(JTA) — Yair Lapid and Naftali Bennett teamed up once before to unseat Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, striking an unusual power-sharing deal after Israel’s 2021 election that briefly ousted Netanyahu from power.

Now, the two men are going even further in seeking to repeat their feat. Lapid and Bennett announced on Sunday that they would run in this year’s election in a shared party called Yachad, or Together.

“Our unity is a message to the entire people of Israel: The era of division is over. The era of correction has arrived,” Bennett said at a press conference announcing the collaboration.

The two men are betting that Israelis will see their coming together as an antidote to the polarization that has deepened under Netanyahu, who was reelected in late 2022 after an 18-month interlude in which Bennett was prime minister for a year and Lapid for six months. They hope that Lapid’s centrist supporters and Bennett’s center-right backers can overlook policy differences, which they acknowledged, for the greater good of the country.

Their announcement invigorated some Israelis on Sunday who believe it is essential to unseat Netanyahu, who has been prime minister for about 14 of the last 17 years and who is facing both criminal prosecution and calls to reckon with the security failures that led to Hamas’ Oct. 7, 2023, attack on Israel. Many of them are willing to make compromises on policy nuances to achieve that goal.

But the union also ignited scorn on the right, as even some who might prefer to see Netanyahu unseated said they could no longer support Bennett if he is working with Lapid, whom they perceive as left-wing. Both Netanyahu and his far-right coalition partners posted on social media suggesting that Yachad would partner with Arab parties or even do the bidding of the Palestinian Authority’s Mahmoud Abbas. Itamar Ben-Gvir, the national security minister, posted an AI-generated image of Abbas presiding at a wedding of Lapid and Bennett, whom he called “an extreme leftist.”

Neither Bennett nor Lapid has prioritized resolving the Israeli-Palestinian conflict or supported the creation of a Palestinian state. Their 2021 coalition included an Israeli Arab party.

Current polls show that the two men alone would not garner enough votes to be able to form a coalition on their own this year. But they could negotiate to add other parties to reach a governing majority either before or after the election, which must be held before the end of October. Gadi Eisenkot, a former army chief of staff who launched his own party last year, reportedly called for a three-way union earlier this year.

Their union in some ways resembles the pre-election alliance-building conducted by Peter Magyar in Hungary, who recently unseated Netanyahu’s ally Viktor Orban there. Many Israeli critics of the current government see the election in Hungary as a template for what could happen in Israel.

In the lead-up to the Yachad announcement, Bennett in particular announced some personal policy shifts that could make him more palatable to centrist and non-Orthodox voters. He said that he would now support same-sex unions in Israel and back public transportation operating on Shabbat.

This article originally appeared on JTA.org.

The post Seismic shift in Israeli politics as opposition leaders Lapid and Bennett form joint party appeared first on The Forward.

(JTA) — Alex Sinclair had no idea what would follow when he posted a picture of his mutilated kippah to Facebook on Thursday.

Sinclair, who lives in central Israel, described being detained by police officers who told him that his kippah, which had both the Israeli and Palestinian flags woven in, was illegal. When he was released from their custody, he was allowed to take his kippah home — but only after the Palestinian flag was cut out, leaving him with roughly half a head-covering.

To Sinclair, a British-born writer and educator whose books include “Loving the Real Israel: An Educational Agenda for Liberal Zionism,” the situation was galling, and not just because he had been accused of breaking a law that does not exist.

“She’d taken my possession, a religious ritual object, something that is very dear to my heart, and destroyed it,” he wrote about the officer who returned his kippah. He added, “That was it. I walked home, shaken, angry, depressed.”

A day after publishing his account of the encounter, eliciting hundreds of almost universally supportive comments, Sinclair said he had not heard from anyone in the government about his Facebook post or the complaint he filed on the Israel Police website.

But he had gotten offers of legal aid; calls from left-wing politicians, including Yair Golan; and even Shabbat flowers from a prominent liberal activist. His phone had been ringing off the hook with calls from journalists, and someone he barely knows was planning a rally for outside the police station in Modiin where he was detained.

“I’ve never experienced anything like this,” Sinclair said in an interview with the Jewish Telegraphic Agency on Friday afternoon.

The Israel Police has acknowledged the incident, saying publicly that a man had been detained after they were contacted about his kippah and had been released “following a clarification process.” They said the official complaint about the incident prevented further comment.

Sinclair said he thought the image of the defiled kippah was resonant for Jews who instinctively associated it with centuries of antisemitism. But he said he wondered whether the depth of the response reflected something else, too.

After the ceasefire in the Iran war, Israelis were “beginning to be able to breathe a little bit and look above the parapet and just sort of see, OK, maybe we can start to think about the future in a way that we really weren’t able to as a society for the past couple of years,” he said. Now, the thought for many is: “If we are looking ahead, oh my God, is this what is in store for us?”

The incident comes amid a broad crackdown on Palestinian symbols in public spaces, and allegations that police, who have come under the control of a far-right minister, are increasingly intimidating liberal activists.

