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Rabbi Chaim Druckman, giant of Israeli settlement and Religious Zionist movements, dies at 90
(JTA) — Rabbi Chaim Druckman, whose mission was to unite the people of Israel, was father to a movement now poised to sow some of its deepest divisions in decades.
Druckman, who died Sunday at 90 after contracting COVID-19, was a giant in the religious Zionism movement, which sought to integrate the two preeminent philosophies that saw themselves as bulwarks against Jewish disintegration: Orthodox Judaism and Zionism.
In the 1950s, he established the hesder movement, which blended Torah study with military service. For tens of thousands of religious Jews, his innovation resolved a dilemma that had beset Israel’s founders: What was the most meaningful way for young Orthodox men to spend their first years of adulthood?
“We study Torah to fulfill our national obligation and serve in the army to fulfill our religious obligation,” Druckman often said.
Over the years, he led yeshivas and youth movements to extend that vision, and in 2012, he won the Israel Prize, Israel’s national award, for his lifetime of contributions to religious Zionist education.
Yet as much as he sought to bridge divides, he was as frequently positioned at their fault lines, in recent years disparaging non-Orthodox Jews and mentoring extremists who seek the marginalization of non-Jewish and non-Orthodox minorities in Israel. He also at least twice defended and sought to rehabilitate religious leaders convicted of sexual abuse, including of children.
Druckman was born in 1932 in Kuty, in what was then Poland and what is now Ukraine. He and his parents went into hiding during the Holocaust and then fled to the Soviet Union. He entered British Mandate Palestine in 1944 posing as the child of another couple and was reunited with his parents after the war.
He soon became a disciple of Rabbi Zvi Yehuda Kook, the rabbi who helped shape the nationalist outlook of the National Religious Party. Kook’s teachings drove Druckman to become one of the first leaders of the religious Zionist movement to embrace the settlement of lands captured by Israel in the 1967 Six-Day War. He was at the seminal 1968 Passover seder in Hebron that is widely seen as the launch of the religious settlement movement and is believed to have coined the name of its principal body, Gush Emunim, which means bloc of believers.
Druckman became a figurehead of the settlement movement, although he lived most of his life in Mercaz Shapira, the Israeli village near Ashkelon where he ran the influential Or Etzion Yeshiva. He served in the Knesset in coalitions led by Likud and Labor prime ministers, from 1977 to 1988 and then from 1999 to 2003, with short periods in the opposition.
In the wake of the massive influx immigrants after the fall of the Soviet Union, Druckman as a senior religious court judge led an effort to ease conversion to Orthodox Judaism. His suasions backfired, leading haredi Orthodox judges to seek the nullification of thousands of conversions he had supervised.
However much he preached reconciliation among Jews, he stood hard and fast against any attempt to dismantle settlements, going so far as to advise soldiers to refuse orders to take part in the removal of settlements. He also stood by Jews accused and convicted of violent crimes associated with tensions over the settlements, including murder and terrorism, raising funds for those accused and welcoming them back into society.
He also stood by people who were accused of sexual abuse multiple times. He was rebuked in 1999 for failing to report credible reports of sexual assault by a yeshiva head he supervised, Zev Kopilevich, and he later championed another rabbi convicted of sexual abuse, Moti Elon. While he conceded in 2013 that the government was right to rebuke him, he also dismissed as “gossip” just this month multiple allegations of rape against another yeshiva head, Zvi Tau.
Until recently, Druckman championed Naftali Bennett and his Jewish Home Party as the natural heir to the National Religious Party tradition — but in 2021 when Bennett chose the path of reconciliation once championed by Druckman, joining a unity government with secular parties, Druckman cut him off and instead embraced the extremist Religious Zionist Party led by Bezalel Smotrich.
Druckman played a role in brokering the entry of the Religious Zionist Party into the government that Benjamin Netanyahu is expected to bring to power in coming days. The entry of Smotrich and a colleague, Itamar Ben-Gvir, into the government is likely to precipitate a crisis with Diaspora Jewry. They favor restricting Israeli laws to favor the Orthodox, annexing the West Bank and loosening laws that restrict troops from killing or physically harming Palestinians.
At Druckman’s funeral on Monday, Smotrich said Druckman “reproached” him frequently for his excesses, but in a recent interview with Yisrael Hayom, the nationalist daily, Druckman made clear that many of the ideas Smotrich champions had his blessing, including his proposal for a state based on religious law and his plans for anti-LGBTQ discrimination.
Tens of thousands of people attended Druckman’s funeral Monday in his home village of Mercaz Shapira. Israel’s leaders at his funeral remembered him as a unifier.
“All of us were your sons, all of us were your students,” President Isaac Herzog said, according to the Times of Israel.
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Somaliland Partnership Could Be a ‘Game Changer’ for Israel in Countering Houthis, Experts Say
Smoke billows following an Israeli air strike in Sanaa, Yemen, Sept. 10, 2025. Photo: REUTERS/Khaled Abdullah
Israel’s potential partnership with Somaliland could be a “game changer,” boosting the Jewish state’s ability to counter the Yemen-based Houthi terrorist group while offering strategic and geographic advantages amid shifting regional power dynamics, experts assessed.
