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Nelson Cruz and other Hispanic MLB players visit Israel to promote Christian-Jewish relations

TEL AVIV (JTA) — On a recent Monday, the owner of a restaurant here captivated a group of 14 lunch patrons with stories of her life before and after moving to Israel from Ethiopia as a youngster. A family visiting from New York approached from another table, and the adult son asked if he could pose for pictures with some of the members of the big group.

After the group had left to walk to the shore nearby, the restaurant’s owner learned that she had just hosted a group of professional athletes and their entourage. She briefly considered running after them for a photo herself.

“I wish I’d known who they were,” she said. 

The athletes — Nelson Cruz, Cesar Hernandez and Jeimer Candelario, all Major League Baseball players in the United States — were surprised by what they learned at lunch, too. For instance, they had not known of the existence of Black Jews, including the thousands of Ethiopians living in Israel.

The players and their significant others were brought to Israel for a week by the Philos Project, a U.S.-based nonprofit organization that promotes Christian relations with Israel and other Middle Eastern countries. It was the organization’s first delegation to Israel involving Hispanic athletes, said Jesse Rojo, the Philos Project’s director of Hispanic affairs. The group toured Christian sites in Jerusalem and the Galilee and ran a baseball clinic for Jewish and non-Jewish youth in Raanana. 

The visit also aimed to “proactively” combat antisemitism, Rojo said, “to show our baseball players that they can make a difference, not wait for someone to come out with an antisemitic tweet to do something.” The trip was organized well in advance of the recent antisemitism controversies involving American celebrities such as rapper Kanye West and NBA star Kyrie Irving.

But the players also expressed eagerness to learn about Israel and to impart their experiences upon returning to their homelands of the Dominican Republic and Venezuela — and to MLB clubhouses.

Cruz, from the Dominican Republic, is 39th on the MLB’s all-time home run list with 459. He hit only 10 homers this year and is 42 years old, but he said he’s hopeful a team will sign him to a contract for 2023. Hernandez, a second baseman who is also now a free agent, hails from Venezuela and is a former Gold Glove winner, earned for being named the best defender at his position in the American League. Candelario, born in New York but raised in the Dominican Republic, is also looking for a new team after playing six seasons at third base for the Detroit Tigers. Cruz and Hernandez played together on the Washington Nationals this past season.

On a minibus, before it set out for a day of touring, Cruz led a prayer of gratitude as everyone along for the ride bowed their heads. Members of the group uttered “amen” responses throughout. In Jaffa, Candelario expressed excitement at learning that the Bible’s Jonah had departed by ship from the ancient city’s port before being swallowed by a huge fish. At lunch, Candelario led the table in grace.

In separate interviews, each of the three visiting players said he had never heard anti-Jewish or anti-Israel views expressed by relatives, friends or acquaintances. Most of their compatriots, they said, think that Israel is constantly under enemy attack, a view they added was dispelled by their experience traveling around the country and feeling safe.

All attributed pro-Israel inclinations to their strong Christian beliefs, including regularly attending church services. They cited their mothers as devout women who raised them with Bible stories.

“We love God and the word of God. This is the land of our fathers,” said Candelario. “Whoever blesses Israel will be blessed,” he said, paraphrasing God’s promise to Abraham. 

Rojo is organizing a charity softball game in the Dominican Republic between Dominican and Jewish-American MLB players in the coastal town of Susua — which was founded by refugees of Nazism who established still-operating dairy and sliced-meat factories. Funds raised through the event will pay to renovate both a baseball field and the town’s synagogue and to commemorate the Jewish immigrants’ roles in Susua’s history, Rojo said.

Cruz is trying to recruit fellow Dominican players to come on subsequent Israel trips and to play in next year’s Susua event. Superstar outfielder Juan Soto, Cruz’s former teammate on the Washington Nationals, considered participating in the recent delegation, but he reversed course after being traded mid-season to San Diego, Cruz said. Cruz also hopes to persuade the retired legends Albert Pujols and Manny Ramirez to come to Israel, too.

Back home, “we’ll share this experience, and definitely more players will be motivated to come,” Cruz said.

“Anyone who’s an opinion-maker from such countries helps us,” said Jonathan Peled, the Israeli foreign ministry’s deputy director general for Latin America. “They become ambassadors of good [will]. Whether a pastor, an athlete, a performer, a YouTuber – on every visit to Israel, there’s nothing like firsthand observation to see Israel in a more balanced, positive manner and less distorted.”

