Benjamin Netanyahu delivering an address to the United Nations General Assembly last night.

It’s Friday, September 25, and something set Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s performance at the United Nations General Assembly last night apart from every other one of his annual productions. On the surface, all the recognizable elements were there: props, plenty of pauses for applause, and a generous number of quotable lines. The difference was the audience.

Even though he was ostensibly addressing the international community, Bibi has always had one eye locked on his domestic audience. Only this year, he was staring directly at them.

Bibi has never agreed with Israel’s founder, David Ben-Gurion’s derisive dismissal of what the latter called “Um-Shmum.” After all, it was in this highly broadcast arena that the young Netanyahu, as Israel’s ambassador to the organization, built his reputation by eloquently sparring with Israel’s enemies.

Yesterday, in one of his broadest-spanning speeches, the prime minister addressed Gaza, Iran, the West Bank, international isolation, Emmanuel Macron, and Zohran Mamdani, careful to provide as many viral clips as possible for Likud’s next month of campaigning. The primary question is: did it work?

Probably not. No matter how flashy his performance, his words were not sufficient, nor intended to beckon opposition voters into the coalition fold. This was Bibi trying to show what Bibi does best: defending Israel, attacking enemies, and bragging about his achievements, all in perfect English, a capability Gadi Eisenkot, notably lacks. He is hoping that showing himself in top form will instill just that extra ounce of energy necessary for demoralized Likud voters to turn out to the polls and give him that vital extra inch.

The biggest problem with that plan is timing. Besides UNGA taking place while voters are busy preparing for the holiday of Sukkot, the circumstances surrounding the speech do not easily build to a grand oration. Last year’s speech was delivered while hostages were still in Gaza; the year before, as Israel prepared for an advance in Lebanon and was still in the aftermath of a direct exchange of fire with Iran. Had he delivered this same speech in March during the war, the brief MoU stage, or the active exchange of fire, he likely would have had a larger impact. Instead, he attempted to heat up some fronts that have been frozen for months, and, judging by Donald Trump’s statements, are unlikely to defrost until after the elections, both Israeli and American.

Nor was the speech of such enthralling quality that it could obscure the successive parade of anti-Israel diatribes that marched in lockstep from the heart of Europe to Pakistan. To no one’s surprise, even UN Secretary-General António Guterres took time on the opening day to put it at the center of the conference. Donald Trump’s solidarity and the shockingly direct, and always welcome, statements from Argentine President Javier Milei could hardly be heard over the din of accusations.

Given Israel’s size and exposure in a hostile region, international relations have always been a key part of security, and security is voters’ highest priority. Bibi would like to flex his vast experience in the field, while omitting recent circumstances in the international arena. Fortunately and unfortunately for the prime minister, UNGA will likely be forgotten by election time. His latest U.N. performance can comfortably be filed along with most of the organization’s speeches, in the drawer labeled pointless.

The Haaretz editorial by Shlomi Eldar and Ruthie Yuval alleging that Netanyahu was warned about October 7 by the UAE’s president Mohamed bin Zayed.

Let’s assume that the biggest story for last week was entirely true, that there really was a lengthy phone call between the UAE leader and Netanyahu. Let’s even assume a warning of October 7 was passed on, and that it was very specific. Let’s assume everything journalists Shlomi Eldar and Ruthie Yuval have published is true, and set aside for a moment the string of side details that were quickly debunked (the Egyptians didn’t personally warn Netanyahu, the Emirati official never spoke to Isaac Herzog about Gaza at all, no proposal was submitted on October 8 to release all the women and children).

Reading the two authors’ book reveals something remarkable. Israel’s government stands accused of, before October 7, ignoring the warnings and not acting against Hamas with enough force and resolve. From October 8 onward, it stands accused of acting with too much force and resolve.

To one’s astonishment, the book portrays the tormentor Yahya Sinwar as a rational figure who, before the massacre, was practically begging Israel’s government to give him an off-ramp and just give him economic aid. “We all understood the explosion was only a matter of time,” an anonymous source recounts. “It couldn’t go on. Gaza had no economic horizon.”

