Last Thursday, February 29th. 2024, the Israeli Occupation Forces showed their true brutal inhumanity when they opened fire on desperate, starving Palestinian civilians, surrounding aid convoys coming into Gaza. The Israeli soldiers deliberately attacked and killed 118 Palestinians and injured over 1000. As per usual, Israeli spokes-persons denied that they opened fire. And when eye-witnesses Continue reading »

Two of the three victims specifically singled out by the New York Times in a marquee exposé published in December, which alleged that Hamas had deliberately weaponized sexual violence during the October 7 attacks, were not in fact victims of sexual assault, according to the spokesperson for the Kibbutz Be’eri, which the Times identified as the location of the attack.

The rejection of the Times reporting in the kibbutz by Be’eri spokesperson Michal Paikin further undermines the credibility of the paper’s controversial December article “‘Screams Without Words’: How Hamas Weaponized Sexual Violence on Oct. 7.”

The Times article described three alleged victims of sexual assault for whom it reported specific biographical information. One, known as the “woman in the black dress,” was Gal Abdush. Some of her family members have contested the claims made by the Times. The other two alleged victims were unnamed teenage sisters from Kibbutz Be’eri whose precise ages were listed in the New York Times, making it possible to identify them. 

According to data from the Israeli government’s public list of the victims who died at the kibbutz during the October 7 attacks, as well as a memorial page established by the community itself, the victims in Kibbutz Be’eri matching the description in the New York Times article were sisters Y. and N. Sharabi, ages 13 and 16. (The Intercept has identified the girls but is not printing their first names.)

“No, they just — they were shot. I’m saying ‘just,’ but they were shot and were not subjected to sexual abuse.”

When asked about the claims made by the New York Times, Paikin independently raised their name. “You’re talking about the Sharabi girls?” she said. “No, they just — they were shot. I’m saying ‘just,’ but they were shot and were not subjected to sexual abuse.” Paikin also disputed the graphic and highly detailed claims of the Israeli special forces paramedic who served as the source for the allegation, which was published in the New York Times, the Washington Post, CNN, and other media outlets. “It’s not true,” she told The Intercept, referring to the paramedic’s claims about the girls. “They were not sexually abused.”

“We stand by the story and are continuing to report on the issue of sexual violence on Oct. 7,” Times spokesperson Danielle Rhoades Ha told The Intercept.

A spokesperson for the Israeli government, Eylon Levy, played a lead role in connecting the anonymous paramedic with international media outlets.

As The Intercept previously reported, Anat Schwartz — an Israeli filmmaker who, before joining the Times, appeared to have no prior experience reporting the news — was hired by the paper to investigate sexual violence on October 7. She worked under Pulitzer Prize-winning correspondent Jeffrey Gettleman, and alongside Adam Sella, who was contracted shortly after October 7 to work for the Times; Sella’s own journalism experience was mostly writing about food and culture. Ben Smith, the editor-in-chief of Semafor and the former media columnist for the New York Times, reported Sunday that Sella recommended his uncle’s partner, Schwartz, to the Jerusalem bureau chief, and she was brought on board for the investigation. Schwartz told Israeli Army Radio she had personally conducted over 150 interviews for the story.

In a podcast interview produced by Israel’s Channel 12 in January, Schwartz described in detail how she sought to confirm that the girls had been sexually assaulted. She said she first learned of the case when she saw an interview with a man identified as a paramedic from an elite Israeli military unit. The Israeli government coordinated media interviews with the paramedic, who did them with his back turned to the camera to avoid being identified.

In her podcast interview, Schwartz said that she had been unable to find a second source to confirm the paramedic’s account. “I don’t have a second source … for the paramedic with the girls in Be’eri,” she said. “This stage of [getting the] second source, it took a very long time.” While she mentions the second source, in the interview Schwartz does not mention any specifics about actually finding one, and the Times report does not cite any other corroborating witness for its portrayal of the condition in which the girls were allegedly discovered by the paramedic.

In the report, the Times presents unnamed “neighbors” at Kibbutz Be’eri who “said their bodies had been found alone, separated from the rest of their family.” According to the family, however, not even that detail is accurate.

A recent interview in the Israeli media with the Sharabi sisters’ grandparents offers details that directly contradict the Times reporting that the girls at Kibbutz Be’eri were sexually assaulted on October 7. “They were just shot — nothing else had been done to them,” their grandmother Gillian Brisley told Channel 12. (A U.K.-based lawyer for the Brisley family did not immediately respond to a request for comment.) The family also gave several interviews to international news outlets before “Screams Without Words” was published that provided information that undercuts the assertions in the Times article, raising questions about why the paper did not include these publicly available details.

