Uncategorized
Ritchie Torres’ challengers are testing how Israel plays in the Bronx — and taking aim at ‘Zionists’ in a Jewish neighborhood
(New York Jewish Week) — In his campaign to unseat the Bronx’s pro-Israel congressman, Ritchie Torres, political organizer Jose Vega has referred to the New York City borough as “Gaza West.”
In both Gaza and the Bronx, he’s said, young people’s lives are “being destroyed.” And in a recent video, Vega identified what he sees as the root of the Bronx’s problem: the concentration of power in Riverdale, the neighborhood where much of the district’s Jewish population resides.
“Rich people like to live in areas where they can buy the politicians easily — like Ritchie Torres, who is bought and controlled by Zionist influencers and millionaires, who all live in Riverdale,” Vega said in a recent video.
The video included photos of Torres meeting with Jewish leaders, with motion graphics highlighting the outline of a kippah on Torres’ head. It has drawn condemnation from Jewish leaders, who accused Vega of using antisemitic tropes.
“Just because you use the word Zionist instead of Jew doesn’t make it any less antisemitic,” said Eric Dinowitz, Riverdale’s Jewish City Council member. “Especially in your video when you have little traces around yarmulkes. Like, it is very clearly an anti-Jewish sentiment that is driving his argument.”
Rabbi Binyamin Krauss, principal of the Modern Orthodox day school SAR Academy, called the video “ugly, ugly, old-fashioned antisemitism.”
The video has served as a particularly contentious chapter in a Democratic primary race for Torres’ seat, which has often revolved around the incumbent’s support for Israel — and which could be a test of how strongly a Democratic primary campaign centered around Israel resonates with voters.
Torres represents New York’s 15th Congressional District, which covers a large part of the Bronx and is one of the poorest districts in the country. And in a moment when many progressives are hoping to take on moderate pro-Israel Democrats, he has made himself an obvious target.
A former City Council member who joined Congress in 2021, Torres is a vocal pro-Israel advocate who’s said he always has been and “always will be” a Zionist and has called himself “the embodiment of a pro-Israel progressive.” He’s received hundreds of thousands of dollars in campaign donations from AIPAC, the pro-Israel lobby, and been enthusiastically embraced by pro-Israel Jews in his district and across the city. In December, children from local Jewish schools serenaded him as he received the Shamash Leadership Award from the Jewish Community Relations Council of New York, in a ceremony held at SAR.
Pro-Palestinian activists as well as some local constituents, meanwhile, have taken aim at Torres’ support for Israel, claiming he’s more focused on foreign policy than his own Bronx district. The Jewish and anti-Zionist podcaster Adam Friedland tore into Torres during an interview last year that went viral.
Torres’ spokesperson has said in statements that the congressman is focused on issues such as housing, affordability and standing up to Donald Trump.
“Voters across the Bronx, no matter their religion, race, or background, trust Ritchie Torres to be their voice in Washington because he is a lifelong resident who delivers real results,” said Torres’ spokesperson, Benny Stanislawski, in a statement. “He remains focused on the issues that matter most to his community, from public housing to affordability, while forcefully pushing back against the harmful attacks coming from the Trump administration, whether they be ICE’s abuses or repeated cuts to the social safety net.”
Stanislawski continued, “Efforts to divide the Bronx and pit communities against one another will fail, because this borough knows who is fighting for them and who is simply desperately chasing relevance.”
But with a primary coming up in June, some of his challengers — and many of New York City’s progressive voters, who recently elected an anti-Zionist mayor in Zohran Mamdani — are hoping that Torres’ support for Israel will work against him. It is the first time Torres has faced a primary challenge since taking office.
https://www.instagram.com/p/DTtHorACWfA/
The three-term congressman’s challengers include Michael Blake, the former State Assembly member who recently ran an unsuccessful mayoral campaign; Vega, a 26-year-old political organizer from the LaRouche movement, which has been described as conspiracy-driven and “cultlike”; Dalourny Nemorin, a public defender and Democratic Socialists of America organizer; and TikTok musician Jon LaTona.
Andre Easton, a member of the Party for Socialism and Liberation, is running as an independent in November’s general election.
The only challenger with a record of supporting Israel, State Assembly member Amanda Septimo, suspended her campaign soon after launching it, citing a recent lupus diagnosis.
