Uncategorized
Israel is gleefully copying Nazi imagery in the propaganda war with Iran
The octopus — with tentacles splayed, gripping the globe — was a staple of European antisemitic caricature in the lead-up to the Holocaust. It was first popularized at the turn of the 20th century, and Nazi propagandists later developed it into a recurring motif: the Jewish people as a malevolent, multi-armed creature strangling the nations of the earth.
That imagery became so infamous, so freighted with historical horror, that when climate activist Greta Thunberg posted a pro-ceasefire photograph with a small stuffed octopus toy in 2023, the resulting outrage pushed her to issue a public apology.
The Israeli Foreign Ministry, it seems, feels no such compunctions. This weekend, the ministry’s official account on X posted an image depicting the Iranian government as an octopus extending malevolent tentacles — precisely the visual grammar that organizations like the ADL have long trained the world to recognize as antisemitic shorthand.
The irony might seem almost too pointed to be real. Sadly, it fits a pattern that has been developing for years: the Israeli government has increasingly adopted the symbolic vocabulary of classical antisemitism and redeployed it, directing its logic not at Jews, but at Iran, Gaza, progressive diaspora organizations — and sometimes even at diaspora Jews themselves.
The puppet master
Consider the case of George Soros.
The Hungarian-born Jewish billionaire has long been the target of a global antisemitic conspiracy theory, one in which a cosmopolitan, stateless Jewish financier is suggested to have secretly orchestrated the erosion of national borders and democratic governments. This myth has inspired mass murder. In 2018, Robert Bowers slaughtered 11 Jews at the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh in part because he believed Soros was orchestrating a Jewish plot to replace white Americans.
In September 2017, Yair Netanyahu, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s son, posted a meme to his Facebook page captioned “the food chain.” The image showed Soros dangling the world before a reptilian humanoid, who in turn dangled an Illuminati symbol before a hooded, hook-nosed figure — a direct echo of the “Elders of Zion” caricatures that served European antisemites.
The ADL condemned the image as containing “blatantly antisemitic elements.” But while Yair Netanyahu deleted the image — without issuing an apology — his father declined to comment. The implicit message: Netanyahu did not see the image, which also took aim at several of his political enemies including former Prime Minister Ehud Barak, as beyond the pale.
The episode was not an isolated youthful indiscretion. As J Street noted at the time, the younger Netanyahu drew the image from an extremist Israeli Facebook page with aesthetics transparently borrowed from the American alt-right. While the page was taken down after the incident, a replacement immediately appeared in its place.
This is not a story of a young man carelessly sharing content he did not understand. It is a story of an entire media ecosystem — developing in parallel in Israel and the American far-right — in which the enemies of the right wing are mocked with an antisemitic iconographic vocabulary.
The Israeli government has not merely tolerated this conspiracy theory. It has, at times, actively promoted it — albeit in more covert terms.
When Israel’s ambassador to Hungary condemned an antisemitic ad campaign by Prime Minister Viktor Orbán that targeted Soros in 2019, Netanyahu officially countermanded the ambassador, insisting that the Foreign Ministry issue a statement saying that Soros “continuously undermines Israel’s democratically elected government.” The words clearly invoked a widespread antisemitic trope that suggests Soros works to insidiously undermine governments across the globe. And in 2023, Israeli Diaspora Affairs Minister Amichai Chikli, whose portfolio included combating antisemitism, doubled down on similar attacks against Soros — despite widespread criticism from the Hungarian Jewish community that the rhetoric was an antisemitic trope.
The “fifth column”
Another example of the Israeli government’s growing penchant to draw from the catalogue of Nazi rhetoric and imagery: an August 2025 post by the country’s official Arabic-language X account warning that the growth of mosques across Europe — from “fewer than a hundred” in 1980 to “over 20,000 today” — represented the development of a “fifth column.”
The phrase “fifth column,” which originated during the Spanish Civil War, will be immediately familiar to any student of antisemitism. It is intrinsically connected to one of the oldest and most lethal charges in the repertoire of European Jew-hatred: the idea that the Jew is not merely a foreigner, but a domestic enemy — an agent of alien interests lurking inside the body of the nation. The accusation that Jews constituted a fifth column, loyal not to their country of residence but to shadowy transnational forces, was used to justify expulsion and extermination across Europe.
As one observer on X pointed out in response to the post, with devastating brevity: “I remember when another entity called Jews a fifth column in Europe. How did that go exactly?”