The Brisley family and relatives in Israel who lived with the Sharabis at Kibbutz Be’eri have never asserted that the girls were sexually assaulted. In numerous interviews, the Brisleys have maintained the girls were killed alongside their mother.

According to the Times report, “Screams Without Words”: 

A paramedic in an Israeli commando unit said that he had found the bodies of two teenage girls in a room in Be’eri.

One was lying on her side, he said, boxer shorts ripped, bruises by her groin. The other was sprawled on the floor face down, he said, pajama pants pulled to her knees, bottom exposed, semen smeared on her back.

Because his job was to look for survivors, he said, he kept moving and did not document the scene. Neighbors of the two girls killed — who were sisters, 13 and 16 — said their bodies had been found alone, separated from the rest of their family.

The Israeli military allowed the paramedic to speak with reporters on the condition that he not be identified because he serves in “an elite unit.”

On February 29, Israel’s Channel 12 broadcast a feature story on the grandparents, who traveled from Britain to the kibbutz to view the home where their loved ones died and to meet with neighbors, family members, and officials. In the interview, the Brisleys’ description of the deaths of their daughter, Lianne, and their granddaughters contradict virtually every detail, outside of the Be’eri girls’ ages and that they were killed, presented in the Times article.

“They were found between the ‘mamad’” — the house’s safe room — “and the dining room and it’s an awful thing to say, they were just shot — nothing else had been done to them. They were shot,” said Gillian Brisley. “A soldier said he saw our daughter” — the girls’ mother — “but she was covering the two girls and they were shot,” added her husband, Pete, the girls’ grandfather. “The seventh of October was the saddest day of my life.” 

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Israel’s War on Gaza

Months before the Times story was published on December 28, the Brisleys had already given an interview to the BBC offering details contradicting the depiction that would later appear in the Times, including the assertion the girls were found alone in a room. Gillian Brisley told the BBC on October 30 that the teenage girls were “found all cuddled together with Lianne doing what a mother would do — holding her babies in her arms, trying to protect them at the end.” Brisley said it was a “small comfort but a comfort nevertheless.”

On October 24, the Israeli news site Walla published a story about the family, which also said the girls were killed alongside their mother. Sharon Sharabi, whose brother Eli was the father of the two girls and was kidnapped that day and reportedly taken to Gaza, said that Palestinian fighters entered the family home, broke into their safe room, and killed Lianne and the two girls. “Lianne and [Y] were only identified through dental records, and [N] by DNA,” he said. He did not specify where the forensic examinations had taken place. N was initially reported missing for two weeks because her body had yet to be formally identified.

“I’ve heard all the versions. What’s the truth? I don’t know.”

Sharon Sharabi told The Intercept that his family has not been provided with any specific details about his nieces’ deaths that would allow him to draw a firm conclusion about what happened to them that day. “To tell you concretely what happened in Be’eri, or what happened at the house of the Sharabi family, I don’t have an answer for you,” he said. “There is certainly no credible information I can give you, only testimonies of ZAKA” — private rescue workers — “or of military personnel who arrived at the scene first and saw the atrocities. So any information I might give you is information that I’m not confident about, and therefore I would rather not give it [at all].” 

He added, “I’ve heard all the versions. What’s the truth? I don’t know.” Sharabi emphasized that he firmly believes there was widespread sexual violence committed during the attacks of October 7.

Before the Times published its exposé, the Israeli military paramedic claimed in interviews with the Washington Post, CNN, and an Indian news channel to have seen evidence that two girls had been sexually assaulted at a kibbutz. “One was on the bed. Her arm was dangling from the bed frame. Her legs were bare, with bruises, and she had a bullet hole in the chest-neck area,” he told the Post. The details of the recollection closely matched those the paramedic gave to the Times. 

The paramedic’s story was met with skepticism by the news site Mondoweiss. In his first interview, on October 25, with an Indian news channel, the paramedic said he witnessed the scene at Kibbutz Nahal Oz, not Be’eri.

According to the official records of October 7 deaths at Kibbutz Nahal Oz, there were no victims that matched the age estimates offered by the paramedic. The closest possible match would have been sisters who were 18 and 20 years old, who were killed at their home at the kibbutz along with their parents. 

