Twice as many Canadian Jews serve in Israeli military as Canada’s armed forces: Report
The Cradle | November 6, 2026
More Canadian Jews were serving in the Israeli army in March 2025 than in the Canadian military as of earlier this year, The Maple reported on 6 November, according to documents from the Canadian and Israeli governments.
An article on the Government of Canada website published in March stated that an estimated 680 Canadian Jews currently serve in the country’s regular armed forces, making up one percent of its total number, with more serving in the reserves.
Jewish Canadians make up about 0.9 percent of the Canadian population.
By comparison, 1,524 Canadian Jews with Israeli citizenship were serving in Israel’s military as of March 2025, according to a document released by the Israeli government in February of this year.
This means that there may be double the number of Canadian Jews serving in Israel’s military than in Canada’s.
In addition, another 60 Canadians who do not hold Israeli citizenship are thought to be fighting in the Israeli army.
In October 2025, The Maple published an article about 49 Canadians who have served in the Israeli military since the genocide of Gaza began in 2023.
The majority were Canadians who moved to Israel to serve in the military as so-called “lone soldiers.”
A March 2026 Pollara survey commissioned by The Maple found that 54 percent of Canadians agree with making it illegal for Canadian citizens to serve in Israel’s military.
Canadians can currently serve in foreign state militaries unless that military is at war with a Canadian ally. It is therefore legal for Canadians to serve in the Israeli military.
In April 2024, the Israeli military killed Canadian-American military veteran Jacob Flickinger, along with six other aid workers in a drone strike in Gaza. He was working with World Central Kitchen (WCK) to help distribute food in the devastated strip when Israel killed him.
The attack attracted international condemnation because the aid workers were traveling in clearly marked humanitarian vehicles on a route that had been coordinated with the Israeli military.
Israel refused to pursue criminal charges against the soldiers involved. Ottawa issued statements condemning Flickinger’s killing but took no action to sanction Tel Aviv in response.
In 2006, the Israeli military killed a Canadian soldier, Major Paeta Derek Hess-von Kruedener, who was serving as a UN peacekeeper in Lebanon.
In the days before an Israeli airstrike killed him, the soldier had “sent emails home to Canada reporting that Israel was bombing schools and waging ‘a campaign of terror against the Lebanese people.’”
Past reporting from The Maple has found that Israeli military service is “celebrated by mainstream Jewish institutions in Canada,” including in Jewish schools, which promote fighting for Israel.
Jared Kushner’s Diplomacy for Hire
By Philip Giraldi | Unz Review | November 7, 2026
Many observers of the highly dysfunctional President Donald J Trump administration have noted how a major contributing factor for the foreign policy disasters might well derive from the appointment of two real estate billionaires personally linked to the president as its top negotiators. That Steve Witkoff and son-in-law Jared Kushner had no diplomatic experience right from the beginning the presumption should have been a given that they would be managed and consistently out-maneuvered by their counterparts from other countries. That Kushner possessed unique access to Trump and might be inclined to give him bad advice in return for business “favors” also should have been reckoned by Congress and the national media.
In fact, there have been a lot of good reasons to be most particularly suspicious of son-in-law Jared Kushner given his history of shady business dealings. Indeed, any concerns have proven to be valid with one only needing to cite the complete failure of the two presidential special emissaries judging by their involvement in the so-called peace negotiations relating to the conflicts in Russia-Ukraine and in the Middle East. In both cases, the situation seen from a perspective of US actual interests, has deteriorated in spite of clear evidence that other parties to the negotiations were seeking a solution. Kushner, an unashamed Israel Firster, like his partner in crime Witkoff, did everything he could to protect war criminal Israel and those Arab states considered to be friends and was ineffective in dealing with the Russians, who rightly do not trust him. Kushner’s family is meanwhile extremely close to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who used to stay at the Kushner family home in New Jersey some years ago when he was in the US. The Kushner family foundation has also been funding Israeli settlements on the Palestinian West Bank, which is illegal, all of which makes Jared a ridiculous choice as US designated negotiator.
Kushner is, of course, married to Donald Trump’s daughter Ivanka, who converted to Judaism which is how he was able to step up into his White House designated position. He also was and is a business partner of the president and his family. Reckoned altogether, it has meant that Jared Kushner has been able to exploit his status with the White House to take steps to enrich the Trump family as well as himself and his own family through both connivance and manipulation of his interlocutors in the foreign policy world, most particularly in the Gulf States.
To cite only one example of how politics, Israeli interests and the profit motive all come together one only has to review Kushner’s glowing account of the splendor of a future redeveloped Riviera style resort, quite likely to be named after Trump and featuring a gilded statue of the president, constructed on the rubble remains of old Gaza that will cover or otherwise dispose of tens of thousands of Palestinian bodies. It is a developer’s dream that is too disgusting to contemplate and is the mark of the man, unfortunately. Kushner’s participation in Trump’s phony Board of Peace has been little more than a cover story giving Netanyahu license to kill coming from America’s president, a man also owned by Israel, who believes that the only real thing that matters is ignoring his responsibilities as president and manipulating his position to make money, lots of it!
Jared Kushner has apparently inherited genes that make him acquisitive beyond all reason. His father Charles is currently serving as Trump appointee US Ambassador in France, where he speaks no French and is constantly complaining about antisemitism in the country. He was previously convicted and served nearly two years in prison more than a decade ago in a felony tax fraud case that grew into a bizarre tale involving sex tapes including the hiring of a prostitute. Kushner had hired the woman to seduce his brother-in-law who was testifying against him over the fraud charges, arranging to record a sexual encounter between the two and send the tape to his sister to force the relative to back off. Charles subsequently received a full pardon from Trump after contributing heavily to the Trump presidential campaign and was subsequently given the ambassadorial post.
Real estate mogul Jared followed in his father’s footsteps to include possible involvement in the aftermath of the 2018 murder and dismemberment of US resident Saudi dissident journalist Jamal Khashoggi in Istanbul by Saudi agents when he reportedly became the White House’s most ardent defender of the Saudi monarchy in exchange for an offshore substantial dollar bank account arranged by Riyadh. As a result the murder of an American resident by the Saudis was never seriously challenged.
And Jared has also been in the news lately over a not-altogether-legal scheme involving the Rothschild banking dynasty that was coordinated with corrupt local officials to acquire an island offshore of Albania to develop into an Adriatic Sea luxury resort. Local people were revolted by the development itself and the corruption involved and turned out in their tens of thousands to protest, forcing the government to back down on the deal.
Corruption might be Jared’s middle name! Beyond the development projects erected over both environment devastation and a mountain of dead bodies, the tragedy of Jared Kushner is his destruction of his slice of US foreign policy out of deference to Trump and his own family interests, which also meant making billions of sometimes insider trading generated dollars as part of the process. A new book by Matthew Cole on his perfidy has just appeared entitled “Princes and Thieves.” There have also number of articles on it and related issues, one of which by Charles P Pierce in Esquire magazine bore the possibly appropriate title “Jared Kushner Is the Worst Thing to Ever Happen to This Country, Maybe the World” subtitled “A new book reveals the extent of his shady dealings in the Middle East.”
The book makes the claim that Jared Kushner conducted something like diplomacy for profit without regard for actual American interests, behavior that might be regarded as treasonous by many. Also considering that Jared was privy to intelligence secrets through his White House access, one might reasonably argue that he shared such information with his “investors” from the Persian Gulf and Israel, meaning that he was engaged in espionage. A major revelation is how he and several United Arab Emirate leaders conspired during Trump’s first term in office to establish a $2 billion in slush funds as part of a plan to influence US foreign policy in the region. Kushner’s ties to Gulf money have also drawn scrutiny more recently. After leaving the White House in 2020, his private equity firm, Affinity Partners, received a $2 billion investment from a Saudi sovereign wealth fund led by Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, a deal that has drawn scrutiny from ethics watchdogs. Affinity has also invested in an Israeli weapons manufacturer, making one question his sincerity in “negotiating” to bring a peace settlement with the Palestinians.