Jeimer Candelario, a third baseman for the Detroit Tigers, interacts with children at the Raanana field. (Nico Andre’ Duran)

Israel enjoys good relations throughout Latin America, with Venezuela an exception after it broke off diplomatic relations with the Jewish state in 2009, Peled said. “But we hope that [ties] will be renewed soon,” he said.

Venezuela, the Dominican Republic and Israel, coincidentally, will be competing (along with Puerto Rico and Nicaragua) in the same group at the upcoming World Baseball Classic, to be held in Miami in March. The teams will feature large contingents of major leaguers, with Israel’s roster consisting mainly of American Jews.

Baseball is not a top sport in Israel, but Team Israel’s periodic success on the world stage has helped promote the game. The Raanana site — dedicated in memory of Massachusetts native Ezra Schwartz, who was killed in a 2019 terrorist attack in Israel — is one of only a handful of baseball fields in the country. Other notable ones are at Kibbutz Gezer, in Tel Aviv’s Yarkon Park, and at the Baptist Village complex in Petach Tikvah.

At the group lunch, Hernandez said that he “would live here” in Israel in the off-season if he could obtain a visa. He was asked whether he meant it.

“Yeah, because it’s the Jesus country,” Hernandez said. “I asked my wife, and she said yes.”

Sitting beside him at the restaurant, Gabriela Hernandez nodded.

“Yes,” she said, “because of the significance it has for us.” 

—
The post Nelson Cruz and other Hispanic MLB players visit Israel to promote Christian-Jewish relations appeared first on Jewish Telegraphic Agency.

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Amnesty International Finally Acknowledged Israeli Victims, and the Media Looked Away

Partygoers at the Supernova Psy-Trance Festival who filmed the events that unfolded on Oct. 7, 2023. Photo: Yes Studios

Two years. That is how long it took Amnesty International, one of the world’s supposedly leading human rights organizations, to formally acknowledge in a report that on October 7, 2023, Hamas committed horrific crimes against the Jewish people and the State of Israel.

These are facts Jews did not need Amnesty to discover. The mass murder, sexual violence, hostage-taking, and brutality were documented in real time. The evidence existed. The testimonies existed. The crimes were undeniable and should have been reported immediately by any organization claiming to defend human rights.

Instead, Amnesty chose a different path. From the outset, it framed Israel as the primary aggressor while sidelining, minimizing, or delaying acknowledgment of the atrocities committed against Israelis.

Worse still, just one year after the massacre, Amnesty released a report accusing Israel of committing genocide. To reach that conclusion, the organization stretched and distorted the definition of genocide, while conspicuously avoiding any serious accounting of how many Hamas terrorists were killed in the fighting. The result was not rigorous human rights reporting, but a document shaped to fit a predetermined narrative.

For Amnesty International, evidence mattered less than preserving a false genocide narrative. When irrefutable proof of crimes against humanity committed on October 7 surfaced, the organization chose silence. The reason is obvious: acknowledging those crimes would have disrupted the carefully constructed narrative designed to strip Israel of international sympathy.

A report detailing Hamas’ crimes was originally scheduled for release in September 2025. Its publication was delayed after internal opposition within Amnesty International, with critics reportedly arguing that even a belated acknowledgment of Hamas’ atrocities might benefit Israel in the court of public opinion, particularly given its proximity to ongoing ceasefire negotiations.

Amnesty International presents itself as an impartial humanitarian organization committed to defending all victims of human rights abuses. Yet this episode reveals how internal politics were allowed to override that mandate. Israeli victims were acknowledged only when doing so could be carefully timed and controlled to avoid disrupting a preferred narrative. That selective moral calculus further erodes the organization’s already questionable credibility and claims of impartiality.

Even with the delay, the mere fact that a major human rights organization had finally documented the crimes committed against Israelis should have been newsworthy in its own right.

Instead, many of the same media outlets that rushed to amplify Amnesty’s deeply flawed genocide accusation against Israel have remained conspicuously silent about its report detailing the crimes against humanity Israelis suffered on October 7.

The contrast is difficult to ignore — and speaks volumes about which victims are deemed worthy of attention, and which are not.

Major outlets, including CNN, the BBC, The Washington Post, and the Associated Press, remained silent on Amnesty International’s new report, despite immediately amplifying its genocide accusation just one year earlier.

Had the media outlets that so eagerly promoted Amnesty’s deeply flawed genocide report been committed to basic journalistic standards, they would have rigorously examined its distortions and misuse of the term genocide. At the very least, they would have also reported on Amnesty’s documentation of Israeli victims. Their refusal to do so tells a disturbing story: one in which editorial judgment determines not only which stories are told, but which victims are allowed to exist at all.