When Levy, the Israeli government spokesperson, promoted the Indian TV interview on social media that day, he posted an edited portion of the interview which removed reference to Nahal Oz. Instead, Levy wrote in a tweet that it had occurred at Kibbutz Be’eri, where official records indicated two teenage sisters roughly matching the paramedics description had been killed. “Israeli special forces paramedic describes the aftermath of the brutal rape and execution of Israeli girls in Be’eri during the October 7 Massacre,” Levy tweeted October 25. In a subsequent post, he wrote, “If media want to interview this special forces paramedic about the horrors he saw in the kibbutzim on October 7, drop me a message in my DMs.” When the paramedic was later interviewed on CNN, on November 18, he maintained he had seen the two girls at Kibbutz Be’eri. In his tweet, Levy implied that the paramedic had been to multiple kibbutzim.

By the time Schwartz met the paramedic, the location of the scene was fixed at Be’eri. Schwartz said during her podcast interview that she put extensive effort into trying to confirm the paramedic’s story. “I said, if I want information about the rapes, I have to call the kibbutzim — and nothing,” she said. “No one saw or heard anything.”

Eventually, she reached the unit 669 paramedic, identified in some media interviews as “G.” He relayed the same story he had told other media outlets. Schwartz cited this incident as a central reason she concluded there was organized sexual violence on October 7. “I say, ‘OK, so it happened, one person saw it happen in Be’eri, so it can’t be just one person, because it’s two girls. It’s sisters. It’s in the room. Something about it is systematic, something about it feels to me that it’s not random,” Schwartz concluded on the podcast.

Schwartz does not mention the unnamed neighbors who allegedly saw the two girls alone in the podcast. 

It is unclear why the Times did not include the well-publicized statements from the Be’eri girls’ family members. Several of them have done interviews with Israeli media and international newspapers and TV networks, including the BBC, the Daily Mail, and the Daily Telegraph.

The case received significant media attention in the U.K. because Lianne was a British citizen who emigrated to Israel, and her children were dual citizens. The family has also been outspoken in pressuring the British government to put greater effort into freeing Lianne’s husband, Eli Sharabi, the father of the two girls, who is believed to be a hostage in Gaza. The Times article does not mention the fact that there are conflicting details and instead airs the single-sourced assertions offered by the paramedic. If Times reporters had other sources for this story, aside from neighbors who allegedly told the Times the girls were found alone, the readers were not given any indication of it.

On Monday, United Nations Special Representative on Sexual Violence in Conflict Pramila Patten reported that her team found information indicating sexual violence took place. “In the context of the coordinated attack by Hamas and other armed groups against civilian and military targets throughout the Gaza periphery, the mission team found that there are reasonable grounds to believe that conflict-related sexual violence occurred in multiple locations during the 7 October attacks, including rape and gang-rape in at least three locations, namely: the Nova music festival site and its surroundings, Road 232, and Kibbutz Re’im,” the report release said, calling for a full investigation. The special representative wrote, “Overall, the mission team was unable to establish whether sexual violence occurred in kibbutz Be’eri.”

The special representative found two high-profile cases of sexual assault alleged to have happened at Kibbutz Be’eri to be “unfounded.” In its coverage of the U.N. report, the Times sourcing on the alleged assaults in Be’eri moves from a singular first responder to plural, and claims that the sexual assault it identified was a separate incident than the two described by the U.N. “First responders told The New York Times they had found bodies of women with signs of sexual assault at those two kibbutzim, but The Times, in its investigation, did not refer to the specific allegations that the U.N. said were unfounded,” the Times reported. (“The plural ‘first responders’ is accurate,” said the Times spokesperson, without elaborating.)

The controversy around the Times coverage gained momentum last week after X user Zei Squirrel highlighted Schwartz’s social media activity, which included “liking” a post that expressed genocidal incitement against Palestinians in Gaza, calling to “turn the strip into a slaughterhouse.” The Intercept then published excerpts of an interview in which Schwartz offered revelatory details about the Times’s reporting process. For months, independent news outlets such as Mondoweiss, The Grayzone, and Electronic Intifada, as well as the independent research collective October 7 Fact Check, have been documenting a variety of problems with the Times story and highlighting inconsistencies.

On January 5, Laila Al-Arian, an Emmy and Polk Award-winning executive producer for Al Jazeera English, sent an email to New York Times international editor Phil Pan, as well as Jerusalem bureau chief Patrick Kingsley and the Times standards department, posing detailed questions about the veracity of the Times report. She received no response.

