Grapevine, March 17, 2026: Threats to border communities

All those who had yearned to return to their homes quickly became Hezbollah targets, and not everyone had access to a fortified safe place in which to take shelter, Rosenbaum continued.

Reports indicate that many residents from the northern communities that have suffered acute damage from Hezbollah missiles have been feeling angry and frustrated.

The reason for this, some say, is that these communities feel that the government has taken funds earmarked for the North’s rehabilitation and transferred them to other ministries instead, such as the Heritage Ministry, headed by Amichai Eliyahu (Otzma Yehudit), and the National Missions Ministry, chaired by Orit Strock (RZP).

Some go as far as to say that these ministries are superfluous and exist only to guarantee the formation and continuity of the coalition.

Meanwhile, large segments of the population have been suffering due to numerous missile alerts, many of them in the middle of the night, as they find themselves scrambling to get to safety.

There are indications that financial aid and rehabilitation of damaged private and municipal property have also been slow to arrive, a factor that seemingly adds to the sense of aggravation and uncertainty.

A noteworthy mention in this regard is Economy and Industry Minister Nir Barkat (Likud), who has been setting a good example. When he was elected, he offered to forfeit his salary. Wealthy in his own right, it is likely he does not need the money. However, the Knesset does not have a mechanism for forfeited salaries, so he decided to donate his salary to charity.

Given that MKs earn around NIS 48,000 per month, whether or not they show up for plenary sessions and committee meetings, while IDF reservists have lost income from businesses or have even lost their jobs, Barkat has set a good example.

Further, there have been complaints that there is minimal encouragement and support on the government’s part for local farmers. Members of the public have volunteered to harvest and pack crops, while Israel’s leadership has been encouraging the import of a variety of agricultural products, saying that this will nurture healthy competition and lower the prices of fruit, vegetables, and dairy products.

Most of the imports, especially cheese and butter, are nevertheless more expensive than Israeli products in the same categories. Farmers say that buying local produce is also an act of patriotism.

Regardless of criticisms that parents may level at their children, the saying goes that woe betide anyone else who tries to do the same to someone else’s child. There’s a similar attitude among the media toward its leaders, some say. There are Israeli outlets that have not exactly been kind to President Isaac Herzog, frequently describing him in unflattering terms.

This is particularly noticeable in relation to his examination of the issue of pardoning Netanyahu for the alleged crimes that the prime minister insists he did not commit.

Herzog has said repeatedly that he will act in accordance with the law of the land, but some journalists and politicians have indicated that this suggests that the president is spineless.

As for the trial, Netanyahu has made varying comments. After years of investigation, when Netanyahu finally had his day in court, he said that he had been waiting for it for years to clear his name.

So, some may argue that if he believes in his innocence, why has he expressed an interest in receiving a pardon? After all, a pardon is granted to a convicted individual who admits to the crime for which they were convicted and expresses remorse.

Netanyahu has done neither, but has said on more than one occasion that he needs to be free to conduct the war. That is a fairly valid argument. A possible solution would be to suspend the trial for perhaps three months, by which time the war will hopefully be over.

It is reasonable to assume that one cannot conduct a war when one has to be in court several times a week. That said, Netanyahu should be back in court when the war ends or if a ceasefire goes into effect. If he really is innocent, and his lawyers manage to prove that, it is in his own interests to be acquitted rather than pardoned.

The latest Netanyahu controversy at the beginning of this week sparked an international debate over whether a video clip of him drinking coffee at the Sataf coffee shop and restaurant in Jerusalem was the real McCoy or an AI concoction.

The clip, which went viral and has been seen in many parts of the globe, features the prime minister enjoying a cup of coffee and complimenting a young blonde barista who served him.

Whether genuine or not, the clip was definitely good for business despite the war; many people flocked to drink what the prime minister drank. The clip, which went viral, will likely attract future tourists to Israel when the war is over. But the clip raised existing questions regarding the dangers of AI: If something that is not real can look so genuine, and the public is aware of such a possibility, what happens to trust?

