Central Florida's Independent Jewish Voice
Central Florida's Independent Jewish Voice
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(JTA) — The Israeli military has recovered the bodies of three people who were killed in the massacre at the Nova music festival on Oct. 7, including Shani Louk, whose body was photographed being carried away in a pickup truck by Hamas terrorists. Rear Adm. Daniel Hagari, the Israel Defense Forces spokesman, said Friday evening in a press conference that the three were killed on the day of the Hamas massacres that launched the war. Like other hostages held by Hamas, their bodies were taken into the Gaza Strip as leverage. “According to the cre...
WASHINGTON (JTA) — The White House denied reports that the United States withheld intelligence from Israel on the whereabouts of Hamas’ leaders. The reports alleged that the United States would provide the intelligence in exchange for Israel curbing its offensive in Rafah, the city in southern Gaza. “The United States is working with Israel day and night to hunt the senior leaders of Hamas, who were the authors of the brutal terrorist assault of Oct. 7,” a White House official told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency. “We are providing unprecede...
WASHINGTON (JTA) — Twenty-six Democrats in the U.S. House of Representatives have asked the White House for a briefing on why President Joe Biden suspended the delivery of large bombs to Israel, the latest sign of fractures in the party over Israel policy. “We are deeply concerned about the message the Administration is sending to Hamas and other Iranian-backed terrorist proxies by withholding weapons shipments to Israel, during a critical moment in the negotiations,” said the letter sent Friday to Jake Sullivan, Biden’s national securit...
WASHINGTON (JTA) — Bernie Sanders, the two-time presidential candidate and leading progressive senator, has announced he will run for a fourth term. Sanders, 82, an independent from Vermont, made history in 2016 as the first Jewish candidate to win a major party’s presidential primary, and ran again in 2020. In both primaries, he finished in second to the Democratic nominee. He is considered the de-facto leader of progressives in the Senate. In an eight-minute campaign launch speech posted online Monday, Sanders called to suspend U.S. mil...
(JTA) - Israeli police arrested Ayelet Waldman, a Jewish American author, while she was with a group trying to deliver relief to Palestinians in the Gaza Strip. Waldman, who is Israeli-born, was one of seven people arrested Friday morning at a protest action organized by Rabbis for Human Rights, and one of five Americans. Two were released before Shabbat, organizers said, but Waldman was still in custody at the police station in Ashkelon, a city near the Gaza border. Her husband Michael Chabon,...
WASHINGTON (JTA) — In his first address about the pro-Palestinian protests rocking campuses nationwide, President Joe Biden said “order must prevail” but rejected proposals to bring in federal troops. “Dissent must never lead to disorder, or to denying the rights of others so students can finish the semester and their college education,” Biden said Thursday in the four-minute speech. “It’s basically a matter of fairness. It’s a matter of what’s right. There’s the right to protest, but not the right to cause chaos.” Biden did not announce conc...
WASHINGTON (JTA) — Israel’s war cabinet unanimously voted to approve an invasion of Rafah in southern Gaza, shortly after Hamas said it had agreed to a ceasefire deal with Israel. The announcements were two landmarks in a whirlwind — and confusing — day of diplomacy and warfare following months of speculation and negotiations. As of Monday night Israel time, both the fighting and diplomacy were ongoing. Israeli officials said the proposal Hamas accepted was different from the one Israel had agreed to. In its statement, the war cabinet said th...
(JTA) - Israel's military intelligence chief, Maj. Gen. Aharon Haliva, resigned, saying he assumed responsibility for the intelligence failures that failed to prevent the Oct. 7 Hamas invasion that launched the current war. The resignation letter Haliva sent Monday to the Israeli military chief of staff, Lt. Herzi Halevi, is unusual in that he assumed responsibility for the failures even before the launch of a state inquiry into the missteps that left Israel unprepared for the attack. "The intel...