Amid mounting public scrutiny, the Times assigned its reporters to effectively re-report their story. The resulting article was published on January 29, and the paper has since maintained it stands by the original report.

Meanwhile, the Times newsroom is facing a serious internal conflict over its coverage of the war against Gaza. Shortly after the December 28 “Screams Without Words” article was published, the paper’s flagship podcast “The Daily” was tasked with converting it into an episode. After a review by producers, the original script, drafted to hew closely to the original article, was shelved, with a more circumspect and caveated script written.

The new script raised problems for the masthead. Running a watered-down version of the article would raise questions as to whether the paper was standing by its reporting amid criticism, including, most prominently, from the family of Gal Abdush. No episode of “The Daily” on the December 28 story has run to date.

The Intercept reported on the internal dispute at the Times in late January. The paper’s masthead responded not by reviewing its reporting, as it did after the debacle over weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, but instead by launching a highly unusual leak investigation. The Times union denounced the probe this weekend for racially profiling journalists with Middle Eastern and North African backgrounds. The probe, the union said, also focused on journalists who used proper Times channels to critique the reporting, as reporters are encouraged to do.

Times Executive Editor Joe Kahn responded to criticism of the internal probe Saturday in a companywide email, arguing that the leak investigation was proper because the whistleblowers had revealed details about an unpublished episode of “The Daily.” That argument, however, elides the reality that the dispute was not about something the Times did not publish, but rather about something that it did.

“They know better than anyone that leaks are desperate measures when people want to expose grave failures without any safe or efficient internal mechanisms,” said one Times source. “Trying to crush the messenger won’t make the basic fact that the story is a journalism failure go away.”

The post Kibbutz Be’eri Rejects Story in New York Times October 7 Exposé: “They Were Not Sexually Abused” appeared first on The Intercept.

The relaunch of legislation to implement Article 23 of the Basic Law to prohibit national security offences, after a pause of more than 21 years, has sparked remarkably few controversies in the local community in Hong Kong. In the light of the political upheaval in 2019, and evidence of dangerous activities emerging from cases currently Continue reading »

The Israeli government covertly meddled into American Jewish politics from the 1950s to 1970s, and they did so to quash Jewish criticisms of the 1948 Nakba — the mass dispossession and expulsions of Palestinians during Israel’s founding — and Israel’s oppression of Palestinians. Israeli diplomats who oversaw the furtive campaign were at one point assisted by Wolf Blitzer — today the host of CNN’s primetime show “The Situation Room.”

These are some of the findings of “Our Palestine Question,” an explosive new book by Emory University scholar Geoffrey Levin that offers historical perspective on today’s crisis in Gaza, especially as it plays out today among American Jews.

Since the murderous October 7 attacks by Hamas against Israel, and Israel’s overwhelming retaliatory attacks against Palestinian civilians in Gaza, American Jews have organized dramatic protests. They have demanded everything from a ceasefire and to an end to U.S. military funding for Israel.

This diverse group of American Jews opposed to Israeli policy, and, at times, Israel itself, is drawing on a history of activism in the U.S. that has long since faded into obscurity — and they are bringing it from history into the present day.

Many of these activists explicitly cite earlier political movements as their inspiration. One was the socialist, anti-Zionist General Jewish Labor Bund, founded over a century ago in Eastern Europe, but which had been defunct for generations. The others are a post-1980 agglomeration of U.S. groups including the now-defunct New Jewish Agenda and liberal J Street, which is still around and lobbying politicians, albeit with fewer resources than the Zionist right. These smaller groups were formed after avowed Zionists and anti-Zionists stopped talking to each other, except to scream.

What few activists remark upon, however, is a time within living memory, in the 1950s, when the biggest Jewish organization in the U.S. — the American Jewish Committee, or AJC — was publicly critiquing the Nakba and pushing Israel to afford full civil and human rights to Palestinians. Less noted and lesser known is how this remarkable status quo was erased: From the 1950s to the late 1970s, Israel orchestrated the back-channel attacks on influential individuals and groups, including the AJC, who were pushing for Palestinian rights.

“Our Palestinian Question” pries the lid from this suppressed tale.

American Jewish McCarthyism

Levin picked up the scent of this hidden history a few years ago. He was a Hebrew and Judaic Studies doctoral student then, sifting through Jewish history special collections in Manhattan as well as the Israel State Archives in Jerusalem, when he dug up evidence of the sub rosa American Jewish McCarthyism. He was the first researcher to discover how the Israeli government, through its diplomats and a spy in the United States, pressured American Jewish institutions to ghost a prominent journalist, fire a brilliant researcher, and discredit an organization of Jews who were critiquing Israel’s treatment of Palestinians and trying to open channels for discussion with Arabs.

