Will Israel look in the mirror on its 77th birthday? (Dina Kraft- April 28, 2025)

Dina Kraft is a journalist, podcaster and the co-author of the New York Times bestseller, My Friend Anne Frank, together with Hannah Pick-Goslar. She lives in Tel Aviv where she's the Israel Correspondent of  The Christian Science Monitor and a creator of the podcast Groundwork, about activists working in Israel and Palestine. She was formerly opinion editor of Haaretz English. Views and positions expressed here are those of the writer, and do not necessarily represent NJN's views and policy positions.

Israel is in the midst of the country’s annual trio of “national days”. They kicked off with Holocaust Remembrance Day last week and Tuesday night begins the back-to-back commemoration of Memorial and Independence. This revered, even sacred, time in the Hebrew calendar typically signals not just a time of mourning and remembrance followed by a jarring shift towards celebration, but also introspection. Or to borrow a Hebrew term, a time of “cheshbon nefesh,” translated imperfectly an accounting of the soul.

Since the Hamas-led October 7 attack on Israel, the notion that time has stopped, that the country has still not psychically exited the shock and grief stage of the deadliest day in Israel’s history is a common one. The ongoing hostage crisis in particular and the way the Israeli media has focused almost entirely on Israel’s ongoing trauma in its coverage of the Gaza War has helped maintain this sense of living in suspended animation.

But close to 600 days into the crisis, time of course has done anything but stop. Israel careens forward, war footing and all, digesting new losses, tragedies, a government at war with its own security establishment, and a creeping brain drain along the way. Some look across the border at the destruction of Gaza and the civilian death toll and suffering there in growing awareness and horror. Some do not.  

Headlines now trumpet news of certain Hamas commanders or operatives killed, but there’s little dwelling on the civilians, among them children, who have been killed alongside them – so many that since the second ceasefire ended in March the number of dead children now surpasses the 1,200 killed in Israel on Oct. 7th.

For me, the large number of civilians killed during these strikes – and the relative lack of news it makes in Israeli media — recalls the 17-year-old Palestinian boy named Ibrahim Bagdadi I met in Gaza City in 2005, shortly before Israel’s withdrawal of troops and settlers from the enclave. He told me how he was still haunted by the memory of a woman’s head and other body parts rolling into his bedroom on a sweltering July night three years earlier when an Israeli missile apparently aimed at Sheik Salah Shehade, a founder of Hamas's military wing, hit the building next to his family’s home. At the time the bombing sparked controversy in Israel because it killed not only Shehade and his wife, but 13 others, including nine children.

He would be 37 now. Is he still alive? If he has children, are they?

In recent weeks, and especially the last week, including on Yom HaShoah last Wednesday, Israel’s Holocaust Memorial Day, photos of children killed in Gaza are cropping up more in public view. At a rally calling for an end to the war held last Thursday in Tel Aviv, a row of oversized posters were held high in the night sky – a mix of both hostage portraits and pictures of children killed recently in Gaza. 

The combination was a striking statement: it was the first time since the war broke out I had ever seen the images of the hostages and the Palestinian victims side-by-side. On Saturday night, a silent vigil of Israeli activists holding the photos of children killed in Gaza had mushroomed from a handful of people to about 500 in recent weeks. Still, these voices exist mostly on the edges of the conversation, although they are beginning to merge with those who have been protesting daily and weekly in the streets since soon after the war began, calling for an immediate hostage release.

Since early March when the second ceasefire ended, putting an abrupt halt to the deeply emotional return of hostages, most of them alive, some of them not, the ongoing cries from the public for a hostage deal and an end the war have intensified. 

The impact of seeing women and men emerging alive from behind the curtain of Gaza captivity during the second truce cannot be overstated. Among those who returned alive was Yarden Bibas, father of the red-headed boys Kfir and Ariel and husband to Shiri, forever seared into Israel’s book of tragedy, who came back instead in caskets. A photo of Yarden holding a hand-written sign that states, “There’s no independence as long as they are still there,” referring to the remaining hostages, is making the rounds on social media.  

The polls remain consistent: a majority of Israelis seek a deal that would win the release of all the remaining 59 hostages, 24 of whom are thought to be alive, in return for an end to the war in Gaza. On Monday, it was reported that Israel had rejected Hamas’ offer of a five-year truce. 

As Israel prepares to mark Memorial Day and Independence Day families and friends are grieving the most recent soldiers to die in Gaza – including two killed Friday and another, reservist Master Sgt. Asaf Cafri, killed Wednesday on Holocaust Remembrance Day. That same day Magda Baratz, his great-grandmother (a survivor of Auschwitz and Bergen-Belsen), and his father received the news when they were in Germany at Bergen-Belsen marking 80 years since the notorious concentration camp was liberated.

During this time of fracture and pain six families who are among those who lost the most in the aftermath of October 7 and the Gaza war that has ensued asked the Israeli public to imagine what unity and healing could look like.  They include Jonathan Polin and Rachel Goldberg, the parents of Hersh Goldberg Polin, along with five other families of the “Beautiful Six” who were executed together in a narrow, cramped tunnel by Hamas last summer. They billed it as a rare, “politics-free event” bringing together left and right, secular and religious, and even Jerusalem’s rival soccer teams.

Together thousands gathered in a Jerusalem square for an evening of song for the return of the hostages.  Rachel Goldberg told the crowd, “Come together our family, our city, our country, our nation, our hostages. Together let’s sing and pray. Come!”

The crowd sang as one, reading along from lyrics of classic Israeli songs on a large screen. Music can be a balm, making people feel more deeply, but also think more deeply. The example of togetherness and common cause Sunday night from across Israel’s societal spectrum might also help lead those there and those who saw it to reflect on what the country could look like as it turns 77 years old. It’s a painful time to look in the mirror. But it’s never been a more urgent mission.

Trump and Netanyahu: New Episode (Yossi Alpher - April 21, 2025)

Yossi Alpher is an independent security analyst. He is the former director of the Jaffee Center for Strategic Studies at Tel Aviv University, a former senior official with the Mossad, and a former IDF intelligence officer. Views and positions expressed here are those of the writer, and do not necessarily represent NJN's views and policy positions.

Q. Was the dramatic Trump-Netanyahu White House meeting two weeks ago a turning point in the Israeli learning curve regarding Trump’s Middle East intentions? What has emerged since then in Israel-US relations?

A. Prime Minister Netanyahu arrived in Washington in early April with the expectation of getting a green or perhaps amber light from President Trump regarding an attack on Iran’s nuclear infrastructure. A secondary objective of the meeting from Netanyahu’s standpoint was apparently to persuade Trump to reduce or cancel newly imposed tariffs on Israeli goods. Also on the two leaders’ agenda were Syria and Gaza.

Netanyahu walked out of his meeting with Trump not only empty-handed (‘four billion a year is enough’), but with marching orders that effectively contradicted the Israeli leader’s designs and desires for the region regarding key issues: Iran, Syria, and Gaza. What emerged, to Netanyahu’s evident discomfort, were Trump tactical moves for at least temporarily reducing conflict and lowering the US military profile throughout most of the region.

Q. Since that Oval Office meeting, more-or-less direct US-Iran nuclear negotiations have commenced. Yet Netanyahu had reportedly come to Washington to persuade Trump to attack Iran. How do you explain the gap or dissonance here?

A. Trump’s envoy, man-for-all-missions Steve Witkoff, is apparently renegotiating the 2015 Obama-era Iran-nuclear deal that sufficed with reducing enrichment levels. Lest we forget, Trump in his day --egged on by Netanyahu-- first viciously maligned and then cancelled the 2015 JCPOA.

True, the original JCPOA was a bare-bones approach that ignored Iran’s missile build-up, hegemonic regional aims and open resolve to destroy Israel. It left in place an Iranian nuclear project that could be quickly upgraded. But it was doable, and it united the entire international community against Iranian military nuclear aspirations.

Now that very same much-maligned JCPOA is being renegotiated without participation by Washington’s partners in the 2015 deal: Russia, China, the UK, Germany and France. In other words, it reflects an international strategy that disdains the notion of global partnership and still ignores Israel’s basic security concerns vis-à-vis Iran beyond a partial lowering of Iran’s military nuclear profile. The new Trump approach also ignores the strategic window of opportunity to attack Iran’s nuclear project that the Israeli security community insists it opened when it decimated Iranian missile defenses a few months ago.

On the other hand, like its Obama-era predecessor, the Trump-Witkoff approach is doable, and quickly. At one and the same time diplomatic, tactical, pragmatic and short-term, it could well produce partial but beneficial results for everyone concerned, including Israel. The Israeli approach, which Trump has at least temporarily rejected, is strategic, a military long-shot, and would likely endanger regional stability, particularly for the Persian Gulf countries that could bear the brunt of an Iranian retaliation.

Both the Trump and the Netanyahu approaches reflect a short-term and shallow attitude toward Israel’s real strategic needs on the part of two leaders known for twisting the facts to fit their requirements and whims. Trump’s approach prioritizes a reduction in potential US military requirements in the Middle East, possibly at Israel’s expense. Netanyahu’s reflects his over-riding need for at least some level of regional conflict to distract the Israeli public and his coalition from his personal-political difficulties at home, at least until 2026 Knesset elections.

Nachum Barnea summed up Trump and Netanyahu, following their DC summit, in Yediot Aharonot:

This is Trump. The joint air exercises, the aircraft and air defense systems that arrived here, thousands of hours invested in joint planning, the threats to open the gates of hell, the compliments to Netanyahu--all these were no more than a message to Iran: I’m ready for a deal.

Where we are going it is early to tell… but the process of Israel’s sobering up from Trump has to commence. If we did not get this in the Oval Office, we have understood nothing.

Q. Trump seems to have invoked a negotiation rather than confrontation strategy regarding, as well, the Turkish military presence in Syria that troubles Israel.

A. And regarding the US military presence in Syria, which Israel values and Trump is already reducing. Whereas Israel sees Turkish President Erdogan with his Islamist ambitions for Syria as an alarming danger, Trump praises Erdogan effusively and sees Turkey as a worthy replacement for the American military in maintaining stability, with reduced US risk, in and around Syria and in neighboring Iraq.

One immediate outcome of the Netanyahu-Trump meeting two weeks ago is Israeli-Turkish discussions of stability in Syria, held in Baku, Azerbaijan. As with Iran, this could provide a helpful short-term fix. But it does not address the basic threat to Israel posed by Ankara-led militant Islam.

Q. And Gaza and the hostages?

A. As with the Russia-Ukraine conflict (where Secretary of State Rubio is threatening to withdraw Washington’s mediation efforts since they cannot produce a Trump-style quick fix), gone in Gaza are the bombastic promises of quick solutions and the dramatic visits of Trump emissaries. Israel and Hamas are as far apart as ever.

The latest Israeli offensive began a month ago. That Israel just recorded its first IDF fatality bears witness to a very cautious Israeli approach that inevitably favors heavy Palestinian civilian casualties caused by IAF airstrikes. The absence of parallel IDF casualties is welcomed by the Israeli public. And it allows the IDF Spokesman to herald the elimination of this or that Hamas battalion leader and ignore the awful collateral damage as well as the fact that that battalion leader’s two predecessors were also ‘neutralized’ over the past 18 months with no effect whatsoever on the course of the war.

Hamas, along with a sizeable portion of the Israeli public and security veterans, insists that the only realistic deal is for Israel to end the conflict and withdraw from the Strip in return for all the remaining hostages, alive and dead. But this falls well short of the ‘total victory’ that Netanyahu insists Israel needs if the PM is to stay alive politically.

No wonder Trump and Witkoff are keeping their distance from Gaza. They can concentrate their efforts on more productive ventures with a short-term payoff: Iran and Syria/Turkey. No wonder Netanyahu, his coalition and their messianist supporters among the Israeli public can assume that the smaller the number of hostages still alive (21 at last count), the less pressure will be exerted on Netanyahu to live up to both Zionist and basic human values and give priority to their release.

If ‘total victory’ - meaning eliminating Hamas - were possible, Netanyahu’s hard line might sound vaguely practical. But, as yet another Gaza offensive by the IDF is demonstrating daily, the Islamist-barbaric Hamas is effectively implanted in Gaza as a grass-roots guerilla force. Moreover, the Netanyahu coalition has no Palestinian replacement to offer; and no one in Israel will accept the cost in IDF deaths and Gazan civilian deaths that would be incurred in the pursuit of an elusive complete conquest and reoccupation of the Strip.

Q. Bottom line?

A. Netanyahu, still the master politician in the Israeli context, managed to walk away from the Trump ‘hazing ceremony’ a fortnight ago declaring that all is well. Despite total failure in recruiting Trump’s backing for his Middle East objectives and the diplomatic isolation this implies, there were no cracks in Netanyahu’s coalition backing.

Of course, it helps that Trump can be expected to contradict himself any day regarding the Middle East issues at stake. And it helps Netanyahu that the political opposition in Israel is again proving ineffective and is fumbling the current opportunity provided by his bumbling international isolation.

Choosing Freedom and Agency Within Bondage (Rebecca Bardach - April 15, 2025)

Rebecca Bardach is a writer and practitioner in building Jewish-Arab shared society in Israel, with thirty years of experience in migration, conflict and development issues. You can follow her on Substack Between Despair and Determination. She is a periodic blogger for The Times of Israel, and contributor to Haaretz and the Jerusalem Post, and is currently working on a book. Originally from Berkeley, CA, she has lived in Jerusalem with her family for more than two decades. Views and positions expressed here are those of the writer, and do not necessarily represent NJN's views and policy positions.