Something has changed concerning the style of presenting news on television and radio programs. On KAN 11, for instance, anchorwoman Tali Moreno has been interjecting often while interviewees are speaking. She seems to be jumping the gun rather than listening to the show's specialists or to the witnesses to the events that are being covered.

On Reshet Bet, broadcaster Arieh Golan has been doing the same. Once upon a time, the whole purpose of such interviews was to hear from people with expertise in the subject or who have witnessed or participated in an incident related to it.

On Monday night, Liel Kyzer, KAN’s economics specialist, was presenting an analysis of recent decisions by Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich. However, she was frequently interrupted by Moreno, who kept grilling her as if she were a government representative rather than an economics reporter on the same channel.

On Tuesday morning, Golan interviewed Haim Tal, a Nahariya resident who does not have a safe room and lives too far from a community bomb shelter to reach it in time. He was in his car when he heard the alert and figured that he could make it home just in time.

In fact, Tal said he did manage to get inside the house before hearing what he described as an incredibly loud boom. The missile had landed some 50 meters from his home. Fortunately, Tal was unhurt.

While he was describing the totality of his experience, however, it was noticeable that Golan kept preempting him. It was annoying not only because it disrupted Tal’s train of thought, but also because it cut short the time allotted to him for the broadcast. It is possible that what he wanted to say would have been far more informative had Golan refrained from repeatedly putting in his two cents.

Apropos news broadcasts, the Israeli Public Broadcasting Corporation (IPBC) is already running promos for Independence Day, which this year falls on the evening of April 21.

The reason these promos started early is that Independence Day this year coincides with the IPBC’s 90th public radio anniversary. Its public radio broadcasts were introduced during the British Mandate administration.

Separately, clips from some of the most popular IPBC’s programs featured on television will be shown in accordance with a public vote currently underway on social media.

Educational television preceded public broadcasting. The first newscast on the public broadcasting channel, Mabat, was presented by Haim Yavin in 1958.

Known as “Israel’s Mr. Television,” Yavin, now 93, hosted the nightly television news show for 40 years, almost without interruption. He and Rivka Michaeli, 97, are among the few people featured in the promo clips who are both still alive.

Yavin, a filmmaker known for inspiring documentaries, is long retired, but Michaeli, an actress, singer, comedienne, program hostess, and former dancer, is still working.

Despite recurring waves of antisemitism in Poland, official commemorations of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising have continued to be held in Poland.

In Israel, the commemoration known as Holocaust Remembrance Day is held in accordance with the Hebrew calendar date of Nisan 26-27, and in Poland, according to the Gregorian calendar date of April 19, which was the date in 1943 when the uprising against the Nazis began.

The commemoration in Poland has become a symbol of international solidarity with the Jewish people, encompassing the annual March of the Living through the Auschwitz-Birkenau Nazi concentration camp.

The first March the Living took place on April 14, 1988. Israel is always represented by a president or prime minister of the state, along with other dignitaries. Former Ashkenazi chief Rabbi Yisrael Meir Lau, who was a child Holocaust survivor, also routinely joins. Lau makes a point of accompanying every March of the Living.

The total week-long event, which includes visits to other Holocaust memorial sites, is believed by some to be symbolic of the prophecy of the Valley of the Dry Bones or of the phoenix rising from the ashes.

It concludes in Israel on Independence Day, which celebrates not only the anniversary of the creation of the sovereign State of Israel, but also the eternity of the Jewish people who have outlived centuries of tormentors, oppressors, and murderers, nearly all of whom have disappeared. In contrast, Jews continue to survive and thrive.

Every year, slightly ahead of anniversary ceremonies commemorating the liberation of Auschwitz and the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, new Holocaust-themed books emerge. The Holocaust is so broad a subject that facts often read like fiction, and fiction often reads like fact.

One such novel is Stolen Legacies: The Fight for Nazi Looted Art, by Adena Bernstein, who has previously written about other Holocaust subjects as well.

As an assistant attorney-general for Arizona and the granddaughter of two Holocaust survivors, Bernstein approached the subject of stolen art at the intersection of law and memory – asking why so much Nazi-looted art remains unreturned more than 80 years later and how countries today are confronting that legacy.