Take the case of journalist William Zukerman. A respected Yiddish- and English-language writer in the 1930s and 1940s, with clips in Harpers and the New York Times, Zukerman started his own biweekly, the Jewish Newsletter, in 1948. It was highly critical of Jewish nationalism and its destructive effects in the new state of Israel and beyond.

In one story, Zukerman reported about a Holocaust survivor who had recently resettled in Israel, in the former home of an Arab family. The survivor became “openly obsessed” about her morality, Zukerman wrote, after her children found some of the evicted family’s possessions. “The mother was suddenly struck by the thought that her children were playing with the toys of Arab children who were now exiled and homeless,” Zukerman continued. “Is she not doing to the Arabs what the Nazis did to her and her family?”

By the early 1950s, the Jewish Newsletter had a few thousand subscribers, and its work was republished in many other outlets, Jewish and non-Jewish, with much larger circulations — Time magazine, for instance. Not all of Zukerman’s readers, however, opposed Zionism. Each of the hundreds of chapters of the Jewish student organization Hillel had a subscription to the Jewish Newsletter.

According to declassified Israeli Foreign Ministry files found by Levin, the Israeli government was alarmed by Zukerman’s influence on American Jews. It started a campaign to keep him from “confusing” Zionists about Israel and Palestinian rights. Israel aimed a letter-writing campaign at the New York Herald Post to discourage the paper from running more of Zukerman’s work, and hatched a scheme to distribute boilerplate text for Zionists to mail to other editors, asking them not to publish Zukerman anymore. The head of Israel’s Office of Information in New York worked to have the prestigious London-based Jewish Chronicle get rid of Zukerman’s column, and he lost the position. By 1953, his work no longer appeared in the Jewish press. 

And there was Don Peretz, an American Jew with generationslong ancestral roots in the Middle East and Palestine. As a young man in the early 1950s, he’d written the first doctoral dissertation about the post-Nakba Palestinian refugee crisis. The study was considered so authoritative that it was published as a book that, for years, was used as a college text. Peretz’s work earned him attention from the AJC. Founded at the turn of the 20th century, the organization had spent decades advocating first for civil and human rights for American Jews and, later, for oppressed groups worldwide. Concerned about the plight of Palestinians and worried that their mistreatment by Israel would increase American antisemitism, the AJC in 1956 hired Peretz as a researcher.

Don Peretz, second from left, in Palestine in February 1949 with fellow volunteers for the Quaker group the American Friends Service Committee. The group was distributing aid to those displaced during the Nakba, the forced expulsion and dispossession of Palestinians during Israel’s founding.
Photo: Courtesy of Deb Peretz

Peretz had extensive, friendly contacts with Palestinians. He began writing informational pamphlets and reports. In one, which an AJC leader personally gave to Secretary of State John Foster Dulles, Peretz suggested that Israel might repatriate Palestinians expelled during the Nakba. After Israeli officials read the pamphlet, they asked a worker at AJC to send them on-the-sly intelligence about the author, with the aim of getting him fired. Then Israel asked the AJC to submit all Peretz’s Middle East-related work to the Israeli Embassy in Washington or the Consul General in New York, for pre-publication review. The AJC complied. When Peretz wrote a new book about Israel and Palestine, the Israelis strongly disapproved of it, communicating their displeasure to the AJC. The group demoted Peretz to half-time work. He quit. 

It’s probably no coincidence that Peretz’s departure occurred in 1958, the year the novel “Exodus” debuted. It quickly became a blockbuster and, later, a movie starring blonde, blue-eyed Paul Newman as a steely, pre-independence Israeli paramilitary warrior. It seemed by then that Americans, Jewish or not, were loving Israeli Zionism more and caring about Palestinians less.

Meanwhile, diaspora Jews were triumphantly assimilating into mainstream America. Their acceptance came with problems. With weakening ties to traditional religious practice, increasing intermarriage, and mass suburbanization, they grappled with an identity crisis and sought new touchstones. One was communal enactment of Holocaust remembrance. Another was the celebration of Israel — no matter what.