The Institute for National Security Studies (INSS), a prominent Israeli think tank, released a new report arguing that Somaliland’s strategic position along the Red Sea, its closeness to Houthi-controlled areas in Yemen, and its willingness to work with pro-Western states could make it a key ally for Israel, benefiting both nations amid rising regional volatility.
Somaliland is an unrecognized state in the Horn of Africa, situated on the southern coast of the Gulf of Aden and bordered by Djibouti to the northwest, Ethiopia to the south and west, and Somalia to the east.
Unlike most other states in the region, Somaliland has relative security, regular elections, and a degree of political stability — qualities that could make it a valuable partner for international allies and a key player in regional cooperation.
“Somaliland’s significance lies in its geostrategic location and in its willingness — as a stable, moderate, and reliable state in a volatile region — to work closely with Western countries,” the INSS report said.
“Somaliland’s territory could serve as a forward base for multiple missions: intelligence monitoring of the Houthis and their armament efforts; logistical support for Yemen’s legitimate government in its war against them; and a platform for direct operations against the Houthis,” it continued.
The Iran-backed terrorist group has been waging an insurgency in Yemen for the past two decades in a bid to overthrow the Yemeni government.
Since 2014, the Houthis have controlled a significant portion of the country’s northern territory and areas along the Red Sea, which they captured in the midst of a civil war.
The Yemeni terrorist group began severely disrupting global trade with attacks on shipping in the Red Sea corridor following the Hamas-led invasion of and massacre across southern Israel on Oct.7, 2023, arguing their aggression was a show of support for Palestinians in Gaza.
Since the start of the Israel-Hamas war, Houthi terrorists in Yemen have regularly launched missiles and drone attacks targeting the Jewish state. However, the Iran-backed group has stopped firing in recent weeks, amid the current ceasefire in Gaza.
The Houthi rebels — whose slogan is “death to America, death to Israel, curse the Jews, and victory to Islam” — said they would target all ships heading to Israeli ports, even if they did not pass through the Red Sea.
According to the newly released study, Israel could gain multiple advantages from formal recognition of Somaliland, including a pro-Western partner with substantial mineral resources and a rare foothold of stability along the Red Sea.
Beyond targeting Israel, the Houthis have threatened — and in some cases attacked — US and British ships, prompting both Western allies to carry out multiple retaliatory strikes against Houthi targets in Yemen. The US and the Houthis reached a ceasefire in May that did not include Israel.
“Since the Gulf states, the United States, and Israel have all fought the Houthis in recent years without achieving a decisive outcome, Somaliland’s location — and the possibility of operating from its territory — could be a game changer,” the study noted.
In the wake of the Oct. 7 atrocities, the Houthis — designated as a terrorist organization by several countries including the US, Saudi Arabia, Malaysia, the United Arab Emirates, Australia, Canada, New Zealand, and Israel — have launched over 200 missiles and 170 attack drones in repeated attacks against the Jewish state.
“Beyond its valuable location, no less important is the fact that Somaliland’s government is eager for broad cooperation with pro-Western states — a combination of willingness and capability,” the report said.
“Messages from Somaliland indicate that [the country] is prepared to maintain broad security relations with the US, including hosting an American base, and even with Israel,” it continued.
Amid rising tensions in the Red Sea and shifting regional dynamics, the report noted that informal contacts already exist between senior officials of the two states, paving the way for potentially significant formal relations.
At a time when Israel is facing a hostile campaign from some Western and regional actors, Somaliland’s largely pro-Israel public discourse suggests it could serve as a reliable and supportive partner in the region, according to INSS.
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UK Doctor Blames ‘Jewish Lobby’ After Suspended by Medical Regulators for Pro-Hamas, Antisemitic Posts
Dr. Rahmeh Aladwan addresses the Activist Independent Movement’s Nakba77, Birmingham Demonstration for Palestine, outside the local BBC offices and studios in 2025. Photo: Screenshot
A British Palestinian doctor based in London blamed the “Israel and Jewish lobby” after she was suspended this week from practicing medicine in the United Kingdom over social media posts denigrating Jews and celebrating Hamas’s terrorism.
“Let this decision stand as the definitive proof that there is no independent British medical regulation. The ‘israeli’ and jewish [sic] lobby decide who can and cannot practice medicine in Britain,” Dr. Rahmeh Aladwan, a 31-year-old trainee trauma and orthopedic surgeon, posted on X on Wednesday just after her suspension. “This is not an end. It is the beginning of a far greater battle for the integrity of our institutions.”
The Medical Practitioners Tribunal Service (MPTS) suspended Aladwan’s registration for 15 months, with a review every six months.
Aladwan, a doctor in the UK’s National Health Service (NHS), had called online for the ethnic cleaning of Jews and celebrated the Palestinian terrorist group Hamas’s Oct. 7, 2023, massacre across southern Israel. She also described Israelis as “worse than Nazis” and Hamas operatives as “oppressed resistance fighters, not terrorists.”