The fact that 59 hostages are still held in Hamas captivity after more than 550 days and that war, death and destruction continues has made this Passover one of the most excruciating many Israeli as well as Diaspora Jews have experienced. How can we celebrate this holiday of freedom with whole hearts given the horrific conditions and abuses of their bondage?

I have been involved in hostage release efforts from the beginning as both a family member (having a cousin who was held in captivity and then executed by Hamas – Hersh Goldberg-Polin z”l) and as part of the broader public insisting that the hostage issue is core to who we are as a country and society. As enormous as the relief and gratitude are for every returned hostage, it’s impossible to feel a sense of dayeinu – it would have been enough – until everyone is home and the war is over.

But even as the hostage situation represents a literal form of current bondage, many Jews in Israel and the Diaspora feel that they are becoming captive to threatening forces which they fear they can’t oppose or overcome, in ways which feel unique to this era, even as they feel hauntingly familiar. We seem to be at a historical turning point. But we are uncertain which way to turn, where we need to go, how to get there and who might be our trustworthy travelling companions.

Many Israelis have been on the streets demonstrating week after week for the hostages’ release, insisting that the state has a fundamental commitment to do absolutely everything in its power to rescue its citizens. But what began as an apolitical act of solidarity, has become increasingly political as the governing coalition has opposed and even explicitly and proudly torpedoed hostage release efforts in pursuit of a political and social reordering that most Israelis oppose.

Hamas and the Iranian axis are responsible for starting this war, and many Israelis feel that their security and even the country’s existence are held captive by these extremists. Tragically, this has made it harder to disentangle the legitimate desire of the Palestinians for freedom from Israeli control, from the illegitimate desire of Hamas to eliminate Israel. As much as innocent Israelis have suffered enormously, innocent Gazans and Palestinians are suffering incomprehensible multiples of that, crushed between internal extremism, the war and Israeli actors or actions which contribute to the violence.

But alongside the external threats to Israel there lies a very real internal threat, with many Israelis increasingly feeling they are held hostage by a governing coalition which is going to astonishing lengths to undermine fundamental aspects of the country – through the courts, in the halls of the governing institutions, in the security forces and in the media – and is working actively against core interests, hopes and values.

Hence the protest efforts, which have been going on, week after week, in various forms for the last two and a half years. Even as I have been part of these protest efforts, I also fear that the protests risk becoming a form of captivity. They are essential to help keep the roof from caving in, but they also risk coming at the expense of urgent work needed to strengthen the walls holding up the roof.

And even as Israelis are reeling from all this, as an American-Israeli I also am acutely aware of the ways that Diaspora Jews feel shackled and fearful of the waves of anti-Semitism and pernicious forms of anti-Israel attitudes which have emerged since October 7. And by the ways that America’s newly elected leadership is attacking the core institutions, norms and values which Jews in America proudly and wholeheartedly protected and advanced throughout their history.

But even in the face of all of these threats, perhaps the greatest sense of bondage comes from the paralysis which the onslaught of events in this situation generates. Wave after wave of events have revealed threats that are genuinely profound and systemic. This generates bewilderment, grief, anger and trauma, and a sense that it is all insurmountable. In turn, these emotional tides leave us in a state of exhaustion and despair, in which inaction and a turning inward towards personal and communal wellbeing seems like the only viable option.

Of all the threats, I believe this is actually the greatest, and of all the shackles perhaps this is the one which most ensures we remain captive to these forces. Because they mean that even when we could fight for freedom, we fail to do so. Remember, the Israelites had already been freed from Pharoah’s bondage when they begged to go back to Egypt and when they gave into the temptations of the Golden Calf, posing their own pits and barriers to getting to the Promised Land.

Giving into despair, exhaustion or overwhelm is the only thing that guarantees that we won’t get there – and if not to a mythic promised land, than at least to a better place. As much as these current dilemmas resonate with historical precedents, this is not the Pharoah or bondage of yore, just as what we are experiencing are not the pogroms, persecution or Holocaust of yore. Even within this place of captivity, we can’t forget that we do still have extensive agency and the obligation to use it to reach a better place.

The key is to remain clear-eyed about both what we are fighting against, but also what we are fighting for. At a time where there are so many attacks on Israel it is important to state explicitly that it is legitimate for the Jewish people to have a state representing them and characterized by their story. We must fight for an Israel that sees its Jewish, liberal and democratic characteristics as working in alignment not contradiction to each other. And we must still pursue a resilient Israeli-Palestinian reconciliation which enables, through both its policies and practices, both the Jewish people and the Palestinian people to live side by side in dignity and security as individuals and collectives.

It’s true that is not exclusively up to us. Even prior to October 7 Israeli Palestinian reconciliation felt almost impossibly beyond reach in so many ways – how much more so after what our two peoples have experienced at each other’s hands since then? But it doesn’t fundamentally change the reality that neither of us will be leaving and we must – eventually - find a way to live together. And there is still more we can do to advance this. My years of working with partners in the spaces of both Jewish-Arab shared and Israeli-Palestinian reconciliation has shown me that there are people in all of our myriad communities who share this vision, even as the situation threatens to overwhelm us all.

Remember – the Israelites experienced 400 years of slavery, and 40 years of wandering in the desert. It’s impossible to know how long it will take to work our way out of this current situation with its myriad threats. But I do know that the Israelites only got to the Promised Land because they embarked on the journey, and step by step, day by day, year by year, generation by generation, they proceeded until they got there.

Most of all, we have to remember that redemption – or, in this case, being a people or maintaining a state – is not ever really a final resting place. Rather, it is a state of both being and doing, debating and creating, striving and pursuing, which ultimately defines us.

NJN in Action- NJN joins Amicus Brief challenging Trump’s anti-free speech agenda

New Jewish Narrative is one of 27 Jewish organizations that have filed a request to submit an amicus brief in federal court objecting to the arrest, detention, and potential deportation of a Tufts University student because of her political speech. 

A motion was filed yesterday in Vermont. The student is Rümeysa Öztürk. She was apprehended on the street last month and is being held in an ICE facility in Louisiana. The Trump Administration revoked Öztürk’s visa under a rarely invoked statute because she co-authored an op-ed in the Tufts student newspaper supporting certain resolutions of the Tufts student senate that were harshly critical of Israel’s military actions in Gaza.

“Without presuming to speak for all of Jewish America—a diverse community that holds a multitude of viewpoints—amici are compelled to file this brief because the arrest, detention, and potential deportation of Rümeysa Öztürk for her protected speech violate the most basic constitutional rights,” we say in our brief. 

While we may disagree with some of Öztürk’s statements, we firmly stand behind her right to voice her dissent. Moreover, we strongly object to the Administration’s claims that its actions against Öztürk support efforts to combat antisemitism. As we wrote in our brief: “The government... appears to be exploiting Jewish Americans’ legitimate concerns about antisemitism as a pretext for undermining core pillars of American democracy, the rule of law, and the fundamental rights of free speech and academic debate on which this nation was built.”

Hatikvah Slate Pesach Haggadah Insert

Our colleagues and fellow leaders of the Hatikvah Slate wrote a haggadah insert for Pesach 2025/5785. As we get ready to lay our seder tables this weekend, we hope that these intentions will resonate with you.

Trump, Netanyahu and ‘Deep States’ (Yossi Alpher- April 7, 2025)

Yossi Alpher is an independent security analyst. He is the former director of the Jaffee Center for Strategic Studies at Tel Aviv University, a former senior official with the Mossad, and a former IDF intelligence officer. Views and positions expressed here are those of the writer, and do not necessarily represent NJN's views and policy positions.

Q. Two weeks ago, Prime Minister Netanyahu wrote: "In America and Israel, when a strong right-wing leader wins, the leftist Deep State weaponizes the justice system to thwart the people's will. They won't win in either place!" Can you explain?

A. The explanation is multi-dimensional. Both Trump and Netanyahu refer frequently to a “Deep State” that by any objective standard does not exist in either the US or the Israeli context. That quote also hints at a broad phenomenon whereby Trump has become an object of emulation by authoritarian leaders globally. Netanyahu is a key case-in-point. And Israel’s current “Qatargate” scandal poses the frightening question of who is ‘deepstating’ whom.

Q. Start by defining what a deep state is and is not.

A. According to the Cambridge online dictionary, a deep state consists of “organizations such as military, police, or political groups that are said to work secretly in order to protect particular interests and to rule a country without being elected.” In recent years, a leader like Trump or Netanyahu who, once elected, attempts to alter the constitutional checks and balances of a democratic system and is frustrated precisely by that system, has responded by labeling institutions within that system, without justification, ‘deep state.’ 

Q. Did you ever encounter a real ‘deep state’ in your work?

A. The original use of the term ‘deep state’ was, to the best of my knowledge, in Turkiye prior to the end of the twentieth century. Turkiye’s Deep State consisted of the country’s security and intelligence establishment, which often operated without the knowledge of its democratic institutions like the parliament and the foreign ministry. 

In 1958, Israel entered into a strategic security alliance, “Trident,” with Turkiye and Iran. In Turkiye’s case, the alliance lasted decades. The two countries engaged in secret strategic cooperation--e.g., the two army chiefs-of-staff once planned a joint invasion of Syria from north and south--without the knowledge of Turkiye’s democratic institutions. 

About a decade ago, long after Israeli-Turkish relations had soured, I queried a high-level Turkish diplomat about that alliance. “We were strategic partners,” I reminded her, only to confront a blank stare and abject denial on her part. The Turkish Foreign Ministry’s narrative of Turkish-Israeli relations simply did not mention Trident.

Here it bears noting that Israel’s role in Trident was approved in Jerusalem by the prime minister and Foreign Ministry. In Israel, Trident represented strategic policy conceived at the highest level and known to the establishment. It also bears noting that Turkiye under President Erdogan, however distasteful his pro-Islamist and thuggish policies, does not appear to have a deep state: there is no gap between the president and his intelligence establishment and army. 

Q. And Israel?

Just to clarify, regardless of Netanyahu’s complaints--he recently went so far as to dub the Israeli security establishment a “junta”-- Israel does not have a deep state. Neither does the US. 

It is Israel that interests us here. Ben-Dror Yamini reminded us in Yediot Aharonot on Sunday that virtually all the judges, generals, spy chiefs, holders of the state purse-strings, and senior government officials whom Netanyahu today accuses of being “Deep State” are his own appointees over a span of more than 15 years. “Considering the government’s priorities and the nature of its decisions,” Yamini writes provocatively, “most Israelis would feel much better if indeed there were a strong deep-state mechanism at work. But there is none.”

I take exception to Yamini’s implied approval of an imaginary anti-Netanyahu deep state. But it is significant because Yamini himself is a right-of-center columnist.

Q. Talk a bit about authoritarian emulation of Trump. . . 

A. This is worrisome. Everywhere you look--Israel, Turkiye, Russia, Hungary, India--authoritarian leaders are invoking Trump and his policies regarding state finances, the judicial branch and the security establishment. And territory: there is an in-your-face correlation between Trump’s overt greed regarding Greenland and the ease with which Netanyahu approves IDF ‘temporary’ expansion into Syria and Lebanon and in Gaza and the West Bank. I don’t hear Trump calling Netanyahu to order.

(Here it is interesting to note that Israel and Turkiye, both apparently feeling reassured by Trump’s behavior, are encroaching on Syria’s territory from the south and north, respectively--albeit without coordination and in an atmosphere of mutual hostility.)

Netanyahu and Hungary’s PM Orban just held an unprecedented three-way conversation with Trump. Indeed, Netanyahu’s visit to Hungary this past week is understood as an overt snub to the rest of Europe, where Gaza-related International Court of Justice arrest warrants await Netanyahu. Meanwhile, the pro-Trump media in the US increasingly dismisses the European Union as weak and feeble. Lest Netanyahu forget: France and the UK were active participants a few months ago in the air defense of Israel against Iranian missiles. The EU and NATO are Israel’s strategic depth vis-à-vis the Islamist world.

Q. That Islamist world includes Qatar, a funder of the Muslim Brotherhood. Prior to October 7, 2023, Qatar allied with Israel in funding Gaza-based Hamas. It is now accused of high-level sabotage and bribery in Israel, in cahoots with Netanyahu’s corrupt government.

A. Reserve General Noam Tibon, one of the individual heroes of October 7, 2023, summed it up recently: “An enemy country [Qatar] successfully penetrated the holy-of-holies of the State of Israel and advanced its interests through the PM’s Office and his trusted advisers.” This produced influence campaigns against the families of the hostages. It produced false accusations regarding Egyptian intentions toward Israel that threatened to raise tensions between Cairo and Jerusalem. 

If there is a deep state to be found anywhere, it is one operated by Qatar in Israel, with the full knowledge of Israel’s prime minister. “The Qatar story is but one symptom of a chronic disease that threatens to dismantle Israel’s security strength from within,” adds Tibon. 

