All News (Page 32)

Israel’s military has cleared Hezbollah terrorists holed up in tunnels under the strategic Ali al-Taher ridge in southern Lebanon, Defense Minister Israel Katz said on Friday. 

Israel had said Hezbollah fighters were embedded in tunnels under the ridge, which overlooks a wide area and had become one of the most hotly contested areas in the Israel-Hezbollah war, despite a ceasefire announced in June.

Reuters reported on Thursday that Iran had warned the United States last month that it would respond forcefully to an Israeli assault on its Hezbollah allies’ positions within the ridge.

“The mission was completed and the tunnels were cleared of terrorists,” Katz said on social media, after a statement by the military late on Thursday saying it had operational control of the ridge.

The military said some Hezbollah fighters had been “eliminated,” while others had fled.

A Lebanese military officer said Israeli troops had seized the southern entrances to the complex and could monitor the northern entrances through surveillance drones.

The complex included various tunnels and storage areas, some of which were not connected to one another, and it was unclear how far the troops had penetrated, and whether any fighters were still there, or might have booby-trapped parts of the complex, the officer said.

Hezbollah did not immediately respond to a request for comment and Reuters was not able to verify the status of the ridge independently.

The Shi’ite Muslim group is believed to have built an underground command center and weapons stores within the ridge and had said it would resist any Israeli assault.

Katz’s announcement comes following a warning issued Friday evening to Israeli citizens of upcoming IDF strikes on Lebanon. 

The announcement, issued by the Upper Galilee Regional Council, told citizens to expect explosions to be heard in the Western Galilee, the Hula Valley, the Ramim Ridge, and possibly in northern Golan Heights.

No further security instructions were given to the public, though the IDF and the council will be in “continous contact” and will issue updates in the event of any changes, the department added. 

Lebanese media reports on strikes

Hezbollah-affiliated Al Mayadeen reported later on Friday a drone strike in the southern Lebanese village of Rumman. 

Two people were reportedly killed in the attack, which was targeting a motorcycle, Ynet reported, citing Lebanese media. 

The IDF struck Rumman earlier this week, according to reports by Hezbollah-run Al Manar TV, after terrorists launched two explosive drones towards soldiers and prompted sirens in some areas in northern Israel. 

Additional reports from Lebanese media on Friday said that two people had been killed from IDF strikes in Zutar a-Sharqiya in the Nabatieh Governorate in country’s south. 

According to Lebanon’s National News Agency, the strikes hit a vehicle in the area. 

The identities of those killed have not been released. 

This post was originally published on here. 

Jafar Farah announced on Thursday that he was withdrawing his candidacy for the Knesset from the second spot on the Democratic Front for Peace and Equality (Hadash) list, saying the decision was made “out of a sense of responsibility and out of support for the Joint List.”

Farah, 59, from Haifa, had been elected to the second position on Hadash’s Knesset slate, but faced mounting pressure in recent weeks following allegations of sexual harassment and calls from within and outside the party for him to step down.

A statement sent to party supporters said Farah made the decision in coordination with Hadash and Joint List institutions, as well as with leading figures in Haifa and across the country.

The statement said the move was intended “to thwart attempts to undermine the Joint List by exploiting the allegations against comrade Abu Basel,” which, according to the statement, Farah strongly denies.

Farah was hospitalized at Rambam Hospital on Thursday after feeling unwell. The statement addressed his health, wishing him a speedy recovery from the “temporary health crisis,” but did not provide additional details.

Farah’s replacement with Hadash

Despite withdrawing his candidacy, Farah said he plans to continue his political and social activities and continue working on behalf of Hadash, the party, and the Joint List.

Following Farah’s withdrawal, Hadash’s national secretariat and central committee are expected to convene on Friday for a joint meeting to select a replacement candidate for the second spot on the list.

According to the statement, all members of Hadash’s national council will be eligible to compete for the position.

This post was originally published on here. 

Yesh Atid MK Michal Shir announced that she is leaving the party and will not seek reelection in a post on X/Twitter on Friday, becoming the latest lawmaker to depart the party amid a growing wave of exits.

“I shared with Yesh Atid chairman and former prime minister, my friend Yair Lapid, that I do not wish to run in the next Knesset election, while expressing my full confidence in him, in my colleagues in the party, which I will remain in and support, and in the need to lead significant change and correction in Israel,” Shir said. 

According to Friday’s Maariv poll, B’Yachad, the party Yesh Atid merged with at the beginning of the election campaign, is currently projected to hold 15 seats, making it the third-largest party.

גאה להיות שליחת ציבור.
כעת הזמן לפעול למען מדינת ועם ישראל במישורים נוספים.
שיתפתי את יו”ר יש עתיד וראש הממשלה לשעבר, חברי יאיר לפיד שברצוני לא להתמודד בבחירות הבאות לכנסת, זאת במקביל הבעת האמון המלאה שיש לי בו, בחבריי למפלגה שבה אני נשארת ותומכת ובצורך להוביל שינוי ותיקון… pic.twitter.com/S3GHq1Q5xE

— 🟠Michal Shir – מיכל שיר (@MichalShir) September 4, 2026

Shir’s announcement followed MK Karin Elharrar’s decision on Thursday to leave the party. MKs Debbie Biton and Tatiana Mazarsky also announced on Wednesday that they would not run in the upcoming election.

The four lawmakers join a growing list of Yesh Atid MKs who have already announced their departures: Meir Cohen, Mickey Levy, Elazar Stern (who joined the party of Gadi Eisenkot), Ron Katz, Yoav Segalovich (who joined Ra’am), Orna Barbivai, Boaz Toporovsky, Yoel Razvozov and Idan Roll.

Party slate reshuffle

Ahead of the presentation of its new candidate list, Yesh Atid is facing a significant reshuffling of its lineup, with political sources already voicing harsh assessments of the party’s situation.

“Look at what is happening there,” a political source familiar with the developments said. “This is a party that was established in 2013. In its first election it won 19 seats, and in the last election 24, and it is simply ending.”

This post was originally published on here. 

Twenty-five years ago next week, America and the world awoke to a morning that would forever divide time into before and after.

On September 11, 2001, Islamic terrorists hijacked four passenger planes and turned them into weapons. One plane struck the Pentagon, while aboard United Flight 93, passengers and crew fought back against the hijackers before the aircraft crashed in a field near Shanksville, Pennsylvania. Nearly 3,000 innocent people were murdered in New York, Washington, and Pennsylvania. The Twin Towers collapsed, smoke rose over Manhattan, and Americans suddenly realized that oceans were no protection against those determined to destroy them.

As we approach the 25th anniversary of that terrible day, this week’s haftarah (Isaiah 61:10-63:9) offers a powerful perspective on destruction, rebuilding, and memory.

Destruction, rebuilding, and memory

The prophet Isaiah declares: “For Zion’s sake I will not be silent, and for Jerusalem’s sake I will not be still, until her righteousness goes forth like brightness, and her salvation like a burning torch” (Isaiah 62:1).

Isaiah is speaking, of course, about Zion and Jerusalem. His prophecy is directed to the Jewish people and describes the future restoration of the Jewish capital.

But the ideas he raises – refusing to be silenced and rebuilding after devastation – speak beyond the immediate context of the prophecy.

That is especially true as America prepares to commemorate September 11.

Throughout the haftarah, Isaiah speaks of Jerusalem’s transformation from desolation to renewal. The city that had been abandoned and devastated will rise again. “You shall be a glorious crown in the hand of the Lord,” he declares (62:3), and it will no longer be called “forsaken” or its land “desolate” (62:4).

Anyone who remembers lower Manhattan in the weeks after September 11 can appreciate the power of those images.

Ground Zero was a smoking ruin. Thousands of families had been shattered. One of the most recognizable parts of the New York skyline had disappeared in a matter of hours.

Yet New York rebuilt.

The terrorists succeeded in murdering thousands of innocent people, but they failed in their larger goal. They did not destroy America or bring it to its knees.

The verse’s opening words contain another important idea: “For Zion’s sake I will not be silent.”

Twenty-five years is a long time.

An entire generation of Americans has now grown up with no personal recollection of September 11. They did not watch the towers burn nor see people covered in ash fleeing through lower Manhattan. They did not watch firefighters and police officers rush into buildings from which everyone else was desperately trying to escape.

For those of us who lived through that day, the images remain difficult to forget. But for millions of younger Americans, September 11 is already history. Which makes it all the more important to tell the story clearly.

This week’s parasha adds a related dimension.

Nitzavim opens with Moses’ declaration to the Jewish people: “You are standing today, all of you, before the Lord your God” (Deuteronomy 29:9).

A few verses later, Rashi (Rabbi Shlomo Yitzhaki, 1040-1105) cites a midrash explaining why these words follow the terrible curses at the end of last week’s parasha of Ki Tavo.

After hearing the 98 curses, Rashi says, the faces of the Jewish people turned pale. “Who can withstand all these?” they asked.

Moses reassured them by pointing to a simple fact: “You are standing here today.” Despite everything they had endured, the Jewish people were still there. It is first and foremost a message about Jewish survival.

Few peoples have suffered as much persecution, exile, and destruction and nevertheless remained standing. Jewish history is filled with enemies who were convinced that this time they would finally put an end to us. They were wrong.

Without equating the Jewish historical experience with what America endured on September 11, there is nevertheless something here that applies.

Terrorists do not seek only to kill. They seek to instill fear in those who survive and to convince them that they are helpless.

But survival is not enough. There is also an obligation to preserve the truth about what happened.

Judaism has always understood that recalling the past is not an exercise in nostalgia. Zachor – remember – is one of the Torah’s great imperatives because the past is meant to guide us in the present.

Twenty-five years after September 11, Americans owe it to those who were murdered and to the firefighters, police officers, and other first responders who ran toward danger not to allow that day to become blurred with the passage of time.

The next generation should know what happened. They should know who carried it out and why. And they should know how Americans responded with resilience and determination.

Jewish history has taught us that survival depends not only on standing firm but on understanding the forces that sought to bring us down in the first place. That is a lesson rooted in the Jewish experience.

But September 11 is not ancient history, and the jihadist hatred that produced it did not disappear with the smoke over Manhattan.

Twenty-five years later, remembering who attacked America, and why, is not dwelling on the past. It is an essential part of defending the future. 

This post was originally published on here. 

Near the end of his life, Moses delivered one of the Torah’s most frightening passages: the tochachah, a warning of the devastation that could follow if we betrayed God. The Torah had sounded a similar warning earlier, but Moses returned to it now, as we prepared to enter the Land of Israel without him.

The scenes are grisly: starvation, sickness, military conquest, exile, dispersion, and crushing psychological uncertainty. Jewish history has brought us through many of these horrors. Twice we were banished from Jerusalem, and we endured suffering that often seemed to mirror Moses’s nightmare.

After delivering this warning, Moses worries that its terrifying images may leave us dispirited. This was especially dangerous for a nation exhausted by 40 years in the desert and the death of an entire generation. Aware of the fear his words had created, Moses reassures them: Atem nitzavim hayom – you are still standing. Despite everything you have heard and endured, you are still here.

Moses speaks across the centuries to every generation forced to endure suffering and upheaval. His words offer a message of recovery: how a wounded people can absorb tragedy without allowing it to define its future.

It feels as if Moses is speaking directly to our generation as we approach the end of a third year of a burdensome war that has taken so much from us. Rosh Hashanah invites us to look back and search for perspective.

This past year cannot easily be separated from the three-year odyssey we have traveled. The past three years have blurred together through war, loss, sacrifice, and uncertainty. After living through what at times has felt like our own small churban (catastrophe), what can Moses teach us about how to stand again?

Moving forward

The first message is that, despite everything we have endured, we have survived. Have all the threats been eliminated? Have we achieved a lasting victory? The answers remain uncertain and probably negative. Yet after nearly three years of relentless war, fought on the battlefield and absorbed on the home front, the country is still standing and thriving.

That recognition should not diminish our ambitions. Israel cannot define success as survival alone, and Jewish history cannot be reduced to an endless cycle of escaping destruction. However, sometimes the great achievement is simply that, after every blow, we are still standing and moving forward.

Confidence

Survival should also affect how we think about the future. Before October 7, many of us assumed a certain level of security and stability. That assumption has been shattered. We understand our vulnerability more clearly now, and we know how quickly circumstances can change. But surviving these years can also create a different kind of confidence.

It comes from having faced danger at close range, suffered painful losses, and still discovered that, with God’s help, we can defend ourselves, adapt, and move forward. This confidence is less comfortable than what we once possessed, but more durable.

Common bonds

Shared suffering also creates deep bonds. Moses gathers a diverse nation, from its most prominent figures to the woodchoppers and water carriers at the lowest rungs of ancient society. Their social and economic differences are real, yet they have all crossed the same wilderness and heard the same dark warnings about what may lie ahead. What they endured together has tied them to one another in ways that status and background cannot easily undo. They may stand on different rungs, but they are standing on the same ground.

That message matters as Israel enters a fractious election season, when campaigns inevitably sharpen differences to mobilize voters. The extraordinary achdut (unity) after Oct. 7 was bound to fade. As the war lengthened, old fissures resurfaced and new ones emerged.

Yet beneath those disparities lies an experience we have shared. We have lived through the same national emergency, followed the same casualty reports, and rushed to shelters under the same sirens. We remain bound by a common fate and by the historical future we are building together. Election seasons encourage us to sort ourselves into camps. Moses asks us to remember the bonds that common suffering creates.

Beyond our own generation

Moses also widens the horizon beyond the generation standing before him. He announces that this covenant is directed not only at “those who are here with us today,” but also “those who are not here with us today.” Jewish history is a mission shared across generations. One generation may be asked to make sacrifices whose full meaning becomes apparent only decades later.

King David yearned to build the Temple. He purchased the site, prepared materials, and laid the groundwork, yet he was not permitted to build it. That task was left to his son Solomon.

That intergenerational perspective can give us patience during our own difficult chapter. We may not resolve every threat, repair every fracture, or complete every national project in our lifetime. Much of what this generation is enduring may be laying foundations for a future that belongs to those who come after us. Covenant means accepting responsibility for a story whose next chapters will be written long after we are gone.

What are we standing for?

Moses also teaches that survival carries responsibility. To remain standing after catastrophe places demands upon us. There is a responsibility to learn from the failures that contributed to disaster, to honor those who lost their lives, and to ensure that their sacrifice shapes the future and doesn’t recede into memory.

Every Jew living in the aftermath of Oct. 7 should, in some form, articulate a personal doctrine of responsibility. We are living through a consequential period of Jewish history, and that raises an unavoidable question: what does this moment ask of me?

The answer will differ from person to person. For some, it may mean a more visible embrace of Jewish identity or deeper attachment to Israel. For religious Jews, it may demand greater seriousness about Torah and mitzvot.

It is hard to imagine living through a period that has altered Jewish history so profoundly and emerging with precisely the same sense of obligation we carried into it. If we are still standing, Moses implies, then we must ask what we are now standing for. Each of us must find a way to personalize this moment in history.

Standing before God

Finally, we should remember in front of whom we stand. Moses does not merely tell us that we are still standing. We are standing before God. Even after enduring the punishments he describes, we remain lifnei Hashem. We may not fully understand the divine logic of suffering, but we have walked through these dark years with Him. Gam ki elech b’gei tzalmavet lo ira ra, ki Atah imadi – even when I walk through the valley of death, I do not fear, because you (God) are with me. Even when we struggle to feel God’s help, there is comfort in knowing that we continue to walk with God.

For the past three years, we have walked with God through fear, grief, and uncertainty. We have cried out, prayed to, and questioned God. At times we have felt God’s presence clearly; at other times we have struggled to find it. But we have never stopped turning toward God.

As we approach the days when we once again stand before God in judgment, we should remember that we have already spent three years standing before Him in struggle. And after everything, we are still standing – before Him.■

The writer is a rabbi and educator at Yeshivat Har Etzion (Gush). Find his latest book, Reclaiming Redemption, Vol. II: Faith, Identity, Peoplehood, and the Storms of War, at mtaraginbooks.com.

This post was originally published on here. 

Four Israeli athletes were removed from the list of participants in the City of Derry Triathlon in Derry, Northern Ireland, the event organizers confirmed on Thursday.

This followed a request from the Israeli National Federation to “remove all the Israeli athletes entered” according to the BBC.

“The North West Triathlon Club (NWTC), who are organising the race, earlier said they could not support the Israeli athletes taking part,” the BBC reported.

NWTC had concerns over “athlete and public safety,” if Israelis participated, according to the public broadcaster’s report.

The event, slated to occur on Saturday, with participant briefings held on Friday, has a “final start list” of participants, and event organizers confirmed that it “does not include any athletes representing Israel.”

“This is not a position directed at anyone because of their religion or ethnicity, nor is it hostility towards an individual simply because they were born in Israel,” NWTC said, according to the BBC.

“It is a position concerning representation of the State of Israel in international sport and the attempt to present normality on the international sporting stage while Palestinians continue to suffer,” NWTC added.

Police became ‘aware of potential protest activity’ if Israelis were to participate

The Police Service of Northern Ireland (PSNI) told BBC’s Northern Irish local outlet that it had “become aware of potential protest activity in relation to the event.”

“The selection and confirmation of athletes for Europe Triathlon Cup competition is managed by Europe Triathlon, under World Triathlon rules. It is not possible to comment on the circumstances or decisions relating to individual athletes. The Local Organising Committee has no role in selecting the international start list,” the event’s website reads.

“The selection and confirmation of athletes for Europe Triathlon Cup competition is managed by Europe Triathlon, under World Triathlon rules. It is not possible to comment on the circumstances or decisions relating to individual athletes. The Local Organising Committee has no role in selecting the international start list,” it adds.

“Having discussed the event with the LOC and National Federation, Europe Triathlon is confident that the race can proceed safely and provide a safe and enjoyable event for all athletes,” the organizers said.

Anti-Zionist groups, local councils praise lack of Israeli athletes as BDS victory, pro-Israeli politician, Jewish community leader denounce decision

The Derry Anti War Coalition, a far Left anti-Zionist group, said on social media that it is “elighted that the triathletes from Israel will no longer be participating in the City of Derry Triathlon.”

Additonally, members of the Derry City Council praised the lack of Israeli participants as a victory for the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) movement.

However, Julie Middleton, one of the five Members of the Legislative Assembly (based in Stormont, Belfast) representing Foyle, which includes Derry, said that the event should have been used to showcase the city’s “hospitality and openness,” and instead has “become associated with the exclusion of athletes because they are Israeli.”

Middleton is from the Democratic Unionist Party, a Protestant party founded by Evangelical Christian preacher Ian Paisley, and its members are generally supportive of Israel.

The city should be one “where visitors and athletes from every background are treated with dignity,” Middleton said.

Deputy Chairman of the Belfast Jewish Community Michael Black told BBC Northern Ireland that Israeli athletes not participating is “very disappointing but doesn’t come as a surprise.”

“Ireland, and I include Derry in this accusation, has the reputation of being one of the most antisemitic countries in Europe,” his statement to BBC read.

He aso denounced the city and district council’s BDS policies, saying that “many of the accusations that Israeli is accused of are false.”

“The Jewish community’s sympathy goes out to all the innocent people who have suffered terribly in this war on every side,” his statement noted.

“Sport should not be used to divide people as this has done and will do nothing to bring peace to the Middle East,” Black emphasized.

Sport should ‘not become vehicle for discrimination, division,’ Embassy of Israel in London says

The Embassy of Israel in London condemned the incident in a post on X/Twitter on Friday, calling the club’s decision “deeply troubling.” 

The decision by North West Triathlon Club (NWTC) in Londonderry to not allow Israeli athletes to compete is deeply troubling.

Sport should bring people together, not become a vehicle for discrimination and division.

If the NWTC cannot provide safety to all participants and… https://t.co/syEsc2qj0R

— Israel in the UK 🇮🇱🤝🇬🇧 (@IsraelinUK) September 4, 2026

“Sport should bring people together, not become a vehicle for discrimination and division,” said the post. “If the NWTC cannot provide safety to all participants and event goers, it raises serious questions as to the ability to hold any future events.”

The post also called on NWtC to “uphold the principles of equality, fairness and inclusion” and argued that Israeli athletes should have the “same right to compete as athletes from every other nationality.” 

This post was originally published on here. 

