From Ian:
Australia heightening security for Chanukah after Bondi Beach massacre
Australian police are dramatically increasing their security presence for Chanukah next month following last year’s deadly holiday attack.
The police have deployed a newly established 250-member unit armed with assault rifles to conduct high-visibility patrols at major public events, places of worship, and crowded spaces.
The move comes after it emerged that only a handful of general-duty police officers were on duty during the Bondi Beach Chanukah attack in December 2025, despite earlier warnings by the Jewish community over a heightened climate of incitement to violence.
“There is no denying that seeing such heavily armed police officers on the streets of Sydney is deeply confronting, and as someone who experienced firsthand the horrific attack at Bondi, I wish it did not have to come to this,” Arsen Ostrovsky, head of the Sydney office of the Australia/Israel & Jewish Affairs Council (AIJAC) and a survivor of the Bondi terrorist shooting, told JNS on Monday.
“But the reality is that these measures have become necessary to protect not only the Jewish community, but all Australians, from the ongoing threat of terror.”
Australian Jewish organizations have long condemned the government for allowing a climate of incitement to violence following the Oct. 7, 2023, Hamas-led massacre to run unchecked, saying it led to a series of hate-based assaults across the country that culminated in the Bondi attack.
Fifteen people, including a 10-year-old girl and an 87-year-old Holocaust survivor, were killed by father-and-son gunmen in the shooting at Bondi Beach on the first night of Chanukah 2025.
About 110,000 Jews live in Australia, primarily in Melbourne and Sydney. This year, the holiday begins at sunset on Dec. 4.
Germany sees sharp rise in Islamist-motivated antisemitic crimes since October 7
Islamist-motivated antisemitic crimes are on the rise in Germany, according to a newly published response by the German government to a parliamentary question, citing Federal Criminal Police Office data.
German authorities recorded 670 antisemitic offenses classified as Islamist in 2025, a 6% increase from the previous year.
Greens MP Lamya Kaddor asked the federal government last month what figures it has regarding antisemitic incidents in Muslim or Islamist contexts before and after October 7, 2023.
Parliamentary State Secretary Christoph de Vries responded with data from the Criminal Police Reporting Service for Politically Motivated Crime (KPMD-PMK). This revealed 16 cases of Islamist-motivated antisemitic crimes in 2022 and 33 from January 1, 2023, to October 6, 2023. In the just three months following October 7, 2023, there were 331 incidents. This almost doubled to 631 in 2024, and now 670 in 2025.
Outlet WELT AM SONNTAG gained access to the Federal Criminal Police Office (BKA) breakdown of incidents. It reported that almost half of them concerned the use of signs of banned organizations such as Hezbollah and the so-called Islamic State. In addition, the BKA registered numerous incidents of antisemitic graffiti, insults, and threats. The most serious was attempted homicide: a knife attack by a Syrian on a Spanish tourist at the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe in Berlin in February 2025.
6,548 antisemitic offenses reported in Germany across all ideological categories
On X/Twitter, Kaddor said: “Islamist antisemitism must be decisively combated, without placing Muslims under general suspicion.”
“For this, effective prevention, reliable data, and cooperation with Muslim communities are needed, instead of cuts and generalizations,” she added.
It is important to note that 670 is not the total number of antisemitic crimes in Germany in 2025. The nation recorded 6,548 antisemitic offenses across all ideological categories last year. Of these, 3,163 (48.3%) had an Israel-related connection. Right-wing extremism remained the largest ideological category.
Josef Schuster, president of the Central Council of Jews, told German media: “Today, Islamist-influenced hatred of Jews is being unleashed quite openly on the streets, at universities, and on the Internet.”
Toronto Conference Glorifying October 7 Massacre Hints at Terrorist Speaker Line-Up
Several terrorists have been teased as potential speakers a November conference in Toronto organized by a U.S.-designated terrorist organization, according to social media posts from October and November promoting the “Three Years of Al-Aqsa Flood Conference.”
The November 28-29 Canadian conference, organized by Masar Badil Palestinian Alternative Revolutionary Path, aims to advance “revolutionary” efforts in the wake of the October 7 Hamas attacks. In posts published in October 20 and November 3, keynote speakers were described as “liberated Palestinian prisoners.”
The term “liberated Palestinian prisoners” and similar phrases have previously been used by Masar Badil and its sister group Samidoun Palestinian Prisoner Solidarity Network to refer to terrorists released as part of deals for hostages held captive by Hamas.
Code for Terrorist Guest Speakers
Masar Badil described Hamas international spokesman Hussam Badran as a “liberated Palestinian prisoner” in a February statement. Samidoun used the same phrase in its own statement about a Masar Badil webinar with Badran, who had been released in the 2011 Gilad Shalit deal. Samidoun used the exact phrase again in a November 2025 statement about terrorists released in exchange for October 7 Massacre hostages. In contemporaneous statements about the release of terrorists during the October 7 War, Samidoun consistently described them as “liberated prisoners.”
The Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine subsidiary groups have repeatedly hosted or organized talks featuring terrorists released in exchange for October 7 hostages. Hamas terrorist Othman Bilal, who was reportedly involved in the planning of bombings that killed 12 people, was featured alongside Masar Badil co-founder and Samidoun founder Khaled Barakat in a December 2025 webinar. Bilal spoke alongside alongside PFLP commander Nader Sadaqa in an April 2026 webinar in Argentina co-organized by Masar Badil. Fatah terrorist Nael Barghouti, who had been released in both the Shalit and October 7 War deals, spoke to participants in Madrid and Budapest in April events organized by Masar Badil’s youth movement Tariq El Tahrir and Samidoun-linked organization Alkarama Palestinian Women’s Movement. The latter group described Barghouti as a “freed prisoner.”
Samidoun and Palestine Action
Beyond the so-called “liberated prisoners,” other terrorism-tied individuals are expected to speak or attend the two-day conference. On Tuesday it was announced that Barakat, who was previously identified by the PFLP as a leader of its organization, is set to speak at a panel about the “red-green alliance” between revolutionary Islamists and socialists. Barakat was specifically sanction by the U.S. Treasury alongside Samidoun. Samidoun was listed by Canada as a terrorist entity, due to its close links to the PFLP, in a joint October 2024 action with the U.S. Treasury. Barakat’s wife and Samidoun international coordinator Charlotte Kates is also listed as a speaker.
Another speaker are representatives of Palestine Action Canada, a branch of the United Kingdom-based political vandalism network Palestine Action. Palestine Action was designated a terrorist organization by the UK in July 2025 and by the U.S. in August. Palestine Action Canada only recently claimed responsibility for an October attack damaging infrastructure belonging to GeoSpectrum, an Ontario subsidiary of Israeli defense firm Elbit Systems.
Another Palestine Action-link expected to speak at the conference is Calla Walsh. Walsh was one of the founders of Palestine Action US, and like Kates appears to now be based in Beirut. According to the Free Press, she is on a suspicious persons watch list, and regularly appears on Iranian-state media.
Other speakers appear to include participants in the protest encampments that paralyzed academic campuses worldwide during the height of the October 7 War.
From Ian:
Walter Russell Mead:
Why the Middle East Is Hard to Quit
Every president since George W. Bush has come into the White House hoping to limit America's risks and costs in the Middle East. The longing for an exit is understandable. Over the last generation, the burden of America's commitments in the region has grown, yet our need for Middle Eastern oil has diminished.
The shale revolution has turned the U.S. into an energy superpower, producing more oil than Saudi Arabia. The Western Hemisphere produces more oil than the Middle East, with increasing fossil-fuel production from Canada, Venezuela, Guyana, Brazil and Argentina. Given this, people ask why we spend billions, even trillions, to police a region whose oil resources we don't need.
Yet the Middle East still matters. The Western Hemisphere may have pumped 37.4% of the world's oil against 30.9% from the Middle East in 2025, but a price shock still reverberated around the world this year when Iran effectively closed the Strait of Hormuz. Similar shocks hit the world's farmers as Middle East exports of urea and phosphate fertilizers fell.
If the forecasts of the U.S. Energy Information Administration prove accurate, projected increases in Western Hemisphere production of fossil fuels won't be enough to prevent price shocks from the Middle East. For the foreseeable future, American security and economic interests are going to keep us engaged, no matter how many presidents in both parties dream of walking away.
Instead of fantasizing about an escape from the Middle East, Americans need to think harder about how to safeguard our essential interests at the lowest possible risk and cost. We need to cut the burden of our commitments without sacrificing interests that still matter.
Facilitating smarter security cooperation between Israel and key Arab states will remain a crucial American objective, and Indian and American interests are broadly aligned in the Middle East. Besides securing energy supplies, India cares deeply about the millions of its citizens who work in the Persian Gulf.
Deepening defense and tech ties with Israel and shared concerns about terrorism commit India to promoting cooperation between Arabs and Israelis. And with Pakistan closely aligned with China, India's interests in countering Pakistani influence in the Middle East line up with American concerns about Beijing.
