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(JNS)
It might very well be that more than all the T’ruah and Jewish Voice for Peace Rabbis (as well a self-professed Jewish clergymen and clergy women) and all the self-identified “As-a-Jew” public figures like journalist Peter Beinart and his IfNotNow minions, and all the employees of self-announced Jewish organizations, the late Charlie Kirk did and probably is continuing to do more for fundamental Jewish values now than they ever did. He probably is representing, in death, traditional Jewish ethics, morals and faith more than they have been seeking to do, they of the liberal, progressive camp of politics.
In a recent clip, the avowed Christian describes how on Friday evening, he “ takes a Jewish Sabbath,” turning off his phone until Saturday sundown. He did it for his mental health. He promoted the honoring of Shabbat. He spoke of getting in line with God’s rhythm. His wife, now a widow, was on board with it entirely. This, of course, is in addition to all pro-Israel efforts, which have put all the above Jews to shame.
His new book, reputedly already a best-seller in pre-publication status, is Stop, in the Name of God: Why Honoring the Sabbath Will Transform Your Life. As he was recorded saying, Shabbat helped save his life. As the promotion informs, Kirk’s thinking was that: “observing the Sabbath isn’t a rejection of modern life but a rebellion against busyness and a pathway to genuine connection, peace, and presence. … Kirk guides you on how to unplug, recharge, and reconnect with God, family and yourself in a way that nurtures your soul.”
This is so far removed from the attitude and thinking of Jewish anti-Zionists and the critics of Jewish religious customs.
These Jewish radicals mirror the behavior and the practices of the worst of current American and Western political norms. As The Free Press phrased it, “In the same way that madrassas radicalize jihadis, America’s campuses are among the places in the U.S. most hostile to disagreement and debate. Where they preach ‘inclusion,’ they actually practice exclusion. … Where they promote ‘diversity,’ they actually enforce a uniformity of thought … .”
Instead of imbuing non-Jewish society with Jewish values, they infect Jewish communal and organizational life with the corrupt and negative norms of their adopted wokeism, neo-Marxism and whatnot.
Kirk, all of 31, was a victim of the cancel culture practiced by the extreme left. Anti-Zionist Jews have embraced that cancel culture by accepting the BDS campaign. In doing so, just as I suggested years ago on these pages, they opened the floodgates not to opposition to policies of Israel but due to vicious and dangerous antisemitism.
In October 2019, I wrote that these groups:
“Seem to prefer a false intersectionality paradigm, seeking unity and comradeship with movements, politicians and leaders who couldn’t care less for Jews as Jews … they have linked up with political forces who express indications of antisemitism, but are blind to that since it is all within the camp of the left … these groups have taken the wrong road. The correct intersection they need be linked to is that which connects them to authentic Jewish tradition, values of culture and the national identity aspect of Judaism.”
A month later, in November, I viewed these radicals as redefining “their Jewishness as having little to do with actually Judaism either as a religion, a culture or an ethnic identity. Their Jewishness is a Diaspora one, and their moorings are fixed not in relation to something Jewish; they seek to apply any sort of Jewishness vestige they have and link that with the general surroundings in which they live.”
Charlie Kirk not only saw the wisdom in traditional, biblically based Judaism; he saw the Land of Israel, and specifically Judea and Samaria, as a necessary element in today’s politics. As an outsider, he knew what real Judaism is.
His loss is immeasurable in the sense that he, seemingly, promised to be the force that could assure the true uniting of Christian and Jewish traditionalism for the next generation and more—a union that would be based on the correct understanding of the role of the Jew, Judaism and Israel in this world for all humankind, an understanding that eluded too many young Jews and their mentors.
Image: A large banner showing U.S. President Donald Trump embracing Charlie Kirk, who was shot and killed on Sept. 10 in Utah, hangs on a building near the Ayalon Highway in Tel Aviv, Sept. 12, 2025. Photo by Avshalom Sassoni/Flash90.
(JNS)
The atmosphere in Europe is rotten. You can smell it in the expulsions at the Polytechnic University of Turin, in the beatings of Jewish students in Pisa, in assaults on tourists, in the closures of sports and cultural spaces, in protests and strikes framed as being in “solidarity” with Gaza.
Meanwhile, the European Union sanctions Israel under the virtuous banner of “pacifism,” dressing up Hamas as the innocent “Palestinian people.”
The United Nations adds its familiar chorus of condemnations, brandishing once again its ugliest weapon—the accusation of “genocide,” the most poisonous word in the world.
Make no mistake: this is incitement. The call to strike Jews is clear. We stand on the brink of new pogroms.
The tragedy is compounded by the blindness of Europe’s elites, journalists, and academics. They march en masse, pretending innocence, while erasing history: 75 years of relentless jihad against Israel, the Second Intifada that followed the Oslo Accords, more than a thousand people murdered in buses and pizzerias, rejected peace overtures and the wave of terrorism unleashed after Israel withdrew from Gaza.
