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World Zionist Congress roiled by left- and right-wing protests, in sign of Independence Day tensions
(JTA) — Tensions over Israel’s future have roiled a convening of the World Zionist Congress in Jerusalem, in a harbinger of a season of Diaspora Jewish participation in Israel’s fierce political fights.
First, left-wing and centrist delegates to the group, which determines policy for an arm of the Jewish Agency for Israel, rallied in front of Israel’s Supreme Court on Thursday to protest Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s sweeping proposal to weaken the judiciary. Then, delegates from right-wing groups sought to block voting on resolutions critical of the Israeli government, in a gambit that generated tense scenes from within a body whose deliberations rarely attract public attention.
The tensions spilled over into Friday when the right-wing Knesset member who leads the committee focusing on the judiciary legislation, Simcha Rothman, was briefly cornered by protesters before being whisked away by police.
The incidents offered a sign of how the coming days and weeks might play out in Israel, as thousands of Diaspora Jews make their way to the country for events tied to Israel’s 75th birthday. The birthday comes soon before the days during which Israel’s right-wing government is expected to resume the judiciary legislation, which both proponents and critics say has the potential to change Israel forever. Protests are expected to be fierce.
The World Zionist Congress is the periodic assembly that determines policy for the World Zionist Organization, the arm of the Jewish Agency that aims to act as a bridge to the Diaspora. Among its functions is providing materials for Jewish schools across the globe and influencing the priorities of large, international Jewish organizations with substantial budgets. It also votes on symbolic resolutions about Israel’s character and future.
About 100 delegates in the World Zionist Congress took part in what participants said was a spontaneous march opposing the judiciary legislation on Thursday. They wore T-shirts provided by UnXeptable, a protest movement organized by Israeli expatriates.
“We are out here today because the current efforts of the Israeli government to undermine democracy and promote division threatens to tear us apart and not only cause divisions within Israel; it attacks the Diaspora as well,” said John Furstenberg, the vice president for Australasia for Mercaz, the Zionist arm of the Conservative/Masorti movement, who was a one of a number of speakers at the rally outside the Supreme Court. “We cannot stand idly by and say nothing whilst we see our enemies worldwide taking joy from our distress.”
Delegates to the World Zionist Congress protest against the Netanyahu government’s proposed changes to the courts, at the Supreme Court in Jerusalem, April 20, 2023. (Josh Drill)
Sheila Katz, the CEO of the National Council of Jewish Women, said delegates from 10 countries participated in the rally. She said she expected more in the coming days, particularly around the General Assembly being held by the Jewish Federations of North America, which is already being assailed by critics of the government for featuring Netanyahu and which is expected to draw 3,000 attendees. Katz is scheduled to be a featured speaker at a massive demonstration planned for Saturday night, which will mark 17 weeks of anti-government protests that have drawn hundreds of thousands of participants.
“All of us who are here believe in the original Zionist vision for this country, and we feel like the current government is losing its way,” Katz said. “And so how do you counter that? You counter it by sharing what the vision really is.”
A second confrontation took place during the congress itself, when a bloc of centrist and left-leaning groups advanced a number of resolutions that would have enshrined the Israeli Declaration of Independence as policy, protected LGBTQ rights and backed those who oppose Netanyahu’s court reforms.
Anticipating that the symbolic resolutions would pass, right-wing groups at the Congress successfully used parliamentary maneuvers to delay voting, though they did not succeed in pressing for individual votes that would have taken many hours and forced delegates to reveal their positions. The votes will now take place online, preventing a repeat of the shouting matches that took place on Thursday, and are expected to result in criticism of Israel’s government.
“This is a victory for the center-left-liberal bloc that will result in the passage of resolutions against the government’s policy, without concessions,” WZO Vice Chairman Yizhar Hess said in a statement about the decision to hold the votes online. “The right tried from the very beginning to prevent there being votes at this Congress. They failed at the beginning. They failed again today.”
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Gaza ‘Board of Peace’ to Convene at WH on Feb. 19, One Day After Trump’s Meeting with Netanyahu
US President Donald Trump speaks to the media during the 56th annual World Economic Forum (WEF) meeting in Davos, Switzerland, January 22, 2026. Photo: REUTERS/Denis Balibouse/File Photo
i24 News – A senior official from one of the member states confirms to i24NEWS that an invitation has been received for a gathering of President Trump’s Board of Peace at the White House on February 19, just one day after the president’s planned meeting with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
The meeting comes amid efforts to advance the implementation of the second phase of the Gaza ceasefire, following the limited reopening of the Rafah crossing, the expected announcement on the composition and mandate of the International Stabilization Force, and anticipation of a Trump declaration setting a deadline for Hamas to disarm.
In Israel officials assess that the announcement is expected very soon but has been delayed in part due to ongoing talks with the Americans over Israel’s demands for the demilitarization of the Gaza Strip. Trump reiterated on Thursday his promise that Hamas will indeed be disarmed.
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If US Attacks, Iran Says It Will Strike US Bases in the Region
FILE PHOTO: Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araqchi meets with Omani Foreign Minister Sayyid Badr Albusaidi in Muscat, Oman, February 6, 2026. Photo: Omani Ministry of Foreign Affairs/ Handout via REUTERS/File Photo
Iran will strike US bases in the Middle East if it is attacked by US forces that have massed in the region, its foreign minister said on Saturday, insisting that this should not be seen as an attack on the countries hosting them.