Blake, who lost the primary against Torres for the same district in 2020, has made Torres’ donations from AIPAC his focal point.
A former vice chair of the Democratic National Committee, Blake said in a phone interview that Democrats, and “especially a true progressive Democrat should be opposed” to positions that AIPAC espouses, such as that the United States should provide military aid to Israel.
Blake kicked off his campaign with an endorsement from former mayor Bill de Blasio, and a launch video slamming Torres for taking donations from AIPAC.
The video drew allegations of fanning the flames of antisemitism, in part because it featured Guy Christensen, an influencer who justified the killing of two Israeli embassy workers near the Capital Jewish Museum in D.C. last year. Blake has said including Christensen in the video was “a miss”; his campaign has since taken down the original video and reposted a new version that does not feature Christensen.
Skeptics pointed out that Blake himself had previously spoken at AIPAC events and attended a trip to Israel that it ran. But he has since spoken out against the organization and scrubbed posts from his social media profiles, while sharply criticizing Israel for committing a “genocide.”
Blake’s change of heart was convincing enough to earn him praise from Track AIPAC, the X account with more than 400,000 followers that works “to end AIPAC and the Israel lobby’s stranglehold on American Democracy” by documenting politicians’ campaign donation numbers from AIPAC and other pro-Israel lobbying groups.
“AIPAC’s Rep. Ritchie Torres has a serious, anti-genocide, anti-apartheid primary challenger in #NY15!” the account posted. “@MrMikeBlake is taking a courageous stand against Israel lobby corruption!”
Included in Blake’s launch video was a clip of Mamdani praising Blake; the two cross-endorsed each other toward the end of the mayoral Democratic primary, in which Blake finished eighth.
Mamdani, whose endorsement could boost a candidate’s profile among progressives, has not weighed in on the 15th district race — and until recently, Blake wasn’t the only candidate showcasing his relationship with the new mayor.
Septimo, who was elected to a second term in the State Assembly in 2024, told Politico that Mamdani, a former colleague in Albany, is “supportive of me and my efforts to deepen my work and the reach of my work.” During last year’s mayoral election, the New York Times wrote that Septimo was part of Mamdani’s inner circle and “brain trust.”
Unlike Blake — and unlike Mamdani himself — Septimo is a longtime supporter of Israel. She strongly opposed Mamdani’s failed “Not On Our Dime” legislation which was aimed at blocking nonprofits from funding Israeli settlements in the West Bank. She also went on an AIPAC-sponsored trip to Israel in 2016, and visited again following Hamas’ Oct. 7, 2023, attack.
Septimo had said her campaign would focus on “centering people in the Bronx and what they’re facing on a daily basis,” rather than international issues. But she suspended her bid last week when she revealed that she had been diagnosed with lupus.
By keeping international issues in the background, Septimo had taken a starkly different approach from Blake’s anti-AIPAC campaign — a move that might be more resonant with voters in the district, according to a political strategist.
“I don’t know if this is a winning approach for Michael Blake,” said Democratic strategist Trip Yang. “Ritchie Torres is a fairly well-liked incumbent in his district, and he has over $14 million in the bank.”
Yang added that it was affordability, and not Israel-Gaza politics, that fueled Mamdani’s rise.
Ross Barkan, a journalist and one-time State Senate candidate, said he doesn’t see Israel as being central to Bronx voters’ priorities in the way that it might be in more heavily Jewish districts, such as the 10th Congressional District race between Rep. Dan Goldman and Brad Lander.
“It’s just not a place where that many voters are emotionally tied to Israel,” Barkan said of the 15th district. “So whether you’re for Palestinian rights or for Israel, it might not resonate much either way.”
That characterization would be news to Jews living in Riverdale, one of the most Jewish neighborhoods in the city where Israeli flags hang on front lawns and synagogues and Ha-Makolet: Shoshi’s Market carries a wide range of Israeli products. The neighborhood is home not only to SAR but to a nondenominational day school, Kinneret, whose founders in 1947 included the Zionist leader Golda Meir — and whose portrait hangs in the hallway.
According to a 2023 UJA-Federation of New York community study, there are 16,000 Jewish adults and 4,000 Jewish children living in Riverdale and the adjacent Kingsbridge neighborhood. Jews are a small minority across the Bronx, though, with an estimated population of 29,000 in the borough of 1.4 million, approximately half of whom live in the 15th district.
