Election results: reshuffling of the deck

Overnight the exit polls were updated, and their revised figures are (graphic from the Times of Israel, fair use under Section 27 of the Israel Copyright Law):

I will update this post with actual results once a useful percentage of ballots have been counted.

So how does this compare with the outgoing Knesset?

Israeli Elections 2026: Outgoing Knesset vs. Exit Polls

Party / List	Outgoing Knesset	Exit Poll Average	Change
Likud + New Hope	36	27.0	−9.0
Yashar — Eisenkot	New	21.3	+21.3
B’Yachad — Bennett/Lapid	24*	12.7	−11.3*
Blue and White (Gantz)	8	0	−8
Joint Arab List	5**	11.3	+6.3**
The Democrats	4	9.0	+5.0
Yisrael Beytenu (Liberman)	6	7.3	+1.3
Ra’am	5	7.0	+2.0
Shas	11	6.3	−4.7
Itamar Ben-Gvir	7	6.0	−1.0
Religious Zionism	6	6.0	0.0
Noam (Avi Maoz)	1	0	−1
United Torah Judaism	7	6.0	−1.0

Source: Times of Israel election dashboard, combined exit polls from Kan 11, Channel 12, and Channel 13 (October 28, 2026). Figures are arithmetic averages, not final results. Outgoing Knesset composition: July 17, 2026.

* B’Yachad is compared with Yesh Atid’s 24 seats, although the new alliance is not its direct successor.
** The Joint Arab List is compared with Hadash–Ta’al’s five seats; the new alliance also includes Balad.
Blue and White–National Unity and Noam had outgoing Knesset representation but won no seats in these exit-poll projections.
The Reservists and Ofer Winter’s list are not expected to cross the electoral threshold (de facto, 4 seats).

Main trends:
(a) “pro-Netanyahu bloc” got a serious drubbing: the merger of Likud and Gideon Saar’s New Hope lost 9 seats and Shas (“Sephardi Torah Guardians”) lost 5, while one seat each was lost by its Ashkenazi counterpart United Torah Judaism and by Itamar Ben-Gvir’s “Kachsuckers-R-Us”. The one-man “Noam” splinter list also disappeared (as expected, given the electoral threshold de facto corresponds to 4 seats). Smotrich/Schmuckrich’s list held steady.

(b) In the “anti-Netanyahu bloc”, Eisenkot’s new “Yashar” (straight, straightforward, straight ahead) list went from nowhere to 21 seats, perhaps absorbing internal migration worth 19 seats from “BeYachad” (together, the joint list of Naftali Bennett and Yair Lapid/Yahir Vapid) and from Benny Gantz’s “Blue and White”, which ended its campaign a week before the elections.

The joint list of far-left Meretz (“zeal”, but really a Hebrew acronym of three ancestor parties) and Labour, “The Democrats” (read: “the Anointed Enlightened Minority”) more than doubled its representation. To be fair, however, the previous result in which Labour (then going solo) missed the electoral threshold by a hair’s breadth was a bit of a fluke.

Also, Avigdor Liberman’s mostly-“Russian” [*] immigrants lists looks to get an extra seat.

(c) And now for the shocker: hefty gains for the mostly-Arab parties. The Joint Arab List more than doubles its representation, while the more amenable Ra`am also got two additional seats. Technically, neither party is purely Arab — the Joint Arab List includes two Jewish communists (a species I hold in about the same esteem as whale excrement), Ofer Cassif and Orly Noy, while Ra`am’s #2 is the former head of the Serious Crimes Investigation Unit of the police, Yoav Segalovitz.

The Joint Arab List is leprous as a coalition partner for both blocs, but the presence of Segalowitz on the Ra`am list (which, may I remind you, was already once part of a government under Naftali Bennett) may offer a “fig leaf” for its addition. (Netanyahu can grandstand all he wants: we know he did approach them in previous coalition negotiations.)

DEVELOPING….

UPDATE 1: with 53.7% of ballots counted, we have the same picture, give or take a seat — except for Mansour Abbas’s list dropping from 7 to 4 seats. BEWARE: its voter base are largely the Beduin communities in the Northern Negev, and I don’t know how well or poorly those are sampled in the 53.7%.

https://www.timesofisrael.com/liveblog_entry/with-over-50-of-ballots-counted-pro-netanyahu-bloc-has-55-seats-opposition-has-50-arab-parties-hold-15

Of the parties below the 3.25% threshold, only The Reservists (2.7%) has even a remote chance of crossing it as votes get counted. Ofer Winter polled at 1.7% and the Chareidi Public at just 0.2% — the latter result against widespread reports of voter and canvasser intimidation in chareidi communities. I mean, “how dare you threaten our feedlot!” 😉

Overall voter turnout, at 77.7%, was the highest since 1999 (78.7%). Israel’s all-time record for overall turnout was 86.9% at the first Knesset elections in 1949.

UPDATE 2 I spoke to an elderly colleague who’s a keen observer, and he pointed out that typically women don’t vote in the Arab villages — but that this time Ben-Gvir and his antics, plus his clear inability or unwillingness to tackle rampant violent crime within the Arabic, angered that population enough that the men sent out the women to go vote at their behest. [ADDENDUM: See here.]

Getting up, I wondered what the theme song of the day would be. Would it be the syrupy “Starting Over” by John Lennon or the grim, evocative “Cold Gray Morning” by Kansas? In the end, I’ll settle for Led Zeppelin’s “Dazed and Confused”.

UPDATE 2b: with 60% of votes counted:

Israeli Elections 2026: Outgoing Knesset vs. partial results

Party / List	Outgoing Knesset	with 60% counted	Change
Likud + New Hope	36	27	−9
Yashar — Eisenkot	New	21	+21
B’Yachad — Bennett/Lapid	24*	11	−13*
Blue and White (Gantz)	8	0	−8
Joint Arab List	5**	12	+7**
The Democrats	4	8	+4
Yisrael Beytenu (Liberman)	6	8	+2
Ra`am (Mansour Abbas)	5	6	+1
Shas	11	7	−4
Itamar Ben-Gvir	7	7	0
Religious Zionism	6	6	0
Noam (Avi Maoz)	1	0	−1
United Torah Judaism	7	7	0

Source: YNet election dashboard, updated 10:04

* B’Yachad is compared with Yesh Atid’s 24 seats, although the new alliance is not its direct successor.
** The Joint Arab List is compared with Hadash–Ta’al’s five seats; the new alliance also includes Balad.
Blue and White–National Unity and No`am had outgoing Knesset representation but won no seats in these exit-poll projections.
The Reservists and Ofer Winter’s list are not expected to cross the electoral threshold (de facto, 4 seats).

UPDATE 2c: with over 70% almost 77% counted, one seat shifts from “Yashar” to the Joint Arab List.

Times of Israel mulls the possible effect of the “double envelopes” vote:

While the majority of ballots are expected to be counted today, the so-called double envelope votes may not be fully tallied until Friday.

According to reports, the Central Elections Committee estimates that there are around 600,000 double envelopes, a significant increase from the 2022 election.

With each Knesset seat thought to be worth around 40,000 votes, these absentee ballots could have a significant impact on the final political landscape.

The votes within those envelopes, the majority of which come from soldiers in the Israel Defense Forces, have traditionally skewed away from the Arab and Haredi parties.

Due to the large number of reservists serving, hailing from across the political spectrum, it is a little harder to predict the impact those votes could have this year.

The Globes financial daily notes that the Arab parties could see a fall in the number of seats they hold when the final double envelope tally comes in.

The so-called double envelopes also include votes from prisoners, medical personnel, those with medical conditions, and Israeli representatives in missions abroad.

Acting CEC director Dean Livne has said that because of the overall high turnout, there could be more absentee ballots that initially anticipated, leading to delays in completing the counting.

https://www.timesofisrael.com/liveblog_entry/how-double-envelope-votes-work-and-their-potential-impact-on-the-political-landscape

I would not be surprised if the votes of deployed soldiers were to carry The Reservists across the electoral thresholds. Not saying it will happen, but it is a possible scenario.

