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JTA: Alleging conflicts, California judge boots Jewish DA from trying Stanford pro-Palestinian protesters

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You see, it’s “anti-Semitic” to suppose that a DA could be influenced by his Jewish identity to go after people Jews don’t like.

Alleging conflicts, California judge boots Jewish DA from trying Stanford pro-Palestinian protesters

Local Jewish groups say the ruling “risks reinforcing longstanding antisemitic prejudices.”

Stanford students protest Israel in California
Students and pro-Palestinian protesters gather at Stanford University to protest Israeli attacks on Gaza, April 22, 2024. (Tayfun Coskun/Anadolu via Getty Images)
By Niva Ashkenazi 

This story originally appeared in J. The Jewish News of Northern California.

Jewish groups in the Bay Area are protesting a judge’s removal of a local Jewish district attorney from a case involving pro-Palestinian protesters accused of vandalizing Stanford University’s president’s office.

The district attorney, Jeff Rosen, was disqualified from retrying a felony case against five protesters after the judge ruled that Rosen had crossed a legal line when suggesting in a campaign message that the protest was antisemitic.

“Rosen is allowed to take a strong stance against crime in the community, against antisemitism. But caution and care need to be taken when utilizing active litigation in campaign communication,” Judge Kelley Paul said from the bench.

“This case is not a hate crime,” Paul said. “The characterization of the prosecution as a fight against antisemitism runs afoul of case law.”

In an email to J. The Jewish News of Northern California, Rosen’s office wrote that while it “disagrees with the judge’s ruling, we respect it.”

In a joint statement, the Jewish Community Relations Council Bay Area and Jewish Silicon Valley wrote that they are “deeply troubled” by Paul’s decision and that the case “must proceed.”

“This decision uniquely targets minority prosecutors, suggesting they are incapable of pursuing justice in cases perceived to be impacting their own communities,” the statement says, adding that it “risks reinforcing longstanding antisemitic prejudices and invites future defendants to weaponize a prosecutor’s identity against them.”

The five protesters face felony vandalism and conspiracy counts stemming from a June 2024 protest in which 13 people broke into Stanford’s executive offices and caused an estimated $300,000 in damages. A jury deadlocked in February, splitting 9-3 on the vandalism count and 8-4 on conspiracy. Rosen quickly announced his plan to retry them.

The disqualification motion was filed by deputy public defender Avi Singh, who argued that Rosen had compromised his office’s neutrality by featuring the prosecution on a campaign fundraising page titled “DA Rosen Fighting Anti-Semitism,” alongside a donation button.

Singh argued that the fundraising campaign falsely implied that the defendants were antisemitic. None was charged with a hate crime.

Rosen, who has spoken publicly about his commitment to fighting antisemitism and supporting Israel, has denied any conflict of interest.

In her decision, Paul pointed to Rosen’s remarks in a March 2025 speech he gave for the San Jose Hillel, about a month before his office filed charges against the protesters. A video of the speech is linked on the “Fighting Anti-Semitism” page on his campaign website.

In the speech, Rosen equated antisemitism and “anti-Americanism,” a phrase that Deputy District Attorney Robert Baker also used to describe the conduct of the protesters during the trial’s closing arguments. Paul ruled that the similarities in the language disqualified the entire DA’s office from the case, not just Rosen.

In their own statement, the local Jewish groups suggested Rosen was being disqualified because he is Jewish.

“Generations of American Jews in positions of public trust have all too often been treated as suspect or inherently conflicted,” JCRC Bay Area and Jewish Silicon Valley said. “This decision risks reinforcing longstanding antisemitic prejudices and invites future defendants to weaponize a prosecutor’s identity against them, casting any public opposition to hate as grounds for disqualification.”

Rosen’s challenger in his June primary election, former prosecutor Daniel Chung, has turned the ruling into a campaign video. Chung called Rosen’s pursuit of the Stanford case “overzealous” and “a waste of time and money.”

