Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s office resolved a dispute between U.S. Ambassador to Israel Mike Huckabee and Israeli Interior Minister Moshe Arbel over the denial of visas to workers and volunteers for several evangelical Christian organizations, two sources involved in the matter told Jewish Insider on Sunday.

“A solution has been reached to the satisfaction of all parties. The Evangelical Christian organizations active in Israel, which represent the vast majority of Zionists in the world today, will receive all of the visas they need through a streamlined and efficient application process,” Calev Myers, the attorney for the organizations told JI on Monday.

Hours before the issue was resolved, a source in the Prime Minister’s Office told JI, “this is something that we consider to be of urgent importance. We have every intention of solving this problem very quickly … It is being handled with the proper sensitivity between the Prime Minister’s Office and the embassy.” 

The PMO source said that Israel has “absolutely no interest in undermining the freedom [of workers and volunteers for Christian organizations] coming to Israel … We value evangelicals. It’s very regrettable that there is a problem and we obviously have to fix it.” 

Huckabee sent a letter to Arbel last Wednesday, expressing “great distress” and “profound disappointment” that after the two met to discuss the matter earlier this year, the Interior Ministry’s visa department continued to conduct investigations into American and other evangelical organizations seeking visas for their workers.

“It would be very unfortunate that our embassy would have to publicly announce throughout the United States that the State of Israel is no longer welcoming Christian organizations … and is instead engaging in harassment and negative treatment towards organizations with long-standing relationships and positive involvement toward Zionism and friendship to the Jewish people and the State of Israel,” Huckabee wrote. 

If the situation continues, Huckabee added, he will instruct the U.S. Embassy’s consular section to treat Israeli citizens in kind.

“Surely this is not the relationship the State of Israel wishes to have with its best partner and friend on the planet,” he wrote.

A source close to Huckabee told JI that the ambassador did not intend for the letter to go public, which it did on Channel 12 news on Thursday evening.

Arbel responded on Thursday that he had committed “to reviewing such applications with the utmost efficiency,” instructed his staff to do so as well earlier this year, and that every specific case raised by Huckabee’s office was addressed “within an exceptionally short timeframe.” The interior minister argued that the specific organizations Huckabee mentioned in his letter were not the ones they had discussed in their meeting earlier this year.

Arbel also said he was surprised by the way Huckabee handled the matter — sending copies of the letter to Netanyahu, President Isaac Herzog, Foreign Minister Gideon Sa’ar and Knesset Speaker Amir Ohana — which, he said, “deviates from accepting working norms and does not reflect the direct and constructive relationship we have established.” 

Rabbi Pesach Wolicki, executive director of Israel365action, an organization connecting Christians to pro-Israel advocacy, said that this has been a long-standing issue regarding clergy and other workers and long-term volunteers, and not Christian pilgrims coming to Israel for short visits.

Huckabee and attorney Calev Myers met with Arbel about six months ago to work out issues with a specific group of organizations, and Arbel said he would solve it, but the issue remained unresolved, Wolicki explained.

The exchange of letters also came up at a time of increased tensions between Israel and Christians, after what Israel said was an errant tank shell hit the only Catholic church in Gaza and killed three people, and after several incidents of harassment and attacks by extremist settlers against the Christian population of Taybeh in the West Bank.

Huckabee wrote on X on Saturday that “Taybeh is a quiet Palestinian Christian village south of Jerusalem w/ a lot of American citizens that has been vandalized-including fires set at ancient church.  I visited there today. Desecrating a church,mosque or synagogue is a crime against humanity and God.” 

“I work for all American citizens who live in Israel –Jewish, Muslim or Christian. When they are terrorized or victims of crime[s], I will demand those responsible be held accountable [with] real consequences,” the ambassador added. 

Wolicki said that “the timing couldn’t have been worse.”

Israel has laws restricting missionary activity, and the visa issue has been exacerbated by the fact that the Shas party, whose Haredi constituency is especially sensitive to missionizing, has run the Interior Ministry for much of the last 25 years, he added.

“Any situation in which you have noncitizens in the country for the long term, it’s a bureaucratic process, and because of sensitivity about missionizing, this has always been an issue,” Wolicki said, noting that Israel365 has also had problems obtaining visas for Christian employees in the past.

