(JTA) — Over 1,000 diaspora Jews are petitioning Israeli President Isaac Herzog to intervene against settler violence in the West Bank, saying that the settlers are threatening Israeli security.

“Mr. President, the terror, death and destruction inflicted by Jewish-Israeli extremists against innocent Palestinians across the West Bank is an abomination,” says the open letter published Thursday. “It is not only morally shameful but a strategic threat to the future of Israel. It damages world Jewry and the relationship of future generations with Israel.”

The letter continues, “Sadly, based on events and on the statements of the most extreme coalition partners it can be concluded that the violence now engulfing the West Bank is not only condoned by the government but is in fact policy.”

The letter was organized by the The London Initiative, a liberal Zionist network founded earlier last year to “strengthen Israeli democracy, advance a fairer shared future for all citizens of Israel, revive hope in the prospects of achieving secure peace, and improve relations between all Israelis and world Jewry.” The number of signatories is growing as the letter circulates.

It comes as violence against Palestinians in the West Bank — often unpunished by Israeli authorities — has reached new heights, with settlers allegedly killing seven Palestinians in the last month, including one on Thursday, and driving others from their homes.

The situation has grown so extreme that the Israeli army this week took the unprecedented step of diverting soldiers from Lebanon, where Israel is battling Hezbollah, to the West Bank. Both the chief of staff of the Israeli Defense Forces and the Central Command chief have warned in recent days that conditions in the West Bank are contributing to a dire manpower shortage in the army.

The issue has also ignited concern from the United States, and from Israel’s U.S. ambassador, Rabbi Yechiel Leiter, who told Ynet that he believed the situation was deterring some in Washington from supporting Israel. He called on the rabbis of the West Bank to constrain their disciples.

“I’m so angry about the issue of Jewish riots in Judea and Samaria,” Leiter said. “It’s a handful of a few hundred people who are staining an entire enterprise — and everyone is silent.”

The new letter signed by diaspora Jews calls on Herzog to advocate for change with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his far-right ministers who have not interceded to stop the violence. The signatories include prominent philanthropists including Charles Bronfman; liberal rabbis from multiple countries; and former British and Canadian ambassadors to Israel.

“Mr. President, Pesach is upon us. As we have for millennia, Jews everywhere will reflect on the promise of freedom and responsibilities of power,” the letter says. “We call on you to use your position to implore the government to put an end to the abomination of Jewish-extremist terror and the era of impunity for its perpetrators.”

When she was 18, Dalia Ziada says, she was like any other college student in her home country of Egypt. When the Second Intifada erupted in 2000, she joined anti-Israel protests on her university campus. 

At the demonstrations, Ziada said, she saw protesters burning the Egyptian flag. Among them were members of the Islamist political movement Muslim Brotherhood, Ziada recalled, and she experienced an intense transformation. 

“It was literally the moment I poked out of this ideological box I was stuck into my whole life,” Ziada told an audience Tuesday night at the Russian-speaking Jewish Community of SF Bay Area’s Menorah Center SF. “I started to ask questions.”

Ziada’s wakeup call, which led her to question everything about the Arab-Israeli conflict, started her toward a career promoting human rights, democracy, liberalism and women’s rights, and later into politics, foreign affairs and counterterrorism. 

Nowadays, Ziada identifies herself as a “Muslim Arab Zionist from Egypt.”

After university, Ziada earned a master’s degree in international relations from Tufts University in Massachusetts. She currently works in the U.S. as the Washington, D.C., coordinator for the Institute for the Study of Global Antisemitism and Policy, a think tank and research institute “committed to fighting antisemitism on the battlefield of ideas.” 

Ziada, 44, spoke in San Francisco about her tumultuous journey to the United States, her work on American college campuses since Oct. 7, 2023, and how she believes the current war in Iran will shape the region. The talk was sponsored by the Northern California chapter of StandWithUs, a group that supports Israel and combats antisemitism, and other local Jewish groups. 

Before Oct. 7, 2023, Ziada was thriving in Cairo, where she directed the Center for Middle Eastern and Eastern Mediterranean Studies. She had established herself as a promoter of Muslim-Jewish dialogue. But that work was disrupted when she publicly condemned the Hamas massacre two days after it occurred. Ziada described Hamas’ actions as “terrorism” in a post on X, calling attention to the rapes of women and the targeting of children and the elderly.

“Whoever supports Hamas or justifies their acts of terrorism is a partner in their crime against the people of Israel,” Ziada wrote.

She immediately faced retaliation. 

The response reached a fever pitch when local fundamentalists targeted her family’s home in search of Ziada after declaring that “her blood should be shed,” she recalled. 

On Nov. 2, 2023, she fled Egypt for her safety and hasn’t returned. “I left everything literally in five hours,” she said, adding that she left her “whole life behind.” 

“Everything I ever owned I just lost. It was a very, very tough experience.”

Ziada escaped to the United States. 

Her work in the nonprofit sector led her to collaborate with Hillel International. During the 2024-2025 academic year, she spoke at nearly 60 universities throughout the country as an educator in Hillel’s Teach-In Tour. 

As Ziada traveled from one American campus to another, she witnessed students join anti-Israel demonstrations. She said she was transported back to her own college experience. This time around, though, she became a target of protesters who attempted to disrupt her events. 

In February 2025, members of Students for Justice in Palestine at the University of Maryland organized a campaign urging administrators to cancel an event with  Ziada. When that effort failed, over two dozen protesters demonstrated outside the event, the school’s student newspaper reported. 

In previous media appearances, Ziada has voiced her thoughts on encountering protesters who hate Israel and back Hamas. Her role, as she sees it, is not to evangelize for Israel, or invalidate concerns about Palestinian rights. Rather, it’s to condemn violent extremism in all its forms. 

“I don’t want them to fall in love with Israel. I just want them to be taken away from supporting Hamas,” Ziada told Israeli American podcaster and former Columbia University professor Shai Davidai in an interview last fall. 

Since the U.S.-Israel war with Iran began in late February, Ziada’s mission has expanded to raising awareness of what she sees as the ultimate purpose of the current war: to dismantle the region’s largest sponsor of terrorism — Iran — and to build inroads for peace agreements with Israel. 

She pointed to Hamas in Gaza, Hezbollah in Lebanon and the Houthis in Yemen as examples of Iran-sponsored proxies that demonstrate the regime’s role as a “terrorist organization with political legitimacy.”

“This regime always treated neighboring countries as a backyard, as a disposable arena,” she said. 

Near the end of the talk, moderator Shachar-Lee Yaakobovitz, who organizes StandWithUs collaborations with universities across California and the Pacific Northwest, asked how Ziada expects the current war to affect the prospects of the Abraham Accords, the normalization agreements between Israel and Bahrain, United Arab Emirates and Morocco signed in 2020 and 2021. 

Ziada remains optimistic about the future for Middle East peace, despite the intensity of the war with Iran. She sees the emergence of other peace advocates like her, such as Mohammed Saud in Saudi Arabia and Loay Alshareef in the United Arab Emirates, as a good sign for future diplomacy. 

“This is a very good indication that after the Iran war settles, more and more Arab countries would want to be friendly to Israel,” she said. “That’s why I think there is a very good chance for peace coming, after this war.”

(JTA) — BUENOS AIRES — As Argentina marks the 50th anniversary of the 1976 military coup, a lesser-known aspect of the dictatorship is gaining attention: the disproportionate number of Jews among the disappeared. 

Estimates suggest that as many as 1,900 Jews were abducted, tortured and murdered by the military junta during the six-year Dirty War, when many sources say 30,000 people were disappeared. Depending on the source, Jews represented 5% to 8% of the total, even though Jews made up less than 1% of Argentina’s population at the time.

That grim history is being explored in educational initiatives by Argentina’s Jewish community, aimed at younger generations and focused on understanding how the dictatorship operated and the disproportionate suffering it inflicted on Jews.

“The Jews were subjected to a particular form of treatment that resulted in greater brutality on the part of the repressive forces,” according to a new curriculum released by the education department of AMIA, the Jewish community center in Buenos Aires. “The experience of Jewish Argentines who were victims of state terrorism was marked by a strong antisemitic imprint among many members of the task forces.” 

The AMIA project includes meetings between Jewish youth and relatives of the Jewish “disappeared,” as well as visits to memorial sites. Some 1,000  students are expected to take part this month. 

A parallel digital project, Eduiot (“Testimonies”), documents the stories of Jewish victims of the military dictatorship and includes meetings between relatives of the disappeared and high school students.  

The materials rely on personal testimonies to explain the human impact of the dictatorship and to put individual stories in the broader historical context.

Eduiot includes the story of Fernando Ruben Brodsky, a 22-year-old student who disappeared in 1979, including accounts from relatives who continue to seek answers. His mother, Sarah Brodsky, shares accounts of her son, a psychology student and kindergarten teacher who was abducted from his home on Aug. 8 and never seen again.

The testimonials relate how security forces subjected Jews to antisemitic abuse when they were kidnapped or detained, including Nazi language and symbols and “special” interrogations reserved for Jews.

The anniversary comes amid renewed debate over how Argentina interprets the dictatorship. President Javier Milei’s government has called for a broader account that also includes victims of left-wing guerrilla violence, which some suggest is a way to minimize the crimes of the dictatorship. Milei and other voices close to the government have also questioned the 30,000-victim figure, promoting a lower number (often 9,000).

Under the junta, the military and state security forces  targeted suspected left-wing sympathizers, including students, unionists, journalists and activists.

In 1979, Jewish advocacy groups such as the Anti‑Defamation League expressed grave concern over the disappearances, focusing on the Jewish victims, and Jewish families in Argentina and abroad helped compile lists of the missing. According to an ADL official at the time, “Jews are not specifically targeted as Jews. However, the security agents tend to be suspicious of Jews.” 

The best-known Jewish target of the state was journalist Jacobo Timerman, who published a left-leaning newspaper, La Opinion. In 1977, the generals who ruled Argentina shut down the paper and imprisoned Timerman. Among other things, Timerman was accused of masterminding a plot to establish a Jewish homeland in the remote Patagonia region of southern Argentina.  

He survived, and in his 1981 memoir, “Prisoner Without a Name, Cell Without a Number,” he recounted how he was subjected to torture during his 2 1/2 years in confinement.

According to Eduiot, Jewish advocacy for the disappeared “proved effective in bringing early attention to human rights violations.” The U.S. Congress launched investigations, and in a 1978 article in Le Monde, novelist and Holocaust survivor Marek Halter compared the persecution of Argentine Jews to Nazi-era atrocities.

The Eduiot site includes photographs and audiovisual material, and features the accounts of parents, siblings, cousins, nephews and nieces of Jews persecuted and disappeared under the dictatorship. 

“Because every testimony matters and holds great value,” according to its website. “Because these dark episodes of our history must never be repeated, and because we want each of the disappeared to have a space of remembrance on this site, helping families sustain their memory and uphold the call for justice.”

Nas Daily, the Israeli Palestinian social media entrepreneur whose short videos have been viewed roughly 20 billion times, apparently has as many critics as he has fans. 

“Every time I say Israel, I lose followers,” he’s fond of saying. 

But as he said repeatedly in his appearance Thursday night at Congregation Emanu-El in San Francisco, if he only posted what people wanted to see, he wouldn’t be true to his mission: harnessing the power of social media to bring people together, particularly in his native Middle East. 

“There’s content that destroys, and there’s content that builds,” he told the crowd that packed Emanu-El’s sanctuary. Describing a hypothetical video showing a Jewish person in Israel behaving badly, he says it can get 10 million views in one day on TikTok and destroy 10 million people’s perception of Israel. 

“It takes 10 seconds to destroy something and 10 years to build it back. So we need to make a lot more [positive] content to counter the destructive kind.” 

Born Nuseir Yassin to a Muslim family in Arraba, an Arab village in northern Israel, he earned an economics degree from Harvard University before launching his first social media campaign on Facebook in 2016, posting daily one-minute videos from around the world for 1,000 days. 

Now 34 and working under his professional moniker of Nas Daily, he is best known for his short travel videos on YouTube, TikTok, Instagram and Facebook, as well as operating training programs for content creators via Nas Academy. His video content has expanded over the years to include everything from popular history to money-making tips to quirky tech to spiritual exploration. In December, he created a series about innovations inside Israel. What ties all the videos together is his upbeat approach to everything — and more recently, his passion for AI.

He speaks widely to the media and in front of live audiences, drumming up support for his various ventures and encouraging people to use social media for good. 

“Content is the fastest way in the world to reach the most number of people, period,” he said in San Francisco, where he appeared in conversation with his partner, Aija Mayrock, a Jewish American author and media personality who focuses on women’s empowerment, Jewish identity and combating bullying.

Nas has taken a lot of flak in the Arab world for his stance on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. He supports two states for two people and opposes Hamas. And the day after the Oct. 7, 2023, Hamas massacre in Israel, he began referring to himself as Israeli first and Palestinian second.

“The thing that I don’t like is hypocrisy,” he said. “When I look at my life as an Arab Israeli, I had so many benefits from Israel even though I didn’t feel equal. We’re not here to say Israel is perfect — it’s far from perfect. But Israel is a good idea, and we love good ideas.”