Robert Kennedy Jr.:
In Defense of Israel
Media outlets piled on this week to express outrage at my observation about the troubling dearth of scientific output from the world's 22 Arab nations over the past five decades. However, the reporters omitted critical context, presumably to bestow plausibility on their accusations that my statements were racist and Islamophobic.
However, my speech was not a critique of Arabs or Islam, but of Islamism (also known as "Political Islam"), a toxic ideology conceived and promoted by the Muslim Brotherhood terrorist group. Islamism is a violent corruption of mainstream Islam that summons adherents back to the seventh-century ideal of bloody jihad.
Sheikh Ahmed El-Tayeb, the Grand Imam of Al-Azhar - the Muslim equivalent of the Vatican and the highest authority in Sunni Islamic thought - has rejected Islamism as "false Islam" and a "perversion of the Islamic religion" and accused it of "barbaric crimes."
Islamism is intensely anti-American, anti-Western, and hostile to modernity. It is explicitly contemptuous of democracy, constitutional government, capitalism, minority rights, gay rights, women's rights, free speech, and virtually all personal freedoms. Its central aspiration is for a global caliphate ruled by a single theocratic despot with absolute power to impose sharia law that dictates every aspect of human conduct.
I pointed out that the Muslim Brotherhood's antipathy for modernity is a dramatic departure from Islam's historical affinity for science and learning. During the 8th through 15th centuries as well as during the Ottoman Empire, Muslim leaders promoted a brilliant flowering of innovation and scholarship in science, mathematics, philosophy, art, literature, astronomy, pharmacology, psychology, engineering, architecture, medicine, and navigation that continues to enrich the world today.
Genocidal hatred against ALL Jews and Christians and other minorities is foundational to Islamism. In 1948, the world's 22 Arab nations were host to 750,000 Jews living in communities that predated Muhammad by 1,000 years. Today, there are virtually no Jews in those nations. In Nazi terminology, they are Judenrein: Jew-free. In 1948, Christian populations represented 20% of those nations; today they represent 4%. These are the real ongoing genocides of the Mideast.
Debbie Wasserman Schultz’s faith in the Democratic Party
Hers is a theory of coalition politics: reject the radical left’s ideas, fight them in primaries, keep moderates in control, and if one of their candidates wins the nomination, tolerate him rather than sacrifice a Democratic majority.
That tolerance is where many in the Jewish community are uncomfortable. They fear that tolerating such candidates gives cover to antisemites and to those who accuse Israel of genocide. Their concern is not that most Democrats share those views, but that ideas can move from unacceptable to tolerated to normalized long before they command a majority. A party does not have to embrace a fringe to be changed by it.
She said that being a Democrat is no more difficult for her today than it was two decades ago. Asked about pro-Israel colleagues who say the caucus feels lonely, she acknowledged that it can feel lonely, though she attributed much of it to reactions to the current Israeli government.
I respect Debbie Wasserman Schultz, and I admire her commitment. She is trying to defend her convictions while remaining inside a coalition under strain. It is not easy to be a pro-Israel Democrat right now, and she has not walked away from the party or the fight.
But I left our conversation unable to reconcile the line she draws with the compromise she accepts. She rejects the DSA and El-Sayed’s genocide accusation, and says she would never campaign for him. Yet when I raised Harris and Obama standing with him, her answer was about other priorities. Each position is defensible on its own. Together they expose the tension between the boundary she draws and what her party is increasingly willing to stand beside, or even endorse.
Democratic Party arguing over Israel, socialism
That tension is what many American Jews see: a party arguing with itself over Israel and socialism. Representative Josh Gottheimer, also a Democrat, warned in The Free Press this August that the “socialist fringe is trying to hijack the Democratic Party,” and that for “a growing number of my colleagues, being anti-Israel has now become a nonnegotiable moral litmus test.” Both love the party. They are describing different parties.
Staying in the tent and fighting from inside is a legitimate choice, and it may prove right. But goodwill is not a boundary. A boundary matters only if crossing it has consequences. The real test comes after candidates who hold ideas she rejects win.
Her answer is that moderates will retain control and the fringe will not set the party’s agenda. That is the wager at the heart of her faith in the Democratic Party: that the party can tolerate the fringe without being changed by it.
Many American Jews hope she is right. But they are watching some of the Democratic Party’s most prominent leaders campaign for El-Sayed, who accuses Israel of genocide and appeared with the streamer she calls a “stone-cold antisemite.”
At what point does supporting such a candidate stop being merely a strategy for preserving a Democratic majority and begin to change what the party is willing to accept – and ultimately what it stands for? And for American Jews, how long can it remain their political home?
From Ian:
The ‘Third Worldist’ roots of the Islamo-left alliance
The New Left’s estrangement from class politics went hand in hand with ‘the cultural turn’ towards identity politics. Above all, it involved a turn towards a distinctly counter-Enlightenment tradition of thought. There was plenty of resistance to this shift among significant figures on the New Left, writ large in works such as EP Thompson’s The Poverty of Theory. But there’s little doubt that influential New Left-era thinkers, especially in France, drew most of their inspiration from those who sought to diminish or even dethrone human reason, from the protests of the Romantics to reactionaries like Friedrich Nietzsche or the card-carrying Nazi Martin Heidegger – the ‘unavoidable’ thinker as the New Left-adjacent Jacques Derrida described him. Even those associated with the New Left who still invoked Marx, like French Communist intellectual Louis Althusser, emptied his work of its ‘Hegelian’ or humanist-centred content.
Many on the New Left used these deeply reactionary, counter-Enlightenment thinkers to ruthlessly critique post-Enlightenment modernity – or even the post-Socratic West, in Heidegger’s case. And like much of the counterculture more broadly, the New Left tended to damn all those living within Western society too, as conformist victims – the duped members of the ‘society of the spectacle’. They reduced Westerners to mere ‘bearers’ of ‘relations of production’, in Althusser’s words, or cast them, Matrix-like, as effects of structures or systems of power forever beyond their control.
Here we come to one of the key moments in understanding the development of what would become the Islamo-left. With the turn away from domestic class politics, large parts of the New Left simultaneously embraced the ‘Third World’ – a term coined in 1952 by French demographer Alfred Sauvy to designate the Third Estate-like revolutionary force emerging in the colonial and the post-colonial sphere. In this reading, the Third World, from Vietnam to China to Cuba to Algeria, was set to challenge the established capitalist and Communist powers of the first and second worlds.
In part, the New Left’s Third Worldism built on traditional left-wing anti-imperialism – that expression of political solidarity with colonised peoples in their fight for the same freedom and autonomy enjoyed by people in North America and Europe. No doubt many left-wingers were still classically anti-imperialist. But there were elements to the New Left’s relationship with the decolonising postwar world that were new. For some, their Third Worldism was based less on class solidarity than on cultural identity – that is, on an almost psychological identification with the radically ‘other’, precisely because the Third World was not the West. As one American radical wrote of Fidel Castro’s Cuba in the late 1960s: ‘We look to Cuba not only because of what we sense Cuba to be, but because of what the United States is not… we needed to tie our fates to someone, somewhere in the world, who was seizing the chances for a humane society.’
There were modernist, interwar antecedents to this identification with the anti-Western and often the anti-modern, too. Think of ‘primitivism’, that modernist celebration of people and ways of life deemed closer to nature. Or think of the French Surrealists of the 1920s, who threw their lot in with the Berbers after a French colonial intervention in Morocco in 1925. ‘We profoundly hope that revolutions, wars, colonial insurrections, will annihilate this Western civilisation’, ran one of the Surrealists’ innumerable manifestos.
Elements of the New Left took this to another level. The Third World was effectively conjured up as the means by which the West might be de-Westernised and saved from itself. This is captured well by Jean-Paul Sartre’s infamous preface to the so-called ‘bible of decolonisation’, Frantz Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth (1961). Going far beyond anything Fanon actually wrote (The Wretched of the Earth was principally a radically humanist work about and on national liberation), Sartre hailed the rise of the Third World for exposing Western ideas of humanism, liberty and equality as ‘an ideology of lies’. From this perspective, independence movements, from Cuba to Algeria, were simultaneously in the process of purging the West of itself – exposing Europe and America’s grand heritage as no more than a ‘justification for pillage’. ‘We in Europe, too, are being decolonised’, concluded Sartre, ‘that is to say that the settler in every one of us is being savagely rooted out’.
Sartre may have got carried away with his own rhetorical brilliance – after all, his political affiliations and sympathies seemed to be in perpetual motion throughout his life. But many other New Leftist elements seemed thoroughly committed to embracing the Third Worldist ‘other’ as the gravedigger of the West. In ways that anticipate the contemporary leftist identification with Islamism, New Left Third Worldists tended to recast themselves as alien ‘others’ within their own societies. In America, anti-Vietnam War protesters filled the streets chanting, ‘Ho, Ho, Ho Chi Minh, the NLF is gonna win’. Elsewhere, Cuban revolutionary Che Guevara became an icon to be emulated, while upper-class Parisian radical Régis Debray transformed Guevara’s guerrilla exploits into a voluntarist model (‘focoism’) for revolutionary action throughout the West and beyond in Revolution in the Revolution? (1967) – a model taken to terroristic extremes by the West German Red Army Faction, Italy’s Red Brigades and America’s Weather Underground. As the politics of Third Worldism streamed through the New Left, this also supercharged racial identity politics among minorities – it’s no coincidence that black separatist movements began flourishing in late-1960s America.
