Netanyahu’s Likud party had 1,113,916 votes (20.59%) after 5,433,662 votes had been counted at 12,332 voting stations, the committee said in an update at 12:44 p.m.

Netanyahu’s bloc, including Otzma Yehudit (304,809, 5.63%), United Torah Judaism (301,487, 5.57%), Shas (285,598, 5.28%) and Religious Zionism-Zehut (265,109, 4.90%), had 2,270,919 votes, or 41.98%.

Gadi Eisenkot’s Yashar had 871,828 votes (16.12%). Together with B’Yachad (496,469, 9.18%), the Democrats (349,488, 6.46%) and Yisrael Beiteinu (321,049, 5.94%), his camp had 2,038,834 votes, or 37.69%.

Based on the partial results, Netanyahu’s bloc was projected to secure 53 seats, compared with 48 for the opposition and 19 for the Arab parties, though the figures remained subject to change, according to Israeli media.

Netanyahu early on Wednesday morning hailed the results of the vote, saying it showed beyond any doubt that the “Likud is the largest party in Israel.”

“Do you remember how the propaganda channels manipulated public opinion? Likud—18 seats, 19 seats—they knew all along that it was a lie,” Netanyahu said, referring to surveys published by various Israeli news channels.

“They tried to discourage you, simply discourage you, from going to the polls. That’s what happened here. Well, the first thing that has become unequivocally clear is that Likud is the largest party in Israel. There is no disputing that,” he continued.

The second thing that has become clear, according to the premier, “is that the right-wing bloc has a clear, overwhelming majority among the Zionist public, among the Jewish public, and among all those who support a Jewish state.”

Netanyahu added, “And that is why I said, and I say again, that we must establish a strong national right-wing government ... We must not, absolutely must not, put Israel at risk by forming a government that relies on anti-Zionist parties—parties that oppose our very existence.”

While Netanyahu still lacked a clear path to the 61 seats needed to form a governing coalition, the partial results, if sustained, could put him in prime position to receive the first opportunity to form Israel’s next government.

Once the official results are published on Nov. 4, Israeli President Isaac Herzog will consult party leaders before tasking the lawmaker he believes is best positioned to form a government with doing so.

That need not be the leader of the largest party, meaning Netanyahu is not guaranteed the opportunity.

Herzog on Wednesday urged political parties to approach coalition consultations with an open mind, stressing the need to avoid another vote.

“We must do everything possible, certainly after yesterday, to avoid another election,” Herzog said during a meeting at the President’s Residence in Jerusalem. “I expect everyone who comes here to come with an open mind.”

“I will receive the official results next week from Justice Sohlberg,” Herzog said, referring to Central Elections Committee Chairman Noam Sohlberg. “Afterward, I will begin the consultation process here, hear from each faction, ask questions and hold discussions.”

The government-formation process follows a timetable set by law. The first candidate Herzog designates receives 28 days, with a possible 14-day extension, to form a coalition. If he or she is unsuccessful, the president can assign another candidate 28 days. If that attempt also fails—or the president determines there is no possibility of forming a government—a coalition of at least 61 MKs have 21 days to request that the president designate an alternative candidate. That candidate then has 14 days to form a government.

Failure to establish a government would trigger another election approximately 90 days later. Herzog has pledged to try to avoid that outcome, declaring: “I really, truly will do all I can so there won’t be repeat elections.”

The vote for the 26th Knesset marked the Jewish state’s first general election since the Hamas-led massacre on Oct. 7, 2023.

© JNS.

“Serious suspicions have been brought before me of improper influence, through foreign funding by external actors acting against the Israeli interest, on the elections,” Sohlberg wrote.

“I cannot attest to the nature of the aforementioned suspicions,” he continued. Because the suspicions concern foreign actors, there is “a duty to investigate them properly,” he wrote.

“Only in this way can we ensure public trust in the election process”

Sohlberg instructed the domestic intelligence agency “to locate evidence to substantiate the aforementioned suspicions or to refute them.”

“Only in this way can we ensure public trust in the election process,” he wrote.

Citing the legal deadlines for filing election appeals, Sohlberg asked Zini to present any findings within a week.

Channel 12 reported that the suspicions concern Qatar

The letter does not name the foreign actor, but Channel 12 reported that the suspicions concern Qatar. According to the report, large sums allegedly flowed from Doha to illegally boost voter turnout in the Arab sector.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s Likud party on Wednesday accused Arab parties of stealing the election through widespread fraud and called for a police and Shin Bet investigation.

The party alleged that thousands of envelopes containing cash and United Arab List (Ra’am Party) ballots were handed out at polling stations in Arab communities. It also alleged identity fraud and ballot-count discrepancies.

© JNS

Neither Netanyahu’s bloc nor the Zionist opposition has secured the 61 Knesset seats necessary to form a government. Despite new parties promising to reshape Israel’s political landscape, voters have largely returned to familiar political camps.

The effort to dislodge Netanyahu has, at least for now, failed.

Likud remains Israel’s largest party

With millions of votes counted as of Wednesday morning, preliminary projections placed Netanyahu’s bloc at approximately 54 seats, compared with 47 for the Zionist opposition and 19 for the Arab parties.

Likud emerged as the largest party with approximately 27 seats, followed by Gadi Eisenkot’s Yashar with 20. Naftali Bennett and Yair Lapid’s joint B’Yachad list was projected to receive 11 seats, Yair Golan’s Democrats eight and Avigdor Lieberman’s Yisrael Beiteinu eight.

On the right, United Torah Judaism was projected to receive seven seats, Shas seven, Otzma Yehudit seven and Religious Zionism six.

Netanyahu waited until after 3 a.m. Wednesday to address supporters at Likud’s election headquarters in Jerusalem.

“We are still waiting for the actual results,” he said, emphasizing that Likud would remain Israel’s largest party.

“The right-wing bloc has a clear, decisive majority among the Zionist public,” Netanyahu declared, calling for a strong national government and warning against a coalition dependent on Arab parties.

Although Netanyahu’s bloc has fallen short of the 64 seats it won in 2022, Likud’s continued dominance is significant. His opponents have yet to demonstrate that they can construct a viable alternative government.

Pollsters underestimated Likud

The early count exposed significant discrepancies between the final pre-election surveys and the actual vote.

Israeli television channels 11, 12 and 13 projected that Likud would win between 19 and 21 seats, while Eisenkot’s Yashar was expected to receive 22 to 23, potentially becoming Israel’s largest party.

Channel 14, which consistently projected a stronger Likud and right-wing bloc, forecast 30 seats for Likud and 20 for Eisenkot—considerably closer to the emerging results than the other major networks.

The discrepancies raise questions about how Israel’s polling organizations measured voter intentions, particularly among undecided voters.

Opposition leaders declared victory prematurely

Shortly after voting closed at 10 p.m., Eisenkot, Bennett and Lapid delivered speeches suggesting that Netanyahu’s political era had ended.

Eisenkot declared that Israelis had voted for change and called on Netanyahu to accept the public’s verdict.

“The people of Israel have stood up and spoken: Netanyahu has lost,” Bennett declared.

Lapid proclaimed: “The State of Israel has saved itself today.”

Yet even the initial exit polls did not give the Zionist opposition a governing majority.

And as actual votes were counted overnight, Netanyahu’s bloc pulled ahead.

The opposition leaders celebrated a victory they had not secured. Their central campaign objective was to remove Netanyahu, but the parliamentary arithmetic offers no clear path to that goal.

The Arab vote complicates coalition arithmetic

One of the election’s biggest surprises has been the unexpectedly strong performance of Israel’s Arab political parties, as of Wednesday morning projected to receive approximately 19 seats, compared with 10 in the outgoing Knesset.

The increase creates a dilemma for the opposition.

Together, the Zionist opposition and Arab parties may command more than 61 seats, but a parliamentary majority on paper does not automatically translate into a viable coalition.

Bennett, Lapid and Liberman have opposed forming a government dependent on Arab parties.

Ironically, the stronger Arab vote may have increased the numerical anti-Netanyahu majority while making it politically harder to establish an alternative government.

New names, familiar political parties

Perhaps the election’s most striking feature is how little Israel’s political landscape appears to have changed.

Numerous new parties entered the race hoping to capitalize on public dissatisfaction with the established leadership. Yet none of the smaller insurgent parties appears to have crossed the electoral threshold.

Even Eisenkot’s Yashar, technically a new party and one of the election’s largest lists, represents more of a political rebranding than a genuine breakthrough.

Eisenkot was previously the No. 2 figure in Benny Gantz’s Blue and White political alliance. He has effectively emerged at the head of a successor political formation, drawing on an established electoral constituency rather than creating an entirely new one.

Bennett and Lapid likewise joined forces under a new electoral banner, but both are familiar figures with longstanding political constituencies.

Meanwhile, Likud, Shas, United Torah Judaism, Religious Zionism and Otzma Yehudit remain the core of Netanyahu’s bloc.

Many of the lists entering the next Knesset bear a striking resemblance to those represented in the outgoing parliament.

The election has produced new party names and rearranged leadership positions, but little fundamental political realignment.

Back to political paralysis

Between April 2019 and November 2022, Israel held five national elections in less than four years, repeatedly failing to produce a durable governing majority.

That deadlock ended when Netanyahu assembled a 64-seat coalition following the November 2022 election.

Now, after the Oct. 7 massacre and a prolonged multifront war, Israel appears to be headed toward the same predicament.

For a government to emerge, either Bennett, Eisenkot or Liberman will have to reconsider joining Netanyahu, or the opposition will need an arrangement involving Arab parties.

Otherwise, Israel may face yet another election.

Trump, Iran and the 2020 precedent

One powerful factor in Netanyahu’s favor is the strong endorsement he has received from U.S. President Donald Trump.

Trump has made clear his preference for Netanyahu to remain prime minister during his remaining two years in office, with the confrontation against Iran at the top of their shared agenda.

“Vote for Bibi Netanyahu for Prime Minister; we have to finish the job that we started!” Trump declared on the eve of the election.

He doubled down following the election, crediting his endorsement with helping Netanyahu’s stronger-than-expected showing.

“When President Trump endorsed Bibi Netanyahu, the whole tide turned,” Trump posted on Truth Social, quoting a statement attributed to Irving C. Schwartz. The post said that instead of a “decisive defeat,” the result appeared to be a “big come-from-behind stalemate, or even a WIN for Netanyahu.”

“It all took place AFTER the Endorsement by President Trump,” the post added.

Netanyahu reinforced that message in his overnight election speech.

“Israel is facing a historic, one-time opportunity along with our friend President Trump,” he said, “to remove the Iranian threat once and for all.”

A prolonged coalition deadlock followed by another election could consume six critical months of Trump’s remaining presidency.

There is a precedent for national circumstances overcoming Israel’s political paralysis.

Following Israel’s third consecutive election in March 2020, the COVID-19 pandemic presented an unprecedented national emergency. Benny Gantz, Netanyahu’s principal challenger, recognized the broader implications of the crisis and agreed to establish a unity government with a rotating premiership.

Gantz, notably, has failed to return to the Knesset in the current election.

The unresolved confrontation with Iran now presents another potential catalyst for political compromise.

The opposition’s preferred outcome was to remove Netanyahu. But the emerging parliamentary arithmetic has not provided a clear path to doing so.

The question facing Israel’s political leaders is whether the opportunity to confront the Islamic Republic alongside a willing American president can overcome the divisions that have repeatedly paralyzed the country.

Trump has an interest in avoiding further delays. President Isaac Herzog, whose constitutional role includes consultations over government formation, would also have reason to seek a resolution without another election.

The precedent of 2020 demonstrates that bitter political rivals can find a formula for governing together when national circumstances demand it.

Israel’s indispensable man?

The paradox of Israel’s 2026 election is that the country has changed dramatically, while its electoral politics have changed remarkably little.

Israel’s security environment has been transformed. Its military has fought across multiple fronts. Its citizens have endured enormous sacrifices.

Yet voters have returned to essentially the same political divisions that existed before the war.

Netanyahu has not secured a governing majority. But neither has the opposition succeeded in removing him.

With Trump committed to confronting Iran and less than two years remaining in his presidency, the stakes of another election extend well beyond domestic politics.

Israel’s political leaders must now decide whether to seek a governing arrangement capable of addressing those challenges or return the country to another prolonged election campaign.

For all the efforts to end Netanyahu’s political career, he remains at the center of Israel’s coalition arithmetic—and its relationship with Washington.

Israel has changed. Its politics, remarkably, have not.

© JNS

“Local police neutralized the attacker and there were no casualties among the employees of the mission, which was closed at that time of night. The matter is under investigation by the relevant authorities,” a spokesperson for Israel’s Foreign Ministry told JNS.

Local media in Serbia quoted the country’s interior minister, Ivica Dačić, as saying that police had killed a suspected Islamic State terrorist after he stabbed and lightly wounded a local officer who was guarding the Israeli embassy in Belgrade.

“A minor, so far unidentified … shouting ‘Allahu Akbar,’ attacked the member of Gendarmerie and attacked him with two knives,” Serbia’s Radio 021 quoted Serbian Interior Minister Ivica Dačić as saying in a statement. He added that the police officer, who was lightly wounded, “liquidated” the assailant in “self-defense.”

The Associated Press quoted Dačić as saying that police were treating the incident as a terrorist attack.

Security officials raised the terror threat to the highest level in Serbia and police presence has been boosted at key locations in Serbia, the report also said.

“Given that the terrorist attack took place on our territory, as the Minister of Internal Affairs responsible for this, I have raised the level of the terrorist threat to the highest possible level; namely to the red level,” Dačić said, according to AP.

© JNS.

Some 7.33 million Israelis are eligible to vote, according to Israeli Central Elections Committee figures dated Sept. 6, an increase of 543,177 since the previous election four years ago. The committee listed 12,018 regular polling stations nationwide, including 6,208 accessible stations.

It is the country’s first general election since the Hamas-led massacre on Oct. 7, 2023.

Some 330,000 young Israelis are casting ballots for the first time, according to Israel’s Central Elections Committee.

“This is a celebration of Israeli democracy,” said Dean Livne, the committee’s acting director-general.

Thousands of committee employees had worked to ensure every voter could cast a ballot “easily and without fear,” his statement continued.

The committee also warned that rumors and misinformation may circulate online during the day. It urged the public to check the source and context of reports, images and videos before sharing them.

Some 2 million Israelis had voted as of noon on Tuesday, putting national turnout at 31.5%, Livne told reporters at a press conference at the Knesset.

Turnout was up 3.1 percentage points from the same hour in the 2022 election, he said.

At 10 a.m., turnout stood at 16.68%, or some 1.2 million voters, according to Livne. That was 0.78 percentage points above the 2022 figure.

JNS

Israel’s foes have more influence on its elections than its friends

Jonathan S. Tobin

This is the highest turnout recorded at noon in a Knesset election since 1973.

Election Day in Israel is a national holiday, with schools, kindergartens and most workplaces expected to close. Voters choose party lists rather than directly electing a prime minister. Lists must receive at least 3.25% of valid votes to enter the Knesset.

Voter turnout among Israel Defense Forces personnel reached 30% as of 10 a.m. on Tuesday, compared with 25.7% at the same hour during the 2022 election, the military said.

Military voting began on Oct. 21 at Israel Defense Forces bases and outposts across operational arenas, including in Gaza, Lebanon and Syria. More than 850 polling stations, many of them mobile, were deployed, according to the IDF, with voting continuing through Election Day subject to operational requirements.

Eligible Israeli diplomats serving abroad and their family members began voting on Oct. 15. President Isaac Herzog attended the opening of voting at Israel’s embassy in Baku, Azerbaijan, calling the election “a celebration of democracy” and urging citizens to vote.