Torres was already popular in the district before Riverdale was added in 2022. But the neighborhood has a special bond with him.
“As Jews in this community, we obviously support Ritchie, and would love that the vote gets out for him,” said Michael Brown, a Jewish Riverdale resident, in an interview. “It’s not just his support for Jews, but he’s been good for his whole constituency.”
Brown said his daughter attends SAR, where Torres has been a frequent guest. “I know, as a congressman, I’m not supposed to have favorites — but SAR is one of my favorites because it is a special and magical place,” Torres told the entire student body during a December 2023 visit, a day after he was heckled for his Israel views on the Upper East Side.
“I actually gave him a report card last year because he spent so much time here,” joked Krauss, the principal. Krauss said he’s been to Israel with Torres twice, including a 2024 trip with a group of Bronx leaders during which they met with Yoav Gallant, then the defense minister.
Torres has consistently voted on pro-Israel positions in Congress, and in January 2024, he left the Congressional Progressive Caucus as his identification with Israel made him increasingly an outlier on the left.
Dinowitz, who represents Riverdale, Kingsbridge and a few adjacent Bronx neighborhoods, is the Chair of City Council’s Jewish Caucus, and left the Progressive Caucus in February 2023.
“With someone like Ritchie in Congress, a lot of us do feel safer, knowing that someone’s not going to shy away from their support of the Jewish community because it may be politically convenient at this time or that time,” Dinowitz said.
Thomas Gardner, the senior rabbi of the Reform synagogue Riverdale Temple, said everyone he’s spoken with has “been very positive about Ritchie Torres.”
Gardner said Torres told him that the most frequent complaint he hears walking around the district is that he supports Israel despite the war in Gaza. Gardner pointed to Torres’ criticism of Netanyahu — that Netanyahu has done “irreparable damage” to Israel’s support among Democrats — as a sign of his alignment with a number of constituents.
“My personal feeling is that his statements were very much along the lines of what most of my congregants think,” Gardner said. “They’re very pro-Israel but they’re not pro-Netanyahu. They believe in Israel and hope that it is strong and exists. But they also hope that the Palestinians don’t suffer. Palestinians need better leadership. The Palestinians need peace.”
For many of Torres’ critics, simply being anti-Netanyahu falls short of the mark.
Jose Vega is taking a Michael Blake-like approach to capture those critics’ attention, having launched his campaign at a town hall called “The Bronx is ‘Gaza West’: Rebuilding Starts Here — and There.”
Vega is part of the LaRouche movement, which follows the ideas of Lyndon LaRouche, who reportedly said that only one and a half million Jews died in the Holocaust, and that the Ku Klux Klan was founded on behalf of B’nai Brith. Vega has made a point of centering Torres’ views on Israel, and even confronted him in a Bronx restaurant about them.
“You are responsible for the death of thousands of Palestinian children, thousands of Ukrainian children — you love funding war,” Vega declared in a video that he took of the confrontation.
Vega posted another video on X of a billboard in the Bronx that featured a photo of Torres and the message, “For every Palestinian child that’s murdered… your Congressman, Ritchie Torres, gains a profit. Let the Palestinian children live.”
Vega said the video was sent to him by a “Torres hater,” though JNS reported that the billboard’s message may have been AI-generated. (Torres called the message “lies and libels that are meant to incite political violence,” in a statement.)
A couple of weeks later, Vega appeared on a video podcast called the Jimmy Dore Show, and said with a smile that he “will not confirm or deny” whether he, in fact, took the video himself, though he did firmly state that “it’s not artificial intelligence, because I hate AI.”
Vega was endorsed by the Anti-Zionist America PAC, a non-partisan group that has endorsed a range of candidates including Democrats, Libertarian independents and America First Republicans calling for mass deportations, on the basis of their anti-Israel views.
His recent remarks about Riverdale Zionists controlling Torres and the district, which came during an interview with anti-Israel influencer Erik Warsaw, drew strong reactions from Jewish leaders such as Krauss, who said he was “sickened,” and Dinowitz, who called the video “frightening.”
“I mean, he wasn’t even trying to hide his antisemitism,” Dinowitz said.