Unlike many of the approximately 2 million Arab Israelis, Nas said he does not hesitate to publicly defend what he considers his home. “The majority of them also feel it’s home, but they will never say so publicly because they are too scared.”

Nas faults his own community for prioritizing consensus over arguing to get at the truth. In contrast to the saying “two Jews, three opinions,” he said, “If you put 2 million Arabs in a room, you will get one opinion. That’s the No. 1 cause of sadness in my life.” 

Emanu-El Rabbi Rena Singer, who moderated the event, asked how he and Mayrock know they are reaching people who don’t agree with them on Israel, given that the “algorithm gods” feed people content on social media that matches what they are already looking at.

Noting that algorithms actually change every two to three months, Nas said there was a period from 2017 to 2020 when an algorithm, called NSI by Facebook, “focused on meaningful social interaction. Then TikTok came out and changed the game.” TikTok, whose algorithm “shows you only what you want to see” is, he said, “the worst thing in social media since social media.” 

Adding, however, that he is “personally excited by the new owners of TikTok,” he said, “If you change the algorithm, you can truly change who watches what, and that means San Francisco. San Francisco residents are the most important people in the world. Your cousin who works at Facebook can actually control the destiny of the Jewish people and the Palestinian people.” 

“That’s a big statement, I know,” he added.

He and Mayrock only have anecdotal evidence that their message on Israeli-Palestinian coexistence is getting through to viewers in the Arab world. But they persist, believing that the sheer weight of the positive content they are sending out will penetrate hearts and minds. 

The work is not without risk. 

“The mission is to bring people together, and that’s not popular,” Nas said. When he started out in 2016, he just “wanted to travel to Nepal, make one-minute videos and have fun.” Today, 10 years later, he has to hire security guards for his own safety.

“I did not expect this,” he said. “There are some countries I don’t go to anymore. North Africa for me is done. And I have never made any negative piece of content.” 

Mayrock quickly corrected him, saying “except about meat.” Nas, a fervent vegetarian, laughed. “Right, I’m anti-meat.”

Asked what one video he would like the whole world to watch, Nas thought for a moment and mentioned “Jews vs. Arabs,” which was filmed in Jerusalem in 2020. It focuses on his encounter with an ultra-Orthodox man and his 15-year-old sister, both of whom believe all Arabs are terrorists. In the video, Nas faults the fact that the only Arabs most Israeli Jews know are the ones they see rioting on TV. Similarly, growing up in an entirely Arab village, he himself had no Jewish friends.

“It’s easy to become extremist,” he acknowledged. “Even Aija and I have moments where we become what we hate. Everybody can fall into the darkness. But you have to pull yourself out.”

A majority of Americans, according to recent polls, oppose the U.S.-Israel war with Iran. But at least one group of Iranian Americans is firmly behind it. 

The National Union for Democracy in Iran (NUFDI), a Washington, D.C.-based nonprofit, opposes the Islamic Republic of Iran and advocates for free and fair elections, a secular democracy and the protection of human rights.

“The Iranian people have been fighting this regime for five decades. Our brave brothers and sisters in the U.S. military and the IDF are bleeding beside us, and we are immensely grateful for their sacrifice,” said Khosro Isfahani, who is NUFDI’s research director and has been a journalist and political activist both inside and outside his native Iran.

Isfahani spoke Monday night during an online event organized by JIMENA: Jews Indigenous to the Middle East and North Africa, the Bay Area–based nonprofit that advocates for Jews from Arab and Muslim countries. 

His message was unequivocal: The Iranian population doesn’t support the Islamic Republic, welcomes the intervention of Israel and the United States, and is fighting “with everything we have” to pave the way for the return of exiled crown prince Reza Pahlavi, the son of Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, who served as the shah from 1941 to 1979.

“The day the [missile] strikes began, women removed their hijabs and danced in the streets,” he said of Feb. 28, the first day of the current war. 

Isfahani was born into opposition activism. His father was an activist jailed for four years after the 1979 Islamic Revolution, and Isfahani himself was taken by his father to his first anti-regime protest at the age of 9. Isfahani left Iran in 2021 for a reporting job at BBC Monitoring before taking the lead role in the Atlantic Council’s open-source research of human rights and international law violations linked to the Iranian regime.

The Iranian population has been “at war with the Islamic Republic since its inception,” he said. 

But opposition has reached a new level since the 12-day war last June with Israel and the U.S. and since the grassroots uprising that began in late December, he said. “Millions of people took to the streets” to protest the regime, he said, and then the government massacred “tens and tens of thousands” of them.

“I have worked on war crimes. I thought I had seen every kind of atrocity,” he said. “But what we saw in January went beyond that. I have seen footage of infants hit by bullets. I have seen faces demolished by shotgun pellets. I have seen children dragging their parents away after they were shot dead.” 

Minorities have been particularly targeted, he said, including the country’s 9,000 to 10,000 Jews. In the aftermath of the June war, he said, dozens of Jews were arrested on trumped-up charges. One was an Iranian American visiting Iran, who was arrested for traveling to Israel 17 years ago for his son’s bar mitzvah. Another was a Jewish man arrested for taking part in a WhatsApp chat that involved Hebrew. It turned out to be a Torah discussion group, Isfahani said.

Asked whether Pahlavi is seeking to restore his father’s monarchy, as is claimed in some media outlets, Isfahani said such charges are untrue. In fact, he said, Reza Pahlavi is the only figure with the moral authority to rally the Iranian people. 

“We see him as the leader of the opposition,” Isfahani said. “He’s not seeking a title. He’s not seeking a crown. He sees himself as a bridge to the future. He has offered himself as a transitional leader that is going to enable Iranians to depart from the Islamic Republic and arrive at that secular democratic future.”

Isfahani referred the audience to recent interviews with Pahlavi, including one for the March 1 episode of “60 Minutes” after Supreme Leader of Iran Ali Khamenei’s assassination the previous day. “He has repeatedly said he wants to deliver us to the ballot box where we can determine our future with our vote. Then his mission will be over,” Isfahani said. 

Sarah Levin, JIMENA’s executive director, concurs. “Within the Iranian Jewish community, and from what I hear in the broader Iranian diaspora as well, there is a wide consensus that Reza Pahlavi is the only credible candidate to guide the country through a transitional period toward a more democratic future,” she told J. in an email.

While urging the U.S. and Israel to continue their military pressure on Iran, Isfahani emphasized that no matter what those two nations decide to do, the Iranian opposition has reached a point of no return. 

“We are not asking for America or Israel to commit boots on the ground. We don’t need that,” he said. 

A “brighter future is finally possible for Iran,” he said. “We don’t want our country to be bombed, [but] there is no other way to end this Islamic fascist system.” 

This story was originally published in the Forward.

The protesters at a January rally I attended in New York City’s Washington Square Park were loud and raw throated as they denounced the brutal Islamist regime in Tehran, then in the midst of slaughtering thousands of their comrades in Iran. A crowd of more than 1,500 called on the United States to make good on President Donald Trump’s all-caps promise that “HELP IS ON ITS WAY.”

I turned to an Iranian friend next to me who was lustily joining cheers calling for the tyrants’ overthrow. Like most of the rest of the protesters, she was also cheering the demonstration’s other prominent images: Israeli flags, the images of President Donald Trump and photos of Reza Pahlavi, the son and self-declared heir of the autocratic monarch Iranians ousted in 1979.

My friend’s parents had once been members of Iran’s leftist Tudeh Party, the country’s official communist faction, which was among the staunchest opponents of Pahlavi’s father. Recalling my own 20-month stay in Iran toward the end of his rule, I asked my friend if she understood the rampant corruption and repression under which Iranians lived during that time.

Was she aware of the role the U.S. played in installing the shah in power, and the torture of dissidents by SAVAK, the shah’s secret police, with support from Israel’s intelligence agency, the Mossad — a record Pahlavi has never acknowledged?

My dear friend fixed me in her gaze with clear eyes, devoid of illusion.

“Yes,” she said simply. “And it would be better.”

Lowered expectations

Whether the bombs and missiles the U.S. is now raining down on Iran will fulfill the promise Trump held out for protesters remains an open question. But In New York City, back in January, there was no mistaking their desperate faith in him — or the irony of that faith.

It was the U.S., after all, that joined with Great Britain in 1953 to overturn the democracy Iran enjoyed 73 years ago. Twenty-six years of U.S. support ensued for the autocracy that followed.

During the Iran-Iraq war from 1980 to 1988, it was the U.S. that also supplied Iraq’s president, Saddam Hussein, with critical intelligence and precursor chemicals that enabled him to manufacture and deploy outlawed chemical weapons against Iranian troops and civilians, asphyxiating thousands.

Given this history and the woeful fates that befell Iraq and Libya after U.S. intervention, many liberals voice grave doubt that any U.S.-forced regime change could restore democracy to the country. But they may be missing an important point: the extent to which crushing U.S. economic sanctions and the Iranian government’s own brutal repression, corruption and incompetence, have produced economic and political desperation among many Iranians, which radically lowers the bar.

The redemption of ‘Big Satan’

Opponents of Trump can recite a litany of his political and personal depravities, his affronts to democracy here at home, and his unreliability as an international partner in support of human rights and democracy abroad.

But I’ve noticed, anecdotally, that such recitations fall on deaf ears with many Iranians.

Two reasons rise to the top, in my mind, that explain this.

The first is the enormous credibility that Trump and the U.S. have derived from being among the primary hate targets of Iran’s despotic regime. This effect has also benefited Israel, the partner of the U.S. in waging this war. Decades of demonization of “the Big Satan” — and Israel, “the Little Satan” — from leaders so many Iranians despise have performed a miracle of reputational resurrection.

Today, this relentless drumbeat of vitriol has rendered the CIA’s subversion of Iran’s mid-20th century democracy — and Israel’s help in setting up SAVAK — a distant memory. This theocratic regime is the present danger.

Secondly, as a famous saying in Washington goes, “You can’t beat something with nothing.” That appears to be why many Iranians, for now, are turning to Trump. In Iran, the protesters’ own lack of leadership and resistance infrastructure plays into this. There is no Charles de Gaulle or Nelson Mandela waiting in the wings to take charge, with highly disciplined and battle-tested resistance groups to support them.

Another important factor may be the American left’s inability to offer Iranians a compelling alternative vision.

Several liberal members of Congress, including Rep. Alexandria Ocasio Cortez and Senator Bernie Sanders, have consistently praised the bravery of the protesters and their cause. But they have not proposed any way to hold their killers accountable, and have opposed Trump’s war as the way to do so. Their approach, diplomacy and international law, produced President Barack Obama’s Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action in 2016, which radically constrained Iran’s nuclear weapons development.

Based on my reporting from Iran for the Forward back then, I can attest that vast numbers of Iranians strongly supported this at the time. They saw the JCPOA as a way to open Iran up to greater Western influence over time — the greatest fear of the country’s hardline ayatollahs.

But Trump tossed that achievement into the rubbish heap of history in his first term. And the left’s toolbox has been useless since. In the meantime, outside of government, some on the left have played down or ignored the Iranian government’s killings and abuses — or even attributed January’s protests in whole or part to Mossad agents embedded in Iran.

‘Striving for democracy’

Another friend, still living in Iran, told me recently that his grandson had left him feeling shamed. How is it, his grandson asked, that his generation had allowed the shah to be overthrown and replaced by this cohort of theocratic thugs?

My friend in Tehran had no answer.

My friend’s parents had been ardent supporters of Prime Minister Mohammed Mossadegh, the fiercely nationalistic Iranian leader ousted by Britain and the U.S. in 1953. But now, the prospect of a return by the shah’s son as a U.S.-backed autocrat with strong ties to right-wing Israelis didn’t phase him at all.

For his part, Pahlavi has publicly espoused a commitment to secular liberal democracy. But just last month his main support group, the National Union for Democracy in Iran, proposed that Pahlavi should serve as the unambiguous “Leader of the National Uprising” who will be empowered to issue official decrees, install hand-picked executive officials during a “transition to freedom and stability” and act as commander-in-chief of Iran’s military forces.

His supporters, meanwhile, have been widely accused of harassing and viciously threatening opponents who do not accept him in this role.

Would a secular, hopefully more competent, authoritarian dictatorship, whether led by Pahlavi or someone else with U.S. backing, be an improvement, I asked my friend in Tehran?

Even as bombs were falling from the sky onto his city last week, he texted back: “Yes sure!”

“I think this can be a phase towards a better situation for striving for democracy,” he added.

To be honest, I fear he and other like-minded Iranians are betting on moonbeams. But even after Israel bombed Tehran’s oil storage facilities over the weekend, engulfing the city in a poisonous black cloud, he texted me poetry.

“Under the black smoke…I saw trees that were hosting a multitude of blossoms with their thin bodies,” he wrote. “It seemed like they were supposed to remind us of spring….To us, who have been stuck in a rut for years? The ideological Mafia rule of the Islamic Republic of Iran has stolen 47 springs from us.”

The views and opinions expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect those of the Forward. Discover more perspectives in Opinion. To contact Opinion authors, email opinion@forward.com.

This story was originally published on the Forward.

(JTA) — About two-thirds of “connected” American Jews support the U.S.-Israel war against Iran, a new survey has found, even as they are concerned that it could exacerbate antisemitism and anti-Israel sentiment in the United States.