UPDATE 3: now with nearly all “direct to ballot box” votes in, and only the “double envelopes” outstanding, Times of Israel and YNet have results that should hold steady for today:

Israeli Elections 2026: Outgoing Knesset vs. Almost Final Results (92.9% of ballot boxes)

Party / List	Outgoing Knesset	with 60% counted	Change
Likud + New Hope	36	26	−10
Yashar — Eisenkot	New	21	+21
B’Yachad — Bennett/Lapid	24*	12	−12*
Blue and White (Gantz)	8	0	−8
Joint Arab List	5**	12	+7**
The Democrats	4	8	+4
Yisrael Beytenu (Liberman)	6	7	+1
Ra`am (Mansour Abbas)	5	7	+2
Itamar Ben-Gvir	7	7	0
Religious Zionism	6	6	0
Noam (Avi Maoz)	1	0	−1
Shas	11	7	−4
United Torah Judaism	7	7	0
Netanyahu Bloc	68	53	-15
Change Bloc	42	48	+6
Arab Bloc	10	19	+9

Source: ToI liveblog, updated 14:32

* B’Yachad is compared with Yesh Atid’s 24 seats, although the new alliance is not its direct successor.
** The Joint Arab List is compared with Hadash–Ta’al’s five seats; the new alliance also includes Balad.
Blue and White–National Unity dropped out of the race; No`am likewise had outgoing Knesset representation but won no seats in these exit-poll projections.
The Reservists (2.63%) and Ofer Winter’s list (1.61%) are not expected to cross the electoral threshold (3.25%; de facto, 4 seats). The Chareidi Public polled at just 0.19%.

CAVEAT: the aforementioned 92.9% of ballots does not yet include the “double envelope” votes of deployed soldiers etc. – which correspond to roughly 12 seats.

UPDATE 4: UGH! Netanyahu told Ben Gvir and Smotrich, “We are together and we are staying together,” according to a report by the pro-government Channel 14.”

https://www.timesofisrael.com/liveblog_entry/netanyahu-speaks-with-ben-gvir-smotrich-we-are-together-and-we-are-staying-together

All sing; “There’s the sound of the wind/Working on the daisy chain ga-a-ang”. I can just see “abu Yair” getting spit-roasted between those two schmucks…

---

[*] In Israeli parlance, all immigrants from Ukraine to Uzbekistan who speak Russian as their first language are referred to as “Russim”. Avigdor “Ivet” Liberman himself hails from present-day Moldova.

Election Day

Today Israelis go to the polls. In person, with national ID cards (although passports are also accepted) and printed voter’s summons. No “vote by mail fraud”. Soldiers vote on post, diplomats and other official emissaries stationed abroad at their diplomatic mission. Election Day is a national holiday here — and by coincidence, this morning I saw a sharply defined full moon.

Around 50,000 expat Israelis are flying in especially for this election — enough to flip one, maybe two Knesset seats out of 120. As there are many reputed STEM academics abroad, Israeli universities (including my own) are taking advantage of having all these minds meeting to organize symposia — mostly for the benefit of graduate and advanced undergrad students.

Two things that those used to American academia may not understand.

1. While academia leans left in Israel, it’s not a monopoly — there is a small and fairly vocal right-wing presence, and expressing right-wing opinions is socially fairly acceptable.
2. Netanyahu has been in power for so long — cumulatively, longer than any Prime Minister of any democracy since the UK’s Robert Walpole in the 18th Century[*] — that there is genuine “Bibi fatigue” even among part of the right-wing electorate, and indeed among his former voters like myself.

Among the plethora of political parties competing for our votes, none are a perfect fit for a Burkean conservative with libertarian sympathies like myself. I rather like Naftali Bennett, but his co-leader Yair Lapid, a.k.a. “Yahir Vapid”[**] frankly nauseates me. If I had any reason to believe they’d cross the electoral threshold, I might vote for the Chareidi Public party, despite not being a part of that community, because I think it is essential that somebody injects a dose of socio-economic realism there. I also am pretty fond of Yosef (Yousef) Hadad, the Arab-Israeli combat veteran and online Israel advocate who is #2 on Ofer Winter’s new right-wing list. And then there’s the crooked maverick Avigdor Liberman — on a personal level, almost too on the nose for a bratva-adjacent Russian strongman character in a novel, but on a political level, remarkably consistent and capable of thinking outside the box. [Rounding out the four major opposition parties, Hell will have cooled to liquid nitrogen temperature before I’d even consider voting for “The Democrats”, the merger of far-left Meretz with the pathetic remnants of our once-dominant Labour Party.]

A younger colleague — whose family slipped out of a Muslim country on a “vacation to France”, then boarded the first available El Al flight to Israel, arriving there with nothing but what they could carry — expressed exasperation how “so many of our colleagues seem to think Bibi’s challenger Gadi Eisenkot is some sort of messianic savior”. (Mind you, she has nothing but contempt for Netanyahu and his “psichologit psichit”[***] wife.) Specifically, she pointed the finger at his tenure as Chief of the General Staff, and how he downsized the reserve army, including reservists who begged to be kept on, including her husband. Thus, she sees him among those indirectly responsible for the October 7 security breakdown.

I countered that everybody, except for a few contrarians like IDF Ombudsman Maj.-Gen. Yitzhak Brik, from wall to wall believed in this concept of a small hitech army back then. She agreed — and has no good words to say about Bennett, BTW — and continued that she’d vote for the small haMiluimnikim [“The Reservists”] which will likely cross the electoral threshold, and is not wedded to either the Bibi or “anti-Bibi” block. The one condition they set for participation in a government coalition is beli Aravim, beli mishtametim [“without Arabs and without [chareidi] draft dodgers”].

We did agree on one thing above others: even if Netanyahu loses and is replaced by an individual who isn’t so deperate to hang on to his chair that his most odious coalition partners have him by the beitzim , at least 80% of our problems won’t not go away. And as Instapundit snarked, Arabs might discover that Netanyahu was the moderate one…

ADDENDUM: I could have gone without the Times of Israel informing me that some over-enthusiastic female Bibi-ist talked at a campaign rally in a small Negav town about sleeping with a “waifu” pillow of her idol… Ecclesiastes 1:18 comes to mind…

ADDENDUM II: on our way back from the polling station (a nearby elementary school) we were accosted by an older woman (a grandmother). She said she had voted Likud all her life — until 4 years ago. Paraphrasing from memory: “Today’s so-called “Likud” is no longer the Likud, but Bibi hangers-on and corrupt nobodies. I can’t vote for them anymore.” She also professed to be more afraid of what Bibi “and his mentally ill family”[****] would do to the country, and “that my grandchildren who came back from the US won’t have a country anymore”.

Let me be clear: I do know that NDS (Netanyahu Derangement Syndrome) is a real thing. I personally actually am not as worried about what Netanyahu given his druthers might do — it’s the corruptocrats and firebrands who have him by the beitzim because he’s unwilling to retire and is looking to stay in power at any price. And I’m under no illusion whatsoever that his forced retirement would solve all our problems — many of them are intrinsic to our situation.

ADDENDUM III: highest voter turnout by 2pm and 4pm in official recorded statistics (which began in 1973)

https://www.timesofisrael.com/liveblog_entry/voter-turnout-at-44-9-as-of-2-p-m-highest-at-this-hour-since-1973-election

The Likud, Shas[-de-toilette], and Ben-Gvir’s list Kachsuckers-R-Us have submitted a formal request to keep the polls open beyond 10pm. Eisenkot’s Yashar [“Straight”] list opposes the request, saying there is no extraordinary event that would justify this. The central electoral commission, for its part, issued instructions that anybody still waiting to be let in at their designated poll station at 10pm would be allowed to vote.

A little fact check: yes, you not only have to vote in person, but you have to vote at your assigned poll station (typically, located at the nearest school to your registered residence address). You cannot even vote at another station in the same building: today, I waited in line for about an hour while there was no line at all at the station in the next classroom — but I was not on the printed voter roll in “kalpi 6″ while I of course did appear in “kalpi 5″.

Exceptions who are allowed to vote at a location other than their assigned station are:

• Soldiers and reservists on active duty
• Hospital patients
• Prisoners, detainees
• Police officers if their duties on Election Day make it impossible to travel to their home ballot statiosn
• Voters with reduced mobility can vote at specially designated “accessible stations”
• People evacuated from their homes
• Sailors at sea
• And of course, as already pointed out, diplomats and others who are abroad on official duty. [Say, an embassy security guard if not hired locally.]