When human rights organizations and newsrooms decide whose suffering deserves recognition — and when that recognition is granted only if it is politically convenient — they do more than mishandle a single report. They corrode public trust, hollow out the principles they claim to defend, and turn the language of human rights into a tool of selective erasure.

The author is a contributor to HonestReporting, a Jerusalem-based media watchdog with a focus on antisemitism and anti-Israel bias — where a version of this article first appeared.

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The Missing Context: Media Distort the West Bank Terror Threat

Illustrative: Palestinians run during clashes with Israeli forces amid an Israeli military operation in Jenin, in the West Bank July 3, 2023. REUTERS/Raneen Sawafta

Compared to the terror threats emanating from numerous fronts, including Gaza, Lebanon, Syria, Yemen, and Iran, the international media often downplays or dismisses the dangers Israel faces from the West Bank.

After the October 7 massacre, Hamas made no effort to hide its intentions to open a front in the West Bank, calling on Palestinians to take up arms against Israel.

In 2024, Israel faced over 18,000 incidents of terrorism, according to the National Public Diplomacy Directorate. The Shin Bet, Israel’s internal security agency, thwarted 1,040 incidents in the West Bank and Jerusalem in 2024, with an additional 231 significant terror incidents reported.

In 2025, the threat persisted. In February 2025, a terrorist from the Nablus area of the West Bank triggered a series of explosions on buses in the Tel Aviv area. Fortunately, the explosives detonated when the buses were empty, causing no injuries.

In September, a deadly terror attack at the Ramot Junction in Jerusalem killed six innocent people and injured 21 others. The terrorists came from the West Bank.

On November 29, a terrorist hurled an iron rod at the windshield of a car on Route 5, a highway in the northern West Bank. Miraculously, no one was physically injured, but the incident underscores the threat targeting Israelis.

The security challenge is real and ongoing. It targets Israelis, no matter where in the country they are.

After the ceasefire went into effect in the Gaza Strip in October, analysts found that Hamas and other terrorist organizations began reorganizing their operations in the West Bank as a way to continue their so-called “resistance.”

For these reasons, on November 26, the IDF launched Operation Five Stones, a counterterrorism operation specifically aimed at countering threats in the northern West Bank.

Naturally, terrorist groups condemned the operation. That didn’t stop the AFP from reiterating the press releases from Hamas and Islamic Jihad.

Counter-terrorism efforts by the IDF have proven successful.

In the first nine months of 2025, 22 terrorism incidents were carried out by Palestinian terrorists from the West Bank, in comparison to 90 in 2024. With the launch of the new operation, the IDF is strategically operating in specific locations in the West Bank that have become hotspots tied to previous terror attacks, including Jenin, Tulkarm, Nur Shams, Tubas, and Tammun.

These cities and villages have become operational hubs for Hamas, Islamic Jihad, and other Iranian-backed groups, producing everything from roadside bombs to shooting cells to coordinated plots targeting Israeli civilians across the country.

Me’ata, a Palestinian media center, claimed that in October 2025, there were 356 “popular resistance actions” in the West Bank and eastern Jerusalem, including 16 incidents of planting and detonating explosive devices, mainly in the Jenin and Tubas areas. One of those explosions in Tubas left two IDF soldiers injured.

Jenin is perhaps the media’s favorite West Bank location to cover, consistently referring to it as the “martyrs’ capital.” What most outlets leave out, however, is that the name reflects the city’s role as the origin for more than one-third of terrorist attacks during the Second Intifada. The next time you read “martyrs’ capital,” know that the journalist is really referring to terrorism.

The IDF began intensively operating in Jenin in January 2025, following a terrorist attack carried out by terrorists from the Jenin area that left three Israelis dead.

During the current operation in Jenin, the IDF eliminated two terrorists claimed by Islamic Jihad. The shooting was documented on film, and an investigation into whether the officers took the correct action to mitigate harm to themselves has been launched, as is proper in a case where there are questions over whether individuals violated the IDF’s rules of engagement and code of conduct.

Several major outlets, including CNN, The Guardian, and The Washington Post, however, reported the incident without stating in the headline that the two individuals killed were not ordinary Palestinian civilians. but terrorists. This omission leaves readers with a distorted impression of the event and obscures the context of ongoing terrorist activity in Jenin.

Sky News went so far as to suggest the two were not terrorists at all.

The terrorist threat Israel faces from the West Bank is not theoretical or isolated, nor did it disappear after the October 7 terrorist attacks. Had the IDF not continuously acted to prevent further attacks, Israelis would be facing a far deadlier and more coordinated terrorism campaign today.

