SAN DIEGO (SDJW) – Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said Sunday that the government has appropriated millions of dollars to double the Jewish population of the Golan Heights, which was seized from Syria in the Six-Day War and which Israel subsequently annexed.
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Israel’s Defense Minister Israel Katz on Sunday told a government committee reviewing the military budget that “recent developments in Syria have increased the severity of the threat … despite the moderate vision that the Syrian rebel leaders are presenting.” He asked for more funds to meet “these elevated threats.”
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Israel’s Lt. Gen. Herzi Halevi, the IDF’s chief of staff, after a tour of the Golan Heights on Friday, commented “We are not intervening in what is happening in Syria. We are here to stop terrorist elements from establishing themselves. … There was a country here that was an enemy state, its army collapsed, and there is a threat that terrorist elements could reach here. We moved forward so that these terrorist elements will not establish themselves – extremist terrorists will not establish themselves right next to the border.”
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Israel’s Foreign Minister Gideon Sa’ar has announced he will close Israel’s embassy in Ireland. “The antisemitic actions and rhetoric that Ireland is taking against Israel are based on delegitimization and demonization of the Jewish state and on double standards,” Sa’ar stated. “Ireland has crossed all red lines in its relationship with Israel. Israel will invest its resources in promoting bilateral relations with the countries of the world according to priorities that are also derived from the attitude of the various countries towards it.”
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Mayor Lester Friedman of Beverly Hills, California, chaired a conference of 230 mayors hosted by the Combat Antisemitism Movement (CAM) at which combatting antisemitism at the local level was the focus. Ifat Ovadia-Luski, chair of the Keren Kayemeth Le-Israel-Jewish National Fund (KKL-JNF) urged the mayors to “build lasting partnerships that combat anti-Semitism and promote unity on a global scale.”
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Ted Deutch, the CEO of the American Jewish Committee, reported that a letter he signed along with the heads of the Anti-Defamation League, the Jewish Federations of North America, and Prizmah: Center for Jewish Day Schools protesting antisemitic rhetoric at a recent conference of the National Association of Independent Schools brought an encouraging reply from Debra Wilson, NAIS president. She wrote: “I write to express my profound remorse over the divisive and hurtful rhetoric expressed on stage at last week’s NAIS People of Color Conference in Denver. There is no place for antisemitism at NAIS events, in our member schools, or in society. … We have already begun implementing meaningful changes to our speaker selection and content review processes. Going forward, all keynote presentations will be submitted in advance, including detailed outlines or full remarks, along with slides and materials. No last-minute changes will be permitted without explicit review and approval.”
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Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas, interviewed on ABC This Week by George Stephanopoulos, said that mysterious drones flying over New Jersey and other East Coast states have prompted the federal government to deploy “additional resources, personnel, technology to assist the New Jersey State Police in addressing the drone sightings. … In September of 2023, the Federal Aviation Administration, the FAA, changed the rules so that drones could fly at night. And that may be one of the reasons why now people are seeing more drones than they did before. …”
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Senator Bernie Sanders (Ind-Vermont) said on Meet The Press on Sunday that “We are moving rapidly into an oligarchic form of society. Never before in American history have so few billionaires, so few people, have so much wealth and so much power. Never before has there been so much concentration of ownership, sector after sector, power of Wall Street and never before in American history – and we better talk about this – have the people on top had so much political power.”
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Compiled by San Diego Jewish World staff