They vote by the “double envelope” system. The anonymous ballot envelope goes into an outer envelope with your name, national ID number, etc. During the separate count of these Kolot yama’im [“Salor’s Votes”, historical nickname] or Kolot chayalim [“Soldier’s Votes”], the outer envelopes are first checked against the voter register [all Israeli citizens automatically enter it when they turn 18] for eligibility. If listed on the rolls — the envelope is opened and the inner envelope set aside for counting. If not listed on the rolls, then it is presumably discarded, or perhaps set aside for further scrutiny. [Amusingly, le scrutin is one French term for the ballot or the voting process. ]

ADDENDUM IV: highest turnout in recorded history also at 6pm. Still 4 more hours to vote. And this is not a great sign of confidence: https://www.timesofisrael.com/liveblog_entry/likud-and-right-wing-allies-scramble-to-mobilize-voters-amid-apparent-alarm-over-turnout/

UPDATE 5: Central Elections Committee rejects Likud [and Kachsuckers-R-Us] request to extend ballot opening beyond 10pm, citing no compelling problems that require it. They did, however, extend hours in the Jewish settlement inside Hevron, following a power failure. (In towns with fewer than 350 eligible voters, polls normally close early at 8pm. They were instead granted until 10pm.) And they stressed again that anybody still waiting at the poll station at 10pm would still be allowed to vote. https://www.timesofisrael.com/liveblog_entry/elections-committee-rejects-likuds-request-to-extend-voting-hours/

UPDATE 6: Exit polls!

So the anti-Netanyahu block is larger, but the Likud is the largest list. And contrary to expectations, the Reservists Party did not make the electoral threshold. And clearly there was massive Arab voting, with Ra`am (the moderate Islamist faction that was part of the Bennett government) increasing its representation to seven seats — potentially catapulting them to the role of kingmaker. (The “ex-“Communists and Arab nationalists of the Joint List are “untouchables” for both blocs.)

---

[*] if one includes semi-democracies like the Kaiserreich, Otto von Bismarck still holds the record.

[**] Yahir means “arrogant” in Hebrew

[***] Literally “psychopathic psychologist”.

[****] Full disclosure: our daughter socially met the younger son Avner, and described him as “super smart but completely normal, unlike his meturlal brother” [slang word freely meaning “bat guano crazy”].

He’s not wrong, you know — Trump and Gad Saad edition

Trump: Any Jew [or JINO] who votes for El-Sayed should be ashamed of themselves https://www.timesofisrael.com/trump-says-jews-who-vote-for-michigans-el-sayed-should-be-ashamed-of-themselves/

Gad Saad, as usual, has his own subtle, nuanced take on the issue:

Gad, what have pigs ever done to you that you compare them to this moiser?

But Gad Saad’s term “wood cricket Jew” is dead-on accurate. As an experiment, I asked Grok to explain the usage. Here is the answer, in less than a second:

Also not wrong:

Via Uri Kurlianchik on X: https://x.com/VerminusM/status/2114507036612272316?s=20

Eric Hoffer wrote this article about Israel almost 60 years go. It reads like it was written yesterday.

“The Jews are a peculiar people: things permitted to other nations are forbidden to the Jews.
Other nations drive out thousands, even millions of people and there is no refugee problem. Russia did it, Poland and Czechoslovakia did it, Turkey threw out a million Greeks, and Algeria a million Frenchmen. Indonesia threw out heaven knows how many Chinese-and no one says a word about refugees. But in the case of Israel the displaced Arabs have become eternal refugees. Everyone insists that Israel must take back every single Arab. Arnold Toynbee calls the displacement of the Arabs an atrocity greater than any committed by the Nazis.
Other nations when victorious on the battlefield dictate peace terms. But when Israel is victorious it must sue for peace. Everyone expects the Jews to be the only real Christians in this world.
Other nations when they are defeated survive and recover but should Israel be defeated it would be destroyed. Had Nasser triumphed last June he would have wiped Israel off the map, and no one would have lifted a finger to save the Jews.
No commitment to the Jews by any government, including our own, is worth the paper it is written on. There is a cry of outrage all over the world when people die in Vietnam or when two Negroes are executed in Rhodesia. But when Hitler slaughtered Jews no one remonstrated with him.
The Swedes, who are ready to break of diplomatic relations with America because of what we do in Vietnam, did not let out a peep when Hitler was slaughtering Jews. They sent Hitler choice iron ore, and ball bearings, and serviced his troop trains to Norway.
The Jews are alone in the world. If Israel survives, it will be solely because of Jewish efforts. And Jewish resources. Yet at this moment Israel is our only reliable and unconditional ally. We can rely more on Israel than Israel can rely on us. And one has only to imagine what would have happened last summer had the Arabs and their Russian backers won the war to realize how vital the survival of Israel is to America and the West in general.
I have a premonition that will not leave me; as it goes with Israel so will it go with all of us. Should Israel perish the holocaust will be upon us.”

Arab social media personality “Nas Daily”: Yes, “antizionism” is a form of antisemitism

“Nas” (nickname for Nuseir Yasin, who is a secular Muslim) gets what Western leftist auto-anilinguists don’t get or pretend not to.

https://www.timesofisrael.com/arab-israeli-influencer-behind-nas-daily-anti-zionism-is-a-form-of-antisemitism

Arab Israeli influencer behind ‘Nas Daily’: ‘Anti-Zionism is

Arab Israeli social media entrepreneur Nuseir Yassin, of the viral vlog “Nas Daily,” said at a US conference devoted to the subject this past week that he believes “anti-Zionism is a form of antisemitism” and stressed his commitment to overturning “misguided hate” against Jews.

Yassin, 34, was speaking with the Jewish Telegraphic Agency on the sidelines of the conference, hosted by the David Merage Foundation for Confronting Antisemitism. A self-described “village boy” from the Lower Galilee town of Arrabeh, he achieved massive success through viral short-form videos that attracted viewers from all over the world. Today he boasts more than 68 million followers across numerous social networks.

Yassin is a Muslim of Palestinian origin, although he said he is not religious. Asked why it was important for a non-Jewish person to participate in a conference about combating antisemitism, Yassin equated this battle to fighting for his family, noting that “the success of Israel and the Jewish people is also my success as an Israeli citizen.”

“I’m not a fan of the Israeli government, and I’m not here to defend it, just like I’m not a fan of many governments,” Yassin noted, but he asserted that the reaction to the government “is absolutely fueled by antisemitism.”“I do believe anti-Zionism is a form of antisemitism,” he added.

He said he views Zionism as “the most vanilla thing in the world – a group of people wanting a place to live,” and has therefore concluded that Israel’s detractors “just really don’t like Jews.”

Yassin, who first broke through in 2016, has become increasingly outspoken in recent years about his combined Israeli and Palestinian identity. During the conference, he recalled that he grew up labeling himself Arab Israeli. After the Hamas attacks of October 7, 2023, he started listing Israeli first and Palestinian second.

“I could not relate to the extremism that I saw, and I wanted to distance myself from it without erasing my identity connected to it,” Yassin said. “I’m not just Israeli because I think it removes a little bit of spice, but I’m also not just Palestinian anymore.”

Advertisement

“A lot of Israeli culture is inside me,” he continued. “I never agree with people. I’m always disagreeable. That’s Israeli. I speak up.”

Yassin noted that he was “the first guy to go study in the United States out of my entire lineage,” graduating from Harvard University in 2014 with a degree in economics and a minor in computer science. Despite having grown up in Israel, Yassin said that Harvard was the place where he made his first Jewish friend.

After working as a software developer for Venmo in New York, Yassin left his job in 2016 to travel and document his journeys. Ultimately, he launched a Facebook page called Nas Daily – using the word for “people” in Arabic – where he posted one-minute videos for 1,000 days, telling the stories of communities around the world.

What was once a personal brand has since expanded into the parent Nas Company, which offers platforms for solo entrepreneurs to build and monetize their online businesses.

Yassin earned an honorary degree from Ben-Gurion University of the Negev in 2025 in recognition of his advocacy work for Israeli and Palestinian coexistence. This past August, he also joined the advisory board for the Genesis Prize Foundation, which each year celebrates inspiring Jewish individuals for their achievements.

“I do not relate to hundreds of men on the street shouting ‘Allahu Akbar,’” Yassin told JTA, adding that there needed to be more women and fewer religious fanatics participating in the Israeli-Palestinian conversation.

Yassin argued that he’s “not a weird Arab for saying this” and that “the entire country of the UAE says the same thing,” referring to one of the Gulf countries that signed onto the Abraham Accords normalizing relations with Israel. He also challenged “Free Palestine” activists to envision a concrete future for Palestinians rather than fixating on Israel’s transgressions.

“We should all be ‘Free Palestine’ – but from what?” Yassin asked. “We disagree on the solution, not on the problem. We don’t want suffering. Nobody wants suffering.”

“I’m a free-Palestine-from-Hamas guy,” he continued. “Just free Palestine,” he said, ”is not an answer. I’m free-Palestine-from-extremism.”

Yassin affirmed that there is room for criticism of Israel’s government, noting, for example, that he would like to see an Arab presence in the government.

