Good afternoon from the Jewish Currents news desk. Today, we speak with the former head of Defense for Children International-Palestine on the NGO’s decision to close after a five-year harassment campaign by the Israeli government. And, Jewish leaders who benefited from Les Wexner’s munificence raise money for Epstein victims. Plus: Eavesdropping on the American Jewish establishment.

The Jewish Currents news desk is directed by Josh Nathan-Kazis. Tips, responses, ideas, complaints, leaks? Email Josh at jnk@jewishcurrents.org. If you were forwarded this email, subscribe here so you don’t miss the next one.

Khaled Quzmar, Former Head of DCI-Palestine, On How Israel Smothered a Palestinian Watchdog

In July of 2021, Israeli forces stormed the offices of Defense for Children International-Palestine (DCI-Palestine) in the West Bank city of Al-Bireh, launching an escalating campaign of official harassment against the organization, which documented and publicized human rights abuses against Palestinian children. That campaign ended last month in DCI-Palestine’s decision to shut down its operations, under mounting pressure from the Israeli government.

Human Rights Watch’s Bill Van Esveld lamented the organization’s closure, calling DCI-Palestine “one of the most reliable messengers about life for Palestinian children under Israeli occupation.” In March, DCI-Palestine reported that half of the 351 Palestinian children in Israeli prisons as of the end of 2025 were being held without charge or trial. That report was one of the organization’s last: it closed a few weeks later. Last week, Jewish Currents spoke with Khaled Quzmar, DCI-Palestine’s general director, about what happened.

DCI-Palestine was established in 1991, during the First Intifada, to provide legal representation to Palestinian children being held in Israeli prisons. It later began offering support to children after their release. “It was difficult for the family to accept these kinds of services,” Quzmar said. “Anyone arrested by Israel is considered an adult, a hero. But in fact a child is a child. He needs special treatment during his childhood.” Quzmar says that Israel began targeting DCI-Palestine after it ramped up efforts to communicate its field workers’ findings about the abuses children were suffering in Israeli prisons with governments overseas. DCI-Palestine was one of six Palestinian civil society groups that Israel’s defense ministry designated as terror organizations in the fall of 2021. The Israeli government offered no evidence to back up the designations, which were widely condemned and dismissed by foreign governments and international experts.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Josh Nathan-Kazis: Tell us about Israel’s efforts to suppress DCI-Palestine.

Khaled Quzmar: The raid of our office [in July 2021] came after DCI documented the case of a child of 15 who was raped by an Israeli interrogator. We shared the testimony with Josh Paul in the State Department in Washington. At the time, I didn’t know why they raided the offices. [Ed note: Paul, now co-founder of the lobby group A New Policy, resigned from the State Department in October 2023 over US arms transfers to Israel. In December 2023, he told CNN that while conducting human rights vetting for the State Department, DCI-Palestine had alerted him to an alleged sexual assault of a Palestinian child in an Israeli prison. Paul told CNN that the July 2021 raid of DCI-Palestine’s offices came one day after he questioned Israeli authorities about the alleged incident.]

Three months after the raid, in October 2021, the Israeli government listed DCI as a terrorist organization without sharing a single piece of evidence to support the designation. One hundred percent fake news, created just to convince themselves.

JNK: How did DCI-Palestine function after Israel designated it a terrorist organization?

KQ: We used to train [children] to be committed to the community, committed to school, and not to participate in any resistance, because children should be out of this. After they become adults, they can decide which path they would like to take, how they would like to resist. But no military actions, resistance action, before the age of 18. From our side, we understood the designation as a message to the children, to the new generation of Palestinians: International law is nothing and cannot help you; the only thing that can help you is to get out of this country.

JNK: How were you able to continue to operate?

