Knesset elections last week. Congressional elections yesterday. There’s a lot to keep track of, and I’m pleased to bring you analysis on the US midterms and the ongoing coalition talks. First, a piece from my friend and former Israel Policy Forum colleague Evan Gottesman on how Bibi Netanyahu is going to try to exploit the American election results to upend coalition talks in Israel. Next, I dive into Gadi Eisenkot’s dilemma, and the question of whether the Change Bloc leader will rise to the stature of Yitzhak Rabin or stoop to the level of a Benny Gantz. Enjoy, and let me know what you think!

Preempting Bibi’s Predictable Post-Midterms Meltdown

Evan Gottesman

Like a political Rumpelstiltskin, Benjamin Netanyahu is going to try to spin electoral gold out of the midterm results in the United States. Voters delivered overwhelming victories for Democrats in both houses of Congress yesterday, even electing a Democratic senator from Kansas, a seat that hasn’t gone blue since before Netanyahu was born.

Israel had its own election last week, and Netanyahu has deployed trick after dirty trick to stop rival Gadi Eisenkot from forming a coalition in the aftermath. He’s already engaging in Trumpesque election denial and inciting against Israeli Arabs. Now, the prime minister will position himself as a levee holding back the blue tsunami from America.

Israel’s favorability has hit rock bottom among Democrats. The default position among party moderates is to oppose news weapons transfers to Israel. Thus, Bibi will argue, the Democrats’ midterm victory is a national emergency, and only he can guide Israel through the storm. Liga aheret (“another league”) and all that jazz.

On Likud billboards across Israel, Michigan Senator-elect Abdul El-Sayed will succeed Zohran Mamdani as the next American hate figure framed alongside the Axis of Resistance. Netanyahu will bank on the Israeli public forgetting that the presumptive leaders of the new Congress are Chuck Schumer and Hakeem Jeffries.

Israelis would do well to ignore the fearmongering. No one is more ill suited for a moment of Democratic dominance than Benjamin Netanyahu.

The reasons that Democrats have distanced themselves are many, and not all of them can be isolated in the person of the prime minister: The war in Gaza; state-sanctioned settler pogroms against West Bank Palestinians; increasingly authoritarian politics inside the Green Line; the growing rift between Israelis and their American Jewish cousins; and, yes, rising antisemitism in following Hamas’s October 7 attacks.

Benjamin Netanyahu has accelerated every single one of these trends, though he is not solely responsible for them. And the one Israel-related factor that topped US voter concerns—the War in Iran and the accompanying surge in fuel prices—is also the issue that can be most closely tied to the Israeli premier. Bibi personally lobbied the White House to take on Tehran. Next to (and perhaps ahead of) Donald Trump, Netanyahu is the individual whom Americans hold most responsible for this Middle Eastern misadventure.

Eisenkot is a degree removed from all of this. He is not enmeshed in childish fights with the mayor of New York City. Rather than prop up fascists like Itamar Ben Gvir and Bezalel Smotrich, Eisenkot could build a coalition with genuine liberals like Yair Golan’s Democrats (not to be confused with the American party of the same name). Meanwhile, Israeli Arab parties supporting a minority government could even act as a bridge to some of the more Israel-skeptical newcomers on Capitol Hill.

We should be careful not to be polyannish. An Eisenkot premiership will not restore the status quo ante on US aid. That ship has sailed. Early on Election Day, President Trump suggested that Washington would end its assistance to Israel, and the Jewish state is increasingly unpopular with young Republicans.

Nor will an Eisenkot government in Israel wipe away the thorniest questions in that nation’s relationship with the United States: the future of Gaza, along with the occupation and de facto annexation of the West Bank. Still, with Eisenkot on one side, and Hakeem Jeffries and Chuck Schumer on the other, there is potential for Israel and the US to approach these issues in the spirit of collaboration. Under Netanyahu, it is guaranteed to be a hostile ordeal.

A new Knesset and a new US Congress present opportunities to break from old patterns, but Israel’s reactionary prime minister isn’t about to step aside gracefully. We are about to witness Benjamin Netanyahu sell himself as uniquely capable of rescuing Israel from its supposed enemies in America. In reality, he is uniquely capable of one thing: sinking US-Israel ties to new lows.

Evan Gottesman is the director of communications and special projects at the Renew Democracy Initiative and the managing editor of The Next Move, RDI’s publication on Substack. He previously worked at Israel Policy Forum and produced and co-hosted a podcast for the Israeli human rights group Terrestrial Jerusalem. Evan has been published in The Washington Post, Foreign Policy, and Haaretz.

Eisenkot has Two Paths: Gantz or Rabin

Eli Kowaz

In 1993, Yitzhak Rabin lost his majority in the Knesset—but continued on as prime minister for two more years.

How did he pull it off? The answer is that Rabin embraced the support of Israeli Arab parties Hadash and the Arab Democratic Party, who voted to keep his coalition afloat from the outside without joining the coalition. This is what’s called a minority government.

Rabin would later secure the Oslo II peace agreement with the Palestine Liberation Organization by a single vote. Rabin’s opponents drummed up incitement against him for accepting Israeli Arab backing, a campaign of hate that culminated in the prime minister’s assassination 31 years ago today.

The debate over Israeli Arab participation in government hasn’t gone away in the intervening decades. If anything, it’s intensified, reaching a fever pitch following last week’s Knesset elections.

Gadi Eisenkot, the head of the Change Bloc, is in line to receive the mandate to form a government. He can cobble together a coalition—perhaps a minority government—if he is willing to work with the Arab factions Ra’am and the Joint List.

This is what a majority of Change Bloc voters want, though a sizable minority object to this tactic, and Netanyahu is inflaming public opinion over the prospect of a government propped up by people whom he disingenuously labels “terror supporters.”

The other option would be a unity government with Netanyahu. Prominent Israelis like self-appointed civilian spokesman Eylon Levy have chimed in to appeal for this option, claiming it would save Israel.