I am partial to the argument that, specifically at this time of heightened strategic risk, Israel needs to elect or reelect leaders with significant security and diplomatic experience. 

But I am convinced that Israel also needs to elect a new, younger generation of bright and believing, unsullied, and notionally more honest politicians – even if they are “green.”

I am certain that there is a capable and courageous next generation of Israeli leaders to take the reins of state – many of them the fearless heroes of Israel’s recent wars. 

Therefore, I eagerly await the day, perhaps in the 2028 or 2030 elections, when the current crop of politicians will have passed – and that means everybody from Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to Yair Lapid and Moshe Gafni. 

In the meantime, when I vote this fall, I am going to seek a synthesis between the two competing wrenches that tug at my conscience: experience vs innovation, resilience vs virtue.

This approach does not present easy choices. But to begin with, it means ruling out the most cynical and mercenary political candidates, those whose career has been based on violent and divisive rhetoric and endless acrobatics – always on the attack and flip-flopping from one position to another.

The classic examples of such cynicism and divisiveness are Avigdor Liberman, Aryeh Deri, and Yair Golan.

Liberman is a cross between the deceased French extremist Jean-Marie Le Pen, a populist rabble-rouser, and Russian dictator Vladimir Putin, who excels at accruing power and asserting his relevance despite inherent weaknesses.

Alas, Liberman’s contribution to Israeli politics runs from negligible to detrimental. He has no record to speak of, aside from incitement and vindictiveness. 

I cannot think of a single positive contribution to Israeli society, economy, defense, and foreign policy made by Liberman and his dictatorially hand-picked Knesset faction members over the past 40 years (quite a few of whom have ended up in jail).

Does anybody remember Liberman’s tenures as minister of infrastructure, transport, strategic affairs, finance, foreign affairs, and defense? Is there a single concrete achievement or worthwhile doctrine that emerged from his tenure in these senior posts?

What I do remember well are Liberman’s many grandiloquent and violent eruptions on sensitive issues that require statesmanship and nuance – two qualities he lacks exceedingly – and his pouting resignations each time he did not get his way.

Yvette the autocrat called for the bombing of the Aswan Dam in response to Egypt’s support of Yasser Arafat. He wanted to transfer Arabs of the Galilean triangle to Palestinian control, and to expel Arab citizens who refuse to pledge loyalty to the Jewish state.

On the other hand, he has played fast and loose with the idea of Palestinian statehood, sometimes fiercely against and other times smarmily and suggestively in favor. 

When, as foreign minister, he was seeking to ingratiate himself in Washington, he declared that he would be willing to evacuate his home in Nokdim (a Gush Etzion settlement) in exchange for peace. What that really meant was that Liberman would readily sell his mother and sister to advance his political fortunes.

In 2019, Liberman nauseatingly pushed the country into another utterly unnecessary election campaign; a campaign that meant months more of deadlock in government policymaking and tons of hateful election bombast – supposedly over the haredi (ultra-Orthodox) army draft issue. And he threatens to do so again now.

But of course, Liberman doesn’t have a sliver of an idea on how to coax ultra-Orthodox Jews into the army. His going to the barricades on this issue to the point of forcing repeat elections was and is nothing more than pompous posturing; a cockfight meant to sadistically draw Netanyahu’s blood.

Deri’s disasters 

Deri’s ruinous record in politics is without peer. He is an acute expression of pugnacious haredi power; a super-self-confident politician who bulldozes over all legal, civic, and moral boundaries to “bolster” (read: enfeeble) his haredi voting public. His brand of blithely sectorial, brusquely cynical politics has been catastrophic.

He is the central father-figure of the haredi world of dependency, of living off the dole; to the creation of the all-encompassing government-support system for those studying in yeshiva, a system so comprehensive that it simply does not pay for a kollel student to step out into the working world.

He has never spoken positively about higher education and professional training programs for ultra-Orthodox men and women that have opened in recent years, and he opposes the new haredi elementary and high school stream that teaches the basic core curriculum of math, science, and English. 

I conjecture that Deri would sell every Judea and Samaria settler to the Saudis, twice over, if that were to earn Shas-affiliated schools a two percent budget increase.

Deri also is directly culpable for turning away Rabbi Ovadia Yosef from his earlier path of religious and political moderation. He whispered wicked things into the ears of Rav Ovadia, as needed, about religious Zionist, Russian, and Reform Jews, and secular politicians.

The fact that Deri has been caught in criminal violations more than once and gone to jail has not stopped him. He brushes this off by presenting himself as a persecuted Dreyfus and wronged John Demjanjuk rolled into one, and as a holy man whose concern for the poor will bring salvation to the downtrodden of Israel.

He seditiously plays the ethnic card, with him being discriminated against as a “franck” (a poor, marginalized Sephardi Jew). He has no problem cynically inflaming ethnic tensions in this way, even though it is of course ridiculous for Deri to claim marginalization. 

If anybody has been in the privileged political driver’s seat for the past 35 years, as opposed to being victimized, it is Aryeh Deri.

Deri also holds the bag for the disasters that befell the haredi community in Meron on Lag Ba’omer in 2021 and during the coronavirus epidemic (when he led the haredi community’s separatist and defiant response to the government’s lockdown restrictions).

And of course, Deri has been a key figure in the ongoing haredi effort to legislate a permanent exemption of haredi men from military or national service – all the while outrageously sitting in the internal security cabinet that made the critical decisions about sending (non-haredi) Israeli soldiers into battle.

The danger of Golan

Golan is both a disappointment and a danger. Disappointment, because I remember him as a nationalist and appropriately aggressive military general who proudly paraded his Jewish-traditional roots. He was a good colleague at one of my conservative-leaning think tanks.

But then he sensed a vacuum at the far left of the political spectrum with the disintegration of the Meretz and Labor parties, and he jumped into politics and revved up the most extreme political positions to benefit from the void.

Golan has grandiloquently attacked religious Zionists and settlers, nationalists and soldiers, defended insurrection in the army, and accused Israel of genocide and other war crimes – to the point where his charges regularly feature in anti-Israel lawsuits around the world.

Golan and the rabble he is rallying also are a danger. 

In every online video I have seen of parlor meetings and political rallies for The Democrats – a political party name meant as a caustic sneer – raw hatred and demonization dominate the discourse – of Netanyahu, of right-wingers, of the religious and ultra-Orthodox, and even of “centrists” like Gadi Eisenkot and Naftali Bennett.

This is accompanied by threats to “crush and close” any and all institutions that don’t align with the party’s “democratic” (sic.) worldview (such as pre-military religious colleges and hesder yeshivas), and to violently roll back (“destroy”) settlements while repeating the Oslo-era mistakes of territorial withdrawals.

Golan’s hypocrisy, hyperbole, and fanaticism light up every warning signal in my book. 

Oh, how Israel truly needs a different breed of upright, principled, and temperate leaders!

The writer is managing senior fellow at the Jerusalem-based Misgav Institute for National Security & Zionist Strategy. The views expressed here are his own. His diplomatic, defense, political, and Jewish world columns over the past 30 years are at davidmweinberg.com.

This post was originally published on here. 

Unity Party chairman and former ambassador to the United Nations Gilad Erdan announced he is withdrawing from Israel’s 2026 election race on Friday.

In a statement, Erdan said the party had little likelihood of crossing the electoral threshold and that efforts to form mergers with other parties had failed to materialize, leading him to suspend the campaign.

“Despite the many efforts we made, the support for the Unity Party I established so far does not provide a high likelihood of crossing the electoral threshold, and the possibilities of joining with additional parties in the unity bloc are also not materializing,” Erdan said. “Therefore, I have decided that the Unity Party will not run in the upcoming election.” 

Erdan said he believes voters are primarily focused on determining who will become prime minister rather than on his party’s platform of establishing a broad unity government.

“Unfortunately, after about a month of campaigning, reality shows that in the upcoming election, a large majority of the public is seeking above all a clear decision on the question of who will be prime minister, and the need for a broad unity government is not high on citizens’ list of priorities,” Erdan said.

Merger talks between Unity, Blue and White fail

The statement comes following N12 News’ Friday report that talks for a potential merger between Unity and the Blue and White party had failed.

Talks of a merger between the two parties have been ongoing for the past few weeks, yet Unity Party officials told N12 following Friday’s meeting that the discussions did not address any substantive issues or include a commitment to unite the bloc. They suggested that the true purpose of the meeting was to generate media attention.

In an interview with Walla published on Friday, Blue and White chairman Benny Gantz said he would not give up the top spot in merger talks.

“Because I need to lead this path,” Gantz said when asked why he should be placed first.

“Because I created it. I know what it needs. I have enough experience to know what to do and what not to do. And it’s not just about a catchy name in a campaign, or someone trying to take you down, it’s about what your essence is,” Gantz said.

When asked whether the people he is negotiating with understand that he will not give up the top spot, Gantz replied, “I believe so.”

Eisenkot calls on parties struggling to cross threshold to act responsibly, suspend campaigns

Yashar party leader Gadi Eisenkot commended Erdan’s decision to suspend his party’s campaign, calling it a “responsible and leadership-driven decision” that would increase the chances of replacing the October 7 government and establishing a broad Zionist government that would bring healing and recovery to Israel.

Eisenkot called on other parties struggling to cross the electoral threshold to make similar decisions, saying, “Any party that is hovering around the electoral threshold should act with the same responsibility and put the good of Israel ahead of any other consideration.”

This post was originally published on here. 

The US and its allies Britain, France and Germany are pushing other countries on the UN nuclear watchdog’s board to pass a resolution next week reporting Iran to the UN Security Council for the first time in 20 years, diplomats said on Friday.

If passed, the resolution would follow up on one adopted on June 12 of last year declaring Iran in breach of its non-proliferation obligations for not fully cooperating with an investigation into uranium traces found at undeclared sites.

The US launched an air war against Tehran on February 28 in which, together with Israel, it destroyed or badly damaged Iran’s uranium-enrichment facilities.

Iran has not let International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) inspectors return to the bombed sites since then or verify what remains of its stocks of enriched uranium, some of which was enriched to up to 60% purity, a short step from weapons grade.

Resolution would be culmination of standoff over IAEA’s access to nuclear sites

A resolution by the IAEA‘s 35-nation board reporting Iran to the Security Council would also be the culmination of a standoff over IAEA access to those sites, since the board has passed two resolutions in the past year demanding Iran declare its enriched uranium stocks and grant the IAEA full access to verify them.

A draft text for the resolution has yet to be formally submitted to the board and negotiations between countries over the exact wording are ongoing, diplomats said. A draft is usually formally submitted early in the week of a board meeting.

As a party to the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT), Iran has the right to develop nuclear technology, including enrichment, for peaceful purposes. Iran says it would never produce nuclear weapons.

It is, however, the only country to enrich to 60% without making a bomb. The amount it has enriched to that level is “a matter of serious concern” to the IAEA.

The IAEA believes well over 200 kg of that highly enriched uranium has survived the bombardments and is held in a tunnel complex at Isfahan and at the Natanz facility.

This post was originally published on here. 

Israel’s Right is conducting an experiment in political self-sabotage.

On August 20, I argued that the Israeli Right needs a merger, not another messiah. Since then, the case has become even more obvious. Ofer Winter has People of Israel. Gilad Erdan and Yuli Edelstein have Unity. Yoaz Hendel and Chili Tropper have Zionist Home. Sharren Haskel has Israel First. 

Everyone wants unity so badly that they keep starting new parties to achieve it. This is not a voter shortage. It is a politician surplus.

The math now moves almost daily. 

A Walla poll conducted September 1-2 put Winter below the threshold while the newly united Smotrich-Feiglin list crossed it. 

A Channel 13 poll that same evening put Smotrich-Feiglin at six seats and Winter at four. 

The exact winner changes by poll. The structural problem does not. The Right keeps moving overlapping voters among competing political vehicles.

Bezalel Smotrich and Moshe Feiglin have now signed a technical-bloc agreement, with Feiglin accepting second place and with room left for Winter to join ahead of him. 

Whatever one thinks of that list, the mechanism matters. Somebody accepted second place. 

Winter has refused so far, and reportedly rejected five guaranteed Likud slots, arguing that Israel needs leaders untainted by the failures of October 7. Fair enough. Israel needs new political blood. 

But every new leader does not need a new ballot slip. Renewal and consolidation are not opposites.

The larger bench is no longer hypothetical. Winter already has Yoseph Haddad and Fleur Hassan-Nahoum. Unity has Erdan, Edelstein, and Aliza Bloch. Zionist Home has Hendel and Tropper. Israel First has Sharren Haskel and Jonathan Pollard, with additional candidates still to be announced. 

Put those networks under one roof, and you have ministers, a former Knesset speaker, diplomats, commanders, and new blood shaped by October 7.

The Israeli Right is not merely wasting votes. It may be wasting the makings of an entire government.

That bench is also why consolidation is difficult. Erdan has the résumé. Edelstein has the stature. Winter has military credentials and momentum. Haskel has ideological breadth and diplomatic experience. 

The tragedy begins when each concludes that being qualified for first makes third unacceptable.

Being number one in a four-seat party may feel more important than being number three in a governing movement. It is not. One gives a title. The other gives power.

Benny Gantz and Erdan continue discussing a merger while both parties remain below the threshold in the latest Walla poll. 

But Gantz said he will not sit with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu; Unity deliberately left that door open. A merger can solve an electoral problem while creating an identity problem.

That brings me back to Menachem Begin. Israelis remember the 1977 mahapach (revolution) as the night he ended almost three decades of Labor dominance. But the lesson came before election night. 

Herut joined the Liberal Party to form Gahal. Gahal later joined other factions to create Likud. Politicians who disagreed about plenty discovered that common purpose mattered more than their individual vehicles.

The Hebrew word “likud” means consolidation. Before Likud became a proper noun, it described an action. Israel does not necessarily need another Likud. It needs another act of likud. 

The next Begin will not be whoever quotes Begin most often or insists on heading the newest party. It will be whoever persuades ambitious people that being second, third, or fourth together is more consequential than being first alone.

We do not yet know who that is. Of all the people in this space, Haskel is the one I am watching closely.

The next mahapach 

I know Sharren. I have advised her and consider her a friend. I have watched her when the cameras were on and off. That may create blind spots. It has also shown me something I value in a culture addicted to performance: she works.

More importantly, Haskel pushed consolidation before the current proliferation made the need impossible to ignore. She has said her first campaign was a campaign of unity and that she still believes these forces need to connect. Consolidation came first. The splinter parties came after.

Haskel has already surrendered something political. She resigned as deputy foreign minister over haredi (ultra-Orthodox) military exemptions. 

After Oct. 7, reservists returned repeatedly, and Israel needed manpower, yet politicians were still negotiating how to protect draft evaders. Principles are popular until they cost somebody a chair. This one cost Haskel hers.

Now comes the harder sacrifice. As Israel First fills out its slate, any new momentum should become leverage for consolidation, not an excuse to abandon it. If Israel First really means Israel first, Haskel may have to accept being number two, three, or four on a consolidated list. 

Someone else may head it. Israel First may disappear into something larger. She has said her party is not a personal campaign for prime minister, but an effort to fix broken systems. Good. That is exactly the test.

The standard applies to everyone. Winter must decide whether independence is an achievement when one poll gives him four seats, and another leaves him outside the Knesset. His argument for renewal is legitimate, but renewal without consolidation can still produce newer names competing for the same voters. 

Erdan, Edelstein, Hendel, and Tropper must decide which red lines are principles and which are obstacles.

That is consolidation: not everyone becoming identical, but everyone understanding that power requires giving something up.

A constituency is waiting: right-wing Israelis who cannot stand Netanyahu yet will never vote for the Left; secular Israelis who love Judaism; religious Israelis who serve and resent unequal sacrifice; entrepreneurs suffocating under bureaucracy; reservists who feel the system does not represent the people carrying the country.

Commentators call them the moderate Right. I hate that description. Oct. 7 made many more hawkish. They want a country strong enough to survive and serious enough to deserve what it asks from its citizens.

For 2,000 years, Jews could say somebody else controlled the army, borders, and machinery of government. Zionism ended that excuse. Sovereignty means that there is no someone else. We are the someone else.

Millions of Israelis increasingly feel they carry responsibilities their political system does not represent: responsibility without representation. Begin understood that possibility. He did not merely find voters. He helped voters find one another.

The ideological home already exists: national strength, individual liberty, Jewish identity, and shared responsibility. Call it national liberalism. Israel should be strong and unmistakably Jewish. Its citizens should be free. Its economy should reward people who build. Citizenship should carry rights and obligations.

The Right does not need to become less right-wing. It needs to remember that anger is not an ideology and outrage is not a governing program. That is why the next mahapach has to happen inside the Right.

We do not yet know who the next Begin is. But we know what the job requires. Someone has to convince a remarkable collection of Israelis that being second, third, or fourth together matters more than being first alone. Someone has to make common purpose larger than ego. Someone has to turn Likud back into a verb.

Sharren Haskel may understand that task better than most. The question is whether she can make the others understand it, too.

That is how the next mahapach begins.

The writer is the founder and CEO of The Israel Innovation Fund and author of the forthcoming book What Is Zionism?

This post was originally published on here. 

You are a soldier, tasked with searching a house for a suspected terrorist and hidden weapons. The house is full of women, children, and an elderly, sick, bedridden man.

How do you proceed? Do you force the man out of bed immediately to complete a thorough search, or do you slow the search to treat him with kid gloves, possibly endangering your soldiers?

Judgment calls like these are everyday occurrences for 19-year-old soldiers – young men whose moral dilemmas only a year earlier involved not getting involved with their best friend’s girlfriend or resisting the urge to glance at the test paper of the nerd sitting in front of them.

But we send soldiers – not a cadre of lawyers – to the battlefield. How are these soldiers taught to make complex calls that could put them on the wrong end of an IED, or just as easily land them in military prison for taking an operation too far, according to the moral sensibilities of the most moral army in the world?

On August 9, according to Ynet, “The IDF raised the level of authorization required for certain strikes as high as the chief of staff, effectively requiring political approval in some cases. Commanders were also recently given explicit instructions to halt immediate-response fire, except in cases involving the removal of a direct threat.”

Per Hillel Biton Rosen, military and security correspondent for Channel 14, just days later Hamas operatives were identified crossing the Yellow Line ceasefire demarcation in Gaza, where they stole engineering equipment. Soldiers requested authorization to engage, but senior command denied the request.

The incursion was just one of more than 65 crossings, three times the number recorded the week before the rules of engagement changed.

A senior security official said: “Hamas is testing us, exactly as it did before Oct. 7. What happened last night could have ended with a soldier being abducted.”

Permission-to-open-fire orders clearly act as a deterrent and are necessary to maintain law and order.

Yet, the rules of engagement are fluid and always have been. They change with government policies and with diplomatic pressure from allies and enemies alike. Even while operating under the rules, there are days when the army is instructed by political echelons to hold its fire, even though the day before, it would have opened fire. 

IDF soldiers are faced with numerous situations that require sensitivity and mindful awareness of civilian populations, but when an army is dealing with terror operatives, tunnels, and a malicious entity that disguises itself as civilian and totally controls its civilian population, it is hard for any soldier to know who in the scheme of things is who. 

Israel’s life-saving measures go beyond what international law requires

JOHN SPENCER – chairman of urban warfare studies at the Modern War Institute at West Point, and one of the most prominent Western experts on urban warfare – has been a leading voice on Israel’s conduct of operations in Gaza. His views are based on comparative historical analysis of urban battles.

In a March 2024 Newsweek op-ed, Spencer claimed: “Israel has done more and implemented more measures to prevent civilian harm than any military in the history of urban warfare.”

He said these measures go beyond what international law requires and beyond what the US and its partners did in comparable fights in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Mosul against ISIS.

Specific practices Spencer lauded:

• Mass evacuation warnings (days or weeks in advance in some cases)

• Phone calls, text messages, and recorded voice messages to specific buildings or neighborhoods

• “Roof-knocking” (firing a small, non-lethal munition onto a roof as a final warning)

• Distribution of maps showing safe routes and daily updates on humanitarian corridors

• Frequent tactical pauses and localized pauses during operations

• Extensive use of precision-guided munitions and formal targeting processes

He noted that no other military has systematically combined these actions at this scale while fighting an enemy deeply embedded in dense urban terrain with a vast tunnel network.