But he marveled at the notion that an alien visiting Earth would likely guess that the most hated country in the United Nations is North Korea, when in fact “it’s not – it’s Israel.”

That struck him as absurd because “the Israel-Palestine conflict is not a big deal when you compare it to everything else that’s happening on planet Earth. The only thing that makes it a big deal is that we, as Palestinians, have the perfect enemy.”

That enemy, he continued, is “the most hated type of enemy, which is the Jews.”

Read the whole thing. Meanwhile, the jihadi-National-Socialist Arab Workers Party (a.k.a. HamaSS) is bluntly threatening another Oct. 7 style “attack”. https://www.timesofisrael.com/liveblog_entry/reports-hamas-explicitly-threatens-israel-with-another-oct-7-style-attack/

And meanwhile, last night in my hometown, a rally of over 100,000 demanded a State commission of inquiry into the catastrophic security and intelligence failure on Oct. 7

https://www.jpost.com/israel-news/politics-and-diplomacy/article-912717

UNRELATED BONUS ITEM: check out this story of a Canadian-Jewish man relaeased from a decade in Iraqi prisons.

No, Virginia: “Corruptocrat Party” is not hyperbole

(a) You already had a sitting congresscritter who appears to have married her own brother (not, G-d forbid, consummated the “marriage” — he appears to be living in the UK “gay” community now) in a case of immigration fraud, and whose own naturalization appears to have been fraudulent.

That the said POS is also an Islamosocialist (i.e., National-Socialist 2.0) is just a coincidence, right 😉

(b) the president pro tempore of the Virginia state senate was arrested in a massive drug-pushing scandal

https://pjmedia.com/vodkapundit/2026/10/22/busted-feds-arrest-corrupt-virginia-dem-and-her-family-members-too-n4958573

Virginia State Sen. Louise Lucas and various family members are in federal custody today, up on charges of racketeering conspiracy, conspiracy with intent to distribute marijuana, conspiracy to launder money, conspiracy to commit audit services fraud, and maintaining a drug-involved premises.

In addition to representing the people of the 18th Senate district, Lucas is also president pro tempore, so the first question you might ask about all those charges is where she found the time.

FBI Director Kash Patel said at a press conference today, “As alleged by the Attorney General, Ms. Lucas, for the last nearly five years, accumulated nearly $5 million in ill-gotten gains through her criminal enterprise.”

When Lucas was heard in a phone tap calling the (alleged!) criminal enterprise her “last chance at generational wealth,” she really meant it: [3 of the 6 defendants in the indictment are her daughters and her grandson].

And of course, she pulls the race card and the TDS card.

(c) Ukrainian diplomat had visa revoked by the Biden puppet show before he could testify about Hunter Biden

https://www.dailysignal.com/2026/10/22/declassified-documents-show-ukrainian-diplomat-was-set-to-testify-about-hunter-biden

No matter how corrupt the “Democrat” party is — the truth is worse.

MOST RIDICULOUS ITEM ON THE DAY SO FAR: this is not corruption, just… “I can’t even” (via Stephen Green at Instapundit)

Two unrelated election stories

(a) Ben Shapiro comments on the recent self-unmasking of a polling firm, quoted all over the media as “authoritative”, as basically just making shiite up to expose how gullible the media can be.

A pollster faked all his data and just got caught months later. So, here’s the lesson: people don’t know how to read polls, poll aggregators are garbage-in-garbage-out, and every major Senate race right now is a statistical dead heat. So go vote. pic.twitter.com/E3rshLqr4U

— Ben Shapiro (@benshapiro) October 21, 2026

Push-polling or “poo-pushing”?

(b) Here in Israel, where we have elections next Tuesday, Ariel Whitman interviews a candidate from the new Chareidi Public party, which is offering an alternative to the established “ultra-Orthodox” parties, United Torah Judaism [Ashkenazi] and Shas [Sephardi and Mizrachi].

I am somewhat pessimistic about the chances of that party to cross the electoral threshold, but it is a very enlightening discussion. The party is represented by its #3 candidate, a rabbi and dayan [religious judge] who in the wake of the October 7 pogrom volunteered for the IDF and is still doing reserve duty. The #2 and #4 candidates are women, not exactly common in that community — but wives are often the primary breadwinners in a family where the husband is a full-time yeshiva student.

The party’s main message: the current social and economic model of the chareidi sector in Israel is unsustainable, no matter how many bribes Bibi pays the parties to stay in its coalition. R’ Pfeffer cites the figure of 140,000 (!) adult full-time yeshiva [=religious academy] students, and that the entire Eastern Euopean yeshiva world pre-WW II had just several thousand. [The famous historical exemption from IDF service given by Ben-Gurion affected a remnant of just 400.]

It is not an accident that several of the party’s leadership are English-speaking immigrants, who come from chareidi communities in the US or the UK where most men work as well as study, and where it is not uncommon for them to take college degrees. [I have been told by a professional matchmaker that “American chareidi” is one of her matching categories, and that some of her clients explicitly request such matches.]

(c) BONUS ITEM: Would that Kara Pisher [sic] had stuck to commenting on Apple hardware and software

The casual admission that Democrats plan to just throw people in jail for supporting Trump. https://t.co/vlYdoj7rDA

— Scott Jennings (@ScottJenningsKY) October 21, 2026

ADDENDUM 2: this is what Paris burning is like (via Dave Rubin)

I am releasing my full documentary titled: Paris 3 Days Later… I dropped everything to go to Paris because it was clear from the footage that this is could be coming to America next.

I couldn't believe my eyes, just burned up upside down cars lying on the street. The crazier… pic.twitter.com/XwdI8ankq2

— Nate Friedman (@NateFriedman97) October 22, 2026

Schadenfreude: American “refugees from Trump” discover Europe isn’t the paradise they thought

This one is rather wryly amusing to us personally, given our backgrounds — Mrs. Arbel as a “Jewish army brat” who’s lived all over the planet, and myself who grew up in the Lowlands nexus of Europe. We have divided our time between Israel and the southern US (TX and FL) for many years.

“Sargon of Akkad” has a field day with a recent article in WIRED magazine: https://www.wired.com/story/they-fled-trumps-america-now-they-regret-it/

It’s hard to beat this comment at the video: “America is turning right wing, I’m going to Poland to get away from it!”

And of course, things that most Americans take for granted are luxuries in some parts of Europe. There is a lot of geographic difference though, given that the US is essentially a subcontinent — if you move from a cramped apartment in Manhattan to one in Paris, you’re not going to be fazed by its size.

The most wryly amusing to be was the gal who moved to the UK and discovered that the much -vaunted “free healthcare” of the NHS was both more expensive (in taxes) than her private insurance and vastly inferior.

Another was expecting old-school polite Britain and discovered that Diversity, Inc. managed to largely destroy that.

A third was surprised that Europeans, especially outside the large cities, are much more stand-offish than Americans. (That cuts both ways: having grown up in 1970s Europe — where even a supermarket cashier was referred to and addressed as “Mevrouw Janssen” rather than “Katrien”, and in the formal second person at that — the phoney informality common in the USA grated on me to no end. Israel is different again — we in many ways act as one big, mildly dysfunctional family :))

But again, the guy who moved to his wife’s native Cracow, Poland to escape Trumpian national-populism took the cake.

We periodically spend a few weeks in Europe for work. We can do so pleasantly, but we do realize that our foreign-sourced incomes (not to mention my work per diem) permits a lifestyle in places like Greece or Italy that the locals cannot afford, and is still comfortable in a provincial Belgian or German town. Plus, we travel with gold-plated insurance that effectively insulates us from many of the pathologies of the local health systems (about which I’ve blogged at length here). It would be another proposition if we had to do this on the prevailing salaries.

Rettig interviews Rettig: why American and Israeli Jews don’t understand each other

My main man, Haviv Rettig Gur of the Ask Haviv Anything podcast, here has a fascinating discussion with his father Rabbi Dr. Ed Rettig about why American and Israeli Jews don’t understand each other.

The AI summary is surprisingly on point, but let me give my own summary as I listen:

• American Jewry is heavily influenced by Protestantism. Rettig the father cites the “first arrivals effect”, according to which the first group to arrive to a new land will set the tone for the territory’s culture.

• He echoes almost verbatim what “Rafael Agassi”, an immigrant from Antwerp, told me many years ago: American Jews are Protestant Jews, Israeli Jews are Catholic Jews.

