Benjamin Netanyahu didn’t win last week’s election in Israel. But he didn’t exactly lose it either. The real loser may have been Israel’s fragile democracy, already corrupted from within, perhaps past the point of no return, by Netanyahu’s decades-long death-grip on power.

On the eve of a momentous election in the United States, the parallels are both inexact and unavoidable. Israelis must now decide what kind of country they will have, or at least what kind they aspire to have. They must decide whose votes actually count, and whether some citizens are more equal than others. 

Those same questions also confront Americans, both in this week’s midterm elections and, in a more general sense, on the larger political and historical stage. No doubt it is tempting for liberals and progressives to express outrage at the blatant flaws and contradictions of Israeli democracy. But to invoke the Christian tradition here, it might be better to remove the plank from your own eye before trying to remove the speck from your brother’s. 

On the surface, the electoral arithmetic in Israel appears straightforward. Parties opposed to Netanyahu’s far-right government won 67 of the 120 seats in the Knesset, Israel’s parliament. So a majority coalition of anti-Netanyahu forces is clearly achievable, right? You would think so, except that 19 of those 67 seats were won by Israel’s “Arab parties,” an all-time high, and that startling fact has thrown the entire political system into confusion.

Netanyahu and his allies have spent the last week airing groundless allegations that the election was fraudulent or rigged, a refrain that Americans are likely to hear a great deal in coming days. What the Zionist far right means is that too many Israeli Arabs — meaning the Palestinian population that remained in Israel after the state was created in 1948 — decided to vote this time, an outcome that no one expected, and that none of the parties representing the Jewish majority particularly wanted. 

Now, in a masterstroke of historical or perhaps biblical irony, Israel’s Arab minority — which is not a monolithic group in political or cultural terms, and until now has never been electorally significant — holds the balance of power, and perhaps the nation’s future, in its hands. 

Gadi Eisenkot, the former general who leads the centrist-Zionist opposition to Netanyahu, promised during the campaign not to form a government with Arab support. Over the last several nights, thousands of demonstrators in Tel Aviv and Jerusalem have urged him to do precisely that, since the only realistic alternative is the grim default setting of Israeli politics: another wobbly right-wing government headed by Netanyahu, which means more brutality and destruction in Gaza, more war with Iran and more settler violence in the West Bank. 

As Gideon Levy of the left-leaning Israeli newspaper Haaretz explains it, 

The future of Israel now depends on its Arab citizens and on the attitude of its Jewish citizens toward its Arab ones. Eighty years after the Nakba and the establishment of the Jewish state, Israeli Palestinians may determine its fate. Is there greater historical justice than that?

The election’s unexpected results are “a cause for rejoicing,” Levy writes, in that they have presented Israelis with a clear choice “between a government led by Benjamin Netanyahu and a government that includes the Arab parties.” If the “change bloc” within the Zionist majority cannot accept a coalition with Arab Israelis, he continues, “they will make it clear that they are actually the same as Netanyahu, that they prefer even the devil Netanyahu over repressing their racism. … [E]veryone will know that racism is the supreme value in this country, across the board, above any other value.”

That ferocious language certainly does not represent mainstream Israeli opinion, but it’s fair to say the strong emotion beneath Levy’s words is far more widely felt. I don’t think it’s possible for a non-Jewish observer (such as myself), however well educated or sympathetic, to understand the anguish felt by Jewish people — wherever they live, and whatever their political views — at the enormous distance between what Israel originally represented to the world, or claimed to represent, and what it represents now.

I’m old enough to remember when most American liberals and progressives viewed the state of Israel in overwhelmingly positive terms, as a locus of charismatic or heroic renewal for the people Hitler couldn’t kill, infused with the spirit of European socialism and, not far below the surface, the collective guilt of the Holocaust. I grew up in one of the most left-liberal corners of America, surrounded by educated adults who supported the civil rights movement, opposed the Vietnam War, hated Richard Nixon and loved Israel. Golda Meir and Moshe Dayan were beloved celebrities; the Six-Day War of 1967 and the Yom Kippur War of 1973, as narrated by U.S. media, were straight-up battles between the forces of light and darkness. 

That says more about the moral blindness or willful innocence of American liberalism, I must admit, than it says about Israel. In any event, when I saw Joe Biden’s fateful bear hug with Netanyahu on the tarmac of Ben Gurion Airport in the aftermath of the dreadful Oct. 7 attack, I understood it. I recognized the country Biden was coming from, because I came from there too: It was the Democratic majority of the not-so-distant past, when Israel was embraced as a light to the nations and left-wing radicals who brought up the Palestinian cause were being unreasonable hotheads, if not openly antisemitic and a little bit Nazi. 

What Israel has become during Netanyahu’s long and destructive reign is now clear to most of the world, and most of all to the many Jewish or Israeli critics who have been speaking difficult truths for many years, often at enormous personal cost. I am disinclined, however, to judge too harshly those who cling to the vision of Israel as an exceptional nation — one that has stumbled, perhaps, but may yet regain its true path. 

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Like I said earlier, we should mind the plank in our own eye first. Isn’t that the same vision that many Americans still cling to? That somehow, on the other side of this dreadful phase of our history — yes, a full decade of Donald Trump, but I’m afraid the damage goes back a lot further than that — the “indispensable nation” variously articulated by Abraham Lincoln, John F. Kennedy and Barack Obama is still there, still retrievable, still bending its moral arc toward justice.

Americans and Israelis are conjoined by history, for better or worse, and now see each other as distorted reflections, through a glass darkly, as the King James Bible puts it. We face versions of the same decisions this week, about whose votes count and whether the highfalutin words of our constitution apply to everyone. About whether to see terror and tyranny for what they are, and turn the page.

The post The dark paradox of Israel’s election — and ours appeared first on Salon.com.

What do a Bollywood actor, a member of Congress, and Israeli directors have in common? 

It sounds like the beginning of a bad joke. The punchline, though, is that governments of India, the United States, and Israel, respectively, think they should be stripped of their national status.