There is a further layer of irony here. The post was published in Arabic, not in any European language, meaning its primary audience was not the European governments it claimed to be warning, but the Arabic-speaking population within Israel. It was, in this sense, not so much a diplomatic communiqué as a declaration of civilizational alliance with Europe’s far-right, broadcast to audiences who would understand its implications most keenly.
A shared ideological structure
In late 19th and early 20th century nationalist antisemitism, the figure of the Jew represented a specific kind of threat to the nation-state: the enemy of hard borders and ethnic particularity — the solvent that dissolved the nation. The octopus was an effective image for this threat because it depicted placeless power — power that extended everywhere because it was rooted nowhere.
Where European nationalists said Jews were a problem because they had no land, early Zionists offered to solve the problem by giving Jews their own territory. If the antisemitic nationalist historian Heinrich von Treitschke could call Jews “a foreign element that has taken up too much space in our life,” then the Zionist activist Leon Pinsker could respond by agreeing that “the Jews are not a living nation; they are everywhere aliens… the only remedy would be the creation of a Jewish nationality, of a people living upon its own soil.”
The far-right revisionist politics that came to characterize the strand of Zionism originated by Ze’ev Jabotinsky, from which Netanyahu’s Likud party directly descends, fetishized national identity, biological determinism, and hierarchy, while building heavily on the frameworks of European nationalist thought. The diaspora Jew, in this view, was not merely unfortunate but defective — a rootless product of historical deformation.
This means that right-wing Zionism has not come to use antisemitic tropes opportunistically. Instead, it does so through a quality it shares with classical antisemitism — that of a deep suspicion of the values that the “globalist” and “fifth column” tropes were designed to attack. Internationalism, universal human rights, liberal diasporism; in this vision, all are dangerous.
Soros embodies a diasporic Jewish archetype that right-wing Zionism has long defined itself against: that of the cosmopolitan Jew, the liberal committed to abstract principles rather than to one particular nation. And when the Israeli state deploys the fifth-column accusation against Muslims in Europe, it is not merely borrowing far-right vocabulary as a tactical convenience. It is expressing a genuinely shared ideological premise: that pluralism, open borders, and minority religious communities are threats to the integrity of a national body.
This explains something that might otherwise seem paradoxical: the Israeli right’s simultaneous performance of Jewish victimhood and its actual hostility to large segments of actual Jewish life.
The Israeli government has refused to recognize non-Orthodox conversions, blocked left-wing Jewish critics of the occupation from entering the country, and treated liberal American Jewish organizations — the majority form of Jewish communal life in the United States — as adversaries.
The same ideological movement that styles itself the defender of the Jewish people treats the largest Jewish community in the world with contempt, because that community is largely defined by exactly the values that nationalist antisemitism — and nationalist Zionism — were both built to oppose.
That’s why the Israeli Foreign Ministry’s octopus post matters. Not just because its resonance with hateful imagery used against Jews is shocking, but because that resonance helps to reveal the structure of a worldview in which the central categories of antisemitic ideology have been detached from their original target — and retrained on new enemies.
The post Israel is gleefully copying Nazi imagery in the propaganda war with Iran appeared first on The Forward.
Uncategorized
A new Hebrew press in Berlin argues that Israel doesn’t own the language
(JTA) — Dory Manor and Moshe Sakal, who run a press for Hebrew literature in Berlin, are often asked if their business is Israeli.
The partners in life and publishing come from Israel, though they have lived in Berlin and Paris for the better part of two decades. But they say their publishing house, Altneuland, is neither Israeli nor European. Instead, they sought to create a home for Hebrew literature from around the world — open to Israeli writers, but free from Israeli state funding.
Altneuland is the first non-religious Hebrew publishing house to set up outside of Israel since the state was established. Manor and Sakal founded the press in 2024, and this fall, Altneuland will launch in the United States.
“I believe that the Hebrew language is not only a national language,” said Manor, the editor-in-chief. “Hebrew has always been a global language, and even modern Hebrew has been an international language — mostly European, but not only — before the creation of the State of Israel.”
Manor and Sakal have expanded their mission from Hebrew literature to publishing Jewish authors across languages, including German, French, Russian and Yiddish. The U.S. launch will include an original English-language book by Ruth Margalit, along with English translations of Hebrew novels by Noa Yedlin and Itamar Orlev.