• When American rabbis speak of “choose to be a Jew”, an Israeli would react something like “choose to have two legs”? American Jewish identity is an identity of choice, Israeli Jewish identity one of fate. Deviating from the narrative here, I am reminded of R’ Dr. Joseph Soloveitchik[*] The Lonely Man of Faith and his concept of G-d’s double covenant[**]: a brit goral [covenant of fate] and a brit ye`ud [covenant of destiny]. Except for outliers who have smoked too many bongs, almost all Israeli Jews will “grok” this consciously or sub-consciously — but only a minority of American Jews will.

• Both Americans and Europeans speak of “separation of religion and state”, but (as I’ve discussed repeatedly on this blog and its predecessor) they mean fundamentally different things by this. The Establishment Clause of the 1st Amendment is fundamentally different from the European concept of religion as a form of “opiate” [yes, the elder Rettig cites Marx]: you sometimes need it to relieve a patient’s pain, but you don’t want it dealt on the black market, so you want it controlled by the state. The American concept was set up to protect religion from the state, the European one to protect the state from religious establishments [historically: from the Catholic Church]. He explicitly cites the French term laïcité [freely: secularism]. [***] The Israeli conception of this is basically European. Moreover, half of Israeli Jews come from Muslim countries where the very concept of a separation was unthinkable.

• Israeli Jewish sense of power is agency; American Jewish sense of power is influence

• secular Judaism exists in the US but is not very influential and in most cases does not perpetuate along generations. In Israel, it’s a major component of society and you can have 3-4 generations of secular Jews

• compare US Memorial Day with yom hazikaron in Israel — they couldn’t be more different. The elder Rettig cites an Israeli who read an ad wishing readers a happy Memorial Day weekend — and wondering if it was some form of sick humor. [Of course, only a small minority of Americans, let alone American Jews, have friends or relatives who fell in battle— nearly every Israeli family does.]

• the elder Rettig concludes with the hope that the small minority of Jews who are equally at home inn both cultures — such as father and son Rettig — can be a bridge between both communities.

The son ends with “I hope we taught somebody something”. A fascinating discussion by any standard.

---

[*] “The Rav” as Rabbi Dr. Joseph Soloveitchik was known to his students, was the single most defining figure of Modern Orthodox Judaism in America. With a secular doctorate on neo-Kantian philosophy as well as traditional rabbinical ordination, he moved seamlessly between two intellectual worlds.

[**] The Rav leans on the double creation of humanity narrative (Gen 1:26-28 and Gen. 2:4-25), and the long-standing rabbinical principle that nothing in the Torah is redundant: if something is repeated, it is for a specific reason.

[***] I do know that there are Americans — organized atheists and secular humanists — who share this conception, but this is definitely a minority view. The elder Rettig calls the “opiate” conception “obnoxious”.

Eight days to the Israel elections

Quick updates:

• Benny Gantz’s Blue and White shuts down its campaign https://www.timesofisrael.com/liveblog_entry/gantz-takes-responsibility-for-electoral-failure-urges-leaders-not-to-return-to-pre-oct-7-divisions/

• Court extends remand of 7 out of 10 suspects arrested following attacks on journalists and diplomats in the “West Bank”/Judea and Samaria. https://www.timesofisrael.com/liveblog_entry/court-extends-remand-of-7-suspects-arrested-following-attacks-on-palestinians-journalists-diplomats-in-west-bank/

• No electoral bump from the Trump endorsement. (Sorry, Israelis don’t vote based on endorsements by foreign politicians.) https://www.timesofisrael.com/liveblog_entry/poll-no-immediate-bump-for-netanyahu-from-trump-endorsement-81-of-opposition-supporters-intend-to-vote-compared-to-74-of-pro-netanyahu-voters/

• Former Netanyahu aide Jonathan Urich admits he took hundreds of thousands of shekels from Qatar. https://www.timesofisrael.com/liveblog_entry/report-netanyahu-aide-urich-admits-qatar-paid-him-hundreds-of-thousands-of-shekels-he-kept-working-for-doha-after-oct-7-saw-no-moral-issue/

• in response, former PM Naftali Bennett demands that Bibi come clean to the public about his relationship with Qatar. https://www.timesofisrael.com/liveblog_entry/bennett-to-netanyahu-you-need-to-tell-the-public-right-now-what-is-going-on-between-you-and-qatar/

* Meanwhile in France, curfews are in force in parts of major cities https://www.timesofisrael.com/liveblog_entry/france-imposes-localized-curfew-in-parts-of-paris-lille-and-nice-as-country-reels-from-riots/

New background info on Flydubai; no, British coal wasn’t killed by Thatcher

(a) The following interview with a former Flydubai pilot showed up in my feed, and sheds some light on the barely-not-9/11 on FlyDubai 1701.

Let me summarize a few points (no, not AI generated):

• in the late 1990s, emerging airlines in the Middle East and East Asia were willing to shell out big money for experienced pilots
• after 9/11 and the ensuing crash [no pun intended] in travel demand, many US pilots found themselves unemployed. [In fact, somebody told me that it actually cost him money not to fly, because he needed to pay for simulator hours or fly for free to keep his license current against the day the airlines would start hiring again]
• at that point, many were willing to take jobs in China, Dubai,… that they wouldn’t previously have considered.
• After air travel in the US recovered, the financial crisis struck, and more took a chance
• And some that might previously have considered a career in aviation thought again
• Then came the pandemic — and the rebound from the pandemic
• Now there’s a dire shortage of pilots. Experienced ones can command huge salaries and signing bonuses for major airlines
• Outfits like FlyDubai have to make do with the leftovers —and he suspects that they do not bother to do adequate screening because they simply might not be able to hire enough them.
• He himself used to fly for them, but left because he did not like the way the company was run, and how HR treated him.
• Modern airplanes are already auto-piloted to such a degree that the pilot becomes more a manager of avionics systems than acyually flying the plane. He foresees that in the next 10 years, one pilot might be in the cockpit — or none at all.
• Hence, if he were young now, he would not go into the field at all rather than wait to be `automated out of a job’.

(b) And now for something completely different. No, British coal wasn’t killed by Thatcher.

I saw something similar happen in the Lowlands, where there was no Iron Lady in sight. Coal mining in Belgium started on a small scale in the 12th century at exposed seams around Liège, then expanded in a major way during the Industrial Revolution; the same also happed in several regions of Hainaut province. ChaptGPT Pro turned up an 1837 parliamentary debate about coal production that shows even then these mines were operated at depths reaching 450m, none less than 200m. According to a report (in French) by the Walloon geological survey, ultimately some mines would go as deep as 1,450m.

Then in 1901, coal was found in the Campines region of Belgian Limburg. These fields were deep but large,”virgin”, and geologically relatively uncomplicated, and could be mined with modern techniques from the start.

Some collieries closed during the Great Depression, but World War Two and the postwar boom ushered in a recovery. After WW II, many miners were German POWs (and Belgian collaborators sentenced to forced labor), plus a contingent of Polish and Ukrainian forced laborers who preferred staying on as paid miners for Belgian employers over living under Soviet rule. A large contingent of Italian guest workers was also recruited — this came to a semi-abrupt end after a lethal mine disaster at Marcinelle where the 200+ dead included over 100 Italians. This is aside from the many health issues (particularly silicosis=”miners lung”) that came with the job.

Ultimately, competition from oil and gas for heating, as well as cheaper imports from strip-mined ores in the USA and Australia, priced the Limburg mines out of the market. Mines in Liege and Hainaut started closing in the 1960s, then Limburg followed. In 1992, the very last mine, in Zolder (literally=attic) shut down.

And all without any Thatcher copycat being involved… “That which cannot go on forever, won’t” (Stein‘s Law)

This does not look good…

Shabua tov/a good week!

When will Bibi stop wetting his pants for his Kach-crazed Kachsucker allies and put them in their place? (And yes, he knew how to do this back in the day when it was needed.)

Ben-Gvir and his fellow Kahane-worshipers are wreaking untold damage unto the country. Netanyahu knows this, and he isn’t down with what they are doing. (Seriously. Contrary to media b*llocks, Bibi is actually pretty moderate in his personal views. But he’s desperate to stay in power at all costs, so he cannot afford a confrontation with his last remaining allies. For that reason alone, I want him gone — I don’t want fascistoid elemnts and theocrats dictating our political agenda. If Bibi hadn’t serially scr*wed over every “normal”ally for short-term political gain, he and the country would not be in that fix now.)