WASHINGTON (JTA) - President Joe Biden said the United States would continue to "impose costs" on Russia for its imprisonment of Wall Street Journal reporter Evan Gershkovich, who was arrested one year ago. The Journal marked the March 29 anniversary by leaving most of its front page empty below a headline reading, "HIS STORY SHOULD BE HERE." Every other article and headline on the front page involved Gershkovich. "Today we mark a painful anniversary: one year of American journalist Evan...
(JTA) – Joseph Lieberman, a longtime senator from Connecticut who as Al Gore's running mate in 2000 became the first Jewish member of a major presidential ticket, died Wednesday. He was 82. A statement sent to former staffers and reported widely said Lieberman had suffered complications from a fall. A moderate - some would say conservative - Democrat turned independent, Lieberman was known for his attempts to build bridges in an increasingly polarized Washington, sometimes losing old friends a...
WASHINGTON (JTA) - Howard Kohr, the CEO who has led the powerhouse American Israel Public Affairs Committee since 1996, is set to retire by the end of this year. Under Kohr's leadership, AIPAC has traversed five presidencies and more than 10 Israeli elections. In that time, its budget and staff have enjoyed significant growth as it has become one of the best known and most powerful lobbies in Washington. During his tenure, the United States' military aid to Israel increased to $3.8 billion per...
WASHINGTON (JTA) — A range of Jewish and pro-Israel figures, including Israel’s antisemitism envoy, accused Sen. Jeff Merkley of advancing a “blood libel” for linking Easter to what he called Israel’s “indiscriminate bombing” of Gaza. Merkley, an Oregon Democrat, had already marked Easter Sunday on X with a generic wish for a “blessed holiday.” He followed up with a post citing the holiday in his call to cut arms shipments to Israel and to pressure the country to facilitate the entry of more humanitarian assistance into Gaza. “On this Easter,...
(JTA) - Tens of thousands of Jews around the world joined in a collective recitation of the Shema prayer on Thursday that was broadcast from Jerusalem's Western Wall to support the more than 130 hostages still held by Hamas. The event was organized by the Hostage and Missing Families Forum along with Aish HaTorah, a haredi Orthodox yeshiva and outreach movement. They timed it to the Fast of Esther, which commemorates the threat the Jews of Persia faced from their persecutor, Haman, during the...
WASHINGTON (JTA) — An overwhelming majority of U.S. Jews say Israel’s reasons for launching a war against Hamas are justified, and a substantial majority approve of how Israel is conducting the war. The Pew Research Center study published Thursday is billed as the rare survey of sentiment about the war to include enough Jewish and Muslim respondents to garner an accurate reflection of their views. It shows that Jewish views on the conflict are in many ways starkly different from those held by the rest of Americans. Far fewer U.S. res...
(JTA) — Vice President Kamala Harris called for an “immediate ceasefire” in Gaza and placed most of the onus on Israel for a shortfall in humanitarian aid entering the enclave. The call for a cessation of fighting was not actually a change in the U.S. position on the war. In her speech, at a civil rights-focused event on Sunday in Birmingham, Alabama, Harris made clear that she was not referring to a permanent ceasefire, which progressive activists have advocated for months. Rather, she was voicing support for the current Israeli-backed propo...
WASHINGTON, D.C. (JTA) — For months, President Joe Biden has asked for — and Congress has debated — sending wartime foreign aid to Israel as it battles Hamas in the Gaza Strip. The bill currently on the table, passed in a bipartisan vote by the Senate last week, would see some $14 billion go to Israel as part of a $95 billion foreign aid bill. Biden is now pushing the Republican-led House to take up the bill. The majority of the bill’s funds would aid Ukraine in its war against Russia, and a smaller portion is earmarked to help Taiwan deter C...
