US President Donald Trump greets Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu at the White House in Washington, DC, US, Sept. 29, 2025. Photo: REUTERS/Kevin Lamarque

Israel Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has denied reports that his country is seeking a new 20-year military aid deal with the US, insisting that the Jewish state is working to wean itself off American assistance. 

“I don’t know what they’re talking about. My direction is the exact opposite,” Netanyahu said on “The Erin Molan Show” on Thursday when asked by the Australian journalist about a new Axios report saying Israel was pursuing the security agreement.

According to Axios, the deal under discussion would include “America First” provisions to win the Trump administration’s support. The current 10-year memorandum of understanding between the two countries — the third such agreement signed — expires in 2028. It includes around $3.8 billion of annual military aid to Israel, which spends nearly all the assistance in the US to purchase American-made weapons and equipment.

The report comes amid growing criticism in the US among progressives and, increasingly, some conservatives over American military support for Israel, especially among younger Americans.

“Now, I want to make our arms industry independent, totally as independent as possible,” Netanyahu said on Thursday. “I think that it is time to ensure that Israel is independent.”

Netanyahu added that US defense aid to Israel is a “tiny fraction” of what Washington spends in the Middle East.

“We have a very strong economy, a very strong arms industry, and even though we get what we get, which we appreciate, 80 percent of that is spent in the US and produces jobs in the US,” he continued, saying he wants to see “an even more independent Israeli defense industry.”

The Israeli premier went on to stress that his country has never asked a single American solider to fight for Israel.

“Israel does not ask others to fight for us,” he said. “Israel is the one American ally in the world that says, ‘We don’t need boots on the ground, we don’t need American servicemen fighting on the ground for Israel or around Israel. We’re fine.’ We fight our own battles, but in doing so, we serve important American interests, like preventing countries that chant ‘Death to America’ from having nuclear bombs to throw at America.”

South Africa’s President Cyril Ramaphosa attends the 20th East Asia Summit (EAS), as part of the 47th ASEAN Summit in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, Oct. 27, 2025. Photo: REUTERS/Hasnoor Hussain

South African President Cyril Ramaphosa insisted that “boycott politics doesn’t work” following the Trump administration’s announced absence from a summit in his country later this month — despite his ruling party’s ongoing support for the boycott, divestment, and sanctions (BDS) movement against Israel.

On Wednesday, Ramaphosa urged US President Donald Trump to reconsider his decision to boycott the G20 Leaders’ Summit, scheduled for Nov. 22-23 in Johannesburg, northeastern South Africa.

Ramaphosa criticized Washington for “giving up the very important role that they should be playing as the biggest economy in the world” in its decision to skip the summit — the first to be held in Africa.

“It is unfortunate that the United States has decided not to attend the G20. All I can say in my experience in politics is that boycotts never really work. They have a very contradictory effect,” the South African leader told reporters outside parliament in Cape Town.

Trump, who has previously accused the South African government of human rights abuses against white minorities — including land seizures and killings — called the decision to host the G20 summit in the country a “total disgrace.”

“No US government official will attend [the summit] as long as these human rights abuses continue,” he wrote in a post on Truth Social. 

However, the South African government has strongly rejected any claims of genocide, saying such accusations are “widely discredited and unsupported by reliable evidence.”

Ramaphosa reaffirmed that the summit will proceed as scheduled, regardless of Washington’s absence.

“The G20 will go on. All other heads of state will be here, and in the end, we will take fundamental decisions. And their absence is their loss,” he said.

“The US needs to think again whether boycott politics actually works, because in my experience, it doesn’t work. It’s better to be inside the tent rather than being outside the tent,” he continued. 

Despite such claims, Ramaphosa’s ruling African National Congress (ANC) party has officially endorsed the BDS campaign against Israel for years.

The BDS movement seeks to isolate the Jewish state internationally as a step toward its eventual elimination. Leaders of the campaign have repeatedly stated their goal is to destroy the world’s only Jewish state.

In 2012, the ANC announced its full backing of the BDS movement, urging “all South Africans to support the programs and campaigns of the Palestinian civil society which seek to put pressure on Israel to engage with the Palestinian people to reach a just solution.”

Following Ramaphosa’s comments this week, it remains unclear why he continues to back anti-Israel boycotts if he believes they don’t work.

Since the start of the war in Gaza, the South African government has been one of Israel’s fiercest critics, actively confronting the Jewish state on the international stage.

Beyond its open hostility toward Israel, South Africa has actively supported Hamas, hosting officials from the Palestinian terrorist group and expressing solidarity with their “cause.”

In one instance, Ramaphosa led a crowd at an election rally in a chant of “From the river to the sea, Palestine shall be free” — a popular slogan among anti-Israel activists that has been widely interpreted as a genocidal call for the destruction of the Jewish state, which is located between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea.

Since December 2023, South Africa has also been pursuing its case before the International Court of Justice accusing Israel of committing “state-led genocide” in its defensive war against Hamas in Gaza.

Israeli leaders have condemned the case as an “obscene exploitation” of the Genocide Convention, noting that the Jewish state is targeting terrorists who use civilians as human shields in its military campaign.