Herzog on Monday night called on citizens to vote in the national election, urging them to “exercise your democratic right to influence the future of the state.”

“Election day is a celebration of Israeli democracy. This is the people’s day,” Herzog said in a video posted to X.

https://twitter.com/Isaac_Herzog/status/2114764174488469607

Proportional representation

Israeli democracy is based on a parliamentary system of proportional representation. This means that Israeli citizens do no vote directly for a prime minister or district representatives. They vote for a party that runs in a single, nationwide constituency, where the legislative body—the Knesset—has 120 seats.

A vote for a party is a vote for a list of Knesset candidates. The 120 Knesset seats are divided proportionally to the number of votes that each party wins. Thus, if a single party won 50% of the valid votes, it would secure 60 Knesset seats.

No party has ever won a majority of the votes, so every government has been formed by a coalition of parties.

In addition, parties must receive at least 3.25% of the valid votes to enter the Knesset; votes cast for parties that fail to reach this electoral threshold are discarded.

https://twitter.com/Israel/status/2113556038762864854

Choosing a prime minister

Although typically the leader of the largest party becomes prime minister, this is not always the case. The law stipulates that the Israeli president designates the member of the Knesset who has the best chance of forming a coalition with the task of forming a government.

The designated member of Knesset must present the proposed government and its policy guidelines to the Knesset and win its approval before taking office as prime minister.

If the designated member of Knesset is unable to do this, the president designates another member of Knesset to try.

The prime minister must moreover hold a Knesset seat while serving as the head of the government. Other ministers are not required to be lawmakers.

The Israeli president is elected by the Knesset for a seven-year tenure. Israel’s current president, Isaac Herzog, is scheduled to end his term in July 2028.

More than a century of democracy

A World Economic Forum ranking from 2019 places Israel among the world’s 20 oldest continuous democracies.

Although since its inception Israel has faced “wars, terrorism, security threats, political upheavals and profound social change,” it has always maintained its commitment to parliamentary democracy, the Foreign Ministry states.

“Israel’s democracy was born in adversity. Its endurance is one of the country’s greatest achievements,” it adds.

“Jewish, Muslim, Christian and Druze citizens, from cities and countryside, religious and secular, from every background and community, will participate [on Oct. 27] in the same democratic process. They may disagree profoundly about Israel’s future, but each has an equal vote in determining it,” the ministry says.

© JNS.

The Israel Defense Forces told JNS that Lander, a former New York City comptroller, had not coordinated the trip with Israeli authorities.

Lander, who has accused Israel of “genocide” and who is Jewish, stated that the Israeli military detained him and “a group of rabbis and volunteers.”

“We were simply harvesting olives in a grove near Nehalim in the West Bank,” he said, writing a term that some use for Judea and Samaria.

“The occupation is a crime under international law,” Lander stated. “Harvesting olives isn’t a crime under any law I know.”

After losing to New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani, Lander endorsed Mamdani, and the mayor—who Jewish leaders have said is endangering Jews with his anti-Israel rhetoric—has backed Lander, who is one of his highest-profile Jewish supporters.

An Israeli military official told JNS that Palestinians did not submit a request to coordinate harvesting on the plot, which is near Beitar Illit. “It does not appear on the area’s coordination maps,” the official told JNS.

Lander was “released once the matter was brought to our attention,” the official said.

“The plot in question requires only a small number of harvesters to collect its produce,” the official told JNS. “The security establishment views the arrival of dozens of activists as an act intended solely to provoke, which undermines the harvesting process.”

Mamdani, who again accused Israel of “genocide” in his statement for the third anniversary of Oct. 7, weighed in on the incident.

“Today, Brad Lander, rabbis, and other New Yorkers accompanied Palestinian farmers during the olive harvest. For that, they were detained by the Israeli government,” the mayor said. “Harvesting olives is not illegal. The occupation is.”

“I am thankful that Brad has been released. But other New Yorkers remain detained, and they must be released immediately,” he said. “The same Israeli government detaining them has committed a horrific genocide against Palestinians, killing more than 74,000 people over the last few years alone.”

About 80 Israeli and foreign left-wing activists were detained between Nahalin and Beitar Illit, in Gush Etzion, according to Kan News reporter Haim Goldich.

The activists said that they were told they had violated a closed military zone order, of which they said they had been unaware, Goldich wrote on social media.

At 2 p.m. in Israel, Lander was the only one released “after it became known that he is a congressional candidate,” Goldich wrote.

“The rest at the Gush Etzion station will be investigated on suspicion of offenses of conduct that may disrupt public order, violation of a closed military zone order and additional offenses,” he wrote.

Yehoshua Schoffman, a former Israeli deputy attorney general who was among those detained, wrote that police and soldiers arrived after about two-and-a-half hours of harvesting.

“We were asked to stop, and everyone complied,” he stated in Hebrew. “There was no friction whatsoever with settlers or with the security forces.”

“The Americans were loaded onto one bus and the Israelis onto minibuses,” he said.

The annual olive harvest in Judea and Samaria generally takes place in October and November. Harvesting in the area where the group was detained requires a request to authorities before the season begins, according to the Israeli military.

“This coordination is necessary to ensure the security of the area and maintain public order,” the military stated.

Soldiers and police officers, including from the border police, detained the group due to “the security risk posed by conducting an uncoordinated harvest near an Israeli community,” the IDF said.

The landowner was given contact information to arrange a harvest at a later date, according to the military.

About 100 coordinated harvests have taken place across Judea and Samaria this season, yielding “many dozens of tons of produce” without unusual incidents, the IDF stated. “In areas designated for coordinated harvesting, only harvesters will be permitted to enter, solely for the purpose of harvesting.”

Earlier this week, Lander said that he was visiting with the “Protect the Harvest” coalition to help Palestinian farmers harvest olives “in the face of state-sanctioned settler terrorism.”

“Our goals for the trip are to help protect the olive harvest and to shed a light on the reality of the occupation,” he wrote.

He called for “a sustained commitment to protecting Palestinian communities from settler violence, forced displacement and the ongoing threats to their right to remain on their land” and “human rights, safety, equality and freedom for both Palestinians and Israelis.”

“Thankfully, our corner of today’s harvest was peaceful and successful, but violence unfortunately is never far away,” he wrote at the time.

Naomi Linder Kahn, director of the international division at Regavim, an Israeli organization that focuses on land-use issues, told JNS before the news about Lander broke that some foreign-funded groups use the olive harvest to provoke confrontations.

“They provide them with cameras. They teach them how to provoke a confrontation,” she said. “They have whole NGOs that they create so that they can fund them, just so they can create these provocations.”

The harvest “is the big thing every year” and “gets bigger every year,” according to Linder Kahn.

“I could count probably 15 NGOs that are devoted solely to the Palestinian Arab olive harvest,” she told JNS. “The thing you’ll hear over and over is that ‘this is such a major part of the Palestinian economy.’ That’s B.S.”

“It’s a very nice pastoral kind of myth,” she said.

Linder Kahn told JNS that the groups receive funding from the European Union, foreign governments and European church groups and that their support includes training activists to generate publicity and confrontations.

“I remind you that in Europe, the church groups are actually funded by the government,” she said. “This is another way to funnel government money without leaving too much of a paper trail.”

The NGOs do not give activists buckets for harvesting olives, according to Linder Kahn.

“What they give them is video cameras, and they give them lessons in social media, and they give them lessons in how to provoke a confrontation, how to present yourself when you’re trying to get into Israel, to misrepresent what you’re coming for and where you’re going to be,” she said.

It is “a very, very well-oiled machine,” according to Linder Kahn.

“On the other end of this machine are people who are eager to believe it,” she told JNS. “They want this narrative because this is their best weapon.”

At 4:35 p.m., Lander wrote on social media that he had been “released from IDF custody with a ‘warning,’ apparently because of my public profile.”

“I told them I wasn’t even a congressmember yet, just a nominee,” he wrote. “But several dozen rabbis and participants harvesting olives with me are still in detention. For harvesting olives. They should all be released immediately.”

He said the incident was “yet one more element of escalating and very clearly state-sponsored ethnic cleansing.”

© JNS.

Never before had an American president so explicitly and openly stated his preference among candidates for office in the Jewish state. But for all of the huffing and puffing this is provoking among Netanyahu’s political opponents, as well as those Americans in the Democratic Party and the foreign-policy establishment who despise the prime minister, Trump’s statement is far from the first time that an American president has tried to intervene in Israeli politics.

His recent predecessors in the White House did as much, if not more, to try to influence elections in Israel as Trump has now done. Presidents Bill Clinton, Barack Obama and Joe Biden were all very clear about their desire to defeat Netanyahu in past elections. Going back to the distant past before Netanyahu led the Likud Party, President George H.W. Bush also worked hard to defeat then-Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir in 1992. He succeeded, and the election of Yitzhak Rabin and the Labor-led coalition that year resulted in Israel traveling down the disastrous path to the Oslo Accords.

The Palestinians also have a vote

It remains to be seen whether Trump’s gesture will have the intended effect on the Israeli electorate. But whether or not the boost among voters grateful to Trump for his pro-Israel policies helps Netanyahu win, it’s important to acknowledge that a foreign entity other than the United States has played a far greater role in determining the outcome of Israeli elections. The Palestinian Arabs and their leaders, along with the Islamist regime in Iran and others elsewhere that encourage their intransigence and terrorism, have done more to influence Israeli voters than any American administration, whether it is as friendly as Trump’s or as hostile as that of the elder Bush or Obama.

It’s as simple as this. Had the Palestinians treated the Oslo peace process as an opportunity to create their own state next to Israel, rather than a chance to intensify their efforts to erase the Jewish state, the shift in Israeli politics that enabled Netanyahu’s record run as prime minister is unimaginable.

Netanyahu’s supporters can point to the enormous role that he has played in helping transform the Israeli economy from the socialist model imposed by the founders of the state, who were Labor Zionists. The Jewish state could not have become the Start-Up Nation with a prosperous, free-market First World financial system without the prime minister’s efforts. But his electoral success—he has headed six different governments that ruled for 19 years overall, 15-and-a-half of the last 17 years—is because the Palestinians have always had a decisive say in Israeli politics, especially since Oslo.

Opinion

How Trump’s endorsement of Netanyahu could change Israel’s electoral map

Alex Traiman

Opposing magical thinking

Netanyahu’s place in history is—contrary to the tsunami of criticism that has rained down on him from abroad—the result of the fact that whatever else you can say about him, he has been the main opponent of “land for peace” schemes that have consistently failed.

He has always been different from his opponents on the political left, as well as those who came from Likud, like Prime Ministers Ariel Sharon and Ehud Olmert, in one major respect. Sharon and Olmert blew up the Likud in 2005 to facilitate the withdrawal from the Gaza Strip that led to the formation of the Hamas state there in 2007 and ultimately the tragedy of Oct. 7, 2023. But unlike them or Rabin, Shimon Peres, Ehud Barak, Tzipi Livni or Yair Lapid, who also competed against Netanyahu in elections, he never succumbed to that sort of magical thinking about peace and the Palestinians and their Iranian allies.

Had the Palestinians been capable of paying the price for statehood—living in peace alongside Israel—that they were repeatedly offered by American presidents who opposed Netanyahu, the political history of Israel would have played out very differently in the last 30 years since he won his first term in 1996.

Americans tend to view Israeli politics through the lens of their own expectations and desires for how the State of Israel should behave. But Israelis, like the citizens of any other democratic nation, vote their interests. The majority welcomed Oslo and the hope it brought for peace. Americans and others who blame Netanyahu for the lack thereof and longed for more pliable Israeli leaders, like the opponents he bested in various elections, have acted as if everything the Palestinians have done since then never happened.

Washington versus Bibi

The efforts of the first President Bush to topple Shamir hinged on his insistence on supporting settlement building in Judea, Samaria and eastern Jerusalem. In 1996, Clinton did everything but canvass door to door in Tel Aviv to get Peres elected after the assassination of Rabin on Nov. 4, 1995. Despite Clinton’s great popularity among Israelis, he failed to stop Netanyahu. That was because of a wave of Palestinian terror attacks, coupled with the intransigence of Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat, in whom the Americans and many Israelis had invested so much faith in his willingness to make peace.

Clinton had better luck in 1999. His preference for then-Labor Party leader Ehud Barak in the 1999 election was enabled by the perception of Netanyahu’s failures in office and the fact that most Israelis were still willing to give Oslo a chance.

But again, the Palestinians proved to have far more influence over Israeli voters than the Americans. If Barak lasted only a little more than a year-and-a-half in office, it was because at Camp David in July 2000, Arafat turned down an offer of an independent Palestinian state in almost all of Judea and Samaria, a share of Jerusalem as well as the Gaza Strip. Instead, that blood-soaked murderer answered with the terrorist war of attrition known as the Second Intifada, which lasted until 2005, and cost the lives of more than 1,000 Israelis and many more Palestinians. That brought Sharon (who had replaced Netanyahu as leader of the Likud Party) back to power and essentially ended the Labor Party as a major force in Israeli politics.

After Sharon’s withdrawal from Gaza in the summer of 2005 proved as disastrous as Oslo, Netanyahu led Likud, which Sharon had abandoned for the centrist Kadima Party he had formed with some former Labor leaders, back to office in 2009. That and his subsequent victories were again largely the result of issues relating to security and Netanyahu’s opposition to a Palestinian state.

President Barack Obama and his foreign-policy advisers despised Netanyahu and rooted openly for his defeat in 2013 and 2015, even indirectly funneling money via U.S. State Department grants to his opponents. But these efforts failed. And they did so because not even Obama’s tilting of the diplomatic playing field in favor of the Palestinians could persuade them to accept the legitimacy of a Jewish state.

Israelis remain divided on a host of issues, such as forcing Haredi Jews to serve in the army and to support themselves financially, as well as the need to rein in the Jewish state’s out-of-control and all-powerful Supreme Court. Many also blame the prime minister for Oct. 7 since it happened on his watch.

However, Netanyahu’s opponents no longer advocate for a Palestinian state and “land for peace,” even if some of them actually want to return to those failed policies. The anyone-but-Bibi coalition, currently headed by former chief of staff of the Israel Defense Forces Gen. Gadi Eisenkot and his Yashar Party, hopes that Trump’s support notwithstanding, those issues and weariness with Netanyahu’s long tenure in office might lead to his defeat on Oct. 27.

But as long as the Palestinians conceive of their national identity as inextricably tied to a century-old war against Zionism—something made clear by the massacre of 1,200 people in southern Israel on Oct. 7, 2023—the Israeli right will remain a dominant force. And most of their political opponents will continue to try to appear as if they agree with Netanyahu on the basic questions of war and peace with the Palestinians and other Iranian terror proxies.

Still, the consensus against a Palestinian state and territorial surrenders cannot be broken by American pressure or persuasion. It can only end when the Palestinians and their enablers elsewhere give up the anti-Zionist project, which means nothing is going to change on that issue for the foreseeable future.

An ally, not a vassal state

To acknowledge this is not to say that American preferences have no impact on Israeli voters.

Israelis don’t like being treated as a vassal state, and Netanyahu has capitalized on that time and again, especially when presidents like Obama and Biden sought to force their country into suicidal concessions to the Palestinians or to restrict their ability to defend themselves and to defeat enemies like Hamas and Iran, as Biden tried to do after Oct. 7.