Soon after being named national security minister in January 2023, Itamar Ben-Gvir told Israeli police officers to exercise wide latitude in removing Palestinian national flags from public places in order to preserve public order. He characterized the flag as a terrorist symbol, even though it is legal in Israel.

“It cannot be that lawbreakers wave terrorist flags, incite and encourage terrorism, so I ordered the removal of flags supporting terrorism from the public space and to stop the incitement against Israel,” he said at the time. Following the Oct. 7 attack on Israel later that year, the crackdown intensified even more.

During the same period, the police have been accused of using inappropriate force against people protesting against the right-wing government. Sinclair said he was concerned about the threats to liberal values in his chosen country.

“The job as a police officer is not to police people’s political opinions,” he said. “That happens in other countries that we don’t want to become.”

Among the hundreds of people responding to Sinclair’s Facebook post were many who echoed that sentiment — even while saying they did not share his appreciation for the Palestinian flag. (Elsewhere in Israel and online, Sinclair drew more scorn.)

“While I don’t agree with your choice of kippa, I do agree you have every right to wear it,” wrote one commenter. “This is awful and I’m sorry you experienced it. And I hate that this is where we are now, that someone could be detained for something like this.”

Gilad Kariv, a Reform rabbi and member of the opposition in Israel’s parliament, said in a statement that there was “systemic madness” within the Israel Police and that he believed a criminal investigation and civil lawsuit would be appropriate. He also called for introspection.

“If police officers had cut off a Jew’s kippah in any other country in the world, there would have been an uproar here in Israel,” Kariv wrote.

Sinclair said the kippah that was destroyed was not his first with the same design. After the wind blew away the first one, which he had custom-made by a popular Jerusalem vendor nearly 20 years ago, he ordered a replacement — that’s how motivated he was to wear his values on his head.

“I’m a Zionist, and I believe in the Jewish people’s right to self-determination in this part of their historic homeland. And I also think that the Palestinians are also people who have a right to self-determination in part of this place, which is also their historic homeland,” Sinclair said.

“By the ironies of history, the same chunk of land ended up being a place where two peoples have a legitimate connection, and we have to figure that out,” he continued. “People from both sides who want to delegitimize or erase the other side forget about whether they’re being nice or nasty; they’re just not being true to history.”

That was once a relatively widely held view among Israelis and Jews around the world. But decades of failed peace efforts, violent attacks on Israelis from Palestinian terrorists, and increasing extremism among both Jews and Arabs have caused a two-state solution to fall sharply out of favor during that period.

Sinclair says he sees himself as a peace activist, though he called the term “grandiose” and said, “I’ve got a lot of respect for people whose life is much more about the activism than mine.”

What he is, he says, is a Jew who loves Israel and is scared for its future. His next book, out this fall, will tackle what he believes is “a struggle for the soul of the Jewish people,” a topic on which he has suddenly become an unwilling case study.

On one side, he said, are far-right extremists, including Ben-Gvir, who “want a kind of Judaism and an Israel which doesn’t have a place for all kinds of things that feel very important to me,” including egalitarianism, Palestinians and left-leaning politics. (That side, he noted, is currently advancing legislation that would ban egalitarian prayer at the Western Wall.) On the other, he said, are those who promote an Israel that “is open and pluralist,” one in which people tolerate people who practice Judaism in ways they would not and hold values they do not.

“We’re in a struggle between these two versions of Judaism and versions of Zionism,” Sinclair said. “I very much hope that we’ll win the struggle. I think it’s not too late to win that struggle. … But it’s not a slam-dunk. And we, the Jewish people, are in real trouble if we lose.”

Sinclair believes his book could help turn that lofty vision into a how-to guide for Israeli liberals. But he also has more practical concerns, like where to get another kippah. He isn’t sure the vendor who made it before will be willing to do so again. And this time, it’s not just him but many of his friends who say they are interested in getting their hands on one.

“Some bright lefty entrepreneur,” he joked, “has got a big money-making opportunity there.”

This article originally appeared on JTA.org.

The post His kippah was a symbol of coexistence. Israeli police officers seized and destroyed it. appeared first on The Forward.

(JTA) — Jewish social justice organizations are sharply criticizing the Trump administration’s decision to indict the Southern Poverty Law Center, framing the move as part of a broader campaign against civil society groups that monitor extremism.

The Department of Justice alleges that SPLC engaged in bank and wire fraud and conspired to commit money laundering, arguing that its use of paid informants to monitor extremist groups amounted to a funding mechanism for those same groups. SPLC has not yet issued a detailed public response to the charges.

For many observers, the clash also echoes an earlier and lesser-known chapter in American Jewish history — one in which Jewish organizations themselves used covert methods, including paid informants, to track and expose white supremacist movements, often with little support from the federal government.

Coincidentally, the indictment came down nearly simultaneously with the publication of “The Secret War Against Hate: American Resistance to Antisemitism and White Supremacy,” by historian Steven J. Ross. The book, which is being released next week, documents how groups such as the Anti-Defamation League and the American Jewish Committee infiltrated neo-Nazi and Ku Klux Klan organizations in the decades before and after World War II, passing intelligence to law enforcement agencies that were often reluctant to act.

