The Dictatorship
I’m a Rabbi. Here is why my faith tells me the war in Gaza must end.
Jews around the world are preparing for the coming High Holy Days, from the traditionally joyful New Year celebrations of Rosh Hashanah and the more solemn Day of Atonement, Yom Kippur. This sacred period is marked by deep introspection: taking stock of our actions throughout the past year and committing ourselves to do better in the year ahead.
Notably, the High Holiday liturgy is written in the plural “we,” a reminder that though we act as individuals, we are inextricably bound together as one Jewish people. The deep bonds between Jews worldwide are why, here in North America, we so viscerally felt the tremendous pain of the Hamas attack on Oct. 7, 2023.
In its efforts to win this war, Israel is losing the larger battle.
They are why we see our own lives as bound up with the fate of the hostages languishing in Gaza and with the pain of their families. And it is this commitment to make the New Year better than the last that compels the Reform Jewish movement that I help lead in North America, and so many others in Israel and beyond, to raise our voices against the Israeli government’s plans to further expand the war.
The tragedy of Oct. 7 will live in the collective Jewish memory alongside horrors such as the destruction of the ancient Temples and the Holocaust. Hamas bears responsibility for this war, having mercilessly attacked Israel on Oct. 7. Through torture, murder, rape and kidnapping, Hamas sought to destroy Israel and eliminate the prospects for a peaceful future between Israelis and Palestinians, as well as between Israel and other regional Arab states.
But in its efforts to win this war, Israel is losing the larger battle. The Netanyahu government’s defense of Israel began justly, but it has become a quagmire.
Nearly two years of war has not brought about the return of the remaining hostages, and the daily violence of war continues to take the lives of innocent Gazans and has brought widespread hunger into Gaza. The Netanyahu government has also shared no clear plan for the day after hostilities end. And the war is increasingly used by extremist members of the government as a pretext for their long-held desires to rebuild settlements in Gaza.
Our concerns about the war’s expansion and the hunger gripping Gaza echo those of hundreds of thousands of Israelis who have taken to the streets, week after week, urging the Israeli government to choose a different path. They amplify the voices of the hostage families who beseech the government to bring their loved ones home. And they reflect the views of respected Israeli military, security and political leaders who have warned that expansion of the war will prove to be a military, political and humanitarian disaster.
Last week, an Israel Defense Forces attack on Gaza’s Nasser Hospital resulted in the deaths of 20 Palestinians, including journalists and medical providers. The office of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu called it a “tragic mishap” that it “deeply regrets.” Such deaths of innocents will inevitably continue as the war expands.
Here in North America, the war is having direct repercussions, as well. It is causing painful divisions within families and within synagogues, and it has severely tested the nearly 80 years of bipartisan American political support that has helped Israel defend itself from hostile neighbors. All this comes at a time when North American Jews are experiencing a deadly spike in antisemitism.
Our concerns about the war’s expansion and the hunger gripping Gaza echo those of hundreds of thousands of Israelis who have taken to the streets, week after week, urging the Israeli government to choose a different path.
Attending a Jewish event should never come at the risk of a person’s life, or any violence. Yet today, Jews around the world are increasingly targeted. When Sarah Milgrim and Yaron Lischinsky were murdered as they walked out of a gathering on humanitarian diplomacy in the Middle East and North Africa, held at the Capital Jewish Museum in Washington, their assailant shouted, “Free Palestine.” Weeks later, in Boulder, Colorado, an attacker hurled incendiary devices at peaceful marchers demanding the release of hostages in Gaza — injuring 12, including an 88-year-old Holocaust survivor, one of whom has since died. Again, the attacker shouted, “Free Palestine.”
These assaults reveal a dangerous trend: antisemitic violence cloaked in the language of liberation. Murdering Jews is not resistance; it is terrorism. Such violence does nothing to advance Palestinian freedom — it only deepens fear, hatred and despair.
Those of us committed to a free Palestine — a Palestine free from Hamas’ tyranny and exploitation and free from the burdens of Israeli occupation — must insist that this struggle cannot and will not be waged through the targeting of Jews.
Ensuring Jewish safety must go hand in hand with bold political leadership that can deliver a future in which Palestinians and Israelis both live with dignity, freedom and peace.
On the cusp of a new Jewish year — the second in which Israelis taken on Oct. 7 languish in captivity — it is time to end this nightmare. The hostages must come home, humanitarian aid must flow into Gaza in amounts sufficient to meet the need, and planning must begin for “the day after.”
Only then can we truly begin to hope for the words expressed in the traditional High Holiday greeting: A Good and Sweet New Year.