Jared Kushner certainly knew then and knows now that any efforts made by him to shape US policy that came from a foreign government that had provided him with money would make him an agent of a foreign power and require his registration under the Foreign Agents Registration Act of 1938. The act requires citizens who lobby in that fashion to declare themselves and the country they are working for to the Justice Department. Once registered, the individual or group would be required to observe complete transparency over the sources of its income and it political contacts with foreign officials. It is presumed that Kushner might be investigated and charged by the new Congress that will be installed as a consequence of the recent election regarding any number of crimes but even if it does happen in the next two years he will likely be pardoned by Trump.
What does Jared Kushner have to say about his behavior? Inevitably, he has denied the claims made in the Cole book, though he has refused to be interviewed on the subject. His lawyer has promised lawsuits however and has already filed one against Vanity Fair, which published an article by Cole on the subject. The book’s claims are in fact supported by descriptions of the access of Cole’s often anonymous sources in his notes, citing, for example, “a confidential source with direct knowledge” and “author interview with source who attended the meeting.” What is already known confirms that Kushner’s key relationship initially, beyond that with Israel, was with the UAE’s president, Mohammed bin Zayed (widely known as MBZ). It developed after the first election of Donald Trump in 2016, with Kushner being identified as the key player supported by the substantial secret bank account to be able to influence the new president on Middle Eastern policy. Per Cole, four senior officials from Trump’s first term, including two national security advisers, stated to him that they knew of no presidential approval for Kushner to have access to any foreign government’s bank accounts which means the UAE relationship was secret right from the beginning.
A highly respectable source that has been plausibly identified by Pierce in his article relating to the Kushner-UAE relationship is, perhaps surprisingly, Dutch government intelligence. “Sometime in late 2017, the Netherlands Defense Intelligence and Security Service (MIVD) made a startling discovery: A General Staff of the Armed Forces of the Russian Federation (GRU) operative, a dark web hacker specializing in stolen bank data, was traveling to the UK for an espionage mission. When the Russian national arrived in England, the Dutch informed him that he had two options: he could work for them against the GRU, or the British would arrest him. Once in UK government custody, the operative would be charged with espionage. If convicted, he would spend years in a British prison. The Russian chose to change his employer. Later that year, the Russian operative gave the Dutch spies access to one of the GRU’s most sensitive assets. Located in Rostov, Russia, the GRU’s hacking and cyber team operated a remote server on which they stored some of their bounty. During their search through these secret files, the Dutch found something astonishing: screenshots of Jared Kushner’s iPhone. As they monitored Kushner’s phone, they discovered he used it to log in to a UAE bank account. By the time the Dutch spies had visibility into the phone, the account had received hundreds of millions of dollars from a bank in Azerbaijan. Their initial assessment was that the bank account was affiliated with the government there.”
The connivance between MBZ and Kushner in what was to follow, whatever its provenance, would represent what must surely be the worst case ever of US foreign policy being managed clandestinely without any regard for the Constitution, the established federal government bureaucracy, nor both the president and Secretary of State, neither of whom were aware of the relationship. In this case, Cole demonstrates how Kushner worked with the UAE to determine US policy across the Middle East and, in return, he was given full access to “slush fund” bank accounts set up for that purpose. Beyond the UAE, it is believed that Kushner used the money to cultivate relationships and come to secret agreements with Israel, Saudi Arabia and Qatar. Some of the money was apparently also used to establish friendly regimes in Egypt, Yemen, Qatar and Libya. One major objective was to support the rise of Mohammed bin Salman as crown prince of Saudi Arabia and, ultimately, the normalization of relations between Israel and many of the Muslim powers, the so-called Abraham Accords.
As it turned out, the UAE’s expectations were borne out by what followed. Trump did indeed make Kushner his senior adviser with a broadly conceived brief that included the pursuit of a final settlement in the Middle East that would benefit both Israel and the UAE. Kushner benefited from the development in that he was able to operate without any oversight while having access both to top secret information and the ear of the president, all of which was financed by what was in practice unlimited dollar accounts coming from the Saudis and the Emirates.
And one should not ignore what was in it for Israel. Israel-firster Kushner, for his part, gained the support of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu as his arrangement with MBZ produced results for Jewish State in terms of the Gulf States often noted failure to align with the Palestinians as Israel moved to takeover both Gaza and the West Bank. Kushner was also able to manipulate Trump, a relatively easy task as both he and the president were already largely dominated by Netanyahu. Interestingly, Kushner and his family as well as several Trumps, including the president, were also getting rich as a side benefit while allowing US foreign policy to be largely influenced and even controlled by several foreign powers.
Over 16,000 hectares of farms, forests burnt in Israeli offensive on southern Lebanon, says minister
Press TV · November 7, 2026
Lebanese Environment Minister Tamara el-Zein says Israeli assaults have scorched more than 16,000 hectares of farmland and forest between October 2023 and September 2026, citing the deployment of phosphorus shells and other munitions banned by international law.
In a statement marking the International Day for Preventing the Exploitation of the Environment in War and Armed Conflict on Friday, Zein highlighted that Israeli forces utilized 1,800 tons of explosives in three demolitions in southern Lebanon.
She detailed the environmental devastation resulting from these attacks, which included fires in agricultural and forested areas, harm to nature reserves, and the loss faced by farmers whose crops and means of living were obliterated.
Furthermore, she pointed out that the demolitions significantly transformed the landscapes of the targeted regions.
“Who will take responsibility for this destruction, and who will ensure that the Lebanese are not abandoned to cope with its repercussions and the costs of remediation?” Zein questioned.
The minister cautioned that the environmental repercussions might endure over time, and emphasized the necessity for monitoring contamination as well as the effects of leftover munitions on soil, water resources, and agricultural output.
Zein shared findings from a Lebanese Environment Ministry report that analyzed three demolitions executed by Israeli forces in southern Lebanon.
The report indicated that around 80 tons of explosives were deployed in Majdal Zoun in the Tyre district, 700 tons near Beaufort Castle in the Nabatieh district, and 1,100 tons at Ali al-Taher Hill in the same district.
Zein noted that the explosions produced shockwaves comparable to earthquakes measuring 3.1, 3.8, and 4.2 on the Richter scale, respectively, while underscoring that the effects reach far beyond immediate environmental harm, influencing the daily lives and livelihoods of residents.
The minister urged the international community and the United Nations to “assist Lebanon in addressing the environmental damage and hold Israel accountable for its actions.”
She also called for the creation of an independent and effective accountability mechanism to ensure that those responsible for environmental harm are held accountable and required to pay for remediation and compensation.
This comes amid a larger context of ongoing Israeli aggression against Lebanon, with airstrikes, drone attacks, and artillery bombardments targeting the country almost daily.
Israeli forces opened fire near Lebanese farmers harvesting olives and detained a resident during an incursion into Deir Mimas in southern Lebanon on Friday, Lebanon’s official National News Agency reported.
The incidents, reported between early Friday and afternoon, affected the districts of Marjayoun, Nabatieh, Bint Jbeil and Tyre.
Hezbollah launched military operations against Israel on March 2 in response to the US-Israeli aggression against Iran, repeated Israeli violations of the 2024 ceasefire, and Israel’s continued occupation of Lebanese territory in the south.
Since then, despite months of negotiations, Israel has continued its military offensive against Lebanon.
Lebanon’s Health Ministry reported on Thursday that Israeli strikes since March 2 have resulted in 4,390 fatalities and 12,429 injuries.
Israel continues to occupy parts of southern Lebanon, including long-held positions as well as territories taken during the 2023-2024 war, where Israeli ground troops moved approximately 10 kilometers (6.2 miles) into Lebanese territory.
Kafr Qasim at 70: The massacre Israel still hasn’t owned up to
Israeli soldiers conduct a military raid in the Old City of Nablus, northern West Bank, Palestine on November 1, 2026. [Nedal Eshtayah – Anadolu Agency]
By Dr Mustafa Fetouri | MEMO | November 6, 2026
Israel almost always promises to investigate allegations of misconduct by its military, the Israel Defence Forces (IDF), which it often portrays as the most moral army in the world. Yet such investigations rarely lead to meaningful accountability, particularly in major cases involving the killing of civilians. They can drag on for months, sometimes years, and when conclusions are eventually announced; they tend to produce one of two outcomes: either no criminal wrongdoing is established, or responsibility is attributed to an individual soldier, usually a low-ranking one, while the commanders and the wider chain of command are spared. A minor disciplinary measure follows, and the case is effectively closed.
