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On the streets of Tel Aviv, protesters on cusp of a big victory vow to keep fighting
TEL AVIV (JTA) — Yaniv, a resident of Tel Aviv, has lost count of how many protests he’s been to during the past three months. But on Monday afternoon, he headed once again to Kaplan Street, the urban artery that has become ground zero of the anti-government demonstrations, to demonstrate once again.
Israel’s current rupture, said Yaniv, 34, is the “biggest crisis in my lifetime.”
“We’ll keep going until something changes,” he said. “They left us no choice. The damage has been done.”
Week after week, Yaniv and tens of thousands of other Israelis have filled the streets of Tel Aviv to protest Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s proposed overhaul of the country’s judiciary — which would sap the Supreme Court of much of its power and influence. Then, on Sunday night, massive protests again took shape to oppose Netanyahu’s firing of his defense minister, who called for a pause on the legislation.
Now, the following day, the protesters came with a different feeling: that their activism might actually succeed, at least in the short term. After people gathered in Tel Aviv, Jerusalem and elsewhere, Netanyahu announced that he would pause the legislation to allow time for dialogue. Several of his ministers had already called for him to do just that.
Justin Jacobs, a recent immigrant to Israel from the United States, said he is hopeful about the outcome of the protest movement. (Deborah Danan)
But even as the campaign to stall the legislation was poised to achieve an at least temporary victory, protesters were not in a celebratory mood. They vowed to continue demonstrating against what some described as Netanyahu’s broader authoritarian impulses.
“You see how the liberal voice that has been missing for so long is returning to the street and has become the mainstream,” said Ben Luria, a resident of Jaffa protesting in Tel Aviv. “It looks like they’ve succeeded in passing the message across.”
But for Luria, that success doesn’t translate into any desire to ease the pressure. “You can’t deny that this is no longer just a question of Bibi being Bibi, this is a dictator in the making,” he added, using Netanyahu’s nickname. “We need to put the line somewhere.”
Even as Israelis were glued to their TV screens, waiting to hear Netanyahu announce a suspension of the legislation, Daria, who immigrated to Israel with her family from what is now Russia, did not pin her hopes on Netanyahu changing course.
“I don’t think that even if they stop this legislation, they will stop anything else,” said Daria, who came to the protest with Yaniv and, like him, declined to give her last name. “Even if they say they’ll postpone until Pesach or for forever, that doesn’t mean that we stop protesting what this government is doing.”
Sunday night’s protests were followed by a countrywide general strike. Blocked streets and canceled bus routes in downtown Tel Aviv meant that a 20-minute journey to a high-risk pregnancy clinic on Monday instead took an hour and a half for Natalie Solomon, who is eight-and-a-half months pregnant. She said she hoped Netanyahu would concede and spare Israelis further disruption.
“Our country is falling apart,” she said, expressing her hope that an end to the political standoff is near. “I really hope Bibi backs down today, that’s the only option. … We care about democracy but we really just care about the health of our baby.
At the end of the day it really does disrupt day-to-day lives.”
Despite being on the cusp of their first major victory, protesters said the potential respite offered by Netanyahu would be a minor gesture, not one that could overcome the hard feelings that have built up over the past three months.
Justin Jacobs, an immigrant to Israel from Lancaster, Pennsylvania, said Israel has “turned a corner” after Sunday night’s protests.”So, [there’s] a glimmer of hope that we’ll go back to the status quo, which to me remains not good enough,” he said. “But not good enough is still better than horrifying.”
Others were less optimistic. “My feeling, the feeling of my parents, my grandparents, [is] that there’s no future here, I don’t know if I’ll raise kids here,” said Yotam Weingrad.
Like Weingrad, Daria, recalling her family’s experience, is also considering her future in the Jewish state.