Two simple truths escape their cultivated minds. First, Hamas cannot be allowed to remain in power in Gaza; lives depend on it. Second, it cannot be defeated except by a war fought on the ground, against an enemy that hides among homes, children’s bedrooms and hospitals.
Only by separating the people from Hamas, only by expelling Hamas, can victory be achieved, as even the Arab League now admits. The cost is terrible: more than 900 Israeli soldiers killed, more than 6,000 wounded. But it is the only way.
And yet, “decent people” in Europe clamor to stop Israel. They prefer to see Hamas win. They amplify Hamas’s propaganda about hunger, hospitals and dead children, while ignoring that Hamas itself engineers this suffering. Israel, once again, is cast as the pariah, the eternal wandering Jew.
Old antisemitism reemerges in new clothes: blood libels, accusations of fascism against a government that is no more right-wing than Italy’s or many others in Europe. Slanders of colonialism, illegality, racism and occupation are hurled to deliver one basic message: Israel has no right to exist.
Instead, the world cheers for a Palestinian state—even if that means sharia rule, the oppression of women, homosexuals and children and the destruction of democracy. Even if it means massacres, rapes and kidnappings. None of this matters as long as it is not Israel.
In Israel, Arabs, Druze, Circassians and Bedouins have the same rights as Jews. That is the truth. Israelis fight not for jihad, but for survival. To deny this reality is not only tantamount to a moral suicide for Europe; it is physical as well.
Europe once vowed, “Never again.” Today it is sleepwalking toward “again.”
Image: Around 75 000 people march in Brussels, Belgium in solidarity with Gaza on Sept. 7, 2025. Photo by Thierry Monasse/Getty Images.
(JNS)
For many readers of The Washington Post who care about the normalization of antisemitism, it was a case of good riddance. Karen Attiah was named the newspaper’s first Global Opinions editor in 2016 and has been a columnist since 2021. This week, she claimed that she was fired over what the newspaper said was a series of posts about the assassination of conservative activist Charlie Kirk, which the paper said were “unacceptable,” and constituted “gross misconduct” and “endangering the physical safety of colleagues.”
Are her posts about Kirk’s murder reason enough to lose her job?
Corrupted institutions
The editors’ excuses and disingenuous “safety” language notwithstanding, the real issue with Attiah or any other similar situation isn’t really about cancel culture.
It’s what it says about the Post, The New York Times and other corporate media institutions that employ many people like her. That they thought placing radical hate-mongers like Attiah in charge of influential platforms was a good idea in the first place is the problem.
We should be extremely wary of engaging in a culture war in which the goal is to silence, shame and even hound out of the public square people with whom we disagree. The question we should be asking in the wake of this latest example of political violence is not about how best to punish those who use their social-media accounts to say terrible things. It’s why we have allowed institutions that should be the bulwark of democracy, like journalism, to be so corrupted as to normalize the sort of public discourse from people like Attiah, whose goal is to tear down the foundations of the American republic and Western civilization.
Attiah has every right to say what she likes. And the same goes for anyone else who unfairly and insensitively defamed Kirk after his death. The same applies to those extremists on the far right who sought to exploit the assassination to promote their own brand of conspiracy theories, whether it was the libelous claim that Israel was responsible or other antisemitic insinuations about the crime.
No one should interfere with the ability of those who behave in this fashion to post on social media (so long as they are not directly advocating violence), stand on street corners or march in the streets while spouting their lies, whether about Kirk, other conservatives, or Israel and the Jews. Still, that doesn’t entitle them to a job at the top newspapers in the country, a tenured professorship at an Ivy League university or a position at a private company whose owners want no part of such madness. And it ought not to grant immunity from criticism or legal action when they violate the law to those who help fund radical groups like Antifa or Students for Justice in Palestine, both of which promote violence and hate.
What we want is not a nation that chills speech. We crave a culture of political discourse that doesn’t normalize hate and toxic extremist ideas—that doesn’t exacerbate racial divisions and promote antisemitism. Just as important, we should be actively discouraging a belief that political violence—whether against conservative activists, insurance company executives or politicians disliked by fashionable opinion on the left—is acceptable discourse.
Marginalizing hate-mongers
Our challenge isn’t how best to silence or punish ideologues who ran to TikTok to cheer for Kirk’s murderer or to mock those who mourned him. It’s recreating a political culture where such people are relegated to the fever swamps of the far left and right, where they belong, rather than featuring them in the mainstream media or allowing them to dominate our educational system.
Attiah was one among many being held up for opprobrium, even sometimes losing their jobs for their insensitive reactions to an act of political violence. But for those who have followed her career, her broadsides aimed at Kirk following his death were typical of her brand of journalism. She claimed that she was fired for “speaking out against political violence, racial double standards and America’s apathy toward guns.” The truth is that she is a typical of those self-styled progressives who have no problem with political violence so long as it is directed against people and groups that she thinks have no rights worthy of respect—for example, Israelis and Jews.