Bollywood star Imran Khan, nephew of Bollywood superstar Aamir Khan, was told he has until October 28 (and since extended to November 2) to leave India, where he resides on an Overseas Citizen of India (OCI) card. India doesn’t allow dual citizenship, but OCI status gives individuals of Indian descent and their family members the right to permanently live, work, and study in India; its revocation uproots its holders from their homes and their lives. Khan had protested in a demonstration demanding the resignation of Gyanesh Kumar, India’s chief election commission. He is challenging the order in court.

Earlier this month, US Rep. Ilhan Omar’s home was raided by federal authorities who are reportedly preparing a case to strip her of citizenship, alleging that her father said she was 17 when she was really 18 when he filed her naturalization paperwork. President Donald Trump subsequently said that, because a federal court filing allegedly referred to her as “Ilhan Nur Said Elmi, a/k/a Ilhan Abdullahi Omar,” she should have to resign from Congress.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has intimated that Yuval Abraham and Rachel Szor, directors of the film NAZA, in which Abraham interviews Israeli soldiers and intelligence officers on Tel Aviv rooftops about how they assessed and decided to kill civilians in Gaza, could be stripped of their Israeli citizenship, saying he would pursue legislation to go after critics of the military who crossed a line. “We will revoke citizenship for anyone who defames IDF soldiers around the world — he will be deeply hurt in his pocket,” said Netanyahu, who cited the filmmakers as a potential example and called their work “intolerable.”

The move to strip citizens of their passports and their rights is not a new one, nor is it limited to these three countries. Perhaps most famously, Jews were stripped of citizenship by the Nazis in Germany and elsewhere in Europe in the 1930s and ’40s. To take a more recent example, over the summer, Russia passed legislation that effectively strips Russians abroad facing domestic prosecution on political grounds of their citizenship (the law takes away their property, freezes their bank accounts, and refuses them consular services).

Still, that three high-profile cases are coming from three countries that claim to be democracies raises the question: Why do reactionary leaders in democracies reach for denaturalization (or quasi-denaturalization, in the case of loss of OCI) as a weapon against political and cultural elites? What do they hope to gain? And, relatedly: What might they lose instead?

It’s not just about the high-profile targets

Reactionary leaders do not typically threaten to make an example of high-profile political opponents or cultural elites as a first step. In each of these cases, there are demographic groups — whole swathes of the population — whose governments have been trying to disenfranchise, denaturalize, or deport them (or some combination of the three) long before the recent spate of high-profile headlines. 

In India, there’s currently a politicized election integrity push that experts warn could illegitimately prevent tens of millions of voters from marginalized groups, especially Muslims, from participating in elections. What should have been a routine clean up of voter rolls ended up with 130 million — nearly 10 percent of the population — struck off the lists. The sweeping approach has raised widespread concern from critics that many voters will be incorrectly removed — and deep suspicions that this disenfranchisement is targeted and intentional.  

Mukulika Banerjee, a professor of anthropology at the London School of Economics, noted this happened after the position of chief election commissioner was made partisan and given immunity for life. And while normally in India (unlike in the United States) the onus is on the state, not individuals, to register voters, in this case, the state said that if people were to be put back on the voter rolls, they “had to produce a whole bunch of documents…which by implication affected the socially disadvantaged,” per Banerjee. 

That meant women, people from lower castes, rural voters — and, since “the Muslim population amongst the most seriously socially disadvantaged, the likelihood of Muslims falling in this category is very high,” Banerjee, author of Cultivating Democracy: Politics and Citizenship in Agrarian India, said. In places like West Bengal, where Muslims make up nearly 30 percent of the population, there were some assembly constituencies where, in elections earlier this year, the number of names deleted from the rolls was greater than the margin of victory, and while anti-incumbent sentiment was high and the BJP may well have won anyway, some, per Banerjee, are asking, “was this an attempt to choose the electorate, so to speak.”

In the United States, the Trump administration has made denaturalization a priority, hoping to find people they can make an example of as part of their broader immigration crackdown. They have already filed to strip dozens of Americans of their citizenship by claiming they lied on their naturalization paperwork (“Justice Department Moves to Strip Citizenship from 40 Criminals in Largest Single-Period Filing Under the Trump Administration,” a press release from earlier this month crowed). The White House also tried, unsuccessfully, to revoke America’s constitutional right to birthright citizenship, which could have left future generations far more vulnerable to removal or persecution.

And in Israel, Palestinians have long been made to feel the weight of citizenship — and the heft of its absence. This is not only true in, say, the West Bank, where Jews live as citizens but Palestinians live under occupation and military law, but in East Jerusalem, where most Palestinians are permanent residents, not citizens, meaning they cannot vote in general elections for the Israeli legislature.

“That is a tool that Israel has used in a different way that could easily be transplanted to citizens,” said Mairav Zonszein, senior analyst on Israel at Crisis Group. And if you can strip residency from Palestinians in Jerusalem, maybe you can strip citizenship, too. “If this government is reelected, I could see that becoming a less and less crazy idea” as what was once unthinkable becomes “normalized.” Palestinian citizens in Israel have expressed the same concern.

The chilling effect of deportation threats 

How — and why — does an aspiring authoritarian move from threatening the rights and status of demographic groups to going after elites?

Sometimes, the elites are — in addition to being outspoken and high profile — from the demographic group under threat.

Several years before Khan’s OCI status came under threat, the Modi government took journalist Aatish Taseer’s OCI card from him. This happened in 2019 — months after Taseer authored a Time story with “India’s Divider in Chief” plastered across the cover, after which the prime minister himself said, “Time Magazine is foreign. The writer has also said he comes from a Pakistani political family. That is enough for his credibility.” Taseer’s father was indeed a Pakistani political figure, but this was hardly some secret of which Taseer had made offhand mention; Taseer had written about his father and the role his absence and rediscovery in his life, including in his first book, Stranger to History: A Son’s Journey Through Islamic Lands.