It’s a bit rich to think that Netanyahu—the man who presided over October 7 in the face of multiple reported warnings, who’s shunted responsibility, who divided Israeli society with his judicial coup, who addressed the 1995 Zion Square rally where the crowd chanted “Death to Rabin”—that this man is the one who will save Israel.

The very suggestion requires amnesia on our part. We are asked not to remember that Netanyahu tried to recruit Ra’am’s Mansour Abbas to his government in 2021. It requires us to forget how Bibi betrayed previous partners in unity governments past: Tzipi Livni, Yair Lapid, and the now-unemployed Benny Gantz.

Netanyahu has spent this week casting doubt on the result. His allies claim the vote was tainted by foreign interference, and Shin Bet chief David Zini, whom Netanyahu appointed, reportedly asked to question Ra’am’s Mansour Abbas, Ta’al’s Ahmad Tibi, and Balad’s Sami Abu Shehadeh, along with one other lawmaker, over suspected Qatari and Turkish funding. Last night Attorney General Gali Baharav-Miara said publicly that no citizen or elected official will be questioned without evidence, and, according to reports, that the Shin Bet had not handed over evidence for three of the four. This morning the Central Elections Committee announced that it had checked every complaint from the parties and reviewed the protocols of about three-quarters of the country’s polling stations, and found nothing pointing to harm to the integrity of the election or any change in the results. Election chief Noam Sohlberg had already written that no one has the authority to withhold publication, and that any claim about the results belongs in court after they are published. The investigation into the funding allegations continues, and Eisenkot’s response is that Qatari involvement is grave whether it is found in the prime minister’s office or in an election, a reference to the Qatargate investigation into Netanyahu’s own aides.

Eisenkot and the other Change Bloc leaders met to discuss their options. Naftali Bennett favors cooperation with the Ashkenazi ultra-Orthodox faction United Torah Judaism. Arch-secularist Avigdor Liberman shares the same view. UTJ is ideologically flexible so long as its community’s demands are met. But even with the Ashkenazi haredim, the Change Bloc will still need some measure of Arab support to pull together a government. Yair Golan of the Democrats has emphasized the need to collaborate with Ra’am and the Joint List.

I recognize that Eisenkot’s position is complicated. He has set forth conditions for future coalition partners: acceptance of Israel as a Jewish, democratic and liberal state; the values of the Declaration of Independence; military, national or civilian service for all Israelis; and recognition of Hamas as a terrorist organization whose military and governmental power must be destroyed or dismantled.

Ra’am’s Mansour Abbas recognized Israel’s Jewish character and condemned the October 7 attacks in the harshest terms. He’s wavered on how he defines Hamas, which is troubling, but it is very clear that he opposes the organization. The test for Abbas is whether he will say plainly what Eisenkot has asked of every partner.

Meanwhile, Eisenkot’s principle of universal national service will likely require some meeting in the middle between the Change Bloc and the haredim.

It’s worth noting that Netanyahu never set forth any conditions for his own partners. Not when he made entreaties to Abbas, and not when he included Jewish terror supporters like Itamar Ben Gvir in his coalition.

Outside observers are quick to label Eisenkot’s four benchmarks as racist, but I believe they are eminently fair. They do not apply exclusively to Arabs, and there are elements that demand compromise from any type of party—secular, religious, Arab, and others.

That compromise is democracy at work. It may be uncomfortable, but it is what’s required to govern a diverse democracy like Israel. And this country cannot move on from Netanyahu without that kind of compromise. The coalition math will simply never work out without Israeli Arabs, who represent more than a fifth of our fellow citizens.

Israel’s relationship with its most important ally is also at stake in this decision. Democrats won both chambers of Congress on Tuesday, and they did it as the party’s voters have moved sharply away from Israel. US public opinion on Israel has sunk during Netanyahu’s time in office, especially during his last term. This summer, nearly half of House Democrats voted for an amendment to cut military aid.

The current aid agreement expires in 2028, while Trump said yesterday it will end at the end of this year. Netanyahu’s closeness to Republicans, from his 2015 speech against the Iran deal to his alliance with Trump, has made that erosion worse, and even Israel’s friends in the Democratic Party aim their frustration at its leadership. Senator Chris Coons said he hopes for a change in Israel, and warned that a Netanyahu government relying on Ben Gvir and Smotrich would deeply hurt the alliance.

A unity government with Netanyahu at the helm tells Washington nothing has changed. Israel cannot afford another Netanyahu government if it wants to keep any kind of close relationship with the United States.

Last night, on the eve of the anniversary, Eisenkot said his bloc would remember what Israel learned from Rabin’s assassination about violence, incitement, and the erosion of democracy, and would “stand firm without fear.” Likud’s campaign to delegitimize this result is the kind of incitement he was talking about.

The path in front of Eisenkot is complicated, but the outcome is clear. If he can’t chart the way, Eisenkot will end up as another Benny Gantz, a forgettable cardboard-cutout general, one more discarded opposition figurehead. Still, I believe Eisenkot has the potential to be a Yitzhak Rabin, a man who bucks political taboos in pursuit of real change.

Listen to my post-election breakdown with Noam Weissman on Unpacking Israeli History.

There was something special about this Israeli election. I made aliyah just eight years ago, but I’ve already had the chance to vote in six Israeli elections, thanks to the political deadlock surrounding Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. There may be yet another vote in the near future, depending on how coalition talks shake out.

Still, this election was particularly special because it was the first time I went to vote as a father, and that experience was meaningfully different. My priorities felt different, what I was voting for felt different, and it was my 3.5-year-old son who ended up placing my ballot in the box (cue Bibi accusing toddlers of voter fraud!).

As my son dropped the envelope into the ballot box, I reminded myself: I’m voting for my kids, so that their future can be here, in the country we love, so that it can be safe. That they can grow up in a Jewish homeland that defends itself but also protects the rights of its minorities and doesn’t compromise on its democracy.