Altneuland is also the German publisher of “The Future is Peace,” a New York Times bestseller by Israeli Maoz Inon, whose kibbutznik parents were killed on Oct. 7, 2023, and Palestinian Aziz Abu Sarah, whose brother died in 1990 after being tortured in an Israeli prison.
In a time when thousands of authors and publishers globally have pledged to boycott Israeli institutions over what they identify as a genocide perpetrated by Israel in Gaza, Manor and Sakal say that Altneuland is not a boycott. They work with writers who live in Israel and sell to Israeli bookstores. Establishing a Berlin-based publishing house made them ineligible for Israeli public funding so they could avoid the fraught question of accepting support from the government.
Sakal, the publisher, acknowledged that Israel was a center for Hebrew and Jewish literature, but said it doesn’t have to be the only center. “We are not replacing it,” he said. “We are doing something else.”
Altneuland allows the founders to work with Israelis while staying apart from the Israeli Ministry of Culture, which provides funding for Israel’s publishing industry, largely through literary awards.
In January, the ministry canceled its annual culture prizes. Culture Minister Miki Zohar, a member of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s right-wing Likud party, cited the political bent of the prizes and said their cancellation was owed to the organizers “clearly ignoring artists whose opinions are held by most of the country.” The cuts came shortly after Zohar launched an alternative state film award ceremony, cutting funds to the Ophir Awards — Israel’s equivalent of the Oscars — after it awarded best film to “The Sea,” about a Palestinian boy in the West Bank who attempts to go to Tel Aviv and see the sea.
Israel’s literary world, which pays poorly and lacks broad recognition, depends heavily on state-sponsored prizes.
“This government is, for me, an enemy of Israel and not Israel itself,” said Manor. “So no, I’m not boycotting anyone, but I don’t want to deal with the current Israeli government. I do want to deal with Israeli readers, with Israeli writers.”
Those writers share many of Manor and Sakal’s political views. The founders’ goal is to make Altneuland a home for Jewish authors with a liberal outlook — especially those who feel pressured by rising nationalism, whether in Israel or elsewhere.
Margalit, a Tel Aviv-based journalist, will publish a collection of her political and cultural profiles in Israel through a collaboration between Altneuland and Pushkin Press. Her book, “In the Belly of the Whale: Portraits from a Fractured Israel,” is coming out in September.
Margalit said she was drawn to Manor and Sakal’s “humanist spirit,” along with their ability to publish the book simultaneously in English, Hebrew and German.
“At a time when so many people are quick to jump to labels or cancellations, it was bracing to find thoughtful partners who were similarly aggrieved about the political situation as I was,” she said.
Arad’s Hebrew novel, “Our Lady of Kazan,” will be published in German by Altneuland as “Kinderwunsch” in July. Arad, an Israeli-born writer, has lived in California for over 20 years and authored 12 books of Hebrew fiction. One Haaretz reviewer summed her up as “the finest living author writing in Hebrew” who was “in exile in the U.S.”
Arad’s books, often featured on bestseller lists in Israel, tend to deal with Israelis living abroad. The theme fits into the global perspective of Altneuland, targeting readers who are curious about crossing national boundaries.
“I’ve been thrilled to see that Israeli readers are willing — even eager — to read stories about Israeli expatriates,” said Arad. “The experience of living outside Israel, whether temporarily for work or study or on a more permanent basis, has become a central theme in Hebrew literature.”
Altneuland takes its tongue-in-cheek name from Theodor Herzl’s 1902 novel, literally meaning “old new land.” The founder of political Zionism envisioned a utopic, multicultural Jewish state where Jews and Arabs lived peacefully together.
“When we finally decided to call our press Altneuland, it was because our Alteuland, an ‘old new land,’ is a land without territories. It is the Hebrew language,” said Manor.
Berlin is a thriving hub for up to 30,000 Israeli expatriates. Among them is a growing community of writers and intellectuals, including some who left Israel out of frustration and anger at their government.
Manor and Sakal see another reason for making Berlin their home base. They view Altneuland as a continuation of Schocken Verlag, a Jewish publishing house in Berlin that improbably persisted through the 1930s. Schocken Verlag was a cultural lifeline for Jews under Hitler’s regime, publishing books by Franz Kafka, Heinrich Heine, Rabbi Leo Baeck and Shmuel Yosef Agnon, a founding father of modern Hebrew literature.