The organizations Huckabee mentioned in his letter, the Baptist Convention of Israel, Christian Missionary Alliance and Assemblies of God are missionary groups, Wolicki said.

“There are official restrictions on missionary activity that, when Christians learn of them — and I say this with a lot of firsthand experience — it really moves them from support for Israel, even from the American level of valuing free speech … but also they feel like, how can you say you respect Christians and you want Christian support but we’re not even allowed to talk about Jesus when we’re there,” Wolicki said.

“Christians don’t think you’re offending anyone when you preach the gospel, and Jews view that as you have a knife and you’re trying to stab them,” he added.

Wolicki argued that the laws against missionary activity are problematic, though he acknowledged that abolishing them would likely be unpopular in Israel.

“Missionaries are active all over Israel anyway. There are Israelis who are active … Anyone concerned about missionary activity, which is a legitimate concern, should know this is not the solution. It causes more harm than good and makes Christians more hostile to the Jewish people,” he said.

Josh Reinstein, director of the Israel Allies Foundation, which promotes faith-based diplomacy, said that he has seen this issue come up repeatedly over the 21 years since the foundation was founded.

“It’s an ongoing issue because they always change the requirements for Bible-believing Christians and their organizations,” Reinstein said. “There are no protections for Evangelicals like the 14 mainline churches [the Israeli Religious Affairs Ministry] recognizes.”

“This needs a solution, but it is definitely not a crisis or a problem of Israel not wanting Christians as the enemies of Israel are making it out to be,” he added.

Reinstein questioned why what he called a minor issue was making bigger news than Christians under attack in Syria. 

“Israel is the only place in the region where Christians grow and thrive, as opposed to in the 22 countries around us,” he said. “People understand the relations bewteen Jews and Christians is so important today…which is why they are trying to make it into a bigger deal than it is. Huckabee is one of the greatest allies and friends Israel has. I don’t think it was his intention to cause a rift.” 

Around 400 Jewish organizations and synagogues signed onto an Anti-Defamation League backed letter Monday expressing concern over the “growing level of antisemitic activity” within teachers’ unions, which recently escalated with the National Education Association’s adoption of a measure targeting the leading Jewish civil rights organization, Jewish Insider has learned.  

Signatories include the American Jewish Committee, Jewish Federations of North America, Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations, National Council of Jewish Women, Orthodox Union, Rabbinical Assembly and Union for Reform Judaism. 

The letter, addressed to Rebecca Pringle, president of the NEA — the largest teachers’ union in the U.S. — comes on the heels of a measure passed last week by the association that bars the union from using any teaching materials from the ADL. 

The letter urges Pringle to reject the measure, referred to as New Business Item 39, as well as to issue a condemnation of and plan of action to address antisemitism and anti-Israel rhetoric in the NEA.

“The ADL has been a national leader in anti-hate education in K-12 schools for decades and is widely recognized as one of the country’s foremost experts on antisemitism,” the letter states, raising concern that, “although NBI 39 does not explicitly say so, we understand that much of the underlying concern prompting this resolution is directed at ADL’s Holocaust education materials.” 

“That reality makes this proposal especially disturbing,” the letter continues. “This is precisely the kind of education that is vital not only to combat antisemitism, but also to fighting hatred and intolerance of all kinds. The effort to exclude ADL’s voice from educational spaces at a time of skyrocketing antisemitism — including in K-12 classrooms — speaks volumes about the climate within NEA that allowed this measure to pass, and the lack of understanding, if not outright hostility, behind it.”

The letter also references several Jewish teachers who spoke out against the resolution at the Representative Assembly, claiming that they were “harassed and shouted down during the proceedings.”

“It is our belief that the goal of those who introduced NBI 39 is to marginalize mainstream Jewish voices within this country’s public school systems and to limit the ability of educators to address the growing threat of antisemitism with their students,” the letter states. 

The ADL has criticized the vote, calling it “profoundly disturbing that a group of NEA activists would brazenly attempt to further isolate their Jewish colleagues and push a radical, antisemitic agenda on students.” 