Meanwhile, the IDF leadership, [mostly ceremonial] President Isaac Herzog, and Foreign Minister Gideon Saar have all sharply condemned the attacks, as has de facto opposition leader Gen. (Res.) Eisenkot.

https://www.timesofisrael.com/european-diplomats-attacked-amid-settler-raids-on-west-bank-olive-harvest

https://www.timesofisrael.com/liveblog_entry/herzog-apologizes-to-photographer-beaten-by-settlers-says-he-was-morally-tormented-by-thoughts-of-attack

https://www.timesofisrael.com/liveblog_entry/eisenkot-calls-settler-attacks-jewish-terror-under-the-auspices-of-the-government-of-israel

https://www.timesofisrael.com/liveblog_entry/saar-condemns-settler-attack-on-european-diplomats-laments-delegations-lack-of-coordination-with-idf

Just before pushing “Publish” I did notice that Bibi now says Ben-Gvir cannot be Police or Defense Minister after the elections. Dunno, the position of special diplomatic envoy to Antarctica is still vacant? (Preferably as a lifetime appointment.) Perhaps Itamar the Kachsucker needs to go preach the “transfer doctrine” to the penguins there…

https://www.timesofisrael.com/pm-says-ben-gvir-cant-be-defense-or-police-minister-after-election-angering-otzma-yehudit

ADDENDUM: this is of course grist on the mill of US “Democrat” politicians, but condemnations have also come from

• Israeli ambassador to the US Yechiel Leiter (who’s national-religious himself!)

• US ambassador to Israel Mike Huckabee

• US Secretary of State [=foreign minister, for non-US readers] Marco Rubio

Netanyahu’s office released a mealy-mouthed statement about “not jumping to conclusions” and “not jumping on a bandwagon to demonize the hundreds of thousands of law-abiding Jewish residents of Judea and Samaria”. Sorry, that’s not enough. The “settler” leadership themselves know they have a problem with what their own chair, Pinchas Wallerstein, once referred to as “crabgrass”. We’d better get this under control tout de suite: but fat chance of this happening with Ben-Gvir in charge of law enforcement. …

https://www.timesofisrael.com/wapo-photojournalist-has-surgery-on-hand-after-being-beaten-by-settlers-in-west-bank

Looking around, October 16

This video from Israel’s Channel 11 is in Hebrew (and Dutch), but if you view it on YouTube it gets auto-dubbed in English.

Behold what the Lowlands of my youth have been turned into.

Finally, Dutch lawmakers have woken up that they need to do something.

[ADDENDUM: tangentiially related: a great guide by Uri Kurlianchik on how to deal with online (and real-life) “dialogue” in bad faith https://urikurlianchik.substack.com/p/what-i-learned-in-three-years-of?utm_id=97758_v0_s00_e0_tv1_a1dennhb6noryj (h/t: Sarah Hoyt)]

(b) I was rather amused to read that, after Ukraine hit a major Russian server farm, the viewership of Sucker Qatarlson (a.k.a. Sucker Putinoff) dropped by about 2/3.

(c) Why did the USSR really collapse? Reagan’s “Star Wars”? Afghanistan? Chernobyl? Glasnost (=transparency) finally revealing all the lies the system was built on? Or, often overlooked: Saudi Arabia’s decision to break ranks with OPEC and stop throttling their oil production, thus tanking world oil prices and hitting the USSR in their most valuable export?

A confluence of all of the above, argues this video. The authors also claim, not without justification, that CIA director William Casey had cajoled Saudi “oil sheik in chief” Yamani into this measure — and he got a receptive ear, since the Saudis didn’t much like what Soviet meddling in Afghanistan was doing to regional stability…

(d) Behold the bitter wages of “feelgood education”: functionally illiterate college students.

And while sold with all sort of “lamecore” DEI arguments,the minorities it claims to help are actually hit hardest.

Shabbat shalom!

(e) Addendum: signs of intelligent life, or taqqiya?

https://www.timesofisrael.com/liveblog_entry/poll-support-for-hamas-continues-to-decline-among-palestinians-over-50-support-two-state-solution/

Support for Hamas among Palestinians continues to decline, according to a poll published yesterday by the Palestinian Center for Policy and Survey Research, headed by Khalil Shikaki in Ramallah.

Overall, 19% of respondents said they support Hamas, compared to 24% in a poll conducted this August, and 35% in August 2025.

Among Gaza residents, 27% said they support Hamas, down from 33% in August and 41% in October last year. Support was lowest in the West Bank, where just 13% of respondents said they support Hamas, compared to 32% in October last year.

Similarly, the proportion of Palestinians who believe Hamas emerged victorious from the war with Israel, which erupted with the terror group’s October 7, 2023, massacre, continues to decline.

Just 16% of respondents said Hamas emerged victorious from the war, compared to 39% in October 2025 and 70% in December 2023, early in the war. Meanwhile, 17% now believe Israel emerged victorious, while 62% believe neither side won.

Some 53% of respondents said they support a two-state solution involving a Palestinian state along the 1967 lines, with East Jerusalem as its capital — 56% in the West Bank and 48% in Gaza — while 44% opposed it.

Regarding the future of the Gaza Strip, 42% of respondents expressed confidence in the National Committee for the Administration of Gaza (NCAG), the proposed technocratic committee.

There was a significant gap between Gaza and the West Bank: 60% of respondents in Gaza expressed confidence in the NCAG, compared to just 29% in the West Bank.

The poll was conducted between October 7 and 11, 2026, with 1,400 respondents interviewed face-to-face — 909 in the West Bank and 488 in Gaza.

You don’t say

https://www.memri.org/reports/palestinian-writer-fatah-hamas-and-hizbullah-leaders-are-rabid-dogs-feeding-flesh-their-own

In an article on Ahewar.org titled “The Parade of Monsters – Between Dogs and Donkeys,” Palestinian writer Majdi Abd Al-Wahhab argues that there is no difference between Hamas, Fatah and Hizbullah. All three organizations claim to speak in the name of resistance, religion, and the homeland, but in reality have brought destruction and devastation upon their own peoples, he says. Abd Al-Wahhab slams the leaders of Fatah, as well as Hizbullah’s slain leader Hassan Nasrallah and Hamas’s slain leader Yahya Sinwar, one of the architects of the October 7, 2023 attack, calling them “rabid dogs,” “a curse walking on two legs,” “sons of destruction,” and “offspring of death.” He particularly mocks Nasrallah, whose name means “victory of Allah,” and Sinwar, whose first name, Yahya, means “he shall live,” arguing that neither understood the meaning of his name or even the meaning of the word “mercy” as they dragged their peoples and homelands into the abyss. He calls on the Arab public to “cut off the air supply” of these leaders “and let nature take its course.”

The following is a translation of Abd Al-Wahhab’s article:

“From Hamas to Fatah, from Nasrallah to Sinwar, disaster stands on two legs, cloaked in the mantle of resistance and spreading destruction in the name of religion and the homeland. [Palestinian Authority President] Mahmoud Abbas once casually called [Hamas] ‘sons of bitches.’ He spoke the truth, even though he is a liar, but he forgot to mention that the all the members of this pack are the same. There is no difference between one fang and another, between those who bite and those who howl. They are all rabid dogs feeding on the flesh of their own people.

“But [in fact] they are not loyal dogs, but wolves clad in the robes of preachers. They devour life wherever they appear and drag the homeland into a bottomless abyss. They are a curse walking on two legs, born of the pus of betrayal and kneaded from the dust of graves. They came not to liberate, but to rule amid the ruins and reign as kings over the ashes.”  

“While the dogs break their silence, the donkeys march in a ridiculous procession…

Read the rest

https://www.memri.org/reports/palestinian-writer-fatah-hamas-and-hizbullah-leaders-are-rabid-dogs-feeding-flesh-their-own

Looking around, “Who the [bleep] thought this was a good idea?!” edition.

(a) Firing Americans en masse to replace them with H-1b visa imports from South Asia, that is.

Microslop truly has the “Mierdas touch” these days — but they’re not alone by any means.

(b) Hussein Aboubakr Mansour of The Abrahamic Metacritique is worried that Israel is… adapting a little too well to its environment. That is, learning the pathologies of the dysfunctional Arab regimes he himself fled to the USA from. A provocative thesis, for sure.

https://critiqueanddigest.substack.com/p/ye-have-troubled-me?r=bj80t&utm_campaign=post-expanded-share&utm_medium=post%20viewer

He stresses the importance for a state to keep a monopoly on violence, and points to the rampages in the “West Bank”/Judea and Samaria. The mainstream “settler” leadership has condemned them, the most “settler”-friendly Shin Bet head in history is telling Netanyahu there is a problem… but Police Minister Itamar “all must worship the holy zayin of Meir Kahane!” Ben-Gvir is running interference. IBG has Bibi by the beitzim , electorally speaking, so Bibi declines to intervene, despite terrible damage to both Israel’s reputation and the nation’s moral fabric…

That alone, as far as I’m concerned, is enough reason why the current coalition needs to be put out to pasture.