Yet among the top priorities of any premier is maintaining the relationship with Israel’s sole superpower ally, whose security assistance and help on the diplomatic front simply can’t be replaced elsewhere. Manifest incompetence at that task is an electoral liability. Netanyahu’s skill in rallying support at home against American pressure to do things most Israelis oppose is rooted in decisions made by the Palestinians and Iran to stay committed to a war for the destruction of Israel and genocide of the Jews.

If Trump has earned some credit in the view of many Israelis, it is because, by and large, he has acted as if he understood that. And it’s possible to argue that the president’s signal to them will persuade some, especially on the Israeli right, that maintaining the prime minister in office is vital to securing U.S. assistance in finishing the war against Hamas and Iran in the next two years.

That said, nothing Trump says about Netanyahu or the avalanche of opprobrium aimed at him by most Democrats calling for his toppling counts as much with Israeli voters as their understanding that the enduring hatred by Palestinians and Islamists in the Arab and Muslim worlds requires them to keep casting their votes on security issues, rather than domestic concerns.

Jonathan S. Tobin is editor-in-chief of JNS. Follow him: @jonathans_tobin.

© JNS

His attempt to thread that needle consisted of, on the one hand, reaffirming his strong, even emotional backing for the Jewish state and noting that while Jews were grieving the third anniversary of the Oct. 7 attacks, they were also under siege from an unprecedented surge of antisemitism. But he balanced that with a denunciation of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who, he claimed, was making it impossible to maintain the U.S.-Israel alliance. He said he hoped that Netanyahu would not be re-elected later this month, thus removing a major obstacle to the presidency for him.

The popular governor is currently cruising toward an easy re-election victory. But most political observers are looking past November and pondering whether his plans to run for president in 2028 will be derailed by what he describes as his “love” for the State of Israel.

A changed party

We won’t know the answer to that for another 12 to 18 months. But given everything happening in American politics in 2026, it’s hard to make a case for optimism for Shapiro or, more importantly, winning back the Democrats for the pro-Israel cause.

In primary after primary conducted by Democrats, a stance such as Shapiro’s or even far more lukewarm affirmations of support was a kiss of death for candidates. It even applied to those like Rep. Dan Goldman (D-N.Y.): an incumbent, reliably liberal and fervently opposed to President Donald Trump.

Even more important is how the party is rallying around the most notorious and prominent opponent of the Jewish state running in 2026—Democratic U.S. Senate nominee in Michigan Dr. Abdul El-Sayed. In the last month, he has received endorsements and even financial support from a host of Democrats, including Jews like Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, Sen. Elissa Slotkin and Michigan Attorney General Dana Nessel.

Schumer has also taken the same line about the dispute between Democrats and Israel being about Netanyahu. But for El-Sayed and an entire rising generation of “progressives,” you hear more about the usual litany of blood libels about the Jewish state being guilty of “genocide” than the prime minister.

With El-Sayed still locked in a close race against Republican Mike Rogers, Democrats just rolled out their version of political royalty to help him: former President Barack Obama.

El-Sayed’s obsessive attacks on Israel and its Jewish supporters, as well as demonizing the AIPAC lobby as part of a plot to capture America for a foreign power, haven’t played as well among African-Americans as they do among college-educated liberal whites. And so, Obama campaigned with El-Sayed this week to help shore up that key Democratic constituency for him.

Obama’s intervention on behalf of an openly antisemitic candidate caused little surprise. But it does bring to mind when the breach between Israel and the Democratic Party became a serious problem.

Netanyahu’s domestic political foes, as well as American liberals like Shapiro, have argued for years that it was the prime minister who blew up bipartisan support for Israel. They say it can be primarily traced to the eight years when Obama and Netanyahu were locked in a long-running duel of clashing personalities and policies when the two were leading their respective countries.

That culminated in the unprecedented address Netanyahu gave to a joint meeting of Congress to oppose Obama’s disastrous 2015 nuclear deal with Iran.

Most members of his party were opposed to appeasement of Iran before Obama decided to betray his 2012 re-election promise not to allow Tehran to have a nuclear program. But even though his signature foreign-policy accomplishment would have guaranteed that Iran would eventually get a nuclear weapon rather than preventing it, he was able to make support for the measure a litmus test of loyalty to his party and himself.

Netanyahu was widely bashed for his chutzpah in going to Capitol Hill to make the case against the pact. But he alerted Americans and those in moderate Arab nations to the danger—and to the fact that Israel wouldn’t allow itself to be put in the crosshairs of an Iranian nuclear program that had been preserved by Obama. In doing so, he prepared the way for its reversal by Trump and for the joint military campaigns in 2025 and 2026 by Israel and the United States that destroyed much of Tehran’s nuclear facilities.

Obama broke the pro-Israel consensus

The problem with the thesis blaming all of this on Netanyahu’s Republican partisanship, which was laid out in a recent article in The Atlantic by Franklin Foer, is that it is largely false. Throughout the eight years of the Obama-Netanyahu duel, it was Obama and a party that he was increasingly pushing toward the left on a host of issues that was pressuring Israel to make policy moves its voters had elected the prime minister to oppose in terms of the conflict with the Palestinians.

Obama’s obsession with pressuring Israel to accept a two-state solution was always the main source of tension between Israel and the Democrats. He was determined to force acquiescence to the creation of a Palestinian state in Judea, Samaria and part of Jerusalem, while Hamas’s separate terror state already existed in the Gaza Strip. He had repudiated the promises made by his predecessor, former President George W. Bush, to Prime Minister Ariel Sharon in 2004 to help persuade him to withdraw from Gaza. That included America recognizing Israel’s right to retain the areas where Jewish communities existed in Judea and Samaria.

The blowup between Obama and Netanyahu in May 2011, when the latter supposedly insulted the former, is seen as a seminal moment in the breakup between Israel and the Democrats. But few remember that the prime minister’s insistence on defending Jewish rights and Israeli security in Obama’s presence came a day after the president ambushed Netanyahu on the eve of his visit with a speech declaring his intention to pursue negotiations intended to force Israel back to the 1967 armistice lines. That reset American policy to one in which Washington was implicitly endorsing the ethnic cleansing of hundreds of thousands of Jews in the territories to gratify Palestinian ambitions and the division of Jerusalem.

As it turned out, Obama’s efforts to tilt the diplomatic playing field in the direction of the Palestinians produced nothing but a pointless quarrel with Israel, as well as more support at home for Netanyahu from a public that recognized Obama as an unreliable ally. As was true in previous decades and in the years since he left the White House, the Palestinians—both the “moderates” of the Palestinian Authority and the “extremists” of Hamas—had no interest in a two-state solution. Their sole goal was and remains the destruction of Israel, as the support for the Oct. 7 massacre and the genocidal intent of the terrorist organization has demonstrated.

The purpose of dredging up this history is not so much to vindicate Netanyahu as to point out that the criticisms of the prime minister by Democrats like Shapiro—who, as a Pennsylvania state assemblyman in 2008, was an early supporter of Obama and personally reassured me that, if elected, he would be a great ally to Israel—are largely rooted in myths about the events of the last two decades.

After Oct. 7

At every step, it was Democrats like Obama, former President Joe Biden and others who took positions at odds with the overwhelming majority of Israeli voters, both before and after Oct. 7. Whatever critiques can be made about Netanyahu and his case for remaining in charge, few Israelis are opposing him because he fought back robustly against Hamas, Hezbollah and Iran in a war that many Democrats like El-Sayed, New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani and others now claim was “genocide.” Nor do they want to topple him because a decade ago and more, he held the line against foreign pressure to withdraw from Judea and Samaria, let alone Jerusalem, to create a Palestinian state from which terrorists could have inflicted the same horrors on communities in central Israel as happened to those near Gaza.

Indeed, in the weeks after Oct. 7, Obama’s qualified statement of support for Israel in the wake of the slaughter of 1,200 men, women and children focused as much on its guilt—and that of its American supporters—as being “complicit to some degree” for the war Hamas started because those parties had refused to empower the Palestinians.

Other Democrats preparing to run in 2028 are listening to the chorus of Israel-bashers on the left, who claim their party lost in 2024 because it was insufficiently hostile to the Jewish state. Speaking in South Korea this week, former Vice President Kamala Harris said that Biden was wrong to tolerate Israel’s “horrific conduct” in Gaza during the war, which is to say that he didn’t save Hamas from defeat. This also ignores the fact that the Biden administration actually worked hard to hamstring the Israeli war effort, slow-walking arms deliveries as well as making false claims that efforts to root the terrorists out of crucial strongholds like Rafah would create massive civilian casualties. This pressure on Israel only strengthened Hamas’s resolve to hang on and keep fighting and undermined their own efforts to end the war and release Israeli hostages.

Harris’s statements weren’t just another instance of her second-guessing her old boss and blaming him and others in the administration for her being defeated by Trump. It was an effort to ingratiate herself with the bulk of Democratic voters who are pro-Palestinian and anti-Israel.

That trend is what made the rise of someone like El-Sayed possible. In the eyes of Israel’s Democratic critics, it isn’t just Netanyahu who is guilty of “genocide.” They view the broad consensus among Israelis, which stretches from right to left in opposing a Palestinian state and insisting on disarming Hamas in Gaza, as responsible for “genocide” and view it as an “apartheid” state.

El-Sayed made it clear this week that he regarded Israel as being as great a threat to the United States as an Iranian state that had been at war with America for 47 years.

Moderates are also turning on Israel

The idea that an Israeli prime minister not named Netanyahu could fix relations with a Democratic Party that treats antisemites like El-Sayed as worthy of support is just wishful thinking on the part of people like Shapiro.

That’s because this issue is not just a matter of the positions taken by radicals like El-Sayed and Mamdani or far-left “Squad” members in the U.S. House of Representatives like Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.), who is also considering a 2028 presidential run.

Democrats like Sen. Chris Coons (D-Del.), who are perceived as moderates, are also signaling that the alliance with Israel will undergo a “thorough re-examination” in the coming years. Coons, who is in line to become chairman of the powerful Foreign Relations Committee if the Democrats regain control of the Senate in November, is already planning on proposing discriminatory sanctions on Israelis similar to those already put forward by British Foreign Secretary Ed Miliband.

None of this is because, as Foer claims, Netanyahu cultivated ties with Republicans while neglecting to do the same with Democrats. To the contrary, it was the Democrats who have aligned themselves against Israel’s interests and—under the influence of a base that has swallowed the toxic ideas of critical race theory, intersectionality and settler-colonialism—view the Jewish state and Jews in general as “white” oppressors who must be suppressed. The claim that Netanyahu should have rejected the support of conservative Republicans (who were not under the spell of these ideologies) to placate Democrats is not a serious argument.

Shapiro may hope this will all fade away if Netanyahu is defeated on Oct. 27. But his problem is not just the possibility that Israeli voters will reject his advice. It’s that the same Democratic primary voters who elevated people like El-Sayed, Mamdani and a host of other “progressive” candidates in the last year view those who express “love” for Israel, even if it is qualified with Netanyahu-bashing, as simply beyond the pale.

In the recent past, Shapiro’s combination of political liberalism, largely successful governance and record of electoral success would have put him among the frontrunners in a presidential race. But over the course of the last year, even the most enthusiastic supporter cannot have missed the shift in the opinions of Democrats.

To them, a figure like Gadi Eisenkot, the former Israel Defense Forces chief of staff who is Netanyahu’s principal opponent, is just as much of a “war criminal” deserving of sanctions as the prime minister. No conceivable concessions that Eisenkot could make to the Palestinians will be enough to win back Democratic voters indoctrinated in left-wing ideologies or the officeholders they want to send to Washington to blow up the alliance with the Jewish state.

A liberal failure

The remnants of a once-dominant pro-Israel faction of Democrats prefer to blame Netanyahu. But the responsibility is theirs. It was Democrats like Schumer and Shapiro who abetted the rise of Obama and who looked the other way as he set in motion the train of events that created so much “daylight” between their party and Israel. They were the ones who refused to anathematize members of the “Squad,” like Reps. Ilan Omar (D-Minn.), Rashida Tlaib (D-Mich.) and AOC when they helped legitimize antisemitism and Israel-bashing. And they are now the ones who, in the hope of appeasing their left-wing critics, are bolstering the candidacies of Jew-haters like El-Sayed.

Democrats who are blasting criticism of El-Sayed’s radicalism and Islamist opposition to Israel’s existence as “Islamophobia” while ignoring or downplaying his bigotry aren’t open to rethinking their opposition to Israel. Nor are they likely to embrace a Democratic presidential candidate who is emotionally committed to the U.S.-Israel alliance but just wants a different prime minister in Jerusalem.

Simply put, Shapiro’s pro-Israel/anti-Netanyahu stand is not likely to satisfy a party base that now regards hostility to the Jewish state, along with opposition to enforcement of immigration laws, as the organizing principle of politics in the second quarter of the 21st century. And it’s likely that neither he nor any other Democrat is going to be able to get past that problem with the sort of nuanced position articulated at his debate. The collapse of the pro-Israel wing of the Democratic Party is a liberal failure of nerve and principle that won’t be undone, regardless of who wins the next election in Israel.

© JNS

A report by Walla in recent days said the US military is preparing to transfer additional forces to Israel, adding that the current deployment includes air defense teams, pilots and supporting technicians, logistics crews, headquarters staff and others.

A third aircraft carrier to the Middle East

The United States has also deployed a third aircraft carrier to the Middle East, along with additional Marines, ahead of the US midterm elections next month. The USS Theodore Roosevelt and additional US Marines were described by international media reports as en route to the region for an extended deployment, having departed the West Coast.

The USS Makin Island Amphibious Ready Group also departed San Diego, carrying the 13th Marine Expeditionary Unit, a force of about 2,200 personnel, along with roughly 2,000 sailors aboard the group’s three ships.

Brig. Gen. (res.) Yossi Kuperwasser, director of the Jerusalem Institute for Strategy and Security and former head of the Analysis and Production Division of the IDF’s Directorate of Military Intelligence, told JNS on Tuesday that there were two factors behind the recent reported deployments.

"Israel is relatively the safest place in the Middle East"

“One, the Americans are looking at all possibilities, and that’s why they are massing forces in the Middle East, including in preparation for the possibility of an escalation,” said Kuperwasser.

“Israel is relatively the safest place in the Middle East, because this is the place the Iranians are careful not to attack. So forces can be stationed here with relative security. It’s also a place where the aerial defense is the best, not that it’s perfect—nowhere is—but it is better, as we have seen, than in other places. So that’s an additional incentive to station forces in Israel as well.

“This is, of course, not at the expense of positioning forces elsewhere. The Americans continue to station forces elsewhere, but also in Israel, assuming this information is correct.”

Israel will want to maximize the joint power of the US and Israel against the Iranians

Kuperwasser said he did not view the US presence as a complication for the IDF or independent Israeli decision-making.

“The IDF, in any case, if the US renews military activity against Iran, will presumably be asked to carry out its own part and participate in such a military effort, and the IDF is preparing for it. Israel will want to maximize the joint power of the U.S. and Israel in activity against the Iranians, in order to inflict the highest possible toll on Iran, and ultimately bring them to accept, if necessary, giving up the nuclear program,” he said.

‘Israel is a team player’

He said Israel was not seeking to act unilaterally.

“Israel is currently playing as a team player. It is subordinating its military to American wishes. It will not put the Americans in an embarrassing position where they need to be in the back and Israel in front.”

The Jewish Institute for National Security of America, a Washington-based policy group, stated in a report published in March that the United States carried out the first-ever operational deployment of US combat aircraft to Israel, sending 11 F-22 stealth fighters to Ovda Air Force Base in southern Israel just before Operation Epic Fury.