There is no polling data yet for the race, and Vega, whose campaign has received about $101,000, is the only challenger to have reported receipts to the Federal Election Commission. Torres, meanwhile, has $14.3 million in cash on hand, rolled over from previous elections.
Dalourny Nemorin, a public defense attorney and DSA organizer, is running on domestic issues like housing, healthcare and immigrants’ rights, though she also criticized Torres for his AIPAC support in an interview with the Bronx Times.
His funding from AIPAC and pro-Israel views, she said in November, have led him to “deny the existence of genocide in Palestine, while we watch in real time as people starve to death.”
When asked by a Reddit user why her campaign site doesn’t emphasize her position on taking AIPAC money, Nemorin said she “wanted to highlight the issues Ritchie was ignoring and not further platform they [sic] people who keeps him preoccupied.”
Meanwhile, music TikToker Jon LaTona has said little about his candidacy. He has worn what appears to be a keffiyeh in unrelated videos, indicating an opposition to Torres’ pro-Israel stance, though the TikTok account for his campaign has been taken down.
The post Ritchie Torres’ challengers are testing how Israel plays in the Bronx — and taking aim at ‘Zionists’ in a Jewish neighborhood appeared first on The Forward.
Uncategorized
Israeli-Arab influencer behind ‘Nas Daily’: Anti-Zionism is antisemitism
(JTA) — DENVER – Israeli-Arab social media entrepreneur Nuseir Yassin, of the viral vlog “Nas Daily,” said he believes “anti-Zionism is a form of antisemitism” and stressed his commitment to overturning “misguided hate” against Jews, at a conference devoted to the subject this week.
Yassin, 34, was speaking with the Jewish Telegraphic Agency on the sidelines of the conference, hosted by the David Merage Foundation for Confronting Antisemitism. A self-described “village boy” from the Lower Galilee town of Arraba in Israel, he achieved massive success through viral short-form videos that attracted viewers from all over the world. Today he boasts more than 68 million followers across numerous social networks.
Yassin is a Muslim of Palestinian origin, although he said he is not religious. Asked why it was important for a non-Jewish person to participate in a conference about combatting antisemitism, Yassin equated this battle to fighting for his family, noting that “the success of Israel and the Jewish people is also my success as an Israeli citizen.”
“I’m not a fan of the Israeli government, and I’m not here to defend it, just like I’m not a fan of many governments,” Yassin noted, but he asserted that the reaction to the government “is absolutely fueled by antisemitism.”
“I do believe anti-Zionism is a form of antisemitism,” he added.
He said he views Zionism as “the most vanilla thing in the world – a group of people wanting a place to live,” and has therefore concluded that Israel’s detractors “just really don’t like Jews.”
Yassin, who first broke through in 2016, has become increasingly outspoken in recent years about his combined Israeli and Palestinian identity. During the conference, he recalled that he grew up labeling himself Arab-Israeli. After the Hamas attacks of Oct. 7, 2023, he started listing Israeli first and Palestinian second.
“I could not relate to the extremism that I saw, and I wanted to distance myself from it without erasing my identity connected to it,” Yassin said. “I’m not just Israeli because I think it removes a little bit of spice, but I’m also not just Palestinian anymore.”
“A lot of Israeli culture is inside me,” he continued. “I never agree with people. I’m always disagreeable. That’s Israeli. I speak up.”
Yassin noted that he was “the first guy to go study in the United States out of my entire lineage,” graduating from Harvard University in 2014 with a degree in economics and a minor in computer science. Despite having grown up in Israel, Yassin said that Harvard was the place where he made his first Jewish friend.
After working as a software developer for Venmo in New York, Yassin left his job in 2016 to travel and document his journeys. Ultimately, he launched a Facebook page called Nas Daily – using the word for “people” in Arabic – where he posted one-minute videos for 1,000 days, telling the stories of communities around the world.
What was once a personal brand has since expanded into the parent Nas Company, which offers platforms for solo entrepreneurs to build and monetize their online businesses.
Yassin earned an honorary degree from Ben-Gurion University of the Negev in 2025 in recognition of his advocacy work for Israeli and Palestinian coexistence. This past August, he also joined the advisory board for the Genesis Prize Foundation, which each year celebrates inspiring Jewish individuals for their achievements.
“I do not relate to hundreds of men on the street shouting ‘Allahu Akbar,’” Yassin told JTA, adding that there needed to be more women and fewer religious fanatics participating in the Israeli-Palestinian conversation.