This pattern is not new. It is deeply rooted in the history of Israel’s establishment and how it conducts itself. More importantly, it helps reinforce an image Israel has carefully cultivated since its creation: that of a tiny but highly modern and democratic country, where the rule of law is supreme and justice is not merely a principle embedded in the state’s legal culture but a way of life, surrounded by a sea of “savages” determined to destroy it.
Last week marked 70 years since Israel committed one of its most notorious massacres of Palestinian citizens, in the small Palestinian village of Kafr Qasim, in central what is now Israel, east of Tel Aviv. Unlike hundreds of Palestinian villages depopulated and erased from the map following Israel’s establishment in 1948, Kafr Qasim survived and retains its name. It is now a Palestinian Arab town, with a memorial to the victims erected in 1976 and a museum preserving the memory of the massacre. On the evening of 29th October 1956, as Israel launched its invasion of Egypt alongside Britain and France, Israeli Border Police officers stopped groups of Palestinian villagers returning home after a day’s work in the fields, quarries and elsewhere outside the village. They had committed no offence and had no knowledge of what was happening: they were unaware that the Israeli military had suddenly imposed a curfew. Earlier that afternoon, the normal curfew time of 10 pm had been brought forward to 5 pm, with the village’s local leadership receiving only half an hour’s notice. The returning workers were given no warning or opportunity to explain their ignorance. Instead, the Border Police opened fire on them at close range. Within an hour, 47 people had been killed in Kafr Qasim alone, including women and children. The massacre is commonly commemorated as the killing of 49 Palestinians, although a more comprehensive archival accounting by the Israeli research institute Akevot puts the total at 51 lives, including two people killed in neighbouring villages, an unborn child and an elderly man who died several hours after the shootings.
The massacre was not the result of a spontaneous confrontation but an intentional mass killing of innocent civilians.
The commanding officer, Colonel Issachar Shadmi, commander of the Israeli army’s 17th Brigade, had ordered the curfew ordered the Border Police officers to enforce the curfew against anyone found outside after 5 pm. The instruction was followed to the letter, and the result was the mass murder of dozens of Palestinian civilians. In an attempt to contain the political damage and protect its image, Israel established a commission of inquiry, followed by the prosecution of 11 Border Police officers. Eight were convicted in October 1958, including battalion commander Major Shmuel Malinki and Lieutenant Gavriel Dahan, who were sentenced to 17 and 15 years respectively. Three others were acquitted. But the convictions did not translate into lasting punishment. Appeals, sentence reductions, presidential commutations and early releases progressively dismantled the original sentences. By March 1960, less than two years after convictions, all eight were free,
Shadmi himself was tried separately, acquitted of murder and convicted only of abuse of authority for imposing the curfew without authorisation. His punishment was among the most shameful in the history of justice: a reprimand and a fine of just ten Israeli prutot, equivalent at the time to approximately half a US cent!
The man at the top of the chain of command escaped a murder conviction, while those who carried out the killings served only a fraction of their original sentences. Ask Israel today about Kafr Qasim and the likely answer would be: of course it was a crime, and those responsible were punished under the law! In details it might add that: it investigated, prosecuted and convicted those responsible. But such an answer deliberately ignores what happened after the verdicts: practically the entire process and its outcome were a joke by any judicial standards.
The same pattern of shambolic accountability continues to this day. A BBC Verify investigation published on 15th October 2026 provides compelling evidence of how little has changed over the last 70 years. The investigation examined more than 60,000 published reports and identified 300 separate incidents in which the Israeli military had said it was investigating allegations of killing or injuring people during Israel’s genocidal war in Gaza, the occupied West Bank, Lebanon and Israel since 7th October 2023. Of these, the IDF announced the outcome of only 28 cases, while the status of another 18 remained unclear. The remaining 254 had no publicly available outcome. At least one person was reportedly killed in more than 200 of these incidents, and some investigations dated back to late 2023. As is usually the case, despite repeated requests, the IDF failed to provide transparent updates on the status of these investigations, either to the BBC or to anyone else. The idea is the same: say a great deal but reveal very little of substance, in order to continue controlling the damage and safeguarding the illusionary image of the “most moral army in the world”, while continuing to commit all kinds of crimes against largely innocent civilians, including more than 20,000 children, in the Gaza genocide alone.
And again, the Israeli criminal military maintained that it took allegations seriously. But this is precisely the problem: announcing an investigation is not the same as completing one, and completing one is not the same as holding those responsible accountable. The IDF’s strategy appears to be based on a simple calculation: announce an investigation, allow it to disappear into the bureaucratic maze, and wait for public attention to fade. As time passes, people either forget or become overwhelmed by the growing number of new crimes committed and new investigations announced. Since so little of substance ever emerges from Israeli investigations into alleged crimes by its forces, few people take these repeated promises of accountability by Israel’s deeply hypocritical judicial system seriously.
Seventy years after Kafr Qasim, the central question remains the same: how many investigations, inquiries and official promises of accountability must pass before those responsible for killing Palestinian civilians actually face justice?
Would President Vance really ditch Israel?
By Tarik Cyril Amar | RT | November 6, 2026
Never hesitate to state the obvious: Everyone with eyes to see is recognizing that the US midterm elections have been sensational. The Democrats have achieved a stupendous – “historic” according to the Financial Times – triumph; the Republicans have suffered a crushing, Stalingrad-scale rout.
Let’s focus on the rout: This is the moment when, on the same day, a New York Times front page main headline promises to explain the GOP’s “historic collapse” while Tucker Carlson starts his show with a wry “well, that was a disaster” (adding that he really means “disaster,” as in the sinking of the Lusitania, not rain at a wedding party).
You may suspect both America’s paper of liberal Centrism and the former Fox host turned MAGA dissident of bias or, at least, Schadenfreude. Yet bias is simply irrelevant in this case, where, for once, the facts really do speak for themselves: The great, enormous, humungous GOP midterm catastrophe is quantifiably worse than the 2006 drubbing the party received for George W. Bush’s Iraq War insanity or the “shellacking” – in his own words – voters administered to Barack Obama and his Democrats in 2010. As the staid Economist has summed up the Republican fiasco, this is “not a normal midterm swing against a sitting president, but the biggest wave-election since the aftermath of Watergate more than 50 years ago.”
What is even clearer than that the Republicans have been devastated is that one man in particular has taken a stunning hit: US President Donald Trump. He may insist that he was not on the ballot as much as he likes. No one is fooled. Of course, he was, if not officially – as no president ever is during midterms – then all the more in reality. This was, the Wall Street Journal has noted correctly, “one of the most decisive repudiations of a president in modern history.”
The causes of this “blue tsunami” will keep commentators and, later, historians busy. Here, let’s just note two things: They go beyond the key issues of “affordability,” a typical US euphemism for mass impoverishment and the “Iran War,” in effect another euphemism, standing for a US defeat much worse than Vietnam, incurred for no real reason other than to please genocidal Israel. In particular, the spike in gasoline prices resulting, most of all, directly from this perfectly avoidable war and defeat has delivered a gut punch to Trump’s party.
But also recall that US voters, as we know from polls, are angry as well about such things as the tariff wars that made their lives more expensive even before the Iran War, the blatant rapacity of the Trump clan and their cronies, and the shooting of US citizens in brutal ICE crackdowns.
Not to speak of bulldozing part of the White House in a quixotic quest for the biggest, blingest ballroom of them all. Most of all, perhaps, there is a deep background noise of resentment at a president who seems to make a point out of displaying how little he cares. About his countrymen and about his own promises of no more wars and putting America first, and not Israel.
And now? That is, of course, the most important and most urgent question of this moment. Rumors are swirling: The (political) heads of Secretary of War (On Behalf of Israel) Pete Hegseth and Trump’s chief of staff and single most important adviser Susie Wiles are said to be on the chopping block, for instance.