In 1939, the publishing house was finally forced to shutter and moved to British Mandate Palestine. The reestablished Schocken Books lives on today as part of Penguin Random House. But Manor and Sakal said their project aligns with the original Schocken Verlag — the one destroyed by Nazism.
“What we find in both models is the possibility of a Jewish cultural space that is cosmopolitan, multilingual, humanist, non-national, and not dependent on a single territory,” said Sakal.
Altneuland has faced skepticism, particularly from Israel. Publisher and editor Oded Carmeli said in Haaretz, “The truth is that there aren’t enough Hebrew readers outside of Israel to support a publishing house – not even a bookstore, not even a shelf in a bookstore – and even if there were enough readers, no store in Berlin or Madrid would maintain such a shelf, for fear of repercussions.”
The Altneuland duo said their risky proposition is working out so far. Most of their Hebrew readers remain in Israel, where they are printing books in the thousands and going into second printings on select titles. But they are also cultivating a readership in Germany, where they print smaller special runs of Hebrew-language editions.
Naomi Firestone-Teeter, the CEO of the Jewish Book Council, said that Altneuland has emerged as pressure mounts on Jewish authors from the right and the left through “book bans, boycotts and cancellations.” (The council itself was recently criticized by dozens of Jewish authors for a “bias toward centering Israeli and Zionist voices.”)
“In this moment, we see their effort to build another home for Hebrew literature and Israeli voices as a meaningful contribution to the Jewish literary landscape,” said Firestone-Teeter.
Altneuland’s books in German and English are the fruit of collaborations with Pushkin Press and New Vessel Press. Manor said they were “positively surprised” when they began talks about working with publishers in Europe and North America. Those conversations began in the immediate aftermath of Oct. 7, and continued against the backdrop of a rising international chorus that has accused Israel of committing genocide in Gaza. So far, no one has boycotted them.
“Usually we had interesting talks, very open talks with people who understood, in most cases, the nuances between our being a Hebrew publishing house and Israel as a state, Israel as a regime,” said Manor. “This is something that we could not predict when we created Altneuland.”
The post A new Hebrew press in Berlin argues that Israel doesn’t own the language appeared first on The Forward.
Uncategorized
Jewish library and Chabad near Buenos Aires attacked, Argentine Jewish advocates say
(JTA) — Counterterrorism officials in Buenos Aires are investigating after a Jewish library and a Chabad center in a suburb in the Argentine capital were attacked last week.
On Thursday night, a Molotov cocktail was thrown at the Israeli Literary Center and Max Nordau Library in La Plata, according to a statement published Friday by the center’s board of directors. Multiple individuals “threw a blunt object filled with fuel at the front of the library, breaking windows and causing material damage,” the board said, noting that the device did not ignite and no one was injured.
The library, a secular educational center founded in 1912 that promotes Argentine Jewish culture, said it is reinforcing security measures in light of the attack.
On Sunday, the Chabad of La Plata was also attacked, according to DAIA, the Argentine Jewish community group, which condemned both attacks. DAIA, which first reported the Chabad attack, did not describe the nature of the attack beyond reporting no injuries.
“We are deeply concerned about the recurrence and the short timeframe of these incidents,” DAIA said in a statement.
The Ministry of Security of the Province of Buenos Aires and the Complex Crimes and Counterterrorism Unit of the Buenos Aires Provincial Police are investigating both attacks.
La Plata’s Jewish population numbers about 2,000, and its Chabad center has existed for more than 25 years. Argentina as a whole is home to the sixth-largest Jewish community in the world and the largest in Latin America, mostly centered in Buenos Aires.
“These acts of violence threaten democratic coexistence and the values of respect and pluralism that we defend our neighbors,” La Plata Mayor Julio Alak said. “We will not allow hatred and intolerance to have a place in our city.”
Argentina is the site of some of the deadliest attacks on Jewish institutions in modern history. A 1992 bombing of the Israeli Embassy in Buenos Aires killed 29 people, while a 1994 attack on the AMIA Jewish community center left more than 80 people dead. Argentina’s president, Javier Milei, a pro-Israel and philosemitic economist, has advanced efforts to hold Hezbollah and Iran responsible for their alleged role in the attacks after years of foot-dragging by prior leaders.
The incidents in La Plata come as Jewish institutions around the world are on high alert amid a string of attacks since the start of the U.S.-Israel war on Iran in February. Several synagogues and Israeli outposts in Europe have faced arson attacks that a group seen as tied to Iran have claimed responsibility for staging. No one has been injured in those attacks.
