US Vice President JD Vance on Thursday sharply criticized the Israeli parliament’s preliminary vote to extend its laws to parts of the West Bank, calling the move an ill-advised “political stunt” that undermines US diplomatic efforts and risks inflaming regional tensions.

The remarks came as Vance concluded a two-day trip to Israel aimed at reaffirming Washington’s support for the country and bolstering the ceasefire deal between the Jewish state and the Palestinian terrorist group Hamas to halt fighting in Gaza.

Israel’s 120-member parliament, the Knesset, on Wednesday narrowly approved, by a vote of 25–24, a bill that would apply Israeli civil law to settlements in the West Bank, a move widely described as an initial step toward “annexation.” However, experts have noted that annexation in international law means taking the territory of a foreign sovereign country, explaining that since the territory in question does not belong to another country, the bill would instead apply Israeli sovereignty to the area.

Lawmakers also passed a similar bill specifically for the Maale Adumim settlement by a vote of 31-9.

Though the measures still face several rounds of approval before becoming law, the votes immediately sparked a political storm both inside Israel and abroad.

“If it was a political stunt, it is a very stupid one, and I personally take some insult to it,” Vance told reporters.

“The West Bank is not going to be annexed by Israel,” he continued, saying that’s the policy of US President Donald Trump. “That will continue to be our policy, and if people want to take symbolic votes, they can do that, but we certainly weren’t happy about it.”

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s office moved quickly to rebuke the vote in a statement, calling it “a deliberate provocation” by members of the far-right opposition and stressing that the government had not sponsored or supported the bill.

Netanyahu’s right-wing coalition is expected to block the legislation in future readings, but the incident highlighted widening divisions within Israel’s parliament and the difficulties in both navigating Israeli domestic politics and managing Jerusalem’s relationship with Washington simultaneously.

Some observers have expressed concern that talk of extending Israeli sovereignty in the West Bank, where the Palestinian Authority exercises limited self-governance, could derail the fragile ceasefire with Hamas and complicate renewed US-backed efforts to stabilize Gaza. Such activity in the West Bank could also pose a roadblock to potential expansion of the Abraham Accords which normalized relations between Israel and several Arab states.

Vance, who visited the region as part of a broader Middle East tour, said annexation “would only serve to embolden extremists on both sides” and “undermine the trust we’ve been trying to rebuild.”

Meanwhile, Trump also warned Israel against moving toward applying sovereignty to the West Bank, saying he promised Arab countries that the Jewish state would not formally do so and warning Jerusalem such a move would harm the US-Israel alliance.

“It won’t happen,” Trump said in a newly released interview with Time magazine. “It won’t happen because I gave my word to the Arab countries. And you can’t do that now. We’ve had great Arab support. It won’t happen because I gave my word to the Arab countries. It will not happen. Israel would lose all of its support from the United States if that happened.”

US Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC) also chimed in, claiming on social media that after speaking with Israeli Ambassador to the US Yechiel Leiter he can confirm that the vote was non-binding and not intended to offend the United States.

“He vigorously stressed no offense was meant and reinforced that no major decisions will be made by Israel without cooperation and coordination with the US,” Graham wrote.

(JTA) — After Graham Platner, the progressive Senate hopeful running in Maine’s Democratic primary, revealed this week that he had had a Nazi-inspired tattoo on his chest for nearly two decades, several of his allies on the left cut him loose. 

One who hasn’t: Vermont’s Jewish senator, Bernie Sanders.

“I’m not overly impressed by a squad of media running around saying, ‘What do you think about the tattoo on Graham Platner’s chest?’” the elder statesman of the progressive movement told Axios this week. “Between you and me, there might be one or two more important issues.”

Sanders also said he “absolutely” stood by his endorsement of Platner. Axios plans to air its full interview with Sanders on Friday but released snippets of the conversation on social media.

Sanders has backed Platner, a Marine veteran and oyster farmer, since soon after the latter announced his Senate bid this August. Platner’s anti-establishment platform, which includes embracing many progressive policies Sanders helped popularize, had made him a rising star despite his lack of any political experience. Platner has also taken a hard line against Israel.

That popularity was shaken following the recent revelation of Platner’s old Reddit posts, in which he made comments disparaging various groups. In an effort to get ahead of the opposition, Platner then himself revealed that he sported a skull-and-crossbones chest tattoo resembling an S.S. Totenkopf. He said he paid for it in 2007 while “inebriated” with fellow Marines in Croatia, and claimed he hadn’t known it was affiliated with Nazis (though subsequent reporting has suggested he knew it was a Totenkopf).

“I’m not a secret Nazi,” Platner said on Monday. He initially did not apologize for or suggest he would remove the tattoo. 