Israeli bases become a regional CENTCOM hub for prepositioning

The report recommended that Israeli bases “become a regional CENTCOM hub for prepositioning, combined exercises, planning, and even operations.”

Retired Gen. Frank McKenzie, former commander of US Central Command, told a webinar in June that the United States needs to “look West” and shift its basing posture from the Gulf toward Israel, assessing that U.S. forces would face fewer access, basing and overflight restrictions in Israel than in any other country in the region.

Jonathan Ruhe, a fellow for American strategy at JINSA, said the reported troop numbers point to an evolving but still incomplete shift in US posture, falling short of a full commitment by either side to a “semi-permanent US presence” in Israel.

The United States is trying to lessen its dependence on permanent bases in the Gulf

“The recent, sudden expansion of US presence reflected ready-made opportunities in Israel: certain bases like Ovda are built to US specifications, Israel maintains high readiness at its bases, and it already had some surge capacity for the rapid influx of American aircraft, personnel, and materiel for [Operation] Epic Fury,” he said.

“But a more permanent and shared basing posture entails tough political decisions from both sides to fund it. Especially after its recent losses, the United States is trying to lessen its dependence on permanent bases in the Gulf, in favor of rotating forces through multiple countries, like Israel, that are farther from Iran.”

Asked whether a sizable US military contingent inside Israel affects the IDF’s operational independence, Ruhe said it was unlikely to do so.

US presence as an entangling tripwire

“It’s likely to affect more mundane, but still important, logistical and budgetary issues like munitions and fuel storage, military construction, and quality of life for personnel stationed there,” he said.

“A key factor that works in both Israel’s and America’s favor is the fact that Israel doesn’t want a US presence as an entangling tripwire. Israel is unique in the Middle East because it sees shared basing as a chance to boost both countries’ freedom of action.”

© JNS

The choice is hardly out of character for an award whose history has repeatedly shown that its name guarantees nothing about its recipients’ merit. Indeed, this isn’t an aberration for the Norwegian committee. But it’s an especially egregious example of a familiar pattern: an international establishment congratulating itself for advancing peace while rewarding people whose records make a mockery of the concept.

Pillay, who chaired the United Nations Commission of Inquiry that accused Israel of committing genocide in Gaza, has become a symbol of the double standards permeating the global system. The woman now being feted in the name of peace presided over a more aptly dubbed “inquisition” whose whole purpose was to brand the Jewish state with a bloody—blood libelous—stain. Like an irremovable tattoo.

The term “genocide” has a specific legal definition, including the requirement to establish intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a protected national, ethnic, racial or religious group. It’s laughable to suggest that Israel’s behavior even remotely fits that description, as it took great pains to avoid civilian casualties and flooded Gaza with humanitarian aid.

That Hamas kept stealing the food and medicine, and prevented anyone other than its goons from entering the hundreds of miles of tunnels, was never of interest to Pillay and her ilk. Nor did they ever note that the population in Gaza has grown in the past three years. Some genocide.

Though her commission’s report wasn’t a judicial verdict, the force of its accusation was unmistakable, and Pillay was gleefully instrumental in promoting the lie for pernicious purposes. Which we now see has paid off, big-time.

This was hardly the first time her commission helped fuel the campaign to portray Israel as uniquely depraved. Pillay, a former U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights (2008-2014), was appointed to her latest post in 2021. That was when the “Independent International Commission of Inquiry on the Occupied Palestinian Territory” was established by the U.N. Human Rights Council to concoct a report to vilify Israel.

And, boy, did she ever come through for her anti-Israel colleagues, producing a mendacious paper on Israeli “crimes” in Gaza. Its allegations reinforced a false narrative depicting Israel not as a country at war with sadistic barbarians—thousands of whom breached the border on Oct. 7, 2023 to rape, maim and slaughter 1,200 innocent Israelis, and abduct 251 others—but as a sexually abusive state.

Nothing new about the turpitude of the U.N.’s endless attempts to demonize Israel. So, Pillay’s having been selected to head the commission wasn’t surprising.

Ditto for her winning an award transformed long ago into a vehicle for leftist virtue-signaling. In his 1895 will, Swedish scientist/businessman Alfred Nobel, inventor of dynamite, bequeathed most of his immense fortune to establishing prizes in science, literature and peace.

The latter was intended to recognize efforts toward fraternity among nations. Its subsequent history, however, has repeatedly exposed the gulf between those ideals and the eponymous committee’s selections. Rather than consistently rewarding meaningful contributions to peace, the prize has served as a platform for globalist ideology involving the inversion of right and wrong.

Pillay epitomizes this moral rot. Her new laureate status is less an honor than a mark of Cain.

To add to this blot, her prize was announced on Oct. 9, two days after Israel marked the third anniversary of the worst atrocities committed against Jews since the Holocaust. The timing highlights the perversity of the prize and its recipient.

© JNS

For three years, the Jewish world has been stunned by the reaction to the Hamas-led Palestinian Arab terror attacks on Israeli communities on Oct. 7, 2023. But it’s time to stop. More to the point, it’s also necessary to cease appealing for sympathy or understanding.

The expectation on the part of most Jews and Israelis, as well as those who are their friends in the days that followed, was that world opinion would swing behind the Jewish state in the aftermath of that horrific orgy of mass murder, torture, rape, kidnapping and wanton destruction. And there was, in fact, some initial sympathy for Israel, even in the media that is so quick to denounce it.

The turn against Israel

Within days, however, that changed. Once it was clear that Israelis were not going to simply accept their victimization and would act to end the threat of more such atrocities, what passes for enlightened liberal opinion, along with some elements on the far right, voiced outrage. That outrage was not aimed at the crimes of the Palestinians. Nor was it a response to the evidence that their leaders and most of the population have meant what they said when they repeatedly rejected an independent state alongside Israel and would settle for nothing less than the destruction of the Jewish state.

Instead, the spectacle of Jews defending themselves and moving to eliminate a threat that no sovereign nation would tolerate on its border was too much for a world that has largely regarded Jewish power of any kind as intolerable. Even before the Israel Defense Forces began their offensive into Gaza to attempt to eliminate Hamas’s ability to make good on their promises to repeat Oct. 7-style massacres, anti-Israel protests began. More importantly, world leaders called for caution and restraint that they would never demand of their own countries under similar circumstances.

The United States was an initial exception to that rule. Yet within weeks, the administration of President Joe Biden, which had supported Israel’s goal of eliminating Hamas, shifted to a more equivocal stance. What ensued was a year-long dance in which the United States sought to pressure the government of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to stop seeking victory. Washington even demanded that Jerusalem accept an outcome in which the continued hold on power on the part of the Islamist terrorists who had ruled Gaza as an independent Palestinian state in all but name since 2007 was to be tolerated.

Biden’s shift was clearly a reaction to liberal and left-wing opinion in his own Democratic Party. After Oct. 7, Democrats, who had already been turning against Israel over the course of the previous decade under the administration of President Barack Obama, overwhelmingly took the side of the Palestinians against the Israelis.

The same was true around the globe as Western European nations—influenced by both the influx of Muslim immigrants from the Middle East and North Africa, and by Marxist and left-wing parties that reviled Zionism—expressed their horror at the idea of Israel pursuing a war to defeat Hamas.

Disingenuous ‘criticism’

Israel’s foes claim that the revulsion was the product of an unusually harsh and “disproportionate” offensive in Gaza in which its military indiscriminately killed large numbers of civilians, including women and children. The Jewish state was accused of “genocide” and causing mass starvation. Indeed, so ubiquitous were these accusations in mainstream media outlets and popular culture that few liberals or left-wingers dared to question them or consider them debatable.

This critique was—and remains—entirely disingenuous. Israel’s military used more restraint in the difficult conditions of urban warfare and, as impartial military experts testified, killed a far lower percentage of civilians than in any other such confrontation in modern-day history.

Hamas hid behind Palestinian civilians and did everything to expose them to death. They stored weapons in schools and hospitals. They stole food meant for residents that the Israelis moved from one part of the Strip to another to keep them out of the way of airstrikes and other military efforts to bring back men, women and children dragged by Hamas on Oct. 7 into the coastal enclave. With the international aid it had received prior to Oct. 7, Hamas had built a tunnel network under Gaza that might be termed the world’s largest bomb shelter, the size of the New York City subway system. But no civilians (other than the hostages, many of whom were hid there) were allowed into them. They were only for terrorist fighters, their commanders and their supplies.

There was no “genocide” or Gaza famine. There isn’t any such thing going on today. Nonetheless, much of the world believes it.

The atrocities of Oct. 7 were denied, even though Hamas and other Palestinian terrorists had documented them with GoPro cameras and social-media uploads (one infamously called his parents to brag about how many Jews he killed that day). The victims, including raped women and men, were ignored or not believed. Posters of the kidnapped, even of a 9-month-old baby, were torn down on the streets of American and European cities. Mass rallies were held to bolster support for Hamas on the streets of those cities and on college campuses.

The main reason for the lack of sympathy for Israel wasn’t because Netanyahu or members of his cabinet were unlikable or too truculent, or because his government failed to mount an effective public diplomacy campaign (though it should have done better). Nor was it because pro-Israel supporters in the United States were equally ineffective in making the case for the Jewish state or against intransigent Palestinian Arabs and their terrorist leaders.

The deck was stacked against Israel long before Oct. 7. Like the American education system, the corporate media had largely been captured by left-wing ideologues who believed in political activism, not journalism. And it, too, adopted the skewed ideas of critical race theory, intersectionality and settler-colonialism that exacerbated racial tensions among the general population, as well as falsely labeled Israelis and Jews as “white” oppressors and their Palestinian opponents as “people of color.” That meant the former were always in the wrong, no matter what they did, and the latter in the right, no matter how awful their crimes.

They’re not listening

While Israel and its supporters might have done better in their efforts to inform the world about Oct. 7 and the century of Palestinian rejectionism that preceded it, the notion that the global audience or even the bulk of the base of the Democratic Party was open to being educated about any of this was unfounded. The red-green alliance of Marxists and Islamists that are skewing European politics and ideas about Israel and the Jews has also secured a beachhead in America, as the success of antisemitic figures like New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani and Michigan Democratic U.S. Senate nominee Dr. Abdul El-Sayed demonstrates.

A world that had decided that the Jews and their state were singular villains, and thus guilty of horrible crimes, was certainly influenced by social-media algorithms and biased media. But their receptiveness to the blood libels about genocide and famine in Gaza or to the lie that Israel is an “apartheid” state wasn’t due to the lack of a proactive information task force in the Israeli prime minister’s office or the failure of much of the organized Jewish world. Having been marinated in the toxic doctrines that taught them the Israelis were the bad guys, liberal opinion was already lost to the Jewish state even before the bodies were buried after Oct. 7.

The only sectors of global or American society that remain impervious, or at least less vulnerable, to the onslaught of Hamas propaganda masquerading as progressivism are among those on the right who have already rejected these doctrines. That’s provided that they are not also being seduced by the wave of Jew-hatred on the far right that employs traditional antisemitic tropes.

Once we acknowledge all of this, the question remains: What do we do about it?

The first thing is for the Jews to stop appealing for sympathy that isn’t coming.

It should have been apparent from the outset that centering pro-Israel advocacy on the victimization of Jews on Oct. 7 or on the appalling treatment of the hostages taken that day was a mistake. It only excited antisemites. And, rather than elicit empathy, it seems to have convinced many others to believe that the Palestinians had a good reason to murder the Jews.

A futile quest

In this sense, it was much like Israel’s misguided and failed efforts to trade “land for peace” throughout the previous three decades. That did more to convince world opinion that the Jews were possessors of stolen property, rather than high-minded people who were willing to compromise their rights and even their security to achieve an end to the conflict. But now, the pleas for understanding seem only to have reinforced the growing chorus of those who believe Zionism—the anti-colonial and national liberation movement of the Jews—equals racism.

Unlike the recent past, the real debate about the Middle East isn’t about a two-state solution the Palestinians never wanted. It now centers on whether all of the Jewish state, including the kibbutzim and other communities near the Gaza Strip whose liberal-minded inhabitants were slaughtered along with everyone else on Oct. 7, is stolen land. That goes hand in hand with the idea that its occupants are foreign colonizers in their homeland, where they are the indigenous people who are only getting what they deserve.

Rather than members of the Jewish community wracking their brains trying to solve the puzzle about how to convince those who aren’t listening to hear sound historical arguments, they need to stop centering so much of their efforts on this futile quest.

It’s true that losses in the information world have real consequences, and that the attempts to isolate Israel diplomatically and economically pose a grave danger to it. But if the Jews should have learned anything in the last century when the world stood by as the Holocaust went on for years, it’s that the most important task facing them is to strengthen their state and its ability to defend Jewish life.

As horrible as the catastrophe of Oct. 7 was, in the three years that have followed, Israel’s defeats of Hamas and Hezbollah—plus the fall of a longtime brutal dictator in Syria—and their Iranian paymasters and sponsors have done more to make Jewish lives safer than all of the clever arguments put forward by its most able public information advocates.

That doesn’t give the Israeli government—or Diaspora leaders and groups—a pass for doing so poorly at explaining the situation. And it certainly doesn’t excuse a tech-savvy Jewish state for not being as nimble as it should have been in employing new media and Internet technologies to make their arguments against those spreading blood libels and antisemitism.

Still, delusions should be discarded about the chances that appeals aimed at inspiring sympathy for Jewish victims will move the needle on international or even American public opinion for those who have bought the pro-Hamas narrative hook, line and sinker. As Dara Horn has written, the world may “love dead Jews,” but what that really means for us today is that their abhorrence of Jews with power is undiminished.

A just cause

What Israel and its defenders must exude is strength, confidence in their justice of their cause, and a willingness to be undaunted by the lies and smears spread about them. Rather than seeking to debate or persuade those crying “genocide” primarily to give the world a pass for permitting the actual genocide of European Jewry during the Holocaust, we must dismiss them as hate-mongers unworthy of intellectual refutations.

As much as Jews everywhere must continue to mourn the victims of Oct. 7, as well as the heroic soldiers of the Israel Defense Forces who fell or were wounded in the ongoing effort to defeat terrorists, they should quit waiting for others to join them.

The real lesson of Oct. 7 is no different from that of the thousands of years of Jewish history that preceded it. Weakness and faith in the kindness of those ready to believe that Jews are the cause of whatever it is they fear most or the greatest societal problems they face is a formula for disaster.

Just as in the past, those who think that destroying the Jewish state will be the first step toward the liberation of the world’s oppressed peoples are not persuadable. But they can be defeated.

A proud declaration of Jewish rights and faith is far more likely to inspire friendship and alliances. That’s a lesson that should resonate for Israelis. But it must also be one adopted by Diaspora Jews perplexed by a wave of bigotry and vitriol they never anticipated and struggle to cope with. Unless and until they realize that they must defend themselves first—and worry about what everyone else thinks later—will they find a way to live in a world where Jew-hatred has again become fashionable.

© JNS.

At the Knesset, relatives of victims and hostages recited “Yizkor,” a Jewish memorial prayer for the deceased. In southern Israel, survivors and bereaved families gathered at the former site of the Nova music festival near Kibbutz Re’im, where 378 people were killed and 44 abducted to Gaza.

The U.S. Embassy in Jerusalem on Wednesday vowed to stand with Israel, saying in a post on X it remembers “the innocent lives murdered by Hamas terrorists.” It also honored “the heroes who risked everything to save others.”

“We remember. We stand with Israel,” the post concluded.

Official state commemorations for Oct. 7 were held in Israel on Monday, according to the Hebrew calendar date established by the government, separate from the national events being held on the Gregorian anniversary on Wednesday.

