress in Jewish-Arab equity.
Still, there is only one public bomb shelter in east Jerusalem, according to Bimkom-Planners for Planning Rights, a group advocating for equitable built environments in Israel.
“This is an issue of equity,” said Bimkom’s Dafna Saporta. “We’re talking about the Arab population. They don’t have equality, and they don’t have justice in Israel. The state is taking care of the Jewish population but neglecting the Arabs. It’s not new. It’s a political decision.”
National civil defense standards are set by the Home Front Command, while planning approval rests with local planning authorities, and cities are typically responsible for maintaining public shelters.
“As per the Civil Defense Law, public shelter construction is the responsibility of local authorities, whereas personal protection is an individual responsibility,” Home Front Command said in a statement responding to a request for comment on disparities in shelter access between Arab and Jewish communities in Israel.
It added, “The Home Front Command also takes measures to provide individual protection and to renovate public shelters, based on guidance from the political echelon and government decisions.”
Oct. 7, the subsequent conflict with Hezbollah and last year’s 12-day war with Iran drew stark attention to disparities that had deepened over time. A missile landed in Rahat, an Arab city in the south, killing multiple residents, and another strike in Tamra, in the north, killed several members of the same family.
Some efforts are underway to close the gap. A government initiative called Northern Shield worked to install shelters last year in homes and schools within a buffer zone of the Lebanese border, where rockets from Hezbollah are again flying now.
Nonprofit groups have also stepped into the gap. The International Fellowship of Christians and Jews, meanwhile, says it has worked with the government to install 700 shelters since Oct. 7, including several this week and some in a Druze village and in Haifa, a mixed city with large populations of both Jews and Arabs.
And the Israeli organization Standing Together, which advocates coexistence between Arabs and Jewish Israelis, has launched a campaign to crowdfund shelters for vulnerable Arab communities in the Negev.
But advocates say the efforts are far outmatched by the need. “While these initiatives are well-intentioned and deeply appreciated, the scale of the need in the unrecognized villages far exceeds the capacity of civil society,” Huda Abu Obaid, CEO of the Negev Coexistence Forum, said about the crowdfunding campaigns.
The Negev Coexistence Forum joined a lawsuit filed by the Reform movement-affiliated IRAC at the Supreme Court of Israel in 2024, alleging that Israel’s failure to build public shelters in Arab communities was a violation of their civil rights.
The government’s defense rested on high rates of illegal construction in Arab municipalities, which, in their view, absolved them of responsibility to ensure that mamads are installed in new homes. (Retrofitting mamads into older buildings is difficult and costly and not within the budget of any municipality, Arab or Jewish.)
The court sided with the government, ruling that the responsibility for building protective spaces rests with private homeowners and that the state is not obligated to build public shelters.
For Narov, the situation in the Negev is particularly galling because the extant planning process does not account for many Bedouin Arabs living there.
“They are not municipalities recognized by the government, so they can’t even build the shelters if they wanted to,” Narov said. He added, “This is the first responsibility of any state to its citizens: security to keep them safe from attacks, from the inside and definitely from the outside, as we’re experiencing right now.”
“If the law requires a protected room in every new building, but thousands of citizens are prevented from building legally or live in areas excluded from state planning frameworks, then the legal standard itself produces inequality,” Abu Obaid said. “Protection should not depend on municipal status, planning recognition or economic ability. It should be universal.”
The mandate that all new construction include a safe room in each unit or a basement shelter, first enacted in the 1990s, shifted Israel’s safeguards away from public shelters. That includes in east Jerusalem, which is administered by the the city of Jerusalem Municipality and hence the Israeli government, where no additional public shelters have been built in the last decade.
On March 2, an Iranian missile landed at the entrance to Ramat Shlomo, just a few kilometers from the neighborhood, injuring six Israelis.
Fatme, a doctor at a hospital in Jerusalem who was riding bus 218 toward the Qalandia checkpoint at the end of her workday on Monday, passed the crater on her way home. Still, she said, the debate was of little practical significance to her.
“There isn’t a single shelter in my neighborhood,” she said. “So when I hear the bombs, I just go on with my day.”
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Graham Platner drops out of Maine Senate race, citing push to ‘end the genocide’ in parting message
(JTA) — Maine Democrat Graham Platner announced Wednesday evening that he will drop out of the U.S. Senate race following new allegations that he had committed sexual assault.
“We believe that for the movement to continue, it can’t be me, and for that reason, we are suspending campaign operations,” he said.
Platner’s withdrawal came two days after Politico reported that a former girlfriend had accused him of entering her home uninvited about five years ago and forcing her to have sex with him.
“All we were asking for was healthcare, was to end the genocide, to use our taxpayer dollars at home to uplift our communities instead of waging war overseas,” Platner said in a Facebook address announcing his exit. He denied the allegations against him in the address, adding that a “corporate media system and the political establishment got to act as judge, jury and executioner.”
