Itamar Ben-Gvir, National Security Minister and chairman of the Otzma Yehudit party, and MK Tally Gotliv, a new member of the party, tour the Mahane Yehuda Market in Jerusalem ahead of the upcoming general elections, September 4, 2026. (Chaim Goldberg/Flash90)
It’s Sunday, September 6, and every parent knows you should never make the children decide who they love more, Dad or Mom. Surprisingly, that is precisely what Itamar Ben-Gvir has been doing for the past two weeks. For years he took great care not to go into direct battle with Benjamin Netanyahu. Every Otzma Yehudit voter wants Netanyahu as prime minister, so Ben-Gvir cast himself as an essential supplement to a Bibi government, or as the wounded party Bibi won’t be photographed with—but he never attacked him head-on.
And suddenly that is exactly what Ben-Gvir is doing. From claiming all the credit at recovering the Altalena, through the charge that Netanyahu doesn’t want him in the government, to the humiliating refusal to meet and discuss a merger with Bezalel Smotrich. A well-known rule holds that when two rivals run the same campaign, one of them is wrong. Netanyahu is going for Otzma Yehudit’s head himself, on the argument that Ben-Gvir is irresponsible, a narcissist who looks out only for himself.
This is a rare campaign error by the campaign artist from Hebron, and the results are already visible in the latest polls. On the one rare occasion when Netanyahu went for Ben-Gvir’s head, in the third election, his party took less than half a percent and came within a whisker of evaporating from politics for good. So why is it happening now? Perhaps because Ben-Gvir believes Netanyahu started it. He believes—wrongly, of course—that the column here two weeks ago on the danger in his continued growth was born of a briefing from Netanyahu’s bureau, which is interested in going with Eisenkot.
And perhaps, no less intriguingly, he feels strong and independent enough to begin preparing for the post-Netanyahu era. His voter base is stable, in the IDF he is the second-largest party according to the polls, and this is precisely the moment to launch Operation Succession.
And then came Israel’s Marjorie Taylor Greene, Tally Gotliv. Scratch the (very) thin layer of class and right-wing conviction and you discover how completely the loud MK cares about herself and her slot alone. The threatening messages she fired off to the Prime Minister’s Office show that the depth of her lack of self-awareness matches the height of her decibels. She was glad enough to take shelter in a reserved slot with Ben-Gvir. One assumes that Achish, king of Gath, before he made room for David, muttered the same thing to himself: do I lack madmen?
Rescue forces at the scene where a missile launched from Iran fell in the city of Tzfat. June 16, 2025. (David Cohen/Flash90)
By the tenth day of Operation Epic Fury, US officials assessed that Iranian drone launches had fallen 83 percent from their opening levels and ballistic missile launches by roughly 90 percent. But a recent report by the Hudson Institute’s Can Kasapoğlu argues that despite the seemingly optimistic numbers, Iranian drones and missiles can make a quick recovery.
His broader assessment is that attrition has hurt the IRGC badly without breaking it. Inventories are depleted and infrastructure damaged, but the order of battle, doctrine, discipline and cohesion have held. Despite the killing of much of the senior leadership in the first 24 hours of the war, the direct Mossad phone calls, and the apparent double agent Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, there have been no senior defections and no organizational fragmentation. Precisely what is needed for an organization to rebuild.
Drones will come back first. The inputs are modular and substitutable, spread across universities, workshops, front companies and foreign vendors. Strikes can eliminate stockpiles, but so long as the knowledge and the suppliers survive, so will the drone threat. Kasapoğlu expects Iran to regain drone mass within months. They won’t be the highest quality, but it doesn’t take million-dollar drones to keep Gulf capitals up at night and the United States restrained.
Missiles will return more slowly, held up by a chemical chokepoint. Solid-propellant production depends on large planetary mixers and on sodium perchlorate from China. Rebuilding a bombed factory is the easy part. Restoring controlled chemical flows, specialized machinery and skilled production teams is not.
Whether that flow resumes depends less on Washington than on Beijing. China supplies the vast majority of Iran’s missile-fuel precursor and more than 60 percent of the electronics in the Shahed drone family, along with navigation modules, optics, batteries, machine tools and fibre-optic cable. Publicly, Beijing has assured Washington that no weapons will reach Iran; in practice, sanctioned Iranian ships have kept docking at Chinese ports.
None of this would matter much if not for one fact: US and Israeli interceptor stocks are stressed, and take far longer to replace than the cheap weapons fired at them.
Much of the mainstream media has hauled the battered Iranian boxer off the canvas, checked he’s still breathing, and declared him the winner for lasting a few rounds with the champion. It continues to insist, even as the effects of the blockade and sanctions have made it clear who has the upper hand.
My argument is simply not to swing from the doomerism of the past two months into triumphalism now. The lion may be trapped and starving, but it still has claws.
Jews pray for forgiveness (Selichot) at the Western Wall in Jerusalem’s Old City, on early on September 6, 2026, ahead of the Jewish holiday of Rosh Hashana (the Jewish New Year). (Chaim Goldberg/Flash90)
“O son of man, why do you sleep? Arise, call out in supplication! Pour out your words, seek forgiveness!” Tens of thousands stood at the Western Wall and sent those words echoing off its ancient stones, at the opening of the high holiday season.
It is the week of the Jewish New Year, and in preparation for the high holidays Jews recite selichot, penitential poems and prayers chanted after midnight. For the past month, Jerusalemites have watched a nightly river of traditional Jews of Middle Eastern origin arrive from around the country and make their way to the Wall. It is an annual spectacle. They range from the barely affiliated to the ultra-Orthodox, and all of them don a kippah and faithfully recite the prayers. This week they were joined by Jews of European origin with their own tradition, turning the river into a torrent as tens of thousands walk the well-trodden path from Jerusalem’s central bus station down to the Old City.
Reciting the prayers myself last night, I found my mind wandering to the oldest surviving selichah, and one of the earliest Hebrew liturgical texts ever found. It turned up not in Jerusalem or Babylonia but in a sealed cave in northwestern China: an eighth-century scrap of paper left at Dunhuang, almost certainly by a Jewish trader on the Silk Road. It is a powerful thing, knowing that twelve hundred years ago and 6,000 kilometres away, he faced west towards the same wall and recited the same entreaties for forgiveness.
By three in the morning, the plaza empties. The crowd climbs back up through the Jewish Quarter in ones and twos, hoarse, unhurried, past the shuttered shops. The following night they will return. For all the intensity of Yom Kippur, a full day of fasting and prayer, this may be the most powerful event on the Jewish calendar.
English Editor: Ari Tatarka
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If he becomes PM, Israel will lose the US.