Which raises the question: Does that make the IDF highly moral or overly cautious?

A history of the ethos

Military ethics long predates the State of Israel.

Carl von Clausewitz, who joined the Prussian army at age 12 and served in the Imperial Russian Army during the 1812 campaign against France, is widely regarded as the father of modern strategic studies and a philosopher of war. His book On War remains one of the key texts used to teach soldiers and shape modern military and political strategy. 

He stated that “war is the continuation of politics by other means,” balancing the people, the army, and the government. Thus, politics determines when a soldier is given permission to shoot.

Here in Israel, we have seen firsthand how diplomacy can get in the way of winning a war. In Israel, where “Never Again” is our battle cry, upon enlisting, each soldier is given a document called “Ruah Zahal,” “The Spirit of the IDF,” which includes a section on “Purity of Arms.”

The purity of arms (tohar haneshek) was an unwritten military tradition developed in the pre-state Jewish defense organizations, especially the Hagana and its strike force, the Palmah, and passed on to the present-day IDF.

“Tohar haneshek” means keeping one’s weapon “clean” from innocent blood. It means weapons and force should be used only for self-defense and the mission, and only to the extent necessary.

Fighters are expected to avoid harming noncombatants, including civilians, prisoners, and the defenseless, as much as possible, and to maintain their humanity even in the midst of combat, refusing to sink into unnecessary cruelty, looting, revenge, or abuse.

By the early 1990s, the IDF had spent several years dealing with the First Intifada, which began in 1987. New missions involved frequent operations in densely populated civilian areas against non-state actors, stone-throwers, and terrorists who did not wear uniforms or separate themselves from the civilian population.

Traditional army-versus-army doctrines were no longer sufficient on their own. Commanders needed clearer guidance for soldiers operating in complex, morally ambiguous environments.

In 1994, then-IDF chief of staff Ehud Barak called in Asa Kasher, who was already deeply familiar with the IDF through years of teaching its officers, a respected professional ethicist capable of turning military tradition into a coherent modern code, and someone who could lend the project both intellectual seriousness and legitimacy.

He is a professor emeritus of professional ethics and philosophy of practice at Tel Aviv University, a senior researcher (emeritus) at the Institute for National Security Studies, and the recipient of the 2000 Israel Prize for philosophy.

Together, they created “Ruah Zahal,” the IDF Code of Ethics, preserving the morals of the “purity of arms” in precise written language. The formal version retained the core ideas of tohar haneshek – the use of force only for the mission, only to the necessary extent, and the obligation to avoid harming noncombatants – while placing them within a broader ethical framework that also included human dignity, the sanctity of life, and the values of a democratic state.

The ethical code treats the drive to accomplish the mission and achieve victory as essential, but not absolute. Force must still be used only to the extent necessary, humanity must be maintained, and unnecessary harm to noncombatants must be avoided. Victory is a professional and moral obligation of the soldier and the army, yet it does not license the use of unrestricted means.

Victory: Is the IDF ‘allowed’ to win a war?

Kasher’s views on victory appear to be the most controversial aspect of his body of writing on IDF military ethics, especially “Ruah Zahal.” He treated “victory” differently, depending on the type of conflict.

He espoused the view that in classical interstate wars between regular armies, traditional concepts of military victory (defeating or destroying the enemy’s capacity to continue fighting) remain relevant.

In the fight against terrorism and non-state actors who embed among civilians, however, Kasher argued in his fall 2014 essay “The Ethics of Protective Edge” in the Jewish Review of Books – the classical notion of total victory is often obsolete or strategically unattainable.

He has further written that in recent decades “victory has been replaced by the ideal of successfully accomplishing given missions.”

One of the core members of the committee appointed in 2000 to drastically revise the original IDF Code of Ethics was Prof. Avi Sagi, a philosopher and leading public voice on modern Jewish identity, existentialism, and military ethics. He served as a professor of philosophy at Bar-Ilan University and a senior research fellow at the Shalom Hartman Institute.

In interviews with former Maariv journalist Tuvi (Toby) Pollack as late as 2024, Sagi argued that “victory is not a moral value” and warned that elevating it could justify the unrestrained use of force.

In a 2026 paper, “The IDF Needs to Return to Its Core Values,” published by Col. (res.) Prof. Gabi Siboni and Brig.-Gen. (ret.) Erez Winner, of the Jerusalem Institute for Strategy and Security, described Sagi’s contribution to the “Purity of Arms” as “one of the most contentious changes” ever made to “Ruah Zahal.”

They continued, “The new language created a sense of ‘moral hygiene’ where the objective seemed not to be defeating the enemy but emerging from battle with a legal ‘clean sheet.’”

In his published paper “Correcting the IDF’s Ethical Code,” Dr. Ronen Shoval, an Israeli political philosopher and head of the Argaman Institute for Advanced Studies, quoted Sagi as saying (on the podcast On the Way: Conversations with Tuvi Pollack, episode 418, titled “Avi Sagi on the Ethics of Combat and Warfare, Dealing with Feelings of Revenge, and the Difficulty of Maintaining Human Dignity”): “Victory does not justify the use of force. If ‘victory’ meets the standard of self-defense, fine; if not, we should reserve the concept of victory for basketball or chess….”

Siboni and Winner argued that “in the end, victory was included only through a kind of compromise typical of Israel’s political culture, in the phrasing ‘commitment to the mission and striving for victory.’ Even so, the formulation of the value itself remained almost apologetic.

“For many in the fighting ranks, pushing victory to the margins of the value system conveyed a sense that the army had lost its bearings. If a military does not educate its soldiers to see victory as a central value, it risks losing its fundamental moral purpose: protecting the lives of the state’s citizens.”

‘Israel is Just the Beginning’

IN A RECENT INTERVIEW with the Magazine, Moshe Feiglin – former MK and deputy speaker of the Knesset, and founder of the Zehut party, which recently announced it will be running in a technical election bloc with Bezalel Smotrich’s Religious Zionism party – he explained, “The Purity of Arms reiterates again and again that the word ‘victory’ is immoral because you’re only allowed to fight to protect yourself. You’re not allowed to fight for justice, for example, or for your country, or for your land, or to achieve any kind of victory over evil forces, because there is no good and bad in the world.”

Feiglin’s new book, Israel is Just the Beginning, posits that Israel’s refusal to embrace its own Jewish identity is keeping it from winning existential wars it must win to survive.

“As long as Israel and its army are led by community-minded leaders and not national ones, the war will not end, because in truth the national war has yet to begin,” wrote Feiglin, who lost a grandchild in Operation Swords of Iron.

“Despite the terrible sacrifice of the soldiers and officers who gave their lives to save our country, this war will not end until Israel’s leadership is likewise drawn from their ranks – from those who have not lost their national consciousness. The war will not end because a community, even one whose sons are heroes, does not win wars. A community can only lick its wounds and redeem its captives.”

In our interview, Feiglin was clear: “When you are in war, there should be only one goal, and it is to win.”

He extended this credo to acts of terrorism. “If an Arab comes out of his town and throws a rock at an Israeli car or at Israeli people who are walking and touring the land, the reaction [of the Israeli civilian or soldier] should be to shoot in order to kill, because he is fighting against you in a national war. It is not a private altercation between people. We are at war.

“When the Egyptian soldiers crossed the Suez Canal in 1973, they didn’t look to see who was shooting at that moment and who was not. They understood that we are at war. Every Arab throwing a rock on you is a soldier in the Arab national war. And when you are at war, there should be only one goal, and it is to win.

“In Gaza we tried not to use methods that would have ended the war fast,” Feiglin said. “We sent soldiers into booby traps and tunnels – including my own grandson.”

He paused for a painful moment. “We think by acting this way, we will gain points with the international moral conscience, but we are actually showing the world that we don’t accept our own code of justice. We want to show the world how westerly civilized we are – but they look at us and say ‘polite colonialists are still colonialists.’”

Do the “don’t shoot” directives, the roof-thumping and flyer dropping advanced warnings go above and beyond the call of duty to warn enemy civilians and combatants that the IDF is about to attack?

“The idea that we can train our soldiers to understand this moral precipice in the classroom fails to take into account the very dynamic nature of war and the ‘fog of war’ that has been described so well by Clausewitz,” Dr. David Leitner shared with the Magazine. He is a strategy and leadership expert, the founder of Rhydl Consulting, and a lecturer at Bar-Ilan University.

“Soldiers face unique situations every single time they go out into the field, and they must make decisions based on what they are experiencing in the moment,” he added.

“To judge those decisions from a legal standpoint that does not understand or accept that war takes place within civilian populations who have, at the very bare minimum, supported the enemy and often are actively participating in enemy activities – it is, in and of itself, a recipe for hesitation that can cost soldiers’ lives.

“International politics are heavily impacting the ability of frontline soldiers to act for their own safety, or to act in ways they perceive as vital for the safety of the home front and the achievement of victory.

“This lack of a clear, shared understanding of what victory looks like – both in the military and the political realms – has led to significant friction between the political and upper echelons of the military and the soldiers out in the field who are experiencing the war through their feet.”

The IDF weighs in

In a conversation with a senior military official, the Magazine asked: “Is the IDF fighting to win?”

The official explained that the overall picture shows the IDF striving to create conditions in which Hamas is weakened and exhausted, no longer capable of operating as it once did, and ultimately defeated. The goal is to eliminate any threat to the residents of the State of Israel. Achieving this objective requires a continuous effort to balance the application of force, strategy, and tactics.

Regarding whether soldiers might refrain from firing to avoid legal consequences, the official expressed certainty that this is not the case. Of the thousands of decisions made during the war, only a very small percentage ultimately reach investigation. Many of these reviews, the official added, are not formal investigations but, rather, inquiries designed to ensure that protocols were properly followed.

Returning to the earlier example of soldiers entering a house that might contain terrorists, the official was asked how the army teaches its forces to respect other cultures while maintaining determination and authority.

The official explained that the IDF does not dictate one precise, specific method for entering a house. Instead, soldiers are given the values and ethics that underlie the mission. They are reminded that a clear, specific mission is the sole reason they entered the house; following the mission’s logic is essential. Respect is emphasized not only as an ethical requirement but also as a practical one – a lack of respect creates chaos, hysteria, and unnecessary noise that harm the mission itself.

Preparation for these complex situations relies on repeated drills and simulations. The simulations are filmed so that soldiers can review the footage and learn from their mistakes.

When asked whether the code of “Purity of Arms” needs to be updated, the official acknowledged that work remains to be done but argued that the original statement does not require rephrasing or rewriting. The code is strong enough as written, the official said. The priority is ensuring the right tools are used to implement it.

Rewriting the rules: Is ‘Purity of Arms’ due for an upgrade?

While “Purity of Arms” assumes a meaningful distinction between combatants and noncombatants and the possibility of limiting force to what is necessary, Israel’s adversaries – Hamas, Palestinian Islamic Jihad, Hezbollah, etc. – systematically reject that distinction.

They embed fighters, command centers, weapons, and tunnels inside and under civilian infrastructure, use human shields, and celebrate their own civilian deaths as strategic assets.

When the enemy deliberately creates mixed environments, the practical ability to apply force “only to the necessary extent” while still accomplishing the mission shrinks dramatically.

The Torah gives distinct guidelines for different kinds of wars, milhemet mitzvah and milhemet reshut, the former being the kind of war that must be fought under any circumstances. Then there is the Amalek war, where after being attacked by the merciless Amalekites, the fledgling nation of Israel was commanded to execute every man, woman, and child, and even livestock. The Talmud weighs in, saying, “If someone comes to kill you, you are obligated to kill him first.”

With that in mind, many individuals and political action groups hope that this year brings changes to the army’s document. These efforts reflect a broader post-Oct. 7 debate on the Right over whether the IDF’s formal ethical language adequately serves a Jewish army confronting existential threats.

In May 2026, MK Zvi Sukkot organized a letter, signed by about 30 coalition MKs, to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu demanding a full reexamination and rewrite of “Ruah Zahal.”

The signatories said lessons from the recent war and the changing security reality required reformulating the foundational principles so they strengthen fighters’ trust and align with the mission of defeating the enemy.

Sukkot criticized the existing version as having been written by “extreme leftists,” claimed Kasher had tried to damage the IDF, and insisted the code must state unequivocally that the lives of Israeli soldiers take precedence over those of the enemy.

Alongside Sukkot’s parliamentary push, a more ideological campaign has emerged from religious-Zionist circles seeking a fundamental rewrite of the IDF’s ethical protocols.

The Torat HaMedina institute, based in Jerusalem’s Beit Orot neighborhood, launched the book Mashiv HaRuah le-Zahal (Restoring the Spirit to the IDF) in spring 2026 as an explicit Jewish alternative to the existing “Ruah Zahal.”

Authored by rabbis Yair Kartman and Yaakov Yakir, the work argues that the current code is overly universalist and restraining, treating war as a necessary evil that risks moral corruption, rather than as a mitzvah and divine mission. 

Drawing on Torah sources, it reframes combat as a continuation of the path of King David and the Maccabees, fought in the name of God and the people of Israel, and proposes five core values: defense of the Jewish people, sovereignty in the Land of Israel, decisive victory, Jewish morality rooted in tradition and prophecy, and the prioritization of Israeli soldiers’ lives in a collective national campaign.

The project has attracted visible support from senior religious and political figures, including Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich, Heritage Minister Amichai Eliyahu, National Missions Minister Orit Strock, and MK Simcha Rothman, who attended related events.

A more measured corrective proposal, advanced by former IDF deputy chief of staff Maj.-Gen. (ret.) Uzi Dayan and Rabbi Oury Cherki similarly elevate victory as the supreme value and clarify the primacy of Israeli lives, while remaining closer to the existing framework.

Rabbi Cherki explained that war is a catastrophe according to the Torah. But, he said, the Torah recognizes that we are going to get into wars, and we must defend ourselves against barbarians. The Ramban, he said, points out that when it is necessary, we are obligated to prevent attacks.

That is part of the morality of war, Cherki told the Magazine. We first seek peace, but if that can’t be achieved, we fight to win.

“We must fight against terrorists who fight among civilian populations,” he explained. “The initial document [“Ruah Zahal”] reflects an immoral value. A fighter needs to have a sense of justice and legitimacy. We should never have to choose between the lives of our soldiers and the lives of civilians on the other side.”

Another notable voice in the critique of “Ruah Zahal” is Shoval’s. In his paper “Correcting the IDF’s Ethical Code,” he explained that “ethical codes for armies thus seek to fulfill three central functions:

“1. Morality and limitations: They establish a framework that defines the boundaries of combat.

“2. Maintaining public legitimacy: A code of ethics ensures that the actions of the military receive the support of the civilian population.

“3. Identity and heritage: The code of ethics strengthens the sense of purpose in military service by framing it not only as a means of defense but also as a mission grounded in values.

“The main problem is that, as it stands, this ‘moral guide’ [‘Ruah Zahal’] is simply not moral,” he explained. “There is a hidden assumption that to fight a war is unjust. But sometimes not killing the enemy is worse than killing them. There is an assumption that using force implies you are doing something wrong. It goes against the Christian ethos of turning the other cheek.”

He continued, “If the role of the soldier is to protect the civilian, the life of the soldier is worth more than the life of the terrorist.”

He pointed out in an interview that the questions come into play if there is an Israeli civilian victim and a Nukhba terrorist, both wounded on the ground. Who should the medics treat first? The current ethics in Israel, he said, is to triage the one who is more wounded, but he said the wounded civilian should morally come first.

In February 2016, Gadi Eisenkot (who was then IDF chief of staff and is currently party leader of Yashar), speaking to high school seniors about to enter the army, at Heichal Hatarbut in Bat Yam, said:

“When there’s a 13-year-old girl holding scissors or a knife, and there is distance between her and the soldiers, I don’t want to see a soldier open fire and empty his magazine at a girl like that, even if she is committing a very serious act. Rather, he should use the force necessary to fulfill the objective.”

He added that soldiers receive weapons to take a human life when required, but the rules of engagement are derived from the mission, and the IDF does not operate according to “slogans” such as “whoever comes to kill you, kill him first.” A soldier may remove the safety and shoot if there is real danger to himself or his comrades but must apply only the necessary force.

‘Purity of Arms’ is unlikely to change anytime soon

THE REAL QUESTION is how an ordinary soldier is to determine the severity of the threat in real time and under maximum pressure.

Shoval said that unless there is a concerted effort, the “Purity of Arms” is unlikely to change anytime soon. “The conception has not changed in the army, and it’s not likely to change. It can only change when we have a new generation of soldiers with fresh ideas, coming from the post-Oct. 7 crop of soldiers.”

Cherki admitted the IDF appears to be hesitating because it is not ready to make deep changes, but he does believe enough people want to see changes happen soon.

“Changing the ‘Purity of Arms’ document should be an election goal of the Right,” he said.

Hopefully, the candidates will clearly state their points of view. Some have already weighed in.

Voters will be left to determine whether the rules of engagement ultimately protect our soldiers and the Israeli nation they defend, and whether this new year will be safer for everyone in Israel.■

What would you do? Responses to a hypothetical army exercise in civilian areas

The mission: You have already given clear warnings to civilians to evacuate an area used by terrorists, to give the inhabitants time to flee. These include leaflets, phone calls, and “roof-knocking.” Some civilians remain. How does this affect your decision to engage a legitimate military target in that area?

Military figures weigh in:

Combat commander: I will never accept a greater risk to my own force to further reduce possible civilian harm. Obviously, we always try to avoid civilian harm. But not at the expense of our own troops’ safety. A properly coordinated and executed mission reduces the risk to my soldiers to zero. No one is more precious to me than my soldiers. 

Remaining civilians do not affect my decision to engage the military target. Unless someone gives an order to call off the mission because the civilians refuse to evacuate, the mission proceeds as planned.

High-ranking elite combat soldier: If clear warnings were given (and in my view, even those warnings go above and beyond), anyone who chooses to remain in an active war zone understands the risks. As a combat soldier, I cannot compromise operational decision-making or soldier safety to account for those who remained after being warned to evacuate. 

In a combat zone, I will almost always prioritize the safety and lives of my soldiers above other considerations.

Former US naval officer: If fair warning has been given, I’d authorize the bombing to commence immediately, regardless of how many civilians remain in the targeted area. If the civilians aren’t smart enough to clear the area, then whatever happens is on them. Of course, they might be loitering around either to buy time for the terrorists to get away or to prevent us from carrying out our bombing.

– J.S.

Moshe Feiglin’s book on identity and the fight against radical Islam

Moshe Feiglin’s new book, Israel is Just the Beginning: How Israel’s Fight Against Radical Islam and Progressivism Protects the Identity and Liberty of the Civilized World, is illuminating and sometimes deeply disturbing. He analyzes the unholy alliance between Islam and progressivism, attributing the connection to a quest to abolish identity – not just Jewish identity, but any identities all over the world.

Chapter by chapter, Feiglin – who was a Likud MK and deputy Knesset speaker from February 2013-March 2015, and now heads the Zehut (Identity) party, which recently joined in a technical bloc with Smotrich’s Religious Zionism party – lays out the facts. Issues span from Israel’s existential war, which he calls “The Temple War,” to the fight to abolish sexual identity, the ideological battle over climate change, how feminists conveniently ignored Islam’s Oct. 7 rapes, Israel’s rules of engagement, COVID coverups, and more.

Feiglin calls out the hypocrisy of Israelis’ blind eye to the government’s state-controlled “dominion over our lives,” submission to Oslo, while also exploring its overall tendency to suppress Jewish identity within the State of Israel. And he exposes Islam’s sometimes concealed, more often unhidden, agenda to destroy the Jewish state.

Embracing Judaism’s God-fearing identity, Feiglin says, is the answer – not only for Israel, but the world. He acknowledges the Jews’ rejection of faith provided “energy powerful enough to propel the Jewish people back to renewed nationhood.” But he says that civic nationalism “could no longer imbue Israeli life with meaning, nor sustain a national sense of justice, validity, and legitimacy.”

Feiglin’s book is a compelling read, even if you don’t agree with all his ideas or conclusions. Regardless of political point of view or religious orientation, he provides enough facts, observations, and simple truths for pro-Israel readers trying to make sense of today’s extremely confusing world situation. – J.S.

This post was originally published on here. 