(c) Meanwhile in academented academia: “Writing” over 200 papers a year by AI, and then hoping you won’t get caught?!

Publisher removes 200 papers University of Chicago statistician wrote in under 1 year

(d) Older but good: Matt Taibbi was having a field day with whichever *rse-clown show thinks it is a good idea to have Alexandra Occasional Cortex run for President https://substack.com/home/post/p-159749821 (post unpaywalled)

Two new books: “In The War Room” and “The Cauldron”

Two great podcasts/interviews about new books today

(a) Haviv Rettig Gur interviews the WSJ’s Eliot Kaufman, who with Yonah Jeremy Bob has a new book out “In the War Room”.

The title of the podcast is provocative, but contrary to what one might think, the argument is not that Israeli decision making on October 7 was paralyzed because Netanyahu didn’t show. It appears that the command infrastructure was so overloaded with the stream of chaotic battlefield information from multiple sources that it took them several hours to find their balance.

This is not to excuse Netanyahu from his role in fostering the fatal illusion that HamaSS had been “tamed”, nor from his despicable unwillingness to admit that he might even have had any part in the catastrophic intelligence failure. But said failure had many, many fathers. And alas, if he f—ed up big time, it was because he was standing on the shoulders of many “giants”.

(b) Bari Weiss has a wide-ranging interview with historian Simon Sebag Montefiore about his latest book “The Cauldron: The making of the modern Middle East”.

Montefiore, BTW, is the great-great-nephew of Sir Moses Montefiore and the husband of novelist Santa Montefiore (who was born to a prominent Anglo family and converted to Judaism).

ADDENDUM: In “Operation World War Eleven” [heh], immigration enforcement agents raided the apartment of Ilhan Omar: https://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2026/10/this-just-in-omar-raided.php

What led to the disastrous decision for Operation Barbarossa

If I were to write a blog post about the greatest strategic mistakes Hitler (y”sh) made in WW II, starting the war itself would be the obvious top contender. But if one excludes this somewhat tautological answer, the invasion of the USSR is generally held to be at the top of the list. And many people, when asked why he did so in the first place, are indeed baffled by this decision or fall back on facile stock answers like “because he hated Communism” (so did Churchill, so did Ayn Rand, so does this blogger) or “Lebensraum”. Answers simple, elegant, and wrong — or at least incomplete.

The terms of the Ribbentrop-Molotov Non-Aggression Pact fall into two basic categories:

• public treaty: a ten-year agreement for the Third Reich and the USSR not to attack each other; trading provisions

• secret annexe: division of Poland and the Baltic States into spheres of influence

Neither of these was dead letter: they did carve up Poland and even had coordination meetings between the Gestapo and the NKVD about its “pacification”, while the USSR effectively annexed Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania. As for trade: there was brisk transit of oil and grain from the USSR to Germany, and of machinery from Germany to the USSR.

“Markets of the Past” lists several converging reasons why the invasion took place: I will comment in square brackets.

• Ideological: the longtime project of “Lebensraum im Osten” (living space in the East), as laid out in “Mein Kampf” itself. The fantasy/faptasy of making Germany the dominant land empire in the world. (Britain would remain the dominant sea empire.) [Concerning the USA, AH y”sh was torn between admiration of its manufacturing prowess and belief that this “mongrelized race” would be hollowed out by race mixing. Here he was thoroughly blinded by his own prejudices.]

• a chronic resource crisis, and hopes of securing durable access to grain in Ukraine and oil from the Caucasus. [However, the USSR was more than willing to sell them these and these were in fact imported in significant quantities during the Non-Aggression Pact. Note BTW that the issue of oil predates the Third Reich: it was German chemists who must-needs developed a working, if very inefficient, means of converting Germany’s comparatively plentiful coal into liquid fuel.]

• Hitler (y”sh) fooled himself into thinking that he could get England to agree to peace if it could no longer count on an attack by the USSR, following a decisive defeat by the latter.

• This cannot be overstated: the belief in a limited window of opportunity. On the one hand, the dismal performance of the Red Army against scrappy little Finland suggested that the RA was incompetent, still reeling from the bloodbath of the Great Purges in its upper ranks. [May I recall that 90% of generals and 50% of colonels were executed — or in the best case, imprisoned — on almost universally spurious charges.] On the other hand, the Abwehr (=military intelligence) was aware of steadily mounting productivity and of new weapon systems [modern planes, the T-34 tank] coming online, and that this would make an invasion very difficult a few years from then. [This was correct, but the Abwehr appears to have underestimated the productivity growth in the defense industry as well as overestimate the time it would take for the obsolete T-26 tanks to be replaced by the T-34s].

The video rightly dismisses the Viktor Suvorov conspiracy theory that Stalin (y”sh) was himself poised to invade in 1941, and that Barbarossa was hence a preemptive strike. [It cannot be ruled out that the Vozhd did have such plans for the medium term — but even Stalin realized that it would take at least until 1943 for the Red Army to be strong enough for an offensive campaign.]

But there is one major point the video seriously underplays:

• The Third Reich’s economic model, combining massive war industry and infrastructure works with a (by 1930s standards) lavish welfare state (for Aryan “Volksgenossen” only, of course ;)), was fundamentally a financial vampire, that could not thrive except by sucking the life blood out of other nations. The term “vampire economy” was already coined in 1939, in the eponymous book by German refugee economist Hans Steinicke (1904-2005, writing under the pseudonym “Günter Reimann”). This thesis was recently elaborated in much greater detail by Götz Aly, as well as by entrepreneur and amateur historian Rainer Zitelmann. 
• At first they could keep the system going by extracting the wealth of German Jews. When those were bled dry, other nations were invaded to foot the bill.

There are some parallels with Put[a]in. Not in terms of access to resources, of course. But Put[a]in also believes in a national destiny for his nation to be the dominant land empire in Eurasia, and simultaneously believed he had a narrow window of opportunity to invade Ukraine.

It’s not just Paris anymore, Brussels is burning too

A secular Moroccan journalist comments:

Meanwhile in England, strontZack Polanski appears to have outlived his usefulness as an idiot shill for the new Herrenvolk:

The following cartoon says it all:

“Timeo DanaosVerdes et dona ferentes” — I fear GreeksGreens, even as they are bearing gifts.

And whodathunkit?

Right. Actual Muslim countries are outlawing the same viper organization that the West has been nursing at its bosom.

And lest you think that all the bile being spewed on X/Tw*tter is “grassroots:”

Finally, for a good laugh, from Powerline’s Week in Pictures:

PS: lest you think radical Islamists only have it in for the “Saturday people”, think again:

The daughter of one of the founding leaders of Hamas left Islam and converted to Christianity.

She explains how they are all raised to kill Jews and Christians.

They even have a different version of Jesus, where he will come back and ‘break the cross’, and help Muslims kill all…

— Dr. Maalouf ‏ (@realMaalouf) October 10, 2026

ADDENDUM: https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2026/10/10/revealed-bbc-arabic-reporter-history-glorifying-murder-jews/

ADDENDUM 2: Ann Althouse reports that MIT is paying a tenured professor not to teach a class on: “Language and Linguistics for Decolonization and Liberation and for Peace and Community Building — From the River to the Sea in Palestine and Israel to the Mountaintops of Haiti and Beyond.” The so-called “professor” is supposedly an expert on Haitian Creole — and the MIT administration blocked him from “teaching” his odious garbage on the grounds of it being too far from his field of expertise. MIT still has the ancient Noam Chomsky (a.k.a. Gnome Chimpsky) on the faculty, but even he stayed within his broad lane of linguistics while teaching.

A commenter brought up Arthur Putz [sic], the Shoah denier who is still on Northwestern’s faculty at age 93. The classes he teaches there are electrical engineering: contacts at NU have told me he was careful to stay on topic as too many people would be on board with termination for cause despite tenure.

“Strontzak” Polanski loses parliamentary by-election [UPDATE: blood libelists get igNoble P*ss Prize]

The walking, talking, sack of excrement[*] leading the Islamo-Communist “Green” Party in the UK was kept out of the Commons. He stood in a by-election for Two-Tier Keir’s former Parliamentary seat for “Holborne and St. Pancras” — a central London electoral district — but lost to the Labour candidate.

https://www.timesofisrael.com/liveblog_entry/greens-zack-polanski-loses-parliamentary-election-to-labour-candidate

Andy Burnham’s Labour Party wins an election for the parliamentary seat vacated by former leader Keir Starmer, fending off a strong challenge from the left-wing Green Party in a boost for the British prime minister.