Yariv and Daria, left, walk in Tel Aviv after participating in anti-government protests on Monday, March 27, 2023; at right, Natalie Solomon said her trip to a high-risk pregnancy clinic took more than four times longer than normal because of the protests. (Deborah Danan)
“I grew up in a family with intimate knowledge of what it feels like to live under oppression, and I feel like it’s our duty to do whatever we can to prevent it,” she said. “But if push comes to shove, if nothing’s going to change, I’ll make the same decision my parents did — my kids aren’t going to live in a dictatorship.”
For those not emotionally invested in the Israeli crisis, the streets of Tel Aviv on Monday provided a rare experience, and a sense of uncertainty. Jennifer, a tourist from Utah visiting Israel with her two daughters, Holly and Diana, wanted to know if “it is going to get scary” and wondered if they’d be able to get back to the United States, as airports had closed due to the general strike.
“We’ve never been to this part of the world so we’re kind of like ‘Wow,’ just taking in everything,” said Diana. “We don’t know what it’s like without the protests, and we’re like, ‘This is Tel Aviv. It’s a lot.’”
Support for the protests isn’t unanimous across Tel Aviv, a bastion of left-wing politics in Israel. Josh Eidelshtein called the protests “hypocritical,” and blamed them for fanning the flames of conflict.
“What if the protesters were right-wingers, Orthodox Jews, or Palestinians?” he said. “Would their strategies still be OK? There is too much hate being bred here, and it’s as if the collective stress and anxiety this country has lived on for so long has been set aflame. The same people who went out to vote [for the left] are now trying to work against the system because they didn’t get what they wanted.”
Khalil, who originally hails from the Arab village of Ein Hawd in Israel’s north, and has lived in Tel Aviv for 50 years, also opted to stay away from the protests, which he felt did not speak for him.
“The Arabs are a minority, what do they have to do with these protests?” Khalil said as he walked his dog near a giant yellow sign reading “Nonstop Democracy,” painted by the Tel Aviv municipality on the boardwalk.
“Bibi has done good things but now he’s silent. This is a man who knows how to speak,” Khalil said. Then, referring to Netanyahu’s coalition partners, he added, “He’s not the king of Israel anymore. He made big mistakes by taking those criminals into the government with him. They want to throw out all the Arabs.”
Also sitting out the protests was Meir Dayan, who counts himself among the supporters of Netanyahu’s proposed judicial reform. He is especially in favor of the legislation that was due to be brought for a final vote on Monday, which would have increased the governing coalition’s control over Supreme Court appointments. But Dayan added that he didn’t appreciate the way Netanyahu attempted to pass the measures into law.
The path along the beach in Tel Aviv has been painted with pro-democracy messages. (Deborah Danan)
“The way they went about it was reckless,” he said. “Change to heavy organizational processes — because this is what this basically is, after all — doesn’t happen with legislation, it happens with people. It must be bottom-up and from a place of education, not ignorance.”
Dayan predicted that Netanyahu will halt the legislation now, and then in the summer months “when the left are overseas,” he will return it to the Knesset floor.
Roughly four miles away from the main protest, a smaller demonstration coalesced near Jaffa’s clocktower, a landmark at the entrance to Tel Aviv’s older counterpart. At this protest, children as young as 5 chanted “Shame!” and “Save Democracy!” while their parents stood to the side.
“Here the adults are quiet so the children are taking the lead. It’s exciting,” said Gavri, 10.
There are a few things he’d like to bring about in Israeli society: the failure of the judicial overhaul, as well as an end to fighting between Jews and Arabs. Like the adults protesting across the city, he vowed not to give up.
“I will be here until the end,” he said. “I hope it won’t be a long time.”
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The post On the streets of Tel Aviv, protesters on cusp of a big victory vow to keep fighting appeared first on Jewish Telegraphic Agency.
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Why both sides are ducking settler violence ahead of Israel’s elections
(JTA) — For American Jews who follow Israel closely, one of the hardest things to understand about Israeli politics today is the gap between the severity of settler violence in Judea and Samaria, also known as the West Bank, and the relatively limited role it plays in the election campaign.