Some 6,000 terrorists from Hamas, Palestinian Islamic Jihad and Fatah, along with unaffiliated Gazans, crossed into southern Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, murdering some 1,200 people, wounding thousands and kidnapping 251.

Israel launched its ground offensive in Gaza on Oct. 27, 2023, with the stated goals of destroying Hamas’s military and governing capabilities, returning the hostages and ensuring Gaza could no longer threaten Israel.

The conflict subsequently expanded across the region, with Israel fighting Hezbollah in Lebanon, terrorist groups in Judea and Samaria, conducting operations in Syria, confronting Houthi attacks from Yemen, striking targets in Iran and responding to attacks from Iranian-backed militias in Iraq.

The Israel Defense Forces said on Tuesday that it struck approximately 100,000 targets across multiple fronts over the three years since Oct. 7. More than 31,500 projectiles were launched at Israel during the same period.

The military said 970 personnel were killed in operational circumstances during the war. More than 70% of wounded soldiers returned to service, while the IDF reserve force grew by approximately 36% as the military established a series of new combat, defense and support formations.

On Wednesday, Israel Police Commissioner Daniel Levi and the force’s senior command saluted and observed a minute of silence at 6:29 a.m. at sites where officers fell on Oct. 7, the Israel Police said.

The main ceremony took place at the site of the former police station in Sderot, where terrorists seized the building, killed 11 officers and fought Israeli security forces for hours until the station was demolished.

World

A survivor of the October 7 attacks commits suicide in front of the grave of his girlfriend, who was murdered by Hamas

Alejandro Baños

Memorial ceremonies were also held at other sites where police and Border Police officers were killed defending civilians. A commemorative convoy was set to leave for Re’im as part of the senior command’s visit to southern Israel.

“The Israel Police bows its head in memory of its fallen, and continues to carry their memory and legacy. We stand with and support the bereaved families and the police officers who were wounded in the battles defending the State of Israel and its citizens,” the statement said.

Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) on Tuesday night marked the third anniversary of the massacre by calling it the “beginning of the end for Zionism” and claiming the terrorist assault “shattered” the image of the Israeli military’s “invincibility.”

The IRGC statement claimed that regional strategic conditions had shifted in favor of Tehran and its allies and warned that any new military action against the Islamic Republic would draw a “painful and devastating response.”

Israel’s National Security Council on Tuesday warned that terror organizations, including Iran, its proxies and other global jihadist groups, view the anniversary as a significant milestone, adding that public disturbances are also expected to increase worldwide.

The council advised Israelis not to post travel plans on social media in advance and to avoid destinations under Israel’s highest, Level 4 travel warning: Jordan, Qatar, Somaliland and Egypt, including the Sinai Peninsula.

In destinations under Level 3 warnings, including South Africa, Thailand and Morocco, Israelis were advised to minimize speaking Hebrew in crowded areas, stay away from demonstrations and avoid large gatherings.

According to a report released Monday by Israel’s Diaspora Affairs and Combating Antisemitism Ministry, 262 pro-Palestinian protests in 37 countries are scheduled between Oct. 1 and Oct. 14, with the largest concentration expected during the weekend following Oct. 7. The ministry classified 87 of the events—about one-third—as posing a medium or high level of risk.

The United States has the most identified events, with 45, followed by Spain with 40, Australia with 21, the United Kingdom with 19 and Italy with 16. Germany and Canada each have 14 events, while France has 10 and the Netherlands eight.

The ministry classified New York, Los Angeles, Montreal, Toronto, Ottawa, Melbourne, Sydney, London, Berlin, Amsterdam, Athens, Milan, Rome, Barcelona, Paris, Istanbul, Bangkok, Bogotá and Santiago as the highest-risk locations.

© JNS.

"I think that it would be a good thing for him to face prosecution," Blackburn told the John Solomon Reports podcast this week just hours before she filed her lawsuit alleging Smith was never lawfully a special counsel and therefore violated her rights as a member of Congress by collecting her phone records.

"I think it would be a good thing for him to have to reveal who all was in on this with him, and I think it would be a very good thing for him to have to return all these records to the people that he [has] victimized," she said.

"Worse than Watergate": Judiciary Committee

Blackburn is part of the Senate Judiciary Committee that on Tuesday laid out evidence alleging that Smith conducted a political espionage campaign masquerading as a criminal investigation codenamed Arctic Frost to collect dirt and intelligence on hundreds of Trump supporters, GOP lawmakers and conservatives who were never accused of or charged with any wrongdoing.

The Committee detailed Smith's actions on its webpage, calling it "worse than Watergate."

Blackburn did not attend Tuesday's Senate interrogation of Smith but announced her lawsuit on Wednesday. The suit seeks only $1 in damages but asks to hold Smith liable in his personal capacity by arguing that a federal judge found that former Attorney General Merrick Garland never lawfully appointed Smith as special counsel and, therefore, Smith conducted his contested actions as a private citizen. The complaint does not address the issue of whether Smith has immunity, but it's likely that issue will come up when Smith files his papers.

The lawyer who filed the lawsuit told the John Solomon Reports podcast on Wednesday the suit makes no claims of criminality, leaving that for others such as the Justice Department to decide, but does make a novel argument about Smith's personal culpability.

"It's so disappointing, you know, as a former DOJ attorney, to see this sort of rogue activity by someone pretending to be a special counsel or posing as a federal prosecutor, which is really what Jack Smith was doing," Blackburn said, quoting Mark Chenoweth, the president and chief legal officer of the New Civil Liberties Alliance (NCLA).

Stripped her of her constitutional right to challenge the subpoena

In a statement, the NCLA said that "While purporting to act as Special Counsel, Smith and others in the DOJ, FBI, Special Counsel’s office, and Public Integrity Section agreed to subpoena Senator Blackburn’s cell phone toll records — revealing whom she spoke with, and when, and for how long."

Smith also sought and obtained a non-disclosure order from the Court, while withholding from the presiding judge the material fact that the subpoena sought the records of a sitting US senator. That non-disclosure order required the senator’s cell phone provider, Verizon, to keep the subpoena secret. The non-disclosure order prevented Senator Blackburn from learning that her cell phone records had been subpoenaed, and thereby stripped her of her constitutional right to challenge the subpoena under the Speech or Debate Clause of the Constitution, which, NCLA argues, protects legislative materials from compelled disclosure.

Compelling evidence of intentionality

"The appointments clause of the Constitution requires for principal officers, which we argue that Jack Smith was, that they have to be appointed by the president and confirmed by the Senate. Neither one of those things happen, even if he was an inferior officer, John, Congress still, under the appointments clause, has to create the position for him to fill. And Congress never created the special counsel position. This is something Merrick Garland came up with on his own. So this whole investigation, this whole Arctic Frost investigation, to the extent that Jack Smith was involved, was polluted by this unlawful, unconstitutional appointment," Chenoweth said.

Chenoweth said the senator's lawsuit provides some compelling evidence of intentionality by Smith and his team.

"Smith talked to the Public Integrity Section at the Department of Justice. They alerted him to the potential speech and debate clause issue, and they decided to withhold that material fact of Senator Blackburn's identity from the federal district judge. So when they went to get the subpoena from the federal district judge in DC, they did not tell him that they were seeking the records of a sitting US senator.

"Wilfully and intentionally false statements"

Smith was accused in July of giving false testimony by House Judiciary Committee Chairman Jim Jordan, R-Ohio, for allegedly making "willfully and intentionally false statements" when testifying before Congress last December.

On Tuesday, Smith was further accused by Republicans on the Senate Judiciary panel of improperly using his prosecution powers to collect donor checks from Trump supporters, journalist contacts with sources and text and phone data from members of Congress.

For his part, Smith has steadfastly denied wrongdoing and said he would pursue a prosecution against President Donald Trump again because he believed the evidence supported it and the evidence-gathering actions he took were lawful.

Smith continues to insist his actions were not partisan

"I personally find it very hard to understand how our investigation can be viewed as partisan when the strongest witnesses, the people who were the difference between the rule of law standing and not in our case, were Republicans," Smith told senators during sometimes brusque testimony.

Smith snooped on emails, phone records and donors' checks, Blackburn says

"Instead of looking into issues that would have been in his jurisdiction, he was getting telephone records. He was getting emails. We found out today nearly 5,000 individuals sent checks to President Donald Trump. [Smith] got copies of those checks," she said.

"We had 102 Tennesseans who wrote checks to the president's campaign, and Jack Smith was pulling those copies, and then he was setting up a file and following these individuals, or Lord knows what he was planning to do with it if they [Biden Democrats] had been able to keep the White House. He was on a witch hunt, and he was determined to find out who was talking to the president, what they were saying."

Criminal conspiracy to use law enforcement to hurt Trump politically, former G-man says

Retired FBI Special Agent Jonathan Gilliam told the Just the News, No Noise television show he would never have engaged in some of the evidence-gathering tactics Smith's team launched against lawmakers and political donors for activity that was protected by the Constitution.

Gilliam added that he believes prosecutors could make a criminal case against Smith or his team as part of alleging an ongoing criminal conspiracy to use law enforcement to hurt Trump politically over a period of time that included the discredited Russia collusion case to Smith's prosecutions.

"We can show that the multiple things that they did were contrived, were made up, or falsified, and that they were done for a reason to go after President Trump to further their ideology, their politics, or their criminal enterprise," he said. "I think that evidence is there, and it's already been proven in some cases that if they wanted to go after Jack Smith."

"If (FBI Director) Kash Patel actually started looking at this criminal enterprise, the cards would fall if they just peeled back that onion a little bit. I think it's clearly evident," he added.

© Just The News

The plane plunged 17,000 feet and continued losing altitude when it was only about 350 kilometers from Tel Aviv. The distance is crucial: The aircraft was already approaching what may have been the intended target when the Omani co-pilot allegedly attacked the captain and apparently sought to seize control of the plane.

According to some accounts, he shouted “Allahu Akbar” and recited the shahada, the Islamic declaration of faith often recited at the approach of death, before stabbing the captain and allegedly setting in motion what Israeli authorities suspect was a plan for a mass-casualty terrorist attack.

What happened next may be almost unprecedented in the history of attempted aircraft hijackings: The passengers themselves fought back, with the courageous help of the Emirati cabin crew.

A handful of Israeli passengers confronted and overpowered the alleged attacker. Photographs and videos show some of them covered in blood as they tended to the seriously wounded captain.

JNS

Netanyahu hails Israeli ‘hero’ as flydubai passengers return home safely

JNS (Jewish News Syndicate)

Crucially, another flight crew happened to be aboard as part of a routine crew arrangement. After the captain was wounded, two pilots from that crew entered the cockpit, took control of the aircraft and flew it to safety.

The aircraft was damaged during the violent jolts, and sheer luck—or perhaps a miracle—prevented an unimaginable catastrophe.

But it was a miracle made possible by people who acted.

Every Israeli knows to watch his back and to react when necessary, whether on the battlefield or amid the difficult circumstances of everyday life. On this flight, ordinary Israelis suddenly found themselves facing an extraordinary threat and became the heroes who may have prevented another Sept. 11.

The jungle of baggage and document checks, the labyrinth travelers have faced at airports around the world for decades, has its own long history of terrorism. The 1972 Lod Airport massacre, in which 26 people were killed, was one of the attacks that demonstrated how vulnerable civilian aviation had become.

It is extraordinarily difficult to prevent mass-suicide terrorism conceived in the mind of a fanatic or a disturbed individual. In 1999, EgyptAir Flight 990 plunged into the Atlantic with 217 people aboard. U.S. investigators concluded that relief first officer Gameel Al-Batouti deliberately caused the crash, repeatedly uttering words translated as “I rely on God,” although Egyptian authorities rejected that conclusion.

There have been other cases of madness, fanaticism or unexplained catastrophe. Germanwings co-pilot Andreas Lubitz deliberately crashed an Airbus into the French Alps in 2015, killing all 150 people aboard. In 2014, Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 disappeared with 239 people aboard, its fate still the subject of investigation and debate.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu had warned—while being criticized, as usual, by the opposition—of the possibility of unusual acts of aggression during these days.

Unfortunately, the backdrop is now twofold.

On the one hand, there are warnings of possible attacks against Jews and Israelis traveling abroad during the Sukkot holiday. Iran continually threatens Israelis and Jews around the world, and the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps has reinforced that message in recent days.

And now, amid rampant antisemitism, there is also the unpredictability of radicalized individuals who have come to believe that attacking Jews is an act of political or religious purity, or even of justice.

Israel is on alert. Saudi Arabia, where the Israeli survivors waited after their emergency landing, did not permit Israeli aircraft to enter to collect them and is holding those responsible for the incident.

There is another striking symbolism here.

The alleged attacker was Omani. Oman has close relations with Iran, which maintains a strategic interest in the country because of its position overlooking the Strait of Hormuz and the entrance to the Persian Gulf.

The captain he allegedly attacked, by contrast, is a citizen of the United Arab Emirates—a friendly Arab country that signed the Abraham Accords with Israel.

And this was a flydubai flight linking Dubai and Tel Aviv, itself an everyday expression of the new relationship between Israel and part of the Arab world.

On that aircraft, the contrast could hardly have been sharper: an alleged attacker apparently seeking destruction and an Emirati crew working alongside Israeli passengers to save lives. The passengers fought. The cabin crew helped them. Other pilots took control. Arabs and Israelis together prevented catastrophe.

Anyone can board a plane. Anyone can enter and leave. The skies are vast, difficult to control and dangerous—and not only for Israel.

The jihadist target has never been Israel alone. The West has repeatedly been a target, and civilian aviation offers terrorists a uniquely horrifying weapon.

Mohamed Atta, one of the planners and perpetrators of the Sept. 11 attacks, was an educated young man who had lived and studied in Germany. Nothing about an ordinary outward appearance reveals what may be taking shape inside a radicalized mind.

The Houthis, Hamas, Al-Qaeda, the Muslim Brotherhood, and the malign influences emanating from Iran and elsewhere are filling the skies with clouds.

But this time, disaster did not strike.

This time, ordinary Israelis refused to become victims. Together with an Arab crew from a country that chose peace with Israel, they fought back—and a new 9/11 was averted.

© JNS.

“You are a hero. You deserve a global medal of honor,” Netanyahu told Yaniv Hayun during a meeting at Ben-Gurion International Airport on Wednesday, hours after Hayun and the other passengers returned to Israel.

Hayun was one of three Israeli passengers who rushed into the cockpit of Flight FZ1073 after the co-pilot stabbed the captain and apparently attempted to crash the Boeing 737 carrying 174 passengers from Dubai to Tel Aviv.

In an interview with CNN, Netanyahu said Israel would participate in the investigation and that it remained too early to determine whether Iran was connected to the attack.

“What we know is [that he is] an Omani national,” Netanyahu said of the co-pilot.

"We’ll find out very soon if Iran had anything to do with it"

<span>Netanyahu said he had spoken with United Arab Emirates President </span>Sheikh Mohamed bin Zayed Al Nahyan<span>, who agreed that Israel would join the questioning of the suspect.</span>

“So we’ll find out very soon if Iran had anything to do with it, but I can’t say that in advance of the conclusion of the interrogation,” he added.

The suspect remained in Saudi custody following the emergency landing at Tabuk Airport and was expected to be transferred to the United Arab Emirates.

Netanyahu said Israel had received intelligence indicating that Iran and its proxies could seek to attack Israelis ahead of the Oct. 27 election, but stressed that there had been no specific warning about the flydubai flight.