It was in the Third Worldist context, too, that Palestine first began to emerge as what it is today – the anti-Western rallying cry of today’s Islamo-left.
Herzog lauds work of Jewish lawyers in battling antisemitism and lies about Israel
In his address on Sunday at the opening of the conference of the International Association of Jewish Lawyers and Jurists (IJL), President Isaac Herzog, himself a lawyer, praised the work of Jewish lawyers in combating antisemitism and lies about Israel.
“We are seeing an expanding cycle of prominent entities, governments, NGOs, media outlets, politicians, and influencers investing infinite resources in indoctrinating the lies about the Jewish people and the world’s only Jewish democratic state,” he said.
“We are seeing our enemies exhibit their distorted view of Israel, and lecture the free world with vile, false allegations against us, while completely overlooking truth, fact, and reality.”
Looking out at the large gathering of distinguished lawyers and jurists from around the world who were seated in Jerusalem’s Museum of Tolerance, Herzog remarked that it is no coincidence that IJL has a special consultative status at the United Nations.
IJL’s reputation and legal expertise, he continued, have informed and influenced international discourse, proving particularly significant for legal matters involving Israel and its worldwide family.
Herzog attributed this to the fact that, in the eyes of the international community, Israel is the focal point of nearly every debate concerning human rights and the rule of law “as a single issue that plagues the family of nations.”
He surmised that the distorted views shared of Israel and the false allegations against it and the Jewish people could be considered antisemitism, as those who repeat them completely overlook truth, fact, and reality.
“The reality is that, for three years, Israel has been embroiled in a war we did not seek, in civilian terrain of our enemies’ choosing,” he said, adding that Israel had no choice other than to defend itself, “despite being dragged into an urban battlefield, forcing us to combat terrorists in schools and hospitals just to keep our borders and people safe and bring our hostages back home.”
Herzog recalled that it was his great-uncle, Sir Hersch Lauterpacht – a Holocaust survivor who prosecuted Nazis at the Nuremberg trials – who was the first to formulate the legal definition of Crimes Against Humanity.
Herzog warns of collapse of the post-Holocaust world order
Based on current disruptions in geopolitics, Herzog warned of a collapse of the post-Holocaust world order, which includes an aggressive delegitimization of Israel by international institutions and a dangerously violent assault on world Jewry.
Turning to Israel’s recent elections, Herzog noted that the pillars of democratic life must be strengthened through foundational judicial cornerstones.
Israel’s ultimate task is to ensure that the state remains rooted in the ideals on which it was founded, he said, listing security, freedom, Jewish pride, democracy, and a commitment to upholding rights for all.
He also emphasized that, on the “day after” the war, Israel must continue to pursue peace agreements with its neighbors.
“At this moment, your role is particularly important,” Jerusalem Mayor Moshe Lion told conference participants, citing the chilling reality that Jewish students outside of Israel cannot study in safety. He said that it is the duty of IJL members to defend Jewish communities and institutions.
From Ian:
Why the US midterms are the election that matters to Israel most
THAT OBSESSION, Israel and Zionism’s status as the ultimate political and cultural “omnicause,” continues to inflame the most consequential midterm races. In Los Angeles, for instance, DSA-aligned mayoral candidate Nithya Raman has finally succumbed to DSA demands that she embrace the BDS movement lest she lose the party’s endorsement.
In Michigan, an ad late last month in support of anti-Zionist Senator candidate Abdul El-Sayed blamed US aid to Israel for America’s high food costs. The commercial was so overreaching and extreme that El-Sayed released a statement saying that it was “not affiliated with his campaign.”
Most disheartening are campaigns by Michigan Jews intended to convince other Michigan Jews to vote for El-Sayed.
In this perverse reversal of logic, well-known Jews such as actor Mandy Patinkin are exhorting Michigan’s Jews to vote for El-Sayed not only as an example of Jewish values, but because “Jewish safety depends on a real multiracial democracy, and Abdul is the one fighting to protect it,” said Patinkin in late last week.
In a second ad a few days later bemoaning attacks on El-Sayed’s Muslim faith, Patinkin suggested that fighting Islamophobia is the best way to combat antisemitism. “Who is going to stand up for the rights of all of us? Abdul,” he added.
Netanyahu fits neatly into this self-sabotaging worldview, serving as the ultimate bogeyman for Jews like Patinkin, ever eager to perform their anti-Zionist ablutions, along with the Gentiles who affirm them. Of course, Eisenkot, a career military man, is nearly as hawkish as Bibi. But as an enigma and newcomer, he would prove far less of a rallying-cry for America’s progressive masses.
Should candidates like Raman, El-Sayed, Troy Jackson in Maine, and Angie Nixon in Florida triumph on Tuesday, the consequences will be seismic no matter who ultimately leads the nation. In July, a vote by more than 100 Democrats to halt aid to Israel was defeated this past summer owing to Republican Congressional control.
But should that control switch from Red to Blue, similar measures are almost certain to be forthcoming – and win.
Even more worrisome for Israel, declarations of “genocide” and other anti-Israel litmus tests are likely to anchor the Democratic platform in the 2028 presidential race.
Already, Kamala Harris is suggesting her 2024 defeat was tied to Joe Biden’s refusal to rein in Netanyahu in Gaza. She and other potential Democratic challengers are unlikely to make the mistake of under-criticizing Israel again.
This type of fundamental policy shift has no precedent, even for a politician as seasoned and wily as Netanyahu. Which means even if he wins the battle to lead Israel, Israel’s war with Washington may not have even begun.
David Collier:
Israel’s Election: Why the Coalition Arithmetic Does Not Tell the Whole Story
Eisenkot’s Dilemma
When Eisenkot receives the first mandate, his options are limited.
Without Arab-party support, his existing bloc falls well short of a majority. Cooperation with the ultra-Orthodox parties would create another set of conflicts over military conscription – and still would not be enough.
And why would the ultra-Orthodox parties break the long-standing union with the Likud for a government that just does not look as if it has a long shelf life?
A minority government dependent on Arab-party support is theoretically possible, but politically contentious, particularly in the aftermath of October 7.
He could also explore a unity arrangement with Netanyahu, although that would contradict explicit campaign commitments.
If Eisenkot fails to form a government, the political balance changes again.
Netanyahu’s Different Calculation
Netanyahu could then have an opportunity to negotiate from a different position.
He could approach Eisenkot with a straightforward argument: neither of us can govern alone, and another election carries risks for both. Why not reach an agreement?
But Netanyahu’s assessment of those risks would be very different.
He could reasonably look at the electoral threshold effects, the opposition’s difficulties and the possibility of another contest and conclude that returning to the polls is an acceptable alternative to making substantial concessions.
Would the tens of thousands who flew in especially to help unseat him – want to repeat the exercise again in a few months? Would the Arabs, having seen the futility of a large turnout, simply stay at home next time?
Eisenkot, by contrast, would have to consider the political damage of failed negotiations, particularly if they involved controversial discussions with Arab parties.
That creates an asymmetry: one leader may feel greater pressure to reach an agreement than the other.
The Succession Question
There is another dynamic that deserves attention.
Netanyahu cannot lead the Israeli right forever. Whenever his departure comes, a struggle for succession will follow.
And there is no undisputed heir.
Both Bennett and Lieberman emerged from the political right. Their ambitions may extend beyond replacing Netanyahu as prime minister through an opposition coalition.
They may also see opportunities in the eventual contest to lead the post-Netanyahu right.
Do not dismiss this just because it seems unlikely today. Gideon Sa’ar was also an ex-Likudnik sitting in the anti-Bibi camp. He made the move first, returning to the fold, probably with an eye to future leadership positions. Lieberman is an ex-Likudnik too. Bennett was once leader of a party to the right of the Likud. In Israeli politics – everything is possible.
This adds another layer to negotiations already shaped by competing interests and political calculations.
What Happens Next?
The central mistake in much of the analysis is to treat Israel’s coalition negotiations as a simple mathematical exercise.
They are nothing of the sort.
Bennett and Lieberman can support his candidacy while rejecting the compromises he may need to make.
Looking at the weakness of the camp, they may both favour another election. It is likely Lieberman does. That would reduce Eisenkot’s problematic 48 seats to an impossible 41.
And behind all of this lies the unresolved question of who eventually succeeds Netanyahu.
To understand what happens next, we need to stop asking only who has enough seats to form a government.
We also need to ask who has the most to gain if they fail.
By my calculations, the majority of seats (right wing 53, Lieberman 7 and some of Bennett’s 12 = up to 72 seats) may well prefer another election.
And if this is the case, we can expect another election in Israel in the spring.