Israeli security forces arrested five members of a suspected terrorist cell in the Kabatiya area of the West Bank on Friday, according to the military. 

Per the IDF, the five individuals were involved in planning and advancing terror attacks, and planning to carry out an attack against Israeli armed forces and civilians. 

The military also touted the fact that the five were each apprehended within less than ten minutes of security forces reaching their locations. 

Upon searching the suspected terrorists’ homes, IDF soldiers found military equipment, including an M16 rifle. 

IDF dismantles over 30 weapon production machines in West Bank in counterterrorism operation

The IDF dismantled over 30 weapon production machines in the Nablus area over the course of a two-day counterterrorism operation, the military announced on Friday.

During the operation, the IDF, guided by the Shin Bet (Israel Security Agency), also confiscated concealed weaponry, questioned suspects, and arrested over 10 wanted individuals.

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu reacted to the operation in a statement released later on Friday.

“I commend our forces on a successful operation in Samaria in which they destroyed dozens of lathes for weapons manufacturing, seized dozens of weapons, and arrested individuals wanted for involvement in terrorism. ​Our activity to thwart terrorism continues with full force in Judea and Samaria, Gaza, Lebanon, and every place where our enemies attempt to threaten the State of Israel,” the prime minister said.

IDF kills Nukhba commander in Khan Yunis

Also on Friday, the IDF announced that it had killed Muhammad Mahmoud Marshad al-Qadi, a Nukhba Force company commander, in a targeted strike in the Khan Yunis area in the southern Gaza Strip.

Qadi took part in the October 7 invasion and was also involved in keeping the Israeli hostages captive throughout the war in Rafah. 

Recently, Qadi led training for Hamas terrorists and worked to rehabilitate the terrorist organization’s capabilities, the IDF said, adding that he constituted an active threat because he had recently planned and advanced attacks against IDF troops and Israeli civilians. 

James Genn contributed to this report.

This post was originally published on here. 

MK Tally Gotliv will be given the second place on Otzma Yehudit’s list for the upcoming Knesset elections, party leader and National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir announced at a press conference on Friday.

Initially, she was given third place on the list, but was raised to second after Yitzhak Wasserlauf volunteered to drop down one place.

Notably, given the way that the electoral threshold works in Israel’s Knesset elections, placing within the top four seats is a technicality, as the minimum number of seats a party list can be granted is four after passing the 3.25% electoral threshold.

“They wanted to silence Tally and shut her mouth,” Ben-Gvir said at the conference. “It was not pleasant for Gali Baharv-Miara and other factors, that Tally would act. She fought like a lioness in the plenum. I am proud that she is with us. You can agree with her, you can disagree with her, but everyone knows that when Tally Gotliv says something, it is clear that she speaks her truth, exactly what she thinks, without fear, without getting confused, stands for the truth without fearing anyone.”

Gotliv said that the people were “thirsty” for Otzma Yehudit.

“Otzma managed to do the impossible and I watched it from the sidelines. Ben-Gvir doesn’t want weak people around him, he wants strong people. There is a brotherhood and unity in the party that is not seen in other parties that see a sense of competition and difficulty in encouraging.” 

She added that she joined Otzma Yehudit in order to preserve the right-wing bloc and ensure that a right-wing government is elected.

Ben-Gvir hints at inclusion of MK May Golan in Otzma Yehudit list

Gotliv has not officially resigned from the Knesset or the Likud party, and thus is able to continue serving and maintain political immunity from prosecution until the slated elections are held.

During the press conference, when asked about the possibility of adding MK May Golan to his list, after she secured an unrealistic position in the Likud primaries, Ben-Gvir responded, “She is a good friend of mine, wait patiently.”

James Genn and Jerusalem Post Staff contributed to this report.

This post was originally published on here. 

There’s a strange collective amnesia taking hold of the cultured masses. Certain circles in Hollywood and beyond have found a new cause: Marwan Barghouti. Some stars have adopted Barghouti’s cause with a passion.

Barghouti, 66, is the new Nelson Mandela. He has been conveniently sanitized to become a saint.

Those promoting Barghouti often fail to mention that he is serving five life sentences for masterminding terrorist attacks that took the lives of four Israelis, including a woman killed at a gas station, three murdered in an attack on Tel Aviv’s Seafood Market restaurant in 2002, and a Greek monk who was mistaken for a Jew in 2001.

Barghouti is the leader of Tanzim, one of Fatah’s “military” wings, and founder of the al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigades. He was acquitted of 21 counts of murder in 33 other attacks for “lack of sufficient evidence.” 

It seems the victims’ families have more reason to claim Barghouti’s trial was unfair than he does.

Multiple actors join Freedom for Marwan campaign

As several writers have noted in this paper recently, more than 20 actors who have appeared in Marvel films have joined the Freedom for Marwan campaign calling for his release. These include Benedict Cumberbatch, Mark Ruffalo, Ian McKellen, Cate Blanchett, and Tilda Swinton, among others.

According to an Instagram post last week, Barghouti’s family launched the campaign at the end of 2025 in coordination with organizations in the UK. Some 200 cultural figures had already signed a petition before the latest round of celebs voiced their support. It’s a culture war with a twist.

As Stephen Flatow noted in an opinion piece last week, the campaign isn’t new: “What’s new is the branding. Someone decided the fastest route to a younger, historically illiterate audience runs through the MCU [Marvel Cinematic Universe] fan account, not the literary supplement. It is a genuinely modern piece of message discipline, and it deserves to be examined as such rather than waved off as showbiz noise.”

Flatow’s daughter, Alisa, was murdered in a 1995 bus attack by Palestine Islamic Jihad. He notes that her name and the names of Barghouti’s victims – Salim Barakat, Yoela Chen, Eli Dahan, Yosef Habi, and Tsibouktsakis Germanus – are being erased, like their lives, while the Barghouti campaign cashes in on famous names.

“Nelson Mandela was never convicted of ordering the murder of a restaurant patron. The comparison was always doing more work than the facts could bear,” Flatow pointed out. “It is doing that work again this week, with better production values and a Marvel logo.”

I was reminded of the so-called Mandela Effect. Nelson Mandela is remembered as a human rights activist who, after years in jail under the apartheid regime, became president of South Africa. His name lives on after his death in 2013 for another strange reason – his non-death.

The term “Mandela Effect” was coined by writer and paranormal researcher Fiona Broome in 2009. She mentioned at a conference remembering Mandela’s death in jail in the 1980s and found other attendees had the same collective memory of the non-event. 

I suspect Mandela might be rolling in his grave, now that he is truly dead and buried, at being constantly compared to Marwan Barghouti, a living martyr in some minds. While Mandela supported Palestinian aspirations, he called on the Arab world to accept Israel’s legitimacy and right to exist in security, and even visited the Jewish state in 1999.

Most of us have fallen for Mandela Effect false memories at some time or another. Oft-cited examples include the common misperception that the Monopoly man icon wears a monocle; Curious George’s non-existent tail; and the entrenched belief that Vikings wore horns on their helmets. These appeared centuries later in a staged performance of Richard Wagner’s Der Ring des Nibelungen, but go tell that to Norway’s fans at this summer’s FIFA World Cup.

Fittingly, several well-known examples of the Mandela Effect come from the cinema world – it’s Loony Tunes, not Toons, for instance. Although Disney’s Wicked Queen in Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs said, “Magic mirror on the wall…” this is not reflected in the way most of us remember it, with a double “mirror.” 

It’s now common knowledge that the famous line in Casablanca, “Play it again, Sam!” is actually “You played it for her, you can play it for me. If she can stand it, I can. Play it!” But that is too long for our memories, or at least for our needs for brevity for quotability.

Veteran readers might remember, correctly, that I have written about the Mandela Effect before. It’s perhaps the only opportunity I have to drop the word “confabulation” into a column. Confabulation occurs when the brain fills in gaps to make more sense of memories. Priming or suggestion can also alter how we perceive an event, and information learned after an event can change the way we remember it.

A look at the Quote Investigator site shows that Gandhi’s “Be the change you wish to see in the world” first came to life in a 1974 book by Arleen Lorrance, more than 25 years after Gandhi’s death. In 1913, Gandhi wrote a less pithy version: “If we could change ourselves, the tendencies in the world would also change. As a man changes his own nature, so does the attitude of the world change toward him.” 

Barghouti, of course, is also compared to Gandhi.

Broome’s more conspiratorial thought suggests the Mandela Effect is related to alternate realities or parallel universes.

Mandela knew what an apartheid state actually was – the white minority completely subjugated and segregated the black majority, who had no vote and no say at all in the corridors of power. This week of all weeks, when Yoav Segalovitz, a Jewish former top police commander and politician, took the No. 2 spot on Mansour Abbas’s Ra’am Islamist Arab list, talk of apartheid seems particularly incongruous. Whatever you think of Segalovitz and Abbas and the politics behind their move, apartheid it ain’t.

There is a thin line between distortion, disinformation, and propaganda, especially in the age of social media, but it might take the Monopoly man’s missing monocle to find it. It is likely that certain satirical shows also play a role in forming public perceptions, with an oft-repeated theme in a skit creating a new general memory.

Barghouti has become a saint while terms like Israeli “genocide” and “starvation” have been bandied around so often they’ve become accepted as truths.

Apropos “starvation,” in the Israeli media, footage leaked by the Israel Prisons Service (ISP) showing Barghouti surreptitiously eating a snack bar in his cell during a Palestinian prisoners’ hunger strike has made a comeback. It killed the hunger strike. Incidentally, despite the Mandela Effect myth, he probably ate a Tortit candy bar rather than tortillas.

In 2005, former IPS chief Yaacov Ganot told The Jerusalem Post’s then-defense reporter Yaakov Katz, that Barghouti was running a political campaign from his cell with the help of his legal advisers. The claim also came up last week in an extensive profile on Barghouti by KAN 11’s Ayala Hasson, where it was noted that he still has multiple visits by his lawyers despite his trial being long over.

By the way, Barghouti received a doctorate in political science from an Egyptian university, having written his thesis while in prison in Israel, the sort of prisoner perks that have since been rescinded.

As the Post’s Danielle Greyman-Kennard noted this week, the Ramallah-based Palestinian Center for Policy and Survey Research consistently shows Barghouti as the leading choice among Palestinians for the next president of the Palestinian Authority. In a poll published last month, it found that Barghouti would receive 54% of the vote, well ahead of Hamas leader Khalil al-Hayya, while Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas would receive 14%.

Barghouti has support among Fatah, not being directly associated with the corruption of Abbas’s regime, and among Fatah’s rival, Hamas, which may think that he could be a puppet president if the terrorist organization helps get him elected.

It’s still a bit theoretical. Elections are scheduled in November for the PA’s Palestinian Legislative Council, but 90-year-old Mahmoud Abbas, now in the 21st year of a “four-year” term, does not seem in a hurry to hand over power. That’s democracy, Palestinian-style.

Collective memories can obviously betray us in a very real sense. Sufferers of the Marwan Effect need a reality check.

This post was originally published on here. 

Two incidents occurred this week: one that filled me with despair, and one with hope.

Hope is always better, so let’s start with the experience at Hadassah Ein Kerem Medical Center, where a dear friend has been on-and-off fighting for his life over the last year.

This week, he was in for another operation, and I volunteered to be part of the rotation of family and friends keeping watch on him post-op.

It’s a well-known cliché, but Israeli hospitals are a stalwart of coexistence among Arabs and Jews. The usefulness of clichés is that their simple truth can be staggering. A Jewish patient was being cared for by an Arab doctor, Arab nurses, and Arab orderlies.

Through a mixture of Hebrew, English, and sign language, the act of saving lives and making patients suffer less was paramount. What a country to live in, I gloated to myself, getting on the light rail, where Jewish and Arab residents of Jerusalem shared a ride on the efficient line running from Hadassah back into town.

Later that night, I got back on the light rail at the same time as four young, white-shirted youth wearing black kippot. Bespectacled, thin, and immature, the teens were jostling with each other and joking in American English peppered with some Hebrew they might have learned in yeshiva.

They took up roost opposite where I was standing at the end of a car, and one of them, the smallest with braces on his teeth, sat down next to a young Arab woman, while the others remained standing around him.

She might have been 18, wearing a hijab, but dressed in jeans and wearing lipstick. Some other female friends or family members were sitting spread out on a few seats behind her. 

She stared out the window as the boys exchanged frivolous banter in a language she probably didn’t understand totally, if at all. They seemed to ignore her presence even though they were more or less surrounding her on three sides.

At some point, I heard the word “Arab” being uttered, followed by laughter, and I began to pay more attention. The woman looked harder out of the window. A few seconds later, the short kid with braces blurted out “F***ing Arab,” and then repeated it.

I realized that something needed to be done or said. In the next 1.5 seconds, here’s what happened: I realized there were four of them, but I also surmised that they didn’t seem to be the fighting types, what with the glasses, braces, and svelte forms. 

Me, I’ve been working out, and like Kenny Banyas of Seinfeld fame, in my mind at least, I’m huge. So I was semi- confident there wouldn’t be any physical violence. Also, were they really going to attack a senior citizen, no matter how good a shape he was in?

I contemplated trying to diffuse the situation with humor and a smile, engaging the youth via our common American bond and appealing to their innate humanistic values. Instead, in the final nano-second of my 1.5 seconds of contemplation, I took another route.

I uncharacteristically shouted out, “Shut the f*** up, a**hole! Show a little respect.”

‘I hate all of them’

Instead of cowering, which I had hoped would be the desired response, Braces yelled back, “Respect for who? Arabs? I hate all of them.”

His friends chuckled and shifted uncomfortably, and the Arab woman exchanged glances with her companions behind her, who were all staring at me.

Not really having a coherent script planned out, and with my heart pounding like a sledgehammer, I managed a weak retort along the lines of, “It looks like you’re going to have a busy Yom Kippur this year, atoning for what a horrible person you are.”

Two middle-aged men in haredi (ultra-Orthodox) light garb – one of whom had offered me his seat minutes earlier – got up and moved away, not wanting to engage on either side of the conflict.

Braces muttered something about Arabs all being terrorists and then piped down, and the altercation seemed to be stuck in neutral. The four disembarked at the next stop (ironically, probably headed to slihot prayers at the Western Wall), brushing past me with glares but without saying a word.

No words were exchanged with the Arab woman either, but we briefly made eye contact. I imagined that there was a glint of gratitude, but it could have easily been hate, that I was no different from the racist louts who had just made her ride a nightmare. 

Or maybe she had no idea what had transpired, didn’t know a word of English, and thought I was a crazy person for yelling at the kid she was sitting next to.

The rest of the ride, I was lost in thought and tried to avoid the comparison – but I kept returning to the feeling that they reminded me of residents of a fascist regime somewhere, sauntering around like they’re in charge, dehumanizing and humiliating the others in their midst. 

And these are the weaklings! Has the Itamar Ben-Gvir era emboldened these racists to unleash their venom without regard for societal norms?

I don’t know what they were taught in their American homes, or in their Israeli yeshivas, but if their mindset is indicative of even a small minority of Jewish thought out there, we’re in deep trouble.

I wish I hadn’t exploded at Braces and his friends, and instead had tried to reason with them. I wish I had told them about the Arabs they so deride that I had spent time with that morning at Hadassah, and the holy work that they are doing each and every day.

The recent pairing of Mansour Abbas and Yoav Segalovitz at the head of the Ra’am ticket in the coming election is a long overdue move that acknowledges the inevitable fact that Jews and Arabs live in Israel and share some of the same concerns.

Arabs may not be part of the Jewish narrative, but they play an integral role in the Israeli narrative. The sooner we all realize that neither of us is going anywhere and that we need each other for Israel to survive and thrive, the less the racist element in our midst will be able to fester and metastasize.

This post was originally published on here. 

Zehut party chairman Moshe Feiglin said that he fully forgave Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich for the harsh comments made against him in the past, while discussing their parties’ joint run in the upcoming election with 103FM on Thursday.

“I think what you do not understand is that it is possible to forgive as well,” Feiglin explained. “We are in the month of mercy and forgiveness. The fact that I truly forgive is not just lip service. You probably have not experienced the pressure of political campaigns, during which he said those things. I have experienced it, and I can understand how a person gets to that point. I forgot about it, and now you are reminding me.”

Feiglin went on to clarify the planned political arrangement, explaining that the Zehut party and the Religious Zionist Party were running as a technical bloc. “We are a completely separate party from the Religious Zionist Party. We respect it, but we will run a separate campaign and operate separately afterward. After the elections, each party will go its own way, without a doubt. I believe we are going to bring five Knesset seats in the upcoming elections, and the connection with Smotrich will bring a double digit number of mandates, ‘read my lips.’”

One of Feiglin’s demands is the Defense Ministry portfolio. When asked, “How can a person who is irresponsible and megalomaniacal be defense minister?” Feiglin chuckled and responded, “With all due respect, the person who has been fighting Oslo for 30 years and the processes that led to the massacre, I was your loyal servant. The line represented by the Zehut party is a line that knew how to predict this massacre better than all the generals.”

The discussion later turned to security issues and the Israel-Hamas War. Feiglin strongly criticized the handling of the campaign and explained why he opposed hostage release deals.

“I think this deal will lead to the next kidnappings. I did oppose it, and I still oppose it,” he said emphatically. “The hostages could have been brought back after two weeks simply by shutting off Gaza’s water supply, a real siege. Anyone who wanted a cup of water would have left the tunnels with a hostage. That is why it took two years and has not ended. The first decision should have been that Gaza must be defeated immediately, and that this problem must be eliminated rather than leaving future generations with another round of kidnappings and massacres.”

October 7 was fault of both right and left, Feiglin claims

Regarding responsibility for the October 7 failure, Feiglin refused to point a finger at the political leadership.

“Responsibility for the massacre is divided equally between both sides, between the left and the right,” he claimed. “Although the left, through Oslo, brought the terrorists to the doorstep of the kindergartens of Kibbutz Be’eri and directly caused the terrible massacre, the right, which came to power in 1996 and did not cancel Oslo, cannot avoid responsibility. Netanyahu, when he did this thing of transferring funds to Hamas, did something terrible, without a doubt. But when the left was in the transition period into power, Naftali Bennett and Yair Lapid also continued it and were proud of it.”

Asked whether there was a “betrayal from within” that led to the massacre, Feiglin responded cautiously. “I truly do not know if we will ever be able to know, because everything is hidden and concealed. But one thing I do know: shortly before October 7, there was a terrible betrayal here by those who did everything they could to openly dismantle the army, especially with foreign state money.”

Regarding the establishment of a state commission of inquiry, Feiglin expressed reservations about the involvement of the judiciary, saying that while he believed a commission of inquiry must be established, “at the same time, the High Court of Justice is a political party. On this specific issue, I completely agree with the Likud.”

Feiglin accuses LGBT community of ‘progressive coercion’

At the end of the interview, the Identity chairman addressed the controversy surrounding his comments about the LGBT community.

“I am not against the rights of anyone, on the contrary. The Zehut party brings uncompromising personal freedom for every citizen of Israel,” he said. “Not long ago there was Pride Month. Everywhere I go, pride flags are flying over every mountain and hill. Imagine if I declared a Temple Month and the entire country mobilized budgets to put Temple flags throughout Israel. What would people shout? Religious coercion. So when there is progressive coercion, that is acceptable? Straight people also deserve rights.”

This post was originally published on here. 

Having survived his ship’s bombardment and emerged bewildered from the Mediterranean into which he was thrown, Menachem Begin resolved to turn military defeat into moral victory. 

The consequent twisting of the confrontation’s events, from who provoked the Altalena war to who waged it, was discussed here last week. Yet Begin twisted another fact, concerning the size and significance of the cargo on the arms ship he led to Tel Aviv in June 1948. 

Emerging that evening on the Irgun’s radio station, Begin delivered his famous address in which he ordered his men not to join a prospective civil war. While at it, he claimed that his crippled vessel had carried “10,000 aerial bombs.” Had those bombs joined the Independence War along with the cargo’s rifles and machine guns, “we might have been standing today on the Jordan, and maybe even beyond it,” Begin asserted. 

In fact, that number was far-fetched, and so was the strategic claim attached to it – a sequel to Begin’s earlier suggestion that “the ship of salvation” would “decide the fate of the war.” (Avi Shilon, Begin: 1913-1992, Am Oved 2007, pp. 127, 135).