Q. Where else in Israel is that disease rampant?

A. Here are three outrageous examples that can be traced directly to the prime minister. First, and worst, to keep his right-messianic coalition together, Netanyahu has restarted the Gaza war and effectively frozen attempts to free additional hostages. More and more Israeli strategic and military observers today understand that this is a counterproductive reversal of national priorities. 

As we write, the IDF is conquering the Jabalya refugee camp in Gaza for the fourth time. Or is it the fifth time? It is easy to lose track while Gazans are being starved and slaughtered yet again. Mysterious schemes seem to be afoot to encourage emigration by homeless Gazans to Albania, Indonesia, and breakaway provinces of Somalia. These are hopeless schemes, all eventually denied by the countries in question. No wonder Netanyahu is welcomed in Europe only in semi-fascist Hungary.

Second, still on behalf of his unholy coalition, Netanyahu continues to ensure that Haredi (ultra-Orthodox) youth are not conscripted. Meanwhile, the IDF lacks manpower. More and more reservists are avoiding yet another round of service. If anything ever “dismantled Israel’s security strength from within,” this is it.

And third, Netanyahu has hopelessly entangled his personal legal problems--he is on trial on three counts of corruption--with the security establishment. This is the exact reversal of his ‘deep state’ obsession. He is trying to fire Shin Bet Head Ronen Bar because he, the prime minister, has ‘lost confidence’ in Bar. The latter just explained in a letter to the High Court of Justice how Netanyahu tried to recruit Bar’s connivance in avoiding his corruption trial: “Netanyahu demanded of me [to inform the courts] that the security situation does not permit him to testify continually in his trial. That is what generated his claim of loss of confidence. The Head of Shin Bet is not the prime minister’s ‘trusted servant’.”

Q. Bottom line?

A. Deep State? Likud Member of Knesset Moshe Saada just explained that the next head of Shin Bet must emerge “from the correct political circles.” Now we get it: the Shin Bet, Israel’s domestic security service, must become Netanyahu’s own private Deep State!

So what is really new here? Step back and observe: Israel is now the target of manipulation by one Arab state, Qatar, which is trying to sabotage Israel’s relations with another, Egypt, and all at the expense of a third Arab people, the Palestinians. Isn’t this just business as usual in the fragmented, undemocratic Arab world? Isn’t this but one additional aspect of Middle East normalization? Isn’t Israel now just ‘one of the guys’ in the neighborhood?

Huckabee Demands Our Attention (Noam Shelef - March 31, 2025)

Noam Shelef (he/him) joined New Jewish Narrative in 2025 as the Vice President of Communications. The issues that NJN champions have always been close to his heart, and he began his career in 1997 as an intern for Americans for Peace Now. In the years since, Noam has advocated in support of progressive causes in Israel, fighting for LGBTQ rights, and to end practices harmful to girls in Africa.

Eight years ago, when President Trump's nominee to serve as ambassador to Israel was announced, our community -- American Jews committed to progressive values -- mobilized in opposition. The nominee, David Friedman, had been a major financial backer of the settler movement. With the Senate under Republican control, there was little hope that his nomination could be stopped. But we still needed to send the message that this nomination was at odds with the views of the American mainstream and the American Jewish community.

In this, we succeeded. While all previous ambassadors to Israel were confirmed by more than 90 senators, only 52 voted for Friedman. 

Last week, President Trump's new nominee for ambassador to Israel, former Arkansas Governor Mike Huckabee, went before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee for a hearing. In light of President Trump's "Flood the Zone" strategy -- and Netanyahu's imitation of many of Trump's neo-authoritarian tactics (not to mention the hostilities in Gaza and across Israel's northern border) -- you could be forgiven for missing the news about this hearing. We at New Jewish Narrative, however, are paying attention. And we are working to mobilize our community and our allies to make sure that this nomination is not understood as an endorsement of Huckabee's radical views by the public at large. 

Here's a sample of what we know about Huckabee's views:

1.  Huckabee strongly opposed the ceasefire deal that freed 38 hostages from Gaza. He said that “there’s no valid reason to have a cease-fire with Hamas” and that a ceasefire should not even be entertained until after the hostages are released.

2. Huckabee has repeatedly denied national Palestinian identity, claiming that there “isn’t such a thing” as a Palestinian. 

3. Huckabee argued that Israel’s rule over the West Bank and Gaza is not an “occupation,” and that the Israeli connection to the West Bank is stronger than the American connection to Manhattan.

4. Huckabee has actively participated in actions that undermine US diplomatic credibility, including ceremonial cornerstone laying ceremonies in settlements. 

5. Huckabee compared the Iran nuclear deal negotiated by the Obama administration to the Holocaust, saying it was leading Israelis "to the door of the oven." 

In his hearing last week, Huckabee had the opportunity to renounce these views. He did not. 

If all of these were not sufficient reasons to oppose Huckabee, I have one more: I find myself deeply concerned by the religious language that Huckabee deploys to express his views on Israel, on Jews, and on the conflict. I came of age at a time when secular political movements -- the Israeli Labor party and the Palestinian Fatah party -- embarked on a peace process that offered the best hope for Israel's survival and would allow both Israelis and Palestinians to have a future worth living in the same land. I remember what the violence perpetrated by religious zealots like Baruch Goldstein and Hamas suicide bombers did to shake confidence in the peace process. At this moment, when the impact of religious fanatics is growing in the bodies politic of both Israeli and Palestinian society, we do not need an American envoy guided by his own end-of-days-motivated reasoning. 

I am privileged to be part of the push-back to this extremism in the American Jewish community. That's why I joined New Jewish Narrative one month ago. It’s about pushing back on Huckabee (and NJN will be in touch with you when it’s time for you to reach out to your senators) and about all the other opportunities when our narrative -- as Jewish, as progressives, as people who care about Israel, peace, and justice -- needs to be heard. I’m thankful for NJN and the work we’ll get done together. 

Is Israel Veering Towards Civil War? (Dina Kraft- March 24, 2025)

Dina Kraft is a journalist, podcaster and the co-author of the New York Times bestseller, My Friend Anne Frank, together with Hannah Pick-Goslar. She lives in Tel Aviv where she's the Israel Correspondent of  The Christian Science Monitor and a creator of the podcast Groundwork, about activists working in Israel and Palestine. She was formerly the opinion editor of Haaretz English.

So much is happening these days. Sometimes it’s the snapshots that say the most.

A Jerusalem sky heavy with storm clouds looming over a group of anti-government protesters opposed to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s efforts to fire Ronen Bar, head of the Shin Bet. It’s another anti-democratic step they say in the government’s slide towards autocracy.  Israeli flags flap in the wind. In the foreground an older man in a black wool hat is being shoved by five border police.

A leaked quote: “Yesterday you accused me of treason. Today you are threatening to send me to jail. Tomorrow you will execute me,” Bar reportedly told government ministers, according to a Channel 12 report.

A tweet by Netanyahu liked by Elon Musk: “In America and in Israel, when a strong right-wing leader wins an election, the leftist Deep State weaponizes the justice system to thwart the people’s will. They won’t win in either place! We stand strong together.”

A text from my daughter while babysitting for our neighbors’ young children upstairs: “If there’s an azaka (Hebrew for air-raid siren) can one of you come help bring them down to the shelter?”

In the last week Israel resumed fighting with Hamas in Gaza, in a surprise air assault that has killed and wounded hundreds, shattering 42 days of a cease-fire, the beginning of relief in Gaza, the emotional return of some of the hostages to Israel. 

And if war resuming was not enough, the some 70 percent of Israelis who don’t support the government felt the gut punch of a resumption of its plan to overhaul the judiciary (code opponents say for a power grab to weaken the courts) and attempts to fire not just Bar but the attorney general too, accusing Gali Baharav-Miara of blocking its agenda.

Tens of thousands of protesters have been packing the streets of Jerusalem and Tel Aviv for the past seven days straight, mass demonstrations of the likes not seen since before the war. On Saturday night in Tel Aviv over 100,000 marched through the streets.  They are back to chanting not just “Why are they still in Gaza?” referring to the remaining hostages and demanding a truce and a deal for all of them to be released from the Hamas tunnels under the rubble of Gaza, but also to chanting “Democracy! Democracy.”

Netanyahu appears indifferent to the sounds of protesters literally outside his home, on Gaza Street (yes, Gaza Street) near the official prime minister’s residence in Jerusalem. He is laser focused instead on pleasing the 68 members of his government, ensuring they will vote for the state budget Tuesday. Shoring up that solid government majority has meant assuring the ultra-Orthodox they will continue to be exempt from being conscripted into the army. It’s also featured welcoming back far-right Itamar Ben-Gvir to his job as national security minister along with his party back into the government.

Amid the government’s latest moves and the deep fracture they are creating – and at wartime no less – and the spiking police violence against demonstrators, former Supreme Court president Aharon Barak said he fears the country could be being pushed towards civil war.

Noting “the severe rift between Israelis and themselves,” he told Yediot Ahronot, the Israeli daily. “This rift is deteriorating and in the end, I fear, it will be like a train that goes off the tracks and plunges into a chasm causing a civil war.”

Shmuel Rosner, a political analyst and senior fellow at the Jewish People Policy Institute, says of potential civil war, “We need to define it before we can say if [it is] close or remote. If we are talking about people putting up barricades in streets or taking out pistols, I don’t think we are close to that.”

One of the potential dangers is people regarding the police as Ben-Gvir’s militia rather than the government body intended to also protect them, he notes.

Those warning of civil war, Barak among them, are “not alarmists, but are raising the flag early… It’s important to say we [Israelis] are not that unique to assume that no such thing can happen in Israel,” he adds. 

As a measure of the growing sense of lawlessness, and the fear and uncertainty that accompany this moment, I offer another snapshot. This one from Monday evening. A post on Bluesky, a social media network, from Yuval Abraham, the Israeli co-director of the Oscar-winning documentary “No Other Land.”

It reads: “A group of settlers just lynched Hamdan Ballal, co-director of our film ‘No Other Land’. They beat him and he has injuries in his head and stomach, bleeding. Soldiers invaded the ambulance he called, and took him. No sign of him since.”

Escalation x2 (Yossi Alpher- March 17, 2025)

Yossi Alpher is an independent security analyst. He is the former director of the Jaffee Center for Strategic Studies at Tel Aviv University, a former senior official with the Mossad, and a former IDF intelligence officer. Views and positions expressed here are those of the writer, and do not necessarily represent NJN's views and policy positions.

Q. On Sunday, PM Netanyahu announced that his government intended to fire Shin Bet head Ronen Bar, radically exacerbating relations between the government and the security community and fueling an atmosphere of national crisis. What happened?

A. The backdrop is criticism of Netanyahu by the Shin Bet domestic security service that has emerged into public view. Of special note is an investigation into suspicious links between Netanyahu’s senior aides and the Qataris (“Qatargate”) when Qatar was, with Bibi’s okay, funding Hamas prior to October 7. 

A public threat by Bar’s predecessor, Nadav Argaman, to expose additional problematic acts by the prime minister helped escalate the situation. The Prime Minister’s Office accuses both Shin Bet heads, current and former, of losing the PM’s trust and undermining an elected government that enjoys a popular mandate.

The Bar firing, an affair that is developing as we write, is linked to Gaza, which in turn is linked to Yemen and the Trump administration. See more below. But first, the second front of escalation.

Q. On Saturday, the US launched an air and naval offensive against the Houthis in northern Yemen. The IDF is attacking select terrorist targets in Gaza, Lebanon and Syria. Hostage talks with Hamas are stalled and Israel is threatening to renew the Gaza war. Can we expect missiles and rockets on Tel Aviv?

A. The short answer is: we should be prepared at least for missiles from Yemen and possibly for symbolic rocket fire from Gaza. That could mean cancellations by airlines and security-related complications for daily life in parts of Israel, not to mention possible casualties.

Q. US President Trump has vowed to end Middle East wars (and the Russia-Ukraine war). Why has the US attacked Yemen?

A. This is the first major use of force by the second Trump administration. It is totally inconsistent with Trump’s declared policy of employing negotiations and ‘deals’ to end Middle East and other wars. Trump’s rationale for the attack appears to reflect frustration over deadlocked US efforts to deter the Houthis from disrupting Red Sea shipping and to deter their backers in Tehran, and frustration with deadlocked Gaza hostage and ceasefire talks that feed into Houthi aggression. 

Nor could Trump miss a chance to try to “one up” the Biden administration’s earlier efforts to deter the Houthis: “Joe Biden’s response was pathetically weak, so the unrestrained Houthis just kept going. The Houthi attack on American vessels will not be tolerated. We will use overwhelming lethal force until we have achieved our objective.”

The Houthis, and Iran which arms and backs them, are tough adversaries. They are almost certain to escalate against Israel, whose retaliatory attacks have failed to deter them. Unless Trump plans to conquer the Houthis’ mountain redoubt in northern Yemen at a heavy cost in American lives, he too could fail. So this is a risky and disturbingly paranoid departure for his administration.

Q. Exactly how does this link up with Gaza, which is well over 1000 miles away from Yemen?

A. The immediate Middle East backdrop to the US attack is failure by Trump’s envoys, Steve Witkoff and Adam Boehler, to bring about a renewed Israel-Hamas ceasefire and hostage-release process. Boehler, who broke precedent by directly engaging Hamas, has been relieved by Trump of his mandate to gain release of US citizens held as prisoners by Hamas. The impression in Israel is that Boehler’s direct approach to Hamas, and its failure, actually ended up setting back efforts to renew the process.