The results of the survey, taken last week by Israel’s Jewish People Policy Institute, suggest that American Jews are more supportive of the war than Americans overall. Multiple surveys last week found that about 60% of American voters opposed the military action, with support significantly lower among Democrats, historically the party of most Jewish voters.

A partisan shift was apparent in the JPPI survey, with near-total support for the war from those who describe themselves as politically conservative. Still, 57% of “leaning liberal” Jews said they support the war. Self-identified “strong liberals” were the only group of U.S. Jews to say they oppose the war, with only 28% backing it.

The survey of 692 American Jews drew from a panel maintained by JPPI that aims to reflect the denominational distribution of U.S. Jews. The institute says its polls reflect the sentiments of “connected” Jews because its panel includes fewer intermarried Jews, more Jews who are affiliated with denominations and more Jews who have lived in Israel than demographic data would suggest is representative of U.S Jewry overall.

The JPPI survey finds that American Jews are more like Israeli Jews than like U.S. voters overall. An Israel Democracy Institute poll taken last week found that 93% of Jewish Israelis supported the military operations against Iran.

Iran has long waged a campaign against both Israel and the United States, but while it has struck at U.S. targets around the world, Israel is geographically in its crosshairs. Its missiles killed dozens of Israelis during a 12-day war last year and have killed more than a dozen already during the current war, which has expanded to much of the Middle East.

President Donald Trump and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu have indicated that in addition to ending Iran’s nuclear ambitions and demolishing its military infrastructure, they want the nearly 50-year-old Islamic Republic regime to fall. The JPPI poll found that only a quarter of U.S. Jews say regime change should be a primary goal of the war, compared with 58% who say the war should seek to “eliminate nuclear program, ballistic missile capabilities, and support of terror.”

American Jews polled by JPPI also said they expected the war to increase both antisemitism (52%) and anti-Israel sentiment (45%) in the United States. Already, the war has sparked debate over whether Trump was forced into the conflict by Netanyahu — a narrative they both have rejected. The survey found that 72% of American Jews believe Trump needed no convincing, while only 14% believe Netanyahu was the primary driver of military action against Iran.

(JTA) — The first time Iris Hefets was detained by German police, she was standing alone on a street corner in Berlin with a sign that read, “As a Jew and Israeli, stop the genocide in Gaza.”

That was October 2023. Hefets, a 60-year-old psychoanalyst who moved from Israel in 2002, was standing by herself because Berlin authorities had barred activist groups from holding pro-Palestinian demonstrations after the Oct. 7 Hamas attack on Israel. By carrying a sign alone, she believed she was circumventing the ban on assembly.

But the police said her sign itself was an offense. Since then, Hefets has been detained four more times while protesting Israel’s actions in Gaza, all for the language on her signs. The offenses were logged in police reports as hate speech and included on the surging list of antisemitic incidents in Germany since 2023.

For Hefets, the penalties carry an obvious irony.

“It made me feel like a Jew,” she said. “This is the first time in my life that I really felt what it meant to be a Jew, and in the minority being persecuted.”

Germany has cracked down on speech and demonstrations that assert support for Palestinians and accuse Israel of atrocities, even since Israel and Hamas agreed to a ceasefire in October 2025. Hefets’ detainments were part of a national policy toward antisemitism, defined over decades in the shadow of the Holocaust and sharpened recently under the helm of Felix Klein, the first federal commissioner for combating antisemitism.

Klein announced last month that he will leave his post, which he has held for eight years, this summer to join the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development in Paris. He leaves behind a proposal to criminalize chants that could be interpreted as calling for Israel’s destruction, such as “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free.”

The proposed legislation is currently being reviewed by the Ministry of Justice, and its future may rest in the hands of the next antisemitism commissioner, who has yet to be announced.

Whoever is chosen for the role will face down a fraught debate over Germany’s historic allegiance to Israel and the legal boundaries of pro-Palestinian speech. Many Jews say they feel safer under such bans, including the Central Council of Jews in Germany, which recommended Klein for his appointment as antisemitism czar. Some human rights groups and pundits have objected, however, saying the bans limit free speech and criminalize legitimate expressions of support for the Palestinian cause.

The next commissioner will also have to grapple with Jewish intellectuals, artists and activists like Hefets, who say that Germany’s antisemitism enforcers are suppressing Jewish voices that don’t fall in line.

The first swell of dissent from Jews came soon after Oct. 7. In an open letter published in the German newspaper “Die Tageszeitung” on Oct. 22, 2023, 121 Jewish writers and artists living in Germany condemned Hefets’ arrest and bans on pro-Palestinian demonstrations.

“Virtually all of the cancellations, including those banning gatherings organized by Jewish groups, have been justified by the police in part due to the ‘imminent risk’ of ‘seditious, anti-Semitic exclamations,’” said the letter. “These claims, we believe, serve to suppress legitimate nonviolent political expression that may include criticisms of Israel.”

Emily Dische-Becker, the Germany director of the international group Diaspora Alliance and a Jewish German-American from Berlin, said Klein’s proposal to outlaw slogans like “From the river to the sea” could cement a sacrifice of free speech, ultimately harming Jews and other minorities.

“I do not think that treating antisemitism as a state of exception to our democratic laws and constitutional rights is going to help combat antisemitism,” she said.

For Klein, there is no contradiction in a German officer arresting a Jewish person for antisemitism. “It doesn’t really matter who is the person who spreads antisemitism,” he said in an interview. “Although it sounds odd at first sight, antisemitism can also be spread by Jews.”

Klein also dismissed efforts to distinguish between anti-Zionism and antisemitism.

“In Germany, we hardly ever talk about anti-Zionism. The political notion hardly exists,” he said. “We talk about Israel-related antisemitism. When someone says, ‘I’m only anti-Zionist, I’m not antisemitic,’ I think in most of the cases, anti-Zionism is also a form of antisemitism. They say Israel, but they mean Jews.”

Germany’s grip on speech about Israel is rooted in a decades-old effort to expunge the taint of its Nazi past. During the 1980s and 1990s, the country formalized a process of “Vergangenheitsbewältigung,” or reckoning with the Nazi era through memorials, education and narratives about German identity. Key to this identity — and to Germany’s rehabilitation — was a special responsibility toward Israel.

Former Chancellor Angela Merkel summed up this bond in 2008. Speaking to the Knesset on the 60th anniversary of the founding of Israel, she said Israel’s security was part of Germany’s “Staatsräson,” or the reason for the existence of the state.

Now deeply ingrained in German politics, that concept has become a tool in the prosecution of pro-Palestinian protesters accused of antisemitism. Last year, immigration authorities ordered the deportation of three European nationals and one U.S. citizen over their alleged activity at pro-Palestinian protests. Three of the orders cited “Staatsräson,” although the protesters’ lawyer said the word had no legal standing.

Disputes over Israel recently erupted at the Buchenwald concentration camp memorial, as both Israel’s critics and its defenders claim the Holocaust for their terrain. The anti-Zionist group Kufiyas in Buchenwald announced a demonstration at Buchenwald on April 11, the anniversary of its liberation, in protest against a German court’s decision that the site could refuse entry to visitors who wear a Palestinian keffiyeh.

The court said it was “unquestionable” that wearing a keffiyeh to send a political message “would endanger the sense of security of many Jews, especially at this site.” Meanwhile, the protesters argued that their campaign encompasses the “descendants of Holocaust survivors,” including Buchenwald inmates, and said the site has become a place of “historical revisionism and genocide denial.”

The group also said the memorial had suppressed other voices that criticized Israel, including the Israeli philosopher Omri Boehm, who was slated to give a commemoration speech at Buchenwald last year. Boehm, the grandson of Holocaust survivors and a critic of the Israeli government, was disinvited after pressure from the Israeli embassy in Berlin.

The planned Buchenwald protest was condemned by the European Jewish Congress, and Klein said it marked a “new low point in the unfortunately all-too-common reversal of perpetrator and victim roles.”

Klein’s office, titled in full the “Federal Government Commissioner for Jewish Life in Germany and the Fight against Antisemitism,” was created in 2018. Germany has since produced a web of antisemitism commissioners, with 15 installed at the state level and others assigned to universities and cultural institutions. The only Jewish state czar, Stefan Hensel of Hamburg, resigned at the end of 2025. (Hensel, who cited rising antisemitic threats in his decision to step down, converted to Judaism shortly before he started the job in 2021.)

According to Klein, the chief target of this antisemitism-fighting bureaucracy is clear: the pro-Palestinian movement. “The most common and most dangerous form of antisemitism in Germany, like in other countries, is Israel-related antisemitism,” he said.

Germany’s Federal Criminal Police Office records the political origins of antisemitic crimes. In 2024, it said that antisemitism driven by left-wing extremism rose a dramatic 172%, from 40 incidents the previous year to 109. Another category titled “foreign ideology” was reported to spur 1,940 incidents, a 63% increase from 2023.

But by far, right-wing extremism drove the most antisemitic crimes, a total of 3,016. Though that figure fell slightly from 2023, the office said that right-wing extremism also constituted the majority of offenses “in every previous year.”

The publicly available statistics do not break down responsibility for different types of antisemitic incidents, from hate speech to property damage to violence, and how many were reported to have Jewish victims.

Nevertheless, Dische-Becker criticized Klein’s office for “decoupling” its focus from far-right activity. She noted that the nationalist Alternative for Germany party or AfD, which has welcomed neo-Nazis to meetings, is rapidly becoming one of the country’s most popular parties and could win in some state-level elections this year.

Klein has support from the Central Council of Jews in Germany, a representative body whose 100,000 members comprise about half of the total Jews living in Germany. The group has said that “From the river to the sea” means “the annihilation of Israel and the expulsion and destruction of the Jews living there,” adding that Germany has an “urgent duty” to clarify that definition. The Central Council did not respond to requests for comment in time for publication.

Israel is an “existential concern” for many German Jews, according to A. Dirk Moses, a scholar of genocide, memory studies and modern Germany at the City College of New York. The Central Council emphasizes that it views the well-being of Jews in Germany as “dependent on the robustness of the Israeli state,” Moses said.

Even when German Jews do not fully align with the Central Council’s platform, he added, they often weigh language about Israel against the risk of undoing Germany’s progress in confronting the Holocaust.

“It’s the fear that you will give ammunition to antisemites in Germany, who will say, ‘Ah, the Jews are committing genocide too, just like our grandparents did, so we don’t owe them anything,’” he said.

The Central Council of Jews in Germany represents a population of Jewish families who largely arrived as refugees from Soviet countries and rebuilt Jewish life in Germany after the Holocaust. Many came in poverty and depended heavily on community structures, including the Central Council, which is state-funded. Today, Jewish retirees still depend on basic social security at 10 times the rate of the average German, said Dische-Becker.

Many of these Jews also carry the memory of Soviet anti-Zionist campaigns, which employed antisemitic propaganda, shut down Jewish life and targeted Jews as ideologically suspect.

“The communities that are part of this umbrella organization are overwhelmingly older, post-Soviet migrants,” said Dische-Becker. “They have an experience of Soviet anti-Zionism that was antisemitic, and oftentimes they lean very right-wing.”

Johanna Vollhardt, a social psychologist at Clark University affiliated with the Strassler Center for Holocaust and Genocide Studies, grew up in Germany’s Reform Jewish movement. She experienced the marginalization of Reform Judaism, which was born in Germany in the early 19th century and destroyed there by World War II, only gaining formal recognition by the Central Council and state funding in the early 2000s.

She viewed the Reform movement as part of a vast, diverse ecosystem of Jewish ideas that was stamped out, and remains stifled by policies like Klein’s proposal.

“To me, it’s important to emphasize this pluralism that was destroyed in the Holocaust and not allowed to rebuild,” said Vollhardt. “This is part of the lack of support for the expression of anti-Zionist Jewish thought, or any other non-Zionist, non-mainstream Jewish thought.”

Over recent decades, younger, richer and more politically liberal Jews have moved to Germany, particularly Berlin. Among them are up to 30,000 Israelis, including some who left Israel out of frustration and anger at their government.

Many of the Jewish artists and intellectuals who came from outside Germany have been caught in the clampdown on alleged anti-Israel or antisemitic expression.

According to data compiled by Diaspora Alliance, Jews were involved in 25% of the performances, exhibits and artistic expressions canceled in 2023 for allegations of antisemitism — despite making up less than 1% of the country’s population. (Palestinian, Muslim and Arab communities were penalized the most.)

Candice Breitz, a Jewish South African artist who has lived in Berlin since 2002, had an exhibition canceled by the Saarland Museum’s Modern Gallery in November 2023. The exhibition centered on sex workers in Cape Town and was unrelated to Israel. Organizers said she had signed a letter from the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement and had not condemned the Oct. 7 attack.

Breitz denied both claims. She said she was not a supporter of BDS, and wrote on Instagram before the museum’s decision, “It is possible to fully condemn Hamas (as I do, unequivocally), while nevertheless supporting the broader Palestinian struggle for freedom from oppression, discrimination and occupation.”