Khaled Abu Toameh:
Qatar Glorifies Terrorism: Al-Jazeera's Propaganda Machine Celebrates Hamas
The Hamas officials featured in Al-Jazeera's footage are portrayed as military leaders, strategists, and figures worthy of admiration.
The program included footage of meetings inside Gaza's underground tunnel network, discussions about terror attacks, and documents that purportedly shed light on the preparations for the October 7 massacre.
Among the most disturbing revelations was an operational order attributed to Deif and dated October 5, 2023. According to the network's presentation, the document specified that the invasion of Israel would begin at 6:30 a.m. on October 7.
What exactly was Al-Jazeera trying to communicate to its Arabic-speaking audience? The message is clear: These are your heroes – men who planned and carried out the massacre of Jews on October 7 and whose declared objective is the destruction of Israel.
This is not journalism exposing terrorism; it is a platform for glorifying it.
Al-Jazeera could have used the material to examine how Hamas transformed Gaza into a military base, diverted resources into tunnels and weapons production, and prepared an assault in which they murdered approximately 1,200 people in Israel and abducted 251 others.
Instead, Al-Jazeera chose to turn the architects of the massacre into celebrated military figures.... These were, however, the leaders of an Iran-backed Islamist terrorist organization whose October 7 assault included the deliberate mass-murder of civilians, rape, torture, and hostage-taking.
Qatar has hosted senior Hamas leaders for years [and] has also served as a diplomatic base for purportedly "neutral" negotiations involving the terrorist organization.
The US Congressional Research Service, which notes that Hamas is an offshoot of the Muslim Brotherhood, has also documented Qatar's engagement with the organization...
Al-Jazeera English presents itself as a major international news organization, competing for credibility among Western viewers.
Al-Jazeera Arabic, meanwhile, operates in a political and cultural environment in which the Muslim Brotherhood and Hamas enjoy considerable support among segments of the public.
American universities, policymakers, and media organizations should ask whether foreign government funding creates conflicts of interest and delectable opportunities for political influence.
Qatar cannot simultaneously present itself as a trusted Western partner and avoid serious questions about its relationships with Hamas and the Muslim Brotherhood.
Sheikh Tamim bin Hamad Al Thani, the current Emir of Qatar, and his family, who provide a media platform for Hamas's leaders to glorify the October 7 massacre, should not be allowed to hide behind the claim that they are merely reporting the news.
From Ian:
Islamic Warfare and the October 7th Massacre: An Ancient Doctrine Marches On
Hamas's Oct. 7 massacre manifested the Islamic categorization of territory into the House of Islam and the House of War, and the imperative of reconquering formerly Muslim-controlled territory.
Hamas also murdered fellow Muslims that day whom they considered traitors to Islam.
Today's Islamic civilization seeks to eventually subjugate and Islamize non-Muslim societies through any means possible, among which are mass immigration, information warfare, and the spreading of Islam in the educational and cultural spheres.
Western governments and officials who relentlessly seek permanent peaceful solutions with Muslim-majority countries do so at their peril.
Westerners continue to ignore the fact that the values and objectives of Islam differ from those of the West. Muslims understand the Western concept of compromise as a form of defeat.
Why My Anti-Zionism Didn't Survive a Houthi Missile
"On the ground. Now." I dropped. Face down on the stones near a Ramle market, hands locked behind my neck. Somewhere above me, a piece of technology was trying to intercept a missile from Yemen.
I had spent two years calling for the divestment of the very system I was now praying would work. The missile had not read my posts.
13 days after Oct. 7, Israel hadn't launched its ground invasion, yet somehow, Stanford students had become genocide scholars overnight. And I was one of them.
Only one question mattered: Were you against genocide or not? Nothing recruits faster than the promise of being on the right side of history.
I was marching for a Palestinian state. The one time I mentioned two states, my new friends from the campus encampment corrected me, gently, the way you correct someone embarrassing themselves: believing Israel should exist made me a Zionist. A slur. Next day, I was an anti-Zionist.
Months later, someone sent me an email about an exhibit in LA about the Nova Music Festival massacre. I decided to go. Somebody had to fact-check it. I stayed longer than I meant to. I realized I was fluent in the state's sins but illiterate in its people. So I went to meet them.
In Ramle, all I could think was: will it hit, will it hit, will it hit? I turned my head and saw it: a thin white line climbing to meet another one.
Ramle has mosques and synagogues a few streets apart. Whoever fired it was aiming at both. Then the interception. The boom.
Then everyone just kept walking. The marketplace reopened almost immediately.
The Misguided Palestinization of America
I am a Black American who is not Jewish. In the aftermath of Oct. 7, 2023, I was constantly looking for activities in Atlanta that expressed solidarity with Israel and the Jewish people. I wanted to find opportunities to stand alongside people who understood that the Hamas-led massacre of Israeli civilians was not merely another development in an interminable geopolitical dispute. It was an assault on human beings, on Jewish life, and on the fundamental right of a people to exist without fear of annihilation.
Amid the increasingly visible demonstrations against Israel, what I witnessed as the real-time Palestinization of America struck me as a profoundly misguided response to the events of Oct. 7 and their aftermath. Too often, I saw political activism that appeared less interested in understanding the history of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict than in making Israel the embodiment of every grievance imaginable.
Let me be clear: Palestinian civilians possess human dignity and legitimate rights. Their suffering deserves serious consideration. One can argue for Palestinian self-determination without denying the Jewish people's right to national self-determination. But there is a difference between advocating for Palestinians and demanding the elimination of the Jewish state. There is a difference between pursuing justice and dressing up hostility toward Jews and Israel in the language of human rights.
I could never accept the proposition that an existing sovereign state should simply cease to exist because someone objected to its existence. The Jewish people's historical and religious connection to the Land of Israel extends back thousands of years.
The Jewish people have endured centuries of persecution, expulsion, discrimination, and violence. The Holocaust remains the bloodiest and most devastating modern expression of that history, but antisemitism did not disappear with the defeat of the Nazis. Jewish communities continue to navigate the consequences of an ancient hatred that repeatedly finds new language and new political surroundings. Oct. 7th added another terrible chapter to that history.
From Ian:
‘The killer was never punished’: The forgotten Egypt terror attack and its tragic fifth victim
Mor Shamli, 35, the widow of Alon Shamli, who was murdered before her eyes in Egypt on October 8, 2023, became the fifth victim of the shooting attack Friday, after dying following more than three years of psychological anguish.
The shooting took place in Alexandria one day after the Hamas massacre of October 7, as Israelis were still struggling to comprehend the scale of the atrocities and eliminate the remaining terrorists in communities near the Gaza Strip. An Egyptian police officer opened fire with his weapon at a group of Israeli tourists near Pompey's Pillar, a Roman triumphal column considered one of the best-known tourist attractions in Alexandria, Egypt's second-largest city.
Alon Shamli and Amnon Bezalel were pronounced dead at the scene, while Hagai Efrat died of his wounds about 10 days later. Egyptian tour guide Sayed Kamel al-Khawalqa was also killed in the attack. Alon's widow later said: "My life ended there in Egypt on October 8, 2023, when they murdered us. The bullet that struck Alon's heart struck mine too."
Alon Shamli, who was 34 when he was killed, coached a youth team at Hapoel Tel Aviv soccer club. He also worked as a physical education teacher at Rishonim School in Bat Yam. Following his death, Hapoel Tel Aviv said Alon "was highly regarded in the youth department. His players said he always devoted himself to them and pushed them to improve."
Amnon Bezalel, 64, of Bat Yam, served in the Israel Police for about 40 years. He was known as a diligent and respected officer and spent much of his career with the Holon police. His final position was technology coordinator in the Ayalon police region.
Hagai Efrat, 83, of Rishon LeZion, whose death was confirmed about 10 days after the attack, played soccer for Hapoel Haifa in his youth and managed Hapoel Jerusalem's soccer club during the 1970s and 1980s.
Friends of Egyptian tour guide Sayed Kamel al-Khawalqa said he was highly educated and possessed extensive knowledge, which helped him in his work as a tour guide. According to Egyptian media reports, he was also accompanying another group of tourists on the day of the attack and was caught in the gunman's line of fire.
But the attack, which received relatively little attention because it occurred so soon after the October 7 massacre, had another victim: Mor Shamli, who never recovered from what happened. In January, she announced to her Instagram followers that she intended to end her life through medically assisted suicide in Switzerland.
The announcement sparked a wave of false rumors that the procedure had already taken place and that she had died. In Instagram Stories posted that month, she explained the painful decision she had made and the feelings that had accompanied her since the attack, which occurred just one day after the massacre in Israeli communities near the Gaza Strip.
‘I went undercover at an extremist religious sect in Kent where Holocaust denial lives on'
A priest repeating Holocaust denial, a worshipper declaring a former synagogue should be burned to the ground and links to figures from far-right political movements.
Reporter Dan Esson went undercover at a breakaway religious sect in Kent to discover whether the extreme views of its notorious founder live on…
It’s a humid morning in Broadstairs, I’m drenched in sweat beneath my suit, and I’m being asked if I’m “quite good on the Jews” in the dimly-lit kitchen of a former guest house.