Right after the massacre—which, we’re told, was launched for lack of any choice—Hamas is once again supposedly extending a generous hand to Israel’s government. “I wanted to pass on that Hamas is ready to release all the civilians right now, and that we’re ready to mediate,” recounts senior Fatah official Samer Mashharawi (we’ll come back to him). “...But Netanyahu isn’t willing to talk about anything.” Never mind that even US Secretary of State Antony Blinken called this an outright lie. Does anyone seriously believe Hamas offered a release with nothing in return, and Israel simply said no? Have you forgotten the two American women released with nothing in return a week later, whose release everyone celebrated? Only someone who buys the absurd lie that Sinwar rushed to tell Israel about a coming all-out war in the immediate term—a secret he supposedly kept even from Hassan Nasrallah and Ali Khamenei—could believe this. It’s a belief Eldar has held for years: the leading light of Hamas normalizers in Israel, the Arab-affairs correspondent who assured readers back in 2009 that “Hamas is not a satanic junta” (Ha’ir, January 16, 2009), and who predicted the chance of “reaching a 30-year hudna with them, which is essentially a peace agreement.”

If Netanyahu had told the cabinet about the call with the UAE leader, and if Eldar and Yuval had been ministers, they’d have proposed one thing: economic benefits, and under no circumstances eliminations. That is exactly what Eldar preached for decades, all while opposing every Israeli operation. He even attacked the killing of mass-murderer “the Engineer,” Yahya Ayyash (”a no-going-back decision that landed a mortal blow on the whole delicate fabric of the Oslo Accords”), mocked the hunt for tunnels (”instead of searching for them underground, we should fix the reason there’s a need to dig the tunnel in the first place”), and dismissed every IDF operation in the Strip (”it only added fuel to the fire... they failed to stop the Qassam fire”). After Guardian of the Walls, even a kill ratio of one and a half terrorists per Israeli civilian drove him out of his mind (”indeed, the landlord has lost it”). “Farewell Gaza, goodbye and don’t come back,” he waxed poetically in 2007. “We already know that to avoid going back there, we need to treat your residents as human beings, ease the passage of goods through the crossings, and open the airport and seaport.”

Tragically, Netanyahu and Bar followed the Yuval-Eldar method: economic easements, in the hope of feeding the very monster whose elimination by military means Eldar had opposed for years. The pair’s manipulation—the claim that Israel should have adopted the Shin Bet chief’s proposal to “put out the fire with an explosion in Gaza, a preemptive strike”—ignores the fact that no such proposal ever really existed. That same Bar stated three days before the massacre that “renewing the calm-for-easements understandings between Israel and Hamas will allow stability to be preserved for a long time.”

Once you scrape away the pile of anonymous sources, it turns out the entire book rests on two shaky sources, two aging senior Fatah figures: Sufian Abu Zayda, who supposedly received the warning from Sinwar, and Samer Mashharawi, who supposedly heard from Sinwar about his readiness to release hostages. This pair has been force-feeding Eldar fantasies and nonsense for 30 years now. They sell, he buys. In his book “Gaza Like Death,” Eldar unquestioningly adopts Mashharawi’s claim that killing Yahya Ayyash foiled, at the last moment, a merger of Hamas into PA forces and an end to terror activity (”a one-time chance that will never come again,” the aforementioned whined in his ear). Abu Zayda, for his part—”coal eyes”—looked out with him over Netzarim in 2004 and declared that terror attacks happen only because of the settlements. “You’re paying with your future and claiming there’s no partner.” “Maybe we really didn’t look hard enough,” Eldar echoes him like a parrot. Sufian and Samer, folk tales Inc.

Eldar and Yuval have written an absurd manifesto on Fatah’s behalf, one that adopts substantial parts of the Hamas narrative, resting on a dubious pair who’ve been spreading falsehoods for decades. It turns out you can know every alleyway in Gaza, every operative in Jabaliya, and still not know your right from your left.

Why are you even bothering with Shlomi Eldar, some readers are probably asking themselves. Well, for years Netanyahu and those under him operated by the line set by the media, the think tanks, academia and the Supreme Court: always react, never initiate. Always offer the carrot, never the stick, and if you absolutely must—then the smallest possible stick.

And so, the responsibility for the tragedy rests entirely with the decision-makers, but Eldar and Yuval aren’t exempt from some harsh soul-searching of their own. After the policy they preached was adopted in full and led to flight, paralysis and a horrific massacre, they go on writing books, the old Israeli habit of shooting first and crying about it after, except this time without ever having pulled the trigger.

This is an excerpt from my weekly column in Israel Hayom.

Recently, I joined Dan Senor and Nadav Eyal on Call Me Back to talk about Benjamin Netanyahu’s brief UN visit weeks before the election. We also touch on Israel’s fast-eroding standing in America even as Netanyahu’s political position at home improves, and whether Israeli voters feel that isolation with anything like the urgency diaspora Jews do.

To listen, click here.