Yassin argued that he’s “not a weird Arab for saying this” and that “the entire country of the UAE says the same thing,” referring to one of the Gulf countries that signed onto the Abraham Accords normalizing relations with Israel. He also challenged “Free Palestine” activists to envision a concrete future for Palestinians rather than fixating on Israel’s transgressions.
“We should all be ‘Free Palestine’ – but from what?” Yassin asked. “We disagree on the solution, not on the problem. We don’t want suffering. Nobody wants suffering.”
“I’m a free-Palestine-from-Hamas guy,” he continued. “Just free Palestine,” he said, ”is not an answer. I’m free-Palestine-from-extremism.”
Yassin affirmed that there is room for criticism of Israel’s government, noting, for example, that he would like to see an Israeli-Arab presence in the government.
But he marveled at the notion that an alien visiting Earth would likely guess that the most hated country in the United Nations is North Korea, when in fact “It’s not – It’s Israel.”
That struck him as absurd because “the Israel-Palestine conflict is not a big deal when you compare it to everything else that’s happening on planet Earth. The only thing that makes it a big deal is that we, as Palestinians, have the perfect enemy.”
That enemy, he continued, is “the most hated type of enemy, which is the Jews.”
As part of his appearance at the conference, Yassin presented a recap of a fellowship he launched this past spring in partnership with the David Merage Foundation to help 50 content creators – 25 Jewish and 25 Muslim – produce meaningful material.
Participants received $1,000 and spent a month learning from the Nas Daily team about viral and impactful storytelling during the fellowship, named for Yassin’s first Jewish friend, Zaki Djemal, who recently died of a sudden heart attack.
To Laura Merage, the Iranian-born Jewish co-founder of the foundation, Yassin was a natural partner for this bridge-building effort. Given his social media following and “infectious personality,” Merage said she felt “that’s what we need more of in the world.”
At the conference on Tuesday, Yassin announced two winners of the fellowship’s influencer competition: recent McGill University graduate Raihaana Adira, a Canadian Muslim, and Grace, a Jewish-American digital content creator who preferred to use only her first name for privacy reasons. Grace tells stories about unique public figures, such as the first Arab “Miss Israel.” Adira, meanwhile, began posting about antisemitism and Muslim-Jewish relations after witnessing anti-Zionist protests at McGill.
“When I see a Jewish person being attacked on campus or online, it feels like I’m watching someone from my own community hurt,” Adira told JTA, noting that she started posting because no one believed her when she talked about incidents on campus.
“I wanted the protests and the graffiti on the walls that said ‘Death to the IDF’ to be seen,” she continued. “I am a Canadian, I am a Muslim, and when people at school on the streets say, ‘Death to Canada, We are Hamas, Hamas is heroic’ – that is not me.”
Adira said she received many death threats when she first started posting. While acknowledging how difficult that was, she also emphasized an influx of support that has helped “drown out the hate.”
Yassin offered a similar perspective, noting that at the beginning of his career, he “used to amplify the blowback and talk a lot about it,” referring to the criticisms he’d receive for promoting coexistence and calling out antisemitism. But after realizing that this deterred others from speaking out, he deemed the threats insignificant, calling them “the smallest price to pay for the largest outcome you can possibly imagine.”
During his travels around the world, Yassin said he has witnessed how flawed people’s perceptions of Jews can be and that he feels “a responsibility to set the record straight.” He also noted that he is dating a Jewish woman, author and influencer Aija Mayrock, whom he is marrying next year and with whom he expects to have children.
“They’re going to be Jewish, so that’s my family – literally, my family,” Yassin said.
This article originally appeared on JTA.org.
The post Israeli-Arab influencer behind ‘Nas Daily’: Anti-Zionism is antisemitism appeared first on The Forward.
Uncategorized
Four Seats or No Seats? Why Israel’s Final Polls Disagree Over Amcha Yisrael
Conflicting projections for Ofer Winter’s party illustrate the uncertainty of measuring public support near an electoral threshold.
A Channel 12 poll gives Ofer Winter’s Amcha Yisrael four parliamentary seats.
An i24NEWS survey reaches the same seat total.
Other final polls find that the party does not qualify for representation.