“This is a humiliating loss for DA Rosen and his entire office,” Chung said in an Instagram video. “For years, millions of dollars have been spent trying to prosecute Stanford student protesters with felony charges.” Rosen’s actions, Chung said, “jeopardized the due process of the defendants” and “exemplifies the undermining of integrity, competence and compassion under DA Rosen for the last 16 years.”

The ruling hands the case to California’s attorney general, which will decide whether to retry the defendants — German Gonzalez, Maya Burke, Taylor McCann, Hunter Taylor-Black and Amy Zhai — or drop the charges.

Col. Douglas Macgregor: How Iran Defeated the US and Israel

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Excerpt:

getting the lay of the land in a political sense, going forward:

COL. Douglas Macgregor: How Iran Defeated the US and Israel

Judge: You refer to [Trump] as surrounded by a bubble. It’s a bubble of sycopants. I mean, we keep hearing these stories that General Caine—the chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff—and the Vice President might not have been part of the sycophant group and might have expressed opinions to [Trump] contrary to what he got from Secretary Rubio, Secretary Hegseth and the others. I don’t need to mention all of their …

Mac: Well, actually, Judge, I spoke over the weekend to some people in the White House and they said the opposite. There was no one more enthusiastic about going to war with Iran than JD Vance. And that’s my own experience with him. I saw this up close and personal. He was always talking about going to war with Iran. So I don’t believe [the Barnes narrative].

Judge: That’s consistent with his financial benefactors, Peter Thiel and Palantir and people that make a fortune on these wars.

Mac: And when it comes to Caine, you know, we’ve discussed that before. He was not appointed and made a fourstar to say no. And he’s an airman. And I think like most airmen, he was more than willing to give it a go because they thought this might be another opportunity to win a war with air power only. Of course, that’s nonsense, as we both know. But nevertheless, I’m very skeptical of these attempts to retrospectively confer a degree of credibility and character on these people when I didn’t see much evidence for it to begin with.

Judge: I guess I have fallen a little bit to the PR view that Vance has thought of himself as the loyal soldier but the dissenter up to the point of the decision to go in. But I accept very much what you said.

Mac: Before we before we leave this topic completely, I think it’s worth pointing out that right now—behind the scenes, at least—I’m being told this, that the argument is that President Trump was misled by his quote unquote Israeli friends and that had he paid more attention to his American advisers, the narrative goes, then events might have taken a different course. But the truth is, there is a mountain of evidence that–like President Lyndon Johnson–Trump and his inner circle, including Vance, were really driving military action and escalation from the beginning. And Trump seems to have rejected advice from anyone in or out of uniform who opposed it. But very few people that opposed what he wanted to do ever got to the White House, if any. And I think that’s your point on the bubble.

…

Judge: So, Colonel, have your friends in the White House expressed a view as to what Trump will do and who will he blame? Will he blame Hegseth? Will he blame General Caine? Will he blame the Israelis? He’s certainly got not going to take blame himself. If he does, it’ll be the first time in his adult life.

Yeah. Well, that’s a good question and I don’t have a good answer to it, except to point out that there are a lot of people who are blaming the Israelis behind closed doors, but they’re all afraid to say so publicly. And I think part of that is that they don’t want to admit that the Israelis have led us down the the path to destruction eagerly. And in fact, Prime Minister Netanyahu spoke quite recently, just a few hours ago, as I understand it, saying that the war is not over. and it must continue. And I think that’s what he wants. He doesn’t care what it costs us. He doesn’t care what it costs the world. He doesn’t care how many people starve in the Global South. He doesn’t care whether or not inflation is going to destroy us along with large numbers of governments all over the world. It’s irrelevant to him. He wants complete dominance, control, hegemony over the Middle East. The only way he can get it is with us. So I think, unfortunately, Trump can’t blame it on the Israelis, whether he likes it or not. He’s going to be held responsible.

