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Good morning. Today: IDF noticed “highly irregular” Hamas drill days before Oct. 7; the accused killer of 19-year-old Jew shared details of the crime during his murder trial; and Democrats push Biden to open pathways for Palestinian refugees.

ISRAEL AT WAR

Benjamin Netanyahu speaks during a ceremony marking Holocaust Remembrance Day. (Getty Images)

Opinion | To save Israel, give Netanyahu a plea deal. Yes, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s three separate trials — on charges of bribery, corruption and breach of public trust — “have nothing to do with the war,” our columnist Jay Michaelson writes. “On the other hand, they are determining the course of the war,” as many believe Netanyahu’s determination to maintain his hold on power is tied to a wish to avoid legal consequences. “Netanyahu not only appears to be guilty of these crimes of moral turpitude, but the Israeli press has meticulously described his outrageous abuses of power,” Michaelson writes. “But compare the injustice of letting Bibi get away with all of this to the consequences of his staying in office, reliant on a far-right coalition.” Read his essay ➤

Latest from the war…

Thousands of Israelis protested outside Netanyahu’s home in Caesarea — with smaller protests in Jerusalem and Tel Aviv — demanding that he set a date for new elections. Separately, hundreds of Haredi protesters blocked a highway near Tel Aviv in a demonstration against efforts to end the longstanding draft exemption for the ultra-Orthodox. And, the Israeli Medical Association is planning a demonstration Sunday to protest police violence against doctors helping those injured at escalating anti-government protests.

Surveillance troops along the Israel-Gaza border noticed a “highly irregular” Hamas drill four days before Oct. 7, a Thursday Israeli TV broadcast reported, raising further questions about the Israel Defense Forces’ failure to anticipate the attack.

The IDF clashed with Palestinians in the West Bank after a 78-year-old Israeli man was killed in a carjacking; a 15-year-old Palestinian boy was killed amid the search for the attackers.

Armenia became the latest country to recognize a Palestinian state.

Omer Granot-Lubaton, left, and Shany Lubaton-Granot, right. (Courtesy)

She came to New York hoping to escape Israeli politics. Instead, she founded a protest movement. The past two years have been a complicated experience for Israelis abroad, watching their home country roiled first by Netanyahu’s proposed judicial overhaul, then by war. For one pair of former Labor party lawmakers, Shany and Omer Lubaton-Granot, who arrived in New York in the fall of 2022, that upheaval prompted a refocusing, and a rapid education in the art of protest. As Shany in particular organized demonstrations first against the overhaul, then in support of hostages in Gaza, she “really revolutionized the Israelis in America, specifically New York, in political activism,” one fellow activist said. Read the story ➤

The homefront…

Sixty-nine Democrats in the Senate and House of Representatives are urging President Joe Biden’s administration to open new pathways for Palestinian refugees fleeing the war.

A White House spokesperson called Netanyahu’s public allegations that the U.S. has for months withheld weapons from Israel “very disappointing, perplexing and vexing” given that the Biden administration has withheld a single shipment of arms. But in a new interview with Punchbowl, Netanyahu doubled down on the claims, saying, “We began to see that we had some significant problems emerging a few months ago.”

The Manhattan district attorney dropped charges against the vast majority of protesters arrested during the occupation of a building on Columbia University’s campus.

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ALSO IN THE FORWARD

Painted rocks decorate a memorial for Blaze Bernstein at Borrego Park in Lake Forest, California. (Louis Keene)

Killer of slain Jewish college student says victim threatened to out him. Samuel Woodward, who has admitted to killing 19-year-old Blaze Bernstein in 2018, took the stand in his murder trial yesterday, saying that the crime was a spontaneous reaction to Bernstein’s alleged threat, not a planned crime connected to his involvement in the neo-Nazi group Atomwaffen Division. During his testimony, including a description of the killing that prompted Bernstein’s mother to leave the courtroom, he insisted that his interest in the group wasn’t about bigotry but a desire to connect with men who showed “each other how to elevate each other to the greatest heights they can possibly be.”

She longed to be a lover and an outlaw; she became a writer instead. “In her first work of personal history, novelist Francine Prose reflects on the short, intense relationship she had with Tony Russo, who was indicted in 1971 with Daniel Ellsberg for leaking the Pentagon Papers, the top-secret Defense Department study of the Vietnam War,” writes critic Ann Levin. The result: A story not just of a love affair, but of a generation seeking clarity and purpose during the final years of that war, after the social upheavals of the 1960s.

WHAT ELSE YOU NEED TO KNOW TODAY

Hebrew Union College’s main campus in New York City’s Greenwich Village. (Plexi Images / GHI / UCG / Universal Images Group via Getty Images)

🔔 In a reversal of a longstanding policy, Hebrew Union College will begin to admit students in interfaith relationships. The Reform seminary will instead require that rabbinical students with children promise to raise them “exclusively as Jews engaged with Jewish religious practice, education, and community.” (JTA)

🚨 New York City police are seeking the man who allegedly told “Zionists” on a subway car to identify themselves. They released a photo of the unidentified suspect wearing a kaffiyeh. (ABC 7)

🏫 “A New Jersey high school yearbook’s misprint of a photo of Muslim students in place of its Jewish Student Union ‘was not purposeful, but rather was a highly unfortunate error,’ an independent investigator has concluded,” reports JTA.

👀 The ADL released updated campus “report cards” that doubled down on the poor grades the civil rights organization assigned many prominent schools in a much-criticized project. (JTA)

😞 A new report suggests that backlash against the Israel-Hamas war has helped spur a rise in extremist crimes in Germany. (JTA)

🖼️ A Swiss museum removed five paintings from display as part of an investigation into possible Nazi-looted art. The works by artists including van Gogh and Monet will undergo a new provenance assessment. (Washington Post)

What else we’re reading ➤“Jewish critics of Zionism have clashed with American Jewish leaders for decades” … “What does Benny Gantz want for Israel?” … “Jews ‘questioning their future in France’ amid fears about rise in extremism.”

VIDEO OF THE DAY

Yesterday was the first day of summer; celebrate by learning the Yiddish words for “freckles” and “butterflies,” both of which include the Yiddish term for summertime.

Thanks to Benyamin Cohen for contributing to today’s newsletter, and to Beth Harpaz for editing it. You can reach the “Forwarding” team at editorial@forward.com.

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Reporting from the ground in Israel and campuses takes resources. Support the news that matters to you with a monthly donation.