People walk next to a large banner depicting U.S. President Donald Trump with the slogan “The Deliverer” hangs on a building in Jerusalem, April 19, 2026. (Yonatan Sindel/Flash90)
It’s Friday, October 16, and on January 3, the members of the new US House of Representatives will walk into their offices. By all signs, several dozen Democrats will move into offices vacated by Republicans routed in the fall. The nearly certain loss of the House, alongside the fairly likely loss of the Senate, will make the president’s life hell. Not only his, perhaps.
U.S. law permits the president to launch military action, but after 60 days approval is required on Capitol Hill. The president, certainly the current one, can continue, but in that case he is exposed to legal risks and especially to budgetary ones. A hostile Congress can block budgets, and America, as is well known, does not fight with only its fingernails.
What can be done in two months that would change the picture? And if the goal is to get ahead of the hostile Congress, is it worth it for Trump, against all odds and analyses, to open a campaign even before then?
A growing buzz has surrounded Washington and Jerusalem in recent days. It is no longer false rumors and speculation. Something is happening. On its face, that runs counter to all logic. The Iranians don’t want to escalate before the elections in Israel, and Trump doesn’t want to escalate before the elections in America. But if you start a campaign at the end of October and then get approval from the still-Republican Congress at the end of December, perhaps that is the way to topple the regime? After all, the Iranians work for the long term, and two months to them is nothing.
Or perhaps the story is a limited, pinpoint event that won’t send fuel prices soaring but will bring a significant achievement that will, hopefully, end the debate over the war’s necessity and results. What could be short and elegant? How do you avoid getting entangled in a third round that ends with no clear decision, at a sensitive time for two politicians whom the polls predict a hard blow, on both sides of the ocean?
This is an excerpt from my weekly column in Israel Hayom.
United Torah Judaism party member MK Yitzhak Pindrus attends the opening of the party’s election campaign headquarters in Jerusalem, October 11, 2026. (Chaim Goldberg/Flash90)
Two weeks before the election, perhaps to distract from how far outside the Israeli mainstream his party sits on the draft, United Torah Judaism’s Yitzhak Pindrus went on a Haredi podcast to remind everyone that it is also still deeply homophobic.
Running through the Haredi grievances against Netanyahu, and the achievements they had banked anyway, he said one thing had denied the government divine help. “At the start of the term they voted for a Knesset Speaker, and I think there’s a chillul Hashem [desecration of God’s name] in that,” he said, adding that it “has a price.”
What about the Speaker Pindrus believed angered God is hardly a mystery. Amir Ohana is Israel’s first openly gay Speaker, and Pindrus closed by quoting the verse from Leviticus warning that the land will “vomit you out” for forbidden sexual relations.
If Haredi politicians truly believed this, why did 17 of the 18 Haredi MKs vote for Ohana, with several embracing him on the floor afterward? They are either cynical enough to have risked divine punishment on the whole country in exchange for draft exemptions, or they don’t really believe it and are happy to throw gay Israelis under the bus to explain away their own failures. In either scenario, Pindrus’s homophobic spew only deepens the divide between his constituency and wider Israeli society.
It also highlights a divide within the right-wing camp. The draft already pits much of the right’s electorate against the Haredim. But secularism pits Likud against nearly every other party in its own coalition. Likud is diverse, and its voters identify strongly as Jews, but depending on the poll, somewhere between 50 and 65 percent of them support civil marriage and some public transport on Shabbat.
That split has taken a back seat to the draft. But in a politics shorn of its current blocs, one wonders whether Likud Pride would sit more comfortably beside Liberman than beside Degel HaTorah.
Few things are as dissonant as the childhood innocence of Spider-Man, printed on the corner of the letter from Yahya Sinwar’s 10-year-old son to his father. The letter expresses the child’s wish to “hold a Kalashnikov and shoot the Jews,” and tells his father of his efforts to make “pistols, tanks and Kalashnikovs out of paper and cardboard.”
The letter is punctuated by the child’s illustrations of a barrage of rockets launching from Gaza while an Israeli tank burns in the foreground. Would that it were only the child of the terror mastermind with such opinions of Jews. One of the key revelations of this war was the sheer extent of radicalization in Hamasistan. It is one thing to watch children’s shows that glorify martyrdom, or to read the textbooks taught in United Nations-run schools. It is another to pick your way through Gaza’s classrooms and find a sniper rifle stuffed inside a teddy bear, grenades hidden in a schoolbag, and certificates awarded to children for excelling at firearms.
The next generation in Gaza has little reason to love Israel. But if they are to have a future, they will need to hate Hamas more. The line has grown trite through overuse, but Sinwar’s son’s letter makes the words of Golda Meir worth repeating:
“Peace will come when the Arabs will love their children more than they hate us.”
English Editor: Ari Tatarka
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I prefer to paraphrase Golda Meir’s astute comment:
There will only be peace when the Palestine Arabs love their own children more than they hate ours.
"Homophobic" ?? How can this made up American PR term be uttered seriously by an Israeli who claims to be a Torah observant Jew?