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Israel antiwar protests spur intensifying government crackdown
TEL AVIV, Israel — It was a strange sight, even for wartime Israel: A line of police horses descended into the vast public bomb shelter beneath Tel Aviv’s Habima Square — hooves clattering against the concrete as officers led them to safety.
While the horses got a police escort, just a few feet away, 17 antiwar demonstrators were stuck on a police bus, pleading to be let off before the incoming barrage of Iranian missiles reached the city.
They had been detained as part of the ongoing crackdown on Israelis protesting against the war with Iran, carried out in the name of wartime public safety.
This round of arrests took place on Saturday night. “Our phones began buzzing with the pre-siren warning,” recalled Alon-Lee Green, co-director of the Jewish-Palestinian coexistence group Standing Together and now one of the leaders of a burgeoning antiwar movement. “We kept asking them to let us go down to the shelter. They refused, even though this is completely against the law. They told us it was our problem because we chose to come to the protest.”
When the siren sounded — signaling 90 seconds to take cover — the argument escalated. Onlookers tried to intervene, urging police to allow the detainees into the shelter. Instead the driver took off for a nearby residential building. The activists, some still in handcuffs, were rushed into the lobby and ordered to lie on the floor. “This was not a protected space. We were under a bunch of glass windows,” Green recounted. “If there had been a direct hit … they put our lives at risk in a very serious way.”
In the weeks leading up to Israel and the United States’ joint strikes on Iran, support for full-scale war among Israelis was high, with most people convinced that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s dire warning of the immediate and existential threat posed by Iran and his promise to eliminate it “for generations” were both truths. As the war began, and Israelis found themselves rushing into bomb shelters, support remained widespread.
But as the fighting has continued to drag on, the antiwar movement has followed a sharp growth trajectory: from a small gathering of far-left activists outnumbered by the journalists reporting on them to multi-city demonstrations drawing more than 1,000 participants each week. The numbers are still modest compared to the tens of thousands who filled Israel’s streets weekly during the judicial overhaul protests and the hostage demonstrations after Oct. 7, but a significant jump given how popular the war was at its outset.
The rise of the protest movement coincides with a shift in public opinion. Support for the war, which began above 80%, has dropped into the high 60s in recent weeks — still a clear majority, but a meaningful decline for a conflict that initially drew near-unanimous backing. One month in, war fatigue has begun to set in. In addition to the growing death and injury toll and financial loss, Israelis are sleep-deprived, desperate for school to resume, and frustrated that the airport is still not operating at full capacity. They are also watching as the government slashes the state budget.
Organizers say they are encouraged by the rapid growth, even as they navigate the pitfalls of coalition-building. But for now, the movement faces a more immediate challenge: as crowds grow, so too does the force being used by uniformed and plainclothes Israeli police officers to disperse them.
Arrests, forcible removal of demonstrators and confiscation of equipment have now become regular occurrences. According to police, these are legitimate methods for dispersing protests, which they say violate Home Front Command directives restricting large gatherings during wartime. But with beaches and malls around the country packed with people, and Haredi communities holding massive funerals, weddings and holiday celebrations, critics have accused far-right National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir of using those same restrictions as a pretext to silence dissent.
That debate has now moved from the streets to the courtroom. Just as Saturday’s protest was getting underway, Israel’s High Court of Justice ruled that blanket restrictions used to shut down demonstrations did not sufficiently account for the basic right to protest, which the court president stated exists even during wartime. The court ordered the state to raise the cap on demonstrations from 150 to at least 600 people, including at Habima Square.
The ruling came in response to a petition filed the day before by the Association for Civil Rights in Israel and activist Itamar Greenberg, following weeks of aggressive police dispersals. The court also raised concerns about selective enforcement, noting that similar restrictions were not being applied to other large gatherings.
By Saturday night, the decision was already being tested. As hundreds of demonstrators gathered once again at Habima Square, part of coordinated protests that also drew crowds in Haifa and Jerusalem, organizers said they were operating within the court’s guidelines. Police disagreed. Citing security concerns and Home Front Command restrictions, officers moved quickly and forcefully to disperse the crowd, confiscating amplification equipment and signs and arresting 17 people, including Green.