The columnist has written explicitly of her belief that the State of Israel had no right to exist. She falsely labels it a European-style colonial project, rather than an expression of Jewish self-determination in their ancient homeland. Even before the Oct. 7 Hamas-led Palestinian attacks on Israeli communities, she was cheerleading for the effort to defend the genocidal terrorists in Gaza from the consequences of their crimes, and delegitimizing Israel and its right of self-defense.
Her work illustrated how toxic left-wing myths like critical race theory, intersectionality and settler-colonialism are a method to normalize antisemitism. Indeed, as an alumnus of one of those institutions that have been a bastion of such terrible ideas—Attiah graduated from Columbia University’s School of International Affairs—there is no better example of the way the academy manufactures and then spreads Jew-hatred.
Many on the political left, like Attiah, thought the aftermath of Kirk’s murder was a license to not only vent their anger at his views, but to post misleading, if not downright false, information about the late activist. They now say that retribution for this is no different from something that the right has long decried: cancel culture.
That’s not a charge that can be dismissed out of hand. And it’s one that is also related to the assertions that President Donald Trump’s efforts to roll back the tide of woke antisemitism at colleges and universities are an infringement on free speech, academic freedom and a form of cancel culture.
Is the backlash against those who mocked Kirk’s death different from the moral panic about race that swept across the United States during the Black Lives Matter summer of 2020? That moment of peak progressive conquest of America’s media and culture led to cancellations of those who were deemed insufficiently sympathetic to BLM or otherwise denounced as “racists.” Most educational institutions, arts organizations, celebrities and even many corporations quavered in the face of this Jacobin-like attempt to purge conservatives or even moderates who wouldn’t bend their knees to BLM lies about race from the public square.
A failure to engage
Left-wingers who were happy to join the cancel culture mobs in 2020 or to cheer on the efforts of pro-Hamas activists to target Jews since Oct. 7 have suddenly discovered that being ostracized in this way isn’t a good thing. They assert that those who disagreed with Kirk—like Attiah and the countless others who have been attacking the victim of an assassination as someone who got what he deserved—are being unfairly punished.
As we saw in 2020, the impulse to persecute those who contradict the conventional wisdom of the moment and to seek to deprive them of their livelihoods is antithetical to how a free republic operates.
The real sickness afflicting American democracy is not primarily the fault of extreme speech that breeds angry arguments, but the unwillingness of so many people to engage with views differing from their own. The bifurcated political culture, in which much of the country reads, listens and watches two entirely different sets of media outlets, has created an almost unbridgeable gap between left and right. That has made many people uncomfortable with opinions or even facts that contradict their assumptions and prejudices. It also encourages them to engage in radical speech that demonizes their political foes.
Thus, it wasn’t enough for many people to state their disagreements with Kirk’s views about Trump, abortion, immigration, gun rights, gender ideology and even Israel (he was a strong and vocal supporter of the Jewish state). They also felt compelled to damn him as a racist, hate-monger, fascist or Nazi, and to double down on the same smears of Trump and his supporters.
That’s bad enough under normal circumstances. But those who did so after the object of their intemperate invective was murdered for exercising his right to free speech are understandably being criticized for what is, at best, insensitive behavior and, at worst, exactly the sort of hate speech that encourages more political violence.
Moving the Overton Window
So, what should our response be to this sort of speech? Should those who do so be held up to public outrage by being “ratioed” with a flood of critical comments on their social-media feeds—the 21st-version of the Medieval punishment of being put in the stocks in the public square for passersby to jeer at? Should they lose their livelihoods and be run out of town?
The answer to that question most often depends on whether the offending poster is situated on your side of the political aisle. We tend to be more forgiving of allies who misbehave online and demand the scalps of those whose opinions contradict our own.
Regardless of where you stand on the political spectrum, some basic truths need to be acknowledged. If you’re going to express opinions that are nasty, insensitive or extreme, then you don’t have standing to play the victim if other people who are offended respond in the same way. That doesn’t excuse foul language or threats, which platform providers have every right to moderate.
Yet we need to draw some distinctions here. Espousing opinions on a wide range of political issues, about which those who believe in democracy are compelled to agree to disagree, is not something that should be treated as a reason for shunning.
Supporting political violence, however, is not the same as backing a particular political candidate on the right or the left. Nor should we treat open racism—whether in the form of white nationalism or fashionable left-wing “anti-racism,” or antisemitism in all of its forms—as the same thing as just having a position on the best way to achieve racial harmony or how to bring about peace in the Middle East. What we’ve seen on the left is the growth of what can only be termed “assassination culture,” as some people laud those who murder their political foes or the terrorists of Hamas. Those who are part of this trend shouldn’t complain if their fellow citizens or their employers want nothing to do with them.
The problem is that the Overton window of acceptable discourse was deliberately shifted by progressives so as to treat their own extremist views about race, gender, American history, the Jews and Israel as normal, and to brand those who defended traditional values on religion, liberty and Jewish rights as hateful. Attiah is someone who despises the America to which her African parents immigrated, and who backs genocidal positions that deny Jewish history and rights. A political culture in which someone like her is treated as a respected voice rather than a marginal extremist is sick and in need of reform.
