Day: May 24, 2024

(JTA) — The International Court of Justice ordered Israel to immediately halt its military operation in Rafah, in a largely symbolic ruling that will likely ramp up diplomatic pressure on Israel in its war against Hamas.

The ruling, handed down in The Hague on Friday, came at the behest of South Africa, which brought charges of genocide against Israel in the ICJ last year.

In a ruling on the case in January, the court said South Africa had a right to bring the charges and that the Palestinians had a plausible case to warrant protection from genocide, but did not order a stop to the fighting. Rather, it chose at the time to withhold an order while it assessed what Israel was doing to wind down its military operations and facilitate the entry of humanitarian assistance.

Friday’s ruling went further.

“Israel must immediately halt its military offense and any other action in the Rafah governate which may inflict on the Palestinian group in Gaza, conditions of life to bring about its physical destruction,” said Nawaz Salam, a Lebanese jurist who is currently the president of the ICJ, the United Nations’ top court.

In a filing earlier this month, South Africa said that Israel’s operation in Rafah was deteriorating conditions for Gaza Palestinians — who now face a growing risk o0f famine as the fighting has led to border crossings being closed. The court agreed with South Africa.

“The court observes that the concern expressed in its decision communicated with the parties on Feb. 16 2024,” it said  with respect to the developments in Rafah, have materialized and that the humanitarian situation is now to be characterized as disastrous,” Salam said.

The court also ruled that Israel should fully open a border crossing into Rafah to allow in humanitarian assistance and ensure unimpeded access to any international investigators. It told Israel to report back to the commission on June 24.

All votes on the 15-seat court Friday were 13-2, with the sole dissenters being Aharon Barak, the former Israel Supreme Court chief justice who is the country’s appointee to the court for the purposes of this case, and Julia Subtend, a Ugandan jurist who also opposed the court’s earlier rulings agreeing to consider South Africa’s petition.

There is no military mechanism to enforce the ruling absent a resolution by the U.N. Security Council, where the United States, which has opposed South Africa’s ICJ actions, holds a veto.

But the ruling promises to increase diplomatic pressure on Israel. The chief prosecutor at another Hague-based U.N. court, the International Criminal Court, this week said that he was seeking an arrest warrant for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Defense Minister Yoav Gallant as well as three leaders of Hamas, the terror group that has controlled Gaza and that launched the war on Oct. 7. The ICC tries individuals while the ICJ tries nations.

Netanyahu says that the final battalions of Hamas’ fighting forces in Gaza are sequestered in Rafah, and that ending the threat posed by the group requires the military operation there, which began earlier this month. The Biden administration opposed an invasion of Rafah due to the more than 1 million refugees who had fled there — many of whom have now evacuated the city.

Lately, consultations between top Biden officials and the Israeli government have tamped down those tensions, and Israeli reportedly has changed its tactics. Meanwhile, the humanitarian crisis continues unabated, and Hamas and other forces continue to fight with Israel in parts of the enclave that Israel had previously said were cleared.

The Biden administration wants a temporary ceasefire to facilitate the release of the 120 or so hostages still held by Hamas, a goal shared by many Israelis, including families of some of the hostages. But Hamas has rejected proposals put forward by the United States and Israel, demanding a permanent end to the war, which Israel opposes. In the face of that deadlock, Israel’s government has pressed ahead with the fighting in Rafah.

This article originally appeared on JTA.org.

The post International Court of Justice orders Israel to halt its Rafah operation appeared first on The Forward.

(JTA) — Israelis have long taken pride in two things: the long arc of Jewish history, and their relentlessly dark humor in the face of unspeakable tragedy.  

For about a decade, the synthesis of those two qualities has been “The Jews Are Coming,” a sketch comedy show now in its sixth season on Kan, Israel’s public broadcaster. 

Nearly every sketch in the show satirizes an event from millennia’s worth of Jewish and Israeli religious texts and history. Its guiding principle is irreverence. 

So the show’s catalog includes spoofs of the story of Purim and the invention of the mezuzah, but it also features joke after joke about the Nazis, the Spanish Inquisition, the Yom Kippur War, the destruction of the Second Temple in ancient times and any number of other lachrymose  episodes of the Jewish past. In the opening credits and between sketches, the show displays the tools used in a ritual circumcision. 

So after Oct. 7, the program confronted a question: What to do when the tragedy isn’t historical but current and — for many Israelis — ongoing?

This week, we got our answer: In unprecedented times, “The Jews Are Coming” did something unprecedented: It got serious. 

In two segments posted online over the past week, which opened and closed out a recent episode, the comedy show hardly aimed to elicit any laughs, but gave viewers a window into where Israelis’ heads are at more than seven months after Oct. 7. 

Both sketches take place in what look like typical “Jews Are Coming” settings. In the opening video, the biblical Moses, a recurring character on the show, praises Israelis for their spirit of generosity after the attack. 

“I saw how you’re volunteering, how you’re hosting guests, how you pile into vans to go and cheer up evacuees, or to dance with soldiers, to bring some happiness to this sad time,” he says. “You really surprised me. You’re a great nation, and you deserve to hear it.”

The closing video begins with Yael Sharoni, one of the show’s actors, dressed in robes indicating ancient times in front of what looks like a wall from the Old City of Jerusalem. Text on screen reads, “Jerusalem, 70 CE.” 