In this volatile dog-eats-panicked-dog world, one man seems to have made up his mind rapidly. Vice President J. D. Vance, former vehement Trump critic, then devoted Trump convert, has had another moment of revelation and rebirth. With the battle scarcely over and lost, he has addressed the public via X to, in essence, put as much distance between himself and his losing boss as he possibly can while, perhaps, keeping his job.
In a long post, Vance has outlined his theory of why the GOP was crushed. Unusually rich in detail about polling, turnout, and voter movements from one camp (the GOP) into the other (the Democrats), the gist of the post is one clear if implicit message: It’s Trump who is to blame.
Because that’s what you are saying when you say, as Vance does, that the key issue that lost the election was the war against Iran. If you add, as Vance also does, that voters wanted not only an end to that war but also a “focus on cost of living/inflation,” putting America truly first, and a “change of our relationship to Israel,” the point gets only clearer. The Wall Street Journal is right: This was a “stunning repudiation” of Trump.
For while Trump is by no means the only one to blame for the perverse American dependency on and support of a hyper-aggressive and genocidal midget state (that would be virtually the whole US establishment), he has made himself the single most prominent epitome of this national syndrome. And that makes him the single most convenient fall guy, too.
There’s no reason to pity Trump for being stabbed in the back by his very own Brutus. It was always clear that Vance is, to put it mildly, highly flexible in his positions and values as well as unscrupulous. His burning ambition is, if anything, even more obvious: Hire a Vance, don’t complain when he’ll kick and stab you when you’re down.
The Iranian leadership has made no secret of being highly unimpressed by Vance’s latest self-update. “Losing gambler energy, can’t walk away from the table. Boss is prepping the next war phase while America teeters on an Israel-First cliff. Skip the TED talk. Why not say this to your boss?” That was the response of Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf, speaker of Iran’s parliament.
Tehran has every reason to be harsh as well as skeptical. But for the rest of us, it makes sense not to dismiss Vance’s sally so quickly. His motives are certain to be selfish. The fact that he was launched by one of America’s most devious and power-hungry oligarchs, Antichrist-obsessive Peter Thiel, makes his CV even less appealing. But we still have to ask what he may have in mind with his “break” with Trump.
Clearly, Vance is positioning himself for a potential run for the presidency. But what would be his agenda if he ran and won? Skeptics see a massive psyop: Vance will only pretend to offer MAGA cleansed of Trumpian contaminations, in other words, to really put America and Americans first, and cut Israel loose. In reality, they predict, his aim is to betray his potential voters no less than Trump has. Trust neither Vance nor his friend and MAGA rebel Tucker Carlson, the skeptics warn, because they will, in the end, sell out to Zionism and give you the same old, same old again.
There is no compelling reason to rule out such a scenario. Yet there is no reason to find it inevitable either. It is equally possible that Vance – out of opportunism, not because of the conscience he does not have – could really stand for a great right-wing turn away from Israel. Not because Israel is genocidal and all-purpose criminal, but because being tied to it is becoming far too politically costly.
This possibility should not be dismissed out of hand. For two reasons: First, being Israel’s tool in the Middle East has really produced catastrophe for the US and its establishment. And second, until now – or perhaps recently – supporting Israel come-what-may has been a vile bipartisan consensus. To break it down entirely will require great changes both among Democrats and Republicans.
US politics is exceptionally dark and often outright evil. But the geopolitics and the domestic calculus of the long decades of America’s “Israel First” obsession could shift even in that world of darkness. For Israel’s victims, the Palestinians, Syrians, Lebanese, Yemenis, Iranians, and many others, it won’t matter why exactly the US will finally stop propping up their tormenters. A realistic commitment to their liberation must focus first of all on getting the US out of the Middle East. Under what regime at home it will make that retreat may matter. Or not.
Tarik Cyril Amar is a historian from Germany working at Koç University, Istanbul, on Russia, Ukraine, and Eastern Europe, the history of World War II, the cultural Cold War, and the politics of memory.
US-‘Israel’ alliance faces growing rupture after midterms
Al Mayadeen | November 5, 2026
The 2026 US midterm elections have exposed a deepening political crisis in Washington’s longstanding relationship with “Israel”, as Democratic victories, declining public support, and statements from senior Republican officials raise questions about the future of American military assistance and diplomatic backing, Bloomberg reports.
Michigan elected Abdul el-Sayed as the country’s first Muslim senator on Tuesday. His campaign included a pledge to end US military aid to the Israeli occupation and characterized its war on Gaza as genocide. His victory came despite the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) reportedly spending $30 million against him.
In Georgia, Senator Jon Ossoff secured reelection, reinforcing the growing presence of Democrats critical of American weapons transfers to “Israel”. Ossoff was among the first Senate Democrats to oppose offensive weapons sales in 2024, a position that has since gained support across much of his party’s caucus.
The electoral developments reflect a broader transformation in American political attitudes toward the occupation and the military campaign in Gaza.
According to a March NBC News poll cited in the original report, only 13% of Democrats held a positive view of “Israel”. The figure was comparable to the share among young American voters overall, regardless of political affiliation.
Minority of GOP support Israeli regime
The trend also extends into Republican ranks. A Pew Research Center survey published in October found that only slightly more than a quarter of young Republicans supported the Israeli government.
For decades, successive US administrations maintained bipartisan backing for the Israeli occupation, providing military financing, advanced weapons, and diplomatic protection. The changing political landscape now threatens the assumption that this support will remain unaffected by electoral competition.
Bloomberg reports that Michael Allen, managing director and partner at Beacon Global Strategies, said the developments had put “Israel” in a precarious position.
“For the foreseeable future I think they’re in a lot of trouble,” he said, pointing to the political developments following the Israeli elections.
AIPAC influence faces mounting electoral resistance
El-Sayed’s election carries significance beyond his victory in Michigan. It challenges the influence of pro-“Israel” lobbying organizations that have traditionally sought to shape congressional positions and electoral outcomes.
The reported $30 million campaign against him illustrates the financial resources deployed against candidates advocating restrictions on military assistance. His victory, however, demonstrates that opposition to unconditional support for “Israel” is gaining electoral ground despite substantial lobbying pressure.
The growing divide within the Democratic Party is particularly consequential as Democrats prepare to assume commanding majorities in both chambers of Congress.
Although legislative efforts to restrict arms transfers remain unlikely to become law under the current administration, a larger bloc of lawmakers opposing military assistance could increase scrutiny of weapons sales, military financing, and Washington’s diplomatic protection of “Israel”.
The shift also presents a longer-term challenge. Younger voters are increasingly approaching the issue differently from previous generations, potentially reshaping the foreign policy positions of both major parties.
Trump and Vance signal Republican reassessment
The political pressure has also reached the Republican leadership with US President Donald Trump, who has repeatedly described himself as the most pro-“Israel” president in US history, announcing on Tuesday that Washington would end its annual $3.8 billion in military assistance to “Israel”.
Speaking to Fox News, Trump said the arrangement would end this year, arguing that “Israel” had become sufficiently successful to operate without direct American military financing.
He also acknowledged the domestic political implications, describing the issue as “almost too easy a target.”
US Vice President JD Vance reinforced the significance of the announcement in a social media post published after the Republican electoral losses. He identified the need to “change our relationship to Israel” as central to the party’s efforts to regain control of Congress and the White House in 2028.
Vance is widely expected to seek the Republican presidential nomination in 2028, making his intervention particularly significant.
The remarks suggest that maintaining unconditional support for “Israel” is increasingly being viewed as an electoral liability, even within Republican political circles.
Nomi Bar-Yaacov, associate fellow at the Geneva Centre for Security Policy, described the election results as a rejection of Netanyahu’s government.
“It is a clear vote of no confidence in the outgoing Israeli government of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu,” she said, Bloomberg reports. “This marks a huge, huge shift in the US-Israel relationship.”
Netanyahu faces political fallout as aid agreement comes under scrutiny
The developments in Washington coincide with Netanyahu’s struggle to retain power following the inconclusive October 27 elections in “Israel”.