“Excluding ADL’s gold-standard educational resources is not just an attack on our organization – it’s a dangerous attack on the entire Jewish community,” Jonathan Greenblatt, the group’s CEO, said in a statement. “We urge the NEA Executive Committee to reverse this biased, fringe effort, and reaffirm its commitment to supporting all Jewish students and educators.”

Even outside of the recent measure, antisemitism and anti-Israel activism in teachers’ unions has been increasing since the Oct. 7, 2023, Hamas terror attacks in Israel. At their conventions last year, both the NEA and the American Federation of Teachers, the second largest teachers’ union in the U.S. — which together represent 4.7 million members — made anti-Israel resolutions a notable part of both gatherings. In July 2024, the NEA signed a joint letter calling on President Joe Biden to halt all military aid to Israel amid its war against Hamas. 

Also in July of last year, at the AFT convention, members voted on a total of seven resolutions regarding Israel, including one against the “weaponization of antisemitism” to defend Israel. One of the seven proposed resolutions critical of Israel at the AFT convention passed.

Longtime Palestinian activists expressed their disappointment at the language in the Israel plank of the 2020 Democratic National Committee platform during a webinar hosted by the Arab American Institute on Tuesday.

James Zogby, AAI’s president, who has been involved in the drafting process of the party’s platform for decades, said this year’s process was markedly more friendly to Palestinian activists and their supporters than in prior election cycles, but still expressed frustration that the 2020 platform did not reference “occupation,” condemn all Israeli settlements or support conditioning U.S. aid to Israel.

Zogby accused party leaders of caving to pressure from the pro-Israel community for political reasons. “It’s not about policy, ever. It’s really about politics,” he asserted. “And it’s sort of a power pull. It’s a question of who can make who jump through hoops… We were always on the downside of that debate. In this case, they did it again, they wouldn’t let those words in the platform just to show who’s boss.”

Zaha Hassan, a human rights lawyer and visiting fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, called this year’s platform drafting process “difficult to understand” and “not very transparent,” adding that Palestinian-American delegates were disappointed with the results. She also decried the party for failing to explicitly support “equality” between Israelis and Palestinians, not using the word “sovereignty” in discussing Palestinian statehood and including language calling for Israel to remain a Jewish state.

Zogby praised the platform’s language regarding the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement, which says the party opposes “any effort to unfairly single out and delegitimize Israel, including at the United Nations or through the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions Movement, while protecting the constitutional right of our citizens to free speech.” Zogby said he sees the second clause as essentially nullifying the previous anti-BDS language and as a disavowal of the state-level anti-BDS legislation that has been adopted by 30 states.

Jewish Currents editor-at-large Peter Beinart, who recently sent shockwaves through the Jewish community with a column arguing that liberal Zionists should abandon hope for a two-state solution, claimed that there is no longer a viable argument in support of Israel from a Democratic perspective.

“One of the things that I think we see more and more clearly is it’s not really possible to cordon off the Israel-Palestinian debate from all of the other debates… People have a set of values and principles,” he said. “In the Republican Party that is not such a problem because those principles fundamentally are not about equality.”

“But in the Democratic Party,” he continued, “the move that people who want the United States to support the Israeli government… is essentially to kind of cordon off, or try to defend the Israeli policies in the language of progressivism, which really doesn’t work when you have a government that’s denying millions of people basic rights because of their ethno-religious status.”

Hassan noted that the platform does not use language seen in previous platforms about “shared values” between the U.S. and Israel — recognition, she said, of this dynamic.

Beinart partly blamed Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s government for this shift.

“We’ve had an Israeli prime minister now for 11 years who is very American, and who often looks to many progressive Americans as a kind of Israeli version of the Republicans that we like least domestically,” he said. “That makes it so easy for Americans to understand why the values that he represents are so anathema to us.”

Despite his criticisms of the platform, Zogby went on to downplay its significance, noting that it often does not reflect how the party, and its members, actually behave in practice.

“I dare say most people never even read the damn thing after it’s done,” he said. “Secondly, I think it’s important to see that the platform is never adhered to even by Democratic administrations… So I’m not going to make much right now of where [Joe] Biden and [Kamala] Harris are going to be.”

