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In Jerusalem neighborhoods bound together by terror, anger and trepidation about what comes next
JERUSALEM (JTA) — Time stops on Shabbat in Jerusalem, for the living and the dead.
Up the stairs in an apartment on the main road in the Neve Yaakov neighborhood in the city’s northeast, past hallway portraits of Sephardic rabbis, the Mizrahi family was not taking visitors on Saturday. “This is not the right time,” a woman who opened the apartment door said.
A Palestinian gunman gunned down Eli and Natali Mizrahi on Friday night. Now the couple was in a morgue awaiting burial. There are no Jewish funerals on Shabbat. They would be buried after nightfall.
The gunman killed seven people Friday night, in the worst terrorist attack in Jerusalem in over a decade.
A day earlier, Israeli troops killed nine people, including two civilians, in a raid in the northern West Bank city of Jenin that Israeli officials said was aimed at preempting a major terrorist attack; a 10th died later. A day later, a 13-year-old Palestinian shot and wounded an Israeli father and son outside Jerusalem’s Old City walls amid a scattering of further incidents.
Jerusalem, the country, the region are on edge. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu announced new measures aimed at curbing the violence, targeting families of terrorists. Police arrested 42 people in connection with the Neve Yaakov attack. Bill Burns, the CIA boss, is on his way to Israel to consult with Netanyahu about how to keep the region from blowing up.
On Friday night, around 8 p.m., in the middle of the Sabbath evening meal, Eli Mizrahi, 48, ran downstairs as soon as he heard the gunfire. His father, Shimon, asked him not to go, the Times of Israel reported. Eli’s wife of two years, Natali, 45, followed her husband.
Eli Mizrahi spoke to the gunman, who shot him and Natali dead.
On Saturday, Neve Yaakov residents stood in groups on the street in the long shadows cast by the winter sun, gossiping, trying to piece together details from second hand reports; Shabbat forbade them from turning on the radio or TV or checking their phones.
“We sat here in the living room and suddenly I heard shooting,” said Sara Gablayev, 76, who lives on the ground floor, below the Mizrahis. “I ran to the window and saw two people falling. Then I saw some running and I shouted, ‘What happened?’ He said two more people were killed down the street.”
Family and friends of Eli and Natali Mizrahi, who were killed in a shooting attack in Jerusalem, mourn during their funeral in Bet Shemesh, jan. 28, 2023. (Amir Levy/Getty Images)
It was Friday evening, as Shabbat services were ending. Kheiri Al-Qam, 21, drove his car down Neve Yaakov Boulevard, shooting civilians, seemingly aiming at whomever he could reach.
He murdered the Mizrahis. He murdered Rafael Ben Eliahu, 56, who worked for the post office, and who left a widow and three children. He murdered Asher Natan, who was 14. He murdered Shaul Hai, 68, a sexton at one synagogue who was entering another to attend a Torah lesson. He murdered Irina Korlova, a Ukrainian caregiving worker. He murdered Ilya Sosansky, 26.
“The terrorist killed three people at the entrance to the synagogue and left three others with various injuries,” said Chanoch Reem, a volunteer first responder with United Hatzalah who lives next to the synagogue Hai was entering and who rushed to the scene when he heard the commotion. “He then drove away while continuing to shoot passersby.”
In a release, United Hatzalah quoted another of its first responders, Yosef Deshet, who was in the synagogue when Al-Qam opened fire. “When I heard the gunshots begin I took cover on the floor under a table with my son,” he said. “Immediately after the shooting ended, I ran to my house nearby to bring my son back to safety and to grab my medical trauma kit and bulletproof vest.”
Al-Qam drove his car to a junction that connects roads to Neve Yaakov and Bet Hanina, a Palestinian neighborhood. There, he exchanged fire with Israeli troops, and was killed.
On Saturday, in Ras al-Amud, an eastern Jerusalem neighborhood seven miles south of Neve Yaakov, Israeli troops surrounded the six-story building where Al-Qam lived with his extended family. Before dawn, troops bound men and boys to one another by the wrists and led them out. Neighborhood Palestinian youths grouped together on a nearby stairway watched the soldiers.