Israeli President Isaac Herzog is expected to decide whether Netanyahu or his principal challenger, Gadi Eisenkot, will receive the first opportunity to form a government.
Opposition figures have already used the American election results to challenge Netanyahu’s political position.
Opposition leader Yair Lapid argued that the results eliminated the possibility of a unity government led by Netanyahu. Liberal opposition leader Yair Golan said they demonstrated “just how toxic Netanyahu is among both Democrats and Republicans.”
Avishay Ben Sasson-Gordis, head of US-“Israel” research at the Institute for National Security Studies in Tel Aviv, described the situation as a major political emergency.
“Politically, this is a five-alarm fire,” he told Bloomberg.
He argued that Trump’s announcement demonstrated how politically damaging “Israel” had become, potentially sending negative signals to its regional rivals.
‘We made a deal that we’re stopping’
The financial implications remain uncertain. Earlier this year, Netanyahu reportedly expressed interest in gradually reducing dependence on US military assistance over the following decade. In June, American and Israeli officials announced negotiations over a new agreement expected to take effect in 2028, focusing on joint investment in research, development, and weapons production.
Trump told Fox News, “Netanyahu and I have made a deal … We made a deal months ago that we’re stopping — and they’re fine with it. They’ve become a very successful country. They don’t need it. And we won’t be paying anymore.”
However, the announcement appears to have caught Israeli government officials off guard.
Two Finance Ministry officials told Bloomberg that they and their counterparts in the Ministry of War were surprised by the reported agreement. Two Foreign Ministry officials separately said they had not been informed of any changes to the existing memorandum of understanding. All four requested anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss the matter publicly.
The apparent discrepancy raises questions about the agreement’s status and whether Washington is preparing to alter the financial foundations of its relationship with “Israel”.
Midterm loss gives Congress power to rein in US war on Iran
Al Mayadeen| November 5, 2026
Tuesday’s midterm elections have left US President Donald Trump facing a Congress with the constitutional means to restrain the US war on Iran, while strengthening Tehran’s hand in negotiations over its memorandum of understanding (MOU) with Washington.
Retired US Air Force Lieutenant Colonel Karen Kwiatkowski and Mohammad Marandi, professor of English literature and Orientalism at the University of Tehran, reached that assessment on Al Mayadeen’s The Grand Standoff on Wednesday.
They tied the Republican losses to Trump’s abandoned promises to end wars and prosecute the “Epstein class,” the economic toll of the war on Iran, and a growing American backlash against Israeli influence in Washington.
Marandi called the result “a major turning point,” though he stressed that the war is far from over.
Congress holds the power to act
The Congress to be seated in January 2027 “was elected to stop the Iran war,” Kwiatkowski argued, and it has several levers to do so. House appropriators can freeze funds not yet disbursed, she explained, while the Senate can pass binding resolutions and refuse a declaration of war, which the Constitution requires.
She noted that Trump has already exceeded the 60-day limit on military action and dismissed his move of halting at day 58 and restarting the clock as “a joke.” A non-binding Senate resolution criticizing the war passed this summer by only a vote or two, she recalled, but a Senate majority now opposed to it could bar him from acting and censure him.
Kwiatkowski cautioned that change will not come overnight, since AIPAC has lobbied lawmakers of both parties for decades. She pointed out that Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer still avoids admitting the war was fought for “Israel,” even though Trump, Secretary of State Marco Rubio, and War Secretary Pete Hegseth have acknowledged that Netanyahu wanted it.
Marandi stressed that the vote also raises the political cost of escalation. A renewed attack would be seen as illegitimate because Americans voted against the war, he predicted, adding that “the price would be much heavier for him and his allies” than before the election.
‘Israel,’ AIPAC take the hit
Both guests named “Israel” as the election’s biggest loser.
Marandi pointed out that Vice President JD Vance himself conceded “Israel” was a key factor in the Republican defeat, since all four reasons Vance cited link directly or indirectly to it.
Kwiatkowski judged Vance’s reading correct but suggested he is trying to distance himself from a sinking Trump, and doubted he would act on it after helping Trump attack anti-war conservatives.
Winning Candidates refused AIPAC money and used the word genocide, Kwiatkowski observed, singling out incoming senators Talarico of Texas and El-Sayed of Michigan, who both voiced moral revulsion at US taxpayer money funding a genocide in Gaza. “That is a slap in Netanyahu’s face,” she said, adding that candidates who defy AIPAC and still win will encourage others to follow.
Marandi cited polls showing young Jewish Americans oppose genocide, apartheid and ethnic cleansing, and credited Americans with waking up “despite being the most propagandized people in the world.” He warned against naivety about the Democratic leadership, though, noting that Schumer and Hakeem Jeffries backed Biden’s policy on Gaza.
A president unlikely to change course
Kwiatkowski rejected Trump’s claim that election results would have been different had he been on the ballot, describing the vote as a referendum on his executive-centered rule.
She also doubted he would adjust, arguing that “the Trump who is 80 years old is irrational” and that only Congress and sustained public pressure can constrain him.
In her view, he is more likely to pick a fight with a Democratic Congress over Ukraine, where Democrats want to keep funding Kiev and maintain tariffs on Russia.
Iran prepares for war
Marandi warned that a US attack could come at any moment. Iranian forces are on full alert, three US aircraft carriers are in place, and “the nights will be very dark” as the weekend approaches, he said.
He added that the Axis of Resistance is active on all fronts, from Lebanon to Sanaa and from Iraq to Tehran, and extended congratulations to Lebanon, Yemen, Iraq and Palestine for helping shift opinion in the United States.
Iran, he continued, will keep tightening the noose in the Strait of Hormuz and demand full US compliance with the MOU. Tehran would shorten the implementation timeline and is ready to “sugarcoat the MOU,” but it will not withdraw its seven demands or allow the substance to change.
He contended that Iran is now in a much stronger position and Trump a much weaker one, noting that Jimmy Carter, whose comparison Trump has long feared, “looks far more successful” in hindsight.
Carter’s shadow over Trump
The discussion turned to the anniversary of the 1979 seizure of the US embassy in Tehran, which Marandi argued Americans are taught to see as the origin of the US’ conflict with Iran, as though the takeover were an irrational act with no cause. Iranians view it differently, he explained, because it followed decades of US interference.
Washington overthrew Iran’s government in 1953, installed the Shah and helped build the SAVAK secret police. During the revolution, the army killed protesters across the country, including on Black Friday in Tehran, and Carter phoned the Shah the next day to reaffirm his support.
After the revolution, Marandi continued, the embassy supported separatist groups and kept contact with officers who might carry out a coup. The decision to admit the Shah to the United States then revived fears of a repeat of 1953, and that was what pushed Iranians to take the embassy.
He hoped that Americans, now more politically aware because of the war, would come to understand that history better.
Kwiatkowski saw the same continuity in Washington’s present-day aims, arguing that US goals toward Iran have barely changed since Carter and still amount to making Iran “kneel before the hegemon.”
She called it a long war, but affirmed that “Iran is winning it.”
Midterms Were ‘Vote of No Confidence’ in GOP, But Iran Has No Illusions About Democrats – Marandi
Sputnik – 05.11.2026
Tuesday’s crushing midterm defeat for Republicans was a “good sign” showing “that the American people are pushing the elites” and “putting pressure on them,” but the Democrats’ victory won’t bring positive changes to US foreign policy, Tehran University professor and prolific political commentator Mohammad Marandi has told Sputnik.
“The Democratic Party is not a party of peace,” Marandi emphasized, pointing out that Democrats were in charge when Israel unleashed its bloody campaign in Gaza in 2023, and initiated or greenlit the bombings, dirty wars and proxy conflicts in Libya, Syria and Yemen, as well as the crisis in Ukraine.
As far as Iran is concerned, the change of power in Congress “doesn’t mean the war is over.” The US “may attack Iran at any time. But it does mean that the regime in Washington, the political establishment in Washington, recognizes that the American people are sick and tired of war,” Marandi said.
“The working assumption is that the United States will carry out aggression,” Marandi emphasized.
“The [pro-Israel lobby] will not give up, and they are the ones who are still in charge,” Marandi said. He warned, however, that any new war will be “much more costly” for the US and Israel, both politically and militarily.