Deborah Feldman, the Brooklyn-born ex-Orthodox Jew and author of the bestselling book “Unorthodox” who moved to Berlin in 2014, said she saw invitations to promote her latest book canceled in 2023. The book, titled “Judenfetisch” or “Jew Fetish,” argued that Germany’s guilt over the Holocaust had distorted its relationship to Jews and Israel.

Other Jewish intellectuals who don’t live in Germany say they have been shunned from coming. The Russian-American writer M. Gessen had a prestigious award from the Heinrich Böll Foundation pulled in December 2023, following an essay in The New Yorker comparing Gaza to a Nazi-era Jewish ghetto (and criticizing Germany’s constraints on pro-Palestinian views). Gessen ultimately received the award after the original ceremony was canceled.

In 2024, Nancy Fraser, a philosophy professor at the New School in New York, was disinvited from a visiting position at the University of Cologne over her signature on a letter titled “Philosophy for Palestine.” The university said that Fraser’s job offer was rescinded because the letter called into question “Israel’s right to exist as an ‘ethno-supremacist state’ since its foundation in 1948.”

Iris Hefets is a founding member of Jüdische Stimme für gerechten Frieden in Nahost (Jewish Voice for a Just Peace in the Middle East), a pro-Palestinian organization roughly comparable to the anti-Zionist Jewish Voice for Peace in the United States. It is much smaller, with membership in the hundreds, and counts only Jews as members, unlike the U.S. group. But membership surged after Oct. 7, 2023, said Hefets.

In 2024, the Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution declared Jüdische Stimme an extremist organization. (The same agency designated the AfD as an extremist group in 2025.)

As a result, newer Jewish immigrants have peeled off from Jüdische Stimme. They don’t want to risk being questioned about their role in an extremist organization while applying for citizenship, said Hefets.

She called it “perverse” to see “Jews being accused of antisemitism by Germans who have Nazi grandparents.” Through her detainments, she believes, German officers were signaling that their “Vergangenheitsbewältigung” was complete; they had finished reckoning with the past.

“What Germany is saying now is actually that Germany worked through its past, and now Germany can go back to business as usual,” said Hefets. “‘We were punished by the Allies, but now it’s over, we are good again, because the Jews forgave us.’ And the Jews, for them, that’s Israel.”

(JTA) — A trove of sacred Jewish objects from Greece that was stolen by the Nazis and displaced for decades in Poland is finally heading back home. 

Poland returned 91 religious and ceremonial artifacts to the Greek government at a ceremony in Warsaw on Wednesday. Among them were Torah scrolls, a Torah mantle and silver finials that adorned a scroll’s wooden rollers — fragments of a rich Greek Jewish heritage that was nearly wiped out.

This marks the first time Poland has repatriated cultural property held under its care that was illegally taken from another country.

The Nazis stole the objects from synagogues in Thessaloniki, a port city once known as the “Jerusalem of the Balkans.” Jews made up half of Thessaloniki’s residents in 1919. Some 59,000 Greek Jews, over 83% of the country’s Jewish population, were killed in the Holocaust.

These items were seized by the Einsatzstab Reichsleiter Rosenberg, a Nazi agency dedicated to looting Jewish valuables, as it plundered homes, synagogues, cemeteries and cultural institutions across Greece in 1941. The objects were transferred to Nazi depots in southwestern Poland and rediscovered at a castle in Bożków after the war. In 1951, the Polish Ministry of Culture moved them to the Jewish Historical Institute in Warsaw, where they remained until now.

This return follows years of advocacy and provenance research. The Greek government formally requested the collection’s restitution in 2024, and the World Jewish Restitution Organization coordinated with Greek and Polish authorities to facilitate it. Now, the objects are headed to the Jewish Museum of Greece in Athens. 

About 5,000 Jews live in Greece today.

Poland is the only member of the European Union with no comprehensive legislation to address the restitution of property seized by the Nazis and later nationalized by the communist regime. Since the country became a democracy in 1989, several bills have been proposed to return private property to Holocaust survivors and their descendants, but none became law. 

In 2021, Poland passed a law that prevented people who sought to claim property from challenging administrative decisions more than 30 years old. This time limit made it virtually impossible for former owners, including Holocaust survivors and their descendants, to recover properties that were appropriated during the communist era. 

In a statement, WRJO president Gideon Taylor and COO Mark Weitzman said the return of the Greek Jewish collection represented a milestone in international cooperation for Holocaust-era restitution.

“While Poland has broader restitution issues to address, we hope this historic act marks the beginning of a consistent, systematic approach to historical justice,” they said.

(JTA) — Around me, I see many Jews using the timing in the Jewish calendar to understand the current U.S.-Israel war against Iran in biblical terms. We are Esther, we are Mordecai, we have defeated Haman, they seem to be saying. We have fulfilled the commandment of blotting out Amalek, our ancient and perpetual enemy.

It’s not hard to see what they are saying. On the Jewish calendar, this past Shabbat was Shabbat Zachor, the Shabbat of remembrance, celebrated each year on the Shabbat right before Purim. The occasion is marked with a reading from the Torah commanding us to remember how Amalekhites, the followers of Amalek, attacked the Israelites on their journey from Egypt to the land of Canaan and that they did so unfairly, picking off the weakest members of the group, those straggling to keep up. The Israelites are then commanded: “When the Eternal your God grants you safety from all your enemies around you, in the land that the Eternal your God is giving you as a hereditary portion, you shall blot out the memory of Amalek from under heaven!” (Deut. 25:17-19)

From this foundation, Amalek has become an archetype of a certain sort of antisemite, one who is infinitely dangerous, who is always lurking in the shadows, waiting for an opportunity to pounce. In the biblical book of Esther, our source text for Purim, Haman, who seeks to destroy the Jews of Persia, is identified as a descendant of Agag, who was once a king of the Amalekhites. That we celebrate Haman’s overthrowing by Mordecai and Esther — and the Jews’ subsequent rampage against their enemies at the book’s conclusion — reinforces the remember/blot out dynamic of Deuteronomy and ties it tightly to Purim. Shabbat Zachor ensures we don’t miss this point.

And so it seems remarkable, pregnant with meaning, that this Shabbat Zachor was also the first day of a new bombing campaign undertaken by the United States and Israel against the Islamic Republic of Iran, which is modern-day Persia. Furthermore, Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, who was killed in the first hours of the campaign, was a hater of the Jewish people and an unfair fighter, sponsoring terrorism that killed the innocent and the weak.

And yet drawing parallels with the Purim story right now is, I believe, a dangerous move that misses essential truths about Purim.

First, the Book of Esther is not a military guide or a guide to defeating one’s enemies. It is a self-contained story with a beginning, a middle, and an end. At the moment that Esther is worrying whether she has the strength to stand up for her people, we already know the end of the story, we know that she will succeed. But Esther herself does not — just think about her request that all the Jews of Persia fast with her in anticipation of the risk she will undertake. We would do well to remember that Haman, too, does not know the end of the story and ends up being hanged on the gallows he prepared for Mordecai. The more certain one is of one’s plans, the more likely it seems one is to fail. This is a book that teaches us lessons of humility and uncertainty.

Second, the customs of the holiday turn us topsy-turvy, encouraging us to dress in costumes so that we are no longer entirely ourselves, and to consume enough alcohol that we no longer remember who the good guy of the story was and who the bad guy was. These practices suggest that the lesson of the holiday is one of uncertainty, of how easily things can fall apart. Shabbat Zachor, with its push and pull of remember and blot out, only underscores this point: You will never blot out because you will always remember but still you will never remember and will always seek to blot out.

Finally, I think that believing we are living through a time of epic or biblical significance risks becoming license to do whatever we want, to act as though God is working through us, as the rabbis later insisted God was working through Esther. That is the sort of midrashic move one can only make centuries later, not only when the end of Esther’s story is known, but when the persistence of Amalek has made a fantasy of blotting out Amalek all the more necessary.

I am not mourning the death of Khamenei or any of his henchman. But neither do I celebrate it. Instead, I worry about what might be next — for Iran, for Israel, for the region, for the world, and back home, for American democracy. I recognize that there are factors way beyond my control and your control but also beyond the control of Donald Trump, Benjamin Netanyahu or anyone else. The middle of the story is not a comfortable place to be. But it is the human place. That is what Purim teaches us.

The views and opinions expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of JTA or its parent company, 70 Faces Media.

(JTA) — In Jewish time, history often has a way of rhyming with the calendar. So when Iran’s supreme leader Ali Khamenei was killed in an Israeli air strike on the Shabbat before Purim — the holiday that commemorates the downfall of Haman, a Persian tyrant who sought to annihilate the Jews — it was perhaps inevitable that rabbis, politicians and social media commentators would reach for the Book of Esther.

Some did so reverently, others triumphantly, and a few with a wink. But as Jews prepared to don costumes and drown out Haman’s name with noisemakers, the ancient story of survival in Persia collided with a very modern war in what is now known as Iran.

The Orthodox Union, the Modern Orthodox umbrella group, put out a statement titled “Purim in Our Time: Standing Up to Iranian Tyranny.” “We will read the Bible story of Esther and Mordecai overcoming the genocidal plans of Haman, who sought to destroy the Jewish people. Today, in coordination with Prime Minister Netanyahu and the IDF, President Trump and the U.S. armed forces took defensive action to silence a modern threat from the same ancestral land of Haman,” the statement read.

Such comparisons have proliferated since the killing of Khamenei.

In his first statement after the beginning of the war, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu made the connection to Purim explicit.

“Twenty-five hundred years ago, in ancient Persia, a tyrant rose against us with the very same goal, to utterly destroy our people,” Netanyahu said. “Today as well, on Purim, the lot has fallen, and in the end this evil regime will fall too.”

Known as Persia until 1935, Iran has been belligerent toward Israel at least since the Islamic Revolution of 1978-79, which brought clerics like Khamenei, with their frequent chant of “Death to Israel,” to power. 

The holiday takes its cue from the Book of Esther, which describes how the Jewish queen to the Persian king Ahasuerus engineers the downfall of Haman, an advisor to the king who was plotting the murder of the kingdom’s Jews. Although Jewish tradition treats the book as historical — and Ahasuerus is often associated with the historical ruler Xerxes I — biblical scholars and historians tend to regard the story as what scholar Adele Berlin, author of “The JPS Bible Commentary: Esther,”  called a “historical novella.”

Jews across the  religious spectrum noted the comparison, often to different ends. Agudath Israel of America, the haredi Orthodox umbrella group, talked about prayer and salvation in its statement about the war.

“The upcoming Jewish holiday of Purim celebrates the downfall of those who rose up against the Jewish People in ancient Persia nearly 2,400 years ago,” it read (the events described in Esther are thought to have taken place in the fifth or fourth century BCE). “We are reminded how the key to the miraculous salvation was the heartfelt prayers of men, women, and children. While prayer is always powerful, our sages have taught that it carries special power during the Purim holiday season. We call upon the Jewish community to unite in prayer and beseech the Almighty to protect all those on the front lines and in harm’s way in Israel and across the Middle East.”

Rabbi Nicole Guzik, senior rabbi at Sinai Temple, a Conservative congregation in Los Angeles, spoke about human agency in her hastily rewritten Saturday sermon.

“Right now we stand at a critical stage where the story shifts, where the final paragraph in the Megillah that we are reading right now, in real time, has yet to be written,” she said, using the Hebrew name for a scroll like the Book of Esther. “The U.S., Israel, our beloved nations are holding the pen, and they are declaring, with courage and conviction, that we will be the authors of our future in the same manner as Esther.”

Some of the comparisons have been offhanded, even flippant. The novelist Dara Horn, speaking Sunday night at a forum on combating antisemitism at the 92nd Street Y in Manhattan, said, “Tomorrow night is Purim, and I think it’s clear to all of us now that the best way to fight antisemitism is to take out Haman with an F-15.”

Comedian Yohay Sponder, an Israeli who often performs in North America, posted a video of a routine commenting on the death of Khamenei. Like the Purim hamantaschen cookies named after Haman, he predicted a time when Jews will eat a food named after the slain Iranian leader. He suggested khamin, the Shabbat stew also known as cholent.

Others have already adapted hamantaschen for the moment. Some have joked about baking “Khamentaschen,” combining the new nemesis’ name with the treat named for an ancient one. At least one bakery in Israel produced “Ayatollah-taschens” with a chocolate center resembling Khamenei’s trademark turban.

Evangelical Christians and Messianic Jews, for whom the Esther story has had increasing significance in recent years, also seized on the parallels. “It all made an amazing story back then, and we are praying for an equally miraculous outcome in our days that will lead to the salvation of many in Israel, Iran, and throughout the whole Middle East,” the One For Israel Ministry, a U.S.-based Messianic group, posted on Facebook..

Meanwhile, some suggested that the timing of the attacks appeared to be more than a coincidence. Digital creator Evan Pickus noted in a Facebook post that, according to the Book of Esther, Haman was hanged on the gallows just days before the calendar date that became Purim. “The evil Persian Prime Minister [sic], who issued a promise to kill all the Jews, destroyed on the same day as his ancestor,” wrote Pickus. “I honestly believe our leaders planned it this way, and I love that.”

Although no Israeli or U.S. official has said they planned the attack with Purim in mind, the idea became a talking point over the weekend, especially after CNN posted a report by Israel correspondent Tal Shalev saying the comparisons had been widely shared in Israel.