For Alex Lasry, 2020 was supposed to be the year of Milwaukee. 

The 33-year-old had high hopes for his adopted city, scheduled to host the Democratic National Convention — the bid for which he chaired — beginning August 17. On top of that, the Milwaukee Bucks clinched the playoffs in February, giving hometown pride to Milwaukeeans who haven’t celebrated a basketball championship since 1971. Lasry, who serves as the Bucks’ senior vice president, was riding high.

Then the pandemic hit, and everything changed. The NBA is now finishing out its postseason in a tightly sealed Orlando bubble, while the Bucks’ Fiserv Forum, where the DNC was set to take place, is a virtual ghost town as the downsized presidential convention has been relocated to a smaller venue.

“It sucks,” Lasry declared bluntly in an interview with Jewish Insider. “There’s no way around it, but there are bigger issues and bigger concerns.”

Despite the setbacks, Lasry is hopeful that the DNC — during which former Vice President Joe Biden is expected to accept the Democratic presidential nomination — will at least help bring attention to Milwaukee, the Rust Belt enclave that is perhaps more often associated with “Laverne & Shirley” reruns than a destination city. “I’m sure there’s a lot of really antiquated thoughts about Milwaukee, and that’s what the point of this bid was,” said Lasry.

“We wanted to reintroduce Milwaukee to the world and to show people that Milwaukee is a top-tier city,” he added, “one that can compete with cities like Houston, Miami, Chicago and New York.”

Bucks president Peter Feigin praised Lasry’s effort to lure the convention to Milwaukee. “He really spearheaded that whole campaign,” Feigin told JI, adding that Lasry’s accomplishment was “beyond an awesome feat.”

Lasry, the DNC host committee’s finance chair, previously worked in former President Barack Obama’s administration under senior advisor Valerie Jarrett. A New York native, he moved to Milwaukee six years ago when his father, the billionaire hedge fund manager and Democratic bundler Marc Lasry, became a co-owner of the Bucks. 

“I didn’t know a ton about Milwaukee before I moved here, but once I got here, I fell in love with the city,” Lasry enthused. “There’s an incredible local food scene. A great local sports scene. It’s got everything you want in a city. Plus, it’s affordable, and you can’t beat the summer weather. I just think there’s so much to Milwaukee that people don’t know about. And that’s what, I think, this convention is hopefully going to start doing — which is getting the word out.”

He also found love of another sort. Lasry proposed to Lauren Markowitz, the interim chief of staff at Planned Parenthood of Wisconsin — who previously worked as a spokeswoman for former Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel — last May, shortly after Milwaukee was chosen to host the DNC. 

They were scheduled to get married on March 28 of this year at the American Museum of Natural History in New York, but were forced to postpone their wedding until 2021 due to the pandemic. 

Lasry said he found out his wedding would be postponed the same day he learned the NBA season had been suspended. “That was an especially crappy day,” he told JI.

Lasry’s love for Milwaukee, basketball and Democratic politics collided when he led the charge to host the DNC, and he has been trying to stay focused on those things as he works from home during the coronavirus crisis. 

He is still trying to raise money for the DNC, he said, and would like to attend, though the four-day convention, which will still run from August 17-20, is a mostly virtual affair. “If I can go, then I’ll be there,” he said, “but I’ll listen to the security precautions and the health precautions of whatever the [Democratic National Convention Committee] wants.”

As for basketball, Lasry told JI that he plans to head down to Orlando to see his team, and that he will most likely stay there for the entirety of the playoffs. 

“There’s still a lot to do,” he said, looking beyond the present moment. “There’s still an offseason we have to prepare for.” What does a potentially scaled-down arena look like, he wondered, or even an arena with no fans at all? “It’s a lot different scenario-planning.”

More than anything, Lasry wants viewers who tune into the DNC to witness the Milwaukee that he has come to appreciate over the past half-decade. 

“Ever since I moved here, it’s been a city that I love, that I’ve made my home,” he said. “And I just want people to see the Milwaukee that I see, and I want the entire country to know that Milwaukee can play on the same level as, really, any city in this country.”