Suspension of the Gaza ceasefire, coupled with the hostage freeze, have led Israel to cut off humanitarian aid to the Strip, causing renewed civilian hardship there. Not surprisingly the Houthis, who ceased firing their Iranian missiles at Israel when the ceasefire with Hamas went into effect in January, responded with renewed threats against Israel and immediate renewal of their attempt to blockade the Bab al-Mandeb Straits at the southern entrance to the Red Sea. 

Note the domino effect: global shipping via Egypt’s Suez Canal link between the Red Sea and the Mediterranean, which was virtually shut down by the Houthis after October 7, 2023 when Hamas attacked Israel, is once again threatened. This in turn affects the global economy. Trump’s surprising gambit to directly attack the Houthis could at least in the interim make things worse for Israel, Egypt, and--indirectly by prolonging the Gaza hostage crisis--Gazan Palestinians. 

Q. Is there an Israeli political backdrop to this new escalation threat?

A. Definitely. Prime Minister Netanyahu is constantly trying to balance Trump’s pressure to renew the Gaza ceasefire and prisoner-hostage exchange with counter-pressures within his coalition. Netanyahu’s messianic Orthodox coalition partners oppose any ceasefire, even at the cost of hostages’ lives. His ultra-Orthodox Haredi partners are holding the coalition hostage until they get a new law enshrining their very unholy exemption from military service. 

If the squabbling coalition does not pass a budget by the end of March, new elections are automatically mandated. Netanyahu wants to avoid elections for fear lest loss of power affect both his standing in a long-running court case and his stonewalling of efforts to launch an inquiry into his own role in the October 7 disaster. That means bribing these coalition extremists by avoiding hostage deals and at least threatening more war with Hamas.

Netanyahu’s relations with the security community, which supports a renewed ceasefire while nevertheless is obliged to prepare an exhausted IDF for yet another round of fighting in Gaza, are strained. His decision Sunday to fire Bar exacerbates those relations to an unprecedented level. Bar has made clear that he will not go quietly: he is challenging Netanyahu’s motives. Attorney General Gali Baharav Miara, another key national gatekeeper whom Netanyahu mistrusts and wants to remove, is intervening.

Q. Efforts by Trump emissaries to forestall renewed Gaza-related violence ended up focusing on an exchange, thus far abortive, for one live IDF hostage and four dead hostages, all US-Israeli dual citizens. Why?

A. The US is traditionally, and understandably, committed to rescuing its citizens from prison in hostile countries or from entities like Hamas. This is Boehler’s mission. The stalemate in broader efforts to restore the Israel-Gaza ceasefire/hostage/prisoner momentum and avoid renewed Gaza fighting reportedly led to an American proposal for a US-Hamas deal involving only five US citizens, dead and alive.

The Israeli public reacted to reports of this deal negatively. Awarding priority to US dual citizens over the remaining two dozen or so live Israeli hostages suffering in Hamas captivity and a like number of dead Israelis had a bad taste to it. Moreover, if there are no more US citizens held in Hamas tunnels in the Strip, might Trump conceivably lose interest? On the other hand, Israelis do not hide their gratitude to the Trump administration for all it is doing on behalf of the hostages. 

The abortive American-Israeli hostage deal was reportedly one of the factors in Boehler’s removal from the Gaza file. In parallel, the very stalemate exacerbated by that deal could well be a factor in the US decision to commence bombing the Houthis in Yemen. If a hostage-prisoner exchange and ceasefire renewal were in the offing, the US would presumably hold its fire to avoid sabotaging it. 

So would the IDF, which has apparently now commenced pinpoint Gaza attacks as a prelude to ending the ceasefire or as a way of renewing military pressure on Hamas without restarting all-out war. Or even, conceivably, with a new chief of staff anxious to please Netanyahu, as an escalatory measure ‘inadvertently’ leading to a full-fledged renewed conflict seemingly mandated by Hamas’s insistence that Israel agrees to end the conflict and leave it in power in Gaza.

Q. Bottom line?

A. Lest we forget, the Shin Bet under Ronen Bar was responsible on October 7 for early warning of a Hamas attack from Gaza. It bears a lot of the blame for that intelligence failure, which has led to the Houthis’ involvement in the conflict. Bar has acknowledged his responsibility and declared his intention to resign. In this context, the head of IDF intelligence and a number of additional key figures have already resigned. 

The only senior official bearing responsibility for the October 7 massacre and the ensuing war who has not acknowledged his failure and offered to resign is Netanyahu himself. It is Netanyahu’s in-your-face refusal to do so that lies at the heart of the current escalation on two fronts: domestic and distant. 

The Trump administration's offensive against the Houthis is totally inconsistent with Trump’s rhetoric about generating and maintaining peace in the Middle East. We must stop trying to rationalize Trump’s strategic thinking. It is clearly unpredictable and hence dangerous.

Israelis must prepare for renewed missile and rocket attacks with all their attendant ramifications for the economy, the burdens of IDF reserve call-ups, and Israelis’ peace of mind. If fighting in and around Gaza now escalates, Netanyahu will have found a new/old way of distracting the public from his evasion of responsibility, his coalition difficulties, and his legal problems. 

In the déjà vu department, I am reminded of the history of US passports in the hands of IDF soldiers. Until around 1970, an American who entered IDF service was obliged to give up his US citizenship. In 1964 I was one of a bare handful of Americans who did so. Eventually, the US Supreme Court changed all of that. Compare to today, when Israelis are speculating ruefully that their sons and daughters heading for IDF service should arrive in the army with a second passport as a potential ‘get out of jail free’ document…

Could Trump ‘Pull a Zelensky’ on Netanyahu? (Yossi Alpher - March 10, 2025)

Yossi Alpher is an independent security analyst. He is the former director of the Jaffee Center for Strategic Studies at Tel Aviv University, a former senior official with the Mossad, and a former IDF intelligence officer. Views and positions expressed here are those of the writer, and do not necessarily represent NJN's views and policy positions.

Q. Two weeks ago at the UN General Assembly, Israel voted with Russia and North Korea and against most of the world on the Ukraine issue. Does this sort of morally repugnant maneuver protect Israel from President Trump’s capricious international behavior, as demonstrated recently with Zelensky in the Oval Office?

A. That February 24 UN vote was something of a milestone for Israel, which had previously tried to demonstrate neutrality towards the Russia-Ukraine conflict. Indeed, a few years ago PM Naftali Bennett briefly tried to mediate between Moscow and Kiev. 

So did PM Netanyahu buy Israel an insurance policy against unfriendly Trump initiatives with that UN vote? Hardly. In the ensuing two weeks, it has emerged that Trump has initiated a direct US-Hamas negotiating track and is moving toward direct negotiations with Iran on the nuclear issue. Both are initiatives that Netanyahu opposes. 

(Even though moving in those directions would long ago have made sense for Netanyahu, too. See below.)

Q. But at both the moral and the global level, what is the significance of Israel siding so openly with Washington and Moscow regarding Ukraine? Surely it could have abstained at that UN General Assembly vote.

A. In view of the Israeli public’s preoccupation with rescuing the hostages and with the Netanyahu government’s renewed efforts at ‘judicial reform,’ that UN vote more or less passed under the radar in Israel. But it is significant. It appears to reflect a number of highly problematic short-term considerations on the part of the Netanyahu government.

For one, despite or perhaps in view of Trump’s near-daily change of tactics on a variety of issues, Netanyahu seemingly reckons he needs not only Trump in the Middle East, but Putin too. For example, in neighboring Syria, where Russian influence and presence (however residual in the aftermath of the fall of Bashar Assad) is preferable in Israeli eyes over Islamist Turkey, which is trying to turn Syria into a vassal state. Regarding Iran (where Moscow presumably opposes a military nuclear program as much as does Washington) Russia has reportedly agreed to mediate the issue between Washington and Tehran. 

Recently, Netanyahu sent his military secretary, Major General Roman Goffman, to Moscow for consultations. He sends no-one to Kiev.

Syria and Iran are areas of concern where Ukraine has neither influence nor interest. Add to this Jerusalem’s lingering Holocaust-era suspicions of Ukrainian anti-Semitism and corresponding WWII-era gratitude toward Russia. Then factor in Netanyahu’s reflex impulse to do Trump’s bidding regarding Russia and Ukraine. All these considerations ostensibly trump whatever moral qualms Netanyahu may have regarding Zelensky’s fate. 

Q. Indeed, Israel appears to have been ‘freed’ by Trump’s administration to take unprincipled and immoral stands regarding issues far closer to home. . . 

A. Precisely. In recent weeks Netanyahu has allowed himself to violate Israel’s US- and Qatari-brokered commitment to Hamas to open negotiations regarding phase II of the hostage/ceasefire agreement and has blocked humanitarian aid to Gaza. And the IDF is taking an unusually free hand on several other fronts. It remains on Syrian territory on the Golan and has even threatened to intervene in Syria on behalf of beleaguered Syrian Druze. It remains inside Lebanon despite the ceasefire agreement there. It is destroying entire neighborhoods in rebellious West Bank refugee camps in Jenin and Tulkarm. 

Q. All this freedom of maneuver, in return for toeing the line on Ukraine. But surely there is going to be a price to pay… 

A. Trump has kicked Zelensky out of the White House, cut off all weapons supplies to Ukraine, taken Russia’s side in the two countries’ war, ordered a cessation of US cyber operations targeting Russia and paused intelligence-sharing with Ukraine. What else, then, is he capable of doing regarding so-called allies like Ukraine and so-called enemies like Russia? Here is veteran commentator Nachum Barnea in Yediot Aharonot just a week ago regarding ramifications for Israel and Netanyahu’s blind support for Trump:

“In the short term this may pay off: As long as Trump backs Israel, it enjoys immunity. But, as Zelensky learned in person, Trump’s support is fickle. When Netanyahu watched the broadcast [of Zelensky, Trump and Vance] from the Oval Office, I reckon his stomach churned. Just a few weeks earlier, he had sat on the same chair. In the absence of shared values, betrayal is always waiting around the corner.”

Q. What sort of betrayal?

A. The Israeli intelligence community is already wondering whether Israeli intelligence shared with the US now flows to Russia (Europeans and Australians are also wondering). If Trump is talking to Iran and Hamas, what is he telling them about Israel? Could his next step be a Ukraine-style reduction of arms and intelligence supply to Israel to leverage pressure, based on his bilateral understandings with the Russians, the Iranians, or even Hamas?

Q. Granted that Trump’s abandonment of Ukraine reflects a lack of moral foundation in his approach to international relations and that Netanyahu is buying into this. But where does it end?

A. In opting for Russia over NATO and Europe with regard to Ukraine, Trump is making a major strategic choice in American policy. Presumably, because he leads the world’s preeminent superpower, he can get away with this and zigzag back and forth at will. But Netanyahu? The Israeli leader’s choice of Russia over Europe with regard to Ukraine and his abandonment of minimal moral principals could have serious long-term consequences for Israel. Not only is Europe Israel’s biggest trading partner, not too long ago UK and French aircraft defended Israel against Iranian missiles and drones . . .  

What’s more, if in Trump’s case the abrupt changes in international orientation can tentatively be explained as a reflection of his sentiment-free transaction-based approach to perceived US interests, this is not the case with Netanyahu. For Bibi, the principal motive is his own and his coalition’s political survival. The hostages, the Hamas ceasefire, the Iranian threat, Israel’s attitude toward a hostile Russia-- all are subordinate to Israeli politics and Netanyahu’s personal fate.

Q. And to Trump’s totally unpredictable policy zigzags and lack of moral and strategic foundation.

A. Amen.

Q. One more issue that you just raised: you suggest that Netanyahu should consider offering direct Israeli contact with Hamas and Iran. But both call for Israel’s destruction and refuse to talk to it.

A. If nothing else, a repeated Israeli call for direct negotiations would highlight to the world exactly who the hardliner is here. Besides, people like me have had unofficial contacts with Iranians and Palestinian Islamists for decades. Asking intermediaries like Russia and Turkey to facilitate negotiations with Islamists is good for Israel’s image in everyone’s eyes-- except Israel’s own Jewish extremists.

New Jewish Narrative- Winter Letter 2025

Read the letter HERE.

The World Zionist Congress Is Our Chance to Demand a Better Future. Don’t Pass It Up. (Maxxe Albert-Deitch, March 3, 2025)

Maxxe Albert-Deitch (she/her) is New Jewish Narrative’s Deputy Director of Communications. In her previous life as a historian, she spent several years researching and working on archaeology projects in the field of conflict transformation in Israel and Palestine. Maxxe is also the primary host of PeaceCast, the podcast dedicated to exploring issues and trends relating to peace and progress for Israel.

"Your generation is going to change the world someday.” At first, I took that remark as praise, as a lofty goal to try to live up to. But then it became, “you’re going to fix the world,” and “you young people are going to save the world.” That phrase has since curdled my sense of optimism into raw determination. It’s difficult to change, let alone fix or save, anything when my generation’s voices are underrepresented in government and, especially in my case, Jewish community institutions alike. But as Shirley Chisholm once said, “if they don't give you a seat at the table, bring a folding chair.” So I found the largest nearby table – the World Zionist Congress – and I brought a folding chair: I attached my name to the Hatikvah Slate for the election cycle of 2025.