Shalev also wrote of the significance of the attacks on the Iranian leaders’ compound falling on Shabbat Zachor, the “Sabbath of Remembrance” that precedes Purim on the Hebrew calendar. The day takes its name from a special Torah reading (Deuteronomy 25:17-19) commanding Jews never to forget how Amalek — said to be the ancestral nation of Haman — attacked the vulnerable Israelites after they left Egypt. The Israelites are given a somewhat contradictory command: “Blot out the memory of Amalek from under heaven. Do not forget!” 

A widely circulated image from Beit Shemesh, where an Iranian missile killed nine people in a bomb shelter that also functioned as a synagogue, showed a fragment of shrapnel puncturing a Torah right on the passage that had been read a day earlier.

The injunctions about “Amalek” are often applied, sometimes controversially, as an ongoing commandment for Jews to show no mercy toward those who might eradicate them. That, in turn, has led some Israeli politicians and Jewish observers to cite Amalek in justifying Israel’s war on Hamas and Iran, and others to criticize those same politicians as ruthless and even genocidal.

Shalev’s report inspired at least some commentators to criticize Israel, suggesting the attacks were inspired by religious or nationalist fanaticism.

Purim is itself a strange mixture of the deadly serious and the wildly playful: a story of a thwarted genocide celebrated with carnival antics, including costumes, a raucous reading of the Book of Esther interrupted by noisemakers, and even a tradition of getting drunk. For millennia, it was often a release for a beleaguered minority in strange and often hostile lands. But as Israel emerged as a military power, scrutiny from within and without the Jewish community has often focused on the real-life implications of the story’s purported lessons.

Yet despite the Israeli politicians who take the Bible as a guidebook for revenge or Jewish supremacy, there is a long tradition of commentary that sees books like Esther as intentionally nuanced, even ambiguous guides to ethical behavior, including the prosecution of just wars.

Chapter 9 in the Book of Esther details the reversal of fortune for the Jews on the 13th of the Hebrew month of Adar, when they were said to have killed 75,000 foes in the wake of Haman’s downfall. Many Jewish commentators have expressed discomfort about what can be read as a heartless response to Haman’s thwarted decree.

On Sunday, Rabbi Michelle Dardashti expanded on that theme in a letter sent to members of her Kane Street Synagogue in Brooklyn. She warned that the Purim story is not just a celebration of the Jews’ victory over a Persian despot, but a warning that “battles that begin in moral clarity do not necessarily remain that way.” 

“Purim pushes us to contend with the gray — to recognize how quickly roles can flip; how, on a dime, individuals and nations can shift from victim to aggressor, from righteous to morally compromised, or into categories that resist easy labels altogether,” wrote Dardashti, whose father left Iran as a young man. “Anyone who tells you with certainty that this war with Iran will unquestionably be good for the Jews and good for the world, that it will surely end well or end quickly — I would be wary of heeding that voice.

“And anyone who speaks with absolute certainty about it being entirely disastrous, unquestionably wrong — I would be wary of heeding that voice as well.”

Rabbi Simon Jacobson, a popular lecturer from the Chabad-Lubavitch Hasidic movement, discussed the parallels between the war and Purim in an installment of his video series, “MyLife: Chassidus Applied.” “The goal, of course, is to eradicate the enemy in every possible way, exactly as it happened in Persia, 2400 years ago in the story of Purim,” he said of the war.

But Jacobson also drew on two common themes not only of the Purim holiday but of much of Jewish tradition: salvation from an enemy, and the ultimate redemption of the Jews and humankind. He characterized the war in metaphysical terms, regretting “any type of bloodshed” but aspiring to “what happens afterwards: a stage, an era, a permanent era of Messianic, … total, solemn, permanent and sustainable peace for all people of this earth.”

For some congregations, the confluence of the war and the Purim holiday posed a challenge in tone — with rabbis asking how their communities might celebrate with bombs falling across the Middle East and Israelis taking cover in bomb shelters.

At B’nai Jeshurun, an independent synagogue on Manhattan’s Upper West Side, the clergy offered a schedule of observance and celebration to match the ambivalent mood. On Monday, a traditional fast day in honor of Esther marking “moments of danger and uncertainty,” they urged congregants to turn “their hearts toward prayer and summoning strength before stepping into the unknown.” 

At sundown, they wrote in a letter to congregants, when the fast “gives way to celebration, in a world shaken by violence and instability, we anchor ourselves in Purim’s four mitzvot”: hearing the Book of Esther, sharing gifts with friends, giving charity and sharing a meal with friends or family.

“We cannot resolve the uncertainty of this moment,” wrote the B’nai Jeshurun clergy. “But we can choose how we meet it — with prayer, with generosity, and with one another.”

Yoni Rosensweig, a rabbi in Beit Shemesh, wrote in a Facebook post that many of the comparisons between the Purim story and the war on Iran miss crucial distinctions.

“Yes, Haman wanted to destroy us, and so did Khamenei — but Khamenei was the ruler of Iran. Haman was not the ruler — he was nothing more than a schemer. This is not just a technical difference, it’s fundamental,” Rosensweig wrote in an email to JTA. “Esther and Mordechai are trying to survive, that is all, They are trying to maintain the status quo in someone else’s kingdom.”

While the events in Persia inspired a holiday, he argued, “there is nothing long-lasting about the Jewish future in Persia which comes from the story.” By contrast, the current war has the potential to profoundly shape the Jewish future, no less than the Exodus from Egypt celebrated at Passover.

“It is about creating something new (we hope) in the Middle East. It is part of a regional war against powers that want to obliterate us. We aren’t looking to maintain the status quo,” wrote Rosensweig. “We are standing up for our right to live free, as a sovereign nation. Much like the Jews who left Egypt weren’t looking to maintain the status quo but rather to embark on a new path and start a new journey, so too we are doing with this war.” 

For Bay Area Jews who fled Iran around the time of the 1979 Islamic Revolution, the decapitation of what they described as a murderous and destabilizing regime presents new hope for freedom in a country with which they feel strong cultural ties, but in many cases cannot even visit.

They are sharing a sense of overwhelm over the prospect of their country liberated from its oppressive theocratic government.

“I feel elated,” said Sharam Sasson of Alamo, a 71-year-old retired businessman who fled Iran in 1978, a year before the revolution toppled the Pahlavi dynasty and established the Islamic Republic.

Others expressed a mix of emotions, from jubilation to anxiety, about what’s to come after the killing of Ayatollah Ali Khamenei and other high-ranking Iranian regime officials by Israeli and American forces.

The promise of a destructive and lengthy war with Iran loomed as the U.S. sent more troops into the region and Iran carried out deadly counterstrikes, including an attack on the Israeli city of Beit Shemesh that killed nine. Iran’s government pledged the country is prepared “for a long war.”

Political reactions to the war reflected existing political fissures in the U.S., as opponents described a reckless campaign with unpredictable consequences launched by a rogue administration. Many Democrats sharply criticized the Trump administration’s decision to launch attacks on Iran without congressional approval, worried that a regime-change war would lead to the kind of quagmires seen in Iraq and Afghanistan. Gov. Gavin Newsom described Trump as a “wrecking ball president” who launched an “illegal, dangerous war” that would endanger the lives of Americans. Six U.S. servicemembers had already been announced killed in action by Monday afternoon.

The Iranian government has pledged repeatedly to destroy the U.S., which it calls “Great Satan,” and Israel, “Little Satan,” and finances terrorist groups like Hamas and Hezbollah.

Prior to 1948, about 150,000 Jews lived in Iran, where a Jewish presence dates back to Biblical times. Many immigrated to the new State of Israel, and by the 1970s some 62,000 remained. More fled after the Islamic Revolution, still due to antisemitism and extreme hostility to Israel. Today only about 15,000 Jews live in Iran, most of them in Tehran. While the country’s religious minorities are technically protected, Iran practices Sharia law and severely restricts civil liberties. Iranian Jews are not allowed to travel to Israel.

Sasson, who attends Chabad in Walnut Creek and practices Sephardic Jewish traditions passed on from his parents and their ancestors, has not stepped foot in Iran for 48 years.

While the U.S. campaign against Iran poses risks, Sasson said he believes not intervening poses even greater risks. As a recent example he pointed to the violent crackdown against Iranian protesters starting in late December and noted a regime that has long been “hell-bent” on developing nuclear weapons.

“We can kick the can down the road and face the consequences in the future, or take advantage of the opportunity to once and for all help bring a democratic government to Iran that will cooperate with the free world,” he said.

Negin Ashoori of Oakland was in tears when she read the news that Iran’s supreme leader had been killed. 

“I was like, it’s done. This villain, this person that has hurt us for so long, is gone,” said Ashoori, who was 3 years old when her family left Tehran in early 1989, just before Ayatollah Khamenei came to power.

“Now there’s so much hope that there’s going to be a better future,” she said, thinking about her sons Elijah, 3, and Ethan, 5.

“Having that possibility of taking them to the country where their mother was born, and showing them where I have not gone back since then … having hope that the people of Iran are going to be free again, and we could go there,” she said. “I was listening to Persian music all day.”

On Sunday, hundreds of anti-regime demonstrators poured into downtown San Francisco, filling the plaza outside the Ferry Building. Iranian music blared from speakers, as did “YMCA” by the Village People, one of President Donald Trump’s rally songs. Demonstrators waved dozens of flags including the U.S., Israeli and pre-revolution Iranian Lion and Sun flags. People hugged each other as drivers on either side of the plaza honked horns in support. 

Other protesters also took to the streets, denouncing U.S. and Israeli strikes and condemning the war. “I’m here to call for no war in Iran, no foreign intervention in the country,” said Yasmine Mortazavi, an Iranian American organizer for the Party for Socialism and Liberation, at a protest that drew hundreds to the Federal Building in San Francisco, according to Mission Local. 

The Jewish community is divided on the use of force by the Trump administration, the Jewish Community Relations Council Bay Area said in a statement, noting that Jewish institutions across the region could face “heightened security threats” as a result of the war.

“We stand with the Iranian people yearning for freedom. … We mourn the casualties and pray for the safety of Israeli, Iranian, and Middle Eastern civilians caught in the crossfire, as well as U.S. and Israeli service members,” read the statement, issued on Monday. “The Iranian regime, led by Ayatollah Khamenei from 1989 until his recent assassination, has been a leading sponsor of global terrorism and responsible for the deaths of tens of thousands of people.”

Natalie Todd, a clinical psychologist in Concord, is a second-generation Persian Jew who over the last two days has had “emotional” conversations with her parents, who fled Iran around the time of the Islamic Revolution. “I think it’s sort of surreal for them,” she said.

Todd yearns to someday visit her parents’ native country safely. “I speak Farsi and make Persian food, and my parents are very connected to the Persian community in Los Angeles,” she said. “To be able to go to the source of that would be incredible.”

Todd said she has been referencing a line from the Passover seder in conversations with friends about the prospect of a free Iran, and the potential to celebrate Passover in the country of her heritage. “Next year in Tehran,” she said.

(JTA) — Six days after Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini seized power in Iran on Feb. 11, 1979, he hosted his first foreign dignitary: the chairman of the Palestine Liberation Organization, Yasser Arafat.

Arafat, seen then by the Americans and the Israelis as a terrorist, was an ardent opponent of the emerging Israel-Egypt peace deal. Khomeini expelled Israeli diplomats and handed the embassy building over to the PLO.

Arafat relayed the message he got from Khomeini: After the new Islamic regime consolidated its hold over Iran it would turn to “victory of Israel.”

“Today Iran, tomorrow Palestine,” Arafat told reporters.

The symbolism was not lost on the Egyptian, Israeli and American negotiators hammering out the peace deal in Camp David: According to reports at the time, they redoubled their efforts to get to a peace deal before the new Islamist regime in Iran could scuttle it.

Keeping Iran from getting in the way of peace has been a preoccupation of Israeli and U.S. governments from then until the Israeli strike Sunday that killed Khomeini’s successor as Iran’s supreme leader, Ali Khamenei, a key aim of the latest U.S.-Israel war against the country.

The regime’s hopes of stymying peace scored successes at time, particularly in the 1990s, when the terrorist group it backed, Hamas, undermined the peace process with repeated and massive terrorist attacks on Israeli targets. More recently it spectacularly backfired, when Sunni Muslim states fearful of Shia Iran’s adventurism in the region shed years of resistance to peace with Israel and forged ties under the Abraham Accords.

Iran, with its massive military capabilities, its oil wealth, its appetite for regional hegemony and its obdurate Islamism may have been the foremost obstacle to Israel’s integration into the region since 1979.

“Iran was a continually negative actor trying to prevent any normalization of Israel in the Middle East,” Joel Rubin, a former deputy assistant secretary of state during the Obama administration, said in an interview.

Khomeini had since the early 1960s cast Israel as an enemy of Islam and deplored the young Jewish state’s relationship with Iran and the monarchy he cast aside in 1979. In a landmark 1980 speech he listed four “world devourers” as the United States, communism, Israel and Zionism.

Khomeini lost little time in making good on his pledge to Arafat to seek Israel’s defeat. In 1982, after Israel invaded Lebanon, Iranian agents cultivated ties among fellow Shia who resented Israel’s presence. Within a year, Hezbollah was established, becoming one of Israel’s most implacable enemies.