The same applies to someone like Tucker Carlson, who may have been a much-needed tribune of conservative resistance to BLM and the far left in 2020, but has since descended into an antisemitic extremist rabbit hole since being fired from his prominent position at Fox News. Those on the right who may disagree with him but are still treating his views as worthy of platforming—unfortunately, that included Charlie Kirk—are wrong.
What happened at The Washington Post and Fox News was not the cancellation of independent voices. They were necessary corrections by companies that don’t wish to be identified with extremism, and to that end, they cleaned house.
The Post’s billionaire owner, Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, may be a hypocrite who shows no sign of having much in the way of principles. And he has belatedly concluded that his money-losing sinkhole of a publication is better off with its editorials and columnists defending free markets and personal liberty, as opposed to partisan progressive extremism. He is trying to align himself with most Americans and actually doing something to defend the democracy that its banner warns will “die in darkness.”
Fox News owner Rupert Murdoch likely also feels himself well rid of Carlson’s particular brand of isolationism and hate for Israel, mixed in with kowtowing to tyrants in Russia and Qatar.
Attiah and Carlson may well prosper on Substack or podcasts on X, though they shouldn’t be silenced or interfered with by the government. Still, they have no place in mainstream media or discourse. Marginalizing them and other radicals aren’t examples of cancel culture to be decried. It’s just common sense. It’s also a sign: We need not despair that we are doomed to helplessly watch the polarization they represent send the American republic tumbling into a civil war between the left and the right.
Jonathan S. Tobin is editor-in-chief of JNS (Jewish News Syndicate). Follow him: @jonathans_tobin.
Image: Karen Attiah, global opinions editor for “The Washington Post” (left) with Alexis Okeowo, staff writer for “The New Yorker,” a New America fellow and author of “A Moonless, Starless Sky: Ordinary Women and Men Fighting Extremism in Africa,” Oct. 11, 2017. Credit: New America via Wikimedia Commons.
(JNS)
Gazans deserve a better future but eliminating the “barbaric animals” of Hamas is a prerequisite to that future, Marco Rubio, the U.S. secretary of state and national security advisor, told reporters alongside Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu at the latter’s office in Jerusalem.
Rubio spoke to journalists on Monday before attending the opening of “pilgrimage road” at the City of David that he called “one of the most important archeological sites in the planet” that has “deep meaning to so many people in the United States.”
“It’s an honor to be here and be a part of that,” he said.
Rubio also visited the Western Wall with Netanyahu and Mike Huckabee, the U.S. ambassador to Israel, and placed a note inside.
In response to a question from one journalist, Rubio said that he doesn’t know anyone “who would not rather see a negotiated settlement in which Hamas agrees to no longer be a terrorist group, lay down their arms, free the hostages.”
“By the way, not just the hostages that they’re holding from Israel but frankly the people of Gaza that they’re also holding hostage as human shields,” he said. “That would be the ideal outcome and one we would all like to see. It’s one that’s been worked on, but I think we have to be prepared for the fact that savage terrorists don’t normally agree to things like that, but we’ll continue to pursue that route.”
Netanyahu told reporters that Charlie Kirk, the conservative activist who was recently killed at age 31 was a year older than the prime minister’s brother, Yonatan Netanyahu, who was killed in Entebbe.
“Some of these people come once in a century, but it’s their legacy that has to live on,” Netanyahu said.
In an interview with Gillian Turner, of Fox News, from Jerusalem, Rubio said that U.S. President Donald Trump wants the war in Gaza to be “over quickly, but he wants it to be over quickly with the hostages released, all of them, and with Hamas no longer being a threat.”
In Israel, Rubio met with Isaac Herzog, the Israeli president, with whom he discussed the security of Israel and “ongoing efforts to defeat Hamas and release all remaining hostages in Gaza,” according to Tommy Pigott, the principal deputy U.S. State Department spokesman.
The secretary also offered the Israeli president “his deepest condolences to the Israelis killed and injured in the horrific terrorist attack in Jerusalem on Sept. 8,” Pigott said.
On Monday, Trump stated that he just read a report in the news that “Hamas has moved the hostages above ground to use them as human shields against Israel’s ground offensive.”
“I hope the leaders of Hamas know what they’re getting into if they do such a thing,” he said. “This is a human atrocity, the likes of which few people have ever seen before. Don’t let this happen or all bets are off. Release all hostages now.”
Featured Image: Marco Rubio, the U.S. secretary of state, and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu deliver joint statements to the press in Jerusalem, Sept. 15, 2025. Credit: Freddie Everett/U.S. State Department.
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(JNS)
Last week, Israel experienced its deadliest terror attack since Oct. 7, 2023. Six Jewish lives were stolen in cold blood, this time by two terrorists from near Ramallah, just a stone’s throw from the internationally acclaimed Cramim Hotel and Israel’s Channel 12 news studio in Neve Ilan.
These attacks do not happen in a vacuum. They are the product of a society that raises its children to hate Jews, glorifies murder, and rewards terror. Yet, our leaders keep repeating the same line: “We are at war against terrorists.”