English Editor: Ari Tatarka

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Neria Leiter (Courtesy)

It’s Thursday, September 24, and less than a day after Macron explained to Israelis that Hamas is not active in Judea and Samaria, and three days since a Hamas gunman murdered Netanel Shukrun, a terrorist rammed a checkpoint, seriously wounding a reserve soldier, Neria Leiter, son of Israel’s ambassador to the United States, Yechiel Leiter.

Neria is also the brother of Moshe Leiter, a father of six and a medical student, who fell alongside three other reservists in northern Gaza in November 2023. Despite losing a brother, Neria was standing in reserve uniform when the attack occurred. “The decision to return to reserve duty was not simple at all,” he wrote, but he couldn’t stand on the sidelines while his friends kept serving, adding that he felt “an enormous privilege... to defend our home.” Like so many others, he served hundreds of days.

Neria’s father was at his post when word reached him. En route back to Israel, he asked the country to pray for a miracle. Thankfully, after hours of intensive surgery, Neria’s condition stabilized—though he remains in critical condition.

The Leiter family’s story sits at the beating heart of this country. Parents who heard Israel’s call and left the comfort of the United States to build a home in the Jewish state. Yechiel has spent his entire life in public service before rising to the country’s most critical diplomatic post—but Israel has no senators’ sons. His children served in the army; one lost his life doing so, another now lies in critical condition. Even as that son fights for his life in the ICU, his sister lies barely 40 meters down the corridor, having given birth the day before the attack. One hallway, holding a family's grief and its future at once. No image captures more sharply the Israeli condition the Leiters chose, in all its triumph and tragedy.

All of Israel is praying for Neria’s recovery.

Central Elections Committee Chairman, Supreme Court Justice Noam Sohlberg, leads a hearing on a request to disqualify Balad chairman Sami Abu Shehadeh at the Central Elections Committee at the Knesset in Jerusalem, September 23, 2026. (Yonatan Sindel/Flash90)

Until two weeks ago, the Opposition Bloc controlled the agenda unopposed, and Benjamin Netanyahu only reacted. That’s no longer the case.

Has anyone heard about the Haredim lately? The million people who were Netanyahu’s biggest electoral problem have practically vanished off the face of the earth. It’s tempting for Gadi Eisenkot, Avigdor Liberman and company to talk about the massacre and Netanyahu’s responsibility for it, and about that phone call that may or may not have happened with the UAE ruler.

But sound campaign discipline would require them to talk about Hasidim in the morning, Litvaks at noon and Shas voters in the evening. Instead, Netanyahu is serving them a different menu: Abu Shehadeh for breakfast, Abbas for lunch and Tibi for dinner. The Haredim disappeared, the Arabs showed up.

The cost of the partnership with the Haredim is already sunk into the bloc, and by most polls it’s still running up a heavy bill. But the rise of the Arab parties—and the rise of talk about the Arab parties—is hurting the bloc badly. At the meeting, Eisenkot pushed back against pressure from Liberman, and from many in his own list, to finally disavow the idea of swearing in a minority government propped up by Arab abstention. He believes it’s the bloc’s last hope. “What’s your alternative?” he asked Liberman. After all, the Yisrael Beiteinu chairman has nothing but the mantra of 63 seats for the bloc—seats that simply aren’t coming. Liberman sketches a frightening scenario of total collapse in American public opinion, leading to UN Security Council sanctions, alongside an extra 125 billion a year in the budget, defense spending, and the unraveling of agreements with the European Union. But he’s dug in: either a genuine change government, or election after election after election. Joining Netanyahu isn’t even up for discussion.

This week also marked the collapse of almost the last remaining path to forming a government: support from the Arab Ra’am. In every poll, without exception, even a yes vote from Abbas and his colleagues doesn’t give the opposition a majority of 61.

Things aren’t any brighter in the other bloc. In some Likud polls it clears 63 seats, in others it comes very close to a majority, but Netanyahu himself is deeply skeptical the numbers are accurate. If he believed them, he wouldn’t be working so hard to finish off Ofer Winter’s party. Winter’s party is collapsing in most polls, barely able to grow: Smotrich still hasn’t cleared the danger zone, Ben Gvir is approaching it too (though those numbers are questionable), and Shas is scraped to the bone. Like Gulliver waking up in Lilliput bound by a thousand thin threads, he too can’t get up. Going by the polls, he isn’t quite the giant, and they aren’t quite such dwarfs.

This is an excerpt from my weekly column in Israel Hayom.