Working with Iran, Hezbollah delivered some of the bloodiest attacks on Israelis and on Jews in the subsequent decades, among them the bombing of Israel’s embassy in Buenos Aires in March 1992, killing 29, and then the bombing of the AMIA Jewish community center in the same city in 1994, killing 85 people, the deadliest attack in Argentine history.

“May this news bring relief to the families and contribute to the acknowledgment of responsibility and to the fight against terrorism and impunity,” the pro-Israel Argentine government said Sunday after Khamenei’s assassination was confirmed.

The timing of the Argentina attacks was not coincidental: The George H.W. Bush administration had in 1991 convened talks in Madrid, bringing around the table for the first time Israel and most of the Arab states in the region. Two years later, Israel and the Palestinians, under the aegis of the Clinton administration, launched the Oslo peace talks.

Arafat by then had done a famous 180-degree turn, embracing peace with Israel and appearing with Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin on the White House lawn. Iran, wary of Arafat since he first expressed openness to peace talks in 1988, had begun to cultivate ties with Hamas, the Islamist group that rejected any accommodation with Israel.

By 1994, Iran’s support for Hamas, according to officials of Arafat’s Palestinian Authority, was in the tens of millions of dollars. The money funded terrorist attacks that undermined Israeli confidence in the peace process, propelling Oslo skeptic Benjamin Netanyahu to the prime ministership in 1996. The attacks included suicide missions — a method that Hamas operatives had learned from Hezbollah trainers in Lebanon.

Oslo petered out in the late 1990s and then exploded into the Second Intifada in late 2000.  In 2006, when it appeared that the second Bush administration was making strides in getting the Israelis and the Palestinians back to the table, Hezbollah, backed by Iran, launched a war against Israel.

Khamenei, who succeeded Khomeini in 1989, only intensified the country’s focus on confronting Israel, spending billions of dollars on terrorist proxies including Hezbollah, Hamas and the Houthi militias and investing in his own Islamic Revolutionary Guard Forces and its Quds Force, which both trains proxies and conducts its own operations abroad.

Khamenei periodically posted on social media his “plan for the elimination of Israel.” When Arafat died in 2004, Khamenei reviled him as “a traitor and a fool.”

Khamenei’s hostility to Israel was ideological: He would periodically deride Arab and Palestinian leaders who said the conflict should be left primarily to the Palestinians to resolve. Palestine was an “issue for the Islamic world,” he said.

“Khamenei was critical” to obstructing peace with Israel, said Trita Parsi, an Iranian-born analyst who is the executive vice president of the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft. “There were others in the system that were more amenable to the idea of adopting a more flexible position on Israel in order to resolve their problems with the United States.”

Confronting Israel was also a means of stemming U.S. influence in the region. A key rationale for U.S. and Israeli peacemaking in the 1990s was to placate other conflicts and focus on Iran. 

“The view was that Iran was the bigger threat, and so for Israel’s peace camp it was, ‘Let’s get over the Palestinian issue, to consolidate support in the Arab world, to enable us to deal with that bigger Iranian threat,’” Rubin said.

Matt Duss, the executive vice president at the Center for International Policy and a former foreign policy adviser to Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders, the progressive leader, said Iran was able to exploit resentment against American and Israeli influence in the region because at times the influence was itself toxic.

“Iran supported terrorist groups that supported violence against civilians, horrific violence, both against its own people and people in the region and elsewhere,” he said. “Iran clearly exploited anger at both Israel and the United States for its own political ends. It did not invent that opposition. It did not invent those grievances. It successfully exploited and weaponized them.”

Parsi, too, noted that Iran did not operate in a vacuum: It at times exploited existing tensions stoked by Israeli actions.

“If there wasn’t a problem at the outset, there’s no way for an outside power to be able to take advantage of it and be able to push for it, and we’ve seen that as long as the situation on the ground between Israel and Palestine remains what it is, and you have more settlements being built and disregard for international law,” he said.

Iran was influential but not instrumental in inhibiting peace, said Aaron David Miller, a senior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, and a top Middle East peace negotiator in Republican and Democratic administrations.

Iran looked askance at Israeli talks with Iran’s ally, Syria, in the 1990s, but ultimately it was Syrian President Hafez Assad’s obduracy that scuttled those talks, Miller said.

“The major determinant was the inability, in my judgment, of Assad to understand that if he wanted more than Sadat got, he would have to give at least as much as Sadat got,” Miller said, referring to Anwar Sadat, the Egyptian president assassinated in 1981 for making peace with Israel.

“Assad was not willing to do nearly as much on the issue of personal diplomacy, public diplomacy, as what Sadat did,” Miller continued. So, no, Iran was not the major constraint or the major reason why we don’t have an Israeli-Syrian agreement.”

Iranian backing, training and funding for terrorist attacks inhibited popular support for peace, said Shira Efron, the Pentagon-aligned RAND Institute’s Israel policy chair.

“It was tangible in the sense that you see Iran’s different ways of altering the security situation” with terrorist attacks. Iran’s hand and this was always their plan,” she said. “Khamenei was talking about it, this idea of creating the ‘ring of fire’ around Israel — it originated in Tehran.”

The “ring of fire” — the threat to Israel composed of militias in Gaza, Lebanon, Syria and as far afield as Yemen and Iraq — was the construct that Hamas hoped would trigger a massive multi-front war when its terrorists raided Israel on Oct. 7, launching the conflict that culminated this weekend with the U.S.-Israel attacks on Iran.

Khamenei hoped that the ring of fire would prevail in a looming conflict with the United States, tweeting just weeks before his death, “The Americans should know if they start a war, this time it will be a regional war.”

But Israel and the United States launched the current war without fear of igniting the region, in part because of the Abraham Accords, the normalization agreements with Arab countries near Iran. Those accords came about in part because those countries saw working with Israel and the United States as the most effective means of stemming Iran’s hostile adventurism.

Some of those countries are now reaping consequences of allying with Israel, taking blows from Iranian missiles and drones. Some are emphasizing that they reserve the right to join the fight against Iran.

“Look at the proximity between the Islamic Republic of Iran and key Gulf states which have either made peace with Israel or want to,” Miller said. “How could anybody in their right mind argue that Iran has been the major constraint, or even a constraint?”

Iran’s regime, Rubin said, was ultimately the author of its own diminishment. “Imagine Iran had said, ‘We’re going to back peace. We’re going to respect the Palestinians whatever they decide. We’re not going to undermine their politics. We’re not going to support Hamas in the case that they blow up Israelis and kill Palestinians who talk to the Israelis. We’re going to actually be a constructive player.’”

With Khamenei assassinated, the question is whether Iran’s future leadership might take more of that approach. That’s the hope of the United States and Israel, which have urged the Iranian people to take hold of their destinies following the war. But the Islamic Republic swears that it is strong and has said it would name a successor to Khamenei imminently. According to reports that emerged after his death, the CIA has assessed that it is likely that a hardliner, perhaps with ties to the IRGC and certainly with opposition to Israel, is the most likely to take his place.

(JTA) — Hezbollah fired on Israel for the first time since a 2024 cease-fire on Sunday, opening a new front in the U.S.-Israel war on Iran that began on Saturday.

Israel hammered Hezbollah positions in Lebanon overnight and said it had killed the group’s head of intelligence, Hussein Makled. Israeli officials said they expected further salvos from the Iranian proxy to the north.

The escalation comes as new missile attacks from Iran caused fresh damage and injuries in Beersheba and as the scope of the damage from the first two days of the war have come into focus. That includes sweeping damage in central Tel Aviv, where one woman was killed; a direct strike on a shelter in Beit Shemesh that killed nine, including three teen siblings; and strikes in Jerusalem that both injured Arab Israelis and sent shrapnel close to the holy sites of the Western Wall and Al-Aqsa Mosque.

Both Israeli and U.S. officials say they expect operations to last for some time, with President Donald Trump suggesting a four-week timeline even as he indicated that Iranian officials had indicated a willingness to return to the negotiating table. Iran’s top security official, whom Ayatollah Ali Khamenei had identified as a leader in the case of his assassination, denied Trump’s characterization.

Military officials including War Secretary Pete Hegseth said on Monday morning that they could not offer a timeline or details about the operations but said they were happy with the operations so far, which are designed to thwart Iran’s nuclear ambitions and topple its Islamic Republic regime. Asked about the significance of the fact that Israel killed Khamenei, Hegseth responded, “I think Israel did a great job in the conduct of that operation.”

A fourth U.S. service member who was wounded over the weekend died on Monday, while multiple U.S. planes were shot down by friendly fire over Kuwait; their passengers survived.

The incident in Kuwait comes as Iran continues to fire on Arab states in the region, in a new escalation of regional conflict. An Iranian drone also crashed into a British base in Cyprus, causing Prime Minister Keir Starmer to agree to a U.S. request to use British bases to support efforts to destroy Iranian weapons. German Chancellor Frederich Merz is visiting Trump on Monday and may also agree to play a role in supporting the U.S.-Israeli operations.

(JTA) — Spirits ran high inside a large public bomb shelter in the Israeli coastal city of Jaffa, with loud chatter, singing and greetings of “Happy Iran Holiday,” an incongruous soundtrack to the joint U.S.-Israeli strike on Iran and the hundreds of missiles that followed.

The room itself looked much cheerier than most shelters, with a ball pit and bright Gymboree mattresses left over from its other job in peacetime, when it doubles as a kindergarten.

A day earlier, the shelter became the accidental venue for a bar mitzvah celebration, when worshipers from the synagogue across the road took refuge there.

One particularly raucous group was made up mostly of American-Israelis from the neighborhood. One of them, Steph Graber, said she was in a good mood despite being exhausted from middle-of-the-night runs to the shelter.

“I’m not sure why, maybe it’s the adrenaline of war or something,” she said on Sunday morning. “But also it’s amazing to see the U.S. and Israel as allies working together to reduce the threat from Iran.”

Graber said she had been sheltering elsewhere but had “FOMO” about not being with her friends, so she switched over in the brief lull between sirens.

Martine Berkowitz, a friend of Graber’s, also said the community around her was what made the disruption feel manageable. Sirens kept interrupting even basic tasks, she said, including her attempt to take a shower, which she tried five times.

“My friends live on my corner, so I’m doing great. We’re all together all the time,” she said. During the last Iran flare-up in June, she didn’t have that kind of built-in circle nearby, she said. “Being alone then was really rough.”

The mood wasn’t confined to Jaffa. Across the country, similar scenes played out in shelters and spread on social media, including one from Nachlaot in Jerusalem of people singing “For the Jews There was Light and Joy,” a Purim song marking the story’s turn after Haman’s plot to kill the Jews was thwarted. The parallel to the current moment, as the Jews once again sought to topple a Persian rule who had called for their death, was not lost on anyone.

In a sprawling underground parking lot turned shelter at Dizengoff Center in central Tel Aviv, Shabbat prayers gave way to dancing and songs of “Don’t Be Afraid, Oh Israel” and “Am Yisrael Chai.” Saul Sadka, who was there, posted a video of the revelers, captioning it “joy and stoicism.”

Sadka later said he was struck by the “sense of solidarity,” and noted that it was Shabbat Zachor, when Jews read the passage about Amalek, a nemesis that they are commanded never to forget. “People seem willing to suffer for a while if it means the defeat of the IRGC,” he said.

Another bomb shelter in Tel Aviv struck a less pious tone, turning into a makeshift night club with red lights, a DJ and people dancing.

In one video, one of hundreds of comedic shelter clips circulating online, a comedian quipped, “The nation of Israel lives” — but only as long as the shelter “has wifi and the iPads have battery.”

Natalie Silverlieb was in the mamak, the communal reinforced safe room on her building’s floor. She said the logistics of repeated alerts had become harder since she became a mother.

“Doing this with a baby is crazy,” she said. The room was packed, including other babies and dogs, and she and her partner tried to follow a system that would get their baby back to sleep quickly.

“I’m so, so, so exhausted,” she said. “When I was doing this on my own the last time, I could at least come back to my apartment and just lay on the couch. But now there’s no laying on the couch. It’s go, go, go.”

For Silverlieb, the uncertainty of the past few weeks hadn’t disappeared so much as changed shape. “The waiting for it to end is more stressful than the waiting for it to begin,” she said. “I just hope it ends quickly. It’s a lot, period.”

In a nearby grocery store, another siren, the 30th or so in as many hours, sent shoppers scrambling. In the residential building next door, the shelter downstairs was decrepit and doorless. Children played limbo with a strip of red cloth. One woman began pitching HAAT, a new, mostly Arab-run delivery service she said was giving Wolt a run for its money. A few people pulled out their phones to download the app, trading jokes about whether it would deliver to shelters, and during sirens. Because it is Ramadan, Muslims in Israel are doubly on edge, from fasting on top of the missiles.

Sasha, who lives in the building, said she was “half happy” the waiting was over. The repeated dashes up and down the stairs, she joked, were at least getting her to her daily goal of 10,000 steps. Still, she said, it “won’t help us if the [Iranian] regime doesn’t fall.”

A Ukrainian who grew up under Soviet rule, it taught her what it meant to live without freedom, she said. “We want to see the Iranian people free and a better Middle East for everyone.”