“But we learned afterwards that the police had begged Home Front Command to give the order that the protest was illegal, and they refused,” he said. “After 30 minutes, the police just decided to act on their own command and begin arresting people.”
IDF officials later confirmed to Haaretz that dispersing the demonstration had not been approved by the Home Front Command, saying the decision was made by police alone. The High Court is expected to revisit the issue this week, even as Justice Minister Yariv Levin has called on the government to consider defying any ruling that expands protest rights during wartime.
For Green, the past few weeks reflect a deeper societal shift. “What we’re seeing is the legitimization of political violence,” he said. “It starts with words — calling people traitors for opposing the war or supporting peace — and it slowly becomes something more.” In recent months, a spate of right-wing provocateurs have begun harassing and intimidating journalists, politicians, and protesters with whom they disagree. Prominent leaders, including Green, have also been targeted at their homes.
He added: “When the public sees that it’s becoming dangerous to speak out, to organize, to protest — that violence is an acceptable way to silence a political camp — it changes the entire public space.”
Both Green and Greenberg stress that the antiwar movement is not the first, nor the primary, target of such force. “By no means did this start with our movement,” Greenberg noted. “It begins with the Palestinians. They bear the brunt of police brutality. But that’s how fascism works — people remain silent, and eventually it comes for them.”
Green agrees. “It’s a slow but powerful process of stripping legitimacy from an entire political camp,” he said, “and giving permission to act against it with violence.”
While that threat has surely kept individuals at home, the movement as a whole continues to expand. It now includes veterans of the antigovernment movement, first-time demonstrators, and public figures such as Hadash-Ta’al political party lawmakers Ofer Cassif and Ayman Odeh — even as many prominent opposition figures remain absent.
For Greenberg, the growth is both intentional and complicated. “We not only expected it,” he said. “We were trying to make it happen as soon as possible.”
“As someone who identifies as a radical anti-Zionist, I understand the limits of my political power. We are a small group. But we are part of this society, and we can still create a movement of resistance to this war.”
That has required letting go of control. “We started this, but now we are part of something bigger,” he said. “There are people at the protests whose views I totally disagree with … but right now we have one mutual goal, to stop this war. I cannot afford to be picky.”
Green suggests that tension is central to the movement’s future. “This is where we see Standing Together’s role — to help build as wide a coalition as possible,” he said, describing efforts to bring together more than 50 groups around a broadly shared platform. “Anti-war, anti-government, anti-abandonment, pro-life. Whoever can agree to this can be in the tent.”
It is a fragile coalition. “Right now, we still feel that our specific voice is being heard loudly and clearly,” he said. “But what happens when it grows to 10,000 people and suddenly we are in the minority?”
“It becomes about finding a balance,” Greenberg continued, “Continuing to show up at largest protests and representing the anti-occupation bloc but also making sure that we are developing separate ways to express our specific beliefs.”
For Green, however, the moment feels larger than any one single cause or agenda.
“I think we’re facing a moment where all the different fronts are uniting,” he said. “People are starting to understand that whether you are coming from a humanitarian viewpoint or from a solidarity viewpoint or anti-government or even self-interest, it’s all connected to one overarching question: Are we going to find a way to live here in peace or are we are going to be stuck in this constant state of war, forever fighting, stealing, assassinating, running to shelters, our children missing school?”
As the protests continue to grow — even amid efforts to suppress them — organizers believe they have opened a space that did not exist just weeks ago.
“We have the opportunity,” Green said, “to present a different way.”
The post Israel antiwar protests spur intensifying government crackdown appeared first on The Forward.
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Molly Crabapple’s book is well researched but ideologically biased
Molly Crabapple’s Here Where We Live Is Our Country is a captivating read. Drawing on the biographies of both major and lesser-known activists, Crabapple tells the history of almost 130 years of the Jewish Labor Bund. Her crackling, imaginative prose brings dry, documentary materials to life, and makes long-ago personalities feel contemporary.