According to Bernstein, “The book explores the history of the massive theft of Jewish cultural property during the Holocaust and the ongoing global efforts to recover works of art that were taken from families. It looks at restitution laws, museum ethics, and the human stories behind these cases across multiple countries.”

There have been ongoing struggles by heirs of victims of the Holocaust for the recovery of valuable artworks that the Nazis looted.

In February 2008, the Israel Museum opened an exhibition of some 40 recovered works titled Orphaned Art. Much of it was found by members of the Allied Forces in hiding places all over Germany.

When it came to cases where there was no documentation of ownership, these works were later brought to Israel by the Jewish Restitution Successor Organization and placed in the custody of the Israel Museum and the Bezalel Academy of Arts and Design.

One of the most famous works of art looted by the Nazis is The Black Feather Hat, a painting by Gustav Klimt dating back to 1910.

The painting, a portrait of Elisabeth Lederer, a Jewish woman, was purchased for a record price of $236.4 million by billionaire art collector Ronald S. Lauder. To those who are not familiar with the name, Lauder is the current president of the World Jewish Congress. This is not the only piece of Nazi-looted art in his collection.

Moreover, the painting was previously owned by Irene Beran, from whom the Nazis stole it. In 2023, after owning it for decades, The New York Times reported that Lauder transferred it back to her heirs.

It has long been said that whatever happens in Israel has repercussions on Jewish communities abroad. This is borne out by the surge of antisemitic incidents over the past two-and-a-half years.

Among the more recent attacks was the one on Temple Israel in Michigan by a Lebanese national who lived in the US but was in Lebanon as recently as January of this year.

Nachman Shai, a former diaspora affairs and combating antisemitism minister and currently the dean of Hebrew Union College, sees a direct link between the attack and the recent decision to deny non-Orthodox Jewish denominations their own space for males and females to congregate together at the Western Wall.

Shai said he could not understand what was so terrible about allowing men and women to pray together in the same space. The implications, he thought, were the linkage to a terrorist attack on one of the largest Reform congregations in the US.

He wondered if denying the right of Reform and Conservative groups to their own access to the Western Wall signifies the absence of Jewish unity and inclusiveness.

When there is such a public international rift, each side becomes more vulnerable to attack, Shai estimated. In the IDF, Jewish and non-Jewish soldiers fight together, so why does this spirit of unity have to disintegrate and crumble in civilian life?

Israel's communication, entertainment, and cultural communities have suffered the demise of numerous celebrated figures in just over a little more than a decade.

Last week, sportscasters and long-time fans mourned the death of Benny Paisik, who, according to his friend and colleague Hanan Kristal, was one of the most ethical journalists in the profession.

Paisik refused to broadcast games in which his favorite team was playing because he did not want to be accused of bias. Kristal, incidentally, is one of several journalists, among them Dan Shilon, Yair Stern, and Oren Nahari, who started as sportscasters, then general news reporters, and then political or foreign news reporters, editors, or both.

One of the most intellectual figures on radio and television, Nahari spent 33 years working for the now-defunct Israel Broadcasting Authority (IBA) and left in 2016, when it was already clear that the IBA would be dismantled.

Before becoming a journalist, he had been a promising basketball player. Then, in the mid 1980s, the IBA decided to take sports personalities with the gift of the gab and employ them as sportscasters.

Nahari, who had served in military intelligence during his mandatory IDF service and was a political science and foreign relations graduate of The Hebrew University, was a natural who quickly moved from sports reporting to general news and foreign relations.

When he left the IBA, Nahari spent two years with Walla as foreign news editor, lectured in Israel and abroad, wrote non-fiction books, and returned to Reshet Bet, now part of IPBC’s KAN 11, following the death in 2022 of another great intellectual, Yitzhak Noy.

Noy ran a two-hour Saturday-morning program on mainly historical subjects, in which he interviewed experts in their respective fields. At the time, Nahari said that he hoped to fill Noy’s very large shoes.