The anti-Israel activist also made explicitly antisemitic claims, such as labeling the Royal Free Hospital in London “a Jewish supremacy cesspit” and asserting that “over 90% of the world’s Jews are genocidal.”
Aladwan also blamed the Jewish people for her suspension in a long X post on Friday.
“The UK ‘israel’ [sic] lobby has pressured my government and medical board into referring me to a tribunal hearing to try and suspend me for opposing genocide. This is Britain. We are occupied,” Aladwan wrote. “Hi. My name is Rahmeh. I am a part-Palestinian British NHS doctor. I am facing the suspension of my medical license. This is not the result of any professional failure, but the outcome of a coordinated lobbying campaign against me because of my public stance against the genocide in Gaza being carried out with my tax pounds.”
Aladwan addded, “I march — having attended over 300 protests in the last 23 months — advocate and educate online, and have taken direct action.”
The Campaign Against Antisemitism (CAA) has led the charge in recent months to raise awareness about Aladwan’s vocal support for Hamas.
Aladwan “has been suspended for 15 months while an investigation takes place into her campaign of hatred against British Jews,” the British charity said in a statement. “Dr. Aladwan has been on an unapologetic crusade to harass the Jewish community and, until now, she has shockingly managed to do so without facing any consequences. We are pleased to see that common sense has finally prevailed – at least for the next 15 months – and that an interim suspension has been handed down, following our complaints.”
British law enforcement had arrested Aladwan on Oct. 21, charging her with four counts related to malicious communications and inciting racial hatred.
“It is inconceivable that a Jewish person would feel safe receiving treatment from this doctor,” CAA Said. “We expect the GMC [General Medical Council, the UK’s top medical regulatory body] to pursue its investigation speedily so that this doctor is removed from the medical profession without much further delay. The steps we have taken against Dr. Aladwan are further evidence of our commitment to protect the Jewish community as the UK’s institutions continue to fail it.”
Aladwan’s arrest followed the GMC’s clearing her to continue treating patients, finding that her conduct had not done anything to “undermine public confidence in the medical profession” and that her comments did not “amount to bullying or harassment.” The MPTS panel concluded that “a reasonable and fully informed member of the public would not be alarmed or concerned” by her being allowed to continue treating patients.
However, following widespread backlash, the GMC said it had re-referred Aladwan’s case to the MPTS for “”an interim orders tribunal,” adding that such referrals are made when an interim order “is necessary to protect the public or public confidence in doctors during an investigation.”
The 15-month suspension came after UK Health Secretary Wes Streeting earlier this month called it “chilling” that some members of the Jewish community fear discrimination within the NHS, amid reports of widespread antisemitism in Britain’s health-care system.
Last month, British Prime Minister Keir Starmer unveiled a new plan to address what he described as “just too many examples, clear examples, of antisemitism that have not been dealt with adequately or effectively” in the NHS.
“We’ve already put in place management training in relation to the NHS, but I think we need a wider review, because in some cases, clear cases are simply not being dealt with, and so we need to get to the root of that,” Starmer said while announcing the plan.
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Pro-Israel Lawyers Challenge UK University Academic’s Boycott of Israeli Scholar
The entrance to Hebrew University of Jerusalem’s Mount Scopus campus. Photo: Wikimedia Commons
An association of lawyers who support Israel is demanding the University of East Anglia (UEA), located in Norwich, England, investigate and take disciplinary action against a senior academic who refused to consider an application from a researcher because the latter was from an Israeli university, the group announced on Friday.
On Nov. 20, a professor of social science at UEA declined to consider a request by an Arab Israeli post-doctoral researcher at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem (HUJI) to schedule a research visit to the British university, according to UK Lawyers for Israel (UKLFI). The UEA professor said the decision was made “primarily as Palestinian colleagues have asked us not to work with Israeli universities at this time,” and noted that the move was “a personal position rather than that of my university.”
UKLFI chief executive Jonathan Turner told The Algemeiner that HUJI shared a copy of both the researcher’s email requesting the visit and the professor’s response with the association of lawyers, following consent from the researcher.
UKLFI wrote a letter to UEA Vice-Chancellor David Maguire about the incident on Wednesday, asking the school to investigate the professor’s conduct, take appropriate disciplinary action, and guarantee that the HUJI researcher’s application is “reconsidered fairly.” The association also called on the university to issue a statement prohibiting discriminatory academic boycotts; examine if similar boycotts are being practiced in the school; and introduce or update training for staff of the UK’s Equality Act 2010, which prohibits discrimination based on protected characteristics that include nationality. The decision targeting the Arab Israeli scholar is likely a breach of the Equality Act, according to UKLFI.
“A refusal to consider an applicant because of her Israeli affiliation directly undermines the principles of fairness, equality, and dignity that the University professes to uphold,” said the group of lawyers.
In its letter to the university, UKLFI also noted that UEA could face legal consequences for the decision and argued that “such boycotts are contrary to fundamental academic values, recognized by international instruments as well as UEA’s own policies.” The UEA has an Equality, Diversity and Inclusion Policy that was issued in August and adopted the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance’s (IHRA) Working Definition of Antisemitism in January 2020.