‘They managed to prevent a 9/11 disaster’

“What we had is a lot of information streaming in that Iran’s proxies, in particular Hezbollah and Hamas, were planning attacks against Israel and Israeli civilians abroad,” he said. “But I can’t tell you that we had any specific warning about this.”

Netanyahu offered new details of the extraordinary sequence aboard the aircraft in an interview with CNN. He said Capt. Smit Machchhar, the Indian pilot who was stabbed and seriously wounded by the co-pilot, showed “incredible heroism” by managing to unlock the cockpit door despite his injuries, allowing passengers to enter.

“The Israeli passenger burst in, saw the attacking co-pilot hover over the instruments,” Netanyahu said. “He wasn’t sitting in one of the two pilot seats, but he was trying to jam the instruments. They managed to prevent a 9/11 disaster."

"There were no pilots in the seats"

Hayun said that when he entered the cockpit, he found Machchhar on the floor and the alleged attacker between the two pilot seats.

“When I went in, I saw the terrorist on the controls, between the two seats. There were no pilots in the seats,” recounted Hayun.

Hayun grabbed the attacker, put him in a choke hold and pulled him from the cockpit as other passengers and crew members helped restrain him.

The aircraft plunged nearly 14,000 feet in less than a minute according to flight-tracking data.

Hayun then returned to the cockpit.

“I jumped back in there, grabbed the controls, started pulling the controls,” he said.

“Air Crash Investigation,” a television documentary series, key to save the plane

Asked by Netanyahu how he knew what to do, Hayun replied that he had watched Air Crash Investigation a television documentary series about aviation disasters.

“The plane started leveling out a little more, and then the pilot told me he was taking over from there,” said Hayun.

Two additional flydubai pilots who were traveling aboard the aircraft then entered the cockpit, took control of the plane and ultimately landed it safely at Tabuk Airport in Saudi Arabia.

“The amazing heroism here of the Indian pilot, the Israeli passenger and his colleagues"

“The amazing heroism here of the Indian pilot, the Israeli passenger and his colleagues, and those pilots managed to prevent a 9/11 disaster, because that’s what it looks like was happening,” Netanyahu told CNN.

Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi praised Machchhar in a post on X on Thursday.

"Captain Smit Machchhar is a HERO," Modi wrote. "In the face of the gravest danger and despite being seriously injured, he showed immense courage and an unwavering resolve to protect the lives of others."

“We kept the terrorist neutralized for 55 minutes, and we landed safely”

Hayun was joined in confronting the alleged attacker by Israeli passengers Assaf Rajwan and Tzvika Manes.

“We kept the terrorist neutralized for 55 minutes, and we landed safely,” Rajwan told Israel's Channel 12 News. “Life is stronger than everything, and we decided to fight for it."

Manes told Channel 12 that his wife, who had accompanied their young daughter to the bathroom near the front of the aircraft, heard screams and a struggle in the cockpit.

The wounded Machchhar then fell through the cockpit doorway as the aircraft began plunging, Manes recalled. He pulled his daughter from the bathroom before joining Hayun and Rajwan in confronting the attacker.

“We don’t want to die”

Manes recalled hearing his daughters screaming, “We don’t want to die,” as the aircraft descended.

The three used corded headphones to bind the suspect. Meanwhile, Israeli dentist Dr. Shota Musayev treated Machchhar, stopping his bleeding and helping stabilize him.

Netanyahu separately praised Machchhar as a “true hero.”

"He saved the lives of 174 people, including Israeli citizens and other nationals"

“My salute to the Indian pilot Captain Smit Machchhar for his extraordinary bravery,” Netanyahu said. “Despite being stabbed and seriously injured, he fought back, resisted, opened the cockpit door, and enabled passengers and crew to overpower the attacker—preventing a catastrophic midair disaster.”

“He saved the lives of 174 people, including Israeli citizens and other nationals,” he added.

Six hours in Saudi Arabia

After landing at Tabuk Airport in northwestern Saudi Arabia, the passengers were met by Saudi medical and security personnel.

Some passengers initially refused to board another flydubai aircraft to return home. Israel sought to send an Israeli aircraft to collect them, but Saudi authorities did not permit it.

After checks were carried out on the replacement crew, the passengers agreed to board. The rescue flight arrived at Ben-Gurion Airport on Wednesday evening, with passengers cheering and singing as they touched down.

"There were two miracles"

One passenger, Lital Shahar, who was traveling with her four daughters, described two circumstances that she believed saved those aboard.

“There were two miracles—that Israelis were on the plane who heroically went into the cockpit... and that there were off-duty pilots onboard who could land the plane in Saudi Arabia,” she said.

The motive for the attack remained under investigation on Thursday.

“We know that Iran is sponsoring a lot of this”

Netanyahu said the suspect’s nationality and the broader regional context inevitably raised questions but stressed that no conclusion could yet be drawn about Iranian involvement.

“We know that Iran is sponsoring a lot of this,” he said, “but I can’t speak specifically of this.”

Herzog recommends four Israelis for heroism award

Israeli President Isaac Herzog said he would recommend four Israelis who helped avert disaster aboard the flydubai flight for the Presidential Award for Civilian Heroism, Israel’s highest civilian award for heroism.

Herzog spoke on Wednesday with Yaniv Hayun, Assaf Rajwan, Dr. Shota Musayev and Zvika Manes, praising their actions after the Indian pilot was stabbed by his co-pilot and the aircraft began plunging.

“At a time when the lives of so many people were in danger, you acted without hesitation, with courage, resourcefulness and extraordinary mutual responsibility,” Herzog told them. “You put yourselves at risk to save others and prevented a terrible disaster.”

"Today, the whole world saw the beautiful and courageous face of Israeli society"

“Today, the whole world saw the beautiful and courageous face of Israeli society. I am proud of you, and I thank you on behalf of the State of Israel.”

Herzog said he would bring their cases before the advisory committee for the Presidential Award for Civilian Heroism and recommend that all four receive the honor.

The president also praised the Indian captain who fought the attacker despite being seriously wounded and managed to open the cockpit door.

“I extend my gratitude and deep appreciation, on behalf of the State of Israel, to the Indian pilot, Captain Smit Machchhar, whose determination and actions made it possible to subdue the attacker and saved many lives,” Herzog said.

"All the passengers were heroes"

Musayev, the Israeli dentist who treated the wounded captain aboard the aircraft, told Herzog that the rescue had been a collective effort.

“It wasn’t only my heroism. Everyone who was there and came near the cockpit was part of it,” he said. “We were all heroes. All the passengers were heroes.”

Rajwan told Herzog that his reaction had been instinctive.

“We felt helpless, suspended in midair, and I didn’t know who to turn to,” he said. “But it was all instinct: to survive, to save the family, the people and the children.”

© JNS

Flight FZ1073, a Boeing 737 carrying 174 passengers, including 27 children, landed safely at Tabuk Airport in northwestern Saudi Arabia after transmitting emergency signals that raised fears of a possible hijacking.

Following situational assessments and testimony from passengers, Israel is treating the incident as a “full-fledged terrorist attack,” reported Israeli journalist Amit Segal.

The co-pilot apparently stabbed the captain several times before crew members and passengers managed to enter the cockpit door and overpower him, according to Segal.

“An extremely serious disaster was averted,” Segal quoted a senior Israeli official as saying.

The co-pilot was being questioned, as indications mounted that he intended to take control of the aircraft and crash it with the passengers on board, according to the official.

‘Great stroke of luck’

Israeli authorities were informed that an additional team of pilots was aboard the aircraft as part of a routine crew arrangement, Israel’s Channel 12 News reported. The pilots were traveling as passengers and were able to take control and stabilize the aircraft after the attacker was subdued.

“The great stroke of luck on this flight was the pilots,” Channel 12 quoted a senior Israeli official as saying. “Otherwise, we would have been facing an incident straight out of September 2001 or July 1976.”

The official was referring to the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist hijackings in the United States and the July 1976 hijacking of an Air France flight that was diverted to Entebbe, Uganda.

‘We just jumped and got him’

One of the passengers who helped subdue the assailant was Zvika Mans, CEO of Bank Leumi’s underwriting company, Barak Leumi, an investment-banking operation.

“It was an incredibly traumatic event,” Mans told financial outlet Calcalist.

“My wife was standing near the cockpit because my daughter was in the bathroom. Suddenly, she heard shouting coming from the cockpit. She shouted to a replacement pilot from Fiji who was sitting there: ‘Get in quickly, see what’s happening,’” he continued.

“He called for help, and two others and I entered the cockpit and subdued the attacker. I’m covered in blood. It was insane,” the CEO recounted.

He further said that the reserve pilot who landed the airplane was from Fiji, the stabbed pilot was from India, and the attacker was from Oman.

Another passenger who was apparently on board gave an account of the event in a video circulating on social media.

“We gained control over the flight,” the man said in Hebrew.

“There was a terrorist here with a knife who stabbed one of the pilots. We just jumped and got him [the attacker] out of the cockpit. A few guys. Now everything is okay... The terrorist is neutralized. There is a pilot who is seriously wounded. And apparently another pilot inside is slightly injured but is landing the plane.”

The new information followed earlier assessments that the incident was an altercation between the two pilots. An Israeli official initially told Reuters that the emergency signals were transmitted after the pilots became involved in a physical altercation.

The Prime Minister’s Office said earlier that the incident was determined not to have been a hijacking.

The aircraft was flying in Jordanian airspace when it first transmitted the 7700 transponder code, indicating a general emergency, according to flight-tracking website Flightradar24. Several minutes later, it transmitted 7500, the international code indicating possible unlawful interference.

The plane subsequently transmitted the general emergency code again before landing in Tabuk.

The signals triggered an immediate security response in Israel, with Israeli Air Force fighter jets scrambled amid fears that an aircraft carrying Israeli passengers had been hijacked.

Netanyahu, Zamir hold consultations

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu held consultations on the incident, while IDF Chief of Staff Lt. Gen. Eyal Zamir conducted a situational assessment with the commander of the Israeli Air Force and other senior military officials.

“Following concerns over an aviation incident, Prime Minister Netanyahu held consultations on the matter and is monitoring developments,” the Prime Minister’s Office said. “The incident is under control and all measures are currently being deployed to return the Israeli passengers safely to Israel.”

Video from aboard the aircraft showed passengers singing “Am Yisrael Chai” (“The people of Israel live”) moments after the plane landed safely in Saudi Arabia.

According to the Israeli Transportation Ministry, “Ben-Gurion Airport is operating as usual,” while the Israel Airports Authority said that “Israel’s airspace is open.” Earlier reports said departures from Israel had been temporarily halted as a precaution during the initial hijacking scare.

A second Flydubai flight from Dubai to Tel Aviv, FZ1081, was diverted back to Dubai on Wednesday while flying over Saudi Arabia, hours after the first incident.

Flydubai operates daily flights between Dubai and Tel Aviv. Israel and the United Arab Emirates established diplomatic relations in 2020 under the Abraham Accords. Saudi Arabia and Israel do not have diplomatic relations.

Regev demands halt to Flydubai flights

Israeli Transportation Minister Miri Regev demanded that all Flydubai flights to Israel be suspended following the suspected terrorist attack aboard the Dubai-to-Tel Aviv flight, according to Hebrew media reports.

Regev also asked the country’s Civil Aviation Authority to investigate whether the United Arab Emirates violated its aviation agreement with Israel. Under the agreement, pilots flying to Israel must hold passports from countries that have diplomatic relations with the Jewish state.

The co-pilot has been identified in unconfirmed reports as an Omani national. Israel does not have diplomatic relations with Oman.

Mossad, Shin Bet investigate

The Mossad and Shin Bet (Israeli Security Agency) are investigating the circumstances surrounding the Flydubai incident, as Israeli authorities increasingly suspect that one of the pilots deliberately attempted to crash the aircraft, Ynet reported.

The initial Israeli assessment indicated that one pilot tried to cause the aircraft to crash before the other pilot, with the help of Israeli passengers, managed to stop him, it said. The Israel Security Agency is expected to question the Israeli passengers upon their return to Israel as authorities seek to determine the motive behind the incident.

Israeli National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir described the incident as an attempted terrorist attack, saying the suspect had “planned to crash a plane and murder the 180 Israelis aboard.”

He thanked God and the “heroic passengers,” while calling for Israel to continue its campaigns against its enemies in Iran, Lebanon, Gaza and Judea and Samaria “until absolute victory.”

Opposition leader Yair Lapid, meanwhile, rejected attempts to link the incident to a security briefing he received from Netanyahu the previous evening. Netanyahu had warned publicly on Tuesday of indications that Israel’s enemies were planning an attack, prompting supporters to cite the Flydubai incident as vindication of his warning.

“Nothing even remotely resembling this morning’s plane incident appeared in the security update,” Lapid wrote on X, responding to government supporters who cited the Flydubai incident in connection with Netanyahu’s warning. “Nothing similar, nothing reminiscent of it; not even a hint.”

Israeli Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich said Israel should judge the perpetrator by his intent rather than the outcome.

“Anyone who tried to crash a plane and murder 180 Israelis should pay as though he murdered,” he wrote on X, adding that the same should apply to “any country or terrorist organization that sent him.”

© JNS

Flight FZ1073, a Boeing 737 carrying 174 passengers, including 27 children, landed safely at Tabuk Airport in northwestern Saudi Arabia after transmitting emergency signals that raised fears of a possible hijacking.

Following situational assessments and testimony from passengers, Israel is treating the incident as a “full-fledged terrorist attack,” Segal reported.

The co-pilot apparently stabbed the captain several times before crew members and passengers managed to break through the cockpit door and overpower him, according to Segal.

“An extremely serious disaster was averted,” Segal quoted a senior Israeli official as saying.

The co-pilot was being questioned, and indications were mounting that he intended to take control of the aircraft and crash it with the passengers on board, according to the official.

The new information followed earlier assessments that the incident was an altercation between the two pilots.

An Israeli official initially told Reuters that the emergency signals were transmitted after the pilots became involved in a physical altercation. The Prime Minister’s Office had also said earlier that the incident was determined not to have been a hijacking.

World

UK issues and lifts power alert: Diesel hits record high, rationing continues under contingency measures

Carlos Dominguez

The aircraft was flying over Jordanian airspace when it first transmitted the 7700 transponder code, indicating a general emergency, according to flight-tracking website Flightradar24. Several minutes later, it transmitted 7500, the international code indicating possible unlawful interference.

The plane subsequently transmitted the general emergency code again before landing in Tabuk.

The signals triggered an immediate security response in Israel, with Israeli Air Force fighter jets scrambled amid fears that an aircraft carrying Israeli passengers had been hijacked.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu held consultations on the incident, while IDF Chief of Staff Lt. Gen. Eyal Zamir conducted a situational assessment with the commander of the Israeli Air Force and other senior military officials.

“Following concerns over an aviation incident, Prime Minister Netanyahu held consultations on the matter and is monitoring developments,” the Prime Minister’s Office said. “The incident is under control and all measures are currently being deployed in order to return the Israeli passengers safely to Israel.”

The Transportation Ministry said that “Ben-Gurion Airport is operating as usual,” while the Israel Airports Authority said that “Israel’s airspace is open.” Earlier reports said departures from Israel had been temporarily halted as a precaution during the initial hijacking scare.

Flydubai operates daily flights between Dubai and Tel Aviv. Israel and the United Arab Emirates established diplomatic relations in 2020 under the Abraham Accords. Saudi Arabia and Israel do not have diplomatic relations.

Its fifth season, which aired two weeks ago on Netflix, plunges graphically into the Hamas-led atrocities in Israel on Oct. 7, 2023. No one foresaw that, at a time of unprecedented hatred of Israel, this show would have such a global impact.