Evyatar said he doubted the regime would fall “unless the Iranian citizens themselves finish the job.”

Ma’or, another neighbor, said he would “happily sit in my bomb shelter if it meant giving my Iranian friends, both in Iran and out, a chance at a normal life.” He pointed to a friend in Tehran who works as a tattoo artist, an illegal trade under the regime.

“I mean, he’s not even free to give someone a tattoo without going underground,” he said. “I’m baffled by the people cheering [on] the IRGC. People who say this war is illegal are out of their goddamn minds.”

Evyatar said he began Saturday uneasy, but grew calmer as the hours passed and he gauged the pattern of the strikes. The alerts came far more often than the 12-day war, but the blasts felt less intense. “At the beginning I felt scared, like it was June all over again.” Over time, he said, he has learned to tell the difference between the sounds of interceptions, shrapnel and direct impacts.

As he spoke, a loud boom hit outside, rattling the shelter and stopping the conversation. “That, for example, was a June sound,” he said.

It turned out to be shrapnel coming down not far away. The impact was part of a wider series of strikes across central Israel, including one that turned lethal in Beit Shemesh, west of Jerusalem, when a public bomb shelter was hit. Nine people were killed including multiple from the same family. Dozens more were wounded, and others still were unaccounted for.

In Beit Shemesh, the strike changed the atmosphere in a city that had so far heard only occasional sirens, during both this round and the last one.

Netanel Alkoby, a Beit Shemesh resident who spent 12 years in the reserves with the Home Front Command, said he has always taken alerts seriously, but that over time a degree of complacency still set in. The strike, he said, “changed our perspective a lot,” forcing him to be more careful, more on guard, and to treat every warning “with the utmost seriousness.”

In the underground shelter at Wolfson Medical Center in Holon, a sign overhead read “the safest shelter in existence.” Patients hobbled in, some with casts and crutches. With doctors also sheltering there, patients used the moment to buttonhole them with questions.

One staffer watched a line of women form to speak to a physician. “Poor thing, he can’t even enjoy the siren in peace,” she said.

Back in the central Jaffa shelter, a couple in black leather and dark glasses stood apart from the banter around them.

“Any fear and terror that Israeli citizens are feeling right now is a direct result of this violent, racist, Islamophobic, power-hungry, greedy fascist government,” said the woman, who declined to give her name, referring to the Netanyahu-led coalition.

Asked whether she thought attacking Iran was a bad idea, she said: “I think it’s a bad idea to attack anyone in 2026. We teach toddlers not to fight and here we have fully grown men doing this, dooming all of us.”

“It’s time we take the power from aging white men,” she said.

Nearby, Martine Berkowitz agreed — in part. “Yep, they are behaving like toddlers. And they are aging white men. Who are fighting evil brown men. If it brings freedom to Iran then it was worth it. But if it doesn’t, then it was all for nothing.”

(JTA) — The death toll is ratcheting up as the U.S.-Israel war against the Iranian regime enters its second day, with casualties mounting among all parties as well as elsewhere in the Middle East.

At least nine people, including children, were killed when their bomb shelter suffered a direct missile strike in the Israeli city of Beit Shemesh on Sunday.

The deaths follow the killing on Saturday of a woman in Tel Aviv, in another incident with multiple casualties. Another man, a centenarian, reportedly died after falling while trying to get to a shelter.

The steep death toll in Beit Shemesh underscores that Israel’s bomb shelters are no match for the heavy artillery being fired from Iran in response to the attack there, which has killed the regime’s supreme leader and an untold number of other officials. On Sunday, former president Mahmoud Ahmedinajad, an anti-Israeli hardliner who may have been plotting an attempt to take power, was reported to have been killed as well.

Authorities say Israelis should still head to shelters when sirens sound, because they are effective in protecting against shrapnel that can fall in the case of intercepted missiles. (The shelters are also protective against the kind of smaller-scale rockets like those historically fired from Gaza.)

Meanwhile, the U.S. military announced on Sunday that three American soldiers had been killed during the operation. They did not offer details about where or under what conditions the deaths took place.

President Donald Trump warned when announcing the operation early Saturday that U.S. service members could die, saying, “That often happens in war.”

Deaths are also mounting in Gulf states where Iran has been firing since the war began, raising the possibility that other countries could get involved as Iran widens its targets beyond U.S. bases. Iranian missiles and drones have hit sites in Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain, Kuwait and Qatar, damaging a luxury hotel, ports, oil infrastructure and other locations.

The UAE said on Sunday that three people had been killed there. It said its military had intercepted 500 Iranian drones and 150 ballistic missiles.

Directing a message to Iran, a diplomatic advisor to the Emirati president, Anwar Gargash, tweeted: “Return to your senses, to your surroundings, and deal with your neighbors with reason and responsibility before the circle of isolation and escalation widens.”

(JTA) — This is a developing story and will be updated.

The United States and Israel jointly launched what U.S. President Donald Trump called “a major military operation” in Iran on Saturday morning, ending weeks of speculation.

Iran immediately retaliated by launching missiles toward Israel and U.S. positions in the Middle East, sending Israelis across the country to bomb shelters for the first time since last June.

Both President Donald Trump and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu indicated in video addresses that their goal was to topple the Islamic Republic regime that has been in place for nearly 50 years.

“Our joint operation will create the conditions for the brave Iranian people to take their fate into their own hands,” Netanyahu said.

“To the great, proud people of Iran, I say tonight that the hour of your freedom is at hand. Stay sheltered. Don’t leave your home. It’s very dangerous outside. Bombs will be dropping everywhere,” Trump said. “When we are finished, take over your government. It will be yours to take this will be probably your only chance for generations.”

Trump cited the Oct. 7, 2023, attack on Israel by Hamas as one in a series of attacks staged or supported by Iran over decades justifying the campaign, in which he warned U.S. service members could die.

One person was reported injured in a first wave of retaliatory attacks in Israel. Most missiles appeared to have been shot down, with the sounds of explosions resounding in parts of the country. A second wave was reported to be on its way several hours later.

Last year, nearly 30 people in Israel were killed by Iranian missiles during a 12-day war that included a U.S. strike on Iranian targets. Trump said again during his address that the attack had “obliterated the regime’s nuclear program” but said the country “rejected every opportunity to renounce their nuclear ambitions” since.

U.S. and Iranian negotiators most recently met on Thursday in Geneva. On Friday, U.S. Ambassador to Israel Mike Huckabee told embassy staff that they could leave Israel, urging them to do so “TODAY” if they chose to depart, signaling that the massive troop buildup in the Middle East could soon be deployed against Iran.

In Israel, Ben Gurion Airport has closed; hospitals relocated essential operations underground; and synagogues that had been hosting Shabbat services reconvened in parking decks. The country is set to celebrate Purim, a holiday celebrating the defeat of a Persian ruler who had tried to kill the Jews, starting Monday night.

(JTA) — KYIV, Ukraine — Viktoria Maksimovich’s students at the Sha’alavim Jewish Day School no longer run for shelters when air raid sirens sound.

“They don’t want to hear the alarms. They don’t care about the shots and bombs. They don’t care about it. This is the biggest problem right now, as they won’t look for a shelter,” she said in a virtual interview from her school in Kharkiv, Ukraine. “It’s like usual life for them, and a lot of them grew up like this during the war and don’t remember normal life.”

Indeed, the Russian invasion, which marks its fourth anniversary on Tuesday, has reshaped everything in the lives of Ukrainian Jews, from big choices about whether to stay or flee to the seemingly mundane decision about whether to take the elevator or the stairs when visiting high-rise buildings.

With Russian strikes on Ukrainian energy infrastructure a near-daily occurrence, taking the elevator means risking being trapped for hours if the power goes out. Recognizing that the dilemma has trapped elderly Jews in their homes, Maksimovich and her colleagues recently organized a service day for their students, who baked challahs and hiked up many flights of stairs to deliver them to Kharkiv’s elderly Jews.

“They managed it and were so happy about it because they met those old people and saw in their eyes, ‘You are here and brought us challahs and candles for Shabbat,’” Maksimovich recalled. “It was amazing.”

The fourth anniversary of the Russian invasion arrives in grim fashion for Ukrainians, with the Russian and Ukrainian armies locked in a bloody stalemate and support from the United States and Europe increasingly uncertain. Ukrainian cities are regularly barraged with drones and missiles, not only exacting a devastating tally of civilian deaths and injuries but making it increasingly challenging for Ukrainian civilians to carry out the basic functioning of their lives.

The last four months have been particularly challenging due to power and water cuts that have left Ukrainians frigid and in the dark. Whereas during the first three years of war, especially in the metropolitan center of Kyiv, life went on largely as normal, albeit punctuated by attacks. Now, mobile “resilience hubs” offering warming and charging dot the landscape, and the sound of generators is overpowering.

For Ukraine’s Jews, the situation means that children are gathering in bomb shelters to light Shabbat candles, the elderly rely on intermittent aid deliveries, and everyone is hunkered down for the worst winter since the war began.

“When the full-scale invasion began, I did not think it would last two weeks, but here we are,” said Julia Goldenberg, founder of the Ukrainian Charitable Funds and partner of World Jewish Relief. “And I still do not think the war will be over even this year.”

Before the start of Russia’s full-scale invasion, according to the Institute for Jewish Policy Research, there was a core Jewish population of 40,000 living in Ukraine. Since then, however, thousands have fled to Israel and Europe, reshaping hubs of Jewish life in the country. Now, with conditions worsening, even far from the front lines, Goldenberg expects even more to leave.

Many will be seeking security for their children, whose schooling and experiences have been peppered with trauma and interruption since even before the war. In-person schools had only resumed after a yearlong COVID closure for a semester before war broke out.

“Parents tell us of children who can’t sleep at night, children who react to all kinds of different sounds. It’s challenging to work with them,” said Rabbi Irina Gritsevskaya, who is based in Tel Aviv and travels to Ukraine regularly to lead Masorti Kyiv, one of the country’s only Conservative congregations.

Jewish schools have borne a wide range of effects. Ariel Markovitch, director of the JCC in Kyiv, recounted how a Russian missile struck the Perlina school and kindergarten in Kyiv in October 2024, where refugees fleeing fighting on the front lines in Ukraine’s east had been sleeping.

Inna Federova, 55, the head of Ukraine’s oldest Jewish day school, Lyceum No. 299 or Orach Chaim, said missiles were only one challenge of many.

“It fractured our community,” she said about the war. “I am a Jewish mother first, and I wanted to be there for the kids, but I couldn’t be once they were scattered all over Europe.”

At least one of the school’s alumni, Igor Tish, was gravely injured while fighting on the frontline, while the Israeli teachers who taught Hebrew and other subjects have not returned since being evacuated in the days before the Russian invasion. Instruction is more rudimentary now, Federova said.

“We have a physical education teacher who does exercises with the children in the shelter, because it’s very hard for them to sit still for so long without moving,” she said, adding: “They’ve lived through bombings, evacuations, constant anxiety. Our teachers received special training from psychologists, including Israeli specialists, on how to support children emotionally during wartime.”

Other support for Jews in Ukraine has come from the Joint Distribution Committee, which leads disaster response for Jewish communities living in conflict zones around the world ; Chabad, the global Jewish network whose emissaries are at the front line of Jewish life in many smaller communities; and Goldenberg’s group, which works to preserve Jewish life and welfare in Ukraine.

Sustained by a network of global donors, the Ukrainian Charitable Funds has helped elderly Jewish Ukrainians repair their homes after Russian airstrikes. Goldenberg recalled one woman she worked with: “She had no windows. She lost all of them in a Russian strike, but did not have the funds to fix them.”

While the advent of war in Israel in 2023 spurred concerns about whether Jewish donors would continue to send support to Ukraine, Gritsevskaya said aid from both inside and outside had made a difference.

“I think in the Jewish community, there is a huge sense of being hugged,” she said, adding, “Ukraine is an amazing example of the ability of Jews to unite and to help others in unbelievable situations. In general, I think that people who are connected to Jewish communities are more capable of going through the difficult things they go through because they have the wider Jewish world.”

Even as she gears up for a potential war in Israel, Gritsevskaya is planning on heading back to Ukraine this summer for another session of Ramah Ukraine, a camp that has already filled with Ukrainian Jewish teens eager for a respite from the challenges of war.

“I would rather not think of the fears I have,” she said. “They are so overwhelming, we have to focus on what must be done.”

Federova, too, said she continues to focus on the positives as she and her students start a fifth year of war.

“We have children from different backgrounds, some from observant families, some who are just discovering their roots, and the school gives them that connection,” Federova said about Orach Chaim. “Even during the hardest times when the alarms go off and when we don’t know what will happen tomorrow, I look at them and think ‘if we can give them knowledge and faith, then we have done something important.”

This reporting was supported by the International Women’s Media Foundation’s Women on the Ground: Reporting from Ukraine’s Unseen Frontlines Initiative in partnership with the Howard G. Buffett Foundation.

This story was originally published in the Forward.

American adults under the age of 30 increasingly view Hamas as “militant resistance” operating on behalf of the Palestinian people, rather than a self-interested terrorist organization, according to data gathered by the American Jewish Committee.