A screenshot from a ‘60 Minutes’ segment, aired on September 17, 2023, with leaders from the Brothers and Sisters in Arms protest group against the Netanyahu government’s judicial overhaul. From left: Shira Eting, Ron Scherf, and Omri Ronen. (Screengrab, used in accordance with Clause 27a of the Copyright Law)

Brothers in Arms, the reservist protest group that led the refusal campaign against the government’s 2023 judicial overhaul, long ago stopped limiting its Twitter account to refusal declarations and the fight against the judicial reforms. This past week alone, it wished the whole people of Israel a happy new year and plugged a new propaganda film about itself. It also attacked Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich’s new AI video and even mourned actor Ilan Dar, a beloved fixture of Israeli stage and screen, who died at a ripe old age.

There is just one event the organization has yet to respond to: “NAZA,” the film claiming that their brothers in arms, the IDF’s soldiers as a whole, are war criminals, child killers and systematic executioners of the innocent. That’s a bit odd, since the organization is to this day demanding redress for the insult to the refusenik pilots whom Communications Minister Shlomo Karhi told to go to hell. These are the very same pilots now accused of killing Gazans for the sake of killing. Suddenly they don’t deserve a defense? What’s worse, being called “leeches” or being accused of being “murderers”? Or is it that as long as the enemy isn’t Justice Minister Yariv Levin, the architect of the judicial overhaul, the great patriots feel no urgency to take to the streets with a blue-and-white flag and “defend our beloved country?”

The silence may be rooted in an interview the organization’s representatives gave to the American program “60 Minutes,” on the very eve of the October 7 massacre. Shira Etting, a reserve helicopter pilot and one of the group’s leaders, explained at the time why they had organized a mass halt to reserve duty. The explanation differed from the one given to the Israeli public: “If you want pilots who can fly and fire missiles and bombs at houses, knowing that they might kill children, they need to have the strongest trust there is in the people making those decisions.” “In their moral values,” added refusenik Ron Scherf, one of the movement’s founders. Omri Ronen sat beside them in silence. Today he is a realistic candidate on the Democrats’ Knesset slate. The message was clear: We stopped showing up because Israel’s leadership in fall 2023 can’t be trusted not to kill children for political purposes.

Three weeks later, children and adults did indeed begin dying in the Gaza Strip from Israeli bombs and missiles. We know the truth: this was regrettable but minimal collateral damage in a war of survival as just as any ever fought. But what is the world supposed to understand? Suppose that in September you explained to it, in fluent English, that there was a real chance Israel would kill Arab babies for lack of morals. Then, from October onward, Israel did kill Arab babies. The inescapable conclusion is that you are, at the very least, in the high-risk group for being a war criminal.

The embarrassment across broad swaths of the Zionist left and the Democrats since the blood libel premiered in Venice is not just fear of an unhinged base. It reflects something deeper: a loss of direction, and confusion. Above all, it reflects dishonesty, and the concealment of true views, by the people who tore down “End the Occupation” signs at the Kaplan Street pro-democracy protests (oh, the irony) so as not to scare off right-wing crowds. In that same “60 Minutes” interview, they explained that what all the protest activists had in common was the desire to end the occupation.

There is consistency in someone who opposed Brothers in Arms’ disgraceful pre-October 7 refusal campaign and also believes Israel has not committed war crimes since that day. There is also consistency in someone who supported the refusal because of the government’s actions before the massacre and argues that Israel has committed war crimes since. It is, after all, the same leadership. But there is no explaining the people who, in September, warned in English on a prestigious international stage that this government might kill children for no reason. In October, under that same government, they themselves flew bombing sorties in which children were killed.

No wonder Brothers in Arms is silent, Eyal Naveh, a leader of the movement, is silent, Shira Etting is silent, Ron Scherf is silent, Shikma Bressler, the physicist who became the face of the anti-overhaul protests, is silent. They didn’t lie on “60 Minutes,” it turns out. They really did have doubts about Israel’s purity of arms. But they know full well what the public thinks of what they really think on the subject. That’s the real reason Brothers in Arms isn’t breaking the silence.

English Editor: Ari Tatarka

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Emmanuel Macron, President of the French Republic, addresses the general debate of the General Assembly’s eighty-first session. (U.N. News)

It’s Wednesday, September 23, and in his last U.N. speech as France’s president, Macron chose to make a dramatic stand and deliver a statement the U.N. hadn’t heard in a full five minutes: Israel bad. The speech was in no way creative, original, or revelatory—except in the extent of French delusion.

Macron’s remarks were centered on what he called “the return of imperialism, of arrogance, the return of unrestrained force which knows no rules.” France has the first two in abundance but is incapable of the third; after all, there is nothing more imperialist and arrogant than explaining Israel to Israelis and nothing more restrained than its limp reaction to Iran closing the strait.