In fact, Begin’s cargo was but a fraction of what David Ben-Gurion had already secured half a year earlier, through an extensive arms deal with Czechoslovakia that included 50,000 rifles, 6,000 machine guns, and 20 fighter planes. This was besides 14,000 submachine guns and mortars that the Hagana had obtained and manufactured before 1948. 

Begin’s twisting of the facts came to mind this week as Sara Netanyahu – whom this column has generally refrained from discussing – made an even more preposterous quip about one of her husband’s rivals, the Democrats’s Yair Golan. 

‘I don’t want to talk’

“YOU CLAIM you fought on October 7,” she said on Channel 14, referring to Golan, suggesting he did not fight. “Early in the morning,” she continued, “you were already there, dressed and ready at a very early hour, while others, like the prime minister, didn’t know.” Asked whether there was treason that day, she didn’t say “God forbid,” or “let’s not get carried away,” or “are you out of your mind?” Rather, “I don’t want to talk.”

Yet talk she did, and her insinuation was as transparent as it was flabbergasting. Golan, according to this “conspiracism,” had advance information of the enemy’s invasion, and was part of it. 

Golan is no political genius. He made some outrageous statements and seems clueless about his party’s domestic agenda, as well as its history as the engine of Zionist pioneering. That is why most voters don’t consider him a suitable candidate for prime minister. But this does not mean he is a villain, let alone a traitor. In fact, Golan is a major-league patriot. 

In contrast to Sara Netanyahu’s hallucination, Golan rushed to the western Negev once news of Hamas’s massacre broke out. There are testimonies of people he personally saved and of others who fought alongside him, like Oz Davidian of Moshav Patish, who said he and Golan jointly rescued people from the Supernova music festival’s bloodbath. 

No one can rob Golan of these heroic credentials. And so, the question arises: why did Sara Netanyahu utter the libel that Golan did not deserve, and which the swing vote will not reward? And the answer is that she twisted the facts of 2023 for the same reason Menachem Begin twisted the facts of 1948.
 
LIBELS ARE invented when the facts are impossible to refute, and their results are impossible to bear. 

Begin could not justify his reckless refusal to unconditionally hand the Altalena’s arms to the sovereign Jewish state. He therefore tried to shift the blame from those who made the provocation to those who responded to it. Similarly, the lie that his unsolicited arms shipment could have changed the course of the war was meant to change the subject, from his reckless misjudgment, to the war’s results.  

Now Sara Netanyahu and the rest of the October 7 conspiracists cannot bear Benjamin Netanyahu’s misjudgments en route to that catastrophe. That is why they, and the entire ruling party, twist the facts and invent libels. 

Likud’s denialism did not start with Begin’s lies in 1948. 

Disastrous moves or fateful mistakes?

BEGIN’S MENTOR, Ze’ev Jabotinsky, made two disastrous moves that his followers would never admit were fateful mistakes. First, in 1923, he resigned from the Zionist Organization’s executive; second, in 1935, he made his Revisionist party secede from the Zionist Organization to establish a competing outfit, the New Zionist Organization. 

It was a separatist mindset that culminated in the creation of a separate militia that challenged the Jewish Agency and its military arm, the Hagana. Jabotinsky thus condemned himself and his followers to history’s margins, where they remained for 37 years after his death. 

Admitting that their irrelevance was their leader’s fault was mentally impossible for his followers. He was infallible. Begin never admitted that his mentor’s legacy of going it alone was catastrophic to himself, his followers, and the Zionist cause. Now that same spirit of “we can’t be wrong” and “it’s us or them” is governing the Netanyahu couple’s treatment of the past three years’ events. 

That is why Sara Netanyahu, her husband, and the ruling party refuse to assume responsibility for what happened on October 7: not Benjamin Netanyahu’s funding of Hamas, not his rejection of pleas to attack Hamas, and not his 2004 vote for the unilateral withdrawal from Gaza – an idea that was conceived and executed not by Golan or any other lefty, but by a government led by the Likud. 

Repenting for any of this does not cross their minds. Like Begin before them, they will finger anyone but themselves. Yet Begin had a good excuse for his denialism and lies: his Jewish enemies had aimed a cannon at him, and fired. What’s your excuse, Sara? 

www.MiddleIsrael.net

The writer, a Hartman Institute fellow, is the author of the bestseller, The Jewish March of Folly (Yedioth Books 2026), now available in English on Amazon.

This post was originally published on here. 

“We are getting dangerously close to a violent, multifront confrontation. According to reports from the security establishment, the number of warnings in Judea and Samaria is unprecedented.

“The ones who will pay the price are our children, who will once again have to enter the Jenin refugee camp, once again go into Gaza, and perhaps once again into Lebanon. The ones who will pay the price are our parents, who will once again have to sit in their safe rooms.”

These words sound like something that could have been said yesterday. They were, however, spoken by Yair Lapid, the head of the opposition, three years ago this month, on September 20, 2023 – just a couple of weeks before the Hamas invasion on October 7.

Lapid later explained that he decided to go before the cameras with such a stark, dire warning after receiving one of the regular monthly security briefings given to the opposition leader by the prime minister and his military secretary. During that meeting, Lapid said, he was shown some of the most sensitive and classified intelligence collected by Israel’s security establishment.

The message, as he understood it, was clear: Israel’s enemies were watching the deep divisions tearing through Israeli society over the government’s judicial overhaul. They saw weakness and vulnerability. And they believed there might be an opportunity to strike.

That was why, on the eve of Yom Kippur in 2023, Lapid issued his warning. He could hardly have been more prophetic. Two-and-a-half weeks later, Hamas invaded Israel. Our children were sent to fight in Gaza, Jenin, and eventually Lebanon. Our parents – and the rest of us – were sent running to bomb shelters and safe rooms.

October 7 to play a role in next election

From the moment elections were called for the end of October, it was obvious that October 7 would play a central role in every political party’s campaign. What was less obvious was the extent to which the disaster would become the subject of manipulation, distortion, and outright fabrication, particularly by members of the governing coalition determined to deflect criticism and wash their hands of responsibility for the greatest catastrophe to befall the Jewish people since the Holocaust, a catastrophe that happened on their watch.

That is how we need to look at the interview that Sara Netanyahu gave this week to Channel 14 in which she attempted to tarnish the reputation of Yair Golan, the leader of the Democrats Party, who famously put on his uniform on the morning of October 7, drove south, and helped rescue Israelis from the killing fields around the Supernova music festival.

Like so many heroic Israelis who saw their fellow citizens in mortal danger that morning, Golan did not wait for orders. A former deputy IDF chief of staff, he took his sidearm and headed toward the fighting, repeatedly entering an area crawling with terrorists to rescue people and bring them to safety.

Yet Sara Netanyahu insinuated that Golan must somehow have had advance knowledge that something was about to happen, because he put on his uniform that morning – while her husband, the prime minister, had not been woken by the heads of the security establishment.

It was a disgusting accusation. It not only suggested some sort of conspiracy against Benjamin Netanyahu, but cast suspicion on a man who risked his own life to save others. To question the integrity, courage, and motives of Israelis who voluntarily entered a combat zone that morning is appalling.

While her comments were rightly condemned across the political spectrum, Sara Netanyahu is not really the story. She is the prime minister’s wife, not an elected official, and her comments should not consume too much of our attention.

The more important story is the coalition itself, which continues to do all it can to evade responsibility.

While Sara was in the headlines, Netanyahu was also pushing his new claim – had he been woken at 4 or 5 a.m. on October 7, he would have made decisions that could have prevented the Hamas invasion. Why wasn’t he woken? Because, he suggested, the security chiefs knew that he would force them to act, and they did not want him to.

There are several problems with this argument. The first is that it is highly unlikely Netanyahu would have done what he now claims.

Had he been woken, he would have heard from IDF chief of staff Herzi Halevi, Shin Bet (Israel Security Agency) director Ronen Bar, and Military Intelligence chief Aharon Haliva. All three would have given him essentially the same assessment they themselves mistakenly believed as they analyzed the little intelligence that was coming in that night: Hamas was probably not preparing for a major attack, and if something was going to happen, it would be limited in scope.

With every senior security official presenting essentially the same assessment, does anyone seriously believe Netanyahu would have ordered Israel to launch a war against Hamas at 4 or 5 in the morning?

Far more likely, he would have instructed them to remain vigilant, continue monitoring the situation, and reconvene a few hours later.

That, essentially, was the catastrophic mistake that Amir Bohbot and I describe in our book While Israel Slept. The warning signs were there, but they were interpreted through an intelligence framework that assumed Hamas did not want a major war.

But Netanyahu’s political objective now is to portray October 7 as exclusively their failure, a tactical intelligence breakdown that had nothing to do with him, his policies, or the strategy he pursued toward Hamas for years.

That strategy included containing Hamas, allowing Qatari money to flow into Gaza, and repeatedly deciding against using the IDF to remove Hamas from power.

Keeping the national debate focused narrowly on the intelligence and operational failures of the night of October 6 and the early hours of October 7 serves Netanyahu politically. It keeps attention away from the much larger question of strategy: how Israel reached a point where Hamas was able to build an army on the other side of the border, prepare an invasion for years, and convince Israeli leaders that it had no intention of using it.

The second problem with Netanyahu’s argument is even more fundamental.

It is a wrong illustration of leadership. Leadership is supposed to mean understanding that subordinates will sometimes make mistakes – even catastrophic ones – and that ultimate responsibility rests with the person at the top.

Sometimes I wonder what would have happened politically had Netanyahu chosen a different path after October 7. What if he had gone to the funerals of those murdered and visited their families during shiva? What if he had stood before the families and heard their yells and criticism, had appeared before the Israeli public and said something simple: I failed. What if he had publicly grieved for the 1,200 people massacred on his watch and accepted even a measure of responsibility for what happened?

Perhaps it would even have helped him politically. Perhaps showing compassion, humility, and accountability would have won back some of the Israelis who turned away from him after October 7.

It is an interesting thought experiment, but that is all it is. Because Netanyahu’s political doctrine has long been clear: never accept responsibility, never admit failure, and, above all, never say sorry.

The tragedy is that nearly three years after October 7, Israel is not only still fighting over who was responsible for the failures of that day. It is heading into an election in which those failures are being rewritten in real time.

And a country that cannot honestly confront how it reached October 7 will have a much harder time ensuring that another one can never happen.

The writer is a co-founder of the MEAD Forum, a senior fellow at the Jewish People Policy Institute, and a former editor-in-chief of The Jerusalem Post. His latest book (with Amir Bohbot), While Israel Slept, is a bestseller in the United States.

This post was originally published on here. 

Several homes in the town of Gva’ot in the Gush Etzion region of the West Bank were evacuated on Friday after a fire broke out nearby, according to the Israel Fire and Rescue Authority.

According to IFRA, the wind drove the fire and pushed it toward the town, prompting the evacuation order.

Firefighting crews were deployed to the scene to put out the fire, assisted by four firefighting aircraft. 

This is a developing story.

This post was originally published on here. 

The gap between Israel’s diplomatic relations with several European countries and the security ties they continue to maintain with Jerusalem is widening. Even countries that have escalated their rhetoric, imposed sanctions, and limited political ties with Israel are not rushing to abandon Israeli weapons systems, technology, and defense equipment.

“Most countries maintain a certain degree of duality,” political officials familiar with the issue say.

Spain is the most prominent example. In September 2025, Madrid adopted a law intended to establish a broad embargo on weapons and defense equipment involving Israel, including restrictions on exports to Israel and imports from Israel. Israeli officials say that in practice, the embargo is not airtight, in part because the law allows the government to approve exceptions when it determines that the national interest requires it.

“There is nothing airtight, and they are not following it either,” Israeli officials say.

According to political officials, defense deals with Spain continued even after the law took effect, including activities permitted under the exemption mechanism.

The Spanish law includes an exception allowing the government to approve deals that would otherwise be prohibited if fully implementing the restrictions would harm “general national interests.” In some cases, therefore, defense activity is not taking place in violation of the embargo, but under the exemption clause that Madrid itself included in the legislation.

The Spanish government has already used the exception to allow Airbus to continue using Israeli technology in strategic projects after determining that completely halting its use could harm production capabilities, jobs and defense projects for which there is no immediate alternative.

Discussions held in Spain also highlighted the country’s continued dependence on Israeli technology, licenses and technical support for several defense systems. Fully replacing these components and systems is not possible in the immediate term and would entail high costs and the development of local or European alternatives.

Madrid has canceled deals with Israel, and Jerusalem does not claim that the embargo exists only on paper. Spain has halted certain purchases and projects and is working to reduce its defense dependence on Israel. However, the exemptions included in the law allow the Spanish government to continue defense cooperation with Israel when it determines that national interests require it.

The Netherlands is also advancing measures against trade with settlements

The Netherlands, for example, is advancing measures against trade with settlements, while its Defense Ministry continues to purchase Israeli systems when no available alternative exists. The Dutch government has publicly stated that, in certain fields, Israeli companies provide essential systems or components for which there is currently no suitable, available Dutch or European replacement.

In Finland, as public and political debate surrounding Israel intensified, Helsinki quietly extended its defense cooperation agreement with Israel until 2034. The agreement, which covers research and development and defense procurement, was renewed in 2024, after the war in Gaza had already begun.

The renewal was initiated by Finland and extended the agreement for 10 years, compared with five years under previous arrangements. The Finnish Defense Ministry did not announce the decision at the time.

The relationship with Israeli defense industries plays a significant role in Finnish defense procurement. Israel is Finland’s second-largest foreign defense supplier and provides systems such as the David’s Sling and Gabriel missiles. Finland has explained that maintaining the relationship is necessary to carry out existing deals, maintenance, and long-term cooperation.

In Germany, expanded defense cooperation with Israel continues even as Berlin has voiced criticism of Israeli policy on issues including E1 and settlements. The Arrow 3 deal and its expansion have made Germany one of the main customers of Israel’s defense industry and were among the factors that helped drive Israeli defense exports to a new record.

In Greece, another major deal with Israel was recorded on Monday, during a period in which criticism of the Gaza war has also been heard in Athens. The two countries signed the “Achilles Shield” deal worth approximately 3 billion euros, the largest defense export deal in the history of Israel-Greece relations and one of the largest in Israel’s history.

In the Baltic states, Jerusalem has identified an “upward trend” in demand for Israeli systems due to growing concerns over Russia. According to Israeli political officials, the Baltic states view themselves as being “on the front line” and fear they could be next if the Russian threat expands.

The war in Ukraine and the Russian threat have changed defense priorities across Europe. European countries are rapidly increasing their defense budgets and seeking systems that have already demonstrated operational capabilities. In several areas, there is no available European replacement for Israeli technology.

Finland, for example, has made it clear that the war in Ukraine has demonstrated the critical importance of air defense capabilities.

Defense exports at a record high

In Jerusalem, officials are seeking to separate, as much as possible, political disputes with European governments from security ties with them. Israel is not rushing to halt defense deals in response to political criticism.

“We are pragmatic,” political officials say.

From Israel’s perspective, stopping deals could harm domestic defense industries, hand market share to competitors, led by France, and reduce the influence created through long-standing ties between Israeli industries and European defense establishments.

The Israeli interest is also reflected in the numbers. In 2025, Israeli defense exports reached a record $19.2 billion, a jump of nearly 30% in one year and more than double the figure from five years earlier.

The Defense Ministry views expanding defense exports as a tool for strengthening industries, financing security needs and advancing diplomatic objectives.

Even in Israel, there is no complete separation between political and security considerations. A deal may be halted if there is concern about technology leakage, the transfer of a system to a hostile actor, or other security risks.

Political officials do not rule out the possibility that political considerations could affect a deal under certain circumstances. The diplomatic tensions with several European governments have not, for now, halted security cooperation.

European countries are increasing defense budgets and confronting the Russian threat, and in areas where no available alternative exists, they are finding it difficult to give up Israeli systems.

Spain is perhaps the most prominent example: even after enshrining a broad embargo on Israel into law, it left room for exceptions when its security needs and national interests require it.

This post was originally published on here. 

An Israeli citizen was indicted for unspecified actions threatening national security undertaken on behalf of a foreign government, the State Prosecutor’s Office publicized on Friday.

According to the indictment, the Israeli was arrested by the Israel Police and Shin Bet (Israel Security Agency) on suspicion of taking actions threatening Israel’s security. During the ensuing interrogation, their connection to an unnamed foreign government was discovered.

This is a developing story.

This post was originally published on here. 

One of the defining characteristics of the Western world is its preoccupation with personal achievements and the pursuit of phenomenal success. Billions of people move alongside one another, viewing others as competitors for success and as threats to their privacy.

This outlook creates a fundamental social problem. A healthy society is based on mutual assistance, in which it is the strong person’s role to support the weak and help them emerge from their difficult circumstances. It is founded on the understanding that the wheel turns: Today I help you, and tomorrow your child will help my child.

But when every person is preoccupied with themselves, people have neither the time nor the inclination to think about the problems of others. An ideology of supposed indifference develops from this: People should be left to manage on their own; they cannot become a burden on society; and every person is responsible for themselves.

The attitude of “leave me in peace,” in which the main concern is that things should be good for me, is a dangerous one. Ultimately, the problems around us reach us as well and they cannot simply be ignored.

Mutual responsibility

This approach is also evident in spiritual and moral matters. Here, in particular, a taboo sometimes develops according to which one should not interfere in another person’s life, and a person has neither the right nor the authority to tell someone else what is true or what is right for them.

Thus, people live according to the principle of “everyone does what is right in his own eyes,” while moral values gradually erode. The enlightened world sometimes prefers to ignore the consequences as long as things are good for me.

Parashat Nitzavim, which is read in the period leading up to Rosh Hashanah, comes to proclaim loudly that the only way to ensure a good and successful new year and a repaired and improved world is through the concept of mutual responsibility.

This approach, known in the world as “social responsibility,” is based on a popular parable about a group of people sitting aboard a ship. One of the passengers took a drill and began drilling a hole in the floor beneath his seat. The other passengers saw him and exclaimed in panic, “What are you doing?!”

He replied, “Why should you care? I’m drilling underneath my seat, not yours!”

They answered him, “We care about the damage, because the water will rise and sink the entire ship, and we will all drown together with you.”

The understanding that when murky waters are flowing through someone else’s home, they may eventually flood the entire world, is a description of human reality. This is precisely the starting point of the idea of mutual responsibility: There is really no such thing as “only under my seat.” What happens to one person may ultimately affect society as a whole.

Everyone is a partner

THIS CONCEPT is the foundation of the Jewish approach to the values of truth and the shaping of the inner soul. We cannot leave the world without anyone taking responsibility, allowing everyone to behave however is convenient for them. Ultimately, the ship carrying our collective values may sink, and the world may reach the state described in the generation of the Flood, when “the earth was filled with violence.”

To understand the importance of this idea, the parasha opens with the words: “You are standing today, all of you, before the Lord your God: your heads, your tribes, your elders, and your officers – every man of Israel. Your little ones, your wives, and your stranger who is in the midst of your camp, from the woodchopper to the water drawer” (Deuteronomy 29:9-10).

The Torah, which is meticulous about every word and formulation and contains nothing superfluous, nevertheless chooses here to elaborate and enumerate all the different types of people who make up the Jewish people: leaders and ordinary people, men and women, adults and children, native-born and converts. They all stand together.

The message is that the way to build a repaired and improved world cannot rely on individuals alone. Everyone is a partner, everyone is needed, and every person has a place and a role in the collective effort.

This commitment took on even greater significance when the principle of mutual responsibility was established anew among the Jewish people. The parasha describes how Moses, on his final day on Earth, gathers the entire Jewish people and presents them with a new standard of the covenant with God. From that point onward, every member of the Jewish people would also bear responsibility for the actions of others.

In the words of the Talmud: “All Jews are responsible for one another” (Babylonian Talmud, Sanhedrin 27b).

Once the principle of mutual responsibility was renewed among the Jewish people, it was no longer a matter of personal opinion. Whoever has the ability to influence those around them and fails to do so bears responsibility for the consequences, as the Talmud teaches:

“Whoever is able to protest against the members of his household but does not, is held accountable for the members of his household; against the people of his city but does not, is held accountable for the people of his city; against the entire world but does not, is held accountable for the entire world” (Babylonian Talmud, Shabbat 54b).