After the revelations, Sanders told Axios he was still “impressed by the guy.”

“He went through some very difficult experiences in the military as a machine gunner, seeing his friends killed, came out of the military, he will acknowledge, I’m not telling you what he doesn’t say, he had PTSD,” the senator said. “He went into a dark period in his life. I suspect that Graham Platner is not the only American to have gone through a dark period.”

Sanders then sought to draw a line between condemnation of Platner and the election of President Donald Trump. “I think as a nation, especially given the fact that we have a president who was convicted on 14 felonies, maybe we have to do a little bit of forgiveness,” he said.

He wasn’t the only prominent progressive Jew who has remained in Platner’s corner since the tattoo revelation. Jon Lovett, the co-founder of influential left-wing podcast “Pod Save America” and media company Crooked Media and a former Obama official, has accused Platner’s progressive critics of demanding “only perfect candidates off the Harvard Law conveyor belt.” (Platner revealed his Nazi tattoo on a “Pod Save America” episode.)

“Of course he SHOULD answer for that tattoo,” Lovett wrote in a follow-up post on X Wednesday. “He’s explained the story, how it wasn’t flagged as a hate symbol when he entered the army or when he received a security clearance. He’s apologized and covered it up. Maybe it’s not enough. Maybe you don’t believe him.”

Following pushback, Platner did cover up the tattoo with a different design he referred to as a “Celtic knot with some imagery around dogs.”

In a post and video he posted to social media Wednesday, the candidate lifted his shirt to reveal his new tattoo and expressed regret that the old one might have invited comparisons to Nazis.

“It’s come to my attention that it has a stark resemblance to a symbol that is used by neo-Nazis, and I want to say, that was not my intent at all. And the idea that I was going around with something like that utterly horrifies me,” Platner said. “I know that symbols like this can be incredibly damaging to people, and the idea that I had it all these years and it could have been read like that is incredibly troubling.” 

He added, “I have lived a life dedicated to antifascism, antiracism and anti-Nazism. I think that racism and antisemitism are a long scourge on our society and a long scourge on our politics, and I think it has no place in our world.”

Platner quickly pivoted, accusing “the establishment” of trying to destroy his movement with distractions. 

“Every second we spend talking about a tattoo I got in the Marine Corps is a second that we don’t talk about Medicare for All, it’s a second we don’t talk about raising taxes on the wealthy,” he said. 

Another prominent Jewish senator, Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, responded to the revelations about Platner’s tattoo by making an endorsement in the race, which he had until this week avoided. He is backing Janet Mills, Maine’s former governor, saying she “is the best candidate to retire Susan Collins.”

A recent poll, conducted just before the tattoo revelations, found that Platner holds a wide lead over Mills among Democratic voters.

Platner’s opponents have started to riff on the controversy, as well: Jordan Wood, a former congressional aide also running in the primary, posted on social media to “fess up” that he, too, has a tattoo — of the symbol of Barack Obama’s presidential campaign. “I got this tattoo a few years ago as a reminder of what hope and a positive vision can do in our politics,” he said on Instagram. Adding a dig at Platner, he concluded, “And yes, I knew what it was when I got it.”

A defiant Platner has pledged to remain in the race. At a rally Wednesday evening in Ogunquit, he again said he hadn’t known the meaning behind his tattoo.

He added, “If they thought this was going to scare me off, if they thought that ripping my life to pieces, trying to destroy me, was going to make me think that I shouldn’t have undertaken this project, they clearly have not spent a lot of time around Marines.”

The post Bernie Sanders downplays Graham Platner’s Nazi tattoo: ‘There might be one or two more important issues’ appeared first on The Forward.

The owner of a vegan kosher food chain in Washington, D.C., said boycotts that targeted his business for its ties to Israel led to the permanent closure this month of his last two restaurants.

This development is the latest chapter in an ongoing wave of vandalism and boycotts aimed at Israeli and kosher restaurants, which have become frequent targets since the start of the Israel-Hamas war.

Shouk, which opened its first location in 2016, was listed on D.C. for Palestine’s “Apartheid? I Don’t Buy It” boycott initiative in March, categorized under “restaurants that culturally appropriate or sell Israeli settlement products.”

While it was unclear what effect the boycott had on the restaurant’s bottom line, organizers of the boycott happily took credit for the closure.

“LOCAL BDS WIN IN DC!!” D.C. for Palestine posted to Instagram in reference to Shouk’s closure. “In times like these, it is still important to uplift small wins, as they are glimmers of the world we want to see!”

