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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🙏🙏🙏We pray, Lord, grant him Neria Dov Leiter — Neria Dov ben Chana a full and speedy recovery. 🙏🙏🙏🫶🇮🇱💙🤍
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