Foreign Minister Abbas Araqchi spoke to Qatari Al Jazeera TV a day after Tehran and Washington pledged to continue indirect nuclear talks following what both sides described as positive discussions on Friday in Oman.
While Araqchi said no date had yet been set for the next round of negotiations, US President Donald Trump said they could take place early next week. “We and Washington believe it should be held soon,” Araqchi said.
Trump has threatened to strike Iran after a US naval buildup in the region, demanding that it renounce uranium enrichment, a possible pathway to nuclear bombs, as well as stopping ballistic missile development and support for armed groups around the region. Tehran has long denied any intent to weaponize nuclear fuel production.
While both sides have indicated readiness to revive diplomacy over Tehran’s long-running nuclear dispute with the West, Araqchi balked at widening the talks out.
“Any dialogue requires refraining from threats and pressure. (Tehran) only discusses its nuclear issue … We do not discuss any other issue with the US,” he said.
Last June, the US bombed Iranian nuclear facilities, joining in the final stages of a 12-day Israeli bombing campaign. Tehran has since said it has halted uranium enrichment activity.
Its response at the time included a missile attack on a US base in Qatar, which maintains good relations with both Tehran and Washington.
In the event of a new US attack, Araqchi said the consequences could be similar.
“It would not be possible to attack American soil, but we will target their bases in the region,” he said.
“We will not attack neighboring countries; rather, we will target US bases stationed in them. There is a big difference between the two.”
Iran says it wants recognition of its right to enrich uranium, and that putting its missile program on the negotiating table would leave it vulnerable to Israeli attacks.
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My university wants me to sign a loyalty oath — am I in America or Vichy France?
As a historian of modern France, I have rarely seen a connection between my everyday life in my adopted state of Texas and my work on my adopted specialization: the period we call Vichy France. Apart from the Texan boast that the Lone Star Republic is bigger than the French Republic, and the small town of Paris, Texas, which boasts its own Eiffel Tower, I had no reason to compare the two places where I have spent more than half of my life.
Until now.
Last week, professors and instructors at the University of Houston received an unsettling memo from the administration, which asked us to sign a statement that we teach rather than “indoctrinate” our students.
Though the administration did not define “indoctrinate,” it hardly takes a PhD in English to read between the lines. Indoctrination is precisely what our state government has already forbidden us from doing in our classes. There must not be the slightest sign in our courses and curricula of references to diversity, identity and inclusion. The catch-all word used is “ideology,” a term Governor Greg Abbott recently invoked when he warned that “Texas is targeting professors who are more focused on pushing leftist ideologies rather than preparing students to lead our nation. We must end indoctrination.”
This is not the first time in the past several months that I have been reminded of what occurred in France during the four years that it was ruled by its German occupiers and Vichy collaborators.
Very briefly, with Germany’s rapid and complete defeat of France in 1940, an authoritarian, antisemitic and collaborationist regime assumed power. Among its first acts was to purge French Jews from all the professions, including high school and university faculties, and to impose an “oath of loyalty” to the person of Marshal Philippe Pétain, the elderly but ramrod straight and clear-headed hero of World War I.
The purpose of the oath was simple and straightforward: By demanding the fealty of all state employees to the person of Pétain, it also demanded their hostility to the secular and democratic values of the French republican tradition. Nevertheless, an overwhelming majority of teachers signed the oath —even the novelist and feminist Simone de Beauvoir, who needed her salary as a lycée teacher, as did the writer Jean Guéhenno, a visceral anti-Pétainist who continued to teach at the prestigious Paris lycée Henri IV until he was fired in 1943.
Vichy’s ministers of education understood the vital importance that schools and universities played in shaping citizens. Determined to replace the revolutionary values of liberty, equality and fraternity with the reactionary goals of family, work and homeland, they sought to eliminate “godless schools” and instill a “moral order” based on submission to state and church authorities. This radical experiment, powered by a reactionary ideology, to return France to the golden age of kings, cardinals and social castes came to an inglorious end with the Allied liberation of the country and collapse of Vichy scarcely four years after it had begun.
The French Jewish historian Marc Bloch — who joined the Resistance and sacrificed his life on behalf of a very different ideology we can call humanism — always insisted on the importance of comparative history. But comparison was important not because it identified similarities but because it illuminated differences. Clearly, the situation of professors at UH is very different from that of their French peers in Vichy France. We are not risking our jobs, much less our lives, by resisting this ham-handed effort to demand our loyalty to an anti-indoctrination memo.
But the two situations are not entirely dissimilar, either. Historians of fascism like Robert Paxton remind us that such movements begin slowly, then suddenly assume terrifying proportions. This was certainly the case in interwar France, where highly polarized politics, frequent political violence and a long history of antisemitism and anti-republicanism prepared the ground for Vichy. In France, Paxton writes, this slow, then sudden transformation “changed the practice of citizenship from the enjoyment of constitutional rights and duties to participation in mass ceremonies of affirmation and conformity.”
As an historian of France, I always thought its lurch into authoritarianism was shocking, but not surprising. After all, many of the elements for this change had existed well before 1940. But as a citizen of America, I am not just shocked, but also surprised by official demands for affirmation and conformity. One day I will find the time to think hard about my naiveté. But the time is now to think about how we should respond to these demands.
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