I can’t fix all the horrors of the modern world, certainly not as an individual. What I can do is ensure that voices like mine – a 26-year-old female progressive Jewish voice – are heard within my own community. The World Zionist Congress is the “parliament of the Jewish people.” Representatives elected to the WZC make key decisions surrounding the allocation of roughly $5 billion over a five-year term. These elections determine and respond to the most pressing needs across Israel and Diaspora Jewish society. I am resolved that democracy, human rights, gender equity, and the pursuit of peace be at the forefront of the Congress’s mission. In addition, voting is a concrete action that signals to the broader Jewish community what our values are and where time, money, and attention should be allocated. Change begins in our homes, in our communities, and in the organizations that speak in our voices. As an American Jew, the Hatikvah Slate is my chance to be heard – and it can be yours, too.

Like so many American Jews, I have grown increasingly frustrated with the establishment Jewish organizations who respond to Israel’s Occupation of Palestinian territories with silence, if not approval. We rightly grieve in shock at the horrific events of October 7th, and the plight of the hostages since then. We rightly guard our safety carefully as antisemitism rises around the world. But our pain does not justify turning a blind eye toward extremist settlers committing heinous acts of violence in the West Bank. That does not explain away the tens of thousands killed in Gaza. From kindergarten to Sunday school to the speeches on the last day of summer camp, Jewish leaders taught me that it’s our community’s job to repair the world and speak out against injustice. I have watched too many in my community stand silent and fail to do so. 

The World Zionist Congress elections might seem like an unusual place to take a stand, especially for someone as outspoken about Israel’s issues as I am. It isn’t. The Hatikvah Slate has long been a quietly revolutionary side of an established structure, and now it provides a chance for my generation’s voice to be heard. I still believe in an Israel that lives up to the best of its ideals: an inclusive, diverse country that provides a safe home to the peoples whose cultures and histories have been rooted there for millennia. Hatikvah represents the chance to channel funds away from radical settlers and extremists, to advocate for gender equity and women’s and LGBTQIA+ voices in traditionally male, Orthodox spaces, and to demand that Israel live up to its promise to be a light unto the nations. 

Voting is open between March 10 and May 4, 2025. I urge everyone in the Jewish community, particularly those who feel disconnected or disaffected in today’s political and religious climate to vote, even (or maybe especially) if you’ve never participated in a WZC election before. Make your voice heard. Help ensure that the governing body that represents our voice and that our community stands for our beliefs. It's in the name: Hatikvah. Vote for hope.

The Israelis and Palestinians Speaking of Reconciliation Amid Rising Calls for Revenge (Dina Kraft, February 24, 2025)

Dina Kraft is a journalist, podcaster and the co-author of the New York Times bestseller, My Friend Anne Frank, together with Hannah Pick-Goslar. She lives in Tel Aviv where she's the Israel Correspondent of  The Christian Science Monitor and a creator of the podcast Groundwork, about activists working in Israel and Palestine. She was formerly opinion editor of Haaretz English.

On Friday morning I woke up along with the rest of the country to the gruesome news that it was not Shiri Bibas’ body that had just arrived to Israel from Gaza along with the bodies of her two red-headed young sons and their peace activist neighbor, Oded Lifshitz,  but that of an unidentified woman from Gaza. It was yet another nauseating plot twist in the ongoing trauma of the October 7 attack and its aftermath, one in which the Bibas’ family’s kidnapping and plight had become the most high-profile symbol.

On my calendar that morning was to go hear peace activists Maoz Inon and Aziz Abu Sarah. Inon is an Israeli whose parents were burned to death the morning of October 7 on their moshav Netiv Asara, and Abu Sarah, a Palestinian whose brother was killed from injuries sustained after being held in Israeli prison, and they were headlining at an event entitled “It’s Time”. It’s tagline: “It’s time to stop the war, to bring the hostages home, and to make peace.”  

I momentarily hesitated, feeling overwhelmed by the heaviness and fresh horror of the moment. I had gone to sleep with the news of not just image of the Bibas family members and Lifshitz returning in coffins swirling in my mind, but the late-breaking story that several empty busses – it turned out to be five in total – had exploded at a bus depot at a southern suburb of Tel Aviv. It was a botched mass terror attempt. For Israelis it was an instant flashback to the Second Intifada era of suicide bombings.

I felt a familiar feeling creep up -- this sense that every time Israelis and Palestinians step an inch closer to some kind of respite from the storm of this war – it is again snatched away. The current uncertainty is whether or not the ceasefire deal that despite its fragility has being holding and halting the bloodshed, and ending the agony for some hostages and their loved ones as well as that of Palestinian detainees held after a mass sweep of arrests following post-October 7 in Gaza who, were also being released. (Among the hundreds of Palestinian prisoners being released there have also been those convicted of killing or planning attacks against Israeli civilians).

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu vowing “revenge” Friday for the false return of Shiri Bibas’  body (her actual remains were returned later in the day), and stalling the handover of the next group of Palestinian prisoners, and an Israeli public seething over the family’s fate as well as the spectacle of the most recent Hamas ceremony and the near-miss of the bus attacks the Israeli public is boiling with rage.

Social media pages posts and tweets brim with calls to “Never forgive, never forget” (the same slogan Israeli prison authority officials printed in Hebrew on the sweatshirts they made Palestinians prisoners wear last week as they were releasesed), Kahanist-style language has been mainstreamed including rousing enthusiasm for “Trumpsfer”  (slang for Trump’s “suggestion” to empty Gaza of Gazans)  alongside calls for Shiri Bibas’ and boys’ “blood to be avenged.” (Notably the Bibas family themselves rejected calls for revenge, speaking out instead for the ceasefire to hold so that the remaining 63 hostages can be returned, over 20 of whom are presumed to be alive).

Against this backdrop, the words of Inon and Abu Sarah made the case for peace and argued they represent a larger piece of the Israeli-Palestinian public than polls or social media anger suggest.  They dismissed those who might call them naive, calling war the solution that despite its ongoing deployment since the history of Israel’s creation has, although it’s played a key role in protecting Israelis, has ultimately yet to prove itself as anything but a harbinger of more doom.

Echoing their Ted Talk from last spring that became one of the most watched of 2024, they described how they are working to help forge a joint Israeli-Palestinian coalition fixed on reconciliation and peace, not more war. “Hope is action,” said Inon. “We have to work together so that another future can be possible – one based on clear principles including reconciliation and security for everyone.”

Abu Sarah, like Inon, works in tourism, leading the dual narrative travel company company, Mejdi.  He says it’s not by chance that both he and Inon come from that world – it’s “a place of dreams, of getting out of your comfort zone, of seeking something different.”

They called on those gathered to join them in The People’s Peace Summit, a two-day event scheduled for May in Jerusalem.

The words and vision were uplifting, but it was the music performed by a Jewish-Palestinian music ensemble that was perhaps the most potent balm on the hearts of those listening, hungry for an alternative to the drumbeat of war.

The pianist thundered through minor chord improvisations invoking intense longings before breaking into the melody of John Lennon’s song, “Imagine”.

Three days later I was on Kibbutz Be’eri, reporting a story on efforts to rebuild the kibbutz, a ground zero of October 7. The remains of many of the homes that were torched during Hamas’ massacre in which 96 people were killed and 26 taken hostage, have been knocked down, leaving muddy plots behind, awaiting what might come next.

Rebuilding efforts are underway, some businesses have reopened including its well-known printing factory a beloved bakery, Lalush, and a dairy shop. About 100 residents, most of them older members, have moved back although the hope is that families with children will return in the next two years. Some are already picking out the tiles and doors for their new homes being built in a new neighborhood of the kibbutz.

The refrain I heard repeatedly is that everyone is aching to return home to the sense of community, to the pastoral views, but what they say, will determine everything, is if people feel safe -- if there is a feeling of security, a pathway to lasting peace with the Palestinians strong enough to break the memories of the trauma.

In 2018, the last time I had been to Beeri, that time for a story on Israeli peace activists  reaching out to people in Gaza,  I interviewed a resident named Tami Suchman, one of the most vocal advocates on the kibbutz for peace, along with her neighbor Vivian Silver. Both women were murdered October 7.  

That day, when we met in a clothing shop she helped run that no longer exists – it was burned down by Hamas, Suchman told me words that still resonate today: “I don’t see anyone working on the diplomatic front … Even if there is war it will not solve anything. Everyone knows that without negotiated deals there are no solutions.”

The Antisemitism Awareness Act is Our Latest Self-Inflicted Existential Threat (Larry Gellman- February 17, 2025)

Larry Gellman currently serves on the board of NJN, J Street, and CLAL. Over the last 40 years he served as a founding member of the AIPAC board in Tucson and was a national leader and honoree of Israel Bonds, a founder of the Milwaukee Jewish Day School, and named Jewish Man of the Year in both Milwaukee and Tucson after chairing Federation annual campaigns in both cities. He spent his career as a widely recognized financial advisor and won awards as a television news reporter in Ohio and Wisconsin. Views and positions expressed here are those of the writer, and do not necessarily represent NJN's views and policy positions.

It is very significant that the leaders of Americans for Peace Now and Ameinu decided to call our new combined organization "The New Jewish Narrative". The basic fundamental definitions of what it means to be Jewish or a Zionist or pro-Israel or what constitutes antisemitism have never been less clear or more the source of passionate disagreement and confusion among caring Jews.

There has never been a time when Jews were more in need of a New Narrative to provide a framework for enabling fact-based, civil, and respectful conversations regarding the meanings of those terms and how to support Israel and move forward as a Jewish community--assuming that is even possible.

Throughout Jewish history, there have been several decent periods and many more very challenging periods. The most common storyline is that Jews have repeatedly faced vicious and brutal discrimination from powerful gentile neighbors who have sought to literally or figuratively humiliate, hurt, or destroy us. We are familiar with legitimate feelings of victimhood and until recently we have had no experience at all regarding how to deal with the power and control over our own destiny that the State of Israel and American Jews enjoy today. In short, we developed narratives and organizations to help us deal with our victimhood but we have no cultural norms regarding how to deal with victory and success.

As I said in my column for APN last July, the term "antisemitism" has been weaponized and politicized (most notably through laws, college policies, and statements) that establish the unconstitutional Israelist International Holocaust Remembrance Association (IHRA) definition which overwhelmingly deals with criticism of Israel and those who "target" Israel and claim to care too much about Israel as the one and only definition of antisemitism. 

President Biden--to his credit--resisted huge pressure from AIPAC and Israelist Jews and Republicans to anoint the IHRA definition as the one and only legal definition two years ago and instead said it was one of several (including the Nexus and Jerusalem definitions which were far less Israel-centric) that are both useful and essential. 

And last year, Senator Chuck Schumer bravely and wisely refused to even allow the Antisemitism Awareness Act to be voted on in the Senate after passing the House. But now--one election and a few months later--Schumer and many of his fellow Democrats have succumbed to pressure from AIPAC and Jewish legacy organizations and pressure from the Trumpenyahu Cult and are SPONSORING the same bill which is now certain to pass by a large margin and become law. 

The bill does not provide a single example of how to fight antisemitism. It simply states that the unconstitutional IHRA definition--which outlaws free speech and states that anyone who suggests that some Jews (most of the Jews I know including myself) are loyal to both the U.S. and the State of Israel-- is the sole legal definition and can be used by the government to charge those who criticize Israel too effectively with a crime and cost them their jobs and their businesses and could perhaps even send them to prison.

In short, in the same way that abortion was criminalized and enabled zealous prosecutors to send providers and recipients of abortions to prison and have their lives ruined, so too this bill risks doing the same to those who are critical of the actions of the Israeli government and branding them as antisemites and criminals. 

This is yet another victory for the Israelists and billionaires who run some legacy organizations and now our government in their fight to remove Jewish and American values as our defining principles and replace them with arbitrary and clearly unconstitutional mandates and laws that make the exercise of those guaranteed rights as criminal activity.

Meanwhile, some Jewish organizations have abandoned most references to "Judaism," and the Jewish ethics and wisdom traditions that most of us were raised with and which for many of us have been the magnet and the glue that attracted us to Jewish study and activism and community leadership. Today, those organizations are all about unequivocally supporting the Israeli government no matter how it behaves and wallowing in very real Jewish victimhood and antisemitism without ever acknowledging how great it is to be a Jew today or any inconvenient truths about the consequences of the Occupation or Israeli government policies in the West Bank and Gaza. For decades, Federations and JCCs sponsored Torah and Talmud classes which attracted thousands. Today virtually all of those classes are sponsored by Chabad or synagogues on a local basis.

There is still Jew hatred among some on the far left who equate Jews as being unequivocal supporters of the Israeli government and its actions but that hatred mostly related to the behavior of Israel. The real existential threats to Jews and Israel are from White and Jewish Supremacists and the political AIPAC/Evangelical/Republican alliance that now is clearly in control of Congress and legacy Jewish organizations. The AAA and the IHRA definition are loaded with examples of antisemitism related to criticism of the behavior of Jews and Israel but provide not a word about the actions of someone like Elon Musk who twice gave a Nazi salute during Trump's inauguration and then told German neo-Nazis they should stop feeling guilty about the Holocaust.