In the Arab world, Fauda has always been popular, and this season has been an instant smash hit. In Lebanon, Jordan, Qatar and Saudi Arabia, Arabs who are programmed to hate and fear Israel are binge-watching a show about Israelis infiltrating Arab areas and fighting Arab terrorists, and about Jewish trauma suffered at their hands.

Maybe this is because “Fauda” presents Palestinian Arab culture with fairness, subtlety and a measure of empathy.

Even more striking has been the reception to this latest season in the Israel-hating West. People there are watching it with their hands to their mouths in shock, horror and tears.

For the first time, it seems, Fauda has made them understand the enormity of what happened on Oct. 7. For the first time, they have registered the depravity of the Gazan Arabs who invaded southern Israel, slaughtered, raped or burned alive 1200 men, women and children and took 251 into Gaza as hostages.

World

New documents point to Palestinian civilian involvement in Oct. 7 massacre

Israel Duro

How can it be, others are asking, that people are only now realizing what happened on that terrible day? How come this TV drama is cutting through when everything that the Israeli government has said about Oct. 7 could not?

The main reason why people are reacting as if they didn’t know what actually happened that day is because those atrocities were all but eclipsed by the coverage of the war that followed.

That has given rise to the grotesque belief that Israel wasn’t defending itself against genocide but was committing it, along with war crimes, ethnic cleansing and the latest evidence of its apparent monstrousness, “settler violence.”

These claims are becoming ever more hysterical and deranged, not least at the shameful anti-Israel hate-fest this week at the United Nations. The UN secretary-general, António Guterres, declared: “The scale of killing in Gaza is unlike anything I’ve witnessed in my years as secretary-general.”

Thus, he claimed that a war in which Hamas itself says some 74,000 Gazans were killed, of whom more than half were fighting-age men, was worse than the 377,000 killed in the savage war in Yemen, or the more than 600,000 who were massacred or starved to death in Ethiopia, or the 150,000 who were killed in Sudan.

Australia’s foreign minister Penny Wong claimed: “In the first six months of this year alone, ‘settler violence’ [in the “West Bank”] has driven more than 15,000 children from their homes.” There is no basis whatsoever for this figure, which she seems to have plucked out of the air.

And French President Emmanuel Macron beclowned himself by announcing: “Hamas has never been active in Judea and Samaria.”

The reality is that Jewish “settlers” in Judea and Samaria are being subjected to virtually nonstop attacks, both carried out and plotted, by Hamas and other Islamic terrorist groups.

On the eve of Yom Kippur, a father of six, Netanel Shukrun, was murdered in a shooting attack at the natural spring in Samaria where he had gone for a ritual immersion.

Within the following three hours, elsewhere in these disputed territories, according to Israeli journalist Amit Segal, an Israeli was attacked and wounded after he took a wrong turn into an Arab village; an attempted car-ramming targeted Israeli troops; and a vehicle with no license plates tried to run down two more Israelis.

All this followed a weekend in which Jewish residents of these areas had reported at least seven other such attacks. On Wednesday, the soldier son of Yechiel Leiter, Israel’s ambassador to the United States, was left fighting for his life after another car-ramming in Samaria.

On the same day, Israeli forces arrested a Fatah-affiliated man, reported by Palestinian sources to be an officer in the Palestinian Authority security apparatus, on suspicion of advancing terrorist activity.

And then Israeli forces discovered two shafts 12 meters deep in Qalqilya, an Arab city in Samaria only a few kilometers away from several Jewish cities. The shafts contained weapons, magazines and ammunition. Israeli forces arrested four Arabs suspected of terrorist activity.

In other words, the Palestinian Arabs are constantly attempting serious terrorist violence against Israelis within the “West Bank”—from where the West has decided that Jewish “settlers” must be ethnically cleansed.

Virtually none of this systemic onslaught on Israeli Jews in these territories is ever reported in the West. Instead, it defames them as monsters wantonly killing Palestinian innocents and driving the rest out.

Many things have contributed to the insanity of the West’s obsessional delegitimization of Israel that has turned it into a pariah in mainstream political and cultural circles. This can only be properly understood as part of a broader and deeper Western civilizational crisis.

However, one factor, in particular, has turned truth and lies inside out in the minds of many. For decades, there’s been a settled view among progressives that Israel is a rogue state that behaves illegally and cruelly.

That’s because the overwhelming majority of media coverage of the Jewish state has consisted of lies and distortions intended to delegitimize it as a prelude to its destruction.

In recent days, a curtain has been lifted on a corner of this madness. Motaz Azaiza is a Palestinian Arab photojournalist lionized by Western liberals for his production of images that have fueled hatred and incitement against Israel. Time magazine listed him among its top 100 most influential people of 2024.

But in a long interview in Arabic, whose translation is now all over social media, Azaiza revealed that every claim or image coming out of Gaza during the war had been crafted to fit the Hamas narrative. If Gazan journalists didn’t toe the line, they disappeared. Every journalist in Gaza belonged to a Hamas-run group.

“They take the details of a specific person, publish his phone number in the group and instruct online activists to attack him, curse him and make his life miserable.”Motaz Azaiza, Palestinian Arab photojournalist

As a result, photographers like him lowered their cameras the moment anyone said something bad about Hamas.

Furthermore, Azaiza himself supported Hamas terrorism. He related how he’d filmed Gazans beating and abusing Israelis who were captured and dragged into the Strip on Oct. 7, but he didn’t publish those videos because he didn’t want Israel to identify the abusers and kill them.

Not a word of Azaiza’s revelations has appeared in Western media. Of course not. That would reveal that they’ve been doing Hamas’s dirty work for it.

Every report from Gaza should have carried a health warning that it was produced under Hamas censorship. Instead, it was all presented as credible or true.

And this has been the case for decades. The Western public has no idea that what it takes to be the truth about Israeli behavior and Palestinian suffering—because it’s “seen it on TV”—is a giant and monstrous lie.

Shockingly, many Diaspora Jews are now claiming that Israel’s terrible image in the world is due to the toxic nature of its prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, and the extremists in his coalition government, Minister of National Security Itamar Ben-Gvir and Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich.

Such a ludicrous misrepresentation of the civilizational emergency that has engulfed the West can only be explained by the desperate need for such Diaspora Jews to deny the danger to themselves from their own society that has simply lost its collective mind.

Fauda is delivering to the West a truth that it doesn’t even realize it has so devastatingly denied.

© JNS

The same appears to be true for a lot of people like Schumer, who are nominally Jewish but who prioritize the interests of the Democratic Party over their abhorrence of antisemitism, let alone support for the survival of the State of Israel. For them, backing Dr. Abdul El-Sayed is a litmus test of their loyalty to the Democrats. It is one that many of them are passing with flying colors, as a recent letter signed by 500 people who claim to identify as Jewish attested.

That poses an interesting question for the rest of American Jewry. Regardless of their partisan affiliations, are they prepared to treat a candidate who is openly antisemitic as a line in the sand they will not cross and, in effect, a litmus test of their Jewish identity, if not also of their decency?

While ardent Democrats know how they stand on the El-Sayed litmus test, the jury is clearly out on whether Jews who don’t treat partisanship as the highest standard to which they aspire feel differently.

Horseshoe politics

Carlson’s extravagant praise for Democratic candidate El-Sayed while bashing his conservative Republican opponent, former Rep. Mike Rogers, in the crucial Michigan race might surprise some people who are still under the impression that the podcaster is on the political right. That’s no longer the case.

For anyone who has taken the trouble to watch his popular podcast in the last two years, Carlson’s praise for El-Sayed is entirely in line with the core of his message. El-Sayed hates America and all it stands for, and has stated that the Al-Qaeda attacks on targets in the United States on Sept. 11, 2001, were a natural reaction to U.S. foreign policy. He opposes the war on the Islamist regime in Iran. More importantly, he repeatedly floats blood libels about Israel committing “genocide,” and regards its efforts to defend itself against genocidal terrorists as uniquely evil. He campaigned on conspiracy theories about Jews trying to buy influence and power in Washington. And he continues to demonize the AIPAC lobby and American Jewish participation in the normal business of democracy if it involves support for the Jewish state.

In this way, El-Sayed and Carlson are a perfect reflection of the “horseshoe theory” of politics, in which the far left and far right always find common ground when it comes to Jew-hatred.

The question remains: Why is Schumer, who has spent his interminable political career boasting in Washington that he is the shomer, or “guardian,” of Israel and the Jewish people, backing El-Sayed?

Prioritizing power

The answer is as obvious as it is illustrative of Schumer’s hypocrisy and lack of principle. It’s also the same reason that motivates most antisemites: power.

Schumer is and always has been almost solely motivated by raw ambition and a desire for power. He needs El-Sayed to hold the Michigan seat for the Democrats so the party can win back control of the Senate. That will give him the ability to advance his party’s left-wing ideological goals, as well as hamstring, and maybe even impeach and oust President Donald Trump from office.

That’s why Schumer has not only endorsed someone who opposes the existence of the State of Israel—the very state he supposedly fought for all these years but has doubled down on support for El-Sayed’s candidacy, recently sending him an extra $10 million from the Democrats’ main Senate Super PAC fund.

If that means sacrificing not only the U.S.-Israel alliance and treating antisemitism as a legitimate cause, then so much the worse for Israel and the Jews.

Schumer isn’t the only Jewish Democrat treating power for their party as more important than anything else.

Michigan Attorney General Dana Nessel attracted national attention last month when she said she wouldn’t attend her party’s state convention for fear of being shouted down as Rep. Haley Stevens (D-Mich.) and other supporters of Israel had been treated when they spoke at a Democratic state gathering earlier this year.

But when faced with the question of whether to prioritize her party loyalty or her Jewish principles, Nessel didn’t hesitate. In a shocking speech to a group of Jewish Democrats, she declared that her party’s cause was more important than Israel or even the safety of American Jews.

Inevitably, that led to her endorsement of El-Sayed on a liberal podcast, where she appeared with him. In it, she anticipated criticism from Jews who don’t agree that their safety or the existence of Israel is either expendable or something that should have to wait until Democrats have saved the world from global warming or AI, saying that she would be called a “traitor to my people” or even a “kapo.” Nevertheless, she made it clear that other issues apparently take precedence over the survival of the Jews. For her, that’s true even amid an unprecedented surge of antisemitism across the United States, which is largely the work of people like El-Sayed, his allies among the Democratic Socialists of America and their liberal media cheerleaders.

Nessel’s disgraceful example is far from unique when it comes to liberal Jewish Democrats who have not unreasonably come to the conclusion that their party has been hijacked by hatemongers, and the only way to continue their careers in politics is to fall in line. Others, like former New York City Controller and likely future member of Congress Brad Lander, came to the same conclusion. He now regularly spouts the same smears about Israel to remain in sync with his party’s increasingly dominant left wing. And he used those haters to unseat incumbent Rep. Dan Goldman (D-N.Y.), who, though impeccably liberal and anti-Trump in other respects, refused to go along with the current liberal fashion when it comes to antisemitism.

And then there’s Stevens, who has spent all of 2026 being abused and smeared by El-Sayed and his supporters as a non-Jewish puppet of the supposedly all-powerful Israel lobby before losing the Senate primary to him. She knows that he’s unfit for office and that he is the spokesperson not just for an Arab and Muslim population that wants to chase those who oppose their Islamist beliefs out of the public square. But in a state where El-Sayed’s supporters control her party, the choice after her defeat wasn’t so much whether or not to back him in the general election as it was whether or not to remain in politics as a Democrat. So, of course, she did the pragmatic thing and endorsed him.

2028 contenders flock to Michigan

National politicians with an eye on the 2028 presidential election who only a few years ago wouldn’t have gone near a candidate with radical views like those of El-Sayed are now also embracing him.

Needless to say, the top celebrities of the Democrats’ left-wing faction that hopes to seize control of the party after being shut out of power by its establishment during the last three presidential election cycles is also all-in on El-Sayed. Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), the left’s unsuccessful standard-bearer in 2016 and 2020, and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.), the ringleader of the progressive congressional “Squad,” have campaigned for El-Sayed. Political observers speculate that AOC is considering a run for president if she doesn’t challenge Schumer for his Senate seat in 2028.

But it’s not just El-Sayed’s DSA allies who are lining up behind him.

In earlier iterations of her political career, former Vice President Kamala Harris presented herself as a strong supporter of Israel and the Jewish community. But she, too, can see which way the wind is blowing among Democrats and is campaigning this week with El-Sayed in Michigan. Rep. Rho Khanna (D-Calif.), who also harbors 2028 ambitions, endorsed and campaigned with El-Sayed during the primary. Former Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg, who appears to be positioning himself as a moderate as he prepares to run for president in 2028, has already endorsed and campaigned with El-Sayed.

For all of the pious rhetoric about putting principles above partisanship, politics is a team sport. That applies as much to Republicans as it does to Democrats.

El-Sayed, however, is a candidate who made the cause of driving the overwhelming majority of Jews who support Israel out of the public square the centerpiece of his Senate campaign. With him, as was the case with New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani, the American public is dealing with something very different from political business as usual.

It is one thing to speak of “big tents” and creating coalitions that include people with whom one disagrees. But when it comes to El-Sayed, Democrats aren’t just agreeing to disagree civilly. They are normalizing anti-Zionism and antisemitism, which in practice are indistinguishable from each other. Endorsing a person like El-Sayed isn’t just about wanting a Democratic majority in the U.S. Senate. It’s saying that legitimizing Jew-hatred is an acceptable price to pay for achieving such a goal. And it has now become a Democratic Party loyalty litmus test.

Still, for the majority of American Jews who identify as politically liberal and as Democrats, yet who are also supporters of Israel, the calculations so critical for those in the business of politics need not apply.

Is Jewish security a priority?

Another litmus test—one that involves not only concern for the welfare and security of Israeli Jews, but here in the United States as well—must figure into the equation. As Nessel conceded in her speech, which acknowledged the threat that El-Sayed and his supporters pose to her community, Jews now understand that their synagogues and institutions have been turned into fortresses against antisemitic attackers. Jews who speak up against antisemitism now face possible cancellation. That includes popular singers like Pink, who faces not just public abuse but attempts at cancelation from celebrities like actor Javier Bardem, who opposed her condemnation of rapper Macklemore’s spreading blood libels against Israel and the Jews during his opening act for pop singer Ed Sheeran.

They can, if they like, accept the declarations from El-Sayed and Mamdani that they want Jews to feel welcome in the Democratic Party—provided they agree that one Jewish state on the planet is one too many. In that way, they can agree to discard an essential element of Jewish identity and faith that involves devotion to the land of Israel, as well as the rights of Jews to live there and defend themselves.

Or instead, they can adopt their own litmus test and say they won’t stand with anyone who backs, either implicitly or explicitly, the genocidal goals of Hamas and the Palestinian Arabs.

It was one thing for liberals to say that support for Israel was just one issue among many they cared about and not necessarily at the top of the list before the post-Oct. 7 surge of Jew-hatred. However, at a time when Jews are undergoing a siege from antisemites who no longer dwell in the fever swamps of the far left and right, but are now at the center of public discourse in politics and the media, that tired refrain is no longer relevant or satisfactory.

Democrats are no more required to renounce their basic political philosophies than those on the right who might face the same challenge. That said, if you think the partisan litmus test is more important than one about antisemitism, Jewish safety or decency, then maybe it’s time to reset your moral compass. If not, liberal Jews need to understand that they are placing themselves on the wrong side of a great divide that puts them in league with those who seek not only to marginalize their community, but to threaten their very existence.