Am I “Jew-wise”, I’m pressed.
Joe and I have only just been introduced, though we’ve been sitting on the same pew for about an hour and a half listening to the Latin Mass.
He doesn’t know I’m a journalist. As far as he’s concerned, I’m Daniel Owens, a lapsed Catholic looking to return to the Church.
The middle-aged court typist from Sandwich, who originally hails from Cheshire, is very keen to express the sort of beliefs I thought I’d have to work a bit harder to capture on my hidden recorder.
When the conversation turns to the former synagogue in Margate, he says “thank God” it’s no longer in use, his northern accent still unmistakable despite having moved to Kent many years ago.
“It should be burned to the ground.”
“Father” Stephen Abraham, the main priest in residence, tells me that Jews have constructed a “mythology” around the Holocaust.
“They’ve created that myth because they’re experts; they have the media, the money to spin these stories,” he says.
I focus my eyes everywhere but his, as he continues: “They’re hiding the fact they’re taking over everything, or taking over the bits that matter.”
Presumably Joe and “Father” Abraham wouldn’t have been so open with these opinions if they knew who I was, but neither realised their newest recruit was wired up.
For more than a decade, this group, the Society of St Pius X Resistance (SSPXR), has operated from the property in Broadstairs.
It was founded by the late Richard Williamson, a convicted Holocaust denier and prominent conspiracy theorist whose extreme views made him one of the most controversial clergymen of recent decades.
He died last year, with his funeral held in Canterbury, but the organisation he headed is still operating from the building he bought on the Thanet coast more than a decade ago.
Ex-Palestine supporter blasts ‘insane’ movement for ‘cherry-picking’ oppressors
Parishad Kavyani was born in the Islamic Republic of Iran and spent most of her childhood there until she moved to Canada at 14, a reality she says shaped her nuanced view of the pro-Palestine, anti-Israel movement she once supported.
Now she says it was destroyed by “liberal intellectualism” that overly focused on the oppressor instead of the human rights of all affected.
“I have never faced the amount of homophobia, racism and sexism that I have experienced in the past nine months from the leftists, from the very people that I marched with for over two years for a free Palestine, and that is insanity,” Kavyani told Fox News Digital of leaving the cause.
Kavyani went on to reveal one of the problems she wrestled with while still supporting the Palestine movement — the absence of support for the freedom and rights of Iranian women.
“[They] advocate for liberation of people, [they] advocate for women’s rights, but when it comes to Iranian women wanting freedom, wanting the freedom to wear whatever they want, [they] suddenly are quiet — and not only quiet, but [they] support the oppressor. That’s my issue… [they] cherry-pick between oppressors,” she said.
Kavyani, who admits to being a part of pro-Palestine when the movement began to form before splitting with the cause after an array of its supporters began posting pro-Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps [IRGC] content, detailed the intricate view Iranians develop on advocacy for Palestinians.
“As an Iranian born and raised in Iran… you are raised with a lot of information, a lot of propaganda around what is happening in Israel, what is happening in Palestine, and you are just told this every single day by the authorities. That Palestinians need help, they’ve been oppressed, they’ve been getting killed all of these years, so we have to help them,” she added.
“Then… you enter the society, and you see there is poverty everywhere. You see that the villages in Iran don’t have drinking water. You see that the villagers in Iran don’t have a road to a hospital… Why? Because the government doesn’t actually do anything about the people in need inside the country, and you’re always told, ‘Oh, but we have to save money to send to Palestine,’” Kavyani said.
“The more time you spend in the country you’re like, ‘Why is it my responsibility to save another nation?’” Kavyani added.
The Hamas terrorist attack on Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, was a tipping point for her.
“When October 7 happened, I had a lot of conversations with people [about it]… Like, just because someone is holding an Israeli passport doesn’t mean that they should just get killed… If there’s a war that you’re including civilians in that war, and you’re taking civilians hostage, and you’re raping civilians or torturing civilians — that’s not something that I support no matter who this person is, because I’m not somebody who thinks someone deserves to die just because of where they’re from or just because the political belief that they hold on to,” she said.
“That is, like, so ideology-driven, which we’re seeing right now on the internet and in real life… You cannot create a hierarchy of people and say this person deserves saving more than this person… That liberal intellectualism is, like, so insane,” Kavyani relayed.
From Ian:
Maxim Shrayer:
Up (and Down) In Michigan
I would submit that the phenomenon of Jewish support for El-Sayed and other openly anti-Israel candidates or elected officials in the Democratic party does not logically or rationally stem from issues affecting Israel or the Jewish diaspora. Rather, it exemplifies the phenomenon I would like to call the “Jewish nostalgia for an American political home” in the Democratic party. Fueling this nostalgia is the anxiety that Jews no longer influence mainstream American politics. Various “Jewish cases” for the election of El-Sayed lay hopelessly bare a longing for the time when Jewish in America rhymed with progressive if not socialist, when Jews were civil libertarians if they weren’t gangsters (sometimes both), and when the Democratic party was a political home for the vast majority of America’s Jews.
This nostalgia also stems from a chronic reluctance to recognize that the Democratic party is becoming more and more a party of phantoms of socialism who either refuse to learn from twentieth-century history (especially Soviet history) or are too ignorant to do so. This Jewish Democratic nostalgia, like most other forms of nostalgia, does not address issues or remedy the present. It is a coping mechanism for the ones who have experienced political and social bereavement. Countless are the Jewish losses in America of the first quarter of the 21st century, and the biggest political loss is the Democratic party’s support of Israel. (That a Dominican-American congressman from the Bronx and a maverick Pennsylvania senator—rather than the Jews in the house or senate Democratic leadership—are the staunchest Democratic supporters of Israel speaks volumes about the predicament.)
Calls for the creation of an anti-MAGA Jewish coalition feel like an eleventh-hour performance of Jewish nostalgia for political influence. Such nostalgia has its deeper origins in the late 1960s, when Jewish activism ceased to be inherently Jewish as American Jews had achieved the status quo and overcome de facto discrimination while the still young Israel enjoyed national popularity and antisemitism was becoming marginal or subterranean.
You may wonder why the one writing these lines—a former refusenik, a Bostonian, an author and college professor—is so taken with this year’s Michigan Senate election. The answer is that through the lens of the Michigan Senate race I see a story of the impending Jewish divorce from the Democratic party and thus a refraction of my own political journey in America.
Shedding illusions is hard, and its even harder to do so when nostalgia performs a siren’s song. I speak from the experience of my family members in the former USSR, Israel, and America. When I reference the pain and pleasure of shedding of one’s political illusions, I also speak of the nearly forty years it’s taken to dispel my own. I’ve never once voted Republican, but over the past two years I have realized I can no longer vote Democratic. I detest Trump and will not vote for him or his menials, but I cannot give my vote to those who refuse to recognize Israel’s right to exist as a Jewish state and those who actively seek Israel’s undoing. This acknowledgment of political homelessness, a particularly difficult predicament for a Jewish immigrant in America, brings me to three closing reflections on the subject of the Senate election in Michigan.
One: Learn from the legacy of Jewish refuseniks. I have previously argued that refuseniks were the last great Jewish political movement in Diaspora. The purpose of the refusenik movement was to free Jews from the Soviet bondage. Ours was an activism on behalf of Jews that also made the world a better place, not the other way around. There is a direct lesson for today’s Jewish voters torn between their past allegiance to the Democratic party and the growing threat of its left wing. American Jews tend to celebrate their participation in American progressive politics while failing to see a powerful alternative in the activism of Jewish refuseniks. Would that today’s American Jews abandon the idea of political activism for the sake of others—including those who, like El-Sayed, openly articulate their opposition to Israel and Zionism.
Two: Putting an enemy of Jewish selfhood in the U.S. Congress can never be a Jewish goal. El-Sayed as a Democratic contender who exploits the climate of Trumpian America to empower himself is less troubling than the very idea of a candidate running against Israel. In this sense, El-Sayed is also a cipher for the radicalized left of the Democratic party: a younger, less Soviet (and more Baathist) muscular version of Senator Bernie Sanders. Explaining why he recently gave one million dollars to El-Sayed’s campaign (following the party lead of Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez), Senator Sanders stated: “I was outraged … that AIPAC … dumped 9 million dollars in support of Mike Rogers. … And what AIPAC wants is continued US financial support for the Netanyahu government in Israel, which, in my view, is a genocidal government … and a continuation of the war in Iran … . AIPAC and Netanyahu want to continue that war with Trump [sic], and I think we’ve got to end that war. Abdul believes we’ve got to end that war.”
Make no mistake: a vote for El-Sayed is a vote against Israel, not a vote against the Netanyahu government. Saying this during the Israeli elections that may well see Netanyahu defeated is especially revealing.