Haaretz: Israel’s Future Holds Its Own ‘Handmaid’s Tale’ if This Group Gets Its Way

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Israel’s Future Holds Its Own ‘Handmaid’s Tale’ if This Group Gets Its Way

A right-wing group with supporters at the highest levels of power is systematically advancing a plan for a halakhic, Gilead-like Israel rooted in Jewish supremacy and a harsh religious vision. The sequel to the ‘The Handmaid’s Tale’ – ‘The Testaments’ – offers inspiration for resistance

A protest outside the Rabbinical Court in Tel Aviv, 2023. The recent expansion of the rabbinical courts' powers, passed by the Knesset, was based on policy papers drafted by the Yachin Center.

A protest outside the Rabbinical Court in Tel Aviv, 2023. The recent expansion of the rabbinical courts’ powers, passed by the Knesset, was based on policy papers drafted by the Yachin Center. Credit: Hadash Parush
… The costumes referenced the novel and television series “The Handmaid’s Tale,” which depict the cruel and extreme fictional state of Gilead, where religion, the military and the government are inextricably fused. This militarized society is ruled by a cadre of elite men known as Commanders, who derive their absolute authority from their interpretation of Biblical law.

At the time, some felt that the use of “Handmaid’s Tale” imagery was fear-mongering and overblown for what appeared to be a legalistic struggle between political and judicial powers.

Three years later, not so much.

Haaretz’s recent deep-dive into an organization called Torat Hamedina shines a light on a strategic crusade that envisions a Gilead-like future for the country – one that would make the darkest fears of the “Handmaid’s Tale” protesters a reality.

The piece, written by Hilo Glazer, focuses on the group’s goal of replacing the Israel Defense Forces’ ethical code with a doctrine that would turn war into a “divine mission,” reminding “every soldier that he is perpetuating the path of King David and of the Maccabees, and that he is fighting in the name of God and in the name of all of the People of Israel.”

In the view of the extremist rabbis speaking at an event promoting the cause, every war Israel fights must be waged as a holy war, with soldiers instructed that they are not defending their homeland with weapons, but enacting God’s will by “eradicating evil,” unbound by “unfounded international law” – accountable only to Jewish law.

For Rabbi Avraham Zarbiv, head of the pre-military academy in the settlement of Beit El and the central figure at the event, this version of God is not only firmly aligned with Jewish supremacy, but also merciless and inhumane. He enthusiastically prophesied that “in the tens of years ahead, a million children in the Strip won’t have where to sleep. They will be hot and then cold, and they all want to get out of there.”

But the goals of Zarbiv and his allies extend far beyond the military. They already scored a major victory in March with the very development the 2023 “Handmaid’s Tale” protesters feared most: the passage of legislation officially expanding the authority of rabbinical courts to adjudicate civil matters beyond their current jurisdiction over religious and family law. If fully implemented, the move could create a parallel religious judiciary, paving the way for the subjugation of the civil sphere to religious law.

As quoted in the article, Zarbiv aspires to a future in which the “entire system of laws of Israel will be based on Torah.” Glazer’s reporting documents how this and other far-reaching goals are being systematically advanced by both Torat Hamedina and the Yachin Research Center for Strategic and National Studies, which reflect Zarbiv’s Gilead-esque vision – and how they have supporters and allies at the highest levels of power.

A spokesperson for a women’s organization quoted in the story warns that their goals embody “a systematic plan to transform Israel into a halakhic state in which women are third-class citizens.”

A measure of hope and inspiration in the face of this frightening prospect can be drawn from the same literary source as “The Handmaid’s Tale”: its sequel, “The Testaments,” which recounts how the brave rebellious women of Gilead ultimately sabotage and overthrow the oppressive regime.

For real-life Israeli women – and men – the challenge is to confront and quell the rise of a brutal messianic, patriarchal and supremacist movement before it becomes reality and transforms their country into a place they no longer recognize.

Neocon Robert Kagan: U.S. should “engage in a full-scale ground and naval war to remove the current Iranian regime, and then to occupy Iran until a new government can take hold.”