We are getting more and more troubling news every day about the actions of our new president and his cult of enablers and how they plan to use and abuse the absolute power granted them by this election to destroy democracy and a civil caring society. Now, for purely political reasons, some of our Democratic leaders and champions have chosen to join them.

There has never been a better time in history to be a Jew than it is in the U.S. today and the differences between what it was like back when Jews were getting nose jobs and changing their names here just a generation ago are overwhelming. And the term Zionism has never been more confusing since virtually everyone who uses it does so to convey very different views about what it means since it was created as an aspirational term before that dream was realized.

To create space and civility and pluralism in the Jewish community to deal with the many new challenges that have come from winning multiple victories and living lives that are beyond the wildest aspirational dreams of our parents and grandparents and any other Jews in history, we desperately need a New Jewish Narrative to help us move forward and to get us to stop digging the semantic hole in which we are being voluntarily buried.

Gaza Week in Review: Buchenwald, Riviera, Israel’s Wholesale Prisoner Release (Hard Questions, Tough Answers- February 10, 2025)

Yossi Alpher is an independent security analyst. He is the former director of the Jaffee Center for Strategic Studies at Tel Aviv University, a former senior official with the Mossad, and a former IDF intelligence officer. Views and positions expressed here are those of the writer, and do not necessarily represent NJN's views and policy positions.

Q. Your title reads like a bizarre stream of consciousness…

A. It was quite a week. Every event (Gaza), bombastic statement (Trump), or low-key yet momentous mass prisoner release by Israel called up a troublesome association from the past. Even the comparisons of freed Israeli hostages to Nazi camp survivors, while historically problematic, were understandable to anyone who knows the US Army photos of Buchenwald and Bergen Belsen survivors from 1945.

Q. Perhaps you can start with the Israeli release of Palestinian prisoners. That got the least media attention.

A. Every time we see three or four Israeli hostages released by Hamas after being paraded before a ludicrous terrorist pseudo-tribunal, with Red Cross participation and a mass Gazan audience, Israel responds by releasing over 100 (183 on Saturday) convicted or recently captured Palestinian terrorists from its jails--with minimal ceremony and fanfare. 

There are several reasons for Israel to downplay its weekly release of Palestinian prisoners. First, it is extremely unpopular among Israelis, who are well aware that they are potentially setting free the next Yahya Sinwar, the next Hamas or Islamic Jihad suicide bomber. 

Shin Bet statistics show that around 12 percent of Palestinian terrorists who are convicted and later released by Israel are terrorism recidivists. Recall that Sinwar, the Hamas leader who orchestrated the October 7 attack on Israel, was released in 2011 as part of the deal for captured IDF soldier Gilad Shalit.

Second, Hamas quite understandably trumpets the release by Israel of its incarcerated Palestinian terrorists and fighters--some, frankly, also looking emaciated and abused--as a victory. The price Hamas extracts from Israel for a single Israeli--dozens of terrorists--is indeed mind-boggling in the annals of prisoner exchanges. Compare for example to Russians and Ukrainians, whose POW exchanges are roughly one-on-one.

Is one Israeli really the equivalent of dozens or even scores of Palestinians, some of them mass murderers? At a certain philosophical level, there is something insulting here to both sides. Israel, for its part, has no need to help Palestinians celebrate. Indeed, the ceremonies Hamas choreographs in the Strip on Saturdays, with emaciated Israelis thanking their tormentors, are designed to play up Hamas’s ‘victory’ and obvious ongoing control of the Strip and, correspondingly, humiliate Israel.

Releasing terrorists in exchange for emaciated Israelis is one primary price that Israel is paying for the sins of October 7, 2023 that are widely attributed to the leadership under Netanyahu and the security establishment. The Netanyahu government is not comfortable reminding Israelis of that, either.

Q. Along comes President Trump with his scheme to transfer out all Gazans and rebuild the Strip as a luxury Riviera. Anything to add to the near universal condemnation of this latest real estate project?

A. It is “something that will be magnificent”, according to the president of the United States. But wait: this is not going to happen.

First of all, I direct Trump’s attention to the weekly Hamas hostage-release ceremonies, in Gaza City, Khan Yunis, Dir al Balach, etc. Note that there are cities sporting functioning built-up neighborhoods in the Strip. Not everything was destroyed by the Israel Air Force. 

Secondly, one way or another most Gazans will not budge, if only because all Palestinian and other Arab leaders will insist they stay. The Trump-Kushner-Witkoff real-estate-messianic settler understanding of the Arab and Islamist world is abysmal. A more constructive approach than exiling 1.8 million Gazans and building a pie-in-the-sky Riviera would recognize that a certain percentage of homes in Gaza, rarely shown by media intent on displaying rubble, survived this war and can be expanded with emergency housing. Indeed, apparently some 30 percent of structures are still usable.

Second, my personal association upon encountering Trump’s Riviera balloon was Shimon Peres and Yitzhak Rabin, two far more down-to-earth leaders in their day, whose visions for Gaza were as bizarre as Trump’s. Peres envisioned the Strip as Singapore on the Mediterranean. Rabin day-dreamed out loud of the Strip sliding into the sea and disappearing. And let’s not forget Netanyahu, who in years past openly espoused the notion of ‘economic peace’ for Gaza with its extremist Islamist leadership and now proposes that Gazans be resettled in Saudi Arabia. 

It turns out that an intractable problem inspires extreme, and ultimately disastrous, visions of solutions.

Q. Then there was Paraguay . . . 

A. After Israel conquered the Strip in 1967, a host of schemes were launched to alleviate its poverty and overcrowding. 

I was then in the Mossad, where I encountered the most advanced program. In the late 1960s Gazans were offered $10,000 apiece to emigrate, with Israel’s logistic help, to Paraguay, which apparently needed an influx of immigrant manpower. Everything went quietly and smoothly, until a disgruntled Gazan migrant attacked the Israel embassy in Asuncion, killing one Israeli. That ended that.

It was not always this way. In 1949 the Strip was occupied by Egypt in the aftermath of Israel’s War of Independence. Its population was primarily Palestinian refugees from southern Israel (whose great-grandchildren were the barbarian Hamas invaders of southern Israel on October 7--that is the meaning of ‘historic conflict’). Prime Minister David Ben Gurion offered to repatriate to Israel 100,000 Palestinian refugees from Gaza (according to another version, even 200,000, meaning most of the refugees; in yet another version, Israel takes in everyone, including native Gazans). 

Ben Gurion’s condition was that Israel occupy and annex the Strip and that the Arab world make peace with Israel. Egypt and the other Arab countries refused.

Israel in 1949 numbered around 700,000 Jews. Holocaust survivors were flooding in. Absorbing even 100,000 Palestinian refugees would have been a huge burden. Ben Gurion wanted the territory of the Strip as a military buffer against an Egyptian invasion targeting Tel Aviv, which the nascent IDF rebuffed at great cost in 1948. 

In the ensuing decades, Israel and Egypt made first more war, then peace. The Strip lost its military significance. Until October 7 . . . 

Q. Bottom line?

A. Notwithstanding Netanyahu’s statements to credulous and compliant American TV interviewers to the effect that Israel is poised to defeat Hamas, Israel is actually withdrawing and the hostage-for-prisoner exchange continues apace. Hundreds of Palestinian terrorists are being released back to Gaza. 

Israel has no viable plan for defeating Hamas, which can legitimately claim to have survived this war despite awesome losses in both leadership and rank-and-file. Absent a working alternative--which Israel refuses to offer--Hamas is the leader of Gazans. 

With all due respect to Trump, he too has no viable plan. Netanyahu cannot bring himself to embrace phase II of the Gaza withdrawal plan. His repeated postponements over the past year of a hostage deal in favor of more death and destruction in Gaza and his own political survival have cost the lives of countless Gazans, hundreds of IDF soldiers and dozens of hostages. One stomach-churning outcome was evident in the Dir al-Balah hostage release on Saturday.

Fantasy check: Were Trump’s transfer scheme actually to transpire, we would likely see another chapter of the Arab-world domino effect that recently toppled the Assad regime in Syria. Remember, the Arab state system is undemocratic and fragile. Hundreds of thousands more Palestinians in Jordan could topple a regime that is militarily allied with Israel and promotes regional stability. Hundreds of thousands of Hamas supporters in Egypt could strengthen the Muslim Brotherhood there that threatens a regime friendly to Israel. King Abdullah II and President a-Sisi will presumably explain this to Trump in person in the days ahead when they visit Washington.

Singapore, Riviera, Atlantis (Rabin’s dream), ‘economic peace’? Let’s face it: We are stuck with the Strip. 

But here is an unintended positive-outcome scenario--whose likelihood is impossible to predict--to conclude with. Netanyahu embraces Trump’s Gaza transfer idea. His defense minister has already set the wheels in motion. Along come the Saudis and offer normalization if only Netanyahu will abandon transfer. 

Sounds incredulous? That is what the UAE did in 2019-20, at least at the declarative level: normalization in return for Netanyahu backing off from annexing the West Bank. Never mind that the transfer idea is not feasible and that West Bank annexation (three million more Palestinian Israelis is not a serious idea) was not really in the cards. Back in 2020, Trump actually got some credit.

And here on earth? Netanyahu and his government are delaying negotiating another phase of hostage release. They refuse to appoint a national commission of inquiry to investigate the events of October 7 that they helped trigger. They prefer to dream of destroying Hamas and ‘relocating’ two million Gazans. And they are selling these fantasies to gullible Israelis.

All Quiet on All Fronts? (Hard Questions, Tough Answers- February 3, 2025)

Yossi Alpher is an independent security analyst. He is the former director of the Jaffee Center for Strategic Studies at Tel Aviv University, a former senior official with the Mossad, and a former IDF intelligence officer. Views and positions expressed here are those of the writer, and do not necessarily represent NJN's views and policy positions.

Q. Until recently, you spoke of no fewer than seven active war-fronts. Now all are quiet?

A. The ceasefire and the hostage/prisoner exchange with Gaza-based Hamas have indeed, at least temporarily, silenced almost all fronts. The Hezbollah/Iran front was already quiescent. Now the Yemeni Houthis and Iraqi pro-Iran militias have also ceased firing missiles at Israel in deference to the ceasefire in Gaza and Lebanon. 

Q. You said “almost” all fronts?

A. The IDF has switched its focus of attention to the West Bank, and particularly the northern West Bank towns of Jenin and Tulkarm. There in recent months militant groups, in part inspired by Hamas and in part in response to settler-extremist territorial provocations, have been targeting Israel and Israelis. IDF and Shin Bet intelligence assess that the cumulative release, under ceasefire provisions, of hundreds of Palestinian terrorists from Israeli jails, many of them to homes in the West Bank, will further augment anti-Israel incitement there. Hence the IDF West Bank offensive is understood to be punitive, preventive and deterrent.

Q. Sounds familiar. Déjà vu?

A. That’s understatement. Way back in the 1930s, during what was known as the Arab Revolt, British mandatory forces fought a radical Palestinian uprising that centered on the northern West Bank ‘triangle’ of Nablus, Tulkarm and Jenin. Then (by the RAF), as now (by the IAF), militant strongholds were bombed from the air, meaning resorting to bombing territory ostensibly under one’s own strategic control in view of the tenacity of the enemy. The northern triangle Arab towns also led the Palestinian cause in the course of two intifadas in the 1990s and early 2000s.

One key difference today is that the IDF is working in tandem with Palestinian Authority forces that are as concerned as Israel about Hamas-inspired militancy in the West Bank.

Q. Quiet is guaranteed on the Lebanon front?

A. No. Political stability is not yet assured in Lebanon--negotiations over a new governing coalition continue apace--and the Lebanese Army has not yet deployed throughout the south in accordance with ceasefire stipulations. The US and the Lebanese have agreed to extend the redeployment deadline until February 18. Until and unless everything is in place, fighting could again break out between Israel and Hezbollah/Iran, thereby potentially triggering renewal of missile attacks from Yemen and Iraq.

Q. So the ceasefire is delicate. This week, Israel enters negotiations with Hamas, hosted by Qatar, Egypt and the US, regarding phase II of the Gaza hostage/prisoner release and ceasefire deal. In parallel, PM Netanyahu meets President Trump in Washington. What is at stake?

A. Phase II is supposed to free the remaining hostages, alive and dead, render the ceasefire permanent, and provide for a number of Israeli, Palestinian and international moves that include further IDF withdrawal and opening of Gaza Strip borders. The PA and Egypt are already taking up roles alongside the European Union at the Rafah crossing between the Strip and Egypt. Trump envoy Steve Witkoff, with whom Netanyahu also meets in Washington, has been playing a hands-on dynamic role.

Note, in this context, that Israel for its part has no known proposals for the ‘day after’ in Gaza. Hamas last week helpfully and accurately summed up Israel’s recent history of abortive proposals: “Here is the list of evil Israeli projects that [Hamas] succeeded in thwarting: the ‘generals’ plan [to empty out northern Gaza], rule by clans, a floating harbor, humanitarian ‘bubbles’, military rule, renewed settlement, Palestinian migration to Sinai, and fragmenting the Strip by means of the Netzarim [central Gaza] and Philadelphi [Rafah, southern Gaza] strips.”

