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Long-delayed Pittsburgh synagogue shooting trial to begin Monday, igniting pain, fear and hopes for closure
(JTA) — Every Thursday, Brad Orsini gets on a conference call with dozens of other security specialists who, like him, focus on preventing threats to American Jews. But in a few days, and for the coming months, the conference call won’t just address the dangers of the present and future. It will also deal with events that occurred more than four years ago.
That’s because next week marks the beginning of the trial of the gunman who is accused of killing 11 worshippers in a Pittsburgh synagogue in October 2018.
Orsini, who oversaw the city’s Jewish communal security on the day of the attack in the neighborhood of Squirrel Hill, hopes to find a sense of closure in the alleged shooter’s prosecution. But he also knows that the trial threatens to broadcast the white supremacist ideas that lay behind the attack, and continue to pose risks for Jewish communities. And he worries that, in addition to providing a possible pathway for survivors and victims’ families to move into the future, it could also thrust them back into a painful past.
“It’s long overdue,” Orsini said. “This has been looming large over the Pittsburgh community and, quite honestly, the Jewish community in the nation. We’re all looking toward finishing this trial and prosecuting this actor for what he did.”
At the same time, he added, “This trial is going to reopen wounds that this community has suffered for almost five years now, and it’s going to have the ability to retraumatize many people in the community. And we have to be concerned about that.”
Beginning on Monday, those countervailing emotions and expectations will come to bear as the deadliest antisemitic attack in American Jewish history is litigated in court. The trial, which will begin with jury selection, is expected to last about three months. Few doubt the guilt of the accused shooter, Robert Bowers, whose name is hardly uttered by Jewish residents of Squirrel Hill. But what remains unclear is what the trial will mean for American Jews — and for the families most directly affected by the attack.
Some hope for the defendant to get the death penalty — even though that will mean prolonging the legal ordeal — while others have advocated against it. Some hope for the trial to shed light on the threat of white supremacy, even as renewed attention on the attack could inspire other violent extremists. And some hope the trial will help them move past the tragedy, even as they know it will be difficult to hear the details of the shooting laid out in court.
“The country is going to have to undergo this unprecedented trial of the country’s worst mass killer of Jews,” said Jonathan Greenblatt, CEO of the Anti-Defamation League. “It’s going to be really hard, so I think our community is really going to have to buckle down and brace ourselves.”
The attack on Saturday morning, Oct. 27, 2018, killed 11 people from three congregations, all of which met at the same building, and injured six others, including four police officers. The defendant faces 63 criminal charges, including hate crimes and murder charges. He has pleaded not guilty. The prosecution is seeking the death penalty — a choice some relatives of victims are vocally supporting. Previously, leaders of two of the three congregations that suffered the attack had opposed the death penalty in this case.
“This massacre was not just a mass murder of innocent citizens during a service in a house of worship,” Diane Rosenthal, sister of David and Cecil Rosethal, who died in the attack, told local journalists, according to reporting by the Pittsburgh Union Progress. “The death penalty must apply to vindicate justice and to offer some measure of deterrence from horrific hate crimes happening again and again.”
For the survivors and families of victims, the trial will likely be especially painful. Some told the Pittsburgh Jewish Chronicle that they intend to take time off work, delay a vacation or be away from family for an extended period of time to be present at the proceedings.
“I want to see justice happen, but at the same time, I hate to think about the families having to potentially see images of what happened and things of that sort,” Steve Weiss, who survived the attack, told the weekly Jewish newspaper. “I’m sure they have mental images, but to have to actually see photos of victims and things of that sort I think can really be difficult for them.”
One thing few people question is the shooter’s guilt, despite his plea of not guilty. He offered to plead guilty in 2019 in exchange for taking the death penalty off the table, but prosecutors, determined to pursue capital punishment for the crime, rejected the plea.
It was the same thing that had happened in the case of the man charged with killing nine Black worshippers in a Charleston, South Carolina, church in 2015. But there, despite the rejected guilty plea, the trial took place a year and a half after the attack, and the shooter was sentenced to death. (In an illustration of the length of death penalty cases, his latest court proceeding happened in October, and he has not yet been executed.)
In contrast, the Pittsburgh trial is not starting until four and a half years after the shooting there. Part of the reason for the delay stems from the work of the defense team, which has pushed back the trial through various court filings. The alleged shooter’s lead attorney, Judy Clarke, has defended a series of high-profile attackers: the Unabomber, the attacker in the 1996 Atlanta Summer Olympics bombing and the Boston Marathon bomber, among others. According to Pittsburgh’s local CBS affiliate, her singular goal is to avoid the death penalty for her client.