Three: A vote is not a matzevah—whatever else it says besides the pei-nun and one’s name in the past (political) life. A vote is not to be made out of nostalgia for a bygone political era. Do not vote to unearth your political past or your ancestral memories of Jewish activism on behalf of civil libertarianism. Those memories had been put to their final rest in the 1970s. Rather than submitting empty ballots of Jewish dignity, perhaps we should pour what remains of Jewish activism, Jewish influence and Jewish resources into a third party, moderate, centrist, founded on traditional liberal values? Or, perhaps instead America Jews should look beyond these shores toward a new great aliyah—the 21st century American aliyah.
I will stop here—out of nostalgia for the illusion of Jewish unity. In closing, I turn to Isaac Babel, that great poet of Jewish upheaval. Babel has a short story from 1913 titled “Childhood. At Grandmother’s.” This early gem features a Jewish boy’s weekly Shabbat visits with his grandmother. She feeds him abundant meals with gefilte fish and fruit compote and teaches him about life in her imperfect Russian with an admixture of Yiddish and Polish. I used to think that American Jews were done loving their children and grandchildren so much that they would break their hearts with harsh and cynical wisdom. Perhaps I was wrong. What this Odessan grandmother says to her grandson in the 1900s applies to the socio-political illusions of today’s Jewish voters who find themselves at the crossroads:
“’Learn,’ she suddenly speaks with power. ‘Learn, you will achieve everything—wealth and fame. You must know everything. All of them will fall and prostrate themselves before you. All must envy you. Do not have friends. Do not give them money. Do not give them your heart.’”
Month after thwarted flydubai attack, Israel issues stringent new rules for all airlines
A month after the attempted terrorist crashing of a flydubai flight bound for Tel Aviv from Dubai, Israeli authorities issued new, stringent directives on Thursday to both foreign and Israeli airlines, requiring them to submit crew information 48 hours prior to departure, amid other steps to bolster security.
The new directives require that any further updates regarding crew members are submitted during the check-in period and no later than two hours before takeoff, and that a final list be issued at takeoff. Bloomberg reported that the measures were ordered by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu after a security review, and are intended to allow adequate time for background checks.
The directives come after a near-disaster on September 30 as flydubai Flight FZ1073 was en route from Dubai to Tel Aviv, when the copilot, Omani national Hamam al-Hammami, attacked the captain, Smit Machchhar, and attempted to crash the aircraft. The plane plunged thousands of feet before several Israeli passengers burst into the cockpit, whose door Machchhar had managed to open, immobilized the terrorist copilot and initially stabilized the plane.
Two off-duty pilots aboard the flight then took over the controls and made an emergency landing in Saudi Arabia before a replacement aircraft returned passengers to Tel Aviv.
Machchhar was seriously injured in the attack by Hammami, who struck him in the back of the head with an emergency axe.
The security requirements were issued by the National Center for Passenger Information Data Analysis, also known as Malan, a division within the Israel Tax Authority. The directives apply to all incoming and outgoing flights to and from Tel Aviv’s Ben Gurion Airport operated by all airlines, foreign and Israeli.
Non-Israeli carriers and Israeli airlines operating foreign aircraft flying in and out of Israel will henceforth be required to complete an online form with full details about pilots, cabin crew and passengers 48 hours before entering Israel, for review by the Israel Population and Immigration Authority.
The Immigration Authority will approve or reject requests to board passengers and crew members on flights entering Israel, departing from it, or passing through its territory.
The National Center for Passenger Information Data Analysis emphasized that the advance-notice period will give Israeli authorities more time to prepare than international practices generally allow and strengthen their ability to address potential security concerns.
Heroic flydubai captain and crew honored by UAE president
The captain and crew of the flydubai flight to Tel Aviv, which was attacked last month, were honored Tuesday by the president of the United Arab Emirates.
UAE President Mohamed bin Zayed Al Nahyan awarded Indian pilot Smit Machchhar and the rest of the crew the First Class Order of Zayed II, one of the Gulf country’s top civilian honors, “in recognition of their courageous efforts to ensure the safety of passengers,” his office said.
The president praised the crew’s bravery and professionalism in protecting passengers during the attempted hijacking on September 30.
The Indian pilot, who has been recovering in an Abu Dhabi hospital after being attacked with a cockpit axe by his Omani co-pilot, attended the ceremony, with scars from his injuries still visible on his head and his arm in a cast.
Despite his severe injuries in the cockpit attack, he managed to open the door, allowing passengers to enter, tackle the assailant and take control of the aircraft.
He has been widely praised as a hero.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has invited him to light a torch at Israel’s Independence Day next year.
From Ian:
Herzog can secure his presidential legacy by bringing Netanyahu and Eisenkot together
The politics of delegitimization and defamation, particularly the demonization of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu by the Left, make the establishment of a broad Israeli government of repair an unlikely scenario.
Yet this is exactly what Israel needs now – the partnership in government of Netanyahu and one of his major rivals, say, the political parties led by Yashar head Gadi Eisenkot and/or Naftali Bennett – to together tackle Israel’s major challenges.
The question is: Who is going to disabuse both the Left and the Right of their belligerent, separatist, extremist dreams of establishing a one-sided government that relies on haredi (ultra-Orthodox) or Arab parties? Who is going to cajole Likud and Yashar and/or B’Yachad into a pseudo “unity” coalition government?
The answer, of course, should be the Israeli president. But I wonder whether President Isaac Herzog is up to the task.
Herzog comes from the Left (a former leader of the Labor Party), and he is already under pressure from his political home base to mandate and approve a narrow Eisenkot government based on an alliance with anti-Israel Islamists or anti-Zionist ultra-Orthodox Jews; a government that defiantly excludes Netanyahu.
The camp’s overriding priority is to dethrone Netanyahu under any circumstances and at any cost. This camp expects Herzog to play along; nay, they demand that he brandish his bully pulpit to legitimize a government that embraces Mansour Abbas and Prof. Yousef Jabareen, or alternatively Yakov Asher and Yitzhak Goldknopf.
Such a government would handcuff the IDF in fighting Palestinian enemies and kill the hope of recapturing the Negev from Bedouin mafia gangs, and it would quash any plan for drafting haredim into the IDF. But so what? In the view of the hard Left, terminating Netanyahu is the higher goal that makes anything and everything kosher.
Herzog needs to repel the pressures and demands of the hard Left and wedge the mainstream parties, the two or three largest in Knesset, into a governing coalition, uneasy and fractious as it may be.
It is not enough for Herzog to say that he “will do everything in his power to avoid a repeat election scenario.” He must actively agitate for a broad Zionist government. He should aggressively intervene in the political process beyond the usual presidential consultative role following elections.
Herzog should declare that he will give the mandate to form a government first and foremost only to a political party leader that is up-front committed to seeking unity as his priority plan of action. And then he should reject any proto-government coalition brought to him that is not broad-based; that is, contingent on fractional Arab or haredi parties.
Herzog can and should go further in making a broad-based government possible by getting into the nitty-gritty of the issues that stand in the way, from Netanyahu’s future (rotation in the prime minister’s post, a timetable for retirement from politics, and a pardon) to good governance (formation of a national commission of investigation into the October 7 disaster, judicial reform, settlement policy, and haredi draft).
Don’t tell me that this isn’t the role of the Israeli president and that he has no powers for such interposition. Indeed, it is not the president’s classic role, and legally he has no such powers.
Jonathan Tobin:
Netanyahu is a realist about Israel’s foes, not a fear-monger
Moreover, Netanyahu is on firm ground in reminding Israeli voters that leaders and parties that campaign on pledges never to allow a Palestinian state or to accede to demands for concessions, including territorial withdrawals, often break their word.
That’s exactly what happened with Yitzhak Rabin when he was elected prime minister in 1992 and reassured voters that he would not negotiate with the Palestine Liberation Organization and its terrorist leader Yasser Arafat, let alone empower them in the territories. But then, he did exactly that.
In 2003, Ariel Sharon was re-elected as prime minister by ridiculing his Labor Party opponent for proposing to withdraw from Gaza. Then Sharon, too, carried out the same policy himself in the summer of 2005 by pulling every Israeli soldier, settler and settlement out of Gaza, thus setting in motion the train of events that led to the creation of a Hamas terror state there and the tragedy of Oct. 7.
Moreover, as Haaretz consoled its left-wing readership over the summer, Eisenkot may have declared that he won’t accept a Palestinian state largely in order to curry favor with the voters. But in doing so, he was, the newspaper said, “running away from what everyone knows he believes.” That is probably true. The former general’s statements while he was chief of staff and those made by his advisers all point to acceptance of the Oslo mindset about the imperative of Israeli territorial withdrawals and the creation of a Palestinian state.
Under the circumstances, it’s far from unreasonable for Netanyahu to point this out and to speculate about whether a government led by Eisenkot would resist the inevitable pressure from foreign governments—possibly including the United States once President Donald Trump leaves office in January 2029—for a Palestinian state.
Nor is it fear-mongering to point out that a repetition of Sharon’s catastrophic blunder of withdrawing from Gaza in the far larger and more strategic Judea and Samaria would raise the likelihood of more Oct. 7-style attacks on Israel. Hamas, which would be certain to seize control of a state from its corrupt and feeble Fatah Party rivals who currently control the Palestinian Authority, has promised as much.