One of the young Palestinian men watching the troops said they were in wait-and-see mode.
“Maybe they’ll demolish the house. Maybe it will be a surprise,” he said. “It’s a crazy government now. Any decision is possible.”
Netanyahu’s government, just weeks old, is the most right-wing in Israel’s history. His public security minister, Itamar Ben-Gvir, was weaned on the teachings of Meir Kahane, the racist rabbi assassinated in 1990, and has called for loosening rules of engagement with the Palestinians.
Ben-Gvir the lawyer represented Jewish Israelis who were accused of violence against Palestinians. In a detail that underscored the entwined fates of the two neighborhoods, one of those whose innocence he helped obtain was Haim Perlman, arrested in 2010 on suspicion of having murdered another Kheiri Al-Qam — the Neve Yaakov attacker’s grandfather. Perlman was never charged.
Ben-Gvir the provocateur with a criminal record made his name acts aimed at forcing the government rightward, accusing it of weakness. On Friday night Ben-Gvir the government minister traveled to Neve Yaakov, and now the anger, the pushback, the pleas to do something, anything were aimed at him.
Israeli security and emergency forces at the scene of a shooting attack in Neve Yaakov, Jerusalem, Jan. 27, 2023. (Olivier Fitoussi/Flash90)
“It’s on your watch!” said one man, caught on video shouting at Ben-Gvir. “Let’s see what you do now!”
The next day, Saturday, the residents chattered with one another on Neve Yaakov Boulevard trying to make sense of the night before. Neve Yaakov, a neighborhood built after Israel captured eastern Jerusalem in the 1967 Six-Day War, is surrounded by Palestinian neighborhoods and the separation wall between Jerusalem looms near.
“We live down the street so we don’t know what happened,” said Miriam Reuven, who was standing on a traffic island with her three granddaughters. “We came to get more information. I don’t feel safe here anymore.”
Some residents shooed away reporters: It was Shabbat, after all. Shimon Yisrael sought them out. He was showing a French camera crew the bullet in his ground-floor window.
“He came with a pistol to my face,” he said of Al-Qam. “I was outside, he wanted to shoot me and I went into the house and he shot at the window. He wanted to kill me.”
He knows what to do with Al-Qam’s family, which is likely to receive benefits that the Palestinian Authority gives to the families of Palestinians killed or imprisoned over their role in attacking Israelis. “Destroy their house,” Yisrael said. “Deport the whole family to Syria, to ISIS, they’ll slaughter them over there.”
In Ras Al Amud, the youths outside Al-Qam’s building said his father, Musa, is at prayers at a mosque a few doors down.
At the mosque, men were gathered in a courtyard, drinking the bitter coffee typically served at funerals. Except there is no funeral. Israeli authorities are holding Khairi Al-Qam’s body.
Musa Al-Qam whose son, Khairi, murdered seven Israelis and was killed, mourns in a mosque in Jerusalem, Jan. 28, 2023. (Orly Halpern)
Musa Al-Qam came out of the mosque to meet a reporter in the courtyard. His voice was toneless.
“Today is a wedding. It’s a celebration,” he said of his son’s death. “We don’t need to cry. Everything that happens is from God.”
Men hugged him. He stiffened.
His hands are calloused. He explained that he has worked for years in construction. He has eight children, four boys and four girls. The youngest are twins, he said, and for the first time, he smiled.
“The soldiers told me my son is a fighter,” he said. “My son is not from any movement. I don’t know what happened to his mind. The occupation kills boys before they are men.”
A few hours later, Netanyahu’s office issued a release: The security cabinet had ordered his apartment building sealed ahead of its destruction.
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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.”
The post Graham Platner drops out of Maine Senate race, citing push to ‘end the genocide’ in parting message appeared first on The Forward.
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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.”
The post Rahm Emanuel: Democrats who support Israel can still lead the party to the White House appeared first on The Forward.
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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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