The allegations were the latest in a series of controversies that have hit Platner’s campaign, including his since-covered-up Nazi tattoo, unearthed Reddit posts and other reports about his behavior toward women.
Platner, who won his Democratic primary in June on an anti-Israel progressive platform, denied the fresh allegations, telling Politico that “any accusation of non-consensual behavior is categorically untrue.”
But the report prompted a rapid collapse in support for Platner among Democratic leaders, progressive allies and organizations that had backed his bid to beat GOP Sen. Susan Collins. It also sparked a scramble among Maine Democrats to find a different nominee ahead of the July 27 deadline for a replacement to appear on the ballot.
On Wednesday, the Maine Democratic Party announced that they had voted to hold a nominating convention to fill Platner’s vacancy.
“There is an unprecedented amount of energy and enthusiasm among Maine Democrats, driven in part by many of the dedicated volunteers and supporters who were inspired by Graham Platner’s campaign,” the party said in a statement. “We look forward to coming together and harnessing that energy around our new nominee as we work to defeat Susan Collins in November.”
The state Democratic Party leadership called on Platner to withdraw as the Democratic nominee on Monday, adding that the party needed to “refocus this campaign” on the fight against GOP Sen. Susan Collins. The seat is key to Democratic hopes of taking back the Senate.
Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders, one of Platner’s most high-profile supporters, as well as New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani also called for Platner to step aside on Tuesday.
Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, who initially backed Platner’s opponent before she dropped out, had said in a joint statement with New York Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand that the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee “will not invest in the Maine Senate race if Platner remains on the ballot.”
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Rahm Emanuel: Democrats who support Israel can still lead the party to the White House
(JTA) — TEL AVIV — Pausing as he looked out at the packed hall at Tel Aviv University, Rahm Emanuel offered his audience a warning about what he was about to say.
“Hold your applause, because you may not like this,” he said, before laying out his proposal for U.S. sanctions targeting Israelis who attack Palestinian civilians and property, Israeli officials who voice support for that violence, and companies and banks that support “illegal settlements.”
The crowd applauded anyway — three separate times.
Under a 2017 law, Israel bars foreign nationals who publicly call for boycotts of Israel or its settlements from entering the country. Emanuel issued his call for sanctions from a stage in Tel Aviv, a measure of how far Democratic politics on Israel have shifted since Hamas’ Oct. 7, 2023, attacks.
Widely viewed as a possible contender for the 2028 Democratic presidential nomination, Emanuel, a former congressman, White House chief of staff, Chicago mayor and U.S. ambassador to Japan, and one of the most prominent Jewish figures in American politics, arrived in Israel on Sunday. His speech Wednesday afternoon, billed as “An Honest Conversation: The U.S.-Israel Relationship, Where It Stands Today and The Road Ahead,” was the keynote of the visit, and was meant to signal the need for a “fundamentally new and different approach” to the U.S.-Israel alliance, as he put it.
Whether Emanuel’s critique will land with the Israeli establishment, or with the ruling coalition, remains to be seen. Emanuel made a point of avoiding Israel’s elected officials during his visit, including Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, saying he did not want to interfere with elections set for the fall. He did meet with President Isaac Herzog, who is appointed by the government, as well as visit hospitals in Tel Aviv and Nablus that partner with each other.
But it was clear that it was resonating with attendees. Moti Porath told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency that he believed Emanuel correctly diagnosed the ailment at the heart of the Israeli government, a leader who has become an outcast abroad but remains too skilled a politician to easily dislodge.
Porath, who splits his time between Newton, Massachusetts, and Tel Aviv, and who attended the Massachusetts Institute of Technology at the same time as Netanyahu, said he recognizes the prime minister as a singularly talented political operator. “He’s a fantastic politician,” Porath said. “Maybe he’s a manipulator.”
To the attendees who spoke with JTA, Emanuel’s message was not anti-Israel but pro-Israel, in Porath’s telling, what a good friend is obligated to do when the other is acting out of line. Emanuel put it similarly from the stage, “True friends tell each other the truth.”
Porath said he hopes the United States and Israel can once again find “a common political vision,” but that doing so will require tough love from America’s next president.
The event was hosted by Tel Aviv University’s Center for the Study of the United States and moderated by its founding director, Yoav Fromer, alongside Yael Sternhell, the professor who heads the university’s American studies program. Organizers solicited questions from students in advance and said more than 100 were submitted.
But with a university audience likely to skew liberal, attendee Yoam Barash said the program would have benefited from a right-wing voice to push back on Emanuel’s comments, since most Israeli voters lean right. A February poll by the Midgam Institute for Israel’s Channel 12 news found 68% of veteran voters and 75% of those voting for the first time identify as right-wing. “Why didn’t they bring somebody from the right?” Barash asked.
Barash is the uncle of Daniel Barash, a managing director at the public affairs firm SKDK who helped organize the event He attended with Hannah Winkler, a friend from his army days and now a doctor in the Tel Aviv area. She said she pins her hope not on the U.S.-Israel alliance but on a left-wing victory in the upcoming elections. “Without that, I have no hope,” she said.