Now, I’m going to tell you which party I voted for.

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I’m not that old, but I’m old enough to understand that there’s one iron law in Israeli elections: never trust an exit poll.

I was only five during the 1996 Knesset elections. The common recollection then was that Israel went to bed with Shimon Peres as prime minister and woke up with Benjamin Netanyahu.

I also remember when, in 2015, the exit polls had Netanyahu in a dead heat with the Zionist Union’s Isaac Herzog, but as the votes were counted, it became increasingly clear that Netanyahu had won.

That is why I’ve had to exercise some impulse control when it comes to commenting on yesterday’s results. Many were quick to pull the trigger as soon as the first exit polls came in. The full results are not out yet, but with 85% of the votes counted, we now have a more complete picture. And complicated though that picture may be, I’m still optimistic about Israel.

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In this conversation

• Why hope has two dimensions, the expectation that something can happen and the wish that it will, and why the wish matters more for politics

• How some leaders leave the future out of their rhetoric and keep citizens in a permanent state of crisis

• His survey finding that “peace” was the warmest word for Jewish Israelis, warmer than agreement, accord or conflict resolution

• Why he thinks peace advocates should focus on media and public discourse, rather than only top-down diplomacy or grassroots work

• What the LGBT movement’s shift toward pride and celebration offers other causes

• Younger Israelis, the way October 7 gets told, and why extremists fear moderates more than each other

• Viktor Frankl’s story of a prisoner whose hope had an expiration date, and what it means if the election goes the wrong way

Timestamps

• 00:00 Introduction

• 01:28 What hope research is

• 03:37 Leaders who erase the future

• 06:15 Hope and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict

• 08:28 The two dimensions of hope

• 14:24 Does leadership matter?

• 18:29 Can you say “peace” in Israel today?

• 24:07 Reaching beyond your own camp

• 27:54 The younger generation

• 33:25 Why moderates get attacked

• 35:26 What if Netanyahu wins again?

• 39:33 History’s tricks

On Friday, in the olive groves outside the West Bank village of Abu Falah, extremist settlers beat a Washington Post photojournalist who had come to photograph Palestinian farmers at harvest. American Heidi Levine has covered conflicts around the world for years. She was wearing a flak jacket and a helmet, clearly identified as a journalist.

Five days earlier, 60 Minutes aired Lesley Stahl’s report from the West Bank, which showed settlers attacking Palestinians on camera, and one settler asked her whether she was “in with Hamas.”

The settlers who attacked Heidi Levine didn’t even ask.

From her hospital bed in Ramallah, Levine said that without her flak jacket and helmet she probably would not be here, because the men “just kept kicking me and kicking me.”

Eyewitnesses say about eighty extremist settlers, many of them masked, came down the hill. Army jeeps arrived while the attack was still ongoing, they say, and the soldiers fired tear gas toward the Palestinians.

The Office of the Prime Minister sought to cast doubt on the whole affair, even though it’s been documented with video evidence. According to Netanyahu’s office, Levine was “allegedly assaulted” (emphasis mine). It also claimed that some 200 “Arabs and far-left activists” had confronted about 40 Israeli youths.

We’ve seen this pattern before. In July, a Palestinian at the village of Tell killed a settler security officer, Benayahu Mellet, and an army major. Within days, settlers burned two mosques, a home and cars, and scrawled the words “Benayahu’s Revenge” on the wall of the mosque in Qusra.

The army said it arrived too late to catch anyone. Then, it raided Tell, took some 70 Palestinians in for questioning, and sealed the homes of two Palestinians ahead of demolition. The state moved against the village within hours and against the men who burned the mosques not at all.

Two things are true here, and I have said both repeatedly. The first is that international focus is out of proportion, and the violent are a minority, both among settlers and certainly among Israelis writ large. The second is that even a small group can cause a lot of damage, and we must confront settler violence.

The violent settlers are Israelis. They are also Jews. They are armed and funded by a state we live in and pay for. Settler violence is one of Israel’s few crises that the government could end next week if we wanted to, without having to ask Washington or account for what Iran and its proxies will do. The state just has to enforce its own laws.

Israel’s own security establishment recorded 660 incidents of Jewish nationalist crime in the first half of this year, up 50 percent from the same months of 2025. Even Mike Huckabee, the pro-settler US ambassador, has repeatedly called violent settlers terrorists. And yet, this government has done almost nothing to stop it, and parts of it have even enabled it. But the signs were there before this government took power.

Almost five years ago, before this government was in power, I visited the West Bank with a delegation of former high-ranking IDF commanders and prominent liberal Zionists—American Jews who’d given millions to Israel. We went to an outpost in the South Hebron Hills called Avigayil to hear from the people living there. The community’s security coordinator met us along with a group of teenagers in tzitzit carrying automatic rifles. At one point, those rifles were pointed at us.

Young men with their fringes showing and automatic weapons pointed at Jews who had come in good faith made me realize, for a few seconds, that these boys did not see us as fellow Jews who simply disagreed with them.

For years I thought settler violence was exaggerated, a few bad actors blown out of proportion by critics of Israel. That belief disappeared in a moment, and I realized how wrong I’d been: if this is how they treat us, with our donations, our generals, and our shared prayers, what might they do to the Palestinians living down the hill? And today they have a government that largely has their back.

In late September, more than 100 settlers rioted in Jalud and blocked soldiers from escorting a Palestinian family back to the home they were driven from, even after the High Court ordered their safe return. They also lightly wounded three Border Police officers. The army said the mission was not completed.

When we visited, Avigayil was an illegal outpost. In 2023, this government legalized the outpost as a settlement through the Civil Administration, which Bezalel Smotrich largely runs.

No shots were fired, and no one ultimately touched us, but we were told to turn around, and it was not the gentle way you guide a guest who has wandered in by mistake. One of the former colonels flashed his army ID to the settlers, and they were not impressed. IDF rank barely protected us that day, and being an American journalist did not protect Heidi Levine.