And so with Imran Khan, Taseer said in a phone interview, there is an element of, “Just get the Muslim out” (Khan’s mother is Muslim). In Taseer’s own case, he said, he became “the Paki.”

The same is true at least in one high-profile case in the United States: Omar is Muslim and from Somalia, two groups that frequently attract the ire of the Trump administration. Recently, Trump urged Minnesotans to “fight back” against Somali immigrants before the state is “taken over.” Omar is also a prominent and progressive member of Congress. 

“It’s got these two levels,” Taseer said. “One is an ethnonationalist agenda. The other is a blunt instrument of coercion.” If you speak out too freely, Taseer added, “you won’t be able to return home.”

The blunt instrument, though, is more narrowly applied than, say, stripping people from voter rolls en masse. It is designed to cause fear among elites: journalists and actors and academics.

And it is meant, Banerjee said, to raise the price of protest.

The government’s first instinct, she said, is to call protesters terrorists and anti-nationals, rather than citizens exercising their rights: “They don’t seem to understand that to peacefully protest is there in…the constitution.”

And by taking a Bollywood star’s OCI status, the government can “make an example and say, look, we can take the biggest and the richest and the most prominent.” It is a message to the rich and the famous and the powerful: Do not think you are bigger than government coercion. You are not.

Whether it works is almost beside the point. Trump is facing an uphill legal battle in proving that an error committed by Omar’s father, if indeed any error exists, means she should lose her citizenship. Omar has said she sees the administration’s goal as exhausting and intimidating her to the point she leaves politics — something she says will not happen. 

And, it’s unlikely, Zonszein said, that Abraham and Szor will actually be stripped of citizenship given Israel’s own judicial protections. But, “It’s an empty threat, but one that works, because it chills dissent, it stifles it, it makes people scared.”

It also suggests that, regardless of whether you’re a member of the targeted group, or have some special status that could set you apart, power can come for you, too. That can scare people out of speaking out for the marginalized. It can also alert them into the need for doing so.

“When it happens in a democracy, one has to always keep one’s radar attuned to who is suddenly becoming prey, whether it’s LGBT in Russia or now in Turkey or in this case in India, Muslims, Taseer said. ”It’s sort of — what they’re going to those people, they’re going to eventually do to the population at large. It’s not one of those things where they’re like, ah, let us do this little thing, and then you guys can all live happily ever after. It’s generally always accompanied by a deeper authoritarian turn.”

For example, in addition to threatening Abraham and Szor, Israel has revoked the entry permits of American Jews who volunteered to work with and protect Palestinian farmers during harvests and froze aliyah — the name for the process by which Jews abroad immigrate — of two Jews over their pro-Palestinian West Bank activism, which, as Israeli outlet Haaretz reported, could be a violation of Israeli law guaranteeing the right of all Jews around the world the right to move to Israel and become citizens. 

“I mean, anybody with their head on straight would say, if you treat one person this way, it’s not that hard to treat another person this way,” Zonszein said. “That’s pretty basic, obvious stuff.” 

Barely noticed among all the talk in the election campaign about great asses, shithouse countries and commie jihadists running for the Senate was a report from The New York Times warning of “heightened levels of tension and risk” surrounding Israel’s parliamentary elections, slated for today, and America’s Nov. 3 midterms due to the countries’ war with Iran, which has “entered a new phase.” They also offered this bracing observation: “This is how countries can escalate into full-scale war, several diplomats and outside experts noted.”

How’s that for a wake-up call?

In fairness, Donald Trump has mentioned in passing that he plans to “finish the job” after the midterm elections, with CNN reporting that the president “appears to be leaning toward major action.” On Oct. 15, the outlet revealed that the U.S. is considering using the “mother of all bombs” on Iranian energy infrastructure and nuclear facilities. (They admit that such a strike would be “performative,” since it would not actually accomplish anything, but would supposedly allow Trump to declare victory.) 

If anyone had the idea that a midterm election campaign would be the place where serious people of goodwill debate the major issues of the day, they were mistaken. For the most part, the war with Iran has hardly come up, and to the extent that it has, it’s been in the context of high gas prices, not the possibility of the conflict turning into a major conflagration from which the United States will not be able to walk away after putting on a fireworks show. We may be at a turning point, and nobody’s paying attention.

The U.S. has received credible intelligence, according to the Times report, that Iran has “advanced” plans to attack Americans at home and abroad. According to Reuters, the State Department has ordered non-emergency government employees and their family members to leave ‌U.S. diplomatic ⁠missions in Saudi Arabia and has reduced staff in Lebanon, the United Arab Emirates, Qatar and Jordan. NBC News revealed that “the U.S. military has been quietly scaling back its troop presence at bases across the Middle East as well.” It certainly sounds as if something is afoot, which the Times characterized in fairly alarming terms:

The fact that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel and President Trump are facing critical elections that could dramatically affect the balance of power in their countries feeds into the complex set of calculations that all sides are making. Even if he is defeated on Tuesday, Mr. Netanyahu could decide to launch one last strike that he may believe his successor would hesitate to execute. Similarly, Mr. Trump, who knows how unpopular the war is even among his strongest supporters, may want to show that at least when it comes to his powers as commander in chief, his authority is undiminished.

Trump has claimed dozens of times that we have already won the war. This is not out of character; his habit is to prematurely declare victory in everything, apparently assuming that the force of his declaration makes it a reality. In the lead-up to the U.S. and Israel’s Feb. 28 attacks on Iran, Trump was apparently so pumped up by his historic political comeback and success at cruel mass deportation, murder on the high seas and the conquest of Venezuela, an oil-rich country, that he assumed he could succeed at what every former president knew was a fool’s errand: take over Iran, seize its oil and dominate the world’s oil supply. And, as Haberman and Swan reported in their book “Regime Change,” Trump had been convinced by whom he called a presidential historian (actually a caddie for Gary Player) that he was “the most powerful man who’s ever existed on the planet by far” — more powerful than Mao, Alexander the Great, Stalin, Hitler, all of them.