Crabapple chooses Sam Rothbord , her great-grandfather, as a guide to the vanished world of Jewish Eastern Europe. Though Crabapple was born many years after his death, her family saved his photos and papers. Crabapple turns to these items to reconstruct a detailed picture of his life.
Born in the town of Volkovysk (now in Belarus), Sam joined the Bund as a young man. He soon immigrated to America, where he became an artist. His first exhibit was held at the former headquarters of the Forward on East Broadway.
Many well-known Bundists make an appearance in the book: Vladimir Medem, Arkady Kremer, Raphael Abramovitch, Mark Lieber, Sophie Dubnova-Erlich , Henryk Erlich, Viktor Alter and others.
Crabapple takes her readers through the cataclysmic events in which the Bund took part: the Russian revolutions of 1905 and 1917, World War I, the establishment of the Polish republic and, finally, the Holocaust. Despite her great reverence for the Bundists’ heroism and sacrifice, Crabapple acknowledges that these heroic figures could also have difficult personalities. She often compares her own experiences as an activist on the left with the struggle of radicals around the world today.
The Bundists left behind a rich legacy of memoirs and documents. Crabapple synthesizes these sources into a lively narrative full of color and emotion.
Crabapple makes liberal use of graphic cliches, and she doesn’t hold back when it comes to representing the ‘bad guys.’ Describing the 1905 pogrom in Odessa, she writes: “Blood-smearedRussian mothers loaded their pushcarts with the spoils from looted Jewish houses, then had their kids torch their homes behind them as they left.” ”
Crabapple is well-versed in Marxist theory, having learned it from her father who, she writes, is a professor of political economy. She clearly explains the ideological differences between the Bund and other leftist parties. Unfortunately, her relationship to historical facts is occasionally a bit loose.
Czar Nicholas I, for example, did not limit the number of Jewish students in Russian universities; at the time there were simply nearly no Russian Jews who would have liked to study there. The so-called “percent norm” (quota) was first introduced by his grandson, Alexander III in 1887, over 30 years after Nicholas’ passing in 1855.
Crabapple also writes that “Tsar Nicholas I wrote his policies with the declared aim of forcing a third of Jews to die, a third to emigrate, and a third to convert to Christianity.” But Nicholas I never declared this; in fact, he strictly prohibited emigration from Russia. Many popular books on Russian Jewish history attribute this statement to Alexander III’s official, Konstantin Pobedonostsev, although no documentary source exists for this.
On the whole, Crabapple paints a historical landscape of the time in black and white. The good guys are the Bundists. The bad ones are various governments, the Bolsheviks and, of course, the Zionists. At fault for all the world’s ills is the West, with its capitalist, imperialist regimes.
The book is prominently anti-Zionist in its politics. This ideological direction must have been a motivating factor for Crabapple as she undertook this project — and she’s successfully conveyed it to her readers, reviving the old fighting spirit of Bundist polemics.
For all this, Crabapple isn’t blind to the political weakness of the Bund. “The Bund had accomplished many things in the areas of mutual aid, cultural production, and armed self-defense. But there was one thing that the Bund had neglected: the necessity of taking power.” A question lingers, however: did the Bund ever have that option, besides a handful of times in 1905, in Russian or Polish cities?
Here Where We Live Is Our Country offers a major intellectual resource for today’s generation of radical activists protesting Zionism and the State of Israel. There’s ample historical and theoretical ammo here for their arguments. At the same time, Crabapple’s book shows that far from every critic of Zionism is an anti-Semite (although many of them are).
Historically, it was Zionism that won out over the Bund, and the State of Israel is an undeniable fact. Indeed, Israel became a new home for many Bundists who survived the Holocaust. For Crabapple, however, that was their bad luck: “The lucky ones got visas for refugee communities in Melbourne and Johannesburg, Paris and Montevideo. Others were not so lucky. In the years after the Holocaust, hundreds of Bundist survivors left for Palestine.” Their party, she adds, meaning the Bund, “had given them fairy tales. Zionists offered a place where they could rebuild their lives.”