No. We are not.
Israel is not fighting an abstract phenomenon called “terrorism.” We are facing a genocidal Islamic jihadi movement, hiding behind the banner of an invented Palestinian national identity that seeks to erase the Jewish people from our ancestral homeland. Misdiagnosing the problem leads to failed remedies, and Israel can no longer afford that mistake.
Look at the facts. The Palestinian Authority and Hamas are not opposites. They are ideological twins. Both raise generations on Jew-hatred and glorify bloodshed. The Palestinian Authority literally pays salaries to terrorists, scaled to how many Jews they kill, with money funneled in from the international community.
United Nations-funded schools in Gaza, Judea, and Samaria teach children to kill Jews and wipe Israel off the map. Western nations and the international community have poured billions of dollars into the “Palestinian” cause over decades, yet instead of building hospitals or universities, those funds have built rockets, tunnels and salaries for “martyrs.”
Western governments know this. They see the money is fueling violence, but the funding continues. That is not just Israel’s tragedy; it is a global scandal.
We must call this enemy by its true name: the modern incarnation of Amalek. Just as Amalek in the Bible preyed on the weak and defenseless, today’s Islamic jihadists target civilians, the elderly, women and children, not just in Israel but in France, Britain, Sweden, Germany and the United States.
On Oct. 7, Hamas murdered and brutalized the most vulnerable among us, babies, children, women, and the elderly. The other morning in Jerusalem, their ideological brothers struck again against the defenseless, just trying to get to work or studies to start their day. The pattern is clear. The ideology is consistent. And unless confronted honestly, the violence will spread.
This is not about borders. This is not about statehood. This is about good and evil. The jihadist death cult that targets Jews in Jerusalem is the same ideology that targeted Americans on 9/11, Yazidis in Iraq, Druze in Syria and Christians across the Middle East and Africa. It is a danger not only to Israel, but to every freedom-loving nation.
There can be no coexistence with those who embrace this genocidal ideology. Arab Muslims who are loyal to the State of Israel or whatever Western country they live in and reject the Islamic jihadi terror can and should remain here.
On the other hand, those who glorify or support jihad must go, not out of vengeance, but out of necessity. The survival of Israel, all Western countries, and the survival of civilization depend on it.
Calling this war “a fight against terrorism” obscures reality and weakens our response. It leaves us chasing shadows instead of addressing the root of the problem. Only when our leaders, political, military and rabbinic, name the enemy honestly can Israel chart a path to victory and ensure Jewish security in our land.
We were not brought back to Israel to die holy deaths as martyrs, but to live holy lives. And that means uprooting this evil from our midst, fully reclaiming our ancestral homeland, and securing a future where Jewish blood is no longer cheapened on the streets of Jerusalem.
Anything less is denial. And denial, as history has shown, is deadly.
Image: Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu at the site of a terrorist shooting attack in northern Jerusalem, Sept. 8, 2025. Photo by Haim Zach/GPO.
(JNS)
Israeli President Isaac Herzog met U.K. Prime Minister Keir Starmer at 10 Downing Street in London on Wednesday, where he voiced firm opposition to the British government’s stance on Israel, according to a statement from the President’s Residence.
The meeting would take place “against the backdrop of recent statements by British Prime Minister Keir Starmer and members of his government regarding Israel, the U.K.’s expected decision to recognize a Palestinian state and the ugly wave of antisemitism rising across Britain,” Herzog’s office said ahead of the meeting.
The meeting was only announced on the second day of the president’s visit to London at the invitation of the local Jewish community.
Herzog would “express protest over the sanctions imposed against the only democracy in the Middle East and over Britain’s echoing of Hamas’s starvation campaign while 48 hostages are being cruelly tortured in captivity in Gaza,” according to his office.
The Israeli president, who holds a largely ceremonial role, also stressed that any move to recognize Palestinian statehood at this time will be a reward for terror and undermine efforts to secure the release of the remaining hostages and end the war. He called sanctions against Israel and its leaders “unacceptable.”
The meeting came just days after Palestinian Authority chief Mahmoud Abbas arrived in London for a three-day visit at Starmer’s invitation.
The two met to advance the P.A.’s “bilateral relations” with London and coordinate ahead of the expected decision by the United Kingdom to formally recognize a Palestinian state at the U.N. General Assembly later this month.
Image: Israeli President Isaac Herzog holds up pictures of hostages Evyatar David and Rom Braslavski during a press conference in Vilnius, Lithuania, Aug. 4, 2025. Photo by Haim Zach/GPO.
(JNS)
An important question asked recently was: What does the United States get from Israel? What are some of the benefits, in addition to the nation being the only democracy in the Mideast and an ally from the get-go?
The answers come in the form of some very useful items.
Israel’s positive impact on the world is apparent in just an abbreviated list of companies, technology and more that have come out of the Jewish state, developed by its citizens.