What Trump has succeeded in doing is making Iran a global power, capable of re-ordering the world through control of one of the most important waterways on the planet. In the process, he has exposed the U.S. as a second-rate military power, at least compared to the country’s previous reputation, by insisting on fighting an unnecessary war of choice without a strategy while being low on munitions and proving that it lacks the capability of fighting on more than one front. Having let down our Middle Eastern partners who assumed that by allowing bases in their countries they could count on America to defend them — not to mention the administration’s destructive tariffs and abandonment of Ukraine — the world knows that the U.S. is unreliable, and they are looking elsewhere for alliances and economic partnerships.

All this brings to mind historian Barbara Tuchman’s “The March of Folly.” Published in 1984, the book examines tragic wars of choice that needn’t have been fought but, because of hubris and ignorance, were waged anyway, despite being against the best interests of the countries that started them. As Tuchman put it:

To qualify as folly for this inquiry, the policy adopted must meet three criteria: it must have been perceived as counter-productive in its own time, not merely by hindsight . . . Secondly a feasible alternative course of action must have been available . . . third . . . the policy in question should be that of a group, not an individual leader.

The war with Iran ticks all those boxes. 

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Among the conflicts Tuchman chronicled in the book are the errors of the Catholic Church that led to the Reformation, as well as King George III’s epic misunderstanding of the dynamics driving the colonists (and England’s other enemies) to rebel against the British Crown. She also turned her keen historical eye to the big kahuna of her era, Vietnam, in which the U.S. squandered its power and moral authority on a war that began as an ideological experiment, escalated for political reasons, and ended in failure and embarrassment only 51 years ago. You’d think that lesson would still be fresh enough that we wouldn’t indulge in such a folly again.

But, of course, we have. While Afghanistan had at least the fig leaf of justification after 9/11, Iraq and now Iran have both demonstrated that the U.S. has learned nothing from its own recent history. Eight months in, Trump’s misadventure in the Islamic Republic has proven even more irrational than the others. As with all the follies, Trump indulged his fantasies, failed to understand the adversary and ended up working against his country’s own interests.

A delusional, psychologically unfit president started a war based on shifting rationales, finally landing on the idea that Iran was pursuing a nuclear weapon. This was the same country that had been complying with an agreement not to pursue a nuclear weapon, but which this president tore up simply because it had been negotiated by the man he succeeded in office. 

We don’t yet know whether these latest threats will lead to an escalation by either party. But either way, the deed is done. The world has been fundamentally changed by Trump’s daft decision to start this war, and there is no going back. That’s how all these follies end, and it’s very rarely a happy ending for the countries that started it.

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Israel felt inescapable in the midterm primaries, especially for Democrats, where centrists and progressives clashed — memorably! — over military aid, Gaza, and (of course) AIPAC.

But with the Election Day almost upon us, the subject seems less prominent. When I Googled “Israel US elections” this morning, all the top results concerned next week’s Israeli parliamentary elections.

In less than two weeks, however, Americans will also head to the polls. They’ll decide which party controls Congress, along with a slew of state and local offices. The stakes are arguably unusually high: Voters will choose whether to check the power of a president who has bulldozed over historical norms and limits. 

As we count down to that momentous and potentially messy day, I’m partnering with my colleague Astead Herndon and Vox’s The Midterms, Actually team for weekly editions on the biggest issues shaping the midterms. We’re breaking down one issue each week and suggesting further reading and races to watch in November.

Previously, we dug into how both parties are changing, the bipartisan backlash to AI and data centers, and the politics of high costs. This week, we’re tackling Americans’ growing disillusionment with Israel — and how that will (or won’t) show up at the midterm ballot box.

Go a little deeper

You know the first part of this story already, because we’ve discussed it quite a lot: Americans’ views of Israel have nosedived over the past 18 months. 

That shift helped shape the Democratic primaries and will likely figure prominently in the coming presidential contest. But how much Israel matters in a general midterm election, to people outside the political left…well, November will really test that.

Voters rarely rank Israel policy among their top priorities. In a poll that the Associated Press and NORC Center for Public Affairs Research conducted earlier this month, about 80 percent of registered voters said Congress should highly prioritize the cost of living during its next term, and roughly 70 percent said the same about ending the Iran war. By comparison, less than a third of voters said they prioritized cutting off aid to Israel. 

There’s another way that Israel factors into US elections, of course — and that’s in fundraising. The American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) has become one of the biggest spenders in US elections and a repeat flash point in this year’s Democratic primaries. 

But in the general election, even AIPAC has been overshadowed by the GOP’s big-business donors, many of them in tech, who have given Republicans a historic spending advantage in this year’s contests. On Wednesday, the lobbying group actually announced it would no longer endorse political candidates or make direct campaign contributions.

In either case, whatever happens in the midterms won’t likely transform US policy toward Israel. President Donald Trump is still in charge of foreign policy, after all, and even if Democrats take back the House, they’ll have little ability to reverse his agenda. 

But a Democratic majority would gain “new congressional tools to act on Israel-Palestine issues,” Hady Amr, the former US Special Representative for Palestinian Affairs, wrote in a new analysis for Chatham House. Those tools aren’t flashy (think: hearings, funding restrictions, and reporting requirements), but they could certainly set the stage for a broader policy shift under a Democratic president.

Races to watch:

• Florida’s Senate race, where Democrat Angie Nixon has criticized her party’s ties to the pro-Israel lobby;
• Michigan’s Senate race, where Democrat Abdul El-Sayed’s campaign grew out of pro-Palestinian activism; 
• Michigan’s (deeply purple) Seventh District, where progressive William Lawrence has vocally criticized US support for Israel. 

More from Vox: 

• The left is winning the argument on aid to Israel. The next step will be harder.
• The first true swing-state test for the Bernie left
• What American Jews want from the midterms

One link for later

➨ Gather ye roast spuds while ye may. Vegan restaurants appear to be experiencing a downturn of sorts: According to one online directory, the number of establishments fell from 1,717 last October to 1,509 now. But the news isn’t entirely or unambiguously bad. One added pressure on plant-based restauranters, for instance, is growing competition from mainstream restaurants that have started offering vegan dishes. 