© JNS

Israel, he said, is the first target in a war against the entire West. The abandonment, betrayal and antisemitism we are witnessing today are a disgrace and, above all, a condemnation of those democracies that, out of opportunism, fear or ignorance, turn against Israel.

Without Israel, the fate of the West would be sealed. But Israel will prevail anyway, Netanyahu declared, “because we have no other choice.”

It was a forceful declaration of awareness of the immense danger the Jewish people have faced throughout the centuries, but also an expression of absolute confidence. The Israeli prime minister called on the Jewish people, and on all those who stand for democracy and freedom, to understand that the times have changed.

Israel is strong, and it will fight without holding back.

That was his message, together with an appeal to the world to examine its conscience and tear itself away from the lies that have become conventional wisdom.

Netanyahu was speaking, too, to the hostile audience that abandoned the U.N. General Assembly chamber when he took the podium. He tried to tell them the truth about a war shrouded in lies.

On one side stands Iran, leader of the radical Shi’ite forces. On the other stands Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, an antisemitic autocrat and champion of the Muslim Brotherhood. Their ambitions will increasingly threaten Western countries as well.

Netanyahu confronted the fundamental distortion of Israel’s long war of self-defense, a struggle that has continued for decades but has been recast as colonialism. An army that has saved Israel from annihilation is instead criminalized for doing so.

He laid out, in a matter of minutes, the pillars of the case Israel has struggled to make to the world: the manipulation of the media; the role of Qatar, Hamas’s closest patron, through Al Jazeera and its enormous financial influence in American and European institutions; Hamas’s use of civilians as human shields; and Israel’s efforts to warn civilians and move them out of danger.

He spoke of the food and vaccinations provided in Gaza—facts that contradict the accusation that Israel is committing genocide.

Politics

Detienen a una candidata demócrata respaldada por el DSA durante protesta contra Netanyahu en Nueva York

Joaquín Núñez

It was a j’accuse directed at the world.

But it was also a celebration of Jewish resilience: 3,000 years of attachment to the same land and the same faith, a civilization that gave the world monotheism and the sanctification of life.

Netanyahu spoke of the heroism of Israeli soldiers and their understanding of the magnitude of the task before them. He cited Neryiah Leiter, the son of Israeli Ambassador to the United States Yechiel Leiter, and his words of complete dedication to serving his country.

They echoed the spirit of Netanyahu’s own brother, Yoni, who was killed leading the mission to rescue Israeli and Jewish hostages at Entebbe in 1976.

We will prevail because we have no choice.

Netanyahu finally turned to Iran. He promised that the murderous regime that persecutes and kills its own people will ultimately disappear, even as the West has too often failed to raise its voice forcefully against it.

Netanyahu’s speech was not simply a defense of Israel. It was an indictment of a world that has turned reality upside down, treating those defending themselves as aggressors and too often excusing those who openly seek their destruction.

It was his j’accuse.

And his warning was directed far beyond Israel: The war Israel is fighting against terrorism, jihadism and totalitarianism will not end at Israel’s borders. A common thread unites all forms of totalitarianism.

Recognizing that threat should likewise unite the world’s democracies in defending freedom.

© JNS

It got to the point that memes began circulating online showing Rubio in the same pose, but in an array of costumes. The joke became so widespread that the White House granted him a gold-framed collage for his 55th birthday featuring 68 photos of him transformed into every type of figure, including an ayatollah.

At the center of the picture, signed by U.S. President Donald Trump in gold ink with the words, “You are great,” is the original photo of Rubio slumped on a couch in the Oval Office.

Then, suddenly, he seemed to vanish. Not literally, of course. Rubio hasn’t been idle. On the contrary, he’s been busy meeting with foreign leaders and engaging in the kind of activity that his role as top diplomat requires.

Meanwhile, Vice President JD Vance—who, for a while, was far less visible than Rubio—has been dominating headlines and generating viral clips.

The flip is striking.

At the Republican Party’s first-ever national midterm convention, held last month in Dallas, for example, Trump delivered a lengthy speech and Vance took center stage. But Rubio was absent.

The reason given for this oddity was that he was on a mission in South America. Still, his lack of attendance at the event didn’t go unnoticed.

The optics raise an interesting question: What, exactly, is going on with Rubio?

One theory is that Trump is deliberately elevating Vance as his heir apparent while sidelining Rubio. A second is that it’s Rubio who’s choosing to step back, since maintaining a lower profile may be the smartest strategy if he harbors hope of becoming Trump’s successor.

Politics

Donald Trump and Delcy Rodríguez meet behind closed doors at a New York hotel for the first time

Joaquín Núñez

After all, why create friction with either Trump or Vance? Why become entangled in every political battle when patience might serve him better?

A third possibility is that he’s thinking even further ahead. Perhaps he sees a Vance-Rubio ticket in 2028 as an option that would open the door to a future presidential bid in 2032 or 2036.

Here’s where Israel enters the discussion.

Unlike Vance, Rubio has been an unwavering champion of the Jewish state. Yet it was Vance whose appearance at the Republican Jewish Coalition Annual Leadership Summit in Las Vegas at the end of August was highlighted.

And this is despite his insistence that his remarks be delivered in a closed-door setting, without press coverage. That made it sound as though he didn’t want his anti-Israel cohorts on the far right thinking he was catering to the Jewish coalition.

Nevertheless, and to the chagrin of many Rubio supporters, Vance was treated to a warm embrace at the venue and subsequent reassurances to doubters that he was actually aligned with Israel.

It didn’t feel that way last week when Vance said on the “All-In Podcast”: “I think that more than, frankly, any president in the last 40 years, [Trump] has shown a willingness to actually part ways with [Israeli Prime Minister] Bibi Netanyahu when he feels like the interests of the American people are different from the interests of the government of Israel.”

Equally disturbing was his declaration that United States foreign policy can’t be “subservient to the State of Israel.”

Rubio would never have made such a statement. But he probably prefers not to contradict Vance openly or otherwise at this stage, when neither of them has even announced a presidential run.

Conservative commentator Ben Shapiro recently explained on the “PBD [Patrick Ben-David] Podcast” why he believes that Rubio won’t, not should be, entering the race.

Calling Rubio “a pretty risk-averse politician,” Shapiro assessed the secretary of state’s calculations as follows:

“If you’re Marco, and you’re gaming out what the next few years will look like for you, here are your choices: You run against JD, you lose, you’re done. You run against JD, you win, it’s a rough election cycle anyway, because the president’s riding in the 30s, and the country’s in the mood for ‘something new,’ and you lose, you’re done. You don’t run, JD may pick you as his VP candidate, JD loses, you’re next. JD does not pick you and JD loses, you’re also next.”

© JNS

The presence of a politician who has cheered on other Islamist terrorists in his career may be unwelcome to many of the families of the victims, and to other New Yorkers and Americans. But just as there was no way to force him to honor Israel by attending the annual parade in New York City, as mayor, he cannot be stopped from being at the 9/11 ceremony. So those there while the names are read aloud of the 2,977 people killed at the World Trade Center, the Pentagon in Washington and on a field in Shanksville, Pa., by Al-Qaeda terrorists will have to endure his presence.

Overshadowed by Afghanistan and Iraq

What matters about this kerfuffle goes beyond anger about the radical mayor’s ability to insinuate himself into the ceremony. If anything, the fact that New York City is now governed by someone who, though condemning terrorism, views America and the West from a perspective not dissimilar to that of those who committed the 9/11 attacks, is something that ought to be considered entirely relevant to the discussion of such a significant anniversary.

The horror of the assault on America 25 years ago is something those under 30 don’t remember. Even for many of us who do recall where we were that awful morning when we first heard the news of what was happening in Lower Manhattan, the memories of 9/11 are now bound up more with subsequent events.

The long, bloody and ultimately disastrous wars that the United States fought in Afghanistan and Iraq have become the primary focus for any discussion of the aftermath of 9/11 or what it meant. Indeed, the anger about those failures dominates the historical memory of George W. Bush’s presidency.

<cite class="c-detail__cite__title">Bush’s mistaken belief that he could remake the Middle East by exporting Western democracy to nations that were neither prepared for such a transition or even wanted it led many Americans to accept a distorted view of what led to those conflicts.</cite>

The idea that Americans can turn their backs on the world—and so avoid wasting so much blood and treasure on forlorn efforts to impose our values on other peoples—is deeply rooted in the country’s historical traditions. The United States has always viewed its defense as defined by oceans and continents, and therefore felt safe ignoring the rest of the world. Foreign wars, not to mention Bush’s failed experiments in nation-building, are almost always unpopular and easily depicted as imposed on the country against its will by those pursuing agendas other than American security.

Indeed, President Donald Trump’s rise and takeover of the Republican Party was part of this sea change in US politics, though that would have been unimaginable on Sept. 12, 2001. It was largely based on a belief that Bush and the rest of the party establishment were more focused on futile foreign wars while pursuing domestic policies that worsened the lives of working-class Americans.

It wasn’t a ‘war on terrorism’

Much was wrong with Bush’s policies at home and abroad. But he was right about one thing.

The lesson of 9/11 was that in the 21st century, it was no longer possible for Americans to live in splendid isolation from foreign threats, especially those originating in the Middle East. Most Americans may not have been interested in an Islamist belief centered on a perpetual war on the West; however, those pursuing that hateful cause were and are very interested in such a prospect. Bush might have been wrong about the wisdom of investing so much into the conflicts in Afghanistan and Iraq. And by toppling the despotic Saddam Hussein in Baghdad, he wound up strengthening an even more dangerous threat to the West in neighboring Iran.

Bush foolishly named the conflict a “war on terror,” even though the enemy was a global Islamist movement, and terrorism was just the foe’s preferred tactic. Whatever name was used, it wasn’t a product of mistaken intelligence about Saddam’s weapons of mass destruction programs or a doomed crusade for democracy in the Muslim and Arab worlds. It was a Western recognition that a great many Muslims and Arabs were already waging a war on them before 9/11, and that rather than going back to sleep, Americans needed to do something about it.

Desperate for international support, especially from Arab nations with governments that were as afraid of the Islamists as Washington, Bush bent over backwards to avoid accurate descriptions of what was at stake. He was equally worried that he might fuel prejudice against innocent American Muslims.

<cite class="c-detail__cite__title">His laughable repeated insistence that Islam was a religion of peace did far more harm than good—and not just because the idea that there was a post-9/11 anti-Muslim backlash was a myth without any empirical evidence to back it up.</cite>

The war in which the 9/11 attacks were a historical milestone was not against “terrorism.” It was and remains a clash of civilizations in which Islamists are not merely destructive radicals, but a global force that seeks the destruction of Western civilization and American constitutional democracy. Yet most Western leaders then and now have continued to refuse to acknowledge this basic truth.

America’s post-9/11 counter-attack against Islamism was not limited to the failed wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. Al-Qaeda was, if not entirely wiped out, still severely damaged. But President Barack Obama’s obsession with winding down Bush’s wars caused him to misread what was happening in the Middle East. The “Arab Spring” of 2010 and 2011 was not—contrary to the understanding of the Obama administration and its mainstream media cheerleaders—a drive for democracy. It was rooted in a desire to replace brutal authoritarians with equally brutal Islamists. And his push for appeasement of Iran was based on a misreading of Iran’s goals. It didn’t want to “get right with the world,” as Obama said. It was an Islamist terror regime that had been at war with America since 1979.

Misunderstanding Islamism and its allies

The Islamist foe of the West that made itself felt on 9/11 may not call itself by the same name used by those terrorists. But in its various current guises, whether among Sunni Muslims who supported ISIS as well as Hamas and the Muslim Brotherhood or its Shi’ite versions embodied by the Iranian government and its Hezbollah auxiliaries, it remains just as much at war with America as it was a quarter-of-a-century ago.

Part of the confusion felt by many Americans is their mistaken belief that the war waged on Israel by Iran and its allies is somehow unconnected to the forces that assaulted them on 9/11. That is largely the result of misleading Islamist propaganda that has both demonized Israel via the spread of blood libels about “genocide” and tapped into toxic Marxist ideas that enabled them to falsely depict the Jews and their state as “white” oppressors.

Leftist orthodoxies embodied in critical race theory, intersectionality and settler-colonialism that have come to dominate academia, the arts and the media in recent years have played a large role in mainstreaming and normalizing the antisemitism that lies behind these lies. But these beliefs have also obscured the direct link between efforts to destroy the State of Israel and the Islamist conviction that the West must also be overthrown.

And that’s why the ascent of Mamdani, coupled with the rest of the “progressive” movement that seems on the cusp of taking over the Democratic Party, remains relevant to any discussion of the legacy of 9/11.

Hasan Piker speaks for many

Popular leftist Muslim streamer Hasan Piker spoke for many who shared his hate for Israel and the West when he said that “America deserved 9/11.”

Mamdani and Michigan Democratic Senatorial candidate Dr. Abdul El-Sayed, who campaigned with Piker, may say they disagree with him about 9/11, yet they do so because it is politically expedient. Still, the entire mindset of the Democratic Socialists of America and their political allies views the United States as an imperial, colonialist and racist power that must be defeated. Indeed, that is the whole point of the settler-colonialist belief system that wishes to undermine American exceptionalism and traditional conceptions of Western civilization as much as it desires Israel’s extinction.

The uncomfortable truth about the intersectional left-wing movement supporting people like Mamdani and El-Sayed is that whether they fully comprehend it or not, they share much of the worldview of those who were behind 9/11. The same ideas that mobilized the 2001 U.N. Conference against racism in Durban, South Africa, which sought the international isolation of Israel, are connected to the notion that the West is inherently evil.

This is now also being echoed to some extent on the political right.

Since 9/11, a number of high-profile political commentators and podcasters on the right have succumbed to the siren song of isolationism. Unsurprisingly, among the leading exponents of that false view of America’s place in the world, people like former Fox News host Tucker Carlson have become open apologists for Iran, Qatar and the Muslim Brotherhood’s American supporters. Many of his followers, and those of even more extreme voices like conspiracy theorist Candace Owens and neo-Nazi groyper Nick Fuentes, may prefer to blame all the ills of the world on the traditional scapegoat of the West: the Jews. But they and those on the left who echo such views fail to realize that they have all become the dupes of those who share the goals and belief systems of the 9/11 terrorists.

This—and not the fact that, as The Wall Street Journal reported, Mamdani gave the pen he signed the annual 9/11 city proclamation to his chief legal counsel Ramzi Kassem, who previously represented Al-Qaeda terrorist clients—is why we should be outraged about him being there at the 25th-anniversary ceremonies.

<cite class="c-detail__cite__title">The thing we should be worried about is not who shows up at 9/11 ceremonies. It’s that a considerable portion of the American public has now fallen under the sway of those who also hate America and the West for some of the same reasons that motivated the murders of nearly 3,000 Americans.</cite>

This is why, although it took place a long time ago and has been overshadowed by subsequent events, that assault on America and the worldview of those who launched it is very much part of our contemporary politics.

Americans need to wake up to the fact that, contrary to the way 9/11 is remembered by much of the media and the political establishment, that dark day was part of a generational “forever” war that can’t be wished away by politicians on the right or the left.

The conflict is between two civilizations that cannot coexist peaceably. The red-green alliance of Marxists and Islamists may want to obscure this truth, as do some of their antisemitic allies on the right. But as much as we might wish it not to be so, Americans need to keep fighting the war against Islamism, and its apologists and rationalizers. Doing so will require judgment as to where to stand their ground and where not to, as Bush’s failures illustrated. Yet if they don’t, sooner or later, their enemies will remind them why the violence that was aimed at them on 9/11 isn’t a historical memory, but a current reality.

© JNS