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Thinking more about Robert Kagan’s article in The Atlantic (Everybody’s Talkin’ ‘Bout It), I come back to Kagan’s solution for remedying the crushing defeat the Anglo-Zionists have suffered—so far—in the war on Iran. Arnaud Bertrand quotes Kagan:

He writes that what’s to be done is “engage in a full-scale ground and naval war to remove the current Iranian regime, and then to occupy Iran until a new government can take hold.”

This is very obviously not any sort of a solution. It’s not possible that it is advanced in good faith. Kagan himself writes:

“just a few weeks of war with a second-rank power have reduced American weapons stocks to perilously low levels, with no quick remedy in sight.”

“if the United States with its mighty Navy can’t or won’t open the strait, no coalition of forces with just a fraction of the Americans’ capability will be able to, either.”

Given those realities that even Kagan recognizes, there’s no possible way to accomplish the goal of “remov[ing] the current Iranian regime and occupying Iran until a new government can take hold”—not by conventional military means. So why, then, does Kagan call for more of what has so signally failed?

My argument is that Kagan paints the current situation as black as possible for the American Empire—plausibly enough—to convince the political establishment that their only choice is to go all in against Iran. Everyone knows that will result in failure and significant casualties. That’s exactly what Kagan wants, because he believes that that will allow Jewish Nationalists to sell nuclear war on Iran to the American people. In effect, his article is a call to Jewish Nationalists to redouble their lobbying of the American political class, because the best way to get to where he wants this to go is to get a declaration of war. Trump is on weak constitutional ground when it comes to restarting the war, short of that declaration. A “full-scale ground and naval war to remove the current Iranian regime”, realistically, will require a full-scale declaration of war. And that will open the way to nuclear strikes.

Haaretz: It Wasn’t Just Revenge That Israel Was After in Gaza

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Revenge, as opposed to reprisal or punitive measures, is not supposed to balance out the preceding sin, said another expert at the conference, Dr. Ariel Handel from the Bezalel Academy of Arts. It doesn’t suffice with an eye for an eye, but demands many eyes for one eye. The revenge song that’s become almost an official anthem in recent years in religious-Zionist circles is called “Remember me.” It is based on the words “for one eye one can kill thousands of Philistines,” Handel said.

Handel and others pointed to a problem with the concept, holding that revenge alone shaped the image of this war. Revenge, Handel argued, “has an endpoint. There is a stage at which you say: I’ve shown you, and the account is closed.” But in Gaza, it seemed that the account was never settled. On the contrary, the more we took revenge, the more we wanted to continue destroying. Revenge alone, Handel said, cannot explain the extent and systematic way destruction was carried out in Gaza.

It Wasn’t Just Revenge That Israel Was After in Gaza

Soldiers in Gaza, in 2025.
Soldiers in Gaza, in 2025. Credit: IDF Spokesperson’s Unit

There is no way of understanding the manner in which the Israel Defense Forces and Israeli society operated over the last two-and-a-half years without recognizing the fact that vengeance was part of the fuel that drove things. The destruction and killing in the Gaza Strip, the Jewish terror in the West Bank, the destruction of villages in southern Lebanon and the legislation of capital punishment have no logic other than the wish to take revenge.

If there were any doubts that revenge has become the official doctrine, along came the selection of Avraham Zarbiv – who became a culture hero due to acts of vengeance he carried out – for lighting a torch on Independence Day. As explained by journalist Yehuda Schlesinger on Channel 12: “We should have seen much more revenge there, with rivers of Gazan blood.” Broadcasters on Channel 14 were obsessed with vengeance. This also cropped up in sermons by rabbis, in interviews by politicians, in statements by the prime minister, who used the Biblical term Amalek, by the defense minister who talked about “human animals” and in the new hit wedding song, “May your village burn.”