Sounds familiar? Netanyahu, it now emerges, has failed to defeat Hamas in Gaza, yet he either does not know or will not acknowledge that fact. Netanyahu and Trump will presumably discuss this Israeli lack of a strategy against a backdrop of a host of key controversial issues that could affect political stability in Israel as well as strategic stability in the Middle East.

Q. Start with political stability in Israel . . . 

A. If the Gaza ceasefire becomes permanent, the Kahanist-messianists in Netanyahu’s coalition, let by Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich, are threatening to leave, thereby potentially bringing down the government and precipitating elections. Smotrich, along with National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir who has already resigned, want to settle the Gaza Strip, not withdraw from it. 

Then too, the unresolved crisis with the ultra-Orthodox or Haredi parties in the coalition over compulsory national service for Haredi young men--a crisis sparked by losses and manpower shortfalls in the war--also threatens coalition stability.

Q. And regional strategic stability . . . 

A. Trump is likely to press Netanyahu to commit to phase II in the Strip, potentially at the cost of coalition stability in Jerusalem. Here Trump’s primary concern is avoidance of war in the Middle East on his watch. Besides, he apparently genuinely believes he can persuade Arab countries, led by Jordan and Egypt, to absorb hundreds of thousands of destitute refugees from the Gaza Strip--a territory whose Mediterranean coastline is in his eyes essentially prime real estate: “You know, we just clean out that whole thing and say, ‘You know, it’s over.’ . . . I’d rather get involved with some of the Arab nations and build housing at a different location . . . .“

Trump’s real estate and mass migration ideas for Gaza and the Gazans are non-starters. They may deceive right-wing Israelis who covet Gazan land and misunderstand Trump’s support. But they are at the very least serious irritants for the Arab world. Above all, Gazans under ongoing Hamas rule or even PA rule will never agree to leave Palestinian territory. 

As Palestine-expert Michael Milstein wrote in Yediot Aharonot, “Like many of Trump’s proposals [Greenland, Panama, Canada], the [Gaza] ‘deal’ has material logic while ignoring ideological and cultural dimensions, historical memory, and tensions between Israel, the Arab world and the Palestinians that are stronger than any other consideration in the Middle East post-October 7.” Trump and his Israeli supporters completely misunderstand the Palestinian issue, not to mention the tenets of Hamas-style militant Islam that is almost certain to continue to rule Gaza. And not to mention international legal prohibitions of ‘transfer’.

Beyond the discomfort of Trump’s abortive Gaza real estate and demographic ideas, Netanyahu will conceivably acquiesce more easily in an ongoing Gaza ceasefire if he receives reassurances, however tentative, about both normalization with Saudi Arabia and joint US-Israel planning for military measures/pressure against Iran over its nuclear program. 

Q. Will Trump accommodate Netanyahu on these issues?

A. True, both steps could prove politically popular with Netanyahu’s constituency. But the Saudis need real promises regarding a Palestinian state, however distant in the future. And Trump does not relish the idea of war anywhere in the Middle East, whether Gaza or Iran.

Q. Bottom line: your best guess for Israel and the region in the months ahead?

A. Elections in Israel in 2025, which leave the nationalist and messianic right wing in power. A stalemate between Trump and the friendly Arab world over the disposition of the Gaza Strip, leaving hundreds of thousands of Gazans in homeless poverty. Trump-sponsored ‘normalization’ between Saudi Arabia and Israel postponed by these events and developments. A Trump administration attempt to negotiate with Iran over nuclear issues, possibly using an Israeli military threat as a ‘stick’.

All this, at barely over 50 percent probability. After all, this is the Middle East. 

And all this while Israel, which has criminally neglected the ‘day after’ in Gaza, is left to contemplate the meaning of October 7 for the Zionist reality; while Hamas remains in power in Gaza because Netanyahu will not back a Palestinian alternative; and while Palestinians and other Arabs contemplate the 50,000 dead, buried and unburied, in Gaza.

Meanwhile, US-Israel relations face dangerous complications regarding Gaza: over the fate of the ceasefire; over population transfer schemes of Trump and the Israeli messianist right-wing; and over the role being played by American mercenaries (“private military companies”), with their doubtful reputation from Iraq and elsewhere, in policing the ceasefire and its population-movement provisions.

As for Netanyahu, he has backed down by doing a deal with Hamas inside the Strip. He has backed down by allowing the PA to return to the Rafah crossing. What next?

As Israel celebrates the return of the young women hostages whose warnings of a Hamas attack were ignored, will the deadly hubris & sexism be acknowledged? (Dina Kraft, January 27, 2024)

Dina Kraft is a journalist, podcaster and the co-author of the New York Times bestseller, My Friend Anne Frank, together with Hannah Pick-Goslar. She lives in Tel Aviv where she's the Israel Correspondent of  The Christian Science Monitor and a creator of the podcast Groundwork, about activists working in Israel and Palestine. She was formerly opinion editor of Haaretz English.

In the weeks and months before Israel’s nightmare scenario unfolded at dawn on October 7, 2023, a unit of young female soldiers reported seeing streams of white pick-up trucks, vans, and motorcycles of Hamas militants near the border fence with Israel. Some paused to use binoculars to get a closer look into Israel.

The “spotters”, posted to 24-hour shifts at Nahal Oz base on Israel’s border with Gaza, studied surveillance cameras for suspicious activity and reported to their superiors what they were seeing.

They also listed other unusual Hamas activity unusually close to the border fence – the flying of drones, attempts to down army security cameras and even what appeared to be practice at shelling tanks. They suspected, they told their higher-ups, some kind of cross-border raid was afoot. They could not imagine the scope of what it would turn out to be a rehearsal for – but they passed on the concerning information – only to be ignored.

Their direct officers, also women,  persisted -- only to be warned by one high-ranking officer in Southern Command that if they continued to pester him, they would be court-martialed. They were trained to be the “eyes” of the Israeli army, they were told, but not the brains.

On October 7,  15 of the spotters, “tatzpitaniot” in Hebrew, were among the over 50 soldiers slaughtered on Nahal Oz base. Seven others were taken hostage, dazed and bloodied into Gaza by Hamas and a handful of others survived hiding, some of them huddled among dead bodies of their fallen friends. One was rescued early on. Another was killed in captivity.

On Saturday Israelis were glued to screens watching four of the five surviving spotters begin their journey to freedom 477 days after being taken captive. They were first seen emerging from a Hamas vehicle in northern Gaza. Across the border in Israel, loved ones shed tears of joy, joined by strangers who feel like they now know them after over 15 months of struggle for their return.

They could be seen walking on their own two feet, even smiling as they walked together, surrounded by masked gunmen and then taken up the steps of a stage erected especially for this moment - intended to be paraded as spoils of the war. But these four brave, strong young women, Naama Levy, Daniella Gilboa, Karina Ariev, all 20, and Liri Albag 19, flipped the script. They appeared defiant and strong on that stage, hoisting their arms in the air, even giving a thumbs up. It was their own victory march – they had survived.  

Soon after they were transported from the awaiting Red Cross officials to the Israeli army and then rushed into the arms of their mothers and fathers who had been put through a parallel version of hell along with their daughters.

Watching in the Channel 12 studio on air was Eyal Eshel, whose daughter, Sgt. Roni Eshel was one of the 15 spotters killed at Nahal Oz.  He said seeing the reunions he was both happy and relieved, but also jealous of the parents since he will never have his daughter back again.  

“I won’t lie, I am so jealous,” he said. “We miss Roni so much.” 

He said he wants to bring the truth to light – for all of Israel to know what happened before the morning of October 7 and what happened that day of blood, fire and abandonment on Nahal Oz. His daughter was apparently burned to death among others in the control room after it was set alight by Hamas. It took weeks to identify her remains.

There is so far no state commission of inquiry into the colossal failures of the army on October 7, including the events at Nahal Oz, which was supposed to be the first line of defense against Hamas in Gaza. So Eshel and other parents whose daughters in the unit were killed have done their own research.

“I understood one thing,” Eshel told the New York Times regarding the parents’ investigation. “Their abandonment and the disdain for them was so great.”

Surviving members of the unit have told Haaretz sexism played a role in their warnings being ignored. “It’s a unit made up entirely of young women and young female commanders,” a soldier said on condition of anonymity. “There is no doubt that if there were men sitting at those (surveillance) screens, things would look different.”

And I wonder, will the older men who dismissed the warnings from the young women pay a price – will the system itself try to make amends? Will there be justice, including for the senior officer who threatened to court-martial them for doing their job? It’s not just a matter of justice. Learning the lessons of that day and correcting the sexist pattern of treatment of these “eyes of the army,” which stretches back decades, is essential for Israel’s security and its soul.

Will the story of their dismissal and deadly abandonment be remembered as vividly as the emotional return Saturday of the brave hostages – and the fifth, Agam Berger, scheduled to be come on Thursday?

Their tale is a cautionary one. We know hatred can kill. So can hubris and sexism.

Imagine had these young women been listened to. Just imagine. 

Ceasefire and the Fight to Come (Jan 20, 2025)

Madeleine Cereghino (she/her) joined APN in the spring of 2021 after seven years educating lawmakers on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict at J Street. An experienced government affairs strategist, Madeleine credits a Birthright trip to Israel for inspiring her to shift her professional focus to anti-occupation work.

Although she resides in Washington, D.C. with her husband, son, and dog, Madeleine will forever be loyal to Bay Area sports. Madeleine is a graduate of Whittier College.

---

Ceasefire and the Fight to Come

Yesterday, the first Israeli hostages since November 2023 were released from Gaza, marking the beginning of a six-week ceasefire. This agreement will see 33 hostages returned to Israel while Palestinians in Gaza are allowed to return to what remains of their homes in the North. The ceasefire will also enable a massive increase in humanitarian aid, which will hopefully alleviate the famine that has devastated the civilian population.

This moment marks what I hope will be the end of the war, with a provision for a second round of more permanent negotiations scheduled to begin sixteen days after the start of this ceasefire.

There is a sense of catharsis now that the ceasefire has begun—a long exhale after holding our collective breath. But even this fragile peace carries the weight of unbearable loss.

The reality is that the general parameters of this agreement were known months ago, and every moment of inaction cost lives. Each casualty is a profound tragedy, a reminder of the futility and horror of this conflict. These are not abstract numbers; these are individuals, each with dreams, families, and futures stolen by the delays, the political machinations, and the failure to act sooner.

After fifteen months of grief and horror, this nightmare may finally be coming to an end. But if you’re feeling exhausted, I understand. I am, too. I am so tired of this war and all that has come with it. Yet, I also know that today marks the beginning of a new kind of fight. 

Today, Donald Trump will once again be sworn in as President. After enduring his previous term and the heartbreak of November’s election loss, it’s natural for those on the left to feel devastated and drained. But this is precisely what Trump and his allies are counting on.

Lasting Israeli-Palestinian peace requires security, self-determination, and dignity for both peoples. Yet, President Trump is already laying the groundwork to undermine these principles. The Trump administration is poised to support Israeli annexation of the West Bank. Key appointments signal this intent. Both Senator Marco Rubio, Trump’s choice to lead the State Department, and Mike Huckabee, the nominee for Ambassador to Israel, have referred to the West Bank as “Judea and Samaria.” Such language is not incidental; it’s a deliberate precursor to supporting claims of Israeli sovereignty over the territory—something Huckabee has actively promoted in the past.

Today also serves as a stark reminder of the challenges we face domestically. 

At the end of last year, Republicans in Congress pushed to pass H.R. 9495—a law that would have granted President Trump broad powers to target ideological opponents by revoking the tax-deductible status of nonprofits, effectively shutting them down. In response, advocacy groups from diverse issue areas united in a remarkable display of coalition building to oppose the bill. This groundswell of opposition led to its initial defeat, a stunning reversal given the near-unanimous support it had received earlier in the year when concerns about the abuse of presidential power were less pronounced.

While Donald Trump has promised reprisals for political enemies and we can certainly expect to see future legislation like H.R. 9495, there's a lesson to be gleaned from the legislative fight last year. Unity across the sector and a commitment to coalition building were pivotal in defeating this bill. Advocacy groups with little in common and vastly different issue areas came together in solidarity to protect the broader principles of democracy and civil society. This collaboration underscores the strength and necessity of collective action in the face of significant threats.

The same spirit of unity is required now as we confront the challenges ahead. 

As exhausted as we may feel, we cannot afford to disengage. This moment demands vigilance and resolve. The fight for a just and lasting peace for Israelis and Palestinians is far from over. Nor is the fight for the soul of our democracy here at home. We owe it to every life lost to fight for that future with all the resolve we can muster.

Why is the IDF Occupying (so many of) its Neighbors? (Hard Questions, Tough Answers- January 13, 2025)

Yossi Alpher is an independent security analyst. He is the former director of the Jaffee Center for Strategic Studies at Tel Aviv University, a former senior official with the Mossad, and a former IDF intelligence officer. Views and positions expressed here are those of the writer, and do not necessarily represent NJN's views and policy positions.

Q. The fate of the Gaza occupation is obviously the most pressing issue. But perhaps you can start by discussing the most recent Arab land occupied: the Israel-Syria border no-man’s land and the Mt. Hermon peak.

A. Occupation in Syria is not only the most recent but also the most complicated issue internationally. Turkey (in the northwest) and the US (in the east) also occupy Syrian lands--far more than does Israel. Nowhere are there clear guidelines or conditions for ending any of these occupations.