This past week, I went on a work trip to Lebanon.

I didn’t mention the Lebanon part to my wife. I just told her that I was going on a staff retreat and left it at that.

How did I get to Lebanon?

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A quick note: This is a special NYC edition, slightly delayed because of travel. Weekly Notes from TLV will resume this Thursday, and more is coming from The Middle Ground this week. In the meantime, check out the latest episode of ’s Older/Wiser podcast, where I spoke to Linda Chavez about upcoming Israeli elections.

Last week, I spent 24 hours in NYC. It is a city I love with all my heart and one of the most special places in the world. A lot of my affinity for the place has to do with my mom’s family.

I often write about my father’s side of the family, the Iraqi heritage, and the story, but my other side is just as important and interesting.

My maternal great-great-grandfather Joe arrived from Hungary at the turn of the 20th century, as did the rest of my maternal ancestors, from other places in the old country. Latvia, Russia, and so on.

That is how my grandparents arrived in the tri-state area. My grandfather grew up a few miles west of New York, in Newark, then the Jewish heart of New Jersey. I definitely inherited his hairline, but my mother generously claims I inherited his intelligence too. He graduated from high school at 16 and finished his undergrad degree at 20.

My Great-Aunt Betti even went to prom with a very famous Jewish contemporary. You’ll never guess who!

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I spent a short stretch in New York this week. Yesterday I was walking the Upper West Side with a friend when we passed a window with a Zohran Mamdani campaign poster, likely from the mayoral election, above Hanukkah stickers. I’m a big fan of Hanukkah (who isn’t?), but even for me, it feels a bit premature to have decorations up so early in the fall. Given how sun-bleached the stickers were, I figure they’ve been up through at least last holiday season.

We looked at the menorah sticker and the Mamdani poster one above the other. I wondered how the family felt about Mamdani on that day in particular.

That morning—on the anniversary of Hamas’s October 7 attacks, the worst massacre of Jews since the Holocaust—the mayor released a statement. It runs about 200 words. It mentions Hamas, Israelis, New Yorkers, Palestinians, and “friends and neighbors.” It never says Jews. Roughly three-quarters of Israelis are Jewish, and so were most of the people Hamas killed that day.

After three sentences of fairly dispassionate criticism of Hamas, the statement switches tack. Now it’s about Israel. Mamdani calls the war a genocide, describes bombs dropped on ambulances and drone strikes on journalists, says New Yorkers’ tax dollars fund war crimes, and closes on occupation, apartheid, and American arms shipments, with one last line about honoring the dead. The section condemning Israel’s conduct in the war is more than twice as long as the section on the unprovoked attack that kicked off the conflict. The dead of October 7 are just the opening for an argument against Israel.

Now, I think this is a slap in the face to the Jewish community. If you read The Middle Ground often, you’ll know how critical I am of this Israeli government, both its statements and its conduct of this war, and Mamdani is entitled to his view of Gaza. My objection is to the day he chose. The mayor of the largest Jewish city outside Israel had a chance to write one statement about the Israeli dead on a day of significance.

Other Democrats managed both. Governor Hochul called it the deadliest day for the Jewish people since the Holocaust. Hakeem Jeffries went further on Gaza than he has in past years, calling the killing of Palestinian civilians reprehensible and saying American policy must change dramatically, and Chuck Schumer also mentioned the devastation there. Jeffries and Schumer both still built their statements around the Israelis Hamas killed on October 7.

It’s very obvious that in the three years since the attack, the Democratic Party has shifted on Gaza, and Israel’s government has played a part in spurring on that shift. Despite their criticisms of Israel, there is comfort in knowing that their rebukes are grounded in a belief—which Hochul, Jeffries, and Schumer all share—in Israel’s right to exist as a Jewish and democratic state. Mamdani does not have the credibility to make these criticisms because he does not believe that Israel should exist.

None of this is new. In his first statement, 36 hours after the attack in 2023, then-State Assemblyman Mamdani turned to Netanyahu and the occupation, paying lip service to Hamas’s crimes. Thirteen days later, he was calling Israel’s war a genocide.

Darializa Avila Chevalier, now the Democratic nominee in New York’s 13th District, was in Times Square the day after the attack at a rally where signs read “Resistance is Justified when People are Occupied.” Mamdani condemned that rally at the time, but he’s since endorsed Darializa.

But for all of Mamdani’s anti-Israel bona fides, for all of his equivocating in his October 7 statements, there’s always a more radical radical.

What surprised me yesterday was the reaction when the mayor went to a vigil in Union Square, organized by Israelis for Peace, a group of Israeli anti-occupation activists, to mark the victims on both sides. A protest that began outside City Hall, endorsed by Young DSA chapters and other leftist groups, marched to the vigil.

Protesters sat in seats meant for mourners, some carried signs showing Yahya Sinwar, and they chanted “traitor” at the mayor, who stood through the ceremony without speaking. One organizer, who said she campaigned for Mamdani, told Haaretz he is already losing supporters. Their stated demands were about his policies, and the groups behind the protest have accused him of capitulating to “Zionist pressure,” pointing to his antisemitism strategy among other things.

Hasan Piker, one of the left’s biggest streamers and a close political ally of the mayor, watched the footage on his livestream and called it “disastrous.” He said Mamdani “did such a good job” with his statement earlier that day, and that by trying to please both sides he’d “please neither.”

This is where the goalposts have moved: recognition of Jewish suffering, and any engagement with Jews who might support Israel’s right to exist, is unacceptable to them. He is experiencing now just a taste of what he’s helped make mainstream.

Two-thirds of Jewish New Yorkers opposed Zohran Mamdani in last year’s election. The mayor’s statement left them on the outside once again.

On Wednesday, October 4, 2023, I was at a friend’s wedding in Caesarea. After the ceremony, my wife and I sat at a table with friends and couples.

One of our friends and her fiancé, Benji Trakeniski, sat next to us. They were so excited for their own wedding. You could see his smile when Benji talked about it. What a smile he had.