In defiance of the mountains of evidence and the experience of every Israeli, Macron insisted that “Hamas has never been very active in the West Bank.” What wonderful news. Perhaps the French president should call on the widow Meirav Shukrun and the six orphans created three days ago, to bring her the glad tidings that that the killers of her husband Netanel, a French citizen, don’t exist.

But his words do more than brush off the victims of Hamas’s terror; they lay bare the ideological point at the heart of a common approach to Israel. In an inversion of the infamous line from Orwell’s 1984, Macron-O’Brien is insisting to the world not merely that Oceania is not at war with Eastasia, but that Oceania was never at war with Eastasia. In that frame, the “violations” Macron claims are happening “day in and day out” in Judea and Samaria indeed have no cause and serve no purpose, because Israel is not at war with Hamas. The violation of the sovereignty of all of its neighboring states is indeed a “fateful error,” and the restriction of goods to Gaza is indeed “shameful” because Israel is not at war with Hamas.

Macron has stumbled onto the same sleight of hand those who accuse Israel of genocide have perfected: omit Hamas. Unfortunately for everyone in the region, and for the Shukrun family in particular, Eastasia exists, and it’s at war with Oceania.

Israeli security officials have been saying for months, on the record, that the Palestinian Authority is losing its grip on Samaria precisely because Hamas is growing stronger. Hamas in Gaza is smuggling in materials to rebuild its missile arsenal, and without Israeli action to tear Hezbollah out root and stem, it will devour Lebanon.

France, as Lebanon’s historical patron, should know better than anyone that ignoring a problem never solves it. Its absentee-parent approach let its charge slide into failed-state status while Hezbollah rose to a state within the state. And like an absentee parent, France prefers to reappear only once others have shouldered its responsibilities—to criticize, and to pretend it knows the way forward.

To be fair, insisting that Oceania is not at war with Eastasia is far easier than looking unblinkingly at the problems inside Palestinian society that make it incapable of becoming a partner for peace. Among them, but not limited to, the overwhelming popularity of Hamas and terrorism.

I am not claiming that Israel makes the wisest move at every turn. But when Macron asked whether we would rather “return to the law of the jungle, or in a civilized international society,” my answer is I would rather live in reality. Macron’s civilized society is a thin screen behind which Hezbollah runs rampant across Lebanon, Iran inches toward a bomb, and terror is politely declared not to exist. “Civilized society” is a luxurious illusion that countries who live without existential danger can indulge in. Israel lives, and has always lived, in the jungle, where it has been and likely always will be at war with terror.

Former Prime Minister Ehud Olmert and I in a special interview on my Hebrew podcast Listening Mode.

In a dramatic strike in September 2007, Israel destroyed a Syrian nuclear reactor at al-Kibar. That part people know. What they do not know—and what former Prime Minister Ehud Olmert revealed in a special interview—is that Israel might have missed the threat entirely were it not for one stubborn agent.

Her name was Anat. Fresh out of Mossad training, she made a strange choice: passing over Iran, the file everyone wanted, she asked for the Syria desk instead. The prevailing assumption was that Syria was yesterday’s enemy and Iran the real threat. Anat thought otherwise. She was convinced there was a nuclear program, and she meant to prove it.

“Stop confusing your mind,” one of her commanders told her. “We’ve already carried out two operations on Ibrahim Othman, and we haven’t discovered anything. There’s nothing; what do you want from us?” For her persistence she was rewarded with a disciplinary hearing—yet she stayed in the service, and eventually rose to a senior post. What saved her, on Olmert’s telling, was not vindication but Mossad chief Meir Dagan’s eccentric habit of pulling the people “who might tell me what others were not saying” into rooms well above their pay grade.

The rest is the story people already know, though Olmert filled in the details. The intelligence reached him in a meeting with Dagan, where, by his own account, he declared to his advisers: “There is a nuclear reactor in Syria, we will destroy it.” Roughly 2,500 people eventually knew Israel was watching the site, each one signing a declaration that a leak would trigger a Shin Bet investigation. Olmert held the sensitive meetings at his residence rather than the Prime Minister’s Office, precisely to keep the circle from widening by accident. George W. Bush’s line to him afterward, as Olmert remembers it: “The fact that it didn’t leak from you is a big deal. The fact that it didn’t leak from us—it’s a miracle.”

More revealing is where Olmert placed the reactor on his own scale of existential threats. October 7 and 1973 don’t qualify, he told me. “There is a difference between a few thousand Nukhba fighters and a nuclear bomb,” he said, arguing that a nuclear strike would have consequences “unlike anything we have experienced in our 80 years of existence.” He didn’t believe Assad would actually have used the weapon. “But it’s not a risk I can take.”