Anyone who possesses the knowledge, tools, and ability to influence others, both physically and spiritually, is obligated to become involved and offer assistance, particularly to those who are influenced by them.

The entire idea is encapsulated in the wonderful words of Rabbi Jonathan Sacks, former chief rabbi of Britain: “I don’t need you to agree with me; I need you to care about me!” There is no need for everyone to think alike. Nor is there any need for everyone to live in the same way. But it is important that everyone care about the people who are in the same boat with them.

This is the important message that Parashat Nitzavim comes to teach us as we prepare for the new year: not only to care for ourselves but also to see the person beside us – because ultimately, we are all in the same boat. And this is the surest path to a good and sweet new year.■

The writer is rabbi of the Western Wall and Holy Sites.

This post was originally published on here. 

“My name is Jimmy Carter, and I’m running for president of the United States.”

That was how Carter, a little-known peanut farmer and former Georgia governor, introduced himself to voters while campaigning in 1976 for the highest office in the land.

Naftali Bennett seems to be taking a page out of Carter’s campaign playbook.

Granted, Bennett – who already served a short stint as Israel’s prime minister – is well known in the country. But, like Carter, he is traversing the width and breadth of the land, talking to “regular people” in informal street-corner “parliaments.”

While Carter introduced himself to the American people, Bennett is trying to reintroduce himself to the Israeli public – especially right-wing voters who feel that, after he formed a government with Ra’am’s Mansour Abbas and Yesh Atid’s Yair Lapid in 2021, they no longer really know him.

In a video clip posted on Bennett’s Facebook page, a man named Yankele describes, at one such “parliament” in Beersheba, how betrayed he felt by Bennett, for whom he had previously voted.

“Do you know why the hurt was so great?” he said, as a black-T-shirted Bennett sat and listened. “Because we know that you come from us – from our camp, from our ideology – and because, excuse me, you turned your back on ideology for a job.”

Bennett’s “parliaments” are punctuated – as in the Knesset – by hecklers yelling “liar” and “traitor.” He told Yankele that he was not going to try to convince him that he had been right but rather explain his motivations. Bennett finds himself doing that over and over, hoping – as Carter did – that one conversation at a time can change the way voters see him.

“I JUST come in, sit, have coffee, and they start cursing,” Bennett said this week during an hour-long interview with The Jerusalem Post, describing these encounters.

“It’s tough, but you know what? I learn a lot. First of all, I listen. I agree with some of the criticism, which is just, and then I try and unpack– and it’s working.”

Asked which criticism he accepts, Bennett replied, “That I broke a promise. Yeah, and they feel that I zigzagged.”

That broken promise – to refrain from joining a government with Abbas – has dogged Bennett ever since among the right-wing camp from which he emerged and of which he still considers himself a part. He once served as director-general of the Yesha Council, remains adamantly opposed to a Palestinian state, and supports settlement in Judea and Samaria.

“I did break a promise. That’s just a fact. Unfortunately, I had promised not to form a government with Abbas, and I did. I can’t change history, but I stand behind that decision, and I explain why I made that decision.”

His 30-second explanation can be boiled down to this: After four elections, Bennett gave Netanyahu his party’s seven seats following the 2021 vote, but Netanyahu still had only 59 mandates. Netanyahu then sought Abbas’s support and, according to Bennett, persuaded nearly everyone in the right-wing bloc – including the haredi parties and Itamar Ben-Gvir – to accept the idea. Religious Zionist Party head Bezalel Smotrich refused, however, and the effort collapsed.

Bennett said he ultimately faced a choice: “I had an option to go to fifth, sixth, seventh elections and tear Israel apart, but I will have met my promise, or do the right thing for Israel, which I thought was to form a government – which would be a good government – and try and pull Israel out of the hole, and that’s what I did.

“I think even my detractors agreed that it was a competent, effective government,” he said. “It didn’t last long because of the coalition, but we got stuff done.”

‘October 7 changes a lot of things’

What about this time? Could Bennett again form a government with Abbas’s Ra’am if the alternative were yet another election?

“No,” he replied. “October 7 changes a lot of things.”

One of those changes, he said, is that a post-October 7 government cannot include non-Zionist parties. Bennett stressed the term “non-Zionist” rather than “Arab,” noting that Yosef Haddad, an Arab candidate running with Ofer Winter’s party, is also a Zionist.

“This is not based on race,” he stressed. “But we are a Zionist country.”

Bennett did not say explicitly that he would refuse to sit with the haredi parties. He did, however, set criteria that would make their participation all but impossible.

He said the next government must be Zionist and institute national service for all. Anyone who dodges service, he added, should receive “not one shekel” from the state.

BENNETT’S PARTY offices occupy the seventh and eighth floors of a glass high-rise in Ra’anana, the city where he lives. A calendar counting down the days to the election greets visitors.

If the campaign is taking a toll on him, it doesn’t show. Bennett, in his ubiquitous black T-shirt, was full of energy.

His advisers made sure that a new book by Ari Shavit, titled Bennett, sat prominently on the table in front of him. Its cover shows Bennett, eyes closed, hugging a soldier.

Hugs appear in many of the clips he posts and seem almost a campaign theme, projecting an empathy that – when one meets him – feels genuine.

“My goal and the reason I’m coming back to politics is to repair Israel. Israel went through a horrible trauma on October 7, the worst trauma. We failed in our most fundamental goal, which is to protect Jews. We failed.”

Bennett repeatedly used the words “fix” and “repair” during the interview. The most urgent repair, he said, is to bring haredim into the army and integrate them more fully into the country’s economy.

“There’s a lot of things we’ve got to do. There’s one that will save Israel,” he said.

That one thing is bringing Israel’s 1.5 million haredim into the military and the workforce, turning them into taxpayers rather than having the state subsidize them, and ensuring that their schools teach math and English alongside Torah and Gemara.

“That’s the single most important thing for Israel’s long-term future because of demography. Right now, every year, we are carrying more tax burden, more weight, and more military service on our shoulders, and something’s got to give. Now’s the time.”

Several parties – from Ofer Winter’s new People of Israel party to Gadi Eisenkot’s Yashar and Avigdor Liberman’s Yisrael Beytenu – have made this a central campaign issue.

Asked what distinguishes his policy from those of Eisenkot and Liberman, Bennett said Eisenkot favors military exemptions for 30% of haredim, while Liberman wants to arrest draft dodgers. Bennett rejects both approaches. His answer is to cut off state funding.

Or, as the man he hopes to succeed might once have put it: You serve, you get. You don’t serve, you don’t get anything. Not a shekel.

Bennett said his policy would operate in three areas: military service, employment and taxation, and education.

In the military sphere, Bennett proposes establishing haredi hesder yeshivot along Israel’s borders with Jordan and Egypt, where participants would divide their days among Torah study, guard duty and patrols, and sleep.

The all-male frameworks, he said, would significantly reduce the burden on reservists, since one soldier in the regular army is the equivalent of 12 reservists serving one month a year.

He also wants to provide haredim with vocational training that will enable them to work.

Most importantly, however, he wants to carry out sweeping reforms in the haredi educational system, something he said he has changed his mind on, since in the past he did not want to get involved in the haredi “value system.”

“No, I will get involved because when you teach your kids to be anti-Zionist, anti-IDF, anti-going-to-work from the age of three to the age of 18, then at the age of 18, they go out and demonstrate, saying they will rather die than serve.”

He wants to set up state haredi schools that will teach a 60% core curriculum, including English, math, Hebrew, Bible, and Zionism, and another 40% that will concentrate, at least for boys, on Talmud. Once these schools are set up, he added, “I’m going to stop funding a school that teaches anti-Zionism and doesn’t teach math and English.”

The “big insight,” Bennett said, is that the country “cannot kick the can down the road forever” on this issue.

The term “conceptzia” applies not only to entrenched thinking on security matters, but also to these types of issues, he said, adding that Israel has operated under the mistaken assumption that it could preserve the status quo with the haredim indefinitely. That may have been sustainable when they constituted 3% of the population, but not when their numbers are approaching 15%.

“Thirty percent of Jewish kids in first grade are haredi. So it’s now or never,” he said.

Bennett opposes granting draft exemptions to 30% of haredim, as Eisenkot has suggested, because that raises the question of who would decide who receives them. He also opposes arrests of draft dodgers, arguing that this merely turns those jailed into heroes.

Nor does he favor continuing the dialogue on this issue with the haredi parties that, he said, has led nowhere for years.

Instead, he wants to turn off the financial spigot. Economic incentives work, he stressed.

The differences between Bennett’s approach to Gaza and Netanyahu’s approach 

IF HAREDI integration is one major issue hovering over the campaign, October 7 is another. Bennett highlighted – in the interview, as he does in his informal “parliaments” – the differences between his approach toward Gaza and Netanyahu’s.

Bennett described his policies toward Gaza as “diametrically opposite” to Netanyahu’s. Netanyahu, he said, pursued a policy of containment, tolerating rockets, incendiary balloons, and disturbances along the border fence, while Bennett adopted a “zero tolerance policy”: “Not one balloon, not one terror kite or rocket.”

He also criticized Netanyahu’s decision to permit the monthly transfer of $30 million in Qatari cash to Hamas. Bennett ended this policy when he became PM in June 2021 and replaced the cash transfers with prepaid cards for Gazan families that Israel could track. But he acknowledged that he neither solved the problem nor foresaw what was coming.

“I inherited a really bad situation and improved it. But I didn’t solve it,” he said. “I admit I didn’t imagine the October 7 scenario in Gaza. I did imagine the October 7 scenario from Lebanon.”

Unlike some of the other candidates in the race, Bennett does not drip with contempt for Netanyahu.

“I am not a hater of Bibi. I never was,” he said. “In fact, in the past, I very much admired him. I think he entered politics for the right reason. His heart was in the right place. I think 30 years is enough.”

Nor does Bennett want to see Netanyahu jailed. “I think he should go home. He should be pardoned.”

Bennett also agrees that it is an exaggeration to blame Netanyahu entirely for Israel’s deteriorating standing in American public opinion. He attributed half the problem to deep progressive, anti-Israel, and antisemitic currents that have taken hold all over the world.

The other half, he said, is of Israel’s own making, citing Ben-Gvir’s selfies with bound prisoners, Zvi Sukkot taking a sledgehammer to a monument in a Palestinian city, and ministers saying that Gaza should be nuked.

Fifty percent is self-inflicted, he said, adding this advice: “Stop doing stupid things. That would be a pretty interesting policy. Don’t be an idiot. A non-idiotic government would be a good step.”

Bennett says he is optimistic about Israeli youth

DESPITE ALL this, Bennett said he is optimistic about the country’s future because of the way its young people have risen to the occasion since October 7.

“I’m optimistic about Israel’s future because there’s a simple formula. I call it the Bennett formula. Israel’s the only Western country in the world that’s having kids – that’s positive. And the kids we have, I look at this younger generation, and I believe it’s Israel’s finest generation.”

His use of the term “finest generation” was deliberate, drawing a parallel to America’s Greatest Generation – the generation that fought and lived through World War II.

“After October 7, what they’ve gone through and what they’ve done on October 7 and thereafter, it’s sort of embedded them with idealism and a drive to fix Israel, similar to post-World War II veterans who came home from America. They built America, right? 1945 to the 90s, the finest generation. This is our finest generation.

“So here’s the formula. Lots of kids times great kids equals a great future. All we need to do is change the leadership.”

And that he hopes to do in over the next two months, one street-corner “parliament” at a time – Jimmy Carter-style.

This post was originally published on here. 

Romanian prosecutors officially indicted social media influencer Andrew Tate on Friday for trafficking minors, money laundering, sex with a minor, and witness tampering and his brother Tristan for complicity, years after they first began investigating them.

The Tate brothers, former kickboxers with dual US and British ​citizenship, were arrested in Miami in late July after Britain requested their extradition.

This is a developing story.

This post was originally published on here. 

The Pentagon instructed US military personnel to stop referring to ongoing operations against Iran as “Operation Epic Fury” in August, CBS reported on Thursday, citing an email sent to the US Air Force.

According to the email, sent on August 7, military leaders were instructed to refer to the conflict as “overseas operations in the CENTCOM AOR [US Central Command Area of Responsibility],” CBS reported.

In response to CBS questioning, the Pentagon stated that Operation Epic Fury had officially ended several months ago, on May 5, when Secretary of State Marco Rubio told reporters at the White House that the operation had concluded.

“Following the April ceasefire, the administration stated Operation Epic Fury had concluded on May 5,” a Defense Department official told CBS. “Subsequent activities have included Freedom of Navigation operations and strikes to further diminish threats posed by the IRGC [Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps] to commercial shipping, Gulf countries, and American forces.”

The Pentagon did not comment to CBS on why it sent the guidance months after Operation Epic Fury concluded.

Pentagon relabels soldiers killed as ‘Overseas Operations Casualties’ 

The confirmation as to the concluding date of Operation Epic Fury raises questions regarding the status of American soldiers who were killed by Iranian attacks following May 5.

In July, the Pentagon designated four soldiers killed in Jordan and Iraq that month as “Overseas Operations Casualties,” separate from the other 14 casualties of Operation Epic Fury listed on its website.

The number of soldiers listed as wounded during Operation Epic Fury also shifted during that time, with 482 soldiers reduced to 417, and an additional 207 soldiers listed as wounded in “Overseas Operations.”

At the time, Chief Pentagon Spokesman Sean Parnell blamed the soldiers’ temporary absence on a “a temporary data disruption” on the website in a post on X/Twitter.

“The Department of War is aware of temporary data disruptions on the Defense Casualty Analysis System (DCAS) website,” he stated. “These site anomalies are currently being resolved in coordination with the Military Services.”

CBS contacted a Pentagon official after the recent confirmation that Operation Epic Fury concluded in May. The official said that “Since Operation Epic Fury has concluded, the Department classifies casualties as overseas operations in the CENTCOM area of responsibility.”

However, as of Friday, the Defense Department’s website continues to list five soldiers wounded in June and one soldier killed in July as casualties of Operation Epic Fury.

This post was originally published on here. 

The High Court of Justice froze on Thursday the provisions allowing the government to begin implementing a law restructuring the Police Investigation Department, blocking appointments to the department’s new leadership and work on its separate budget while challenges to the law remain pending.

Court President Isaac Amit and Justice Dafna Barak-Erez issued the interim order in a 2-1 decision. Deputy Supreme Court President Noam Sohlberg dissented.

The ruling does not strike down the law or decide whether it is valid; a hearing on three petitions seeking its cancellation is scheduled for December 28, two months after the October 27 election.

For now, the order prevents the Justice Ministry from establishing the leadership structure intended to oversee the transition to the new department.

The court suspended four provisions governing the appointment of the PID director, the five-member committee that selects the director, a new official responsible for resolving disputes involving the department, and its separate budget.

Those were the only provisions that took effect immediately when the law was published on June 15. Most of the overhaul is scheduled to come into force eight months after publication, in February 2027, with the possibility of a four-month postponement.

The order therefore does not formally suspend every section of the law. In practice, however, it stops the steps that can currently be taken to establish the new department and prepare it to begin operating.

Amit and Barak-Erez said they had considered the positions of the petitioners and Attorney-General Gali Baharav-Miara, who supported an interim order because of the immediate consequences for the PID and the election period.

They also considered the opposing positions of the Knesset and Justice Minister Yariv Levin, who emphasized the status of legislation enacted by the Knesset.

Knesset approves law after proposal by Likud MK

The Knesset approved the law on June 11 by 43 votes to 39. Proposed by Likud MK Moshe Saada and promoted by Levin, it would separate the PID, which investigates police misconduct, from the State Attorney’s Office and reconstitute it as an independent unit within the Justice Ministry.

Under the new structure, the department’s director would receive powers currently held by the attorney-general, state attorney and district prosecutors in criminal cases handled by the PID. The department would retain responsibility for both investigating suspected criminal offenses by police officers and prosecuting cases arising from those investigations.

The law would also create a coordinator for police investigations, who would decide appeals against certain decisions to close cases and resolve disputes between the PID and other investigative or prosecutorial bodies. In some circumstances, the coordinator could transfer a case from the department to another authority or from another authority to the PID.

The department would remain subject to the general directives of the attorney-general and state attorney, but authority currently exercised by officials outside the department would be transferred internally.

Supporters of the law argue that the PID’s current position within the prosecution creates an inherent conflict of interest because police and prosecutors work closely together in other criminal cases. Saada and Levin have presented the separation as a way to strengthen the department’s independence and address deficiencies identified in previous reports on its work.

New PID appointment system opens possibility for political influence, detractors say

The petitioners and Baharav-Miara argue that the new appointment system would instead expose criminal law enforcement to political influence.

Baharav-Miara told the court that Levin or the Justice Ministry director-general had direct or substantial involvement in the selection of three of the five members of the appointments committee. She argued that advancing long-term appointments through that structure during an election period could have a chilling effect on police officers, investigators and prosecutors.

Levin maintained in his court filings that the appointment process should proceed despite the election. The law expressly required the committee to be formed within one month and instructed it to appoint the department’s director and coordinator as soon as possible, he argued.

The court had already barred new steps in the appointment process on August 23 while it considered whether to issue a broader interim order.

Levin sharply criticized Thursday’s decision, accusing a “handful” of Supreme Court justices of seeking to protect what he called a failed institution.

The court’s December hearing will address the underlying challenges to the law. Until then, the existing PID structure remains in place and the government cannot advance the appointments or budget arrangements covered by Thursday’s order.

This post was originally published on here. 

Dr. Ruth Bar is the most famous anonymous woman you have never heard of. On January 14, 1993, Benjamin Netanyahu, sweating and somber, burst into the studio of Israel’s Channel 1 television to confess live on air that he had conducted an extramarital affair with the strategic adviser working for him in the race for the Likud leadership. That woman was Ruth Bar.

The primaries to succeed Yitzhak Shamir as Likud chairman were then in full swing, after Shamir’s defeat by Yitzhak Rabin in the 1992 election. Netanyahu’s rival, and the man standing in his way of winning the Likud leadership, was David Levy. Netanyahu, a scion of the Revisionist aristocracy and a member of Israel’s old elite, was an outsider in Likud.

Only a few years earlier, he had returned to Israel from the UN, joined Likud, and decided to take the party by storm in an American style his rivals had never encountered.

The “Likud princes,” including Bennie Begin, Ehud Olmert, Dan Meridor, Roni Milo, Limor Livnat and others, saw him as a threat. In their eyes, he was a phony opportunist, a foreign agent who had come to carry out a hostile takeover and was trying to exploit the defeat by Rabin to seize control of the party. To their astonishment, Netanyahu rapidly gained popularity and took the lead in the race. Even he had not expected his plans to materialize so quickly.

Then, in the middle of his ascent, someone called the Netanyahu family home and told his young wife, Sara, that her husband was having an affair with his strategic adviser at the primary campaign headquarters, and that unless he withdrew, a tape containing incriminating evidence of the affair would be made public.

Netanyahu decided not to give in to the blackmail. Instead, he chose to get ahead of the blackmailer and confess live on television. He arrived at the studio, where news anchor Ya’acov Ahimeir and police affairs reporter Uri Cohen-Aharonov were waiting for him, and told the nation that he had indeed cheated on his wife. It was a telenovela broadcast live. In the same breath, he accused a “senior Likud politician,” meaning David Levy, of attempting to blackmail him, and said he was surrounded by “a gang of criminals,” meaning Ya’acov Bardugo and the late Moti Mishani.

Israel had only one television channel at the time, with a 100% rating. The uproar was immediate. The entire country talked about the incident, after which Netanyahu was thrown out of his home by his wife Sara, with no intention of allowing him back. But, as usual, he returned. Crawling.

That tape was never published, for a simple reason: There was no tape. Someone had either played a prank or threatened Netanyahu with a cap gun. That was enough to send him racing to television to confess live on air that he had cheated on his wife.

Dr. Ruth Bar’s name was indeed published at the time, but there were no social networks and there was no digital media. Bar managed to disappear back into anonymity, from which she never again emerged. She continued her work as a psychologist and strategic consultant specializing in branding and decision-making, working with senior politicians including Shlomo Lahat, known as Chich, former Ramat Gan mayor Zvi Bar, Ehud Barak, Ehud Olmert, Dan Meridor and Gabi Ashkenazi. Her past clients included brands such as Osem-Nestlé, Tivall, Sabra, Strauss, Jafora, Materna, Tara, Nirlat, Electra and others. In the financial sector, she worked with Bank Hapoalim, Bank Leumi, Clal, Psagot, Gazit Globe, the Tourism Ministry and others.