“Any attack on Iran will be met with a decisive response, and that will lead to a global economic calamity.”
Israel will inevitably also work to try to rope the US into a new conflict, because they can’t fight alone, the observer noted.
Israel “needs, for example, the refueling planes of the United States. That would mean US involvement…And that, of course, would mean the involvement of the Arab regimes in the region…because the United States uses their bases, airspace and jet fuel,” Marandi said.
“Iran is both prepared for a very decisive battle in the coming days or weeks, and they’re prepared for a very long-term conflict as well,” with the government putting a wartime economy in place, Marandi said.
The military has received “a very large budget,” with the country traditionally having “the smallest military budget in the region” for decades.
The military is building “new underground cities,” expanding existing missile city and command and control infrastructure, developing new missiles, drones, and producing so much equipment they’re running out of places to store them, Marandi said.
The Islamic Republic is ready to fight through the remainder of the current US administration’s term, if necessary, and will not relent, Marandi stressed. The US will have to come to the negotiating table in the end.
Did Israel lose the midterms?
Trump is paying a heavy price for joining Benjamin Netanyahu’s war on Iran
RT | November 4, 2026
The view from Washington is clear: President Donald Trump’s decision to wage war on Iran cost the Republican Party the midterm elections. RT looks at how Benjamin Netanyahu’s war became Trump’s problem and whether Israel will bear any costs.
The Republican Party suffered an unequivocal wipeout in Tuesday’s midterm elections, handing Democrats their largest House majority since Bill Clinton entered the White House in 1993, along with a majority of at least ten seats in the Senate. Democrats flipped Senate seats in Texas, South Carolina, North Carolina, Kansas, Iowa, Ohio, and Maine, while Trump-backed gubernatorial candidates Vivek Ramaswamy and Greg Abbott lost in Ohio and Texas respectively – states Trump won comfortably in 2024.
All of this is a dramatic about-turn from 2024, when Trump and the GOP won a decisive mandate after promising to lower costs and keep the US out of foreign wars.
Did Israel cost Trump the elections?
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu visited the White House five times between Trump’s inauguration and the start of ‘Operation Epic Fury’ this February. The Israeli leader consulted Trump’s closest neoconservative allies, among them the late Senator Lindsey Graham, for advice on how to persuade Trump into war with Iran, and when the war began, an army of pro-Israel podcasters and influencers reassured Trump’s base that it would be easily won and would have no impact on the midterms.
“I think in the midterms this will be kind of a mild footnote,” conservative journalist Will Chamberlain predicted in April, two months into the war. “Whatever happens in the midterms, it doesn’t appear that Iran’s going to drive anything one way or another,” pro-Israel radio host Mark Levin told podcast host Ben Shapiro in September.
Shapiro, who like Levin has spent years lobbying for war with Iran, claimed that Trump’s unpopularity in the run-up to the elections was “not because of this stuff.”
Trump entered the war with no clear victory conditions or exit plan and, according to Secretary of State Marco Rubio, at the direct behest of Israel. Although the war is the least popular American military adventure since Vietnam, Pew Research ranked foreign policy the sixth-most important issue among midterm voters, with the economy in first place. Trump and the GOP could likely have survived an unpopular war had the closure of the Strait of Hormuz not driven gasoline prices to record highs, undermining his campaign trail promises to reverse the sky-high costs of the Biden years.
What’s the view on the right?
To many in Trump’s original MAGA base, the war was a catastrophic unforced error that directly cost the Republicans the elections. “Trump launched an unpopular and pointless war. Gas prices are too high. People can’t afford groceries. Trump abandoned the American First message. This is why Republicans are getting crushed. It’s very simple,” podcast host Matt Walsh wrote on X.
“Tonight is a massacre because of Iran,” right-wing influencer Scott Greer posted, adding that “denying that is pure cope.”
“President Trump, and it’s hard to even understand why, continues to do whatever Netanyahu tells him to do,” former Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene told RT. “We will continue to see this war go on.”
The pro-Israel right has shirked responsibility for the loss. “The vast majority of us are utterly unaffected by that war,” Levin said on election night. “If we lose… it’s not because of the Iran war.” Neoconservative influencer Joel Berry blamed the loss not on Trump’s war or high gas prices, but on “a sophisticated foreign demoralization campaign” that drew attention to these issues, and on Republicans going “socialist on economics and soft on abortion.”
In Tehran, the prognosis is [dis]similar. “I think the war of aggression against Iran played the key role in Trump’s defeat,” University of Tehran professor Mohammad Marandi told RT. “The Iranian resistance and resilience and steadfastness against Trump and Netanyahu and the Zionist lobby… it has turned the tide against Trump.”
“While there is a uniparty of sorts [in Washington],” Marandi continued, “ordinary people felt that this is the only way that they could make their views known. It was a bad defeat for Trump and for Zionism.”
Did Israel lose its bet?
In pressuring Trump into attacking Iran, Netanyahu succeeded where he had failed with George W. Bush, Barack Obama, and Joe Biden. Trump, the Israeli prime minister remarked last year, “is the greatest friend that Israel has ever had in the White House. No American president has ever done more for Israel. And it’s not even close.”
Pro-Israel donors spent around $123 million on Trump’s 2024 campaign, with Israeli-American megadonor Miriam Adelson coughing up the lion’s share at $106 million, according to Federal Election Commission filings.
Since then, Trump has purged anti-Israel voices – including Greene, Rep. Thomas Massie, former National Counterterrorism Center Director Joe Kent, and a host of formerly loyal media allies including Tucker Carlson and Alex Jones – from his MAGA movement, and given Netanyahu the war he wanted for decades, but at a cost to West Jerusalem.
American sympathy for Israel vis-a-vis the Palestinians is at an all-time low, more than half of all Americans want military aid to Israel cut off or decreased, and 71% of Americans told Ipsos in April that they want nothing to do with Israel’s various Middle Eastern conflicts. Tens of millions of dollars in donations from the US’ powerful Israel lobby failed to prevent candidates such as Senators-elect Abdul el-Sayed in Michigan and Representatives-elect Darializa Avila Chevalier in New York, Adam Hamawy in New Jersey, and Donavan McKinney in Michigan from winning on an explicitly anti-Israel message.
A Democrat-dominated Congress may be slightly less compliant to Netanyahu’s demands, but regardless of whether the GOP won or lost on Tuesday, the Israeli leader is currently fighting to form a coalition after losing his majority in last week’s parliamentary elections, and may not be in power in January.
Moreover, the Israel lobby remains a potent force in American politics, and its influence transcends party lines. Hakeem Jeffries, who will assume speakership in January, is among the 354 of 433 sitting members of the House who have received funding from AIPAC, while el-Sayed will be the only Senator not to have taken money from AIPAC or another pro-Israel group such as J Street or the Republican Jewish Coalition.
AIPAC spent $120 million on this year’s midterms, and 245 of 267 candidates – 92% – backed by the group won their races on Tuesday, according to data from ‘Who Funds my Rep?’
“It doesn’t matter whether it’s the Democratic Party or the Republican Party,” Marandi told RT. “Both parties are utterly corrupt and bound to the ‘Epstein Class’, as I would call it. The issue isn’t so much who replaces whom, but that the mood among ordinary Americans has shifted. If the elites don’t take this into account, they will get into trouble.”
Did Iran win the elections?
Whether or not Iran benefits from the Republican loss depends largely on what Trump does next. The midterms may have rendered Trump a lame duck and dealt the GOP a generational defeat, but the president still retains the power to wage war, and that’s exactly what some of his most vocal ‘Israel-first’ allies want him to do.
There is “nothing to lose now,” pro-Israel influencer Laura Loomer wrote on X. “Time for President Trump to deal with Iran once and for all. Just do it.”
“Trump still has time to topple the [Iranian] regime and be remembered as one of the greatest US presidents,” Israeli analyst Dr. Eli David posted.
Trump has strongly suggested that he could restart the war after the midterms, telling supporters at a rally last week that “you’ll see Iran in a couple of weeks.” Speaking to Fox News on Wednesday, the president said that “in a short period of time, we have to do something large” against Iran, and that this would likely involve a “heavy hit.”