It was a cultural coup for pro-Israel advocates — American Jews were coming around en masse — informed by societal changes in the diaspora, but also with organized elements, much of it orchestrated by Israel, that catalyzed and enforced the shifts. Over the next decade, the trend would only increase, as Israel’s unlikely victory against its Arab neighbors in the 1967 Arab Israeli war reinforced themes of both admirable, scrappy Israel, and a nation badly in need of support from fellow Jews across the world. In the U.S., American Jews increasingly answered the call.

The AIPAC policy conference at the Washington Hilton, on March 31, 2003, in Washington, D.C.
Photo: Chris Maddaloni/Roll Call/Getty Images

Against Two States

Even as the ubiquity of American Jewish support for Israel grew, Israel and its advocates began to push back not just on anti-Zionism, but even what would become widely known in the U.S. as liberal Zionism. It was in this capacity that Blitzer, the CNN host, became involved in the sorts of efforts Levin covers in “Our Palestine Question.”

Levin discusses an incident from late 1976 where Blitzer, still a young reporter, and Israeli government sources worked together to kneecap an American Jewish peace group called Breira: A Project of Concern in Diaspora-Israel Relations. Breira means “alternative” in Hebrew. The group had first organized in 1973 to protest the hard-line Jewish organizational positions that emerged after the recent 1973 Arab–Israeli War.

Pro-Israel advocates in the U.S. were taking on more right-wing visions of Zionism and reacted to the war by embracing the ideas that Zionist settlements in the occupied territories and ostracization of the Palestine Liberation Organization were essential to Israel’s survival. Instead, Breira wanted to provide the “alternative” and called for Israel to recognize Palestinians’ desire for nationhood; it was the first American Jewish group to advocate for a two-state solution. The New York Times editorialized in early 1976 that Breira was overcoming “the misapprehension of many Jewish Americans that criticism of Israeli policies would be seen as a rejection of Israel.”

Then Israel pushed back.

In November 1976, a handful of people who worked at several American Jewish organizations met secretly and as private individuals with moderate representatives of the PLO. Attendees were affiliated with the American Jewish Congress, American Jewish Committee, B’nai B’rith, the National Council of Jewish Women, and Breira. They would later insist that they had no wish to engage in diplomacy with the PLO, only informal dialogue to discuss peacemaking. One meeting took place in New York City; the other was in Washington. Afterward, some attendees wrote reports and sent copies for informational purposes to Israeli diplomats they knew personally. They trusted that the diplomats would not publicize the meetings.

At the time when the meetings occurred, Blitzer worked as Washington correspondent for the Jerusalem Post. His beat was reporting on how Middle East affairs played out in America, especially regarding Israel. The Jerusalem Post, however, was not his only employer. Blitzer also worked for two publications that, in effect, were the house organs of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, or AIPAC.

Days after the Washington meeting, Blitzer wrote a hit job about the Washington meeting for the Jerusalem Post and named the American Jewish attendees. Based on details in his coverage and press that followed, attendees said it was clear that Blitzer had received a confidential report leaked by Israel. His piece quoted unnamed “Israeli officials” and an unnamed diplomat expressing “concern” about the meeting as part of novel “PLO propaganda tactics” with the aim of “the destruction of Israel.”

A firestorm ensued among American Jewish groups. All the organizations whose members had attended as individuals denounced the meetings — all, that is, except for Breira. Its continued defense of the gatherings prompted AIPAC to excoriate the group as “anti-Israel,” “pro-PLO,” and “self-hating Jews.” Virtually no influential Jewish organizations publicly countered these denouncements. Breira’s national convention in 1977 was disrupted and vandalized by intruders who left leaflets supporting the vigilante far-right Jewish Defense League. The group lost membership, and internal conflict led its major donor to withdraw funding. By 1978, Breira had sputtered out. Thanks to an AIPAC-linked journalist and Israeli officials, another vein of American Jewish dissent about Israeli policies had been stripped.

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Israel’s War on Gaza

Though Levin’s book was already in press months before the October 7 attacks, the mothballed history it airs has become since especially apt. If the Jewish community decades ago had known about Israel’s meddling, “you could have had a broader conversation,” he speculates, “which maybe would have led to less discomfort discussing difficult issues now.”

Levin added that “a lot of really bright people were pushed out of the mainstream American Jewish establishment” for discussing issues that have today been furiously rekindled. Would Jewish America’s Palestine question have stronger answers now if not for Israel’s underhanded attempts, years ago, to silence its U.S. diaspora critics? “You have to wonder,” Levin said, “what the American Jewish community would have looked like if it had welcomed some of these voices.”

The post How Israel Quietly Crushed Early American Jewish Dissent on Palestine appeared first on The Intercept.