But in many other ways, the parallels between the Charleston trial and this one are clear. Both concern shootings by alleged white supremacists in houses of worship, tragedies that have become gruesome symbols of a national rise in bigotry. In both, the culpability of the defendant was assumed before the trial began. Like the Pittsburgh defendant, the Charleston shooter has been lionized by white supremacists, including some who cited him as an inspiration for their own violent acts.
And in both cases, there is an understanding that a conviction does not heal the wounds opened by the shooter.
“This trial has produced no winners, only losers,” said the judge in the Charleston shooter’s trial, Richard Gergel, according to the New Yorker. “This proceeding cannot give the families what they truly want, the return of their loved ones.”
Still, some who are watching the Pittsburgh trial closely hope that it will bring new facts and connections to light. Amy Spitalnick, the executive director of Integrity First for America, a nonprofit that spearheaded a multimillion-dollar victory in a civil trial against the organizers of the 2017 far-right rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, hopes that the Pittsburgh trial illustrates the links among different white supremacist shootings — such as the attacks in El Paso, Texas; Christchurch, New Zealand; and at a synagogue in Poway, California.
Those attackers spouted similar conspiracy theories and referenced other recent violent attacks in their manifestos. Spitalnick said that the accused Pittsburgh shooter allegedly communicated with the organizers of the Charlottesville rally on the social network Gab, which is known as a haven for right-wing extremists.
“Trials like this can really be illustrative of how deep the poison of white supremacy and antisemitism goes,” she said. In the Charlottesville trial, she said, “The reams and reams of evidence… really helped pull back the curtain on what motivated the defendants, how they operated, the tools and the tactics of the movement, the conspiracy theories at its core.”
There’s also the possibility that, with the attack resurfacing the shooter’s motivations, and putting him back in the spotlight, it will act as an inspiration for other white supremacists. In the years following the synagogue shooting, Pittsburgh became a kind of pilgrimage site for the defendant’s admirers — leading to continued harassment of local Jews.
“We’re giving a platform to an individual who is a Jew hater, who wanted to kill all Jews,” Orsini said. “What does that spark in other like-minded people? We need to be very cognizant throughout this trial on what kind of chatter is going to be out there on the deep dark web, or even in open portals.”
In the face of concerns about retraumatization, Greenblatt said the ADL is preparing resources on how to discuss the trial with students and amid the Jewish community.
“To relive the horrors of, the grief of, the event — this thing being constantly in the news — it’s going to be hard to avoid, it’s going to be difficult and it could be grisly and upsetting,” Greenblatt said. “I would much prefer this trial didn’t happen — I would much prefer this crime never happened, I would much prefer that those people were all still with us today — but this is where we are.”
He added, “If there might be some ability to raise awareness among the non-Jewish population of what we’re facing, [that] would be of value.”
One potential challenge for American Jews as a whole, Spitalnick said, is that federal prosecutors don’t necessarily share the needs of Jews who will be following the proceedings. While the trial will conjure a mix of emotions for Jews locally and beyond, she said, prosecutors will be more focused on the nuts and bolts of what happened that day and the details of the accused attacker’s actions and motives.
“We’re going to probably spend a lot of time hearing from the prosecution about what motivated him, but it’s not through the lens of what we as Jews think about when we think about Jewish safety,” she said. “It’s through the lens of making the case that this guy did what he did motivated by this extremism and hate… It’s going to be very deliberate and tactical and precise, versus where we as American Jews have been thinking about this from a deeply personal, communal safety perspective.”
The deliberate and detailed work of prosecutors, however, may not be at cross purposes with the emotional needs of Jews, Orsini said. When the trial ends, he said, the establishment of Bowers’ guilt may itself prove to be transformative for how Jews relate to the tragedy, in Pittsburgh and beyond.
“The fact that this individual has not been fully brought to justice… and is not convicted yet of this mass shooting — in some way, yes, that closure and finality will be done at the end of this trial,” he said. “The community can kind of regroup and truly become resilient once this phase is over with.”
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Blinken, Pompeo: Strong U.S.-Israel ties, assistance to continue despite Trump call to end aid
(JTA) — Former secretaries of state Antony Blinken and Mike Pompeo both downplayed the potential end of American military aid to Israel on Sunday, insisting such a development would not harm U.S.-Israel ties during a joint appearance in Washington.