The historical parallel is not exact, but it is striking: Tactics once employed by Jewish groups to counter violent extremism are now at the center of a federal prosecution against one of the country’s most prominent civil rights watchdogs.

The Union for Reform Judaism said it was “watching with concern” the Department of Justice’s action, noting SPLC’s long record of combating hate, including antisemitism.

“SPLC is a long-time ally in the civil rights space and has a record of more than five decades of combating hate, including antisemitism,” the group said in a statement. “While no one is above the law, this DOJ has pursued multiple cases over the last 14 months whose political motivations have been questioned and even rejected by juries and judges. For this reason, we are concerned that this, too, is a case motivated by politics, rather than fact.”

Leaders at the Jewish Council for Public Affairs were more forceful, casting the indictment as a direct threat to organizations that track hate groups and protect vulnerable communities.

“Civil society is under attack as the administration weaponizes the federal government against those with whom they disagree, while normalizing extremism and gutting the very programs we have to counter it — and it puts Jewish and so many other communities at risk of violence,” said CEO Amy Spitalnick.

“As today’s attack on the Southern Poverty Law Center shows, groups that protect civil rights and counter violent extremism are being criminalized by this Administration,” she added. “None of us can afford to be silent.”

The liberal Jewish advocacy group Bend the Arc similarly argued that the indictment reflects an effort to undermine democratic institutions.

“Groups like the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) make this nation safer for American Jews and all Americans — which is why the Trump regime’s DOJ is targeting them,” the organization said. “Americans and American Jews will keep showing up to defend our democracy, from our elections to all of our liberties.”

Ross, whose parents were Holocaust survivors, describes a period in which antisemitism and white supremacist ideology were both widespread and frequently violent, with extremists targeting synagogues and Black churches and staging rallies adorned with Nazi imagery. Figures such as George Lincoln Rockwell, who founded the American Nazi Party in 1959, and Jesse Benjamin Stoner, the racist and antisemitic politician convicted in the 1958 bombing of the Bethel Baptist Church in Birmingham, Alabama, sought to build mass movements rooted in racial and religious exclusion.

At the same time, Jewish defense organizations quietly developed sophisticated intelligence operations, including the use of informants, to monitor those threats. Their efforts, Ross writes, were often met with indifference from officials such as J. Edgar Hoover, whose FBI frequently declined to take more than token action against extremist groups.

In his book, Ross argues that while movements and leaders evolve, the underlying ideas — including white supremacy and antisemitism — persist. Today, he notes, those ideologies are often expressed less through explicit antisemitism than through broader attacks on immigrants and demographic change.

Speaking to NPR’s Terry Gross on Thursday, Ross said he was skeptical about the indictment of the SPLC.

“I’m not sure if the indictment is true or not, but the idea that there are informants is not illegal,” he said. “These people are simply monitoring what was going on and whether accused of stealing records, their records were sent, I’m sure, to the government forces like the FBI, the Justice Department, because they weren’t doing their job.”

Ross also said that the groups he writes about in the book made it clear to informants and infiltrators that they couldn’t break any laws. “I’m sure the SPLC is doing the same thing because they know their informants would get in trouble otherwise, that they could be prosecuted by the government,” he said.

Another ADL operation came to light just a few years ago when political historian Matthew Dallek of George Washington University wrote a book detailing how the ADL’s covert operation targeting the John Birch Society helped bring down an influential far-right extremist movement in the United States in the 1960s and ’70s.

“The ADL also had undercover agents with code names, who were able to infiltrate the society’s headquarters in Belmont, Massachusetts, and various chapter officers,” Dallek told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency in 2023. “They dug up financial and employment information about individual Birchers. And they not only used the material for their own newsletters and press releases, but they also fed information to the media.”

In the early 1990s, however, the West Coast branch of the ADL was accused in federal court of illegally spying on left-wing and pro-Arab groups, including the African National Congress, the American Indian Movement and the Association of Vietnam Veterans.

The ADL eventually settled a federal lawsuit, which charged, among other things, that the organization had sold information on anti-apartheid groups to the government of South Africa. The ADL consistently denied any improper or illegal actions, a position reiterated in the settlement.

Critics at the same accused the ADL of drifting from its founding mission — fighting antisemitism and promoting tolerance — to target legitimate criticism of Israel and advocacy of the Palestinian cause.

The Anti-Defamation League did not respond to a request for comment about the Department of Justice’s prosecution of the Southern Poverty Law Center.

But for Jewish groups now rallying to SPLC’s defense, the concern is not only about a single indictment but about the potential chilling effect on organizations that track and expose extremism — work they see as essential at a time of rising antisemitism.

“At a moment of rising antisemitism and broader extremism,” Spitalnick said, “the Administration should focus on how to protect our communities from these threats, not attack the very organizations and infrastructure whose work helps keep us safe in the first place.”

This article originally appeared on JTA.org.

The post DOJ’s indictment of Southern Poverty Law Center recalls Jewish groups’ use of informants to fight extremism appeared first on The Forward.