KQ: Israeli military law designated DCI a terrorist organization. This means that all of the staff are considered terrorists, and all our beneficiaries are considered terrorists. We tried to act as usual, to go to the office. We managed to continue the work. And then, after one year of the designation, they raided our offices again. They confiscated many files, many assets, without leaving any documentation of what they confiscated. I was summoned for interrogation myself, where they threatened me not to go back to work, otherwise I will be arrested. I told them I’m doing my mission, and if you feel that I’m violating the law, you created the law yourself, I do not recognize your law. So I continued my way.

JNK: Were you able to continue to access the banking system given the terrorist designation?

KQ: Not easily. From the beginning of the designation, we started to face problems with the banks. Each statement, each transaction, required a lot of paperwork—documents, contracts, reports—to justify the amount that we are receiving. It became very, very complicated. We decided to try to understand the bank restrictions, as [the bankers] would also like to protect themselves. We had a meeting with ministers, we had a meeting with [Palestinian Authority president Mahmoud Abbas] himself, and all of them clearly said that they could not force [the banks] to work with us, because they could not protect them from Israel. In Palestine, we live in a place where no one can protect you—no government, no president. So everyone tries to take his own actions to protect himself, because he is not protected.

JNK: After all this, what spurred the decision to stop DCI-Palestine’s operations last month?

KQ: On December 1st, 2025, the Israeli army raided the offices of the Agricultural Committees during the day [another of the six Palestinian civil society groups Israel had designated as a terror organization in 2021]. This was their first time coming during the day. [They also came] accompanied by the media machine, a TV crew filming how the Israeli army arrested the staff. They put each of them in different rooms, and interrogated them while blindfolded and handcuffed. [Ed note: According to the UN Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights, those present during the December 1st raid at the offices of the Union of Agricultural Work Committees were kept “blindfolded and handcuffed, kneeling down, or with their faces down on the floor for several hours.” Israeli forces detained eight men.]

To me, it was shocking. As director, I look at my staff—we have on staff a mother with a baby of five months. If they raid the office and arrest them, how I can help them? So I consulted the board of directors.

The board of directors cannot take on this responsibility for the staff working in the office under threat of arrest. The second issue is we couldn’t protect the children because, according to Israeli military law, those who benefited from a terrorist organization are subject to arrest and prosecution. Another issue is that Israel controls the bank system in Palestine, and any second they can close our account—that’s happened with many Palestinian NGOs before. Also, if we continued and Israel decided to close DCI, we would have lost the history of the organization because there would be no time to save our archives.

So we decided to make the decision ourselves while we are still free to do so. The decision was not to close [the organization], but to [stop its operations].

JNK: What does this mean for the children you served?

KQ: DCI did not work alone on the ground. We used to work with local NGOs and other international human rights organizations. So now they are taking care of our beneficiaries, the children that we used to work with.

JNK: What will you do now?

KQ: Since I submitted my resignation more than one month ago, I am applying for new jobs. Of course, I will stay in this field. I’m not going to change my history.

Jewish Leaders Who Benefited from Les Wexner’s Munificence Raise Money for Jeffrey Epstein’s Victims

Josh Nathan-Kazis

Generations of American Jewish leaders owe their careers to Les Wexner, the lingerie billionaire with deep personal and financial ties to Jeffrey Epstein, as Jewish Currents reported in February. Now, some of them are looking for a way to cancel out that debt. On Monday, a group of prominent Wexner alumni announced the creation of a fund to support Epstein survivors, and survivors of sexual violence in general, inviting fellow alumni to donate.

For more than three decades, the Wexner Foundation picked the best rabbinical candidates and graduate students in Jewish studies, and handed them tens of thousands of dollars in tuition stipends, access to networks of established leaders, and a seal of approval that all but guaranteed an enviable job.

Since the extent of Wexner’s relationship with Jeffrey Epstein became clear in 2019, some alumni of the Wexner Foundation programs have wrestled with their own proximity to Epstein’s crimes. “It’s clear from conversations in alumni spaces that many Wexner alumni have been feeling the weight of this without having a lot of clarity about what exactly to do, or how to direct that energy,” says Rabbi Danya Ruttenberg, an author and one of the organizers of the new fund. “This [fund] is a way to mobilize the community.”