Before you go…

• Did you know…that North America’s largest wind farm has more than 900 turbines, each as tall as the Statue of Liberty, and encompasses an area roughly the size of Chicago? It just came online in June. 
• Today’s trivia: What’s the plural of Prius, as in Toyota’s hybrid hatchback car? (You can find this and other brain puzzles in Vox’s daily crossword. Look for the answer in tomorrow’s edition.)
• Yesterday’s trivia: Yesterday we asked after the definition of the word “cartomancy.” That’s the practice of fortune-telling or divination using a deck of cards. Witchy!

President Donald Trump endorsed Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu for reelection Sunday, warning Israeli voters against choosing the “wrong Leader” just nine days before the country’s national election.

In a lengthy Truth Social post, Trump praised Netanyahu as a “Great Warrior Prime Minister” and a partner in confronting Iran, while suggesting that electing someone else could complicate future U.S. military action against Tehran.

“If Israel has the wrong Leader, which would be anyone other than Bibi, America will have to do this work ourselves, and I am not inclined to do so,” Trump wrote.

Trump also threatened to “soon finish the job” against Iran unless its leaders “change their ways, rapidly.”

The endorsement marks a shift for Trump, who had spent months declining to publicly back Netanyahu despite their longstanding alliance. Earlier this month, when asked whether he supported Netanyahu’s reelection, Trump told Time magazine, “I’m not involved in politics anymore.”

Their relationship has been strained by disagreements over the nearly eight-month war with Iran, Israeli military operations in Lebanon and efforts to negotiate a ceasefire in Gaza.

Netanyahu welcomed Sunday’s endorsement.

President Trump, my friend Donald – thank you for your extraordinary endorsement. Israel has never had a greater friend in the White House. Together we will never let Iran’s regime get nuclear weapons. Thank you for your clarity, courage and unwavering support.

@realDonaldTrump https://t.co/GqaOVB74Dj

— Benjamin Netanyahu – בנימין נתניהו (@netanyahu) October 18, 2026

“Thank you, President Trump, for the tremendous support and work together,” Netanyahu wrote on X. “Together we will complete the mission!”

His Likud party also circulated a campaign video featuring the two leaders.

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Netanyahu faces a competitive election against opposition parties led by figures including former military chief Gadi Eisenkot and former Prime Minister Naftali Bennett. Recent polls suggest Netanyahu’s governing bloc could fall short of the 61 seats needed to command a majority in Israel’s 120-member parliament.

Trump has increasingly departed from the traditional U.S. practice of avoiding explicit endorsements in foreign elections, backing candidates in countries including Hungary, Japan and Argentina.

Israelis vote Oct. 27 in their first national election since Hamas’ October 2023 attack.

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On Friday, Israeli settlers attacked Palestinians living in the West Bank, as well as a Washington Post photographer, who was hospitalized with serious injuries.

Photojournalist Heidi Levine was knocked down, beaten, and robbed of her camera equipment by masked settlers in an attack captured on video by other journalists. Those other members of the press rescued her from the attackers while Israel Defense Forces soldiers reportedly stood by.

Levine had lacerations and a wound to her hand that split her finger to the bone, according to the Post, which condemned the attack in a statement. Jasper Nathaniel, an independent journalist who helped Levine escape the attack, said that Levine also had cracked ribs, and may have been stabbed.

Assaults like this one are becoming more common in the West Bank, where settler violence — which is currently targeting the ongoing olive harvest — has worsened. Last week, another photojournalist for the news wire Agence France-Presse was beaten with rifles by settlers, and Palestinian residents of the West Bank have been shot, beaten, and terrorized while the Israeli settlers targeting them face few consequences.

Why settler violence is growing in the West Bank

As my colleague Zack Beauchamp recently explained, under international law, the settler movement in the West Bank is clearly illegal. Nevertheless, it’s continued to grow, and it has a friend in the current Israeli government led by Benjamin Netanyahu. It’s also becoming increasingly violent. 

Two current Israeli officials, Bezalel Smotrich and Itamar Ben Gvir, are settlers themselves, and both have used their offices — as ministers of finance and national security, respectively — to further the settler cause, including by making it easier for settlers to commit unchecked violence against Palestinians. 

The United Nations reported in June that settler attacks had reached “the highest sustained levels ever recorded…with [an average of] six daily attacks that have resulted in casualties, property damage or both,” and in many Palestinians being forced from their homes by settlers. In late September, the International Committee of the Red Cross said that expanding Israeli settlements and violence by settlers was “making everyday life untenable” for Palestinian residents of the West Bank.

As Zack has reported, settlements and settler violence are both intentional tactics, serving to force more Palestinians off their land, isolate the ones who stay, and push any potential two-state solution further out of reach. 

That kind of violence is likely only to worsen in the weeks to come: Israel will hold elections on October 27, which could well result in Netanyahu’s settler-friendly government losing power. As a result, the Washington Post reported earlier this month, settlers are “racing to lock down gains” before the election with ever more extreme violence.

One link for later

➨ Agentified kind of life. My colleague Adam Clark Estes turned the keys to his life over to a passel of AI agents for two weeks to see what would happen. They successfully saved him some times, he writes, largely with mundane tasks — but he left with mixed feelings about the experiment, including the possibility of contributing to a world with more AI slop.

Before you go…

• Did you know…that the aerodynamic crouch used by jockeys in horse racing — known as the “martini glass position” — made race times roughly 5 to 7 percent faster? Jockeys maintain it with only a few toes resting on each stirrup.
• Today’s trivia: Who is the author of the 1952 self-help book The Power of Positive Thinking? (You can find this and other brain puzzles in Vox’s daily crossword. Look for the answer in Monday’s edition.)
• Yesterday’s trivia: We asked about the answer to the ultimate question of life, the universe, and everything in The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. That would be the number 42 (take it up with Douglas Adams).