Peter Beinart, a prominent anti-Israel writer, being interviewed in January 2025. Photo: Screenshot

One of the most notorious anti-Israel activists in the US has castigated prominent Jewish writer Peter Beinart, a strident critic of Israel himself, for describing antisemitism as a “real” phenomenon rather than a political tool. 

The fracas began on Nov. 5, when Nerdeen Kiswani, the founder of the radical anti-Israel organization Within Our Lifetime (WOL), attacked New York City Mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani, another anti-Israel activist, on social media, posting that Mamdani’s condemnation of swastika graffiti spray-painted outside a Jewish school in Brooklyn the day after his election victory. In his tweet, Mamdani called the vandalism “disgusting and heartbreaking” and said he will “always stand steadfast with our Jewish neighbors to root the scourge of antisemitism out of our city.”

Kiswani took issue with Mamdani’s statement, despite the mayor-elect’s fierce opposition to the Jewish state.

Swastikas were found painted on the exterior walls of Magen David Yeshiva, a Jewish school in Brooklyn, in the early morning on Nov. 5, in what police are investigating as a hate crime. Surveillance footage reportedly shows a man on a bicycle scrawling the antisemitic symbols before fleeing the scene. The incident came just hours after Mamdani was elected mayor of New York City, prompting renewed concern over rising antisemitic acts across the city.

Beinart chided Kiswani, asserting that antisemitism is in fact a “real social phenomenon” that needs to be countered. He pointed to the growing popularity of antisemitic streamer Nick Fuentes as evidence of societal antisemitism on the rise.

“Your response to a swastika at a yeshiva is to condemn the mayor for condemning it? Because that might imply that antisemitism is a ‘real social phenomenon?’” Beinart wrote. “Yes, like other bigotries, it’s a ‘real social phenomenon.’ If you don’t believe me, ask the 1 million people who follow Nick Fuentes on this platform.”

In her retort, Kiswani clarified that while she found the swastika graffiti “reprehensible,” she took issue with Mamdani asserting that antisemitism is a “problem in NYC.” She argued that Jews weaponize antisemitism to silence critics of Israel and accused Beinart of using the plight of Palestinians to sell books. 

In his new book, Being Jewish After the Destruction of Gaza: A Reckoning, Beinart writes that Jewish texts, history, and language have been “deployed to justify mass slaughter and starvation [of the population of Gaza].”

“I took issue with the implication that there’s an antisemitism problem in NYC and cited Norman Finkelstein on the idea that it’s not a social phenomenon. He talks about it in the context of the US, I referenced NYC,” Kiswani wrote, referencing another prominent anti-Zionist.

You really have some nerve, grifting and writing books about “after” the genocide of my people as it’s still ongoing, to completely reframe what I was saying. I never condemned his condemnation of the graffiti, I explicitly called it reprehensible myself. I took issue with the… https://t.co/Gx52RnGsyx

— Nerdeen Kiswani (@NerdeenKiswani) November 7, 2025

New York City has experienced a surge in anti-Jewish hate crimes since the Palestinian terrorist group Hamas’s Oct. 7, 2023, massacre across southern Israel, amid the ensuing war in Gaza.

“There’s no structural disadvantage to being Jewish like there is to being Palestinian, and you know that. You’re being purposely obtuse. You can pander to the anti-genocide line but you’re still a liberal zionist [sic],” she continued, further attacking the Jewish academic.

“Peter Beinart calling Palestinians antisemites while claiming to ‘recognize our suffering’ shows what liberal Zionism really is: a project to save Zionism’s legitimacy, not dismantle its violence. It’s the rebranding of supremacy into something palatable, the illusion of moral balance while genocide continues,” Kiswani added. 

Kiswani has called for the expulsion of Zionists from all public spaces and for Israel to be “wiped off the map.” Leadership for WOL has repeatedly expressed support for terrorist groups such as Hamas and for violence against Israel, defending Hamas’s Oct. 7, 2023, invasion of and massacre across southern Israeli communities. Previously, Kiswani reprimanded US Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY), one of the foremost critics of Israel in the US Congress, as a “genocide apologist” for honoring the victims of the Nova Music Festival, where hundreds of Israelis were murdered and dozens were kidnapped by Hamas-led Palestinian terrorists during the Oct. 7 atrocities.

Beinart, meanwhile, has established himself as one of the most prominent anti-Zionist public intellectuals in the US in recent years. As a contributing opinion columnist for the New York Times, he penned an op-ed for the newspaper disavowing his previous support for Israel, claiming that he “no longer believes in a Jewish state.” He has accused Israel of oppressing Palestinians and erecting an “apartheid” state built on the notion of ethnic supremacy. 

Though Beinart has condemned the Hamas-led massacre, he has also compared the deadliest day for Jews since the Holocaust to the Haitian Slave Revolt and Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, arguing that Israel’s alleged “oppression” of Palestinians led to the Oct. 7 invasion. He has also accused Israel of perpetrating a “genocide” in Gaza.

Some observers noted on social media that Kiswani’s attacks against Beinart were an example that “for those who object to Jewish peoplehood to begin with, no Jew will ever be anti-Zionist enough.”