Benji was a career soldier, a major in the IDF’s 7th Brigade. Three days after we sat together in Caesarea, he woke up, kissed his fiancée goodbye, and rushed to Kibbutz Be’eri, responding to news of an attack there.

Benji helped save dozens of people that day, but he never came back. There was no wedding. The next week, at his funeral, I heard his fiancée read from the vows she had written for their wedding.

I’m telling you this story because it comes to mind every October 7.

Everyone in Israel is at most a couple of degrees connected to the loss of that day. For me, the connection is Benji. I saw him. I spoke to him 72 hours before.

The officer who fought beside him told Ynet that Benji’s weapon jammed, and that Benji turned to pull the wounded to safety while he kept firing. He also said they went in on their own, without orders, and that he had no body armor or night vision. What happened to Benji after that, we still don’t know exactly. His family says he fought for hours and fell around nine that night. He was listed as missing for three days. How much longer before anyone found him?

We deserve people in charge who will do everything they can to find answers—to fill in Benji’s story and the hundreds of others like his.

In a normal country, the government would establish a state commission of inquiry. The Israeli government has not established one. The families of those murdered by Hamas and Islamic Jihad are forced to mark yet another anniversary of their loved ones’ deaths—another anniversary of the largest massacre of Jews since the Holocaust—with too many open wounds.

At Benji’s funeral, an ambulance pulled up. The officer who reported that Benji’s gun had jammed was badly wounded himself. But he showed up to the funeral, on the first day of his rehabilitation, to speak about Benji’s heroism. For hundreds of families, these fleeting anecdotes are all that they have.

We are left playing guessing games. We turn to secondary sources to connect the dots. Reporting by intrepid Israeli journalists. Books like Amos Harel’s excellent 6:29 or Brett McGurk’s new Brink, a lead American negotiator’s account of the hostage talks.

My son was three months old on October 7, and we have had another since. Benji and his fiancée should have been married in April 2024.

Instead, Benji isn’t here, and we’re stuck with painful questions. They go beyond the precise circumstances of his death to affairs of state: Why were the warnings ignored? Reporting in recent weeks says Egypt’s intelligence chief flew to Israel a week and a half before October 7 to raise the alarm, and that the UAE’s president also warned Netanyahu.

Netanyahu’s office denies it. The warnings, officials say, did not specify when or how large an attack would be.

There are questions closer to the ground, too. The IDF’s own investigation of Be’eri found that most of the kibbutz civilian emergency squad’s weapons were in the armory when the attack began. The same investigation concluded that the army failed in its mission to protect the kibbutz. Amit Mann, a 22-year-old paramedic who lived there, was trapped in the clinic with the wounded for hours before Hamas broke in and murdered her.

After the investigation came out, Benji’s sister, Sharon, wrote that people should “notice the difference between the systemic failure and the personal heroism.” The failure, she said, was institutional, and without fighters like Benji the toll would have been far worse. She couldn’t have been more right.

Here again, we could benefit from a commission of inquiry. The government says a commission must wait until the war is over.

As a sop to angry families, the government has advanced its own politically appointed panel in the meantime. A state commission’s members would be chosen by the president of the Supreme Court, not by the people whose decisions it will examine. The families are asking for a commission that can ask this government hard questions.

I have spoken a lot about the Israeli government, so let me be clear on two counts. First, Hamas is evil, and its leaders and fighters had agency and chose to commit unspeakable crimes. Next, the hostage crisis was genuinely complex, with Israel’s leaders placed in an impossible position with no easy out—punt on a deal, and risk the lives of the hostages, or concede to Hamas’s demands, save the hostages, and essentially give Hamas permission to try this all again.

Still, the government’s opacity is telling. On October 5, 2026, the government held its official memorial ceremony. Today, on October 7, the families hold theirs. They called a minute of silence at 6:29, at hundreds of sites across the country. The two ceremonies pull apart for one reason: the government has not owned up to what happened or investigated it. We should be able to mourn, but instead we’re left to wonder.

In memory of Maj. Benji Trakeniski, and of all those we have lost since October 7, 2023.

We will never forget.

Wednesday was one of those days that you won’t forget. One of those moments you remember for the rest of your life.

We just passed the 25th anniversary of 9/11. I remember September 11, 2001 well. I was 11 years old. I remember walking into my parents’ room just before seven in the morning Pacific time, sensing something was off because my dad usually leaves for work at 5:30 am. I asked what was wrong. My dad said something horrible had happened, and I looked at the TV to see the first tower crashing down.

Which is why I knew something was up when my dad called me on Wednesday, way past his usual bedtime, to tell me that an airplane had likely been hijacked.

You’ve all likely heard the story: the heroism of the Israeli passengers, joined by a FlyDubai pilot, subduing the would-be hijacker—the flight’s first officer—who was trying to crash the plane. The captain, Smit Machchhar, stabbed and badly injured, mustered the strength to open the cockpit door to allow the passengers to fight back.

The whole affair evoked the story of United Airlines Flight 93, the fourth plane to crash on 9/11, and the only one to not reach its target. The passengers on that plane revolted, but it was too late, and while it did not strike a landmark (likely the US Capitol), all aboard were killed.

After 9/11, cockpit doors across the aviation industry became essentially impenetrable. If the wounded pilot hadn’t been able to unlock the door, the fate of Flight 1073 could have been very different.

They could have ended up like the passengers on the four planes that the 9/11 hijackers turned into missiles. We would have known their names, and mourned them, and only ever guessed at what they said to each other before they acted. They could have become like Todd Beamer, the United 93 passenger who inspired his fellow passengers with two words—“let’s roll”—or Aner Shapira, the fallen soldier who died throwing grenades back at terrorists on October 7.

Thanks to quick thinking, resilience, and heroism, Flight 1073 will be a different sort of memory: the uplifting kind; the story with a cinematic happy ending. We’ll remember Tali Manes, who took her young daughter to the bathroom near the front of the plane, heard fighting, saw blood, and roused her husband to action. Tali had no warning that she was about to be tested, but she did her job, and her husband Tzvika did his.