There’s a sense of mixed feelings here: disdain for the Zionists, coupled with the acknowledgement that the Bundist project had come to nothing and Zionism did a better job for the Jews. In keeping with Crabapple’s anti-Zionist attitude, she makes no mention of the Bund’s vibrant afterlife in Israel, which included figures such as Isaac Luden and Mordechai Tsanin, and the Israeli magazine Lebns-Fragen, which was highly critical of the Israeli government.
But perhaps the book’s greatest weakness is its deeply caricatured portrayal of Zionism. Not a single word is said about the major role of the Zionist program in Europe and America to support Jewish life in the diaspora. Compared to the Bundists, the Zionist activists were often less dogmatic in their perspective on Jewish culture.
Crabapple clearly demonstrates the ideological divide between the Bund and Zionism. However, she doesn’t seem to acknowledge what these two movements shared: a commitment to the future of the Jewish people. Both emerged from the political environment of late 19th-century Eastern and Central Europe, where various ethnic communities were seeking to reinvent themselves as nations.
The Bund and the Zionists offered two different responses to this challenge. One centered on diasporic nationhood, the other on the creation of a nation state. For both, however, Jewish peoplehood remained the primary concern.
Crabapple concludes her book on the Bund by thanking “the people of Palestine.” It’s a provocative and predictable call in today’s radicalized climate. What remains unclear, however, is who exactly these people are: do they include Israeli Jews? A Bundist answer, I suspect, would be “yes.”
The post Molly Crabapple’s book is well researched but ideologically biased appeared first on The Forward.
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At Trump’s Christian revival on the National Mall, one rabbi made a Jewish case for America
On the National Mall Sunday, Christian worship music boomed from giant speakers as “Adonai” and other names of God flashed across jumbo screens behind a praise band. Pastors invoked America’s biblical destiny. Sadie Robertson, the Christian social media personality and granddaughter of Duck Dynasty patriarch Phil Robertson, preached from both the Old and New Testaments.
And then Rabbi Meir Soloveichik — the lone Jewish speaker at the planned nine-hour “Rededicate 250” rally called by President Donald Trump, billed as a national “jubilee of prayer, praise and thanksgiving” — stepped to the podium and began talking about Irving Berlin.
Soloveichik, 48, a scion of one of modern Orthodoxy’s most revered rabbinic families and a member of Trump’s Religious Liberty Commission, used his remarks to offer a Jewish case for American exceptionalism, a contrast to the explicitly Christian vision of the nation’s founding that defined the day.
Recalling how Berlin wrote “God Bless America” as fascism spread across Europe and antisemitism consumed the continent, Soloveichik described the song as both a patriotic anthem and a prayer of gratitude from a Jewish immigrant who found refuge in the United States. The hymn, he said, represented “a plaintive prayer to God that America continue to be blessed.”
The four-minute speech fit squarely within Soloveichik’s broader worldview. A senior scholar at the conservative Tikvah Fund and rabbi of Congregation Shearith Israel in Manhattan, the oldest Jewish congregation in the United States, he has long argued that America’s civic ideals are aligned with traditional Judaism and biblical morality. His 2024 book, Providence and Power: Ten Portraits in Jewish Statesmanship, examines Jewish political leadership through the lens of faith and moral responsibility.
For Soloveichik, the connection between Judaism and American identity culminated in the Second World War. He noted that “God Bless America” was first broadcast publicly the day after Kristallnacht, when Nazis destroyed Jewish homes and synagogues across Germany. “At the very moment when darkness deepened,” Soloveichik said, “America raised its voice united in the song that Irving Berlin wrote.”
He added that “in the years that followed 1938, the prayer that is ‘God Bless America’ was carried by American soldiers who defeated evil, liberating Europe and the world.”
Then came the line that drew some of the loudest applause of his remarks: “It is a reminder, as hatred of Jews makes itself manifest again, that antisemitism is utterly un-American.”
Separation of church and state
The moment captured the complicated role Jews increasingly occupy within the Trump-era religious right: embraced as part of America’s Judeo-Christian heritage, even as critics warn that the broader movement surrounding events like Rededicate 250 blurs the line between religious pluralism and Christian nationalism.