In the weeks and months following Hamas’s brutal October 7, 2023, attack on Israel, and Israel’s devastating campaign in Gaza that followed, the world’s attention turned away from the West Bank. 

Over the past three years, however, the situation in the Israel-occupied territory has worsened as Israeli settlers have carried out more violent attacks on Palestinians.

The attacks can range from acts of daily harassment and trespassing to a major mob assault in the West Bank village of Jalud that overwhelmed Israeli security forces and blocked a displaced Palestinian family from returning home. Last week, Israeli settlers shot and killed a Palestinian man.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has largely dismissed violent West Bank settlers as an issue, blaming the Jalud attack on a “handful of rioters” and referring to settlers as “juvenile delinquents” in a speech to the UN last month, in which he argued that the world should focus on violence committed by Palestinians instead.

But even as he downplays the problem, human rights organizations have documented a record level of Israeli settler violence in the West Bank. The International Committee of the Red Cross has said that such attacks have made everyday life “untenable” for the more than 3 million Palestinians living in the West Bank.

The Israeli settlements are also clearly illegal, as Vox’s Zack Beauchamp explained in September — but that hasn’t stopped them from expanding. 

Ahead of Israel’s elections later this month, settlers have accelerated a campaign of ethnic cleansing with the explicit backing of some Israeli cabinet ministers, led by young militant Jewish settlers that are part of a loose network known as the Hilltop Youth. 

The Wall Street Journal’s Feliz Solomon reported on the Jalud attack and has written about the role of Hilltop Youth in worsening settler violence. She spoke with Today, Explained co-host Noel King about the reality on the ground in the West Bank, the settler groups behind it, and how Israeli officials are responding.

Below is an excerpt of their conversation, edited for length and clarity. There’s much more in the full podcast, so listen to Today, Explained wherever you get your podcasts, including Apple Podcasts, Pandora, and Spotify.

Tell me about the last three years in the West Bank. What’s been happening?

The October 7 attack really hardened a lot of people’s views in Israel, and that’s played out in the West Bank in a number of ways. 

One is that the government of Benjamin Netanyahu, which has some powerful members who are settlers themselves, became much more overtly supportive of expanding the Jewish settlements. 

The second thing that changed was basically a total breakdown of trust, both between Jews and Arabs, and also between Jews and the state, because a lot of people felt that they were really on their own in terms of security. 

All of this created a really combustible environment. There are more settlers there now. They’re behaving more brazenly, and there’s what a lot of people would describe as a permissive environment of almost total impunity.

What does that total impunity look like? We often hear the term “settler violence.” What does that mean?

There’s really a whole spectrum of violent actions. It’s mostly by younger male settlers. There are some acts of daily harassment, like trespassing on Palestinian property, vandalism, stalking people, blocking roads, and preventing access to resources like water wells. And then on the other end of the spectrum, there are also acts of extreme violence. 

There have been some very serious physical assaults. Settlers throwing rocks with slingshots. Last year, there was a viral video of an elderly woman who was beaten with a stick. She was hospitalized for days. And lately, we’ve been seeing more mob violence where a large group of settlers will raid a Palestinian village. They’ve set mosques and other property on fire. 

Just to be clear, there’s violence by Palestinians too, but we’re really seeing an alarming surge of violence by settlers that’s often unpunished, and increasingly it’s happening when settlers go into Palestinian areas where they’re not supposed to be.

You reported on an attack that happened last week in the West Bank near the Palestinian village of Jalud. Tell me what happened.

Over the summer, some young settlers who are associated with a group called the Hilltop Youth set up an encampment around three houses on the outskirts of the Palestinian village, Jalud, and essentially besieged the houses. They blocked their access to essential goods and harassed the residents until, in late July, they felt so unsafe that they fled.

Two of those houses belonged to the Tubasi family. In early September, Israel’s high court ordered the state to ensure their safe return, and in late September, they tried to go back. We spoke with Wael, who’s one member of the family, and also with their lawyer about what happened when they tried to go back. 

A few dozen [Israeli] security forces were deployed to escort them home in the middle of the night, and when they got there, they found that the house was totally ransacked. They showed us before and after pictures, and the windows were smashed, the doors were broken, electrical wires were cut, and there was just debris all over the place.

When they came inside for the first time in about two months, they were walking through the property looking at the damage with flashlights, and they’d only been there for a few minutes when suddenly they were surrounded by a mob of settlers. They said at first that there were about 50 settlers around the house, and the military later said that there were more than a hundred people that took part in what they called a riot. 

The authorities told the family to take cover deeper inside the house, and they hid inside a stairwell as the soldiers tried to force these settlers to retreat, but they were shouting and throwing rocks at the house, and then, according to Wael, they even started climbing in through the windows. At that point, the authorities told the family to go upstairs, all the way up to the roof and to hide in a corner of the rooftop. 

Wael explained what he saw up there. He was looking down and he saw the soldiers battling it out with this large group of settlers and this thick cloud of tear gas and loud bangs from stun grenades.

“There are more settlers there now. They’re behaving more brazenly, and there’s what a lot of people would describe as a permissive environment of almost total impunity.”

Eventually, the security forces realized that they weren’t getting the situation under control. They had to get this family out of there. They took them back downstairs and outside and put them in a military vehicle, but then the settlers surrounded the vehicle and they were rocking the car. They slashed the tires so that [the family] couldn’t leave. Then the soldiers had to move them into an armored military vehicle and eventually they got them out. 

A short while later, not long after they had escaped, they started receiving video messages from some of their neighbors that showed what happened after they left, which was that their car and their house had been set on fire.

All right, so the Israeli authorities in the form of soldiers were trying to help this Palestinian family legally return and settlers violently blocked them. This is settlers versus the authorities. What do we know about who these settlers are and what is motivating them?

This was a very large group. We know of three people who were detained in this incident. All of them were teenagers. The youngest one I believe was 15 years old. 