I write a lot about Israeli politics. I could write about Netanyahu’s response, how he rushed to the airport after avoiding the Gaza border communities for years. I could write about how some Western media coverage downplayed the seriousness of the hijacking attempt. Iranian state-linked media went further, claiming within hours that Israel itself was plotting the attack, while thousands of posts on X blamed Israel or Jews, as if a captain stabbed and bleeding in a cockpit were a prop.

But I don’t think those stories deserve our attention this week; they can wait. I don’t think that Tali, Tzvika, or the three other Israeli heroes, Yaniv Hayun, Shota Musaev, and Asaf Rajuan, asked one another whom they would be voting for on October 27, or whether they’d be voting at all, before taking action. I doubt that the pilot, Smit Machchhar, who’s Indian, was thinking about Middle Eastern geopolitics or Israel’s government when, battered and bleeding, he saved a plane full of Israelis.

A plumber. A dentist. Ordinary people who decided to save lives.

In fact, the only one thinking about ideology was the plane’s first officer, the attacker. Everything we know so far points to terrorism. He tried to crash the plane with more than a hundred innocent people aboard.

The foreign press will do what the foreign press does. If the airline and the foreign press want to call what could have been a 9/11-scale terrorist attack an “altercation,” fine. Bibi Netanyahu will do what Bibi Netanyahu does too. If he wants to use the extraordinary courage of the passengers on Flight 1073 to score cheap political points, so be it. In a few years, we won’t remember these petty insults and misleading headlines. We’ll remember the heroes, and we’ll look back with pride and a smile.

Thank you, everyone, for subscribing. We have now reached over 100 paid subscribers. It means a lot. More importantly, thank you to the heroes of flydubai 1073, whose heroism saved the lives of 174 people. I’ll post my thoughts on that here tomorrow. In the meantime, here’s this week’s Notes from Tel Aviv.

Chag Sameach!

Last weekend I took my son to his first Israeli soccer match.

Now, in North America, it’s normal to take young kids to a sporting event. In Israel, it is a different ballgame, literally. Israeli soccer culture is usually not a family affair.

Ultras (the most intense fans and hooligans), flares, rivalries, and curse words. Soccer is more an identity than a game to many Israelis, and it cuts to the core of people’s politics and personal belief systems.

If you’ve read The Middle Ground consistently, you’ll know that I frequently bring up soccer. There’s no hiding that I’m a big fan. Naturally, I’m trying to indoctrinate my son at the earliest possible opportunity.

As a good husband, I would always float the idea to my wife.

“Our son is now three, maybe I can take him to a game?” I asked.

She answered, “What time is it at?”

The answer was 8 pm. I knew then I’d lose my case. It was probably for the better. That was the game between Hapoel Tel Aviv and Beitar Jerusalem, one of the fiercest rivalries in Israeli football, between teams that represent the left and the far right, respectively.

But then I looked again at the schedule and found my moment: a 3 pm Friday afternoon game, just before Shabbat. This matchup was Hapoel Tel Aviv versus Hapoel Petah Tikvah, so there wasn’t likely to be a civil war in the stands. It was perfect.

I asked, and this time, my wife agreed.

This was it. We went to the game, and my cousins were there too, which made my son Eitan even more comfortable.

The game was rather uneventful; Hapoel Tel Aviv were comfortably ahead, and Eitan was having a blast.

Until halftime, that was, when he saw Hapoel Tel Aviv’s mascot: the devil. Yes, really.

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Moadim L’Simcha! First off, thank you to everyone who has subscribed. I am truly grateful. You only have two days left to get 36% off paid subscriptions. That’s the price of two overpriced shawarmas in Tel Aviv or two everything bagels with lox in NYC. Paid subscribers get access to Notes From Tel Aviv, my weekly series of personal dispatches from Israel. I’m excited to see what we can do at The Middle Ground in 5787.

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If you were to ask me at the start of the year whether or not I would write a piece on The Middle Ground about Ed Miliband in 2026, I would say no way. Twice in one month, absolute insanity, but that is where we are. Yesterday, the foreign secretary said at a Labour Conference: “I want to say to the millions of people in this country and indeed elsewhere, who have been moved and outraged by the plight of the Palestinian people. We hear you. You were right.”

On one hand, this is troubling; millions of British citizens have marched in the streets chanting “Free Palestine.” This happened almost immediately after the October 7 attacks. These protests didn’t call for a two-state solution, the release of the hostages, or the removal of Hamas — they were hate marches directed at Israel.

On the other hand, the organizers of these marches were provided the perfect recruitment tools not only because of Israel’s war on Gaza, but because of its government, statements from its ministers, and the policies promoted in the West Bank.

That is why I found responses from two prominent Jewish commentators on Israel, on opposite ends of the conversation, interesting. And I hope both of them are wrong. One is Dan Senor, the host of the excellent podcast Call Me Back. Senor said on X that “this is an impossible standard no Israeli government could meet.” In many ways, this is a continuation of the debate he was having with award-winning author of The Gates of Gaza, Amir Tibon, which I wrote about last month. On the other side of the spectrum is Peter Beinart. He said that Miliband’s speech was a preview of the Democratic National Convention in 2028. Earlier this week, Beinart said every potential Democratic contender should be calling for Marwan Barghouti’s release from prison. That’s not a fringe position anymore—it’s where the argument is heading if this government stays in power.

First, let’s look at Senor. I understand the gut reaction to be defensive and think of this as intentionally caving into an antisemitic mob. It’s the predictable cost of a government that’s given settler violence a pass, backed by a finance minister who said this week Israel should “go to war” in the West Bank and “do there what we did in Gaza,” and a national security minister who unveiled a plan this month to remove 1.86 million Palestinians from Gaza as a condition for joining the next coalition. Miliband is reading the room, but this Israeli government wrote his speech.