Speaking at the Jewish Federations of North America’s annual General Assembly, both men also defended Israel’s security and its need to defend itself in the wake of the Hamas attack on Oct. 7, 2023, condemning voices who try to equate Israel’s actions with those of Hamas and accuse it of committing genocide.
But Blinken, who was secretary of state in the Biden administration at the time, also didn’t spare Jerusalem from criticism over its conduct of the war.
Following Oct. 7, “the Israelis did, for the most part, the bare minimum of what they felt they needed to do for people who were stuck in the middle of this crossfire in Gaza,” he said. “There was a certain amount of disregard, a certain amount of disdain for the well-being of the Palestinian civilians.”
He added that “that is vastly different, vastly different from an intent to do them harm, from an intent to eliminate them. The target was Hamas, and horrifically, too many people were caught in the middle of that and suffered terribly as a consequence.”
Still, he said, it is important to “recognize that we’re at an inflection point” when it comes to American attitudes toward Israel. Blinken recalled discussions with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu as the Gaza war was raging in which he warned that Israel was “not only losing the Democratic Party — and that may be fine from your perspective — you’re going to be losing young Republicans, young evangelicals.”
On Election Day last week, following campaigns in which many candidates called for reducing support for Israel, President Donald Trump declared that the money “gets cut off at the end of the year.”
Pompeo, who served as CIA director and secretary of state during the first Trump administration, said that while he did not “know exactly how this administration will follow through on that,” there had been conversations between Jerusalem and Washington “about what’s the appropriate level of assistance and what [is] the right model” for cooperation.
Calls to change the nature of U.S. military aid have become “bipartisan,” he noted.
Stating that he is “very optimistic,” the former Republican congressman asserted that “whether we provide the $4 billion a year — which … mostly goes to buy U.S. weapons systems from Lockheed and Raytheon and big defense contractors — is much less material than the nature of the relationship between the United States and Israel.”
“And so whether we provide that particular money, there will still be deep connectivity. There’ll still be lots of assistance, and there will be a partnership that is historically important, not just for Israel, but for the United States of America as well … we couldn’t do the intelligence work we need to do without them.”
“They save American lives all the time,” he continued. “I still have a death threat on me from the Iranians. The Israeli intelligence has been very helpful at making sure that I’m where I need to be and I’m not where I ought not be.”
Israel’s 10-year memorandum of understanding (MOU) with the United States, which currently pledges Israel $3.8 billion annually for the fiscal years 2019-2028 subject to congressional appropriations, has proven a political liability for Trump. Last week he questioned why his administration should have to deal with criticism from Democrats over the issue. Following the GOP’s loss in the midterms, Vice President JD Vance explicitly called to put America first and “change our relationship to Israel.”
Blinken responded similarly to his Republican counterpart on the question of U.S. aid to Israel.
“I think you’re seeing a recognition on the part of the Israeli government that this thing is not going to last forever, and an attempt to make it clear in the body politic in Israel that, no, we can pay for our own stuff. We don’t need the kind of assistance that we’re getting from the United States in terms of paying for what we’re acquiring,” Blinken stated, adding that “it doesn’t change anything … about the inherent value of the relationship and the partnership.”
But while Pompeo and Blinken appeared largely on the same page regarding military aid to Israel, the two differed significantly regarding the conflict with Iran and a future resolution to the long-running conflict with the Palestinians.
Asked how to negotiate a settlement with Iran, Pompeo replied that “I just I simply don’t think that it’s possible with the regime” even as he admitted the United States cannot currently curtail Iran’s ambitions through military means.
Pompeo called to “continue to apply pressure there” through the current economic blockade and by “going after further assets inside of Iran” because “they still have the capability to muck up the Gulf region and to threaten Israel [while] we have the capacity to, if not eliminate it, mitigate that materially.”
As for offering concessions to keep the Strait of Hormuz open and maintain the flow of oil, Pompeo insisted that “we should never give the Iranians a damn thing.”
Blinken, on the other hand, stated that Trump needs to acknowledge that the war against Tehran “might not be a loss” but it “wasn’t a real win.”
But while concessions, possibly including sanctions relief, may be needed to bring the Iranians back to the table, “I think what you have to do is exert sustained, systematic pressure on them economically … for purposes of getting to negotiate,” he added.
The lesson learned from the 2015 Iran deal, otherwise known as the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, Blinken said, is that it can take time to get Iran to the point where it is ready to negotiate.