• PillCam (capsule endoscopy): A swallowable camera pill that revolutionized gastrointestinal diagnostics
• ReWalk exoskeleton: A wearable robotic exoskeleton that enables paraplegics to walk
• Copaxone and Rebif: Leading multiple sclerosis treatments developed in Israel
• Cherry tomatoes (genetically modified to be long-lasting): Developed at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem
• Mobileye: Vision-based driver-assistance technology that underpins many autonomous vehicle systems (acquired by Intel)
• USB flash drive (disk-on-key): Created by M-Systems (Dov Moran), changing portable storage forever
• ICQ (early instant messaging platform): The forerunner of WhatsApp, Messenger and other chat apps
• Waze: Mobile satellite navigation application, or GPS, later acquired by Google
• Firewall and cybersecurity software: Check Point Software pioneered modern network security
• Intel chips (Pentium and Centrino developed largely in Israel)
• Iron Dome: Missile-defense system capable of intercepting short-range rockets with high accuracy
• UAV/drone technologies: Israel is a world leader in developing advanced unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs).
• Drip irrigation: Netafim pioneered precision drip irrigation, now used worldwide to save water and boost crop yields
• Water desalination and recycling: Israel leads the world in water reclamation, with advanced desalination plants and reuse systems
• Solar-energy innovations: Early development of solar-water heaters and modern solar tech.
• Face ID-style 3D-Sensing (PrimeSense): Technology behind Microsoft Kinect, later bought by Apple and used in iPhones.
• OrCam: Wearable AI device that helps visually impaired people read text and recognize faces.
Israel also has around 100 companies listed on NASDAQ—the fourth most in the world after the United States, Canada and China. Compare Israel to Jordan, which has four times Israel’s land mass and about 1.5 million more residents than Israel. Jordan has one company listed on NASDAQ. Egypt has 116.5 million people; it, too, has only one Egyptian company on NASDAQ.
The Israeli military is ranked among the top 15 in the world, and with its recent crushing of Iran in its 12-day war, it is obvious that its air force, special forces and intelligence are among the top five in the world.
The fact that Israel does not require American troops to fight for it is different than American allies like Japan and South Korea, where the United States has 81,000 military troops stationed in those two countries. The United States also appropriates $36 billion to defend Europe and has 80,000 troops in Europe, including around 34,000 in Germany.
Despite U.S. President Harry S. Truman being the first leader of a country to recognize the modern-day State of Israel in May 1948, he did not supply Israel with arms while it fought a war of independence against multiple Arab countries that attacked to destroy Israel and murder its 600,000 inhabitants just three years after the Holocaust in Europe. It wasn’t until President John F. Kennedy in the 1960s that Washington provided Israel with any military equipment. Still, it didn’t supply offensive military weapons, like planes, until after the Six-Day War in June 1967.
The Jewish people are the indigenous people of Israel, as can be seen with the Mount of Olives 2,000-year-old Jewish cemetery, showing the Jews being indigenous to the land (the oldest Muslim cemetery in Israel was built in the 11th century). After World War I and the end of the Ottoman Empire, the international world agreed to the Jewish right to Israel (including Jerusalem) in San Remo in 1920 (they gave the Arabs the countries of Lebanon, Syria, Iraq etc.).
The San Remo decision of recognizing the re-establishment of a Jewish right to a state in its ancestral homeland were legalized in a unanimous League of Nations Resolution in 2022, and the United States agreed to this League of Nations’ decision in the Anglo-American Treaty of 1925 (or the Convention Between the United States and Great Britain regarding the Palestine Mandate, signed in 1924, effective in 1925).
The Jewish right to Israel was supported by five American presidents during this time, including Warren Harding, Theodore Roosevelt, Woodrow Wilson, Herbert Hoover and Calvin Coolidge (Coolidge signed the Anglo-American Treaty of 1925). Article 80 of the U.N. Charter incorporated by reference the 1922 League of Nations decision makes the League of Nations decision binding international law until this day.
The Palestine Liberation Organization, as the precursor to the Palestinian Authority, made clear in Article 24 of their 1964 founding covenant that their sole goal was to destroy Israel and not to establish a Palestinian Arab state. Article 24 states” “This organization does not exercise any territorial sovereignty over the West Bank (includes East Jerusalem) in the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan, on the Gaza Strip, or the Himmah area. Its activities will be on the national popular level in the liberational, organizational, political and financial fields.”
Furthermore, the P.A. has shown a state led by it would not bring peace as is has a virulently antisemitic and anti-American “pay to slay” law that says that anyone who murders Jews and/or Americans like Taylor Force, will be financially rewarded with the more people you murder the more money you and your family receives. The P.A. regularly disburses hundreds of millions of dollars a year under this law.
Image: Uri Levine, co-founder and president of Waze, an Israeli mobile satellite navigation application, speaks during the Second Jerusalem International Tourism Summit at the Jerusalem International Convention Center, on May 28, 2013. Photo by Flash90.
(JNS)
For the first time, Orthodox students outnumber secular students among Israel’s first-grade pupils.