Sure, there are other factors, UK politics among them, and the disproportionate global focus on Israel is real. Miliband needed that line for his Labour base. Labour has lost support to the Greens and their anti-Zionist Jewish leader, Zack Polanski, and this is part of new leader Andy Burnham’s leadership reset, which seems to be working. He’d have wanted this regardless of what Israel’s government did this month. All that is right, and yet none of that changes who supplied the material.

Imagine an Eisenkot government that cracked down on settler violence, had no ministers trying to resettle Gaza and floating the idea of nuking it, ended the war earlier with more hostages back alive, and backed a US-led plan to disarm Hamas in Gaza. In this scenario, there would most certainly not have been sanctions placed on the West Bank by the UK and eleven other countries, and the anti-Israel crowd would be arguing from the pre-war debate over occupation and apartheid accusations, not the fresh material this government has supplied it since.

Beinart’s comment is more interesting because in a worst-case scenario, he could be right. If this Israeli government is reelected, the DNC in 2028 could look exactly like the Miliband speech, and that is what Beinart likely wants, but this government has shown the world, as Noam Tibon put it when I spoke to him last week, “an ugly face of Israel.” Over the past decade, Beinart has gone from liberal Zionism to advocating a one-state outcome, to the point that he apologized for prioritizing the chance to speak to Israelis over what he called his solidarity with Palestinians, after giving a talk at Tel Aviv University. His argument today depends on Zionism being the furthest thing from liberal, and that is what this government delivers.

The reality is that the outcomes of both are intrinsically tied to specific policy choices made by the Israeli government; one can debate them on the merits, and there are compelling arguments to be made on both sides. But the idea that any Israeli government would meet the same fate is at best naive, and at worst willfully ignorant.

We have a tendency to be reflexive. On Israel, I am much closer to Senor than Beinart. Beinart no longer believes in a Jewish, democratic Israel, while Senor does. But our gut tells us that when we hear a speech like Miliband’s, we react: this is Israel hate, pure and simple; it doesn’t matter which government, Netanyahu or not, this is what it looks like. And I understand the temptation. It is the easy out. The reality is, this government has done so much damage to Israel, and you simply cannot leave that out of the conversation even if there are many other real factors at play.

I hope both of them are wrong, because if the Milibands of the world are blind Israel-haters that want to dismantle the world’s only Jewish state, then we are in trouble, and if all Democrats are as well, that is something I refuse to believe. Call me naive, call me blind, but I believe that Democrats that have shifted over the past few years are reachable, and a different Israeli government that makes different decisions can bring them back.

And I sound like a broken record, but that is why the stakes are so high in this Israeli election. The Israel that can afford to see Beinart’s vision for the 2028 DNC come to fruition is an Israel that doubles down on Netanyahu, Ben Gvir, and Smotrich’s politics—which leads Israel down the course of international isolation and “Super Sparta.” That Israel has no good outcome for any of us—just ask Sparta. And that is why we can’t be a Beinart and give up on Israel, but we also can’t be a Senor and fail to look in the mirror despite the temptations.

Chag Sukkot Sameach! You still have a few days left to get 36% off paid subscriptions, now through the end of September. That’s the price of two overpriced shawarmas in Tel Aviv or four macadamia milk matcha lattes in New York City. Paid subscribers get access to Notes From Tel Aviv like these, my weekly series of personal dispatches from Israel.

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Also, I recently sat down with October 7 hero Maj. Gen. (res.) Noam Tibon, now #6 on the B’Yachad list, to talk about elections and his vision for Israel — Watch Here. And my latest piece, on Brad Lander and Mahmoud Khalil’s Yom Kippur chutzpah, is up as well.

My dad grew up in Beer Sheva. By my count, he hasn’t voted since 1981. I’m not sure who he voted for then, Shimon Peres or Menachem Begin. I would pick either man in a heartbeat over our current prime minister.

Slicha, I forgot these Notes from Tel Aviv are not supposed to be about politics.

Anyway, back to my dad and his hometown. Beer Sheva is an interesting place, and it was back then. I’ve written about its soccer team at length in previous notes, and the multiple times they’ve broken my heart. But this note is not about football or soccer.

When my grandparents arrived from Iraq, my grandfather’s more established, educated Baghdadi side settled in Petah Tikvah, while my Svata’s Basrawi side (Jews from Basra, Iraq) settled in Beer Sheva.

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Chag Sukkot Sameach! You still have a few days left to get 36% off paid subscriptions, now through the end of September. That’s the price of two overpriced shawarmas in Tel Aviv or four macadamia milk matcha lattes in New York City. Paid subscribers get access to Notes From Tel Aviv, my weekly series of personal dispatches from Israel. I’m excited to see what we can do at The Middle Ground in 5787.

I used to live on 7th Avenue in Park Slope. I loved how close it was to Prospect Park. The main entrance was just around the corner at Grand Army Plaza. That’s where I started my morning runs and frequented the farmers’ market. I was shocked when it became a venue — an anti-Israel political tool — on the holiest day in the Jewish calendar.

Yizkor, the service to remember those we’ve lost, was repurposed as a Gaza vigil. By any account, this was just another anti-Israel rally, this time bearing the trappings of an integral Yom Kippur ceremony.

The “service” was organized by Jews for Racial and Economic Justice (JFREJ), Rabbis for Ceasefire, IfNotNow, and Jewish Voice for Peace (JVP). Speakers addressed the crowd from a podium adorned with a sign — “for the sin of genocide we atone.” Behind them stood a mock-up of a synagogue ark reading “Refuse, Remember, Recommit.”

Yizkor asks us to remember our own dead, not to grieve strangers as a political statement. That’s why using this service to indict a foreign government is so disturbing. It has nothing to do with the holiday itself.

The headliner for the event was Mahmoud Khalil. Khalil, if you’ve forgotten, is the anti-Israel college activist actively contesting deportation over his role in Columbia’s campus protests.