Nor is Netanyahu conjuring up imaginary threats when he speaks of the need to finish the process of eliminating Hamas in Gaza and defeating the Islamist regime in Tehran. Israelis know all too well that their enemies are not figments of their imagination on which an unscrupulous prime minister is preying.
And he isn’t making things up when he describes the radicalism of both the Arab parties that did so well in this week’s vote.
Halbfinger is correct that Ra’am has worked hard to sell itself to Jewish voters as a reasonable partner that can be trusted to be loyal to the state while standing up for the interests of Arab voters. Israelis may be proud to live in a country where the Arab minority enjoys equal rights under the law. But even if he served in the government led by Naftali Bennet and Yair Lapid in 2021 and 2022, many, if not most Israelis know that its leader Mansour Abbas’s Islamists beliefs make it impossible to truly accept the legitimacy and permanence of a Jewish state. What’s more, they also know the larger Joint List won’t even pretend to give up their dreams of Israel’s eradication. That’s true even if they are willing, for the moment, to prop up a minority government that would end Netanyahu’s career, due to the fact that he is the greatest foe of those who wish for Israel’s destruction.
Should Eisenkot rely on them to keep a minority government in power outside of the cabinet or ask them to join it outright, he would be giving them an effective veto over future military action to defend Israel against Iran, Hamas, Hezbollah and the Houthis. Some on the left may think that’s a good idea. But in rejecting such a scenario, Netanyahu would not be exploiting fears as much as pointing out to Israelis that Eisenkot would be doing what the overwhelming majority of Israelis, regardless of who they voted for on Oct. 27, oppose.
The specter of the genocidal intent of Hamas and Iran, for which the atrocities of Oct. 7 were just the trailer for what they want to do to all of Israel, is no boogeyman that Netanyahu pulls out of his bag of tricks to scare Israelis. It is a clear and present danger that must be addressed by any government of Israel, no matter who is at its head, if it is not to betray the trust of its people.
A still dangerous neighborhood
If Israelis understand—their victories in the post-Oct. 7 war and the survival of the Abraham Accords, notwithstanding the global surge of antisemitism—that they still live in a dangerous neighborhood, it’s not because they are fearful. It’s because they have been paying attention to events and are able to judge what happens when their leaders succumb to the temptation of earning the respect of the Times and liberal pundits, and seek to trade “land for peace.” In each case, such policies were not only a betrayal of campaign promises but also wound up doing nothing more than trading territory for terror that led to the loss of thousands of Israeli lives.
If Netanyahu retains a large amount of support, despite the understandable fatigue with a prime minister who has held power for so long and the impulse to make him the sole scapegoat for Oct. 7, it is because Israelis respect and value his realism. For all of his faults and mistakes, he is still the only major Israeli leader of his era who did not fall prey to the magical thinking that led to Oslo and the Gaza withdrawal, and its betrayed promises of gaining peace in exchange for a Palestinian state that the Palestinians don’t want. Pointing this out isn’t scare tactics. It’s realism.
The prime minister’s critics should consider whether their desire to ignore or downplay the real threats to Israel is something worse than speaking to the fears of Israelis: a deliberate attempt to disarm and weaken them in the face of very real genocidal threats.
Canadian author warns Bondi lessons being forgotten
Kinsella said governments and social media companies were the two entities most important in fighting the problem, and both had “dropped the ball”.
Of social media owners including Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg and Elon Musk, he said: “You’ve got billionaires, in one case a trillionaire, who operate in this lawless, wild west environment where anything goes.
“We’re not asking them to donate a kidney. We’re asking them just to observe certain basic restraints, such as to promote truth and discourage hate and lies.”
He said governments should tell the companies: “You will do this, or there will be consequences … so far, there’s not really a government in the world that has done that.”
Kinsella was also critical of Prime Minister Anthony Albanese and his Canadian counterpart Mark Carney for recognising a Palestinian state at the United Nations in September 2025. He said recognition had been predicated on elections, governance reform, changes to the school curriculum and an end to the Palestinian Authority’s “pay-for-slay” program.
“None of those things have happened, not one,” he said. “[The] Palestinian state, at least in the case of Gaza, is governed by a designated terrorist entity in this country and in my country.
“We have leadership that is weak and is either recklessly or wilfully blind to this virus of antisemitism and hatred that is spreading in our countries, and that in some cases has cost people their lives.”
Referring to the Royal Commission on Antisemitism and Social Cohesion, Kinsella said the Australian government had questions to answer over Bondi.
“Here, feet from where we are at the moment, you got 15 people [who] were slaughtered as a consequence of an ideology that was allowed to be taught without restraint in this country, and the people involved in that have to answer that. But so too does the government,” he said. “I’m hopeful that the commission of inquiry deals seriously with what it’s got, which is a serious problem.”
Kinsella also addressed a lunch for AIJAC supporters in Sydney on Monday. “The beast of antisemitism is out of its cage, and it is everywhere to be seen,” he told attendees.
Kinsella said he had fought antisemitism for decades as a lawyer, journalist and political adviser, facing threats against his life and at times requiring police protection. “I have never seen it as bad as it is now. Never,” he said.
He argued that antisemites across the political and ideological spectrum were driven by envy and resentment. “[They] envy your success in every endeavour. They envy the resilience and the strength of the Jewish people,” he said.
Kinsella said Israel was always going to prevail militarily, but a second war – “the information war, the propaganda war” – was under way. He said social media profiles began appearing across North America, Europe and the Middle East 18 months before October 7. He said they sat dormant until the day of the attack, then were used to spread denial of the atrocities.
Kinsella said most people in the West supported Israel and the Jewish community. But he warned that millions of young people on the right and the left “have fallen under the spell of Hamas and Iran and the Jew haters”.
“We cannot lose a generation. We cannot lose the future,” he said.
He said the campaign’s blueprint was devised 40 years ago, and traced its origins to the Soviet Union. “I believe we will win that war,” he said. “Because we must win that war.”
From Ian:
The Orwellian rewriting of the October 7 massacres
On October 7, 2023, 1,200 people were killed and 251 taken hostage to Gaza. In proportional terms, that would be the equivalent of roughly 8,400 killed and 1,750 kidnapped in Britain. Nor can those numbers convey the suffering of the victims of rape and other sexual violence.
And then came the Orwellian plot twist. Before the dead had been buried, while the hostages were being brutalised in Gaza, and as Israel’s military response was taking shape, the account of what happened began to change, manipulated by Hamas and its allies, enablers, and useful idiots in the West. History was turned on its head. The deadliest day for the Jewish people since the Holocaust was blurred, rationalised, justified, celebrated, and, in certain quarters, dismissed as a false-flag operation.
I saw this again recently when I addressed a large university audience in Europe. Fifteen students, strategically positioned around the room, offered a case study in chanted slogans substituting for thought. They robotically repeated accusations of “Nazi-like genocide”, “ethnic cleansing”, and “settler-colonialism”, more intent on reinforcing one another’s certainties than examining the outrageous, unexamined claims they made.
More consequentially, over time, some governments that should have known better began sacrificing high-minded principle for street-level politics. Students at so-called elite universities in the US and UK revealed how little they knew, or cared, about the facts. Too many media outlets seemed quicker to question the evidence staring them in the face than to scrutinise Hamas’s fictionalised claims. Organisations that professed universal concern for women and children were conspicuously missing in action, or raised the evidentiary threshold to new heights, when the victims were Israeli. And the United Nations once again showed how far it had strayed from its founding ideals. It was not until September 2025 that the General Assembly endorsed a declaration condemning Hamas’s October 7 attacks, while some ostensibly neutral UN staff working on relief efforts in Gaza were revealed to be Hamas sympathisers or even moonlighting as Hamas terrorists.
Hamas had announced its intention to destroy Israel long ago. On October 7, its attackers acted on that aim with unprecedented ferocity, in full view of the world, in some cases gleefully recording and sharing their crimes with family and friends. Yet, in the story that took hold in many quarters, democratic Israel became the villain, the aggressor, and even the alleged perpetrator of genocide. Terrorist Hamas, meanwhile, was sanitised as a resistance movement and its reports treated as gospel. Its killers were romanticised as freedom fighters and, in some circles, all but fetishised.
Western capitals rightly supported Ukraine as it defended itself against Russia’s illegal invasion. Yet too many could not, or would not, recognise Israel’s need to fight back powerfully against the aggressors on its own border. Instead came sanctimonious lectures from Dublin to Madrid, Paris to Oslo, and Brussels to Ottawa, as if Israel were confronting a foe that cared a whit about the laws of war.
Strip away the rhetoric, and what many seemed to be saying was something else: for the sake of our streets, our electoral fortunes, our domestic political pressures, and our wider Middle East interests, appease. Sacrifice your interests for ours. Trust the untrustworthy. Be good Christians (!) and turn the other cheek.
Then, in September 2025, London, Paris, Ottawa, and Canberra recognised a Palestinian state without agreed borders, a unified government, or control over its territory – while hostages remained in Gaza. What a sense of timing! What an unearned gift! What shameless pandering!