Told that some attendees had wanted a more politically diverse lineup, Fromer defended the format. “This is academia,” he said. “The goals here are very different than they would be on a political panel.”
At the same time, Fromer echoed the attendees’ view that Emanuel’s message was that of a friend rather than an adversary. “To say to someone, look, I’m trying to save you, if you don’t change your behavior, you’re going to self-destruct — that’s someone who cares,” he said.
The stakes, in his telling, are high for Israel and for the university. “Israelis have become pariahs. We used to be admired, the most admired,” he said, echoing Emanuel’s own warning from the stage that Israel’s leadership has turned it into a “territorial pariah.”
The damage is not merely reputational, he argued. “It’s not just feeling bad. It has practical implications,” he said, speculating about investment and capital that will stop flowing, students and tourists who will stop coming, Israelis who will lose their jobs.
During the anti-Israel protests that swept U.S. campuses in 2023 and 2024, ties with Israeli universities, including Tel Aviv University, were frequent targets of divestment demands. Emanuel himself warned in his speech that Israel’s scientists face exclusion from international research networks and that its artists and academics are being shut out of exhibits and conferences.
Inside the hall, at least, the message was received. “Most of the people in this room are quite sympathetic to what you have to say,” Barash told Emanuel on stage. “That is not the case across Israel.”
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Synagogue targeted by picketers inspires Ann Arbor ordinance to protect houses of worship
Ann Arbor, Michigan has become the latest city to pass legislation aimed at protecting houses of worship from protests, echoing similar policies passed by New York and proposed by California earlier this year.
But while New York and California introduced such legislation in response to occasional anti-Israel protests outside synagogues, Ann Arbor has been home to the persistent and brazen protest of a Holocaust denier who shows up to picket the same congregation every week on Shabbat.
While synagogue leaders are moved by the city council’s gesture, they don’t expect the protests to end anytime soon.
“The significance of the resolution is that a city council in a highly progressive city had the bravery to call out the antisemitism of Jew haters,” said Rabbi Nadav Caine, the spiritual leader of Ann Arbor’s Beth Israel Congregation. And that’s no small thing.
For the past 23 years, a small group of protesters have gathered outside Beth Israel on Shabbat carrying signs with hateful slogans like “Jewish Power Corrupts,” “No More Holocaust Movies” and “Antisemitism is earned, never given.”
Partly in response to those decades of hateful demonstrations, the Ann Arbor City Council on Monday unanimously passed a resolution directing the city manager to develop a plan for protecting houses of worship during protests, which can include protest-free buffer zones.
Jerry Sorokin, executive director of Beth Israel, expressed gratitude for the city council’s sentiment — though he also believes the measures “won’t make any real difference.”
The protesters carry “incredibly offensive” signs, Sorokin said. But they also stay off synagogue property and don’t interfere with congregants trying to enter, he said, making it unlikely that a security perimeter would affect their demonstrations.
“They’ve found out exactly what the limits of their legal rights are in terms of what they can say, where they can say it, and how they can interact with the public, and they push it right to the limit without going over,” Sorokin said.
A court agreed. In 2019, a congregant and local Holocaust survivor lost a lawsuit against the Beth Israel protesters and the city of Ann Arbor, with a court concluding that the protesters were engaging in protected speech.
Buffer zones across the country
The measure in Ann Arbor reflects a broader national debate about balancing protesters’ free speech rights with worshippers’ ability to safely access religious services, as New York and California have also moved to enact buffer zones outside houses of worship.
In May, demonstrators outside Park East Synagogue in Manhattan chanted “We don’t want no Zionists here” and “There is only one solution, intifada revolution,” outside an event promoting real estate sales in Israel and the West Bank. New York lawmakers approved a 50-foot security buffer around houses of worship proposed by Gov. Kathy Hochul. Meanwhile, New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani allowed a bill that requires the New York City Police to develop a plan for managing protests at houses of worship.
In Los Angeles, protesters targeting Wilshire Boulevard Temple for hosting speakers affiliated with the Israeli defense contractor Elbit Systems prompted California lawmakers to introduce a buffer-zone bill that would make it a crime to approach a person within 100 feet of a synagogue in order to hand out a leaflet, hold a sign, or “engage in oral protest.” First-time offenders would face up to six months in jail.
At the federal level, U.S. Rep. Tom Suozzi of New York introduced the SACRED Act, which would make it a federal crime to intimidate, obstruct or harass people within 100 feet of a house of worship.
But those proposals all face the same constitutional constraint: They can regulate how protests are conducted, but not the viewpoints being expressed. There’s no legal remedy to the offensive messages painted on placards and yelled at passing drivers, Sorokin said.
“I think what the city council did is laudable, and it is reassuring to us that they’re showing support for freedom of worship and for access to synagogues, churches, and mosques,” he said. “But I don’t think it’s going to change what goes on outside our building every Saturday.”
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