(JTA) — A campaign to protest President Joe Biden’s support of Israel by voting “Uncommitted” in the Michigan Democratic presidential primary declared victory on Tuesday night, as returns showed the movement garnering more than 10 percent of the vote. Biden still won the primary overwhelmingly. But the Uncommitted movement, also called Listen to Michigan, had set a goal of drawing 10,000 votes — the margin by which Donald Trump won the state in the 2016 presidential election. By early Wednesday, with most votes counted, more than 100,000 p...
WASHINGTON (JTA) — A conflict that started on a tiny perimeter of land on Oct. 7 is, less than four months later, reverberating throughout the region, from Lebanon in the north to Morocco in the west, Iran in the east and Yemen in the south. “This is an incredibly volatile time in the Middle East,” U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken said Monday at a press conference. “I would argue that we’ve not seen a situation as dangerous as the one we’re facing now across the region since at least 19...
WASHINGTON (JTA) — A growing number of countries has suspended funding to the main United Nations agency aiding Palestinians in the wake of allegations that a number of its staffers were involved in Hamas’ Oct. 7 massacre in Israel. The U.N. Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees, known as UNRWA, protested the cuts, saying that they were accelerating an oncoming famine in the Gaza Strip. The agency was founded to administer relief to Palestinian refugees and their descendants and is the main provider of aid in Gaza, where it emp...
WASHINGTON (JTA) — Fifteen Jewish Democrats, including some pro-Israel stalwarts, slammed Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu after he rejected the idea of creating an independent Palestinian state after the Israel-Hamas war. “We strongly disagree with the prime minister,” said the brief statement released Friday morning by the office of Rep. Jerry Nadler, the New York representative who is the unofficial dean of Jewish House Democrats. “A two-state solution is the path forward.” The statement — which comes amid rising calls from some Jew...
(JTA) — Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis said that if Israel were faced with a “second Holocaust,” he could understand why it would remove Palestinian civilians from the Gaza Strip. The statement came hours after Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said that Israel has no intention of doing so. DeSantis’ remarks at a Republican presidential debate came on the eve of opening arguments at The Hague, where Israel faces charges of genocide at the International Court of Justice. The debate was the final one ahead of the Iowa Republican caucuse...
(JTA) — France’s newest prime minister is getting attention for the two firsts he brings to the job: Gabriel Attal, at 34, is the country’s youngest ever prime minister, and its first to be openly gay. He says another facet of his identity also shapes him: His late father’s Jewishness. Attal’s mother raised him and his siblings in her Russian Orthodox Christian faith. But his father, the film producer Yves Attal, was Jewish, born in Paris to Tunisian Jewish and European Jewish parents. “My father said to me, ‘Perhaps you’re Orthodox but yo...
WASHINGTON (JTA) — Americans for Peace Now, a left-wing pro-Israel organization, is calling for an end to the Israel-Hamas war, the first American Zionist group to do so after more than three months of fighting. “Continuing this devastating war poses unacceptable risks for Israel, Gazan civilians and the entire region,” James Klutznick, the group’s chairman, said Monday in a statement. “For the sake of the security and wellbeing of civilians in Israel and in Gaza, the Biden administration must push Israel to bring about an immediate cessation...
WASHINGTON (JTA) — The Biden administration condemned calls by two Israeli government ministers for Palestinians to be removed from the Gaza Strip. Rabbi Rick Jacobs, the president of the Union for Reform Judaism, also condemned the call. The criticism comes as gaps remain between President Joe Biden and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu over who will govern Gaza on the day after Israel’s ongoing war with Hamas, the terror group that controlled the territory prior to its Oct. 7 invasion of Israel. While Biden has pushed for the Wes...
(JTA) — Dean Phillips is running for president. And he wants to talk. Talking runs in the Jewish Minnesota congressman’s family — his grandmother is Dear Abby. And he’s friends with Ilhan Omar, despite their polar opposite views on a range of issues, including Israel, because they like to talk things through. Now, Phillips, 54, is hoping that penchant for dialogue will fuel his latest endeavor — a long-shot bid to defeat Joe Biden in the Democratic presidential primary. “The greatest ch...