Blinken added, “Same thing with the Iran-Iraq war. There wasn’t a capitulation. There was a negotiation. I think at this point that’s in our interest.”
Turning to the Palestinian issue, Blinken argued that part of why Hamas attacked on Oct. 7 was to preempt the further expansion of the Abraham Accords and that “for that vision to be fully realized, it requires a resolution of the Palestinian question.”
“I believe to the bottom of my heart, as I have throughout, that the only way forward, and again, this is very unpopular these days, is through a secure Israel and a sovereign Palestine,” Blinken said.
He drew pushback from Pompeo, who argued that “one of the keys to success of the Abraham Accords was not letting the conflict between the Palestinians and the Israelis get in the way of what the Gulf Arab states actually know needs to happen.”
This article originally appeared on JTA.org.
The post Blinken, Pompeo: Strong U.S.-Israel ties, assistance to continue despite Trump call to end aid appeared first on The Forward.
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‘Jews are welcome, Zionists are not’: Is a Zionist ban at a restaurant legal?
Sap Sua, a Vietnamese restaurant in Boulder, Colorado, was one of Emily Lanigan’s favorite restaurants. She even celebrated her 44th birthday there in June. So Lanigan was stunned when the restaurant posted this since-deleted message on Instagram in September: “Jews are welcome, Zionists are not.”
Lanigan, a former synagogue president, identifies as a Zionist, which she defines as the Jewish right of self-determination. Was she really no longer welcome at the place where she had received a complimentary dessert just months before?
She wondered if the restaurant had a different definition of Zionism, she said, and thought maybe reaching out and offering to have an in-person discussion could clear things up.
“Being a Zionist does not mean I do not also believe in the freedom and autonomy of Palestinians,” Lanigan said she commented on Instagram. “You and I are not so far apart.”
But Sap Sua’s owner, Anthony “Ni” Nguyen, doubled down: “As you clearly saw, the full statement was ‘Jews are welcome. Zionists are not.’ Jews are a protected class, and all Jews are welcome,” Nguyen wrote in messages to Lanigan reviewed by the Forward. “Zionism is a political ideology, like Nazism.”
Nguyen’s response to Lanigan implied the law was on his side. He could ban “Zionists,” it seemed, so long as he let in Jews who shared his views about Israel.
Legally speaking, Nguyen was partially correct. Neither federal civil rights law nor Colorado law prohibits businesses from refusing service based on customers’ political beliefs — meaning turning someone away based solely on their political support for Israel could be allowed.
But the line gets murkier when “Zionist” is used as a stand-in for Jewish or Israeli identity, which can violate laws prohibiting discrimination based on religion or national origin.
The distinction matters not only for Sap Sua, as spaces from coffee shops to book festivals to concert venues make disavowing Israel a condition of entry or participation. The troubling practice raises a thorny question: How should the law distinguish between excluding someone because of their political beliefs and excluding them because of who they are?
The right to exclude?
Sap Sua was not the first business to declare itself off-limits to Zionists with no legal consequences. In Utah, after a bar called Weathered Waves declared “no Zionists allowed” in 2024, the attorney general found no evidence of legal wrongdoing. (Weathered Waves later closed over a dispute with its landlord.)
But that doesn’t mean “Zionist” bans are always legal. According to Richard Katskee, a professor of law at Duke University with expertise in public accommodation law, the legality depends on how the ban is enforced.
Does the business ask only Jewish or Israeli customers to disclose their views? Does it make assumptions about the politics of customers wearing kippahs? If Jewish customers are being singled out, Katskee said, that would make a finding of illegal discrimination more likely.
Omer Wiczyk, senior counsel at the Brandeis Center, told the Forward that two cases he’s currently litigating cross that line. At a coffee shop in Oakland, California, a customer wearing a Star of David baseball cap was asked on video if he was a Zionist and told to leave. At an eyebrow salon in Northern Virginia, a customer was kicked out after disclosing she was Israeli-American.
Businesses “cannot turn a customer’s identity into objectionable politics, and then invoke that to justify their exclusion,” Wiczyk told the Forward. “Being Israeli is not a political issue. Being a Jew is not a political issue. It’s who you are.”
But if a business required every customer, regardless of their identity, to affirm a particular political position on Israel before receiving service, that could be legal, Katskee said — though enforcing such a policy fairly would inevitably prove difficult in practice.
“It might be legal, like putting up a sign saying ‘Republicans only’ or ‘Democrats only,’” Katskee said.