Ruttenberg and a group of other organizers that includes Rabbi Josh Feigelson, CEO of the Institute for Jewish Spirituality, are calling this new effort the ASHRU Fund, and are seeking to raise $100,000 from Wexner alumni and others. As of Monday afternoon, $21,000 had been donated. The fund will split donations between the nonprofit World Without Exploitation, which is working with Epstein survivors, and the National Survivor Network.

A large part of Epstein’s wealth appears to have originated with Wexner, who in 1991 gave Epstein power of attorney over his financial affairs. Wexner has positioned himself as another Epstein victim, who was “conned” and did “nothing wrong.” “I think he had, in hindsight, multiple personalities,” Wexner said at the end of a five-hour deposition before House Democrats in February.

Jewish Currents reported in February that the Wexner Foundation had invited alumni to Zoom meetings to discuss what “the Foundation is to do now,” after brushing off questions about Epstein since 2019. At least some of those meetings have already taken place, though the foundation has made no public statement about any outcome or response. Ruttenberg said that the organizers setting up the ASHRU Fund had notified the Wexner Foundation’s president, Elka Abrahamson, shortly before launch, and had asked the foundation to contribute, but had not heard back. (Abrahamson did not immediately respond to a request for comment about the ASHRU Fund.)

“We know for a fact that Jeffrey Epstein built his wealth working for and with Les Wexner,” says Ruttenberg. “If we have benefited in relation to profound harm, there is an obligation to use some of the privileges that we have to be part of repair.”

Contact Josh Nathan-Kazis at jnk@jewishcurrents.org.

Israel has wrecked Gaza, southern Lebanon, and Iran; killed thousands of civilians across the Middle East; soured American public opinion; and lost even its most committed shills in the Senate. How does the American Jewish communal apparatchik tasked with posting happy pablum to mark the 78th anniversary of the state of Israel, which falls this Tuesday night and Wednesday, spin all that into a hopeful message?

The Jewish Federations of North America, whose leader declared himself the president of the Jews earlier this year, has some suggestions. In internal messaging guidance to Jewish communal officials across the US late last week, it suggested light and meaningless fare: “Israel, a national home for the Jewish people, is a democracy and has a diverse population, an active civil society, independent courts and competitive elections.”

Jewish Currents has been eavesdropping for weeks on the messaging strategy of the US Jewish establishment through Project Halo, a newsletter from the JFNA intended exclusively for workers at local federations across the US, to “help Jewish Federations on the frontline of addressing the barrage of antisemitism and anti-Zionism.” These Project Halo emails aren’t secret, exactly, but they’re not intended for public consumption. They go out a couple of times a week, with broad suggestions on how to spin uncomfortable news developments. (Two days before the Oscars, Project Halo sent an email suggesting lines of attack against The Voice of Hind Rajab, the Oscar-nominated film that dramatized the 2024 killing of a five-year-old Gazan girl by Israeli troops. Project Halo advised federation professionals to say that the movie “dehumanizes Israelis and places full blame on them.”)

Last Thursday, Project Halo sent an email with guidance for local federations looking to post about Yom Ha’Atzmaut, the celebration of Israeli independence. The advice from Project Halo this week is to “highlight Israel as unique,” to “celebrate the shared values of Israel, the United States and Canada,” and to “focus on how marking holidays . . . strengthens Jewish peoplehood.” Yom Ha’Atzmaut, Project Halo writes, is marked with “festive public gatherings” that “allow people in both Israel and the diaspora to celebrate Jewish values, such as democracy, freedom, pluralism and innovation, among others.” It’s a retreat into meaninglessness: Democracy and freedom, amid occupation and genocide? Pluralism, amid Orthodox hegemony? And since when is “innovation,” the corporate buzzword of the twenty-teens, a Jewish value?

— Josh Nathan-Kazis