Olmert’s self-regard aside, the story carries a haunting parallel: a lone female voice in a skeptical establishment warns of imminent danger, only to be ignored and derided. In 2023, Anat’s role was played by the tatzpaniyot, the young women of the observation units—except their ending was the opposite of happy. Fifteen were killed at Nahal Oz in the attack they had warned of; seven were dragged into Gaza as hostages. The lessons of history, tragically, are seldom learned in time to prevent its worst disasters.

English Editor: Ari Tatarka

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Members of the Joint Arab List Ahmad Tibi, Sami Abu Shehadeh and Yousef Jabareen arrive to submit their party’s candidate list to the Central Elections Committee ahead of the upcoming general elections at the Knesset in Jerusalem, September 8, 2026. (Yonatan Sindel/Flash90)

It’s Tuesday, September 22, and 24 hours after the worst massacre in Israel’s history, with Hamas gunmen still in Israel’s south, a former Knesset member thought it was the right time to declare in writing that the massacre was “an important historic event from a military, political and strategic perspective.” Three years later, Balad chairman Sami Abu Shehadeh wants back into the Knesset.

The law is clear cut. Section 7A of Basic Law: The Knesset bars any candidate whose actions or statements negate Israel’s existence as a Jewish and democratic state, incite racism, or support the armed struggle of an enemy state or terrorist organization against Israel. Otzma Yehudit has petitioned the Central Elections Committee to disqualify Abu Shehadeh on the first and third grounds.

The evidence isn’t exactly conjecture. His column hailed the attack, then drew a lesson from it. Israel and its intelligence services, he wrote, don’t know everything, and “if small and besieged Gaza was able to do this, and at this level, others can do it more effectively and simply.”

Abu Shehadeh knows he can’t spin his words, so he isn’t trying. He’s pleading ignorance, claiming he did not know the extent of the massacre at the time of writing. An impressive feat for any person with a working internet connection, let alone a former member of the country’s parliament.

Even if Shehadeh produces the rock he apparently spent those 24 hours under, he is caught in a trap of his own writing. Was the day historic at 200 dead but not at 1,200? The achievement he credits to “small and besieged Gaza” only grows with the body count.

Nor was the column a lapse. In February 2022, as a sitting MK, he marked the killing of three members of a Nablus cell that had been carrying out shooting attacks on IDF troops by posting their photos with the words “Glory and eternity to the martyrs of our people, the innocent ones.”

The committee will likely bar him. Balad has been disqualified four times, in 2003, 2009, 2019 and 2022, as have two of its MKs, Hanin Zoabi and Heba Yazbak. Every time, the Supreme Court, self-appointed guardian of democratic discourse, put them back on the ballot. The court has only ever chosen to read one of the three clauses, repeatedly citing the ban on racism to disqualify Jewish extremists.

There are two objections worth answering. The first is that democracies should defeat bad ideas at the ballot box rather than keep them off it. That is right for bad ideas. It is not right for applauding a massacre while it is still under way. In one of the best-known rulings on the subject, Aharon Barak offered an example: a party running on a platform of planting a bomb under the prime minister’s car would not be allowed to run. A country, however democratic, does not have to seat someone opposed to its existence, let alone someone who greeted the massacre of its citizens as a historic achievement. The second objection, raised by Abu Shehadeh himself, is that the petition comes from Itamar Ben Gvir, a man once convicted of supporting a terrorist organization. But justice is blind to plaintiff and defendant alike. The case has to be judged on its merits.

The trouble is that the court has always peeked at the defendant. The raison d’être of Balad’s founder, Azmi Bishara, was stripping Israel of its Jewish character. Even when he engaged in his hobby of terror support, praising Hezbollah and, on a visit to Syria, an enemy state, speaking up for “the resistance,” the court protected him. Better, the reasoning went, to keep political enemies inside the tent than drive them toward non-democratic means. Unsurprisingly, no consequences did not incentivize good behavior. In 2007 Bishara left for Qatar under suspicion of passing information to Hezbollah during the Second Lebanon War.

Praising Hezbollah in the early 2000s was a puff of wind next to celebrating October 7. Not even a court blind to the law can salvage Abu Shehadeh. Balad, though, will likely emerge from the blast unscathed. Despite the party’s record of terror support and a platform built on rejecting Israel as a Jewish state, the party remains protected by the court’s blind spot for half of Section 7A.

Its next leader will likely step far more carefully around supporting terror. One cannot help but wonder what moderation might be possible if the court read the clause in its entirety.