Israel, for its part, insists that the relatively small parcel of border area no-man’s-land that it occupied after the fall of Bashar Assad in December of 2024 will be abandoned when Jerusalem is convinced that the new regime in Damascus can ensure stability and that it harbors no threatening Islamic extremist intentions. Meanwhile IDF units in the new Syria buffer zone are providing medical aid to Syrians--but also clashing with anti-Israel demonstrators. 

Israel’s suspicions are understandable, for three reasons.

First, Syria has not yet been stabilized. Regime forces are fighting Alawite supporters of Assad in Homs and along the Mediterranean coast. Alawite sources cite growing unrest among this religious minority that previously anchored the Assad regime. There is also unrest among Druze in and around Suwayda near the Syria-Jordan border. Not to mention unresolved Kurdish-Arab-Turkish issues in a huge swath of territory in Syria’s northeast.

Second, Syria’s new rulers previously fought in the ranks of al-Qaeda and ISIS in Iraq and Syria. Today they claim to be more moderate and pluralistic. They say they do not seek conflict with Israel. Having fought militant extremists for the past 16 months, Israel is not yet convinced it can abandon its new buffer zone.

Third, the Turkish factor. Turkish leader Recip Tayyip Erdogan, who supported and sheltered the new Syrian leaders for years in their northwest Syria redoubt, is widely seen as the patron of the new Syrian regime. His aggressive anti-Israel rhetoric gives Jerusalem cause for concern. 

The previous Syrian regime, under Assad, hosted Iranian forces that used Syria as a transit point for moving weaponry to Hezbollah in Lebanon. Now Israel harbors similar fears regarding Erdogan with his neo-Ottoman geostrategic ambitions.

One way or another, the presence in Syria of both Turkish and American armed forces is seen by Israel as a mitigating factor in its occupation considerations. And speaking of occupation, there are reports that the Shiite-majority government in neighboring Iraq has asked Washington not to withdraw its 2,000-strong armed contingent from eastern Syria, alleging that it buffers Iraq against any possible aggressive intentions on those now ruling Damascus.

Q. Apropos Hezbollah, IDF occupation of southern Lebanon is scheduled to end later this month. Will that happen?

A. Lately, Israel has alleged that the Lebanese army is not fulfilling its ceasefire obligation to move south and police the Lebanon-Hezbollah-Israel agreement reached last November with US mediation. Israel has attacked suspicious Hezbollah armed activity and has hinted that its forces might remain in Lebanon an extra 30 days. But the election last week--after two years of delays and political intrigue--of a new Lebanese president, army chief Joseph Aoun, appears to bode well for Israeli withdrawal. US mediator Amos Hochstein was in Beirut last week and reportedly vouched for the January 26 deadline.

Q. That brings us to Gaza. This week marks yet another negotiating round in Doha, Qatar, aimed at clinching a deal on Israeli withdrawal and hostage release. Are we about to witness the end of Israel’s military presence withn the Strip?

A. Full IDF withdrawal from the entire Gaza Strip is Hamas’s ultimate condition for releasing all 98 hostages, dead and alive, that Israel claims Hamas is holding deep underground in the Strip. The innovative factor in the current round of talks is the Trump ‘hellfire’ threat (against whom? to do what?) if a deal is not reached by January 20. 

The threat is not likely to impress Hamas. But it may have some effect on Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu, an ardent Trump supporter who obviously wants to get off on the right foot at the start of Trump’s second presidency.

A Netanyahu pledge of full withdrawal from Gaza will be supported by the IDF and most Israelis. Yet it will pit Netanyahu against his own coalition’s messianists who threaten to bring down the government unless it enables them to exploit the occupation infrastructure that the army is building and paving in Gaza to begin settling at least the northern Strip. His coalition’s collapse would leave Netanyahu at the mercy of both the voters and the courts. 

In other words, Netanyahu needs the occupation of Gaza and ongoing (and endless!) war with the remnants of Hamas for his own political survival. Perhaps that is why Defense Minister Katz just pathetically and bombastically directed the IDF, which is currently trying to clear out terrorists from some parts of Gaza for the fourth time (!) in a year, to bring him a plan for “decisive victory”.

This is where the open questions arise. Trump already has his own mediator, Steve Witkoff, shuttling between Doha and Jerusalem. Is Witkoff empowered by Trump to make Netanyahu ‘an offer he can’t refuse’ in return for an Israeli commitment to a full withdrawal in stages? Can a Netanyahu pledge to withdraw be designed with sufficient loopholes to enable him to convince his coalition hawks that Israel will be free down the line to renew the war in Gaza?

Or is Trump (surprise surprise!) bluffing, and unlikely to take any significant action if his January 20 ‘hellfire’ deadline is not met? In any event, Witkoff’s presence in Doha sends Hamas the message that, at least on the hostage/ceasefire issue, Trump and Biden are working in tandem during the presidential transition.

Q. You haven’t mentioned the West Bank . . . 

A. Of all four occupations--Syria, Lebanon, Gaza, West Bank--the latter is not in ‘danger’ of ending any time soon. On the contrary, under the current Israeli government settlements are spreading in the West Bank, Palestinians are being displaced, and nothing is likely to change.

Q. Bottom line #1?

Trump’s ‘hellfire’ threats and his demand to end the Gaza war before he takes office on January 20 are understood to be a factor, at least psychologically, in motivating both Hamas and Israel to do a deal. Yet this is the same Trump who talks very aggressively about American territorial expansion: annexing Canada, retaking the Panama Canal, and occupying Greenland.

Accordingly, look for Israel’s land-greedy right-messianists who dominate Netanyahu’s coalition to cite Trump’s inspiration in spinning their schemes to annex both Gazan and West Bank territory. As one sympathetic IDF reservist in the Strip recently stated to a friendly TV camera, “We won’t stop until we complete the task assigned to us: conquer, evict, settle. Hear that, Bibi? Conquer, evict, settle.”

Q. Bottom line #2?

Iran has been beaten by Israel in Lebanon and has been forced out of Syria. Another Iranian proxy, the Houthis in Yemen, are absorbing heavy blows from the US and UK as well as from Israel. Tehran is also gearing up for Trump administration sanctions and pressures on the nuclear issue. 

All of which suggests, perversely, that something has to ‘give’ in Tehran. It points to the danger of deniable Iranian-sponsored provocations--along a border, missiles, a terrorist attack?--any day now.

Q. Bottom line #3?

A. Note the undeclared partnership between Netanyahu and Hamas in Gaza. Prior to October 7 Netanyahu made sure that suitcases of dollars from Qatar were delivered to Hamas. He avoided assassinating Hamas leaders and heralded ‘economic peace’ with them. That is what triggered the events of October 7, 2023. 

Now Netanyahu makes sure no alternative Palestinian leadership is introduced into the Strip. And he pursues a war without end with Hamas. This seemingly guarantees yet more occupation, either now or at a later stage.

2024 (Hard Questions, Tough Answers- January 6, 2025)

Q. What is your take on Israel’s fortunes during the outgoing year?

A. Seen from a distance of barely a week, 2024 represents yet more descent down the slippery slope toward a conflicted, non-democratic, immoral, isolated, messianic and binational entity between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean. That is one end of the scale. Yet at the other end there had emerged by the end of the year one very significant and positive exception to this dynamic.

Q. Start with the exception. It makes for more encouraging reading . . .

A. In recent months, Israel’s security community registered dramatic victories over Iran, Hezbollah and almost the entire Axis of Resistance or Shiite Crescent. In a fascinating domino dynamic, the pro-Iran Assad regime in Syria fell and Iraq’s Shiite militias ceased attacking Israel. 

Only Hamas in Gaza and the Houthis in Yemen, neither a strategic threat, continue to attack Israel. In September, a dramatic IDF commando operation targeting an Iranian missile factory deep in Syrian territory sent yet another message to Iran about the vulnerability of its nuclear project.

Note that Israel’s Sunni Arab neighbors, from Egypt to Bahrain via Jordan, Saudi Arabia and the UAE, actively assisted it in combating Iran. This means that for the first time in its modern history, Israel was allied with major actors among its neighbors, while those few neighbors that remain openly hostile have been beaten into retreat. Even countries critical of Israel in the West have allied with it in combating Iran and the Houthis.

This is very good news for Israel’s overall security, and it happened in 2024. 

Q. Now back to the bad news from 2024: Slippery slope? Immoral? Isolated?

A. In 2024 Israel lost a great deal of international support at the moral level due to the IDF’s behavior in the Gaza Strip. What began as a legitimate war of retaliation for the brutal Hamas massacre of October 7, 2023, deteriorated over the past year into death and destruction in Gaza on a horrific scale. 

While much of the Gaza destruction can theoretically be justified in terms of the cost of eliminating Hamas, by the dawn of 2025 the IDF had not eliminated Hamas, could not declare victory in Gaza, and must contemplate what looks like the loss of its moral compass.

Worse, while the world recognizes this, the majority of Israelis apparently do not. The IDF continues to force hundreds of thousands of Gazans out of the northern Strip while the messianists in the government lay plans to settle that territory. Israel had every right and obligation to defeat Hamas by conquering the Strip. But everything it did beyond that in 2024 is a moral stain on the army and the country.

Q. Yet you began by noting that the events of 2024 allied Israel with its neighbors. That is hardly isolation or moral reprobation.

A. Israel’s neighbors are either failed states (Lebanon, Sudan, Libya) or autocratic police states (all the rest, again stretching from Egypt to Bahrain). That the events of 2024 rendered Israel more acceptable to the neighborhood says a lot more about Israel and its changing values than about the neighborhood.

Take, for example, the Israeli hostages in Gaza. Traditional Israeli and Jewish values embodied in Maimonides’ famous dictum that “there is no greater mitzvah [religious obligation] than redeeming captives” have been set aside by a government full of ostensibly pious Jews who regularly quote Maimonides. Keeping Netanyahu in office despite his moral and legal bankruptcy, allocating copious funds to building settlements and promoting religious ‘values’, and postponing creation of a commission of inquiry likely to blame it for the war--all are more important to this government than stopping what has become a pointless war and saving those hostages who are still alive. 

Israel’s elected leaders do not want to inquire what happened on October 7: why the Palestinian issue exploded and why the country was so unprepared. That is deplorable, and it lays the foundation for the next destructive strategic surprise. Yet Israel’s neighbors could not care less. They never appoint commissions of inquiry. Their leaders have no real empathy for the Palestinians, much less for Israelis slaughtered on October 7. They simply know how to identify shared strategic interests with Israel. 

Q. On December 31, 2024, Israel’s population passed the ten million mark. Significant?

A. Yes. This is critical mass. It is significant at the strategic level. But little noticed in statistical analysis of the past year was the fact that over 80,000 Israelis left the country, many not planning to return. These are by and large young professionals representing the economic backbone of the country. The absence of hi-tech workers may not be so noticeable insofar as in the short term they can continue to participate in the Israeli economy from abroad. But the absence of medical professionals is already increasingly glaring. Try to get an appointment with a medical specialist in less than two months.

These Israelis no longer believe in a future for themselves and their families in Israel. They are setting up expat colonies in Cyprus, Greece and beyond. 

This too happened in 2024. And in 2025, many additional Israelis are contemplating a similar move. Not because they are afraid of Iran or Hamas. They are afraid of Netanyahu and his messianic, fascistic allies in government--all democratically elected.

Q. The crisis over military conscription belies the claim of demographic ‘critical mass’.

A. Indeed, despite crossing that ten million landmark and despite Israel’s cyber and hi-tech advantages, a war lasting more than a year and being waged on multiple fronts revealed in 2024 that the IDF does not have enough combat soldiers. Compulsory service has been extended. Reserve duty has been stretched for some to hundreds of days. The toll on families, on mental well-being and on the economy is enormous. The term ‘critical mass’ proves deceptive because the entire Haredi (ultra-Orthodox) community, well over a million strong, has been exempted from service while its young men study Torah, grow huge families and otherwise live off government funding. 

In 2024 it emerged that traditional Jewish veneration of devout Jewish youth studying holy books no longer holds, particularly when many of these youth are actually enjoying their exemption while idle or working. Notably, the protest against the Haredi exemption was led by equally religious Jews from the National Religious sector who have served, and died in combat, above and beyond the call of duty.

Q. This points to the equally prominent role played by the National Religious in 2024 in prosecuting the war in Gaza for messianic religious reasons . . . 

A. While Haredi Jews have cultivated Torah study as a principled and sacred alternative to military duty, the National Religious have over recent decades (the turning point was alarm over the 2005 withdrawal from Gaza) cultivated participation in the security community as a messianic duty. In the IDF, they are increasingly prominent at the senior officer level.

And so are the messianic values they bring with them and which they disseminate among the ranks. Professor Yagil Levy of The Open University, probably Israel’s most prominent sociologist of the military, does not hide his alarm: “Talk of Armageddon, a war of Gog and Magog that will drown the region in blood and fire, was there before October 7,” he states. “[But] the war has normalized it. . . . [In Gaza] a moral disaster is taking place.” 

Q. Bottom line?

A. After 2024, Israel’s future seems assured from a security standpoint. But what kind of Israel? The more the country resembles its neighbors and the less liberal and less democratic it becomes, the more it signals both moderate Israelis and the Diaspora that a day of reckoning is approaching. That is the message of 2024.