By: Daniel Sokatch, NIF International CEO
Daniel Sokatch and Mickey Gitzin at a protest in Tel Aviv
In a few weeks, starting in January, I will begin a year-long sabbatical. NIF is one of a growing number of non-profit organizations that understand that meaningful time away is a key to professional longevity and performance, and I am so grateful to our board for this incredible opportunity. You can be sure I will take good advantage of it! During my sabbatical, I’m going to work on a new book project (yes, it will also be related to our work; updates to follow), read a lot, travel a bit for pleasure, hike, kayak, and enjoy beautiful Northern California, and spend time with friends and family.
I am proud to lead an organization that recognizes the importance of providing staff members the opportunity to step back from the intensity of our day-to-day work, and pursue and explore personal interests, and recharge internal batteries. And, while I am gone, NIF will be in excellent hands. Mickey Gitzin, our executive director in Israel, will relocate to New York for the year with his family to serve as acting CEO for the duration of my sabbatical.
For those of you who know Mickey, have heard from him on countless NIF webinars, or have seen his name pop up in your inbox again and again, you know this is going to be a treat. Mickey will be the first ever Israeli to lead this organization. He and I have worked closely together for years, and he is exceptionally qualified to lead NIF while I’m away. To say that he has my complete confidence and that of our board of directors would be an understatement.
I am excited for you, our supporters around the United States, to meet him in person as he visits NIF communities in 2026. We see this is an amazing opportunity for him to bring his energy, expertise, and unparalleled familiarity with the work on the ground in Israel to this side of the ocean. And speaking of that work in Israel, I am excited to announce that our own Shira Ben Sasson, NIF’s associate director in Israel, will step into Mickey’s role as our executive director in Israel. If you haven’t met her, Shira is the embodiment of our NIF values: she is compassionate, kind, and utterly committed to building a better future for all Israelis. In addition to these two rock stars, NIF is blessed with an incredible professional team and a dedicated board of directors who will be with Mickey and Shira every step of the way next year, including our new VP for Public Engagement, Idit Klein who just joined us after 24 years building and growing Keshet, the nation’s leading Jewish organization for LGBTQ+ equality.
For the moment, however, I am still here—and I want to take a moment to tell you about something that just happened in the Israeli Knesset. Minister of National Security, Itamar Ben Gvir, leading his extremist party, Otzma Yehudit (literally “Jewish Power”), has taken up a longstanding dream of the Israeli right—to give terrorists the death penalty—and brought it forward as legislation. Ben Gvir and his henchmen wore a new lapel pin the other day to the Knesset. It was not the yellow hostage ribbon, it was not the Israeli flag, it wasn’t even a clenched fist—the symbol of “Kach,” the extremist party of Ben Gvir’s ideological godfather the racist American rabbi Meir Kahane. It was a golden noose. Let me say that again: members of the Israeli Knesset showed up for work this week sporting a noose on their lapels. The message was clear: this law they are advancing to put people to death is a law of revenge.
Fetishizing revenge like this only contributes to an endless bloody cycle of violence. It drives hatred, resentment, and dehumanization. It pushes the hope for a just, sustainable, shared future ever-further away. Yet revenge—and its symbols—have always been a driver for Ben Gvir and his lot. In my book, Can We Talk About Israel: A Guide for the Curious, Confused, and Conflicted (an updated and revised edition was recently rereleased which includes the story of the last three years in Israel), I tell one of the most revealing stories about Ben Gvir—from when he was an ultra-nationalist nineteen-year-old activist. Here’s an abridged version:
A Young man stands in front of the TV news camera. A large white kippa covers his dark hair. He wears big, round glasses and a light- blue T- shirt, his left arm in a sling. He smiles slightly as he gazes at the Cadillac hood ornament he holds in his hands. A few weeks earlier, it had been attached to Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin’s official state car. It was torn off by radical right-wing extremists during an antigovernment protest, another in a series of worrying, increasingly violent acts by those opposed to Rabin’s moves to make peace with the Palestinians.
… Anger at Rabin’s peace process is morphing into something toxic, something dangerous. Ministers in the government are routinely heckled, jeered, even threatened. At massive protests, furious right-wingers wave signs with pictures of Rabin in a Nazi storm trooper helmet and chant “Rabin is a traitor.” Radical rabbis issue religious edicts deeming Rabin a rodef, one who pursues another in order to kill him and who, as a result, must be killed himself…
Off- screen, a reporter asks, “You were able to take the hood ornament off of Rabin’s car? To tear it off?” In front of the camera, the young man raises his eyes …and says, “A hood ornament is a symbol, and this symbolizes that, just like we got to this hood ornament, we can get to Rabin.” He is right. A few weeks later, Prime Minister Rabin is assassinated by a right- wing extremist as he leaves a massive peace rally in Tel Aviv.
Down the line, Ben Gvir was barred from serving in the IDF; his views were deemed too extreme. He went to law school and built a practice defending the most notorious Jewish terrorists who had been accused of murdering innocent Palestinians. He himself was convicted on terrorism-related charges. And now he leads Israel’s most racist political party and, three decades after the scene with the hood ornament, he is the minister of national security of the State of Israel, in charge of the national police force. Ben Gvir is still using symbols to inflict fear. And, just as was true with Rabin, Ben Gvir today means what he says.
Professor Maya Mark of Ben-Gurion University’s Research Institute for the Study of Israel and Zionism commented on this new symbol of terror. She noted that symbols are powerful because “they unite people, they bring to the surface what cannot be recognized without them. They are a statement. And when a person puts a symbol on his shirt lapel, he tells the world who he is and what he believes in the most open, outward, and public way…This is the moment a violent movement defined and marked itself. The Jewish DNA in all of us screaming for us to listen. We know better than anyone where this goes from here.”
As I write this, NIF grantees are fighting Ben Gvir’s death penalty bill. The Association for Civil Rights, of course, but also a host of others—Mehazkim, Citizens HQ, and the Israel Reform Action Center, to name a few. And they are not only fighting the bill itself; they are fighting the symbols of hate with symbols of hope. And of course, our NIF community has their backs.
And for NIF, 2026 will be a year in which we go from strength to strength, fighting for a better future, no matter how long the odds. I am excited to watch this amazing group of people work—Mickey, Shira, Idit, and their teams will be in touch. So, l’hitraot for now. I’ll be back next January, and I look forward to reconnecting with all of you then.