In a poll conducted one year after the Oct. 7 Hamas attack against Southern Israel, 33% of 18- to 29-year-olds described Hamas as a “resistance group” — nearly double the 17% of Americans over 30 who used that label — and that figure jumped to 43% this past fall.

The findings, shared with the Forward this month, track with another survey last summer that found 60% of 18- to 24-year-olds sided with Hamas over Israel in the Gaza war. It suggests the support that young Americans express for the Palestinians, and the same cohort’s deeply negative views toward Israel, are breaking through what was long a taboo: sympathy for an organization classified as a terrorist organization by the United States, and which has engaged in decades of violence against Israeli civilians.

Tariq Kenney-Shawa, a fellow at the pro-Palestinian think tank Al-Shabaka, attributed this shift to a broader disillusionment with mainstream media and the political establishment that has long presented Israel as a close U.S. ally with shared values.

“Americans have come to not trust these traditional narratives,” he said in an interview. “That spills over into thinking, ‘If we’ve been lied to about Israel’s true nature, maybe that means we’re also being lied to about Oct. 7 and groups like Hamas.’”

Open support for Hamas has been relatively rare among the protesters demonstrating against Israel’s prosecution of the war in Gaza. But constant demands for activists to condemn Hamas after Oct. 7 quickly became a source of derision on the left, while slogans and iconography celebrating Hamas violence became more common as the conflict dragged on and Israel killed tens of thousands of Palestinians, destroyed the vast majority of Gaza’s infrastructure and restricted aid shipments as experts warned of famine and raised the specter of genocide.

But many Jewish leaders and other critics of Hamas say young people are misinformed about the nature of the group — including its lukewarm support among Palestinians living in Gaza — and the war.

They also say apparent support for Hamas, especially in a public opinion poll that offers limited response options, may be less about genuine support for the organization and its political platform and more about picking the answer that aligns with their support for Palestinians.

“There’s a tendency in our very polarized society to find a camp and stay in the camp and whatever words the camp is using become your words,” said Julie Fishman Rayman, vice president for policy at the American Jewish Committee.

Complex — and incomplete — views on Hamas

In the immediate aftermath of Oct. 7, a core of activists sympathetic to Hamas made their presence known. Demonstrations in major cities celebrated the attacks, while the coordinating body of Students for Justice in Palestine approvingly referred to Hamas militants as “the resistance.”

But as a broader protest movement calling for an immediate ceasefire in Gaza grew — drawing in Jews and others who simultaneously condemned Hamas violence on Oct. 7 and called for Israeli hostages to be released — some leading Jewish organizations and pundits continued to paint the demonstrators as terror supporters.

What data was available painted a more complex picture.

A study conducted by Eitan Hersh, a Tufts University professor, found that 5% of self-identified leftist college students — those who were generally organizing and participating in the campus protests against Israel — believed that “all Israeli civilians should be considered legitimate targets for Hamas,” compared to 17% of conservative students.

And since the Israel-Hamas war began, the Harvard/Harris poll, a collaboration between the school’s Center for American Political Studies and a private polling firm, has consistently found that between 40% and 50% of the youngest American adults — those aged 18 to 24 years old — side with Hamas over Israel when forced to choose. The monthly poll’s August edition made headlines when that figure briefly jumped to 60% support for Hamas.

A member of the Democratic Socialists of America’s New York City chapter pointed to that statistic while pressing Shahana Hanif, a progressive member of City Council, during an endorsement meeting on why she had condemned local protesters who had chanted in favor of Hamas. “With 60% of Gen Z supporting Hamas against Israel, many of us are realizing now that we’ve been lied to all our lives,” the person said, according to a recording obtained by Jewish Insider. (A NYC-DSA spokesperson said that members do not reflect the organization’s position.)

But most coverage overlooked the poll’s other findings, including that 61% of that age group believed “Hamas must release all remaining hostages without any conditions or face serious consequences” and that 63% disapproved of Hamas’ conduct in the war.

The Harvard/Harris survey has been criticized for being unreliable and at times producing results about antisemitism and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict that are “bizarre and difficult to account for,” in the words of a Harvard Crimson columnist.

But some observers say that people expressing sympathy for Hamas may have nuanced views.

“I speak to a lot of Palestinians who have supported Hamas not because they support terrorism but because they support action to oppose the occupation,” said Roei Eisenberg, chair of the young adults network at Israel Policy Forum, a dovish Zionist think tank. “They have a Palestinian Authority that’s broken and corrupt and not actually standing up for them — and they see Hamas in Gaza at least putting up a fight.”

Ahmed Moor, a Palestinian-American writer and fellow at the Foundation for Middle East Peace, said that supporters of the Palestinians in the United States are following a similar logic as they see evidence of devastation and Israeli brutality in Gaza. “Why are Zionists so resistant to the idea of Palestinian resistance?” he asked. “Any normal person would look and say, ‘Of course these people have a right to resist.’”

That sentiment has circulated on social media, often among anonymous creators.

After Israel killed Yahwa Sinwar, the military leader of Hamas in Gaza, many users on TikTok created videos praising the bravery of his final moments, in which he is recorded throwing a stick at an Israeli drone.

“In a million years, you would never see Joe Biden, you would never see Ben-Gvir, you would never see any of these people die for anyone but themselves,” a Jewish user who goes by Dirty Alex told his 23,000 followers.

He added an ambivalent caveat: “It’s weird because I think — because of Oct. 7, the people who perpetuated it should be held accountable — and I think they would agree, actually — but at the same time I will always support righteous struggle.”

That tendency to equivocate when it comes to Hamas’ most egregious atrocities is common even among those in the U.S. who otherwise express support for the group. Many have sought to downplay the Oct. 7 attack as primarily an assault on Israeli military positions and claimed that atrocities committed against civilians were exaggerated or completely fabricated.

On social media, many users have rushed to highlight any evidence that Israeli hostages were treated well by Hamas during captivity. For example, several large accounts claimed that Israeli Maya “Bengi” had refused to meet with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu because his “hands are stained with the blood of children in Gaza.”

But the real hostage, named Maya Regev, did meet with Netanyahu and said she had been abused by sadistic doctors in Gaza.

The most popular symbol associated with Hamas among Israel’s opponents in the U.S. is also connected with attacks on the Israeli military rather than civilians: the inverted triangle, which comes from grainy propaganda videos that use the red arrow to point out Israeli military units operating in Gaza immediately before Hamas militants fire at them.

Kenney-Shawa, the Al-Shabaka fellow, said the growing support for Hamas among young Americans suggests that “more people are vibing with the idea of Palestinian resistance” rather than aligning with the organization’s specific tactics or policies.

Others acknowledge that while Hamas has engaged in war crimes and violations of international law, Israel stands accused of engaging in similar behavior. “Palestinian resistance has always been armed — and that’s always been in line with international law — and the violation of international law has also occurred both by Zionist groups and Palestinians,” Moor said. “Everyone has committed crimes.”

Hamas officials have also sought to present positions to Western audiences that are palatable to progressives, emphasizing measured political positions and portraying Israel as the more radical and intransigent party.

“We are politically realistic,” Khaled Meshaal, a senior Hamas leader, told Drop Site News in December. “We are ready to engage with any serious project to establish a Palestinian state along the 1967 borders even though I realize, unfortunately, that this is impossible because of Israeli policy.”

Hamas as symbol of resistance

Hamas coming to represent the strongest resistance to Israel among young people in the U.S. is frustrating for some Palestinians, who say it sanitizes what Hamas actually represents and overlooks the preferences of Palestinians in Gaza.

Khalil Sayegh, a politician analyst and director of the Agora Initiative, which advocates for Palestinian rights in Israel, the West Bank and Gaza, said he appreciated that Americans were turning away from an uncritical pro-Israel narrative but worried about polarization in the opposite direction.

“Resistance has become basically equal to Hamas and Hamas equal to resistance,” Sayegh said. “That’s a very toxic and wrong thing.”

He said that “Israeli apartheid and genocide” was the main problem in Gaza but that Hamas also stood in the way of establishing a “secular, democratic Palestine.”

While around half of Palestinians in Gaza said they were satisfied with Hamas’ performance in the war, according to an October survey, the poll also suggested that the organization would be soundly defeated if open parliamentary or presidential elections were held across the West Bank and Gaza.

Around 33% of voters in Gaza would support a Hamas candidate for president, while most of the remainder would either vote for Marwan Barghouti, a leader of secular rival Fatah who is currently imprisoned by Israel, or not participate, according to Palestinian Center for Policy and Survey Research. Respondents were roughly split on whether negotiations and peaceful protest or “armed struggle” were the best method to establish a Palestinian state.

Throughout the 1980s and 1990s there were robust debates in the Palestinian diaspora over which political factions to support. But Sayegh said those faded from public view as Israel eliminated most credible alternatives and fears grew that open critique of Hamas would be weaponized by pro-Israel groups to weaken the pro-Palestinian movement.

Additionally, he said, activists in the U.S. who support Hamas have intimidated its critics within the Palestinian community. “There is still a debate but there is no public debate,” Sayegh said. “The masses that are supportive of Hamas have scared the people who oppose Hamas into silence.”

Ahmed Fouad Alkhabtib, who moved from Gaza to the U.S. in high school, has become one of the most prominent Palestinian critics of Hamas and now positions himself in opposition to most of the pro-Palestinian movement.

Alkhabtib, the founder of an initiative called Realign for Palestine at the Atlantic Council, attributed the rise in support for Hamas to a combination of ignorance and malice within the “pro-Palestine industrial complex” composed of “far-left meets far-right meets the Islamists meets the Taliban and al-Qaeda meets the idiot Jewish kids who said they were lied to about Israel at summer camp.”

But he said that some Palestinians had told him during the war that they shared his antipathy toward Hamas — especially as some blamed the group for contributing to aid shortages over the summer — but that they would speak out once Israel ended its military operations. “I did pick up on notes of the pro-Hamas euphoria dying down,” Alkhabtib said.

And yet both Palestinian and Jewish observers said that leading pro-Israel organizations have also contributed to polarization around the Israeli-Palestinian conflict that drives some people toward Hamas or makes them reluctant to criticize the group.

Eisenberg, with the Israel Policy Forum, said that many Jewish groups have refused to acknowledge Israeli atrocities in Gaza and rushed to paint the country’s critics as terror supporters. “It’s coming from a place of being unable to hold complexity,” he said.

Alkhabtib said he has experienced this firsthand. Despite being an unequivocal critic of Hamas and maintaining close ties to many Jewish organizations, he has found little tolerance for also critiquing the Israeli far right.

“The pro-Palestinian people are watching me — the pro-Hamas people are watching me — and saying, ‘Well what incentive do I have if you’ve been Mr. Dialogue and Engagement and they turn on you the second you criticize Israel,” Alkhabtib said. “There’s something to be said about the role of Jewish communities to reverse these problematic trends.”

This story was originally published on the Forward.

(JTA) — An annual festival in Andorra drew condemnation from the country’s small Jewish community after an effigy bearing the Israeli flag was staged in a mock trial and then hung and shot.

The incident was part of the traditional Catalan festival Carnestoltes, which occurs yearly before Lent, the 40-day period that precedes Easter. At Monday’s festival in Andorra, where a mock king is typically tried and burned, organizers instead used an effigy wearing blue with the Israeli flag painted on its face.

During the festivities, the Israeli effigy was symbolically tried, hung, shot and burned, according to social media posts and a report in the Israeli outlet YNet.

The incident drew outcry from the microstate’s tiny Jewish community, which only just got its first full-time rabbi, a Chabad emissary, in the last two years.

“This is a ritual they perform every year as part of carnival, where they mock many things,” Jewish Andorra resident Esther Pujol told YNet. “This time they dressed the effigy in the colors of the Israeli flag, with a Star of David on its face. They put it on trial, sentenced it to death and carried out the sentence by shooting and burning it. It is completely unacceptable.”

Pujol told the outlet that it was the first time she had seen the festival include anti-Israel or antisemitic elements, and that she had contacted Andorran lawmakers to express her outrage. The mayor of Encamp, the city where the incident took place, and local politicians took part in the ceremony, according to YNet.

The European Jewish Congress also decried the display in a post on X, writing that the mock-execution was a “deeply disturbing act that risks normalizing antisemitism and incitement.”

“This incident requires unequivocal condemnation, full clarification of responsibilities and concrete measures to ensure that antisemitism is never tolerated in public celebrations or institutions in Andorra or anywhere in Europe,” the post continued.

Other Lent festivities have also been the site of antisemitism in recent years, with Belgian celebrations in 2019 featuring antisemitic caricatures and a Spanish parade in 2020 featuring a Holocaust-themed display.

The incident marks a rare instance of open turmoil for Jews in Andorra, which is nestled between France and Spain in the Pyrenees mountains. While France and Spain have seen widespread pro-Palestinian protests and antisemitic incidents in recent years, Andorra has largely avoided similar tensions.

In September, Andorra formally announced its recognition of Palestinian statehood alongside a host of other European nations during the United Nations General Assembly in New York City.

But local Jews have also sought to remain under the radar, considering that Andorra officially prohibits non-Catholic houses of worship. The Jewish community calls their gathering place a community center rather than a synagogue. In 2023, Andorra’s parliament elected a Jewish lawmaker for the first time.