Argentina has also faced homegrown antisemitism scandals. In September, a video of a group of Buenos Aires high school students on a graduation trip chanting “Today we burn Jews” went viral, earning condemnation from Jewish community advocates and even Milei himself. The group, from the private school Escuela Humanos, was traveling with Escuela ORT, a Jewish school.
Following the attacks in La Plata, comments on a local news outlet’s Instagram post about the attack on the local Chabad Sunday were filled with antisemitic tropes, including blood libel and false flag theories. Antisemitism watchdogs say false flag allegations, holding that an operation is staged to look like an attack in order to garner sympathy for the victim or attribute blame to another party, have flourished in recent years against Jews and Israel.
The post Jewish library and Chabad near Buenos Aires attacked, Argentine Jewish advocates say appeared first on The Forward.
Uncategorized
Cornell’s Jewish president clashes with students following on-campus debate about Israel
(JTA) — Cornell University President Michael Kotlikoff and student protesters are trading accusations after an incident in which protesters surrounded the president’s car following an on-campus debate about Israel.
The protesters, from a group called Students for a Democratic Cornell, released a video appearing to show that President Michael Kotlikoff had backed up into one of them while a protester shouts that the car ran over his foot.
In response, Cornell released its own video depicting what it said was a “harassment and intimidation incident,” its enhanced version of which it said offered “complete footage of the parking lot interactions, instead of clips to support a narrative.” That video shows students surrounding the president’s car as he tries to exit his parking space. After he eventually departs, the students continue to mill around with no obvious indication of injury to any of them.
In a statement of his own, Kotlikoff said that despite being surrounded by protesters who banged on his car windows, he waited until his backup camera showed a clear path before maneuvering out of the spot.
“The behavior I experienced last night is not protest,” Kotlikoff said in his statement, released Friday night. “It is harassment and intimidation, with the direct motive of silencing speech. It has no place in an academic community, no place in a democracy, and can have no place at Cornell.”
In an Instagram post, the protesters rejected Kotlikoff’s claims that they banged on his car and that they had previous records of misconduct on campus. They also reiterated their allegation that he had struck them.
The incident marks a relatively rare example of a clash between a university and pro-Palestinian student protesters two years after the student encampment movement roiled campuses across the United States, including at Cornell. The Ivy League university, like many others, enacted new rules designed to constrain protests that have kept demonstrations at bay amid pressure from the Trump administration to curb what it said was antisemitism among protesters. In November, Cornell agreed to pay $60 million to resolve federal antisemitism allegations.
Kotlikoff became Cornell’s president in early 2025, saying at the time that he was “very comfortable with where Cornell is currently” following “two relatively peaceful semesters” in which there were only isolated incidents that violated university rules around protest. He soon rejected pro-Palestinian students’ demands to cut ties with the Technion university in Israel. But he also urged the campus to foster academic debate around the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
The event that preceded his clash with students on Thursday represented a striking example of such debate. Sponsored by an ideologically diverse array of groups, including the pro-Israel advocacy groups StandWithUs and the Zionist Organization of America as well as the campus chapter of Students for Justice in Palestine, which has previously been suspended for violating university rules, the event was the second in a two-part “Israel-Palestine Debate Series.”
The series was organized by the Cornell Political Union according to a format its website says it has long maintained. The format features a lecture by a speaker followed by formal responses from students and an audience debate.
In the first event, held earlier in April, the Israeli historian Benny Morris lectured on the topic “The American-Israeli Alliance Serves America’s Interests.” Morris is a liberal Zionist critic of the Israeli government whose work has included foundational research on the founding of the state arguing that many Arabs were expelled, rather than fled, during the 1948 war.
The second, on Thursday, featured the pro-Palestinian Holocaust historian Norman Finkelstein, who lectured on the topic “Israel Was Not Justified in Its Response to October 7th.” Finkelstein, who has criticized Morris for showing a pro-Israel bias, has compared the plight of the Palestinians to that of Jews during the Holocaust, and Students for Justice in Palestine posted a picture of its members posing with him on Thursday.
Kotlikoff offered introductory remarks at the event, which promoted a no-technology policy designed “out of respect to student[s] who will be given the opportunity to speak openly on a divisive topic.”
The post Cornell’s Jewish president clashes with students following on-campus debate about Israel appeared first on The Forward.