After October 7, Israel vowed never again to let the country or the Jewish people face such devastation and insecurity. A secure Israel after that massacre means dismantling terror networks before they can carry out mass-casualty attacks, not after. It means denying Hamas and Islamic Jihad the ability to embed in civilian areas, build explosives factories, or dispatch terrorists into Israeli cities. In a post-October 7 reality, counterterrorism is not optional. It is the prerequisite for any genuine stability, security, or peace.

The author is a contributor to HonestReporting, a Jerusalem-based media watchdog with a focus on antisemitism and anti-Israel bias — where a version of this article first appeared.

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Will Mamdani and His Support for Israel Boycotts Make New York Less Affordable?

New York City mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani holds a press conference at the Unisphere in the Queens borough of New York City, US, Nov. 5, 2025. Photo: REUTERS/Kylie Cooper

Mayor-elect Zohran Mandani’s vocal support of the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) movement is an announcement to the world that New York City is no longer a place that values entrepreneurship, innovation, art, and research carried out and supported by Israeli companies, companies that engage with Israel, and people who study and teach at Israeli universities. 

A case in point is Mamdani’s early targeting of Cornell Tech in 2020 as a State Assemblyman. Mamdani apparently believes that he has been given a dual mandate by New Yorkers: to make New York City more affordable and to engage in economic warfare against the state of Israel.

These two objectives are fundamentally inconsistent. Israeli commerce, research, science, and art are deeply cemented into New York City. If Mamdani decides to take a wrecking ball to this ecosystem, he will make New York City less affordable, not more affordable. Entrepreneurs and venture capitalists count on a government that will respect and defend property rights against bias and bigotry. They will factor the costs of the BDS movement into their business decisions.

In 2025, the Calcalist “Mind the Tech NY” conference was held for the ninth time in New York City. The conference focused on the “challenges facing the Israeli high-tech industry and the global tech sector.” Experts discussed the “potential synergy between artificial intelligence and human ingenuity.” Dr. Maya Sapir-Mir, the CEO and co-Founder of PoloPo, gave a session on “Revolutionizing Protein Production for the Food Industry.” PoloPo grows protein-rich potatoes at scale. It would be harmful to New York City in both the short and long term if Mamdani decided to discourage these events, which offer economic and social benefits that extend far beyond New York City.

On May 19, 2025, Mayor Eric Adams and the Israeli Minister of Economy and Industry Nir Barkat, signed a declaration of intent to establish the New York City-Israel Economic Council. The objective of the council is to: “facilitate business partnerships between New York City and Israeli companies; support Israeli businesses looking to establish a presence in New York City; promote collaboration in key technological sectors, including environmental innovation, life sciences, and artificial intelligence; and coordinate participation in major business and technology conferences.” If there was ever an anti-BDS move, this was it. Mamdani will likely disband the council. 

Another target of Mamdani in his BDS campaign is likely to be the overturning of Executive Order 52 (EO) signed by Mayor Adams in 2025. This EO requires all city agencies to use the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA) working definition of antisemitism. Abandoning the IHRA definition of antisemitism is an attempt by Mamdani to drive a wedge between anti-Zionism and antisemitism. He is committed to redefine antisemitism so that he is free to advocate for the elimination of Israel as the Jewish state without being called antisemitic. 

Another target of Mamdani in his quest to promote the cause of BDS could be Executive Order number 60 — “Procurement and Investment Decisions Relating to Israel and Israeli Citizens,” signed by Mayor Adams on December 2, 2025. This executive order prevents city agencies from discriminating against Israeli companies in their procurement decisions. If Mamdani seeks to revoke Executive Order 60 or defund the New York City-Israel Economic Council, it may activate New York State Executive Order 157, which prohibits New York State from investing in any institution or company involved in BDS activities or encouraging such actions. This would require the State of New York to cease financing any New York City agencies which are complicit in the BDS campaign. But given that Governor Kathy Hochul is a Mamdani ally, this seems unlikely. 

The newly elected comptroller of New York City, Mark Levine, may be another barricade to Mamdani’s BDS aspirations. He has stated that he will not pursue the divestment of NYC pension funds from assets linked to the Israeli government and Israeli companies, and will reinvest NYC pension fund assets in Israeli Bonds. 

Mamdani knows quite well that the intent of the BDS movement is not a two-state solution, but rather a one state solution premised on the destruction of Israel as a Jewish state. Mamdani himself has stated he doesn’t think Israel should be a Jewish state. And he might use his new position to try to bring about that reality. 

Charles A. Stone is a Business Professor at Brooklyn College, CUNY.

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