Rabbi Rick Jacobs
Rabbi Rick Jacobs is president of the Union for Reform Judaism, the most powerful force in North American Jewish life. The URJ leads the largest and most diverse Jewish movement in North America, reaching more than 2 million people through 825 congregations, 14 overnight camps, the Reform teen youth Movement NFTY and the Religious Action Center in Washington, D.C. For more than 150 years, the URJ has been at the forefront in promoting an open, progressive Judaism.
WASHINGTON (AP) — U.S. President Donald Trump and Vice President JD Vance say their interim deal to end the war with Iran will deliver a financial windfall to American farmers.
But the Iranians deny it. And in the absence of more details, sanctions experts are flummoxed over exactly how billions of dollars’ worth of Iranian assets would make their way to the American heartland from the escrow accounts where they’ve been locked for years by U.S. sanctions.
A tentative agreement reached last week would reopen the Strait of Hormuz, through which a fifth of the world’s oil and natural gas once passed, and allow Iran to start selling its oil freely again during a 60-day period when the two countries will continue negotiating key issues. The memorandum of understanding also promised to unfreeze Iranian assets.
Trump’s deal has come under fire for failing to address the reasons the president cited for going to war with Iran on Feb. 28, including curbing Tehran’s nuclear ambitions, its missile program and its support for militant groups such as Hezbollah in Lebanon and Hamas in Gaza.
Lashing back at critics Tuesday on his Truth Social media platform, Trump said U.S. farmers would get a payday: The U.S. Treasury Department, he wrote, would release the Iranian assets “into escrow, controlled by the U.S.A., and will be used for the purchase of food and medical supplies, exclusively from the United States, including Corn, Wheat, and Soybeans from our great American farmers. These are things that are desperately needed by Iran.’’
Vance, who spoke about the proposal after high-level talks in Switzerland, and Trump say that any frozen funds and assets held outside of Iran will be used to buy U.S. crops.
But the Iranians deny that’s part of the deal. A spokesperson for the Iranian Foreign Ministry, Esmail Baghaei, said any agricultural purchases would be based on “prices and quality,’’ not terms dictated by Washington.
“It is interesting that the philosophy and goal of the war, which was the destruction of the Iranian civilization and the collapse of Iran, has become enriching American farmers,” Baghaei said.
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Iran’s ambassador in Geneva, Ali Bahreini, rejected Vance’s contention that the U.S. and Qatar would dictate how Iran uses unfrozen funds. “Iran is the only country who decides what to do with those assets,” he told reporters.
A U.S. official dismissed the contradiction, asserting that Iranian leaders were speaking to their domestic audience. The official spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak on the record.
Joseph Glauber, a research fellow emeritus at the International Food Policy Research Institute, said Iran was unlikely to abandon its other trade partners on food.
Iran’s major suppliers include Brazil, India, Turkey, the European Union, Canada, Australia and Argentina, he said. Trump’s demand to buy from the U.S. would “create some hard feelings with some of our competitors.”
Under previous sanctions, the U.S. has required that money foreign countries spend on imports from Iran — such as South Korean purchases of oil and Iraqi purchases of Iranian electricity — be locked in escrow accounts and typically released only if the Treasury approves and if the proceeds go toward “non-sanctionable’’ items such as food and medicine.
On Monday, the U.S. Treasury approved the sale of Iranian oil, petrochemicals and petroleum products through Aug. 21. It did not mention any escrow accounts.
Richard Goldberg of the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, who coordinated efforts to put diplomatic pressure on Iran in the first Trump administration, said in a post on X that he would welcome “a clarification that Iran is actually restricted to only buying U.S. agricultural products.”
Richard Nephew, senior research scholar at Columbia University’s Center on Global Energy Policy, said it’s unclear what the new U.S.-Iran agreement actually means for releasing restricted Iranian assets.
Could the U.S. require that the assets be used to buy American farm products?
“Well, we can try!’’ Nephew, who helped design Iran sanctions in the Obama and Biden administrations, said by email. “All you really need to do is to tell a foreign bank that they can move the money but only to a U.S. bank to buy soybeans or whatever.”
Banks do not have to comply, he said. If they refuse, the U.S. could sanction them as well.
But it’s rare for the U.S. to conduct itself that way, he added, “in part because we don’t usually like to give the impression that we treat national security issues as a cash grab.”
___
Associated Press writers Josh Boak and Michelle L. Price in Washington contributed to this report.
Wednesday marks four years since the Supreme Court issued its landmark Dobbs decisionwhich effectively overturned Roe v. Wade and repealed the constitutional right to an abortion. On “Morning Joe,” co-host Mika Brzezinski explained how the ruling set off a domino effect across the United States, affecting not just abortion-related care, but also altering “the state of women’s healthcare as a whole.”
As Brzezinski noted, states across the country have enacted harsher abortion restrictions since the 2022 ruling, with 13 outright banning the procedure with very limited exceptions. This has created a climate of fear among those who treat pregnant patients, with many healthcare providers worrying that any care involving an abortion could violate the law, even when the mother’s health is at risk.