Jenin Younes, legal director of the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee, argues that businesses have some latitude to refuse service based on customers’ politics. The ADC is currently making that case on behalf of Poetica Coffee, which is fighting a Department of Justice investigation into its decision to publicly bar Rep. Dan Goldman over his support for Israel.
In Goldman’s case, Younes said, his public profile and easily searchable voting record help support the idea that the coffee shop targeted him for his political views.
“It’s harder to make the argument that ‘No, this was really about just not letting Jewish people in’ — because he’s a public figure,” Younes said. “He’s said what he thinks on these issues.”
Even Goldman himself said that the coffee shop incident did not warrant a civil rights investigation because of his status as a public figure.
Younes argues that the same principle applies to situations unrelated to Israel and Zionism.
In 2018, for example, the owner of a Virginia restaurant kicked out White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders citing the Trump administration’s “inhumane and unethical” policies. The restaurant faced social backlash, but no legal consequences.
And last year, a Martha’s Vineyard farmers’ market stand refused to sell lawyer Alan Dershowitz pierogi, citing his legal defense of Jeffrey Epstein and other men accused of sexual assault. Dershowitz threatened legal action, but it appears he never actually filed suit.
“In my opinion, businesses should have the right to exclude people whose views it doesn’t like,” Younes said. “And by the way, I would apply this in the other context: If there’s a pro-Israel coffee shop owner and they wanted to say, ‘We don’t want anyone wearing a pro-Palestine pin in here,’ I think they have that right.”
The law’s limits
Whether businesses have the legal right to exclude certain customers is a different question than whether they should.
Such bans can end up holding ordinary Jews responsible for the actions of the Israeli government — with the misguided idea that denying them a meal or a cup of coffee will somehow advance the Palestinian cause.
And since “Zionist” means different things to different people, using the label as a litmus test will almost inevitably lead to erroneous assumptions about peoples’ views.
In cases where the law is not a remedy, the free market may be. Businesses that turn away “Zionists” must be so committed to their beliefs that they are willing to refuse a paying customer, risking boycotts and reputational damage.
At the same time, some businesses may believe the publicity will draw in new clientele. Karimi Brows, which turned away the Israeli-American customer, boasted that it gained 40,000 TikTok followers in the month after the incident.
For its part, Sap Sua appeared to backtrack amid intense public pressure, posting to Instagram that it would welcome “every guest who walks through our doors.” (Sap Sua did not respond to the Forward’s request for comment.)
But for Lanigan, the damage was done.
“It was one of my favorite restaurants,” Lanigan told the Forward. “But I will never set foot in that place again.”
The post ‘Jews are welcome, Zionists are not’: Is a Zionist ban at a restaurant legal? appeared first on The Forward.
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Explainer: Gadi Eisenkot’s four conditions for forming Israel’s next government
(JTA) — JERUSALEM – Israeli President Isaac Herzog tasked Gadi Eisenkot on Sunday with forming Israel’s next government, giving him up to six weeks to assemble a coalition with a total of 61 seats out of 120 in Israel’s parliament, the Knesset.
If he fails to do so, then the president can give another Knesset member the opportunity; most likely this will be incumbent Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. For his part, Netanyahu, has urged Eisenkot to join him in an emergency national unity government that will keep Israel strong against ongoing threats.
Eisenkot has responded that the “national emergency government” he will form will comprise the “four Zionist parties” of the change bloc – his own Yashar Party, B’Yachad headed by former prime ministers Naftali Bennett and Yair Lapid, Avigdor Liberman’s Yisrael Beitenu Party and the Democrats under Yair Golan.
He also said he would welcome “parties and Knesset members who support Yashar’s four principles” to join the coalition.
At the President’s Residence in Jerusalem on Sunday, Eisenkot said he would be sending out formal invitations as soon as possible “to every Knesset faction, calling on all their members, both as parties and as individuals, to take part in forming the government and bringing it to its swearing-in.
“The rule is simple,” he added. “If you are prepared to sign on to the four principles I have set out, you are potential partners in a national emergency government under my leadership.”
Throughout his campaign, and particularly since the Oct. 27 election, Eisenkot has emphasized these four principles as the basis for forming the next government. But what are they exactly? And who, out of the other 11 parties, will be able to accept them and join his coalition?
1) Recognition of the State of Israel as a Jewish and democratic state.
Eisenkot wants to define his coalition as a government that is committed to Israel’s Jewish national identity and to democracy, not simply an alliance united by opposition to Netanyahu.