Bar conducted a very long series of scientific studies to substantiate the theses and theories she developed over the years. She never gave an interview, never appeared before a camera, microphone or reporter’s notebook. Not off the record, not on the record. Very few political journalists, if any, know her.

Over the years, she focused on research, during which she cracked the formula that makes it possible to influence the brain and the decision-making mechanism. The same mechanism causes us to choose one particular product when we stand in front of a supermarket shelf, or one particular ballot slip at the polling station.

Now she is talking. For the first time ever.

This interview is not about politics, nor is it about the election. Bar is reluctantly giving up her anonymity. Her life’s work, a book of more than 600 pages, is being published after years of work. That is the reason for the timing.

The book is called Brain Under the Influence, and it is due to reach stores around this time. It contains a great deal of professional material, but also a great deal of politics and a meticulous analysis of most of the election campaigns Israel has seen.

Bar’s testimony has particular significance because she was part of the small team that shaped Netanyahu’s political persona at the beginning of his career, when it was still in its infancy. As you will understand later, everything roiling our lives in these years was already sown and planted back then, in those days.

Holding on to life

Ruth Bar has been married all her life to the same husband, Dr. Shmuel Bar, who was also her husband during her affair with Netanyahu. He is an ophthalmology specialist who became known as an airborne physician with the 669 rescue unit and was the first to perform a full surgical tracheotomy on the battlefield.

Their marriage survived that trauma, “mainly thanks to my husband,” she says, but that was only the preview. Later, two of their three children were killed, one in an accidental shooting and the other in a traffic accident. It is almost impossible to recover from a blow like that. They did. Ruth and Shmuel Bar somehow managed to pull themselves out of the abyss, overcome depression, cling to life and move forward.

This is the first interview she has ever given, 33 years after a single television broadcast turned her into the most famous woman in Israel, apart from Sara.

Is there really a mechanism that operates our decisions? One that makes us reach for a particular product rather than its competitor, or for a particular ballot?

“We have known for several decades that we have two decision-making systems. The first system is unconscious, intuitive, associative, simultaneous and very fast. It absorbs information and at the same time produces meaning from it. Then, what is in front of your eyes is what determines things. It isn’t short-term memory, it is truly immediate. This system doesn’t retrieve information from memory, only what is happening in front of your eyes, here and now. This system is very dominant. The second system thinks in a more logical, sequential, systematic way, and it is more critical. The first system is not critical. It is intuitive and unconscious. The second one is.”

So what actually happens at the moment when we face a decision?

“There is an important model I developed called the ‘survival layers model.’ You have to understand, this model is backed by dozens of scientific studies I conducted over many years, with hundreds of respondents and hundreds of situations. According to this model, human perception is wired according to four survival layers. Nothing is accidental in the way we perceive events or brands. The first layer is impression, the second is the relations layer, the third is protection, and the fourth is emotions.

“Every experience, every event, everything receives a score in these four layers. Impression is how much this event impresses me. Relations is how much it relates or is connected to me. Protection includes values such as security and peace of mind. Emotions are the emotions the event generates in me: joy, hope, hatred, fear. This is where our processing begins, until the decision is made.”

I assume we’ll come back to that later. How did your professional relationship with Netanyahu begin?

“I started my career at the Warshavsky advertising agency as head of the marketing department, and from there I moved to Ariely Advertising, which sent me for professional training in Manhattan to entice me to join them. I arrived at a place that was the pinnacle of the advertising world. I studied under the greatest people in the field, and I had some nice successes in building brands. I worked with politicians. I came up with the phrase ‘Lahat does Tel Aviv’ for Shlomo Lahat, Chich, and Ariely loved it and turned it into a slogan.

“By 1989, I had already done my first political study. We didn’t exactly know who it was being done for, but I assumed it was for Netanyahu, who had just returned to Israel and joined Likud. At one stage, we ran a campaign for Zvi Bar, who was then running against Ramat Gan mayor Uri Amit. Eyal Arad was on Bar’s team, and they brought me in. Bar was trailing Amit by 20%, and in the end he won. On the day of the municipal election, Bibi Netanyahu unexpectedly arrived at the headquarters. That was our first meeting.”

Was there chemistry?

“There were other people there. I was writing the numbers on the board, the results started coming in from the polling stations, and suddenly Bibi walked in. He started asking all kinds of questions, and I answered. A few days later, Arad approached me and asked whether I would be willing to meet Netanyahu. Of course I agreed.”

What was the meeting like?

“We met in an apartment in Tel Aviv, I think at Eyal’s place. They told me Bibi wanted me to watch his television appearances and analyze them, the advantages and disadvantages. They put in a tape and I watched. He was good, but there was a lot to correct. He listened to all my comments.”

That’s how it all began?

“Yes. After that I started doing political research for him. Intensive, in-depth research. At the time he had a ‘submarine,’ a close and secret group of advisers. Eyal Arad was there, Ivet Liberman was there, Ya’acov Akst was there, and others. One day Bibi and Ivet had an argument, and Bibi threw him out of the submarine. I was the one who convinced him to bring Liberman back. I told him: ‘Ivet is very smart and very important to the campaign. Get over your anger.’ And he got over it. Fortunately for him, because Ivet was a very important factor in Bibi’s system.”

Ignoring the affair, were your professional relations with Bibi good? Did he speak with you outside the political submarine meetings as well?

“Yes. Bibi would also call me privately and consult me. He asked me to come to his events in front of audiences and analyze those too. I did. At one of those events, in front of an audience of Likud members, he got a little lost. There was noise, the audience wasn’t listening, they weren’t impressed by him. We worked very hard on that. He wasn’t the Bibi of today. He was at the beginning of his path. He was carving out his way. He needed help. He knew he intended to climb all the way to the top, to the highest floor.”

How long did you work with Netanyahu?

“More than three years.”

Were you paid, or, as is customary with him, did he manage to avoid that too?

“Of course I was paid. I have invoices. The payments went through the law office of Von Weisel, Fischer, Shimron.”

Bar will not say a word about the affair between them. Contrary to what the public understood, the affair lasted almost as long as the professional relationship. It was not a momentary slip. It ended only with that televised uproar.

To the best of my knowledge, after the television uproar there were other scenes as well, including loud telephone conversations between the betrayed wife and the mistress. But Ruth Bar will not say a single word about that either. There is no point trying to persuade her. When asked why she is unwilling to talk about the affair itself, she answers dryly: “Ask him. After all, he’s the one who ran to television to talk about it.”

What was your impression of him as a politician, as a person?

“I was his adviser and pollster for three years, and the first thing I noticed about Bibi was his extreme sense of superiority. It was a sense of deep, almost frightening superiority. He was certain he was above everyone. He dismissively called everyone else ‘clerks.’ You could hear the contempt even in his tone of voice. All his rivals, in his eyes, were small, pathetic and insignificant. That was my first impression of him, and I remember it to this day. Not long ago, Yoav Horowitz, who was his chief of staff, called him an ’emperor.’ I saw it even then, long before he became prime minister.”

Didn’t that make you think about leaving? What am I doing with this man?

“I had thoughts in that direction. But I have to admit that the professional temptation to work with him was enormous. Working with Netanyahu was an incredible school for me. I learned a great deal from working with him. It was the first time I had worked with someone who appeared on television with such high frequency, and that enabled me to build, implement and test all my models and theories. He was my training ground, and he was perfect for that purpose.

“I did a huge number of studies with him. We tested before an appearance, after an appearance, I wrote a great many theses and documents. He also asked me to come to his public appearances and analyze them, asked my opinion about the quality of the appearance, the messages, the body language, everything. I also conducted regular studies for him throughout that period on all his rivals in Likud. In those studies, you can see what position he starts from against them, and how he advances and overtakes them one by one as if they don’t exist.”

Whom did you examine?

“When you work on a brand, and Bibi was a brand, you need to examine the level of its brand equity. Where it is strong, where less so. And examine the rivals. I examined Bennie Begin, Olmert, Katsav, Meridor, and later, of course, Levy as well. We mainly surveyed the younger figures: who was most highly regarded, who was most popular, who was best suited to Likud. And you can see how Bennie Begin, for example, starts out highest and then declines, and how Bibi starts in the middle, but takes off and leaves all of them behind.”

‘Nationalism that conceals ultranationalism’

Bar has documentation and records. The studies she conducted for Netanyahu are laminated and arranged in order.

One examined the “authoritativeness” of the younger Likud candidates. In October 1989, Bennie Begin led the table with a score of 30.6, while Netanyahu had only 22.9. Moshe Katsav had 5, Olmert 6.9, and Meridor 13.3. Moving forward, Netanyahu steadily closed the gap. By the end of May 1991, Begin had fallen to 25.7, while Netanyahu had surged to 42.9. On charisma, Begin began with 32.8 and declined to 25.6. Netanyahu began at 32.4 and soared to 51.6. The same pattern appeared across all the other categories.

Bar also has documents she wrote for Netanyahu about the quality of his appearances and ways to improve them. One, for example, is titled “Ways to strengthen the image of the comprehensive expert.” It stresses the need for clear and unequivocal messages, the need to sound forceful and in command of the material, and not to appear like a student being questioned by the interviewer. Instead, Netanyahu should seize the initiative and dictate the pace of the interview, so that the interviewer would be perceived as an “acolyte.”

Another document, which may explain the beginning of the construction of Netanyahu’s famous “base,” on which he still relies, is titled “Ways to increase charisma.” It contains the following jaw-dropping statements:

“Satisfying the need for self-admiration: Admiration of the leader causes the individual excitement and pleasure, since admiration of the leader satisfies the need for self-admiration (narcissism), through the mechanism of ‘transference.’ In order to strengthen the satisfaction of this need, beyond strengthening admiration for the leader, it is recommended to create a blurring between the leader’s ‘I’ and the audience’s ‘I.’ In this sense, it is important to emphasize the dimension of ‘we’… In the realm of charisma, the emphasis is on emotional rather than rational content. Emphasizing the superiority of ‘us,’ or alternatively emphasizing the inferiority of the hated others.”

Another subsection reads:

“Satisfying the need for forcefulness. This need is especially prominent among floating voters and Likud voters. Satisfying this need by demonstrating force and control definitely strengthens the leader’s attractiveness. Emphasizing nationalism that conceals ultranationalism also serves this purpose. However, it should be remembered that the message must remain national, because then it serves both purposes: the need for nationalism, which carries a positive label, and the need for ultranationalism without the negative label.”

The document later deals with “satisfying the need for national pride,” as well as “satisfying the need for belonging,” and “satisfying the need to remove inhibitions.” This is done through the dimension of charisma, which operates mainly by stimulating the pleasure center. Part of creating pleasure comes from satisfying forbidden needs, or alternatively from removing inhibitions. “Therefore, the more correctly one works in this direction, under the protection of a positive label, the more one can increase the candidate’s attractiveness.”

When you look at him now, what do you think?

“It reminds me of something he said to me back then, in one of our meetings. He told me, ‘I’m looking for someone with high verbal ability who can formulate a devastating verbal attack against my competitors.'”

How did you react to that?

“I didn’t react. I probably repressed it. In retrospect, I understand that this idea, which entered Netanyahu’s mind more than 30 years ago, is what lies at the foundation of what is now called the ‘poison machine,’ which floods life in the State of Israel with venom and poison. Now I understand the power of it. This machine activates the emotional layers so that the positive ones fall silent while the negative survival-emotion layers come to the fore.

“It floods people with negative thoughts and harms the target, undermining his spirit and also damaging his perceived brand equity, meaning his image, thereby harming his chances of defeating Netanyahu in an election. For example, everything they did at the time to Benny Gantz, with the alleged stutter, the ‘Yoo-Yoo-Nit’ interview, and the rumors. It is very important to expose the poison machine, explain how it works and how dangerous it is. They target someone and start crushing him. It looks instinctive and driven by impulse, but it is scientific. Completely scientific.”

You spoke earlier about his sense of superiority, about everyone else being small, clerks. Whom does he actually mean?

“Everyone. Military people and chiefs of staff as well, of course journalists and media people, all his political rivals and colleagues, and the voters too, including his own voters. His superiority extends over the president of the United States as well. He is above everyone.”

Isn’t that going a little far? How did you reach those conclusions?

“He spoke about it explicitly. He said it in his own voice. The tone and manner every time other people were discussed. Who are they, anyway? They are all dwarfs. Clerks. And because he sees himself as above them, he can also influence them and control them, in his view. Look, I have worked with many politicians, brands, authors, professors, banks, and I have never encountered a person with such a sense of superiority. To his credit, he knows how to hide it.”

It seems to me it’s not so hidden anymore.

“Think about what that means. If he is above everyone, he can influence their minds, mold their personalities. The means is to have a dominant presence in the media. He understood that first. I didn’t teach him that. He came to me with it. I learned it from him. That is why working with him fascinated me so much. Suddenly you see that you can give a client instructions according to your model and see how he implements them, how he corrects himself, in real time, like in a laboratory.”

Do you agree that he is the best, by a wide margin, in this field?

“He understood how the media operates much better than others. What distinguished him from others and contributed significantly to his success from the very beginning was the enormous importance he attributed to prominence in the media. He understood that it had enormous significance, and he was the first and only one who understood it. That is where his advantage over everyone else begins. There is a precise Archimedean point at which he simply passed all the others, when he recognized how important media dominance is. He truly lives it.”

Give me an example.

“At one of our working meetings, he was in a gloomy mood, when suddenly he noticed a photograph of himself in the newspaper. And suddenly, all at once, his face lit up. He was glowing with happiness. That reaction was purely emotional. It wasn’t a pose. It was authentic. He was genuinely happy. It changed his mood. And I, as a psychologist, connect that reaction with his sense of superiority and his obsessive need to be above everyone. Rationally, he understood the enormous influence the media has on people’s minds. He also understood it intuitively and acted accordingly.”

And still, in the 1999 election, he was defeated.

“And that is why he said at the time that when he came back, he would come with ‘my own media.’ That is how his enormous motivation to control the media and suppress the free press was built. The Communications Law now is an expression of that.”

What does it mean when people talk about the media’s enormous influence?

“It is a dramatic influence that the media has in real time. At the very moment when things are published or broadcast before the public’s eyes. What you see at that moment on television affects you immediately. We talked about this at the beginning of the interview, the intuitive, immediate, fast system. Bibi understood it first, and from that he understood that controlling the media means controlling people.

“I know, from conversations with him, that he doesn’t get overly excited by something very bad or something very good. He understands that everything passes, everything is a matter of images, and in the end the only question that matters is how it is presented on television and in the media. He didn’t understand the psychological mechanisms behind it, which I understand from the research. He grasped it intuitively. What you see now is what influences you. What you see later is what will influence you later. So there is no reason to panic over something bad, because it can be repaired afterward. When you control what people are shown, you control people.”

He also has an amazing ability to control people himself, through demagoguery, charisma and other elements, doesn’t he?

“Look, we once used to say that it doesn’t matter what people say, what matters is what they do. People would say it doesn’t matter what the gentiles say, what matters is what the Jews do. With him, it is the opposite. It was already the opposite 30 years ago. It doesn’t matter what you do, what matters is what you say. He understood that words are the drug that acts on the brain, and that the story you tell through them is the most powerful drug.”

So he is our drug supplier?

“Yes. Absolutely. For me, he was a school. Through him, I came to understand from the ground up the effect of the public sphere on the individual. That is why my book is called Brain Under the Influence.”

‘Bibi benefited from the missiles’

Do you remember the moment when he suddenly appeared on the Mabat television news that night?

“Of course.”

Was it traumatic for you?

“I have more severe traumas. But it was very unpleasant. I received a warning that he was going to television. Someone from his circle told me it was happening.”

Was it the right thing for him to do?

“It was a rash decision that came out of panic. Through that decision, you can understand his personality. How he activates his strategy in real time.”

What does “activates” mean?

“Reactivates. From his perspective, in order to influence, he has to be the one dictating the pace and leading the story in the media. To lead, not to be led. At that moment, he was convinced there was a tape of him.”

Of the two of you.

“Yes. So he has to take control of the event and lead it. True, on the one hand, it drew a lot of ridicule. People asked, why on earth are you running to television to confess that you cheated on your wife? On the other hand, it generated emotional involvement among a huge number of viewers.”

So if we use for a moment the professional terms from your book, what is actually the source of Netanyahu’s power? Within the four layers you described, where is he strong?

“Bibi’s great asset is the survival layer of impression. The image of being big, successful, a leader, impressive, in a different league. That is what dictates everything. His weak layer is the relations layer. This is credibility, caring, compassion, personal connection. Especially credibility. I identified that back then, 30 years ago. Even today, go look at studies about him and you will see that credibility gets the lowest score.

“The relations layer is almost nonexistent for him. Everything is centered on the impression layer. In relations, he is simply disabled. And that is why he ran to television to babble about an extramarital affair, in order to take command of the event. That is impression. In the end, on the one hand, he got enormous ratings, and people were impressed that here was a man coming to confess. On the other hand, that is where his disability in the relations layer begins to emerge, and it continues to this day.”

How does this business of the layers work?

“It’s simple. When something happens, when an issue comes up in the public sphere, it belongs to one of the four layers. The candidate who is stronger in that layer is the one who benefits more from it. Take the haredi draft-evasion law. It belongs to the relations layer. That is why it hurts Netanyahu, who is weak in that layer.”

Why is the draft-evasion law part of the relations layer?

“Because it deals with equality and fairness within society. By the same principle, every time we reached the issue of security or protection, Netanyahu led. That is the protection layer, where he is strong. And he has an advantage here because, as prime minister, he is responsible for these issues.”

And what happened to that for him after October 7?

“Severe damage. He was hurt both in the protection layer and in the impression layer. Until then, he had a huge advantage in both. Now, no longer. It is still considered a strong point for him, but not like it used to be. The advantage is no longer unequivocal. Once, he played alone on that field.”

Being prime minister essentially allows him to control the agenda and raise issues from the layers that are comfortable for him, right?

“Exactly. And that is critical. Control of the agenda is control of people, because you put on the agenda issues from the layers in which you have an advantage. That is one of the reasons there should be a two-term limit.”

This thesis of yours is based on public opinion research. Is there also a biological basis for it?

“Of course. Each survival layer has a hormone that corresponds to it. It is all hormones. Because he has been badly damaged in all the survival layers, even when there is a war, which is entirely in the impression and protection layers, he cannot leverage it into an advantage. And you see that even at peaks of the war he did not manage to rise in public opinion for any sustained period, unlike in the past.”

Incidentally, how do you create this situation in which you lead in the impression layer? Does it come naturally, or do you have to work at it?

“Of course you have to work at it. Netanyahu, for example, was not afraid to enter confrontations with almost every chief of staff he had. Maybe except Aviv Kohavi. He would enter confrontations with them, come out on top, and mark another target. That way, instead of them being Mr. Security, he became Mr. Security and Mr. Impression. It is a technique. I win, I dictate.”

I’m trying to understand the division into survival layers and how dominant Netanyahu’s strength in two of them, impression and protection, has been over the years.

“Take two examples. In the 2019 election, Gantz established Israel Resilience and released a video with a counter showing the number of terrorists killed while he was chief of staff. It was a security video par excellence. It was supposed to boost Gantz, but that did not happen. Because that is the impression and protection layer, and Netanyahu is strong in those layers. After the video, Gantz stayed at 13 seats and Netanyahu rose.

“Want another example? On March 25, 2019, Hamas fired missiles from Gaza toward central Israel, Gantz gave his famous ‘Yoo-Yoo-Nit’ interview, and Donald Trump recognized the Golan Heights. Bibi strengthened in the polls and widened the gap because all three of those events belong to his strong layers. And so, despite the missiles on central Israel, Bibi was not hurt. Missiles belong to the protection and impression layers, which are strong layers for Netanyahu.”

Does that still hold true now?

“Less so. The fact is that he failed to rise even when there was a sense of victory over Iran and Hezbollah. Suddenly it didn’t help him. He lost his excess dominance in those areas. It doesn’t benefit him as it did in the past. Although, from his perspective, it is still better to raise those issues than, for example, the relations layer, such as the draft-evasion law.”

