Monday, August 18, 2025
From Ian:
Jpost Editorial: Hostage protests: Fighting each other is what Hamas wants
Jpost Editorial: Hostage protests: Fighting each other is what Hamas wants
There is no question that an entire nation wants its children to come home, only the method. But what cannot happen is turning one another into the enemy, is allowing disagreements – deep and essential ones – to delegitimize us in one another’s eyes. That is precisely where the line lies.The Black Book
Zvika Mor, the father of hostage Eitan Mor, said on Sunday morning, in a plea to his fellow hostage families, “My brothers and sisters, I make this plea from the bottom of my heart. You called to shut down the country... You did not miss the opportunity to ensure that the public is repulsed by us, the hostage families.”
He called for the strike to be canceled. “It cannot be that reservist soldiers who are on their way down to the Gaza Strip – to fight Hamas and bring our hostages home – can’t get to their bases because highways are blocked. This cannot be.”
Mor is a member of the Tikva Forum, a smaller representation of hostage families compared to the larger Hostages and Missing Families Forum. These two represent the true standard to which public dialogue is supposed to be; they disagree, but they respect and hold space for one another.
The act of protesting is one of the most sacred and vital tools in the hands of citizens in a democratic state to express their sentiments, wishes, and opinions. It cannot be stifled or curtailed, especially in an era where many feel and fear that democratic institutions in Israel are under attack.
But it is important to draw a distinction between the cause – freeing all of the hostages and bringing the security situation to a state of calm – and the method. Not everybody agrees with the method, and there is validity to both sides.
The heartfelt nature of a nationwide shutdown cannot be stated enough, especially after nearly two years of war. People dropped everything and followed their hearts and their consciousnesses out to the streets to join in pain and demand action. This has merit, and woe to Israel the day that citizens don’t care for their brethren.
Dialogue, though – healthy, respectful dialogue – cannot get lost in the shuffle.
Leningrad, February 1976. The broad boulevards of the city, founded by Peter the Great as Russia’s “window to Europe,” lay frozen under the deep frost of a typical Soviet winter: gray, unmoving, sealed in silence. We were a Jewish family of four—my father, Gennady; my mother, Mila; my sister, Elena; and me—living in a city then called Leningrad (today Saint Petersburg) at a time when silence was often the only defense. Leonid Brezhnev, general secretary of the Communist Party, presided over a vast and crumbling empire. The world would later call it “the period of stagnation”—a term far too mild for those living beneath its weight. The economy was paralyzed, the politics rigid, but repression moved with quiet efficiency. Political dissidents, Zionist activists, Prisoners of Zion, and Jews in general were treated as suspect—perpetual outsiders in a state obsessed with control.Rubio’s State Department yanks more than 6K student visas due to assault, burglary, support for terrorism
We lived under constant watch, not for any action or offense, but simply for being a Jewish family in the Soviet Union. And yet the strength we drew from one another, and the trust of a few close friends, gave us just enough oxygen to endure. Snow-covered streets and frozen canals reflected a city choked in frost—bitterly cold, silent, and subdued. The average temperature hovered around 23 degrees Fahrenheit, but the wind, the damp, and the endless cloud cover made it feel far colder.
That winter, our family received an official invitation to immigrate to the State of Israel. The invitation had come from my mother’s uncle, Rabbi Ben-Zion Brook, head of the Novardok Yeshiva in Jerusalem. It was a legitimate request for family reunification—one of the very few justifications the Soviet regime would accept for emigration. After all, why else would anyone want to leave the so-called paradise of the Soviet Union, a country that spanned 12 time zones and one-sixth of the planet’s surface? To admit that Jews wanted to leave because of ideology, discrimination, or spiritual longing would be to expose the cracks in the system. “Family reunification” was a narrow but permissible loophole.
Ben-Zion had left the Belarusian town of Rogachev in 1920, when my grandfather (my mother’s father) was five years old. Decades later, they found each other again and began corresponding in Yiddish. My grandfather would read the letters aloud, his voice trembling, while my parents listened with tears in their eyes. But before long, the KGB summoned my grandfather to the infamous “Big House” on Liteiny Street and ordered him to stop all correspondence immediately.
Then, in February 1976, the visa invitation finally arrived. Not through the mail, but in person. The superintendent of our enormous Soviet apartment block—a sprawling concrete maze of modest flats—arrived at our door with the letter in hand. Standing beside him were two young men whose presence said everything: plainclothes agents. My parents, raising two young children, were filled with fear. They had spent years secretly listening to Voice of America and Radio Liberty. They understood what this meant. The silence was about to break.
But along with the fear came a flicker of joy: Three previous invitations had simply disappeared, swallowed by the system. Now, at last, one had arrived. My father rushed to share the news with my grandfather. In a gesture both symbolic and chilling, my grandfather handed him a samizdat copy of The Black Book, compiled by Ilya Ehrenburg and Vasily Grossman—a rare and dangerous volume from a small, secret library he had maintained. He believed, with quiet defiance, that his children and grandchildren needed to know the truth about the world.
The State Department has yanked more than 6,000 student visas in 2025 for overstays and law violations — including support for terrorism, Fox News Digital has learned.
The Trump administration has launched multiple initiatives aimed at cracking down on immigration and revoking visas of those attending academic institutions in the U.S.
Those who’ve participated in pro-Palestinian protests have faced heightened scrutiny, as one example, and Secretary of State Marco Rubio said in May that the administration was reviewing the visa status of those students.
The roughly 6,000 visas that were pulled were primarily due to visa overstays or encounters with the law, including assault, DUIs, burglary and support for terrorism, the State Department told Fox News Digital.
"Every single student visa revoked under the Trump Administration has happened because the individual has either broken the law or expressed support for terrorism while in the United States," a senior State Department official said in a statement to Fox News Digital. "About 4,000 visas alone have been revoked because these visitors broke the law while visiting our country, including records of assault and DUIs."
Those who had their student visas yanked due to assault — roughly 800 students — either faced arrest or charges stemming from assault, according to the State Department official.
Those whose visas were pulled due to support for terrorism — between 200 people to 300 people — engaged in behavior such as raising funds for the militant group Hamas, which the U.S. State Department has designated as a terrorist organization, the official said.
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