Education Ministry data for the 2025/26 school year lists just over 66,000 pupils entering state-secular schools, compared with roughly 72,000 combined in the state-religious and Haredi streams.
Arab, Bedouin, Druze and Circassian schools together account for about 40,000 first graders, bringing total enrollment to just under 180,000.
Demographer Sergio DellaPergola, professor emeritus and former chairman of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem’s Harman Research Institute of Contemporary Jewry, explained that these statistics are the culmination of a long trend.
“For many years, we have seen the numbers shifting in this direction; the shift has been gradual but stable,” DellaPergola told JNS.
DellaPergola further explained that the driving force behind this shift is fertility: “Clearly, the dominant factor is the birth rate. The birth rate is the main engine of population change in Israel …, the wide differences in the birth rate of different sections of the Israeli population … determine a much faster rate of growth among the religious population and, in particular, the Haredim.”
Two decades ago, about six in 10 Jewish first graders were enrolled in the secular system; today, it is fewer than half.
DellaPergola noted that official forecasts underestimated the scale of the change: “There are more than 40% more children in first grade in the Haredi system than had been expected 10 years ago, whereas changes for the secular and Arab systems are virtually nil.”
He added that while secularization continues to play a demographic role, its effect is limited compared with fertility: “There is a continuous transfer of people from one movement or section of persuasion to another …, a net process of secularization in Israeli society. However, this is very weak compared with the actual numbers of the newborn, which are substantially stronger.”
DellaPergola emphasized that first-grade enrollment is a preview of future society: “First grade is six years after you are born, so the trend anticipates what will happen later.”
Israeli educational performance
While the enrollment figures highlight who is entering Israel’s classrooms, test results indicate what those students are learning once inside. National assessments provide a first look at how different parts of the system are performing against the backdrop of a major demographic shift.
The most recent Meitzav (“School Efficiency and Growth Indicator”) exams, Israeli national standardized tests for students in Hebrew, math, English and science, showed widening gaps between pupils in the center and those in the geographic and socioeconomic periphery.
Average math scores in state-secular schools were roughly 40 points higher than in the Haredi sector, where many schools do not administer the test at all. Arab schools, serving nearly one-fifth of the country’s students, also reported significantly lower averages in core subjects compared with the Jewish state system.
Israel’s standing in international comparisons tells a similar story. In the 2022 OECD PISA exams, Israeli 15-year-olds scored an average of 458 in math, 474 in reading and 465 in science, each slightly below the OECD averages of 472, 476 and 485, respectively.
In math, 63% of Israeli students reached level 2 or higher, compared to 69% across the OECD; in science, 68% achieved this level, versus 76% on average.
At the top end, 6% of Israelis reached levels 5 or 6 in math, while in reading, Israel was closer to the OECD norm.
The results also highlighted wide internal gaps: high-achieving pupils in Tel Aviv and Jerusalem performed on par with peers in Europe and East Asia, while students from peripheral towns and low socioeconomic communities scored far lower.
Yitzhak Klein, former head of the Department of Policy Research at the Kohelet Policy Forum, told JNS, “The Israeli public education system really doesn’t work. It’s comparable to dysfunctional systems in big American cities like Chicago or New York, structures weighed down by interests that have little to do with children’s needs.”
Source of the problem
Some critics point to the organization of the school system as a central issue.
State-secular, state-religious, Haredi and Arab schools operate under separate curricula and oversight. The critics argue that the structure allows families to choose an education aligned with their community, but also produces uneven resources and outcomes.
However, Klein dismissed these concerns, saying “the division into multiple school systems doesn’t drive polarization so much as reflect it. The schools mirror Israel’s cultural divisions rather than create them.”
The highly centralized Ministry of Education continues to face pressure to give schools greater autonomy.
Advocates argue that more local control would allow principals and teachers to adapt to their students’ needs, while critics caution that it could deepen inequalities between the different streams.
Staffing is also often cited as one of the system’s weak points. Israel employs about 200,000 teachers, yet statistics from the Education Ministry show gaps persist in math, English and science, particularly in schools outside major cities.
Education Ministry data further shows that more than a third of teachers leave the profession within their first five years, and average salaries remain below the OECD mean despite recent agreements to raise wages.
Some observers argue that these shortages and retention problems are a major reason for weaker student outcomes. Others contend that performance is less a question of numbers than of policy, pointing to overcentralization, bureaucracy and limited school autonomy.
Avrum Tomer, a researcher of education policy at the Kohelet Policy Forum and head of the parents organization HaDor HaBa—Parents for Choice in Education, rejected the shortage narrative in his interview with JNS.
“According to all available data, there is no shortage of teachers. On the contrary, in recent decades the number of teachers in the system has grown rapidly relative to the number of students,” he said.
“On the ground, then, there is a shortage, but it stems from centralization and the lack of flexibility that a freer, more responsive labor market could provide to meet the varying needs in each place,” Tomer said.