Meanwhile, amidst this diplomatic circus, history, geography, and reality all got upended.
First, history. Before the attack, Israel maintained neither settlements nor a permanent military presence inside Gaza. It had dismantled its settlements and withdrawn its forces 18 years earlier, giving Gaza’s leaders their first chance ever to chart the strip’s future. They could have chosen Dubai or Singapore as a model. Alas, they did not.
Second, geography. Striking how collective amnesia sets in whenever there is discussion of Gaza’s “encirclement” by Israel. Lo and behold, Gaza has a second border. It’s with Egypt, an Arab and Muslim-majority country. Yet many neglect this inconvenient fact. Why does Egypt maintain such a formidable Gaza border fence, topped with layers of concertina wire?
And third, reality. The “experts” in government, universities, social media, and think tanks presume to know exactly what Israel is not supposed to do. But what, precisely, would they have had Israel do after October 7? Leave a genocidal foe in power on its doorstep? Abandon the hostages, some of whom would endure brutal captivity for more than two years? Defer to Hamas’s use of civilians to shield its fighters and ignore the vast armed infrastructure it built above and below ground? Pretend that Iran and the Muslim Brotherhood had no interests of their own in the conflict? It is easy to preach restraint and question strategy from a distant armchair. It is harder to say what Israel should have done against an enemy determined to destroy it.
Yet for all the second-guessing, all the libellous accusations of genocide, Israel demonstrated two things: military resolve and an effort to limit civilian harm.
It fought a war on seven fronts to weaken its declared enemies and restore the power of deterrence. In that fight, it showed any number of wobbly, flaccid Western nations what valour, patriotism, and resilience look like.
To be sure, there were tragic civilian deaths. Every such death is an incalculable loss. Israel nevertheless sought to minimise civilian casualties as best it could in an immensely difficult, weaponised, and confined environment. In fact, Israel risked the lives of its own soldiers in that effort rather than relying solely on air power. It also permitted humanitarian assistance, albeit with interruptions, much of which, alas, was seized by Hamas for its own use and profit.
Hamas started a war. It was a naked act of aggression. And then, along with fellow travellers, it methodically convinced much of the world that it was the innocent victim of the very war it began. George Orwell, where are you?
David Bell:
My report on antisemitism in education is based on hard evidence – now let’s implement its findings
What matters is what emerges when that evidence is considered together. The survey responses, testimony and wider evidence presented to the review consistently point to antisemitism being a real issue among young people and within schools and colleges.
Antisemitism is rising in wider society and it has filtered into our schools. You do not need to look far to see deeply troubling cases involving Jewish pupils and teachers. Statistics are important, but we do not need a single statistic to tell us that antisemitism is present – it is clearly visible.
Questions have also been raised about my impartiality when conducting the review. I did not come to this review with an agenda or narrative I wanted to promote.
Instead, throughout this work I have been led by the evidence presented to me, and I would encourage anyone questioning its conclusions to engage with that evidence in full.
Free speech and open debate are vital, especially in schools and colleges where young people are learning how to navigate these types of conversations.
Young people should be able to discuss difficult and contentious political questions, including the actions of the State of Israel.
That's why I don't believe asking schools and colleges to adopt the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance’s definition of antisemitism will inhibit legitimate debate. Applied in a way that respects their legal duties, including on equality and freedom of speech, it should help institutions distinguish legitimate criticism from antisemitism.
Debate must be encouraged in education, but school and college leaders also have a responsibility to ensure political expression is appropriate, particularly in the classroom, and that they meet their legal duties.
My conclusion is clear – antisemitism is a serious problem in our schools and colleges, and we must tackle it in a coherent and comprehensive way. My report is a start in that direction so now it’s all about implementation.
WSJ Editorial:
Blaming the Jews for Everything in Michigan
A common theme of antisemites throughout history is to blame the Jews for any and every social ill.
Now this has reappeared in America with a new ad for Michigan Democratic Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed that blames grocery prices on U.S. support for Israel.
The ad features a couple agonizing over high prices at a supermarket. The wife tells her husband that "you're going to have to put those eggs back" because "we have to set that $7 aside for killing Palestinians."
Later the husband asks about the Israelis, "Don't they get universal health care too?" "Yeah, they do. And we're paying for that too probably," she replies. "Might as well put the bananas back."
The unmistakable message: Americans are paying more and making personal sacrifices because the U.S. is supporting Israel's alleged genocide against Palestinians.
Most Michiganders are smart enough to know that Israel isn't responsible for inflation, but the ad is intended to feed grievances on the far left and right.
From Ian:
Bret Stephens:
Very Little Is Likely to Change after Israeli Election
The first thing to say about Tuesday's election in Israel is that the country is having one. Competitive, lawful, on schedule. That's more than can be said of the Palestinian Authority under the presidency of Mahmoud Abbas, who was elected to a four-year term in 2005 but has bypassed elections ever since. It's more than can be said for Hamas, which won Palestinian legislative elections in 2006, went to war against its domestic political opponents, and has ruled through fiat and fear ever since.
It's difficult to take Israel's inveterate critics seriously when they demand a "Free Palestine" without registering the slightest audible objection to the tyrannies in Ramallah and Gaza; or when, in the name of freedom and equality, they seek to abolish the Middle East's only functioning liberal democracy.
For an election widely billed as the most important in the country's history, very little is likely to change, at least as far as the outside world is concerned. Not one of the leading contenders wants a Palestinian state. Not one of them is going to remove Israelis from the West Bank or issue a blanket ban on settlement construction. Not one of them wants anything less than an assertive military posture toward Hamas, Hizbullah and Iran.
Of the many intellectually flabby critiques of Israeli policy since Oct. 7, the idea that Israel should have traded its physical security for the sake of some added dollops of liberal pity is among the flabbiest. Israel doesn't exist to showcase Jewish victimization. It exists to end it.
At stake is whether a people who have borne the burden of Hamas's terror and Iran's missiles and a nonstop state of emergency and the unceasing chorus of global condemnation that is one part ignorance, two parts bigotry and three parts self-delusion should have a government worthy of their sacrifice, steadiness and courage.
After Oct. 7, Israelis Were Forced to Choose between Two Bad Options
Politicians on the left and right in the U.S. these days often seem more focused on Israel, its treatment of the Palestinians, and its policies in the Middle East than on the usual local concerns, like the number of children in a classroom or unemployment. This preoccupation is a puzzle to many Israelis.
Do Israelis really not care what the world thinks about them? No. They care a lot. But what concerns them even more is what their enemies think. Israelis want the Western world to love them but their enemies in the Middle East to fear them.
In the days after the Oct. 7 massacre of Israelis by Hamas, most Western countries displayed a deep empathy for Israel. But the coin had another side. Hamas's invasion and the slaughter signaled to the neighborhood that Israel had lost power. Western love moved Israelis, but their enemies' dissipation of fear aroused existential anxiety.
Three years later, the successes of the Israeli Army rehabilitated the army's deterrent power in the Middle East. The trouble is that the actions that restored Israel's image in the region have severely damaged its image in the West. Any restraint that Israel might have shown to maintain Western sympathy would have prevented it from restoring the fear felt by its enemies. And everything it did to establish fear eroded sympathy. The catch is that it can't have both.
After Oct. 7, Israelis were forced to choose between two bad options. Going to war against a terrorist army requires ground operations amid a civilian population - a blueprint for large-scale death and devastation. But not going to war would have left Hamas with the ability to repeat the massacre, signaled to Israel's enemies that it had lost the ability to defend itself, and stripped Israelis of confidence that they could continue building a future in their own country.
There is broad agreement in Israel: the war and its justifiability are not topics of public debate in the current election. Israel was required to choose bad over worse but judged as if it had chosen bad over good.
Israelis Are Broadly United on Attitude to Country's Enemies
Despite the inconclusive result of Israel's general election, it remains highly unlikely that replacing Netanyahu with Eisenkot would have any profound impact on the many security challenges facing the wider Middle East. When it comes to issues surrounding Israel's security, there is little to distinguish between the two main contenders for the premiership in terms of their uncompromising approach to defeating Israel's many foes.
Eisenkot, 66, the former head of the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) who served in Netanyahu's war cabinet after the Oct. 7 attacks, is just as much a hawk as Netanyahu when it comes to defending Israelis from the many regional threats they face. He shares Netanyahu's view that Israel must prevent Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons at all costs, and that it is vital to disrupt and degrade Tehran's terrorist infrastructure throughout the Middle East.
Following the national trauma of Oct. 7, it is a prerequisite for almost all Israeli voters that whoever leads their country regards the defense of the Jewish homeland as their number-one priority. So far as the wider Middle East is concerned, the next Israeli government will be equally robust when confronting its many foes.
Israel will continue to target any attempt by Iran to reconstitute its nuclear program, the majority of which has been reduced to rubble. Likewise, Israel will continue to press for the complete disarmament of Hamas terrorists in Gaza, and will maintain its efforts to disrupt the activities of Hizbullah and other Iranian-backed terror groups in the region.
Tuesday, November 03, 2026