Should Trump go down this route, he is on a clear countdown timer. The new, Democrat-controlled Congress will be sworn in on January 3. Although Democrats have voted on several resolutions this year aimed at preventing Trump from waging war against Iran, these have all been destined to fail with Republicans in charge of both houses of Congress. Now, voters expect even their AIPAC-funded Senators and Representatives to follow through and rein in Trump’s war powers.
“If Trump chooses to attack Iran now,” Marandi told RT, “Democrats and some Republicans will be under some pressure to stand up to Trump, whether their funders like it or not.”
Tehran is not holding out hope for a course correction in Washington, but Tuesday’s election taught both parties a lesson that will reverberate for years to come: picking a fight with Iran is economically unviable, domestically unpopular, and political suicide for whoever is in the White House.
The bottom line
Trump and the GOP paid the ultimate price for agreeing to fight Benjamin Netanyahu’s war, with only the most die-hard Israel-firsters in the Republican camp suggesting that anything else was to blame for the shellacking the party received on Tuesday.
For Israel, the results are less clear. Netanyahu, or whoever succeeds him, may never get another American president as amenable as Trump. However, the Israelis still have a powerful lobby in Washington that will get to work on the new Congress, just as it has done for decades, to make extricating the US from the Iran war as difficult as possible.
Israel elections: More Arab votes, same Zionist consensus
By Mouin Rabbani | The New Arab | November 2, 2026
Israel’s 27 October election, we were repeatedly informed, would be the “most consequential” in the state’s history. Why, however, this was the case was left unstated.
Indeed, Israel’s most consequential policies, most prominently its illegal occupation of Arab territories, its apartheid regime, and a genocide against the Palestinian people now in its fourth year, were not up for debate between the main candidates. A continued rejection of Palestinian rights, and an increasingly aggressive and expansionist regional posture, in fact represented one of the few areas of agreement between the rival coalitions.
The issues that most bitterly divided them, namely the future of the Israeli judiciary, the military conscription of ultra-Orthodox religious youth, and the formation of a state commission of inquiry into the 7 October 2023 attacks, may be of significance to the Israeli Jewish public. But taken together, these hardly qualify for the dramatic characterisation of the elections adopted by so many foreign journalists.
A better explanation for the superlatives is that it was widely anticipated that the Israeli voter would put a definitive end to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s career, and additionally rebuke National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir and Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich, his compulsively extremist partners in crime. In performing its assigned role, the electorate would restore the Beautiful Israel of the liberal imagination, “the only democracy in the Middle East” with “the most moral army in the world”.
Has anything really change?
Shorn of Israel’s toxic leaders, the Gaza Genocide could be consigned to the memory hole, and things return to normal, where Israeli crimes could be glazed over with statements of “concern” and platitudes about the Zionist state’s “right to defend itself”, “right to exist”, and right to do as it pleases.
If the initial exit polls appeared to validate such aspirations, the actual results revealed the above scenario to be yet another exercise in wishful thinking by those who refuse to recognise Israeli realities. Netanyahu’s Likud, although diminished, comfortably emerged as the largest party, and those even further to the right successfully retained their previous levels of popular support and parliamentary representation.
Put differently, the Israeli Jewish public liked what it saw during Netanyahu’s most recent premiership and, as a gesture of appreciation, gave his party and the coalition it leads more votes than its Zionist rival. Netanyahu became Israel’s longest-serving leader in 2019. Noxious as he is to the rest of the planet, Netanyahu is today the embodiment and personification of the state he leads.
The above notwithstanding, the Likud-led coalition failed to achieve victory because it did not secure a parliamentary majority. Although parties that ran on a platform of removing Netanyahu from office will collectively have the numbers to achieve this objective, the rival coalition led by Gadi Eisenkot received fewer votes and fewer seats than Netanyahu’s.
The incumbent did not win, but the challenger clearly lost.
The explanation for this anomaly is to be found in Israel’s Jewish supremacist regime. From the outset, Eisenkot made clear that he rejected the inclusion of any Palestinian-led party in his coalition so as not to tarnish its Zionist credentials.
Under normal circumstances, the structural exclusion of Israel’s Palestinian citizens from meaningful political participation is a prerequisite for electoral success. But these are not normal times.
The Arab vote
The ceaseless demagoguery, incitement, and vicious repression towards this community by Israel’s outgoing government, particularly when viewed through the prism of the Gaza genocide and rampant pogroms throughout the West Bank, raised genuine fears that Israel has more in store for its Palestinian citizens than the apartheid regime that has ruled over them since the late 1940s.
Responding to this existential challenge, Palestinian citizens voted in unprecedented numbers, and the parties that represent their interests secured enough seats to deprive either coalition of a working majority.
In any other country, refusing to govern with minority parties as a matter of racial and political principle would be called by its proper name. But for Israel there is always an exception to established norms, and in this case it extends to the use of common vocabulary. Thus the former US peace processor Aaron David Miller, ever Israel’s dutiful lawyer, helpfully explained to his readers that Israel is a “preferential democracy”. Think of it as the political equivalent of three Michelin stars, and never say apartheid.
Where things go from here is hard to predict and will be shaped by a mix of opportunism, backroom dealing, back-stabbing, and U-turns.
Eisenkot, for example, is not averse to partnership with Netanyahu, and was in fact a key member of Israel’s genocide cabinet during 2023-2024. If Netanyahu can prevail upon him to join forces once again, for example in response to the widely anticipated resumption of Israel’s war against Iran, this would have the added benefit of taking much of the wind out of the opposition’s sails.
This is also said to be Washington’s preferred scenario, which views such a coalition as a formula for stable government. If so, the Trump administration doesn’t seem to understand, or perhaps understands only too well, that Netanyahu will use it as a transitional steppingstone to new elections from which he anticipates emerging with an expanded mandate.
Alternatively, either Netanyahu or Eisenkot could engineer defections from the opposing coalition. While this is entirely plausible, the numbers required for success are difficult to reach. More to the point, in a reality where everyone detests everyone else, gaining a new partner may well mean losing an existing one. That would mean back to square one.
The simplest solution, of course, would be for Eisenkot to incorporate the Palestinian-led parties into his coalition, which would give him an unassailable parliamentary majority. Their requirements for joining are rather modest, and although he has replaced his slogan of “a Zionist government” with an openness to any party that accepts four specific conditions, these are, arguably by design, a non-starter for at least one of these parties in a reality where he would need the support of both.
In other words, it remains very far from clear that Eisenkot would rather win with Palestinian backing than lose without it.
The Palestinian question
The irony is that it was none other than Netanyahu who, at the beginning of this decade, was the first Israeli leader to offer an Arab party participation in government. Doubly ironic when one considers that the party in question, the United Arab List led by Mansour Abbas, has its roots in the Muslim Brotherhood.
The gambit to partner with an offspring of what we are repeatedly told is the devil incarnate failed, but as a result, Abbas became a minister without portfolio in the right-wing government formed by Naftali Bennett.
Short of forming a government, Eisenkot may seek to forge informal parliamentary majorities, including the Palestinian-led parties, to pass legislation and appoint parliamentary officials to bolster his coalition’s prospects in new and early elections. Even this may, however, prove too much for certain parties in this “preferential democracy”.
More importantly, the conventional wisdom is that the main beneficiary of another election will be Netanyahu. Not least because the combination of ceaseless demagoguery, incitement, and repression against Israel’s Palestinians citizens, including disqualifications by its discredited judiciary and growing demands that “Arabs” be stripped of their voting rights, will have an impact.
Together with the deliberate marginalisation from the political process by both coalitions, a significant reduction in Palestinian voting numbers is widely expected.
Perhaps the most important takeaway from Israel’s recent elections is that the uniparty has once again triumphed. Its key leaders may be bitter rivals on matters affecting Israeli Jewish life, but when it comes to relations with the Palestinians, whether the millions disenfranchised and actively persecuted in the occupied territories, or the millions who are citizens of Israel but not considered legitimate members of its body politic, one struggles to identify a meaningful distinction.