A lot of the harassment in this area comes out of a nearby settlement called Esh Kodesh and smaller, more informal settlements around it that are called outposts. And these outposts are usually pretty crude encampments. They often start with just tents or a camper van or a trailer with no electricity and no water. And the people who choose to live in these places tend to be very young, very extreme ideological settlers.

You mentioned something called the Hilltop Youth. Who are they?

The Hilltop Youth is a loose network of settlers that live outside the mainstream, and they often have much more extremist views than the mainstream settler movement. It’s an offshoot of religious Zionism, which is one of the main ideologies of the settler movement, and it sort of fuses the ideas of Orthodox Judaism with ultranationalism. 

The Hilltop Youth take these ideas to the extreme, and I’ve spoken with a bunch of them myself. They believe that they’re on a divine mission to reclaim the Holy Land for Jews, and they’ll cite parts of the Torah and other religious texts that they interpret as empowering them to take the land back and even to use violence. They see it as a preventive type of self-defense, and they see themselves as protecting all other Jews.

These are young people, some of them teenagers. Where are they coming from? Why are their parents not grounding them? How has this been allowed to unfold the way it has?

It’s a good question, and I should say also that not all Hilltop Youth are violent, but a lot of the violence that’s committed by Jews in the West Bank does come from this group, and they come from all over the place. Some of them grew up in the settlements, and then as teenagers, they kind of wandered and they struck out on their own. And then there are others who come from all over Israel. 

A lot of the Hilltop Youth, we’re finding, are kind of troubled kids. Sometimes they’re dropouts from strict religious schools, sometimes they have behavioral issues or ADHD, and they just didn’t really fit in. We heard from some kids who said that they found out about the outposts by word of mouth, like someone at their school had invited them to come for the weekend and they’d come and they’d stay a few days and eventually they’d start spending more and more time there until at some point they’re just living there. 

There are a number of NGOs that recruit young kids to come work as farm hands on agricultural outposts in the West Bank, and some of those are in these areas that are more prone to radicalization. These organizations present themselves as very innocent in that they’re identifying kids that need help and are bringing them to a place where they will learn some discipline and they will have a purpose and they’ll have something to do. But that often puts them into a more extreme environment.

In the case of the family you profiled in Jalud, it’s clear that the Israeli authorities, in the form of soldiers, attempted to help the family get back to their home. How does this typically play out, though? How do Israeli soldiers typically respond when settlers attack Palestinians?

There have been a number of high-profile examples of video footage circulating that appears to show Israeli soldiers either standing idly by or even, some would argue, siding with the settlers. 

In one recent example, there was a video that showed some soldiers praying alongside settlers who had besieged the home of a Palestinian American man, and that was actually not very far from where the Tubasi house is. The military said that it was looking into it to determine whether disciplinary action needed to be taken. 

In general, military officials acknowledge that this violence by settlers is a big problem, and the security establishment definitely does not support what’s happening here. They see it as getting in the way of counter-terrorism efforts and overall efforts to bring stability to this very volatile area. 

I’ve heard this directly from military officers, but on the ground there does seem to be a breakdown of discipline in some cases and a lack of clear instruction in other cases. Some soldiers simply don’t know how to deal with threats from other Israelis, especially really young ones, as you pointed out. It’s just not what they’re trained to do.

Do you think the government could put a stop to these attacks by settlers if it wanted to, or has the government lost control?

This problem has gotten so big that it’s going to be very difficult to solve without significant backlash, but I have spoken with a number of former Israeli security officials who say yes, much more could be done — starting with a more frank acknowledgement of what’s happening, clearer law enforcement procedures, and more disciplinary actions.

This story appeared in Today, Explained, a daily newsletter that helps you understand the most compelling news and stories of the day. Subscribe here.

Jewish communities in Israel and around the world are currently marking the third anniversary of the October 7 attacks that killed 1,200 people and triggered the war in Gaza.

Memorials for the victims of the attacks have been held at homes, on highways, and at the site of the Nova music festival. In Tel Aviv, a massive art installation at the Trumpeldor beach commemorated both the victims and the 251 hostages taken by Hamas three years ago.

Of those hostages, 166 have since returned alive, and the remains of the last deceased captive were released to Israel in January. But there’s no undoing the national trauma of the October 7 attacks — the deadliest massacre of Jewish people since the Holocaust — or the brutal retaliatory campaign that Israel launched afterward.

Those events profoundly changed Israel, Gaza, the broader Middle East, and the United States, and they continue to shape global and domestic politics. So today, we’re taking a look at the very long shadow of the October 7 attacks and Israel’s response to them.

Go a little deeper

Writing about the first anniversary of October 7 two years ago, Vox’s Zack Beauchamp warned that the “horrors” first triggered by the attacks would continue to unfold in tragic and unforeseeable ways. “Events that might seem contained to the Middle East have come to hurt people around the world,” he wrote, “in ways that we may not yet fully understand or even be capable of predicting.”

That hurt has undeniably been most acute in the Gaza Strip, where three years of war have reduced entire cities to rubble. Israel’s military campaign has killed more than 74,000 Palestinians — most of them civilians — since October 2023. Most of Gaza’s 2 million residents have also been displaced from their homes, crowded into makeshift shelters and refugee camps riddled with hunger and disease.

But the consequences of October 7 extended beyond Gaza. Settler violence against Palestinians intensified in the occupied West Bank. And the ensuing conflicts also weakened Iran and changed the balance of power across the Middle East.

That’s because Iran had long relied on its allies, like Hamas in Gaza and Hezbollah in Lebanon, to project power and deter attacks by its longtime rival, Israel. After October 7, however, Israel significantly weakened both groups, leaving Iran vulnerable and setting the stage for the direct strikes on Iran that Israel and the US began last winter. 