Family and friends attend the funeral of Netanel Shukrun the cemetery in his community of Alei Zahav, September 21, 2026. (Hilel Ben Or/Flash90)

Six hours before the Jewish Day of Atonement, Yom Kippur, Netanel Shukrun, a father of six, was killed when a terrorist opened fire on his car. Netanel used his last seconds of life to tell his son to run. An hour later, a terrorist tried to ram soldiers at a checkpoint. An hour after that, an Israeli who took a wrong turn into a village in the Hebron Hills was attacked and wounded. Forty minutes later, another attempted ramming targeted Israeli troops. Ten minutes after that, a vehicle with no license plates tried to run down two Israelis. Simply another average day in Judea and Samaria.

And people wonder why Israelis tire of the endless accusations of settler violence.

By August 11, the Foreign Ministry had counted 896 Palestinian terror attacks in Judea and Samaria since the start of 2026, with four Israelis murdered and 119 wounded. Over the first half of the year, the security establishment recorded 660 incidents of Jewish nationalist crime, in which six Palestinians were killed and 140 wounded. For the first time, the two columns look almost the same size, but only if you leave out the attacks that would have happened: in 2025 alone, the Shin Bet foiled 1,374 significant attacks, 717 of them shootings and 630 bombings.

Statistics do not justify violence, and this government’s loss of control over the territory is a case of criminal negligence and moral indifference. But for all the talk of how settler violence radicalizes Palestinians, you might expect someone to spare a word for the Palestinian violence that radicalized the settlers.

I do not expect Netanel Shukrun’s name to travel far. No matter how often Israelis point out that Jews in Judea and Samaria are in greater danger than Palestinians, sympathy only flows one way. The international press has settled on a story about the region, and a father murdered on his way home from a swim with his son is not part of it. If the killing is noticed at all, expect a long paragraph on settler violence. The implication, never stated outright, is that people like Netanel brought it on themselves.

So it is worth asking plainly: what did Netanel Shukrun do to deserve death? Was it the swim, or that ancient offense of being a Jew in the wrong place?

The liturgy of Yom Kippur is preoccupied with death. For 25 hours, Jews argue their case before God. They admit to arrogance, stubbornness and baseless hatred, and ask to be absolved and inscribed in the book of life for the coming year. Netanel Shukrun will not get a hearing. In the eyes of the world, he was sealed in the book of death for one unforgivable sin: he lived on the wrong side of the line.

English Editor: Ari Tatarka

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Palestinians released by Israel arrive at Al-Awda Hospital in the Nuseirat refugee camp on October 13, 2025. (Ali Hassan/Flash90)

It’s Sunday, September 20, and the most revealing sentence spoken from Gaza’s press corps this year came on a podcast from one of its greatest stars. “If someone says something like this, many journalists lower the camera.”

That is Motaz Azaiza—one of TIME’s 100 most influential people of 2024, GQ Middle East’s man of the year—explaining how, when faced with dissent, the Gaza media complex fixes the narrative on Hamas’s behalf.

Speaking on the Palestinian podcast Taqarob, Azaiza described a WhatsApp group that “all the Gaza journalists are in.” For anyone picturing a professional association: its icon is a Hamas flag, and its administrator, he said, is the media director of the Rafah crossing.

Azaiza is no friend of Israel. TIME’s honoree celebrated October 7 and filmed hostages being beaten in a Gaza street, but then promptly buried the footage. When Yahya Sinwar was killed, he told mourners that anyone who had not answered Sinwar’s call to go out and engage the enemy had “no right to mourn and boast about the manner of his death.” Sinwar, he wrote, “wanted you in the field.”

That Gaza is an authoritarian hellscape is hardly worth stopping the presses for. Anyone thinking critically assumed Hamas controlled the narrative from the very beginning. Azaiza’s testimony is less an indictment of Hamas than of the media complex that lapped up its releases.

The Committee to Protect Journalists ran a feature in May of last year in which the head of the Palestinian Journalists’ Syndicate listed Hamas’s methods—summonses, interrogations, threats, beatings, arrests, publication bans, interference with content, surveillance—and his deputy conceded that most journalists in Gaza now censor themselves. One photographer, beaten unconscious by plainclothes police beside Nasser Hospital, told CPJ that when colleagues tried to intervene, they were informed that “the spy and the journalist are one and the same.” CPJ noted the violations were vastly underreported, because the victims were too frightened to say so.

Despite publishing all that, CPJ joined the foreign press in doing what Gazan journalists did out of loyalty or under duress: carrying the Hamas line. For two years its casualty database was the load-bearing source for the charge that Israel systematically targets journalists. In June it quietly removed 20 names from that database—eight of them after Hamas and Islamic Jihad published obituaries claiming the dead as their own fighters. The Meir Amit Center found a further 23 examples, and there are doubtless more.

