Free Republic

Former IDF chief says ridicule over his English reflects prejudice against Mizrahi Israelis, asking where Netanyahu’s 'excellent English' was on Oct. 7. Yashar party leader Gadi Eisenkot accused Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s circle of racism after a senior Netanyahu adviser shared a post mocking Eisenkot’s English, saying the attack reflected panic among the prime minister’s allies... “It is racist, and I despise them,” the former IDF chief said in an interview with “120 and One,” ynet’s Hebrew-language political podcast... Eisenkot, who is expected to challenge Netanyahu in the upcoming general election, said he had attended dozens of English-language meetings with...

As the sun sets on a Friday evening, preparations for Shabbat are in full swing in South Brooklyn... Inside one of the few grocery stores still open, a man who left Damascus in the 1990s greets one of his regular customers in Syrian Arabic as a Hebrew song plays in the background. The pair part ways with a “Shabbat Shalom.” These Brooklyn streets—home to the largest Syrian Jewish community outside of Israel, with an estimated 75,000 members—echo the spirit of the once-bustling centers of Jewish life in Damascus and Aleppo. Today, Syria’s historic Jewish quarters are a dimmer scene. Only...

Israel on Wednesday made public for the first time some 200,000 pages of documents related to the fate of the 1950s missing Yemenite children, something Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said was meant to “correct the historical injustice” of hiding the fate of the children. “It is difficult to believe that for almost 70 years, people did not know what happened to their children,” Netanyahu said. “And as difficult as the reality may be, we are not willing for this to continue.” Netanyahu's comments came at a ceremony in the Prime Minister's Office where a website was launched with the documentation...

Along with resurgent identity politics in the United States and Europe, there is a growing inclination to frame the Israeli-Palestinian conflict in terms of race. According to this narrative, Israel was established as a refuge for oppressed white European Jews who in turn became oppressors of people of color, the Palestinians. As an Israeli, and the son of an Iraqi Jewish mother and North African Jewish father, it’s gut-wrenching to witness this shift. I am Mizrahi, as are the majority of Jews in Israel today. We are of Middle Eastern and North African descent. Only about 30% of Israeli Jews...