‘Peace disappeared from the campaigns’

We are less than two months from an election. In your view, is it still possible to move votes from one side to the other? The conventional wisdom is that people do not switch camps at the last minute.

“That is a mistake. I call them ‘jumping votes,’ and they are very significant. Some people call them the ‘switchers.’ Let’s go back to Bibi for a moment. When I worked with him, during the period in which I examined all the young Likud leaders over a year and a half, he gave me completely free rein in the research. I did whatever I wanted, and among other things, I conducted repeated studies among the same respondents over a long period. I didn’t change focus groups. I examined the same people over and over again.

“I discovered that even among regular respondents, people you return to again and again, between 10% and 15% can change their minds within a month. Move from supporting Bennie Begin to supporting Bibi Netanyahu. From one end to the other. At first I didn’t believe it, and I focused on it, but it is a fact. I continued with it later in my doctorate as well. I did dozens of studies on it. I developed a model that can quantify what percentage of people’s positions are stable, and what percentage can be influenced until the very last moment. I told Bibi about it, and he was pleased.”

Instability in positions means the ability to influence more people. He was the underdog at the time and wanted the ability to influence.

“Later, I developed the model in my doctorate, and discovered that besides the fact that there is a scale for people’s level of stability, and it depends on personality traits and several other things, there is a number of people who completely change their position as a result of external influence at any given moment, including at the very last moment. I called them the ‘jumping votes’ even during my time with Bibi. They exist in every layer and in every party. They are capable of changing their position not just along a continuum, but of actually jumping to the other side.”

Most experts disagree with you and think it is impossible to move many people at the last minute.

“They are wrong. You remember that in 2015 all the polls showed a victory for Bougie, and in the end Netanyahu won by a large margin. There were jumping votes here. He brought them over through the statement that Arab voters were coming out to the polling stations in droves. That is the impression layer. The Arab enemy is charging at us. In the third election, in March 2020, he did the same thing to Gantz through Ahmad Tibi. He powerfully leveraged the impression layer and reactivated the message that without Tibi, Gantz has no government.”

Now it’s “without Mansour, Gadi has no government.” Could that work for him again?

“It depends on Gadi and his strategists. Netanyahu is strong in the impression layer, but inferior in the relations layer. Even very weak. Recent events have weakened him even further in that area. The abandonment of the residents of the South and North, for example. The abandonment of reservists and fighters when it comes to enlistment.

“Gadi has a major advantage in the relations layer. Netanyahu whispered into Rabbi Kaduri’s ear, told Orna Peretz, ‘You’re boring us.’ Eisenkot let Gantz become chief of staff before him, he has a human and modest presence, the bereavement of his son. All those things built him a powerful image when it comes to relations. Therefore, Eisenkot needs to constantly raise issues from that layer. The classic one is haredi enlistment. When the relations layer is on the agenda, Gadi Eisenkot gets stronger. And he must not be dragged after issues from the impression layer, which play into Bibi’s hands. Gadi is stronger in the relations layer than Bennett too, who is branded more as a strong right-winger and is trying to compete with Bibi in the impression layer.”

But Bennett is also brotherhood, hugs, “together we’ll fix it.” I was sure he was strong in the relations layer too.

“It’s hard to be both. It was clear to me that the connection with Lapid would hurt him in this respect. You cannot connect two opposite layers and hope it will work. Lapid is much more in the relations layer, Bennett in the impression layer, which is associated with the Right. When that is joined together, there is a collision. It creates terrible confusion.

“It was clear to me in advance that the connection with Lapid would hurt, and not for the reasons discussed in the media. You can’t take two different layers at equal strength. One layer activates one set of associations, and the other layer activates another set, as well as different hormones. Lapid is positioned in the center and is much more in the relations layer. Bennett is positioned in the impression layer, which is characteristic of the Right. So it clashes. It creates terrible confusion.”

What you’re basically doing is expressing in professional language the idea that Bennett voters are afraid of Lapid, and Lapid voters are afraid of Bennett.

“I’m saying that there are deeper layers here than we are aware of. Impression and relations are different things.”

So there is no leader who can hold two or three layers at once?

“There is, but it depends how. One layer has to be dominant, and the others complement it, but do not compete with it. Eisenkot is positioned in the relations layer, his party is called ‘Yashar!,’ and he was also chief of staff. That is completely opposite to Bibi. You can take values from another layer and put them alongside your dominant layer, add a shade, but not instead of it. Alongside. If, for example, Gadi now starts talking about security and mentioning that he was chief of staff and focuses on that, it would be a mistake. He would leave the layer where he has an advantage and enter the layer where Bibi has an advantage. And vice versa.”

So what can he do?

“Say Gadi cares about people, Gadi will take care of security. The word ‘cares’ belongs to relations. That is how you bring security values into the relations layer. Gadi has to remain in the relations layer. All the parties in the bloc need to be there. And attack only Netanyahu. Eisenkot needs to focus only on him.”

But if he attacks Netanyahu, doesn’t that harm the relations layer?

“No. Netanyahu is an external body. The relations layer is within your own bloc.”

Is this theory biological as well as psychological?

“Of course. We talked about the hormones. Each layer has the hormones identified with it. And I am talking to you about hundreds of studies in which this emerged. The impression layer is centered on sex hormones. In men, it is testosterone, and in women, two hormones, estrogen and estradiol. In the relations layer, it is the hormone oxytocin. When you caress your daughter, your oxytocin rises.”

How do you explain the differences between polls?

“In the book, I analyze all the election campaigns here since 2019. There was an episode with Trump’s Deal of the Century, when Gantz was ahead of Netanyahu in most of the polls, and with Shlomo Filber it was the opposite. What did I discover? Before Filber asked about voting, he asked two questions about Trump’s Deal of the Century. Those questions brought the impression layer to the surface. He essentially primed the impression layer. It was a manipulation. One question was about the Trump plan, and a second question about applying sovereignty to the Jordan Valley and the Israeli communities. That raised Bibi.”

Let’s return to the jumping votes. Are they relevant in the current campaign?

“Very. The jumping votes, by definition, are the people easiest to influence, even at the last moment. When you see movement from small parties to large parties, those are the jumping votes. The atmosphere of victory, momentum, those are factors that influence them.”

Who will they jump to this time?

“It depends what happens. If things happen in the impression layer, Bibi can get jumping votes. If things happen in the relations layer, Eisenkot will benefit.”

So what is the best way to move jumping votes to your side before an election?

“Demonstrations, for example. They are very important for victory. I think that if people take to the streets ahead of the election, it will help. It focuses the media, gives expression to the things being said, to the leaders participating. The messages gain dominance. And who is influenced by that dominance? The jumping votes. It also strengthens and amplifies your ‘home audience,’ who will come out to vote, raising turnout on your side.”

Are the jumping votes basically what we once called “floating voters”?

“Absolutely not. They do not say ‘I don’t know’ or ‘I haven’t decided yet’ in a poll. They identify as the audience of a particular side. But they can move to the other side. They have no inclination toward the other side. So when you move them from one side to the other, it has a double effect. Every bloc has potential jumping votes, between 5% and 15%. They belong to a brand’s home audience, but are capable of leaping to the competing brand. Your job is to keep your own jumping votes with you and bring jumping votes from the other side over to you. That is what Netanyahu did in 2015. He transferred Herzog’s jumping votes to himself.”

Couldn’t large demonstrations have the opposite effect? Frighten the jumping votes?

“They could, and therefore it depends on the messages. If you’re talking about the change bloc, then the demonstrations need to be about enlistment, about a state commission of inquiry. Not about other issues. Control the messages, go for issues that are in the consensus. Large demonstrations mean major emotional involvement with a dramatic influence on the jumping votes, and they must contain the emotions layer. It is the strongest element that turns an ‘exclusive preference’ for a particular brand into a ‘stable exclusive preference,’ which is the strongest preference, the preference that influences actual behavior, meaning going to the polling station.”

From the moment he ran to television and confessed to the affair with you, was your relationship with him completely severed?

“Yes, of course.”

With his people too? Sara removed Eyal Arad from his surroundings almost immediately and blamed him for introducing the two of you.

“Yes. Everyone cut off contact with me. I haven’t heard from them since.”

Did you continue following him? Three years later he was already prime minister.

“I watched Peres make a mistake in the campaign with the slogan ‘A strong Israel with Peres.’ He went into the impression layer and played into Netanyahu’s hands, where Netanyahu had an enormous lead over him. He entered Bibi’s home field, while Bibi went after him with ‘Peres will divide Jerusalem,’ which also belongs to the impression layer, in the negative.

“Bibi also made a mistake with ‘Making a secure peace,’ which meant going into Peres’s layer. Netanyahu’s research showed that the word ‘peace’ drove voters away. Peace is the relations layer. They greatly reduced the use of the word ‘peace’ as the campaign progressed. The word ‘peace’ made Netanyahu voters uncomfortable, and strengthened Peres.”

A double blow, with a birth in between

We’ve reached the truly difficult part. Tell me about the children.

“Shmuel and I lost two children. Two very heavy disasters came down on us. Shoham, our daughter, was killed on April 30, 2004, in a road accident in India. Two months earlier, in February, we came to visit her there, in India. She was 21 and a half, and had gone on a post-army trip with her boyfriend. We spoiled her. We bought her a car in Israel. We made her swear not to travel in anything, only in a car. They rented a motorcycle. He was driving, and she was killed. Eleven years later, in 2015, our son Omer was killed in a handgun accident. An accidental discharge. He was 37.”

How do you recover from something like that? Is it even possible?

“After Shoham was killed, we were in a state of shock that is difficult to describe. It took us months just to digest it. But we chose life. And believe it or not, we had a son. Yes, after Shoham was killed. I was already 50. It was a very difficult pregnancy, and Matan was born. As impossible as it sounds, he filled the house with joy. The human brain is very focused on what is in front of it. The immediate experience. That is system number one we talked about. And the immediate experience with Matan was so powerful that it literally flooded us with happiness, which came within the endless bereavement we were living through.”

You analyze even this as a psychologist, through an empirical research approach.

“That’s right. In the brain too there is competition over which issue controls the agenda. As sophisticated and intelligent as the brain is, it is also stupid. What is present before its eyes is what activates and defines the experience. And because the experience of the new child was fresh and present, it gave us strength, both personally and as a family, to continue functioning for ourselves and for others.”

And then, 11 years later, Omer was killed. A double blow.

“That’s right. An extremely hard blow. But we had no choice. There was a small child at home. We clung to life. In bereavement, there is a phenomenon of clinging to pain. When you cling to the pain over the child who is gone, it is as though you bring him back to life. He is present. The pain keeps the loss alive. We decided to let go of that.

“For me, my children have a transcendent existence. Like transcendental meditation. Descartes explored this, that things have a spiritual existence even if they have no physical existence. They are present in the soul, in the mind, in the heart. I feel that my children, whom I adore and love so much, are here next to me all the time. And I never feel alone.”

What is your advice to people going through experiences like that? Unfortunately, there have been quite a few of them recently.

“The main advice I can give is to give yourself permission to live. Give yourselves a break. Live. Love yourselves. Tell yourselves that you were excellent parents, that you did everything, that you gave everything. Don’t sink into feelings of guilt. That is what the children would have wanted to happen.”

Matan is 20 now, in the Academic Reserve program, about to begin serving in the IDF. I assume he was raised like a precious etrog.

“If it were up to me, he wouldn’t leave the house and wouldn’t move away from me for a minute. Thanks to my husband, he is allowed to do as he pleases. As he gets older, he is so charming, and we enjoy him so much. He radiates, he’s handsome, excels in his studies, is in the Academic Reserve. Everyone loves him very much. We wish only one thing for him: a long life.”

After a disaster like losing a child, is investing in and trying to have another child the right thing to do?

“Of course. Anyone who can should do it. Matan knows there is a lot of responsibility on him, he understands the situation, but he receives so much love, and it doesn’t make him spoiled.”

You’ve been married to the same husband since…

“That’s right. Shmuel is a veteran and respected eye surgeon. We met when we were very young, 22 or 23. I knew from a very young age that I would go into academia and earn a doctorate. Education plays a leading role for me. I used to go on dates according to the man’s education. I wasn’t interested in money, only education. When I met Shmuel, he was already a doctor. We have something like 20,000 books at home. Shmuel has read all of them.”

And then he found himself in the middle of the story of you and Bibi, and on television too. How does a marriage survive that?

“Usually it doesn’t. Marriages don’t survive something like that. We survived largely thanks to him. He has self-confidence, he is a successful and very handsome man, and he decided he wasn’t prepared to lose me. And he doesn’t regret it, I think.”

Do you agree with the statement that the coming election is the most fateful in the country’s history?

“Yes, very much.”

Are you worried?

“Yes, very much. I once had a conversation with Netanyahu that shocked me deeply. He said there is no such thing as justice. And I was unwilling to accept that. As our acquaintance deepened, I understood that he doesn’t aspire to justice either. The concept of justice is supposed to be protected at the core of the survival relations layer. When a person like Netanyahu, with an extreme sense of superiority, heads a country and does not believe in justice, it raises real concern. It is a very basic matter. It is enough to look now at the laws his government is passing in order to preserve its rule to understand that if he is elected once again, democracy in Israel will be in existential danger.”

That serious?

“Yes. With a person whose survival relations layer is very weak, it is doubtful whether he will care for the citizens of the country more than he cares for himself. That means concern for the citizens’ security is not in good hands either. With Netanyahu, he is always the victim. He is focused only on himself, on the aspiration to preserve power, on the deep conviction that the power belongs to him.”

Did the fact that he managed to survive a full term after October 7 surprise you?

“No. I have an entire chapter in the book about what he did to make that happen. Once that is your supreme and almost only goal, and your entire system is subordinated to it, there is a chance you will reach the goal. He worked only on that. He dropped to 17 seats and managed to climb back up.

“He focused on dismantling all the other factors, placing responsibility on everyone else, preventing a commission of inquiry that could become an influential external factor, and clinging to the base. He understood that in order to survive, he had to divide the people into two polarized camps, and he did it. He bet on his base, and it was the right bet. Some of them are still with him. If he had spread his efforts elsewhere, he would have lost. He has no problem tearing the public into pieces, bringing us to the brink of civil war in order to survive. And that is frightening.”

This post was originally published on here. 

Almost half of Israelis, particularly those aligned with parties that form Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s coalition, believe that there was a “betrayal from within” conspiracy around the morning of October 7, 2023, a poll published by Maariv on Friday found.

Out of the respondents, a slight plurality, at 44%, believed that there was no “betrayal from within,” while 40% believed such an event did occur, and 16% said they were unsure.

The poll also broke down these results by political affiliation, with 61% of coalition voters believing there was an “betrayal from within,” while 64% of opposition voters believed there was no such event.

Smotrich-Feiglin merger, launch of Winter’s People of Israel, boosts PM’s coalition to highest point since May

Meanwhile, the alliance between Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich’s Religious Zionist Party and Moshe Feiglin’s Zehut pushed them above the 3.25% electoral threshold, gaining five seats, the poll also found.

The Ofer Winter-led People of Israel party also passed the threshold with four seats, boosting Netanyahu’s coalition to 51 seats in the poll for the first time since May.

In contrast, the opposition bloc fell by two seats to 57, driven by a two-seat weakening of Gadi Eisenkot‘s Yashar party. The Arab parties also lost one seat as compared to last week’s poll.

This raises serious doubts about whether the opposition can form a government without the help of another party, as it has moved four seats away from the 61-seat majority needed.

However, RZP and People of Israel are still in danger of failing to pass the threshold, which could heavily change the picture.

Who is the most suitable prime minister?

The poll also queried respondents on who is most suitable to be prime minister following the election.

The latest poll found that the gap between Eisenkot and Netanyahu narrowed as compared to previous weeks, with Eisenkot being supported by 48% of respondents as compared to 39% who would support Netanyahu out of the two.

Former prime minister and leader of B’Yachad, Naftali Bennett, is also viewed as more suitable to be PM than Netanyahu, with 43% of those surveyed supporting him, as compared with 39% who would prefer Netanyahu. This gap is similar to those found in previous polls.

Former defense minister Avigdor Liberman slightly trails Netanyahu in a PM preference face-off, with 39% of support compared with 42% for the incumbent.

Additionally, the poll asked whether respondents fear another war between Israel and Iran in the near future. A majority, 55%, fear another war breaking out, while 39% are not concerned about this possibility. Another 6% said that they did not know how they felt on this matter.

Just over half of opposition party voters (52%) believe that there should be further mergers within the election bloc before the vote on October 7, 27% believe that the current parties should run separately, and 21% said they were unsure. Those aligned with Yair Golan’s Democrats party or Liberman’s Yisrael Beytenu party were slightly higher in their support for mergers at 57% and 55%, respectively.

Full Knesset election poll results

Yashar (23)

Likud (20)

B’Yachad (15)

Democrats (10)

Yisrael Beytenu (9)

Otzma Yehudit (8)

United Torah Judaism (7)

The Joint List (7)

Shas (7)

Ra’am (5)

Religious Zionist Party-Zehut (5)

People of Israel (4)

In the poll, conducted by Lazar Research, headed by Dr. Menachem Lazar, in cooperation with Panel4ALL on September 2-3, 4,102 people were invited to participate, and 600 respondents (15%) answered it. They constitute a representative sample of Israel’s adult population aged 18 and over, Jews and Arabs. The poll’s maximum sampling error is 4%.

This post was originally published on here. 

Concern is mounting within the IDF Southern Command that commanders in Hamas’s military wing could carry out a guerrilla operation against IDF outposts or patrols along the Yellow Line in response to a series of targeted strikes and the capture of a senior Hamas official earlier this week, sources told Walla on Thursday.
 
Southern Command officials are also not ruling out rocket fire toward Israel as an attempt by Hamas to demonstrate its strength. The sources said the assessment is that Hamas prefers the US not to allow the IDF to conduct deep operations in the strip and therefore may seek to use the period before elections in Israel and the US to respond to recent developments.

Ahead of Rosh Hashanah next weekend, a situational assessment will be held to examine the possibility of a targeted reinforcement of forces in the Gaza Strip. The move could include sending messages to Hamas that any activity against IDF troops or the Israeli home front would lead to an unusual IDF response.

The defense establishment has declined to comment on the arrest of the head of Hamas’s internal security apparatus, but officials said he is a key figure in understanding the organization’s behind-the-scenes activities. According to the officials, his interrogation could help answer critical questions regarding operational plans, protected individuals, methods and tactics, and field commanders who were recently appointed to sensitive positions.

If Gazan forces attack, Israel’s response will be severe

On the same day as the arrest, the IDF raised its alert level over concerns of a possible Hamas response. Diplomatic officials conveyed messages through mediators that if Gaza-based forces carried out an attack against IDF soldiers or Israeli civilians following the arrest, Israel’s response would be severe.

The arrest operation was carried out in cooperation with the Shin Bet (Israel Security Agency) and a Gazan Palestinian anti-Hamas militia. IDF and Shin Bet Special Forces entered the al-Shati refugee camp area in the Gaza Strip using vehicles. According to Palestinian reports, Hamas operatives detected the force and a firefight broke out, during which the force was extracted from both the ground and the air. Based on those claims, no arrest was carried out.

However, according to Defense Minister Israel Katz’s statement released after the operation, the arrest did take place. “We do not wait for threats, but rather pursue Hamas terrorists, eliminate them and destroy their terror infrastructure,” he wrote.

Katz said the arrest was carried out in response to an increase in the launching of explosive kites from the Gaza Strip toward Israeli territory. “The response to every launch from Gaza will be powerful and clear. The test will not be in their launches but in our response, and it will be severe,” he emphasized.

This post was originally published on here. 

An investigation into the unusual turbulence which hit an Air India flight from Thailand to Delhi in August, resulting in the injury of over 20 people, revealed that the captain’s confirmatory test for psychoactive substances was non-negative, the India air accident body announced on Friday.

According to the body, four people were seriously injured during the incident, and another 20 lightly injured.

The investigation further revealed that the seat belt signs had been off at the time of the turbulence, and that flight control systems detected the loss of all three hydraulic systems.

This is a developing story.

This post was originally published on here.