Labour candidate Sagal Abdi-Wali, the leader of the local council, wins the by-election in the central London constituency of Holborn and St Pancras with 12,292 votes, compared with 8,928 for Zack Polanski, the Green Party leader and candidate.

Polanski, who is Jewish, is staunchly anti-Israel, and the Greens party earlier this week passed a highly controversial motion declaring “Zionism is racism.”

Burnham has meanwhile called this execrable resolution “completely wrong” and has called for its being rescinded. https://www.timesofisrael.com/liveblog_entry/uks-burnham-says-green-partys-zionism-is-racism-motion-is-completely-wrong-should-be-rescinded/

More later possibly — I am battling a deadline at work.

Otherwise, Shabbat shalom!

UPDATE: The [ig]Noble “Peace” Prize committee manage to plumb ever greater depths by awarding the prize to a blood libeler

https://jakewallissimons.substack.com/p/un-official-behind-genocide-lie-who

That prize lost all meaning when it was awarded to a freshly elected B. Hussein Obozo, who actually himself said he hadn’t done anything yet. (If only it had remained that way — that despicable ‘man’ wreaked untold damage on the US and the broad West.) Bad as the award to Yasser Arafilth (may he burn in Hell forever) was, it could be argued it was given for the (with hindsight disastrous) Oslo Accords, and that Rabin z”l and Peres z”l could not have been awarded without symmetry.

UPDATE 2: from an Insty comment thread:

---

[*] The only (alleged) humans I consider beneath even actual Nazis (or Islamomarxists, but I repeat myself) are Jews who make common cause with them.

Three years after the pogrom

Been burning the midnight oil working a few days too many in a row. So did not get around to blogging, only to restacking a few Substack posts.

Yesterday was, by the Gregorian calendar, the 3rd anniversary of the October 7 pogrom.

Here in Israel it was actually marked on October 5th, at the assigned Hebrew date. (The pogrom took place on Shmini Atzeret. But since one cannot have a mourning observance on a Jewish holiday, it gets put off to the next business day)

Through colleagues, I saw a preview of a loooong documentary by Yaron Zilberman “Nir Oz: Heaven and Hell” about a particularly hard-hit kibbutz. The “Heaven” part was the bucolic and peaceful life in the community prior to that — most residents were diehard peaceniks back then, BTW — and the “Hell” obviously… He shot 17 segments (10 edited so far) of between half and hour and an hour — the four I saw were centered on long-form interviews with survivors. One was a couple whose husband fought nearly to the death to protect his family, only to be saved at the last minute when help finally showed up. Another was a woman whose husband was murdered and whose son was held captive for nearly two years. A third was kept hostage herself.

He clearly has great raw material to work with — now is the challenge of editing this collection into a 2hr movie, into a miniseries, or both. Being a student of history (including its darkest periods), I have a very strong stomach, but still my sleep was unquiet.

Francis Turner (a.k.a. “masgramondou”) has his own reflections which criticize Israel’s response… for not being fierce enough. Go read it all — I can’t do it justice by selective quoting.

https://ombreolivier.substack.com/p/hamas-miscalculation-3-year-progress?r=bj80t&utm_medium=ios

Needless to say, the shadow of October 7 looms large over our upcoming elections. A nontrivial percentage of people feel everyone who was in charge then — including but very much not limited to Bibi — should leave the stage. The trouble is, of course, that there was nearly a wall-to-wall consensus that HamaSS had been ‘tamed’. As much as it pains me to say it, the half-crook, half-maverick Avigdor Liberman is one of the few who saw through their game, and he was dismissed as a Russian crank.

Polls predict that former IDF Chief of Staff Gadi Eisenkot will be able to assemble the largest block — the jury is out on whether he will be able to achieve an outright majority, or whether he’ll have to run a minority government. The third option — a national unity government with alternation between Eisenkot and Netanyahu, is likely off the table after the way Bibi bamboozled Eisenkot’s predecessor Benny Gantz. (Both Netanyahu and Eisenkot have ruled out the Arab parties as coalition partners, though I suspect that Eisenkot is leaving the door open to Ra`am, which already served in Naftali Bennett’s cabinet.

Some of the smaller lists hovering around the electoral threshold (de facto: 4 Knesset seats) may prove wildcards. Benny Gantz’s Blue and White likely won’t make it, following a series of defections. (A shame. He is too decent a person for politics, really, and Bibi pulled the wool over his eyes by deliberately bringing their joint government down before it was Gantz’s turn at the helm. And Israelis don’t like “freierim”, suckers.)

The two others are HaMiluimnikim (The Reservists) and a new hard-right party led by Ofer Winter. Whatever they may differ on otherwise (The Reservists is center to center-right), they agree wholeheartedly on one issue (especilally in light of dire IDF manpower shortages, and a heavy reserve duty burden): all sectors of society should serve either in the IDF or in alternative civilian service, including the chareidim (“ultra-Orthodox”) whose two political parties have Bibi by the beitzim. His inability, reluctance, or (likely) both to deliver a blanket draft exemption (rather than the existing situation) have even led to grumblings on the part of Shas and “United Torah Judaism” (a joint list of Chasidic “Agudat Yisrael” and Litvish “Degel HaTorah”) that perhaps they might abstain from a confidence vote on an Eisenkot-led coalition, rather than vote against. Today were again demonstrations by this sector against the draft — I can say that in all the years I’ve been living here, I’ve never heard so much resentment expressed against the said group. Also, while in the past the “Dati Leumi” (national-religious, Israel’s version of Modern Orthodox) were reluctant to bad-rap their more-strident fellow Orthodox Jews, this has definitely changed. The prominence (through conviction) of the National-Religious in IDF combat units begets not only a disproportionate burden of reserve duty, but also overrepresentation among combat casualties and fatalities. Some will continue to vote for Shmuckrich or even for the truly odious Ben-Gvir, but I suspect that not a few Likud voters among them may defect to Ofer Winter, or even Naftali Bennett. (I like Bennett a lot, but I utterly despise his running mate Yair Lapid a.k.a. Yahir[*] Vapid. Eisenkot is a political rookie — which may prove to his advantage in a ‘throw out the bums’ electoral mood, while his background may be a unifying factor.)

In the wake of the ever-more miraculous FlyDubai “almost-9/11”, recent revelations of the security lapses involving foreign airlines — our failed-upward tourism minister Miri Regev effectively telling foreign airlines that pilots should not come from enemy nations, but leaving it to the said airlines to enforce this and nixing involvement by our security service — have even led to (likely idle) talk of the US canceling its visa-waiver agreement with Israel. Regev is of course a diehard Bibi-ist, so he will likely balk at firing her. But public pressure may leave him no choice, if he wants to have any chance at all of being able to form a blocking minority.

There’s lots of other news (the world is a crazy place): former head of the German Bundesnachrichtendienst [Federal Intelligence Service]suspected of selling state secrets to a third country (Russia specifically denied); more riots and burnings in France; Mamdani being an odious piece of khara as always; Ballsack Ogabe campaigning with and for El-Sayed (ugh). And of course, Sucker Qatarlson having gone even more completely off the deep end (and getting his derrière handed to him by Jacob Rees-Mogg). https://instapundit.com/828096/

One point of light is Marco Rubio’s amazing speech in Athens: here are Instapundit’s thoughts on it.

https://instapundit.substack.com/p/marco-goes-hard?r=bj80t&utm_medium=ios

But let me end with a book excerpt from “Israel’s Woman Warriors” by Tal Schneider, in which she highlights the heroic efforts of the Caracal mixed-gender combat battalion on October 7. Tehila la-giborot ve-giborei Israel

https://www.timesofisrael.com/were-not-breaking-the-untold-heroics-of-the-female-fighters-who-held-off-hamas-at-sufa

---

[*] yahir means “arrogant” in Hebrew. I had a degree of respect for his late father, journalist and chess master Yosef “Tommy” Lapid (né Tomislav Lempel), even as I disagreed with his anti-religious zeal. The son is just a yuppie windbag captured by the globalists and the Alphabet People lobby.

ESR on the end of software secrecy

The end of software secrecy is almost upon us. The death of closed source, and the final triumph of open source.

I should have realized this a few months ago when I successfully decompiled the game of Firefighter from an ancient DOS shareware binary. My robot friend was able to…

— Eric S. Raymond (@esrtweet) October 5, 2026