He could not know then that his term might be cut short, not because his employers were displeased with him, but because of a discovery late last year that he had amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, better known by its initials ALS or as Lou Gehrig’s disease, named for the renowned US baseball player who died from it in 1941.

ALS is a degenerative, fatal condition that affects the nerves and muscles. It usually progresses very quickly. Wanting to say farewell to people he cares about, Nahari made his condition public, just as singer, musician, and composer Matti Caspi had done a few months earlier.

Roni Kuban had interviewed Caspi on KAN 11 before the musician’s death in February. Last Saturday evening, KAN 11 screened Kuban’s interview with Nahari, who described what it was like living with ALS.

He told Kuban about having to depend increasingly on his wife, Vered, for the simplest of tasks, such as getting dressed or undressed or making a cup of coffee.

She was the love of his life, he said, and when he thought of what he would miss by dying, it was time spent with her and the chance to see his grandchildren grow up.

Nahari also said he had contemplated going to Switzerland. Notably, this is the country where euthanasia and assisted suicide have been legalized. He did not want to be in the position of communicating only with his eyes.

ALS strikes people in different ways. Moshe Nussbaum of Channel 12, and formerly of the IBA, was initially affected in his speech; Nahari was affected in his legs.

Nahari hoped to finish writing two more books before he met the Grim Reaper, he said. But he was philosophical about his fate, partly because he and Vered never waited until he reached pension age to do what they wanted in life.

Of course, they had more plans for the future, but if his wife realized them, she would have to experience them alone or with another family member, Nahari said.

Every death is sad, and it’s hard to decide whether to know more or less when it’s coming and to prepare for it, rather than for it to come suddenly, especially where national icons are involved.

On the following day, when speaking to journalist Liat Regev on Reshet Bet, Nahari said that he had been flooded with messages on social media, some of which commiserated with him and others from people with ALS. He was also contacted by people whose spouses had died from ALS.

They all thanked Nahari for giving voice to what a calamitous illness this was, he said. In a typical nonchalant manner, Nahari said that he had managed to receive his obituary before his demise.

Among celebrated journalists, people from the entertainment industry, and well known writers who since 2015, have died from various illnesses are: Nissim Kivity, Dan Margalit, Chaim Topol, Yehuda Barkan, Alon Abutbul, Dana Eden, Rami Heuberger, Orna Porat, Yaakov Agmon, Arieh Elias, Avraham Gabriel Yehoshua (A.B. Yehoshua), Meir Shalev, Amos Oz, Aharon Appelfeld, Meir Banai, Nava Semel, Yehonatan Geffen, and Yoram Taharlev.

Student residents who are part of the Ayalim Association in Beersheba and Dimona have not been idle over the past couple of weeks.

They have been busy cleaning public shelters and making them habitable for the communities they serve. In addition, the students have made a point of visiting senior citizens who live alone and helping them in various ways.

Much of the traditional Seder meal is shunned by vegetarians and vegans who believe that consumption of meat and fish is both inhuman and unhealthy. To bring this message across, the Jewish Vegan Life and its allies will gather on Thursday, March 19, 2026, at 5 p.m. PT and 8 p.m. ET for a virtual discussion as part of an event called Liberation for All: The Compassionate Passover.

Speakers will explore how Passover’s message of freedom can inspire compassionate, plant-based holiday traditions.

Participants will include Jewish educators, rabbis, activists, and food innovators to explore how the Passover story of liberation can inspire a more compassionate relationship with animals, the planet, and one another.

Hosted by Stephanie Dryer, the program will feature Rabbi Donn Gross, head of Congregation Bet Dovid in New Jersey, Megan Tucker, founder of Mort & Betty’s in Los Angeles, and Michael Gribov, head of Movement Building at Jewish Veg & Jewish Vegan Life, who will introduce the organization’s annual Passover Earth Day campaign.

“Passover is the story of moving from constriction to freedom,” Gribov said. “This event invites us to expand that liberation – to our plates, to the planet, and to all living beings.”

Participants who register will be able to watch the live stream and interact in a live chat during the event. Register: https://jewishveganlife.org/events/liberation-for-all/