“We are talking about people dying when they’re miscarrying because doctors are too afraid to intervene and save their lives,” Amy Littlefield, abortion access correspondent for The Nation, told MS NOW.
Brzezinski said the laws have effectively limited women’s “access to lifesaving healthcare.”
The MS NOW host reflected on some high-profile stories of pregnant women who faced delayed care in states with near-total abortion bans, noting “the numbers of cases that we’ve covered here on the show of women who have had their lives threatened, have been forced to give birth to dying or dead babies, and then, by the way, denied the access to ever create life again, because they became sterilized in the process.”
“There’s an image I can’t get out of my head,” Brzezinski added, before sharing reporting from ProPublica about Porsha Ngumezi, a 35-year-old mother who died in Texas in 2023 after not receiving timely care for a miscarriage.
“For months afterward, Porsha’s 3-year-old son would chase after women who looked like her on the street, shouting, ‘That’s Mommy!’” Brzezinski said. “That’s the detail I can’t forget. I can’t stop imagining that little boy chasing after strangers on the street. And that story repeats itself.”
You can watch Brzezinski’s full comments in the clip at the top of the page.
Allison Detzel is an editor/producer for MS NOW. She was previously a segment producer for “AYMAN” and “The Mehdi Hasan Show.”
One of the biggest upsets in Tuesday night’s primaries came in New York’s 13th Congressional District, where Darializa Avila Chevalier, a 32-year-old democratic socialist, managed to beat incumbent Rep. Adriano Espaillat, 71, who was backed by establishment Democrats.
Chevalier, a doctoral student in sociology at the City University of New York, secured 49.4% of votes in the district — which encompasses upper Manhattan, Harlem and parts of the Bronx — defeating Espaillat, who received about 46% of the votes after representing the district for nearly a decade, according to The Associated Press. She now advances to the November general election, which she is presumed to win in the solidly Democratic district.
Chevalier’s primary win marks a major win for the Democrats’ left-wing flank that backed her, including New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdaniwho endorsed Chevalier last month during a joint interview on MS NOW’s “The Briefing with Jen Psaki.”
Here is what to know about Chevalier and the platform she campaigned on.
She has never held elected office
Prior to her congressional campaign, Chevalier had never run or held elected office. But she has been involved with advocating for issues that became political flashpoints, including helping organize the pro-Palestinian encampments at Columbia University, according to her biography on the website of the Justice Democratsthe progressive group that recruited her to run.
The daughter of Dominican immigrants, Chevalier also worked as an organizer for Families for Freedom, a New York City group that assists immigrants facing deportation.
Chevalier earned a bachelor’s degree in Middle Eastern studies from Columbia University in 2016 and later worked as a paralegal, according to her LinkedIn.
Chevalier faced scrutiny during her campaign over previously articulated stances and incendiary comments, including her appearance at a Times Square rally the day after Hamas’ attack on Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, where attendees reportedly suggested the attack was justified.
At a March candidates’ forum, Chevalier declined to condemn Hamas, saying that a request to do so “ignores the 75 years of occupation that the Palestinian people have been subjected to and the conditions that that folks were living under before this genocide began,” the local outlet City & State reported. Later, on local radio station WNYC, Chevalier said she did condemn Hamas when asked, adding, “As far as I know, the U.S. does not send a single dime to Hamas. What we fund is the Israeli military.”
In a series of since-deleted social media posts between 2018 and 2022Chevalier also used expletives to refer to former Vice President Kamala Harris and the Democratic National Committee, calling for abolishing borders and stopping all deportations, according to BLN. Other reports noted that she called former President Joe Biden a “rapist” and disparaged white people in some of her posts.
Chevalier has said she has “grown considerably” since writing those posts and that she regrets them. Mamdani defended her after the social media posts surfaced but said he was unaware of them before endorsing Chevalier.
She’s the left’s preferred candidate
Chevalier’s focus on affordability, expanding housing access and opposing war and deportations made her the preferred candidate of many progressive groups. In addition to the endorsements from Mamdani and the Justice Democrats, she was also backed by the New York City chapter of the Democratic Socialists of America and several progressive members of the New York City Council.
After her primary win, the Democratic establishment also seems to have rallied behind her, despite her previous expletive-laden critiques of them.
In a statement Tuesday, DNC Chair Ken Martin called Chevalier “a tireless advocate for the hard-working people of New York City” who “will fight for healthcare, affordable housing, public education, civil rights, and an economy that works for everyone.”
Julianne McShane is a breaking news reporter for MS NOW who also covers the politics of abortion and reproductive rights. You can send her tips from a non-work device on Signal at jmcshane.19 or follow her on X or Bluesky.
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