How can surveys conducted close to the same election produce such different results?
The answer lies partly in the difference between measuring a vote share and converting it into parliamentary seats.
A Statistical Boundary
Israel’s electoral threshold is 3.25 percent.
For a party receiving substantially more than that percentage, modest sampling fluctuations may change its expected number of seats without calling its parliamentary presence into question.
For a party whose support lies near 3.25 percent, the same type of fluctuation may change its projected representation from several seats to zero.
This does not necessarily mean the polls are measuring completely different political realities.
They may be producing estimates close to the same threshold but on opposite sides of it.
Sample Size Is Only One Factor
The i24NEWS survey conducted on October 22 included 5,124 adult respondents and reported a sampling error of plus or minus 1.4 percentage points at the 95 percent confidence level.
That is a substantial sample by conventional political polling standards.
But a larger sample does not eliminate every source of uncertainty.
Different pollsters may employ different recruitment methods, weighting systems and procedures for estimating turnout.
They may also differ in how they handle respondents who are undecided or reluctant to state their preferences.
These choices can matter particularly for smaller parties.
The Problem of Turnout
Opinion polls generally estimate voting preferences before actual voting takes place.
Election results reflect the ballots cast by people who participate.
Differences between intended and actual turnout can affect parties in different ways.
Analysts must therefore consider not only how many respondents express support for a party, but also whether the poll’s turnout model accurately reflects the eventual electorate.
Without transparent, comparable information about the methods used by each polling organization, it is difficult to identify which methodological difference is responsible for a particular disagreement.
Reading the Final Surveys
The appropriate interpretation of Amcha Yisrael’s polling is neither that its parliamentary representation is guaranteed nor that exclusion is certain.
The available surveys demonstrate uncertainty around a legally decisive boundary.
The four-seat projections reported by Channel 12 and i24NEWS are meaningful observations.
So are the below-threshold findings published by Channel 13, Maariv and Zman Yisrael.
Each survey is a measurement of electoral intentions under a particular methodology, not a count of actual votes.
For readers following Israel’s election, this makes Amcha Yisrael an instructive case study in how polling uncertainty interacts with electoral law.
The final result will provide the definitive seat allocation. The polls explain why the outcome was difficult to measure in advance.
Uncategorized
As Trump betrays Ukraine, it’s beginning to feel a lot like Munich
In Munich on Sept. 30, 1938, the leaders of Britain and France signed an agreement with Adolf Hitler that caved to the Nazi leader’s demand that Germany be given a chunk of Czechoslovakia. Five months later, Hitler ordered the German military to forcibly take the remainder of the neighboring country.
On Oct. 9, 2026, Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin struck a deal allowing Russia to sell diesel fuel to global markets, most importantly to the US. Then Trump waived a package of sanctions on Russia that had been passed by Congress. By replenishing Russia’s war coffers, it is likely more Ukrainians will die because of these twin gifts from America’s president to the warmongering Russian autocrat.
Why is Trump doing this? He seems to be hoping the diesel deal will help him avert disaster in the upcoming midterms. Or maybe there’s more to it than that. Perhaps Trump seriously thinks that this will get him the Nobel Peace Prize by ending the war in Ukraine through helping Putin win it. Perhaps it’s one more scheme to further enrich himself and his family. Or maybe Putin really does have something on Trump.
In any event, it feels like Munich all over again.
There are some remarkable parallels between Czechoslovakia’s predicament in 1938 and Ukraine’s nine decades later: separatists in two vulnerable Central European democracies were encouraged and supported by a neighboring authoritarian regime that sought to seize adjacent territory under the pretext of protecting a minority from oppression.
And at the center of both narratives is betrayal: of Czechoslovakia by Britain and France, and Ukraine by Trump.
In the spring and summer of 1938, Konrad Henlein, leader of the Nazi-allied Sudeten German Party in Czechoslovakia, held secret meetings with Hitler and other Nazi officials. They concocted a plan: Cause so much disorder in the Sudetenland that the Czech government would declare martial law, thus creating an excuse for German troops to march in to protect the ethnic German minority.