The phenomenon is not being ignored altogether. Israeli politicians across the political spectrum condemn acts of violence by Jewish extremists, and security experts have warned that Jewish terrorism and nationalist crime have become a serious threat to Israel’s security and democratic institutions. Yet the issue has not emerged as a major dividing line in the elections.
Why? Part of the answer is that Jewish violence in Judea and Samaria is politically inconvenient for both major blocs. On one side stands Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s coalition. On the other stands the loosely aligned “change bloc” seeking to replace it. That bloc includes parties with markedly different ideologies: Naftali Bennett’s B’Yachad, Avigdor Lieberman’s Yisrael Beiteinu, Gadi Eisenkot’s Yashar and Yair Golan’s Democrats. They agree on the need for political change, but they do not share a common position on the future of the settlements, Palestinian statehood or the long-term status of Judea and Samaria.
The reason settler violence has not become a defining campaign issue becomes even clearer once two different questions are separated. The first is straightforward: How should Israel deal with violence committed by Israeli Jews against Palestinians? The second is much broader: What should Israel do about the settlements, its control over Judea and Samaria and the long-term future of the territory? These are not the same question.
Distinguishing between these two lines of thought matters because the Israeli opposition may be united in its condemnation of settler violence, but it remains deeply divided over the settlements themselves. Yashar does not advocate for a general evacuation of settlements. B’Yachad supports Jewish settlement and opposes the establishment of a Palestinian state. Yisrael Beiteinu supports strengthening Jewish settlement and Israeli control in parts of Judea and Samaria. The Democrats take a substantially different position, including opposition to illegal settler outposts and an explicit commitment to fighting what they call “Jewish terrorism.”
There is, however, potentially a much broader consensus around law, order and state authority. That is where the political framing becomes important.
The Netanyahu camp does not entirely deny the existence of Jewish violence. After recent incidents in Samaria, Netanyahu condemned what he called a “handful of rioters” and called on law enforcement authorities to prosecute them. Foreign Minister Gideon Sa’ar described those responsible as criminals who should be dealt with severely.
This framing treats the problem primarily as one of law enforcement: Extremists are committing crimes, and the state must enforce the law against them.
That approach is also reflected in a significant proposal by Defense Minister Israel Katz. In August, Katz instructed the IDF to prepare a plan for transferring civilian enforcement involving Israelis in Judea and Samaria to the Israel Police, in part to reduce the military’s involvement in civilian law-and-order incidents.
This position is coherent: If Israel regards itself as sovereign over the territory, Israeli civilians who violate the law should be dealt with by the police, while the military should concentrate on security threats.
But this logic is not inherently a right-wing argument. It can serve the change bloc just as well. The change bloc can describe Jewish violence as evidence of governmental failure, loss of control and the erosion of state authority. That allows parties with very different views about the future of Judea and Samaria to agree on an immediate principle: The state must enforce its laws.
For politicians such as Bennett, Lieberman and Eisenkot, this is a much easier political proposition than making the future of the settlements and their legal status the central issue.
This is where Yair Golan, leader of the Democrats, stands out. Golan does not limit himself to terms such as “rioters,” “criminals,” “extremists” or “lawlessness.” He repeatedly uses the term “Jewish terrorism.” While the change bloc party leaders have on occasion used that phrase in English, they do not often use it in Hebrew. Golan is the one who uses the term repeatedly.
In August, Golan said explicitly: “What we are seeing today is Jewish terrorism that is receiving legitimacy from the Israeli government.” He has also presented the fight against Jewish terrorism as one of the issues on which he believes the change bloc can agree.
This choice of language is more consequential than it may initially appear. Once the phenomenon is called terrorism, difficult questions follow: If this is terrorism, should Israel not fight it with some of the tools it uses to fight other forms of terrorism? If Palestinian terrorism is understood as a national security threat requiring intelligence, organized investigation and preventive measures, what should happen when the perpetrators are Jewish Israelis?
Israel has developed extensive counterterrorism mechanisms for dealing with Palestinian terrorism: intelligence gathering, investigations by the Shin Bet internal security and counterintelligence service, administrative detention, military and security operations and other exceptional legal tools.