Any party wanting to join must accept Israel’s identity as the national home of the Jewish people first. The requirement has historically been contentious for Israel’s two Arab parties, who represent 19 Knesset members.
Parties must also accept the country’s democratic institutions, which uphold equality and rights for all citizens and prioritize the rule of law.
This means parties, such as the far-right and the ultra-Orthodox, that, as members of the outgoing government, have been pushing to overhaul the country’s judiciary – a key institution in Israel’s system of democratic checks and balances – might think twice about joining.
2) Acceptance of the values of the Declaration of Independence.
Israel’s Declaration of Independence, proclaimed and signed on May 14, 1948, is a foundational document that has helped shape the country’s constitutional principles, although Israel does not have a single, formal written constitution.
In it, the signatories laid out their vision for Israel, including the historical ties the Jewish people have to the land of Israel and its place as a safe haven for Jews around the world who are in trouble.
For Eisenkot, the emphasis appears to be on one particular section that declares: “The State of Israel will foster the development of the country for the benefit of all its inhabitants; it will be based on freedom, justice and peace as envisaged by the prophets of Israel; it will ensure complete equality of social and political rights to all its citizens, irrespective of religion, race or sex; it will guarantee freedom of religion, conscience, language, education and culture; and it will safeguard the Holy Places of all religions; and it will be faithful to the principles of the Charter of the United Nations.”
By embracing the Declaration of Independence, Eisenkot is recognizing the place of Israel’s minority groups, highlighting their “full and equal citizenship.” A point mentioned twice in the declaration.
The declaration also reaffirms that Israel is a country seeking peace, rather than endless conflict, at a time when Netanyahu has recently been criticized over his handling of the country’s wars on multiple fronts.
3) Mandatory service for all — military, national, and civilian, to strengthen the IDF and expand its ranks.
Including this condition for joining the government is a direct message to the ultra-Orthodox parties, at least one of which is considering supporting Eisenkot’s coalition.
United Torah Judaism, which has been aligned closely with Netanyahu’s bloc for at least the past two decades, on Thursday refused to recommend the prime minister as Israel’s next leader. Instead, the party, which holds seven seats, abstained from recommending any candidate.
Both UTJ and the second ultra-Orthodox party, Shas, have resisted efforts that would include ultra-Orthodox young men studying in yeshiva under a universal draft law requiring all eligible Israelis to perform military service.
Previous exemption laws have expired, and Israel’s Supreme Court has ruled that the state’s blanket exemption of yeshiva students from military service has no legal basis and violates principles of equality before the law.
By including this condition, Eisenkot is telling the ultra-Orthodox – and even the Arab community, most of whose members are also exempt from mandatory military service – that everyone in Israel must do their part, whether through military service or some type of national or community service.
This stipulation could either keep the ultra-Orthodox out of the government, even though Eisenkot’s partners have expressed willingness to allow their participation. Or it could force them to be more flexible on an issue that until now they have appeared unrelenting.
4) Recognition of Hamas as a terrorist organization and commitment to dismantling its military and governing power.
Leaders of the two Arab parties, the Islamist Ra’am Party and the more nationalist Joint List, have refused to make this statement out loud.
Ra’am leader Mansour Abbas, who has repeatedly condemned the Oct. 7 attack, has said he does have a clear position on this but refuses to state it publicly for several reasons ranging from concerns about his personal safety to his ties to the Muslim Brotherhood, to which Hamas is also affiliated. He has also questioned why Arab politicians are required to pass loyalty tests that are not applied equally to Jewish politicians.
When President Herzog pressed him on the matter last week, Abbas said: “I have an unequivocal answer, but leave me space to be a bridge. To also influence the other side.” He argued that maintaining channels of communication with Palestinians requires him not to adopt language that would immediately alienate them.
For the Joint List, the continued refusal to call Hamas a terror group appears to reflect the view that Hamas is part of the broader Palestinian political movement. Some of its members argue that labeling it a terrorist organization risks delegitimizing Palestinian political aspirations as a whole.
Members of the 11-member faction have condemned the Oct. 7 massacre, but are unlikely to accept this particular condition because it could be used to justify Israel’s military campaigns in Gaza and the West Bank. Its leaders also want to preserve their credibility among Palestinian voters, many of whom see the conflict through the lens of occupation and Palestinian national rights.
This article originally appeared on JTA.org.
The post Explainer: Gadi Eisenkot’s four conditions for forming Israel’s next government appeared first on The Forward.