“It was the morning of the ninth of Av,” she begins, looking troubled, in a reference to the day when the Second Temple was destroyed by the Roman Empire. “We were awakened by a terrifying noise. We didn’t know what was happening, until we understood that the Romans had started burning the temple.”

Second later, looking terrified, Sharoni’s character says, “Then we heard shrieking from the house next door.” 

The scene shifts to a man in medieval garb, from Cologne in 1096, during the crusades, who picks up the narrative where Sharoni’s character left off. He is followed by Jewish survivors of the 1903 Kishinev pogrom, the 1929 Hebron massacre, Kristallnacht in 1938 and the Farhud, an antisemitic pogrom in Baghdad. Each describes witnessing the murder of Jews and their own fears of their families getting killed by violent antisemites. 

Finally, the narrative shifts to a woman in contemporary clothes and full color, alongside the text, “Kfar Aza, 2023.” The community was one of the sites hit hardest by the Oct. 7 attack.

“Everyone asks if we can go on living with this,” she says. “We have no choice. We must carry on, step by step, and start rebuilding from scratch.”

The message is clear: With global attention increasingly turned to devastation in Gaza, the video relays the Israeli perspective that Hamas’ attack — which killed approximately 1,200 people, destroyed Israeli communities and took some 250 people hostage — is just the latest in a long line of antisemitic massacres that the Jews have overcome. 

“In October we got a slap in the face not just from Hamas but from all of history — from Pharaoh, Amalek, Haman, the Cossacks, the Mufti, Hitler — those who in every generation rise up against us,” Natalie Marcus and Asaf Beiser, the show’s creators, posted in a statement online. “At difficult moments, when the present is intolerable and the future is clouded with fog, the past has a special power: It’s a source of comfort, guidance and, above all, a sense of proportion.”

Both videos, uploaded with English subtitles, are directed at an Israeli audience as well as a global one. And both, aiming for a unifying tone, come from a show that has divided Israelis in the past. Its premiere a decade ago was delayed for months after a promo clip satirizing right-wing extremist murderers from Israeli history drew charges of political bias. 

Orthodox rabbis have complained about depictions and invocations of Jewish tradition, and critics staged a protest against the show in 2020 that drew thousands of people. The show includes a disclaimer at the beginning of each episode that says “We apologize in advance” if anyone is offended.

The show’s creators appear wise to the fact that messages of shared destiny may ring hollow at a time when their country is both deeply traumatized and deeply divided. In the Moses segment, he cautions Israelis not to yield to the forces pulling them apart.

“Remember what you’ve been like in this time, without fighting or shouting or civil wars. And decide what kind of generation you want to be: a generation that destroys or a generation that builds. The future generations of the Jewish people are watching you now,” he says. 

(Because it is, after all, a comedy show, he adds, “Past generations are watching too, but that’s because there’s nothing better to do. We don’t have Netflix.”)

Still, he ends on a hopeful note: “I know this is a tough time, but remember, I got past Pharaoh — you can get past this.”

Whether the message of Jewish endurance will register in today’s Israel and around the world is unclear. But online, where the segments took off as soon as they were posted, in part because of the addition of English subtitles, there were signs that they were hitting their mark. 

“I love the way your team have made us laugh,” one commenter wrote on YouTube. “Now you deserve also my gratitude for your tribute to our reality.”

This article originally appeared on JTA.org.

The post Israel’s Jewish humor show offers a serious message for a dark time: We will survive appeared first on The Forward.

(NewsNation) —  Communities along the northern U.S. border with Canada are sounding a new alarm over a significant increase in people illegally crossing into the United States.

Officials say the number of people they are encountering within the Swanton Sector, which covers Vermont as well as counties in New York and New Hampshire, are up by 118% this fiscal year from last year.

April numbers eclipsed FY21 and FY22 combined, according to Swanton Sector Chief Border Patrol Agent Robert Garcia. As of Thursday, there have been nearly 2,000 encounters in May alone. Last year, there were 365 during the same time period.

“The question is how much of it, how many ‘gotaways’ are there, so to speak?” Garcia asked.

According to U.S. Customs and Border Protection data, there were a total of 16,750 migrant encounters along the entire northern border in April, an 18.5% increase from April 2023. Since October — the start of the 2024 fiscal year — there have been more than 108,000 encounters along the entire northern border, roughly four times as many as there were in all of fiscal year 2021.

Encounters along the northern border have increased each year since 2021.

Border walls have not been constructed along the northern border, unlike its southern counterpart. 

While concrete barriers are starting to be built in the area, these are meant to stop cars, not necessarily people.

In the Champlain area of New York, the busiest part of the Swanton Sector, one mom told NewsNation she won’t let her kids go outside without supervision because of the spike in crossings. Christina Wimble, who runs a day care in the area, says she and others have seen many people walking freely through the front of their yard. 

“They don’t have a handle on it,” Wimble said. “It wouldn’t be happening if they had a handle on it. I don’t feel safe with my kids being outside by themselves. I’m constantly outside or I’m looking at my windows, because they’re little. They can’t protect themselves.”

Border Patrol sources confirmed to NewsNation that things have slowed down a little since some agents from the southern part of the country, namely Texas’ Del Rio Sector, came up to the northern border to help out.

These sources say they’re trying to get agents to come to the northern border, as well as San Diego, as they don’t have enough resources on their own.

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