A U.S. charity in Gaza is worried that teachers at its schools might stray from a curriculum it says promotes peace and tolerance, so it plans to record classroom conversations and use artificial intelligence to flag speech deemed “hateful” or “inciting.”
"The suppression of that report was just one of many actions that Milstein has taken in recent months to tilt U.S. policy toward Israel and shield it from accountability, the report finds — wielding a strange amount of power within the embassy for someone with his rank, and even ruffling feathers among openly pro-Israel officials for his efforts to back its government.
Milstein, who has been in his role since April 2025, has “repeatedly suppressed or significantly revised embassy reporting on Israeli activities to present the Netanyahu government in a favorable light,” the sources said. He frequently goes to “unusual lengths to frame Israel in a positive light,” officials said, and “has blocked reporting from being sent, rewritten cables to deliver a different — sometimes opposite — message from the original, and delayed approving drafts until the topic was no longer relevant.”
He has insisted that all reports from the section of the embassy that handles Palestinian affairs go through him, which had a major chilling effect on the flow of such reports, going “from several a week to a few a month, as some staffers refrained from writing reports for fear that Mr. Milstein would block or rewrite them.”
Among the other reports he’s suppressed is one on the massive surgeof settler violence in the occupied West Bank this spring, during which Israelis rampaged across Palestinian communities on a daily basis, leaving death and destruction in their wake.
In that report, the embassy reportedly suggested that the Israeli government was not taking sufficient action to stop settler violence. The Israeli government fully backs Israeli settlers and is known to be providing them with the weapons they use to siege Palestinian villages and homes.
Milstein, who is known by officials for intervening in efforts to prevent the expansion of illegal settlements in the West Bank, blocked the report from being sent. Instead, the embassy sent a cable, with Milstein as its first author, to Washington, D.C. officials entitled “Government Cracks Down on Escalating West Bank Violence.”
Last year, Milstein also reportedly intervened on a cable on the work done by the U.S.-sponsored Gaza Humanitarian Foundation (GHF) in Gaza. The cable, written by U.S. diplomats, noted that Palestinians were being killed at these sites, where Israel unleashed so much violence that the head of GHF resigned just weeks after its launch.
Milstein apparently disagreed, and instead rewrote the cable to say that GHF’s operation was a success.
The reporting is in line with other accounts of Milstein’s outsized role in the embassy."
Mr. Ovadia and other Satmar Jews saw the flag’s display as an endorsement by their town of a state “whose existence their religion holds to be forbidden,” his lawsuit said. A state law prohibits municipal buildings from displaying a foreign flag except under limited circumstances.
Mr. Ovadia said that he drove several people in his van to protest the flag on Nov. 13, 2023, helping gather about 20 Jewish people outside the town hall. Also present, Mr. Ovadia said, were people affiliated with the anti-Zionist Neturei Karta, a fringe, ultra-Orthodox organization whose political activism has been condemned by mainstream Satmars.