Both the war in Iran and the continued occupation of Gaza have badly hurt Israel’s international image. Across 36 countries surveyed by Pew last spring, a median of 67 percent of adults viewed Israel negatively. That disapproval has translated into diplomatic shifts, as well: 155 countries — including longtime allies of Israel, such as the United Kingdom, Canada, and Australia — now officially recognize Palestinian statehood, up from 136 before the war. That doesn’t change much on the ground, but it represents a real rebuke to Israel. 

In the US, meanwhile, Israel has become a huge flashpoint in domestic politics. While more than half of Americans had a favorable view of the country before October 7, sentiment deteriorated sharply in 2025 and 2026, particularly on the left.

The issue could help determine some key midterm races, like the Michigan Senate election, where Democrat Abdul El-Sayed has called for ending US military aid to Israel. That’s a policy nearly half of House Democrats and many potential presidential candidates have also endorsed. 

Cutting off US aid to Israel isn’t likely to change the country’s stance toward Palestinians, however. (Israel is a wealthy country in its own right, and American aid represents just a small piece of its budget.) Instead, changing Israeli policy on Gaza and the West Bank would likely require far more aggressive pressure — pressure that, even in the current political environment, the US is unlikely to apply.

A single day may have kicked off a cascade of hurt and horrors. But putting an end to them will take far more time.

One link for later

➨ Cultivate hope. It can feel difficult (not to mention: naive, pointless, and exhausting) to maintain optimism in the face of current events. So Jamil Zaki, a psychology professor and the director of the Stanford Social Neuroscience Lab, suggests another tact: Do away with blind optimism and lean into hope — that belief that the future could turn out well, but requires real care and attention.

Before you go…

• Did you know…that sea turtles regularly cry (okay: “shed tears”) to rid their bodies of excess salt? Scientists are studying sea turtle tears to learn more about animal navigation. 
• Today’s trivia: What’s the word for a baby eagle? (You can find this and other brain puzzles in Vox’s daily crossword. Look for the answer in tomorrow’s edition.)
• Yesterday’s trivia: Yesterday we asked you for the final letter of the Greek alphabet. That would be omega, as in the Bible verse, Swiss watch brand, and nutritional supplement. 

At the Venice Film Festival earlier this month, the documentary NAZA received a 25-minute standing ovation. In Israel, it’s all anyone’s talking about, even though few have actually seen it. 

Made by two Israeli filmmakers, Rachel Szor and Yuval Abraham, the movie takes place on the rooftops of Tel Aviv, where 24 anonymous Israeli intelligence agents and soldiers discuss things that they did in Gaza and how they did them.

As Bilge Ebiri writes in his Vulture review of NAZA, “One officer recalls blowing up a building with 500 people in it to go after one target. They admit to knowingly wiping out entire neighborhoods, fully aware of the catastrophic human toll.”Another interviewee agrees that Israel is committing a genocide in Gaza. 

Since its reception in Venice, the film has faced harsh criticism from the Israeli government — with at least one politician issuing a call to revoke the filmmakers’ citizenship. 

Shany Littman is a journalist for Haaretz in Israel and has been reporting on the film’s reception. She spoke with Today, Explained co-host Noel King about the conversation around the movie in Israel. 

Below is an excerpt of the conversation, edited for length and clarity. There’s much more in the full podcast, so listen to Today, Explained wherever you get podcasts, including Apple Podcasts, Pandora, and Spotify.

Have you seen the documentary NAZA?

I haven’t. I asked the PR person of the movie to send me a link and it’s not possible. I mean, considering the huge storm that came out, they’re probably rethinking how to handle the distribution of the film.

What I hear you saying is it’s safe to assume most people in Israel have not actually been able to see the movie. Is that right?

Yes, that’s correct.

But they are aware of what is in it. Let’s talk about the conversation around this movie in Israel. What’s the reaction been like?

You can find many different types of criticism from all sides of a political range. It’s not only right-wing people or people who are supporting the war. The claims are first that maybe the film itself is not verified. They have witnesses that are anonymous that they didn’t verify well enough. But I think most people — they just feel that this is an opportunity for all the pro-Palestinian, anti-Israeli, and [antisemitic] people in the world to attack Israel. Israelis from all sides are afraid of the way the world is seeing us at the moment. 

Is anybody in Israel saying, “Hey, we’re glad that they did it. We’re glad that they made this movie”?

Yes. There are people who are supporting Yuval and Rachel, the filmmakers, supporting their right to criticize, to investigate. As a liberal country, we should be able to investigate ourselves, to criticize ourselves. They are doing their work as journalists. 

There has also been a reaction from the Israeli government at a more official level. What has the Israeli government said about this film?

“There’s a really long history of films that were criticized, especially by different culture ministers. But I haven’t seen anything like this, like what is happening now. This is really frightening.”

The first person to react was the minister of culture. He said that the nationality of Yuval and the filmmakers should be revoked. That they should not be Israeli citizens anymore. There’s a really long history of films that were criticized, especially by different culture ministers. But I haven’t seen anything like this, like what is happening now. This is really frightening. I’m completely horrified by this. 

I already saw some clips on social media by people who were filming themselves where…you could see a house [in the background] and someone was saying, “You can all come here. This is the house of Rachel Szor’s parents. They live here and you can come and do whatever you want. I invite you all to come here and take revenge.” And there were several clips with the same message. 

I’m guessing they’re not coming back to Israel at the moment. I think it has become really dangerous for them to be here, and it’s a new level. I published an article about this. I didn’t do the movie. I just published an article supporting them in Haaretz and my mother is afraid that someone will attack me. The echoes of this event, they’re going very far now.

Are you frightened for the filmmakers if they choose to return? Do you fear for their safety?

Yes, absolutely. Especially because the elections are coming in a month. Many Israelis see this day as like the red line or the moment where we will be able to know if we can still live in Israel as a democracy, as a liberal democracy, or that the country has changed in a way that many [civil] rights and liberties that we think we have are gone. And that this country is not a democracy anymore. And so I think this is also why the blood is boiling.

This is a very, very tense and fragile moment. And for them I assume it is even more crucial and I hope they will not do anything that will put them in danger.