Ultimately, Israeli politics do not operate in a vacuum. Decades of impunity have conditioned the Israeli electorate to believe that extremism pays handsome dividends and comes without consequence.
It is high time to discard illusions about the Zionist state, deal with it as it actually exists, and end the state of exception it has enjoyed once and for all.
Mouin Rabbani is Managing Editor of Jadaliyya and author of Gaza Apocalypse (OR Books 2026).
Follow Mouin on X: @MouinRabbani
‘The Arab Vote’: How Israeli Racism Has Ruined Their Elections
By Robert Inlakesh | Palestine Chronicle | November 1, 2026
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has claimed that Palestinians are responsible for “stealing” the latest round of Israeli elections, in what has been labeled the most consequential race in Tel Aviv’s history. What instead has been revealed is that Israel’s existence is predicated on the idea that democracy should be forbidden.
Palestinian citizens of Israel turned up to vote in historic numbers this past Tuesday, with roughly 80% of eligible ‘Arab voters’ casting their ballots. As a result, they managed to secure 19 seats for Arab Parties in the Israeli Knesset (parliament).
In order for a government to be formed in Israel’s parliamentary system, a coalition must gain at least 61 seats. Currently, Israeli PM Netanyahu’s bloc has 53 seats, while his opposition secured 48.
The opposition, headed by Gadi Eisenkot, ran a campaign based around the idea of forcing Netanyahu from power and argued their case fiercely, with many claiming that Israel’s future depended on this election. When the results emerged, the opposition fell short of the numbers they were projected to hit, according to the pre-election polls and Netanyahu’s bloc managed to secure more seats than expected.
However, the factor of ‘the Arab vote’ changed everything. Because the Palestinian citizens of Israel exercised their ability to vote, an activity that many previously felt to be useless, the opposition bloc on paper has the ability to form a government and oust the longtime Israeli leader. For years, this opposition has mobilized hundreds of thousands of Israelis in mass demonstrations against Netanyahu, and now they have the opportunity to act.
But there is one thing standing in their way: the opposition refuses to work with Arab Parties. Doing so, even if the Israeli opposition sought to do it as a tactical maneuver, would be to commit political suicide. Giving Palestinians a say over any Israeli policy is viewed by the vast majority of Israeli Jews as tantamount to the destruction of their Zionist project.
Israel is Antithetical to Democracy
Israel advertises itself as the “only Democracy in the Middle East”. This is one of its key hasbara talking points, yet when the Israeli society and political leadership get even a whiff of democracy, they seek to ban it.
There’s an obvious elephant in the room that also has to be addressed when discussing the Israeli political system: around 30% of the people living between the River Jordan and the Mediterranean Sea are completely excluded from voting; instead, they are subjected to military rule. On July 18, 2024, the Israeli Knesset unanimously passed a bill that banned the creation of a Palestinian State. The International Court of Justice (ICJ) also ruled that the Israelis have to immediately withdraw from Gaza, the West Bank, and East Jerusalem, yet the Israelis have done the very opposite.
Israeli settlers living in the West Bank are treated the same as their counterparts living in Tel Aviv; they can vote, and every mainstream Israeli politician dubs the territory “Judea and Samaria”, arguing that the territory is the “biblical heartland of Israel”. There are no “peace talks”; they refuse to engage any Palestinian parties and vow never to leave the territories they have seized and illegally settled. In other words, this is not a temporary occupation; it is a de facto annexation of these lands.
The only reason Israel has not declared a de jure annexation of these territories is that it would then face a dilemma, whereby it must kill or violently expel all these Palestinians, but it understands that the conditions to successfully do that have not yet materialized. Not only will it be militarily costly, but neighboring countries are not prepared to open their borders and facilitate it.
If Israel were to give these persecuted people Israeli citizenship, then the result would be that Palestinians would be a majority, while Jews remain a minority. In other words, Palestinians would vote in a government that is truly representative of the population, and the Zionist State, which is built on the concept of Jewish Supremacy, exceptionalism, and exclusivity, would be gone.
Inside what is called “Israel proper” – a term used to exclude the West Bank, Golan Heights, East Jerusalem, and Gaza – the Palestinian citizens of Israel, who are today also referred to as “Arab Israelis”, are roughly 22% of the total population. They are the Palestinians who managed to remain on their lands during the Nakba (1947-9). Their birthrate is already higher than that of their Jewish counterparts. In addition to this, the highest birthrate amongst Jews is that of the Haredim (ultra-Orthodox), who are essentially useless to the Zionist project as they overwhelmingly do not work and refuse to join the army.
In other words, if the Israelis are to continue to allow their Christian and Muslim citizens to vote, then eventually the Jewish citizenry are not going to have the numbers to be able to form an all-Jewish government anymore.
Already, this problem has presented itself in the latest round of elections. A coalition government could easily be formed, but it would include the Arab Parties, who will inevitably demand that various Israeli projects come to a halt. For example, the Israelis have sought to ethnically cleanse the Bedouins of the Naqab (Negev) region, cracking down on them and destroying their homes in order to achieve this. That project of ethnic cleansing and Judaization through the establishment of Jewish settlements would be brought to a halt. There would also likely be resources actually allocated to combating criminal gangs in Palestinian neighborhoods, or funds put into their communities more generally.
All of this is a threat to the Israeli Jewish public and the Israeli Jewish government’s core values. They seek to expand the territory which they currently occupy, to make it more Jewish and less Arab. The last thing they want to see is a government that would help Palestinian Muslims and Christians.
In their irrational racism, the Israelis have made an obvious mistake when approaching this issue. The likes of Itamar Ben Gvir, who used his position as Security Minister to persecute Palestinian citizens of Israel, while rubbing it in their faces and passing racist bills, have now politicized a population that had long been far from political mobilization.
Israel is putting its back against the wall, and because of that we just saw a protest vote, one that sent a powerful message to the Israeli leadership, one that asserts: ‘we are here’. In reaction to this, Israeli settlers began to physically assault Arab voters on election day, as Netanyahu accused them of being part of a Hamas conspiracy, evidently inciting against them.
Now the results of the election are being blamed upon them. In the eyes of the Israelis, the Arabs aren’t supposed to ever have a say; they can vote but have no right to influence any government, nor its decisions. Suddenly, the Israelis felt a little taste of what democracy can bring, and they are advocating removing this right from their Muslim and Christian citizens. A notion that even American Zionist commentators, like Ben Shapiro, have themselves echoed.
Democracy would destroy Israel overnight, because the Jewish settlers are just under half of the population living in occupied Palestine. If there ever were a truly democratic election, the Zionist regime would no longer exist. In order to protect that regime of ethno-supremacy, they must kill and/or expel almost all of the Palestinians, at least doing so until there aren’t enough of them to ever prove a demographic threat ever again.
Now that Netanyahu is blaming the Arab for stealing his election victory, he will continue inciting hatred against them for political gain. Yet, this strategy is short-sighted, as stirring up tensions in this way could result in a domestic uprising, one which could spiral into something much more dangerous for the Zionist regime. In 2021, we got a taste of what could happen if Tel Aviv pushes things too far.
– Robert Inlakesh is a journalist, writer, and documentary filmmaker. He focuses on the Middle East, specializing in Palestine.
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Book Review
Book review: Boiling Point, How America Brought War to Ukraine
By Tim Kirby | Strategic Culture Foundation | November 14, 2026
Did Vladimir Putin just wake up one day on the wrong side of the bed and decide to invade Ukraine in February of 2022 or is there a lot more to this single decision that has been reshaping the 21st century geopolitical landscape?
Obviously, from the way that I just posed the question you can see that I am on the side that views the causes for the war in Ukraine to be very deep, long-term, historical and consciously nefarious, and most importantly, not from within the halls of the Kremlin. So it was a pleasure to take a look at the book “Boiling Point, How America Brought War to Ukraine” by author Stephen Kinzer, who like myself, also believes that the real reasons behind military conflicts around the world are not what CNN and the BBC have been telling you. The main thesis of this book was stated clearly by its creator; the war “may have been illegal, but it was definitely not unprovoked.” … continue
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