That does not mean those tools should automatically be applied identically to Israeli citizens. There are important legal and practical differences. But calling settler violence “Jewish terrorism” inevitably raises the question of whether it should be treated as more than ordinary criminality, and is important to harnessing the attention and power of the state to address it even as it labels it something that is an outlier.
The future of Judea and Samaria may be one of the most consequential questions facing Israel, but voters appear to be focusing more immediately on security, the economy, military service and Netanyahu’s political future. Here’s the dilemma all the parties are facing: The issue of settler violence can be important enough to condemn, but too politically complicated to campaign on.
For the Netanyahu bloc, emphasizing the systemic nature of settler extremism risks highlighting failures within a political constituency that is central to its coalition. For the change bloc, emphasizing it as a distinct political problem risks reopening the much larger argument over the settlements — an issue on which the change bloc itself remains divided.
Nevertheless, ahead of the elections, politicians can demand vigorous enforcement against violent settlers without supporting the dismantling of settlements. One can oppose illegal outposts without opposing the settlement enterprise as a whole. And one can regard Jewish violence primarily as a security, governance and even terrorism problem without having a position on the ultimate political status of Judea and Samaria, as important as that may be.
This article originally appeared on JTA.org.
The post Why both sides are ducking settler violence ahead of Israel’s elections appeared first on The Forward.
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How a Jewish play from 1908 enshrined the idea of America as a cultural ‘melting pot’
It’s long been unfashionable to refer to the United States as a “melting pot.” Identity politics and multiculturalism have undermined the ideal of an assimilation so complete that it obliterates ethnic distinctions. Now the persistence of difference is hailed, at least in some quarters, as enriching rather than estranging, even if the associated metaphors — “salad bowl,” “kaleidoscope,” “mosaic” — lack poetic vigor.
The first reference to the U.S. as a melting pot is said to date to J. Hector St. John de Crèvecoeur’s 1782 Letters from an American Framer, in which he wrote: “Here individuals of all nations are melted into a new race of men.” Similar notions surfaced in the writings of Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry James and the historian Frederick Jackson Turner. But it was Israel Zangwill’s 1908 play, The Melting Pot, that injected that industrial metaphor into the national consciousness.
Set in New York City, the play is a love story between a musically gifted Russian Jewish immigrant of Sephardic extraction and a gentile settlement house worker from the pogrom-wracked city that he fled. Its backdrop is the turmoil of an early 20th-century America trying to make sense of massive waves of Eastern European, and particularly Jewish, immigration. The playwright was an English Jew, a disillusioned Zionist who had begun looking to the U.S. as the promised land.
After its debut in Washington, where it was praised by President Theodore Roosevelt, The Melting Pot moved to Broadway in 1909 and has since enjoyed occasional revivals. Crescendoing debates around immigration, antisemitism and who deserves to be an American seem to lend it renewed currency.
So, at least, was the reasoning of Jesse Bernstein, producing artistic director of Philadelphia’s Theatre Ariel, whose focus is Jewish-themed work. Bernstein adapted and directed Zangwill’s play, and has teamed with the Philadelphia Artists’ Collective, which produces rarely seen classics, to mount it. Their streamlined, modern-dress version, part of the America250 celebration, opened Wednesday at Philadelphia’s historic Arch Street Meeting House.
Bernstein said in an interview that he pruned as much as half an hour from the original (it now runs about 95 intermission-less minutes) with an ear to modern sensibilities. He also has made some additions that undercut the play’s triumphalism. The Melting Pot nonetheless remains an odd fusion of melodrama and polemic, interesting mostly as an historical curiosity.
Bernstein’s direction does the piece no favors with a stiff, presentational style, in which characters frequently address the audience rather than one another. On the other hand, when they turn away, the meeting house’s unfavorable acoustics make them more difficult, sometimes impossible, to hear. Offstage characters sit in chairs behind the action awaiting their cues. Meghan Jones’s spare set, representing both the Quixano family home and different locations within the settlement house, is draped with oriental rugs and strewn with steamer trunks and valises.