Rachel Laser, the Jewish CEO of Americans United for the Separation of Church and State, denounced the rally before the event. “If President Trump and his allies truly cared about America’s legacy of religious freedom, they would be celebrating church-state separation as the unique American invention that has allowed religious diversity to flourish in our country,” she said in a statement. “Instead, they continue to threaten this foundational principle by advancing a Christian Nationalist crusade to impose one narrow version of Christianity on all Americans.”
Sunday’s event — part revival meeting, part patriotic pageant — was the centerpiece of the Trump administration’s religious programming tied to this year’s 250th anniversary of the founding of the United States. Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth and House Speaker Mike Johnson were slated to appear alongside evangelical pastors, worship leaders and conservative Christian influencers. President Trump and Vice President JD Vance were scheduled to address the crowd by video, while Trump himself spent the weekend golfing after returning from an overseas trip to China.
“This is a recognition of the deeply embedded history and religious and moral tradition of the country,” Johnson said Sunday on Fox News, dismissing criticism that the rally blurred the separation of church and state. Those objecting to the event, he added, “want to erase the history of America.”
No Muslim speakers appeared on the lineup. Organizers promoted Trump’s declaration of a national “Shabbat 250” observance the day prior as evidence of interfaith inclusion.
One of the Sunday event’s chief promoters, Trump spiritual adviser Pastor Paula White-Cain, had reassured supporters beforehand that the gathering would celebrate America’s Christian foundations without “praying to all these different Gods.”
Soloveichik did not address those tensions. Instead, he closed by returning to the image of America as a nation uniquely capable, in his telling, of transforming a Jewish refugee into the composer of one of the country’s most enduring patriotic hymns.
“To sing this song,” he said, “is to be reminded that America’s story is unique.”
“GOD BLESS AMERICA IS NOT JUST A SONG. IT’S A PRAYER.” 🇺🇸🙏
Rabbi Meir Soloveichik delivers a powerful reminder that America’s love of liberty has always been tied to faith — tracing its story and why anti-Semitism is fundamentally un-American. pic.twitter.com/aKMg42nS2I
— Real America’s Voice (RAV) (@RealAmVoice) May 17, 2026
The post At Trump’s Christian revival on the National Mall, one rabbi made a Jewish case for America appeared first on The Forward.
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Israel to Establish Defense Offices in Former UNRWA Compound
A man handles fallen cables at the Jerusalem headquarters of the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees (UNRWA) as the headquarters is dismantled by Israeli forces, in East Jerusalem, January 20, 2026. Photo: REUTERS/Ammar Awad/File Photo
Israel’s cabinet on Sunday approved a plan to build a defense compound on the site of the recently demolished premises of the United Nations Relief and Works Agency in East Jerusalem.
Israel in January demolished structures inside the UN Palestinian refugee agency’s East Jerusalem compound after seizing the site last year, in an act condemned by the agency as a violation of international law.
In a joint statement, the Defense Ministry and Jerusalem Municipality said the new compound would include the establishment of a military museum, a recruitment office and a defense minister’s office.
Defense Minister Israel Katz called the decision one of “sovereignty, Zionism, and security.”
UNRWA, which Israeli authorities accuse of bias, had not used the building since the start of last year after Israel ordered it to vacate all its premises and cease its operations.
A UNRWA spokesperson declined to comment on the Israeli plan.
The agency operates in East Jerusalem, which the U.N. and most countries consider territory occupied by Israel as it was captured from Jordan in the 1967 Middle East war. Israel considers all Jerusalem to be its indivisible capital.
UNRWA also operates in Gaza, the West Bank and elsewhere in the Middle East, providing schooling, healthcare, social services and shelter to millions of Palestinians.
“There is nothing more symbolic or justified than establishing the new IDF recruitment office and defense establishment institutions precisely on the ruins of the former UNRWA compound — an organization whose employees took part in the massacres, murders, and atrocities committed by Hamas terrorists on October 7,” Katz said.
Israel has alleged that some UNRWA staff were members of the Palestinian terrorist group Hamas and took part in the attack on Israel on October 7, 2023, that killed about 1,200 Israelis and led to Israel’s war against Hamas.