Jinan Deena, a Palestinian chef who helped organize the boycott against Shouk, told the Forward she took issue with Shouk’s Israeli branding, viewing its omission of the cuisine’s Palestinian roots as part of a larger pattern of cultural erasure.

“This food ties us to our land,” Deena said. “As long as we continue to serve our food [and] we properly label our food as Palestinian, then we will always continue to exist.”

Shouk had tried to be sensitive to concerns like Deena’s. The restaurant once described its menu as “Tel Aviv street food,” but in recent years had shifted to marketing it as Mediterranean fare, co-founder Dennis Friedman said in an interview. The restaurants displayed the word “Shouk” in both Hebrew and Arabic — “Souk” — to signal that it was “a place for all to come,” Friedman said.

“I think more of the issue was that I’m an American Jew, and my business partner was from Israel,” he said.

Deena rejected that characterization, arguing her criticism was not about Jewish identity but cultural appropriation. “There’s a difference between Jewish and Israeli cuisine,” she said. “I’m not attacking anyone for matzo ball soup or schnitzel.”

‘Food is not owned’

Friedman and Ran Nussbacher co-founded Shouk to bring healthy, plant-based food to the Washington, D.C., area as part of a fast-casual concept.

They named the restaurant after the Hebrew word for an open-air market, and the plant-based menu was inspired by the food Nussbacher ate while growing up in Israel.

Shouk’s veggie burger earned early acclaim. The Washington Post called it their favorite in the area during the restaurant’s first year, and in 2018, the Food Network highlighted it on its series “The Best Thing I Ever Ate.”

At its peak, Shouk operated five locations across Maryland and D.C. Two of its locations closed in 2023 for unrelated reasons.

But the restaurant soon got caught up in discourse over who lays claim to foods like falafel and hummus, long the subject of contentious debate among Israeli and Palestinian chefs.

Starting in 2022, Deena, who spent her teenage years living in Ramallah in the West Bank, used her personal Instagram account to help organize a boycott of Shouk, along with other Israeli restaurants in the area. She critiqued Shouk’s description of the menu as inspired by “the open-air markets in Tel Aviv.”

“Profiting off of the occupation and oppression of my ancestors is a hard line for me, and should be for you too,” Deena wrote. “Erasure of Palestinian food is a part of the occupation strategy.”

At the time, Nussbacher dismissed such disputes as missing the larger purpose of food.

“I’m disappointed when we don’t use food as a bridge,” Nussbacher told Moment Magazine in 2022. “Is pizza an appropriation of Italian culture? Is pasta Italian or Chinese? Food is not owned. Food is dynamic. And it’s created and recreated time and again. The question of ownership is irrelevant.”

The boycott gains traction

Shouk was “on track toward profitability” at the start of this year, the restaurant said in an email to customers about its closure.

Sales declined dramatically this summer, Shouk said in the email, more than the typical seasonal decline.

Friedman, who did not share specifics about the business’ financials, attributed the downturn to protesters chanting “Free Palestine” outside the restaurant, gluing posters to the restaurant’s windows and outdoor seating, and coming inside to intimidate customers and staff.

At Shouk’s Georgetown location, which closed in 2024, protesters were “steady and frequent, and they just didn’t let up,” Friedman said.

“We heard from customers that there was some concern. It was either concern for safety or just not wanting to deal with that negativity in that type of environment,” Friedman said. “And I couldn’t blame them. I wouldn’t want to, either.”

Friedman said he was in touch with authorities about the incidents, and a plainclothes officer began monitoring the situation from a car across the street. But he said the extra security ultimately didn’t make a difference.

On Oct. 3, Shouk emailed customers explaining why the remaining two restaurants in Rockville, Maryland, and Washington, D.C. had closed.

“One factor was that we found ourselves caught in the crosscurrents of a toxic political climate surrounding the Israel/Gaza war,” Shouk wrote. “More and more, customers have chosen to avoid businesses connected to Israel. We heard from long-time regulars who stopped visiting us for these reasons.”

“The restaurant business is a hard business to begin with, with razor thin margins,” Friedman told the Forward. “And so if you have something like this, and it’s prolonged, it’s kind of inevitable what’s going to happen.”

Friedman emphasized that Shouk was “not a political place.” To the extent that the restaurant did engage in advocacy, Friedman said, it was focused on environmental issues, from promoting plant-based eating to using biodegradable cutlery.

“We wanted to truly do something that could be a game changer. And for quite a while it was — so that’s why it makes it a little heartbreaking that we had to stop,” he said. “Even though I’m sad of how it ended, man, I’m grateful for the last 12 years.”

The post An Israeli restaurant chain said it closed due to boycotts. Protesters are celebrating. appeared first on The Forward.