The protagonist, David Quixano, played with endearing sensitivity by Adam Galloway, survived the infamous 1903 Kishinev pogrom, in which all his immediate family were murdered and he himself was shot and left for dead. After that trauma, America has become both his dream and his salvation. In New York, he lives with his cynical uncle, Mendel, also a musician; his Yiddish-speaking grandmother; and an Irish American housemaid, Kathleen (Jessy Gruver), who wrestles comically with Jewish customs and dietary laws.
Through a violin concert, David meets and falls for the lovely Vera (Lexi Thammavong), a former Russian “revolutionist” who now combats poverty through settlement house work. David is composing an American symphony that will convey his rapturous views of his adopted homeland. He finds a ready admirer in the German conductor Herr Pappelmeister (Adam Pelta-Pauls, speaking convincing German).
Standing in David’s way, personally and professionally, are two villains — the wealthy, unscrupulous nativist Quincy Davenport (Eli Lynn), a married man who lusts after Vera, and Vera’s estranged father, Baron Ravendal (Brian McCann), a reactionary Russian military commander who turns up unexpectedly. McCann brings a strangely mannered intensity to a role that is already a caricature.
Zangwill’s characters represent a spectrum of early 20th-century attitudes. Ravendal and Davenport, brutal in different ways, both give free rein to their antisemitism. Frau Quixano (played by a bewigged McCann) and Mendel Quixano (J Hernandez, appropriately world-weary) reflect the resistance of older immigrants to assimilation — and especially to its culmination in interfaith romance.
The Melting Pot is deadly serious at times, larded with apocalyptic symbolism and images of Jewish suffering. But it also has its share of comedy, including the maid Kathleen’s gradual embrace of Jewish traditions and some playful digs directed at critics.
It is up to David, the musical prodigy, to articulate the famous message at the play’s core. Early on, he declares his fealty to a new American ideal:
America is God’s Crucible, the great Melting-Pot where all the races of Europe are melting and re-forming! …A fig for your feuds and vendettas! Germans and Frenchmen, Irishmen and Englishmen, Jews and Russians—into the Crucible with you all! God is making the American. The real American has not yet arrived. He is only in the Crucible, I tell you — he will be the fusion of all races, perhaps the coming superman.
David returns repeatedly to this soaring rhetoric, lauding American greatness born of industrial-grade homogenization, and seeking to embody it in his symphony.
The original play ended exuberantly, with both love and David’s melting pot vision of “the glory of America” conquering all. Bernstein’s adaptation, with its insistence on relevance, duly complicates that vision. He wraps the action with supporting characters challenging David’s view of American harmony, and with the future of the betrothed couple clouded in doubt.
The Melting Pot runs at the Arch Street Meeting House, 320 Arch St., Philadelphia, through Nov. 8.
The post How a Jewish play from 1908 enshrined the idea of America as a cultural ‘melting pot’ appeared first on The Forward.
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‘I wanna blow up a synagogue’: Online posts lead to hate crime charge against Utah man
(JTA) — A Utah man accused of possessing explosive devices, searching online for nearby synagogues and making online threats to kill Jews is due in court Friday to face charges including attempting to commit a hate crime.
A federal grand jury indicted Skyler AJ Rose, 22, on Wednesday, the Department of Justice said in a release.
Rose allegedly made threats on social media, including “I wanna blow up a synagogue,” leading the FBI to join the Ogden City Police Department in a search of his home, where they allegedly discovered six pipe bombs, two rifles and ammunition.
A review of a cellphone seized from the home allegedly showed that Rose had searched online for a nearby synagogue, according to the Department of Justice.
The charges Rose faces include possession of an unregistered destructive device, threats to kill and injure people and to destroy a building, and attempting to commit a hate crime.
This article originally appeared on JTA.org.
The post ‘I wanna blow up a synagogue’: Online posts lead to hate crime charge against Utah man appeared first on The Forward.