Revenge isn’t something new in Israeli discourse. It underlaid the motivation for reprisal attacks in the 1950s, the demolition of the houses of the families of suicide bombers, the targeted and not-so-targeted assassinations. But until October 2023 and the current government, official Israel saw revenge as something to be condemned, not admitted publicly and definitely not boasted about. The beaten and humiliated Israel following the October 7 massacre felt a need to restore its self-confidence rapidly and recklessly, and the way to do this was to take revenge against the inhabitants of the Gaza Strip. The result was killing, destruction, deliberate starvation and uprooting at an unprecedented scale in the history of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

Researcher Yagil Levy organized a conference three months ago dealing with revenge in the October 7 war. The conference was held at the Institute for the Study of Civil-Military Relations at the Open University. The usual censors on the right tried to prevent it from taking place, but the university, with courage not to be taken for granted these days, insisted on going ahead with it.

Levy distinguishes between two groups in the IDF that have been captivated by the revenge discourse. One is the nationalist ultra-Orthodox. They are a small but powerful elite that has embraced a conception whereby war is not only a security-related or diplomatic move, but also action that holds values related to “the struggle between the Jewish good against the evil of its enemies.” The second group captivated by such an idea is what he calls “blue-collar combatants,” soldiers of the ground army, usually of traditional Mizrahi background, who rose up against the military rules of the game.

They videotaped themselves spraying graffiti, demolishing houses, abusing prisoners, as part of a vengeance discourse, but no less so as an act of defiance against their commanders. “Instead of erasing the graffiti, let’s erase Gaza,” wrote one soldier on a wall in Gaza after his commanders told him to erase the messages. The fact that revenge served as an expression of identity and a source of military motivation made it hard for senior commanders to uproot this phenomenon.

Revenge, as opposed to reprisal or punitive measures, is not supposed to balance out the preceding sin, said another expert at the conference, Dr. Ariel Handel from the Bezalel Academy of Arts. It doesn’t suffice with an eye for an eye, but demands many eyes for one eye. The revenge song that’s become almost an official anthem in recent years in religious-Zionist circles is called “Remember me.” It is based on the words “for one eye one can kill thousands of Philistines,” Handel said.

Handel and others pointed to a problem with the concept, holding that revenge alone shaped the image of this war. Revenge, Handel argued, “has an endpoint. There is a stage at which you say: I’ve shown you, and the account is closed.” But in Gaza, it seemed that the account was never settled. On the contrary, the more we took revenge, the more we wanted to continue destroying. Revenge alone, Handel said, cannot explain the extent and systematic way destruction was carried out in Gaza.

Destruction in Gaza City, last week.
Destruction in Gaza City, last week.

Destruction in Gaza City, last week. Credit: AFP/OMAR AL-QATTAA

To understand this, argued Prof. Sara Helman from Ben Gurion University, one needs to use the concept of “permanent security” coined by the genocide researcher Dirk Moses. This was the basis of most genocidal acts throughout history. “Permanent security” is the idea that there is a need to nullify and efface any hint of threat, real or imaginary. According to this approach, an entire population, including women and children, is perceived as a permanent threat to the security of a dominant group – “there are no innocent people in Gaza,” some said.

The best example of this logic is a statement by panelist Stella Weinstein on Channel 13, who said that a baby in Gaza is akin to a “terrorist in an incubator.”

Revenge and the concept of “permanent security” merged into an unbridled war in Gaza. Chasing revenge and permanent security is a recipe for committing war crimes and crimes against humanity. But this chase almost always harms the quality of life and security of the attacking side.

One can see this in the deceptive war with Iran and Hezbollah. Chasing after the last launcher, carrying out a Sisyphean effort to kill more and more military and political figures and destroying villages in Lebanon did not contribute a thing to the security of Israelis. It seems that they only bolstered extremist elements and their resolve to arm themselves.

Movie theaters have recently been screening a new version of Quentin Tarantino’s revenge movie “Kill Bill: The Whole Bloody Affair.” It’s four-and-a-half cathartic hours of justified revenge. But in the first scene, Tarantino planted a little girl who witnesses her mother’s murder as part of the revenge saga. When you grow up, if the wound in your heart is still fresh, I’ll be waiting for you, says the avenger (Uma Thurman). “The problem with revenge is the cycle of revenge,” Handel noted. “There is a sense of closure and then a surprise when the avenger suddenly realizes that someone is taking revenge against him.”