Tensions that had long existed along the Czech frontier erupted into gunfire and death in the Sudeten town of Habersbirk on the morning of Sept. 13, 1938. A mob of German separatists hung a swastika banner from a church tower, stormed the police station, kidnapped the wife of a cop, and engaged in gunfights with police officers that lasted hours. Four Czech police officers and four insurgents died. Outbreaks of violence, terror and torture raged along the border for days, backed by Freikorps paramilitary troops who crossed from Germany and by SA and SS men who took part in cross-border sabotage and armed attacks.
The uprising had the desired impact. Just 17 days later — on Sept. 30, 1938 — Britain, France, Italy and Nazi Germany signed the Munich Agreement, yielding to Hitler’s demand that the Sudetenland be ceded to him. After landing at an airport outside London, Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain waved a document in his hand and jubilantly proclaimed:
“The settlement of the Czechoslovak problem which has now been achieved is, in my view, only the prelude to a larger settlement in which all Europe may find peace.”
“I believe it is peace for our time,” Chamberlain said later that day.
But it didn’t take long for Hitler to show he could not be trusted. Hitler’s army marched into Czechoslovakia on March 15, 1939. Germany’s invasion of Poland followed less than six months later, and by 1942 German forces controlled territory spanning from the Atlantic Ocean to deep inside the Soviet Union.
Ethnic Germans’ uprising in Czechoslovakia in 1938 found an echo nine decades later in Ukraine’s Donbas region, where unrest that began with pro-Russia protests in 2014 evolved into the war Russia has been waging on its neighbor for nearly five years.
In the spring of 2014, paramilitary units led by Russian intelligence officers stormed government office buildings in several towns and cities in Donbas, seizing weapons and clashing with police. In a scene reminiscent of the Habersbirk siege of 1938, on April 14, 2014, pro-Russian militants seized the police station in Horlivka, beat up the police chief, and murdered a member of the city council, whose body was found in a river. Similar clashes occurred throughout Donbas.
Two Kremlin-backed pseudo-states soon emerged: the Donetsk People’s Republic and the Luhansk People’s Republic. Russia funneled tanks, artillery, air defense systems and fighters into Donbas, fueling a war between separatists and Ukrainian forces that dragged on for years.
Like Hitler in the Sudetenland, Russia’s de facto occupation of Donbas was not enough for Vladimir Putin. His eyes were on all of Ukraine, and he spent years manufacturing pretexts for the full-scale invasion that began on Feb. 24, 2022.
Trump has been buttering up Putin for more than a decade, starting with his 2015 campaign for president, when he effusively praised the ruthless Russian autocrat’s leadership style. Putin is a “strong leader,” is “far more respected than our president,” meaning the immensely popular Barack Obama, and was someone he “would get along with very well,” Trump said back then.
Trump’s admiration for Putin took on ominous tones after becoming president. During a press conference after the two leaders’ 2018 Helsinki summit, Trump questioned intelligence findings on Russian election interference and said he believed Putin’s denial. “I don’t see any reason it would be Russia,” Trump told reporters, with the Russian strongman standing at his side.
After Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022, during Biden’s presidency, Trump called it “a pretty smart move,” praised Putin as a “genius,” and also said it wouldn’t have happened if Trump was still president, remarks that were amplified by Russian state media.
During Trump’s second term, his buddy-buddy relationship with Putin has turned into a virtual strategic alliance, as the American president repeatedly makes moves and statements that seem designed to please the Russian autocrat. There are Trump’s threats to abandon NATO, his humiliation of Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelensky during a February 2025 meeting inside the Oval Office, and most recently Trump’s demand that Ukraine cease its drone attacks on Russian oil refineries, his call for Zelensky’s ouster, and envoy Steve Witkoff thanking Putin for being a “humanitarian.”
Putin has proposed a summit between himself, Trump, and Chinese leader Xi Jinping to discuss ending the war in Ukraine. It’s notable that Ukraine has not been invited. This is also what happened in Munich nine decades ago, when Czech delegates were excluded from the room, and others decided Czechoslovakia’s fate.
Last October, aboard Air Force One, Trump told reporters the Donbas region should be “cut up,” leaving most of it in Russian hands.
“Let it be cut the way it is,” he said. “They can negotiate something later on down the line.”
It seems the fate Trump envisions for Ukraine is similar to the one Hitler envisioned for Czechoslovakia. It would be naïve to think that Putin’s expansionist ambitions would stop there.
The post As Trump betrays Ukraine, it’s beginning to feel a lot like Munich appeared first on The Forward.