For those skeptical that teacher shortages are the main reason for weak outcomes, attention often turns to the unions. The Israel Teachers’ Union and the Secondary School Teachers’ Association (SSTA) are among the most influential labor groups in the country, regularly clashing with the Finance Ministry over salaries, contracts and work rules.
Tomer was blunt: “Teachers’ unions in Israel could, in principle, play a constructive role. Instead, they have become a heavy weight on the system’s neck, consistently blocking essential reforms.”
He added that by prioritizing seniority over excellence, the unions have entrenched mediocrity over merit.
Klein echoed the criticism, linking bureaucracy with organized labor: “Administratively, everyone suffers from the way the system is run. The Ministry of Education retains complete centralized control run by career bureaucrats, political leaders are threatened constantly with strikes, and the unions demand quantity over quality. Together, it’s a recipe that blocks improvement.”
Both Tomer and Klein explained that beyond the issues surrounding union politics and bureaucracy, teacher quality was also a central weakness.
Tomer stressed, “The real challenge is not the number of teachers in the system but their quality. We fail to attract the most capable university graduates into teaching.
Klein voiced similar concerns about standards in teacher training: “People who populate schools of education are not the top college students, but near the bottom. … a system cannot be better than the teachers who populate it, and the teachers in Israel are, as a whole, not good.”
He argued that low salaries prevent talented candidates from entering the classroom: “If you had 3% of the entering class in the Technion engineering schools going into teaching math and physics, you could solve a big part of the problem, but you’re not going to solve it at 9,000 shekels [$2,700] a month.”
Klein summarized the point bluntly, saying, “The qualification needed for being a teacher in Israel is basically having a pulse.”
Both Klein and Tomer emphasized that greater school autonomy is another factor critical for raising standards.
Klein explained that meaningful reform depends on giving principals real authority: “To really improve, schools need autonomy. Principals should be able to hire and fire, and to pay enough to bring talented people into math and science classrooms. Without that flexibility, you can’t attract the people who could raise standards.”
He added that local administration of the education system during the COVID pandemic proves that decentralization can work in practice: “The dirty secret is that local authorities already managed fairly well during Corona without the ministry’s micromanagement.
“What’s needed from the state is not to run schools but to set clear standards of what a student should know by the end of each grade,” Klein said.
Tomer made a similar argument, saying that the state should set measurable goals but avoid interfering in day-to-day management.
Innovation and reform
Despite recurring labor disputes and persistent bureaucratic hurdles, a growing wave of educational reforms has advanced in Israel over the past several years.
One of the most significant is the Shoreshim (“Roots”) program, announced on May 27, 2025, by Education Minister Yoav Kisch. The initiative seeks to reinforce Jewish and Zionist identity by embedding weekly Bible classes in all schools from grades 1 to 12 and integrating a Bible study exam into the national Meitzav assessment.
A new core subject, “Paths of Heritage,” is being introduced for elementary and middle schools by 2026. To support this rollout, more than 1,600 educators have undergone specialized training. The education budget for Jewish identity studies alone has quadrupled, from 1% to 4% of total allocations in just one year.
In parallel, Israel has embraced technological transformation in the classroom, culminating in the declaration of 2025 as the “Year of AI.” As part of this program, the Ministry of Education launched a national effort to train 70,000 teachers in classroom applications of artificial intelligence, supported by 3,000 mentors from more than 400 tech companies, including Google, Microsoft, Apple and Nvidia.
Five core AI tools, ranging from chatbot tutors to Minecraft-based learning environments, are being deployed across grades 4 to 12 to enhance lesson planning, engagement and personalization.
Complementing this initiative is the AI Regulatory Sandbox Pilot, launched in July 2025 with 10 million shekels ($3 million) in funding. The sandbox allows approved ed-tech companies to run live experiments in public schools, testing AI-driven personalized learning solutions under regulatory supervision.
These reforms aim not only to boost academic performance but also to mitigate challenges such as teacher shortages, large class sizes and uneven resource allocation.
Local governments have also experimented with alternative models, building on earlier pilots. Municipalities such as Tel Aviv and Haifa have expanded their “autonomous schools” program, granting principals greater discretion over hiring, budgeting and curriculum design, within national guidelines.
In the Negev and Galilee, charter-style schools continue to pilot STEM-focused curricula supported by philanthropic foundations. Though evaluations show modest improvements in student engagement and achievement, efforts to scale these models nationwide have met logistical and institutional opposition.
Tomer pointed out that political resistance is a persistent barrier.
“Any courageous minister of education who attempts to lead fundamental change will immediately face fierce opposition from all those who benefit from the status quo: teachers’ unions, senior bureaucrats, and at times, local authorities,” he said.
Tomer added that the state of Israel’s education system constitutes a paradox, considering the country’s standing as an international leader in tech innovation.
“Israel’s technological renaissance is being driven by only a relatively small portion of the population. … The excelling minority benefits from stronger educational opportunities, partly because it is less dependent on the state system and receives much enrichment from outside it,” Tomer said.
Image: First graders on the first day of school in Jerusalem, Sept. 1, 2025. Photo by Chaim Goldberg/Flash90.
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