Haaretz analysis Ben-Gvir’s Birthday Bash Marked Another Dark Day for Israeli Democracy

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Haaretz analysis by Yossi Verter: Ben-Gvir’s Birthday Bash Marked Another Dark Day for Israeli Democracy

In Israel’s atmosphere of far-right anarchy, the gatekeepers are submissive and fearful ■ One of Netanyahu’s court cases involving favors for positive news coverage shows us how far he’ll go to stay in power ■ Smotrich badmouths Bennett more than he does Hamas

… The police brass, with the commissioner’s approval, gathered Saturday night in Kiryat Arba in the West Bank for a party that was clearly going to be attended by criminals, lawbreakers and thugs. Ben-Gvir has no normal friends; this is his environment. The police have internalized the commander’s spirit: They beat peaceful protesters, arrest them and humiliate them, while exchanging high fives with far-right activists Mordechai David and Roi Star.

In the West Bank, which has turned into a killing field for Palestinians, the settlers enjoy zero law enforcement. Jewish terror has never known such good times. … The Shin Bet security service is behaving the same way. Its head is doing exactly what he was appointed to do, undertaking Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s revenge for the Qatargate affair and undermining the agency’s independence and norms that once existed. Shin Bet chief David Zini is dismantling the service from within, sowing fear and suspicion, freezing appointments and behaving like a dictator. He aims to remove the good people and replace them with dangerous types like himself – nationalist and messianic types who dream of the State of the Torah.

We have a government whose defense minister delays for months an indictment against a lawmaker in his party who revealed the identity of a Shin Bet agent, thereby endangering his life. We have a prime minister who protects his advisers suspected of security offenses and declines to fire a minister who refuses to appear for police questioning. We have a national security minister who protects a prisons commissioner suspected of crimes.

Amid all this, appointments critical to the functioning of democracy are weighed based on the criterion of total loyalty to the boss. The result is an atmosphere of complete anarchy.

Fear is in the air, like the smell of a corpse. The Supreme Court is afraid to make a decision in the case of the criminal Ben-Gvir. Seeking to steer clear as much as possible from the constitutional crisis that will erupt if their ruling is ignored, the justices forget that everyone is watching them – senior officials, army and police officers and lower court judges. Everyone recognizes the fear.

The message that is filtering down is also clear: It’s better not to confront the government or anger its agents who roam the streets, harassing and terrorizing. Let’s wait for this year’s general election, the justices have suggested, to hopefully extract us from the mud.

But the government’s thuggish behavior also has implications for the integrity of the election process itself. We can’t rely on the election if the agencies responsible for ensuring that it’s free and fair, notably the police and the Shin Bet, have been corrupted and serve the interests of the regime. Elections can be the cure for a disease, but they will have no efficacy if the process itself is tainted.

Continues…

“Teen Takeovers” according to The New York Times

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These “teen takeovers” are clearly mainly a Black phenomenon. But this is all The New York Times has to say about race:

Some of the panic over teen takeovers has echoes in worries over “wilding” in the late 1980s and “superpredators” in the 1990s.

“There was a lot of dog whistling there about the fact that these are Black kids who are gathering together in these large groups, and we should be afraid of them,” Mr. Steinberg said.

Black and Latino youth gatherings are more likely to be assumed as criminal, said Kristin Henning, a Georgetown University law professor who specializes in juvenile justice. White children in skate parks in the 1980s and 1990s did not generate nearly the same level of surveillance and arrests as Black gatherings, she said.

About par for the course for the NYTimes.

What Are ‘Teen Takeovers’ and Why Are Police Struggling to Stop Them?

Across the country, police and city officials are trying to crack down on sometimes violent youth gatherings, but the teens themselves say they need some way to socialize and blow off steam.