To be fair, “Totalitarian Islamists co-opt the press” is a far more compromising headline for a media organization to run than “Israel targets press.”

The foreign press has omitted Hamas control since 2008, when Hamas stopped the West Bank dailies at the crossing and told their editors, according to the head of the Palestinian Journalists’ Syndicate, that they could enter Gaza once they signed an undertaking not to criticize Hamas. It broke cover once again in 2014, when, in a rare moment of lucidity, the Foreign Press Association condemned the “blatant, incessant, forceful and unorthodox methods” used against its members in Gaza. A Hamas information official then confirmed it on Lebanese television: the security services, she explained, “would give them some time to change their message.”

When the war began, Hamas already had years of evidence that the foreign press would take what it was served. That is how a single group chat, with no foreign members, set a global narrative.

Will the world take note of Azaiza’s testimony? Unlikely. The most serious piece of journalism of Azaiza’s career will likely be his least cited.

Leader of the Likud party as well as prime minister soon to be Benjamin Netanyahu and leader of the Kadima party Tzipi Livni attend the opening session of the 18th parliament. February 24, 2009. (Yossi Zamir/Flash90)

An old title, once very important but since all but forgotten, may soon return: largest party. Netanyahu has been so successful at drilling in the importance of the bloc and the number 61 that almost no one is impressed anymore that a party fresh out of the wrapper, Gadi Eisenkot’s Yashar!, takes first place in nearly every poll. Why does size matter if the bloc is what counts? No one will again risk the humiliation of Kadima’s 2009 victory celebrations, “28 is more than 27,” only to discover that four years of opposition lay ahead, because 65 is more than 55.

So it is natural, understandable and even logical that this past week’s headlines have focused on how fast Eisenkot’s bloc is shrinking, rather than on how much Eisenkot’s party is widening its lead over Likud. His rivals within the bloc also make a point of noting that ever since he struck out on his own, the bigger he gets, the smaller the bloc gets. It’s called cannibalization.

And yet, the largest-party question may make a comeback in this election. Right now, Netanyahu is like a commander who can’t strike inside a civilian area for fear of collateral damage. If he grows too much, he’ll knock Bezalel Smotrich below the electoral threshold, Ofer Winter will burn votes, and Itamar Ben-Gvir, according to the polls, is also nearing the danger zone. But then again, will he simply walk into the 20-seat range, maybe lower, of sound mind? In the 2019 elections, the genius of forming Blue and White lay in creating a race for first place. Netanyahu closed a 10-seat gap, but at a heavy price: Moshe Feiglin and Naftali Bennett fell below the threshold, and he lost his Knesset majority. That is exactly what Eisenkot is doing now.

It is almost the opposition’s only way to change what looks like a headlong gallop toward an inconclusive outcome, or worse, losing the ability to replace the government under almost any scenario. The polls that once put the change bloc within touching distance of a Zionist majority now signal a landslide and collapse. The shrinking Zionist-secular-center-left bloc is being eaten away by demographics, the Smotrich–Ra’am link, the reunited Joint List, the founding of Winter’s party and the remnants of the third bloc.

Despair and dejection have spread through the camp this past week, an ominous sign for its chances of replacing the government. In a parallel universe, the decision would be to jolt the campaign awake. But that strategy is impossible, since the only chance of bringing Netanyahu down is for his voters to stay apathetic. If they wake up and turn out at the last election’s rate, he will probably be prime minister again.

On the reasonable assumption that the dream of 61 is dead, we are not far from another possible turning point in the campaign: the moment Netanyahu’s bloc has one more seat than the opposition bloc. At that point, even the plan to form a government with the Arab parties abstaining from outside won’t be enough. It would take Ra’am’s active support, plus abstentions from Balad and perhaps Goldknopf, to form a rickety, reviled stopgap government. On the other side of the ledger, of course, will be the fear of going to elections again with Netanyahu still prime minister, after the opposition won a crushing majority.

“What will you do in that case?” I asked a senior figure in the bloc the day before yesterday. “It’s a choice between bad and very bad.”

This is an excerpt from my weekly column in Israel Hayom.

We are taking a break for Yom Kippur; We will be back on Tuesday.

English Editor: Ari Tatarka

If you enjoy the newsletter, you can show your support by becoming a paid subscriber—it really helps keep this going. I’m also offering a special monthly briefing for a small group of premium members. I’d love to have you join us—just click below to find out more.

Thanks for reading It’s Noon in Israel! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work.

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