Khalil went through a harrowing ordeal in federal custody, the result of an egregious First Amendment violation on the part of the Trump administration. That his virulently anti-Zionist ideas aren’t illegal doesn’t make them sound, and it certainly doesn’t make Khalil a legitimate moral guide on Judaism’s holiest day.

At the podium, Khalil, playing rabbi, said that God should “remember that Israel is committing genocide.” Repentance, he continued, is hard “when our tuition fees, our tax dollars, our votes are being used to kill, to maim, to displace Palestinians.”

In other venues, though, Khalil has been less restrained. He’s called for the “Zionist genocidal project and the ideology of supremacy that it’s built on” to “collapse completely.” Some peacenik!

Khalil’s presence alone was something. But the Yizkor for Gaza organizers had two helpings of chutzpah prepared on Monday.

Indeed, Khalil’s opener was none other than the anti-Israel movement’s favorite non-Zionist Zionist, Brad Lander (Macklemore was apparently busy despite a newly opened touring schedule).

Lander is the Jewish congressman-apparent who declared at his son’s bris that the newborn renounced the right of return.

In his Yizkor speech, Lander appealed to “my fellow liberal and progressive Zionists about the repentance that we must do today.”

Then: “As someone who feels a connection to Israel, who cares about it, I feel today so deeply that my vidui, my confession, must center on my, on our complicity in what I view as genocide in Gaza.”

He anticipated the obvious objection and waved it off. “I understand the hesitation of some to call it genocide,” he said, adding that he understood fears of rising antisemitism too. Then he asked the crowd how any Jew who feels connected to Israel could avoid putting “the wanton destruction of Gaza, the famine exacerbated by lack of aid, the land thefts and murders in the West Bank” at the center of their Yom Kippur confession.

Then he began with his confession: “Ashamnu,” he said. “We have been culpable. Bagadnu.” These are the opening words of the Al Chet, the alphabetical confession Jews recite together throughout Yom Kippur: we have sinned, we have betrayed. Lander wasn’t echoing the liturgy. He was reciting it, live, with Gaza standing in for the sins the prayer was written to name.

This isn’t new for Lander. It’s the same act he ran during the primary against Dan Goldman: call yourself a Zionist, keep company with people who treat the word as an insult, and drain it of any meaning.

Note that JFREJ, which co-organized Monday’s event, says outright that it’s rooted in “Diasporism,” not Zionism.

Last month, my friend Evan Gottesman called out a related pattern in The Middle Ground. After protesters at Madison Square Garden heckled Lander for his nominal Zionism, Evan pointed out that one of Lander’s political allies — a person whom he’d campaigned with — referred to Zionists as “functional Klansmen.”

Lander waved off the MSG protesters as “a few loud mouths,” but he didn’t address the oozing disdain and condescension his own political camp has for an ideology and a country he claims a connection to.

Lander did the same at Grand Army Plaza. He reiterated the genocide charge — the price of admission in far-left spaces these days. He gave everything to Mahmoud Khalil and the other anti-Zionists, and asked nothing in return.

No one repented beneath that soaring arch in Brooklyn. Teshuva asks you to look at your own conduct and change it. The introspection that’s so central to this act was absent at Grand Army Plaza. A Jewish crowd gathered on the most solemn day in our calendar to perform fealty to anti-Zionist ideology. The attendees may believe that giving Mahmoud Khalil the mic for the Dvar Torah was their highest moral duty. But in outsourcing Jewish spiritual leadership to someone beyond the tribe — with views like Khalil’s, no less — Lander and his fellow travelers abdicated their responsibility to Am Yisrael.

I’m happy to share my conversation with Maj. Gen. (res.) Noam Tibon, who drove from Tel Aviv to Nahal Oz on October 7 to reach his son’s family, and is now a candidate for the Knesset with B’Yachad.

He says Netanyahu received multiple warnings before October 7 — from the Egyptians, from MBZ, and from Yair Lapid — and that the Shin Bet pushed again and again to kill Sinwar and was refused. On the Qatari officials he says are still working in the Prime Minister’s Office: “They are going to be in jail, all of them.” We also spoke about NAZA, and about his own documentary that premiered last year at TIFF, and his vision for Israel.

Stay tuned for more exciting features like this in the upcoming year. And remember, you still have a few days left to get 36% (double chai and my age) off paid subscriptions, now through the end of September. That’s the price of two overpriced shawarmas in Tel Aviv or four macadamia milk matcha lattes in New York City. Paid subscribers get access to Notes From Tel Aviv, my weekly series of personal dispatches from Israel. I’m excited to see what we can do at The Middle Ground in 5787.

Chag sameach,

— Eli

Thank you all again for your support in 5786. Your generosity has allowed me to push out more content and even hire, yes, a real, human editor (if anyone caught my typo last week). You still have a few days left to get 36% (double chai and my age) off paid subscriptions, now through the end of September. That’s the price of two overpriced shawarmas in Tel Aviv. Paid subscribers get access to Notes From Tel Aviv, my weekly series of personal dispatches from Israel. I’m excited to see what we can do at The Middle Ground in 5787. Also, stay tuned later this week for a full sit-down with October 7 hero and Knesset candidate Maj. Gen. (res.) Noam Tibon.

Wishing all those fasting an easy fast and a Gmar Chatima Tova.

— Eli

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It feels like a different Israel. It was a time when no one could imagine Ben Gvir as a minister, or even a member of Knesset. It was January 4, 2017. On that day, a military court at the Kirya — the IDF headquarters in Tel Aviv — convicted IDF soldier Elor Azaria of manslaughter. A few hundred meters away, a crowd chanted that the Chief of Staff of the IDF Gadi Eisenkot should be assassinated.

The words were “Gadi, be careful, Rabin is looking for a friend.” Oren Hazan, then a Likud MK, was out there with them.

“Gadi, be careful, Rabin is looking for a friend” - January 4, 2017

Back then he was considered one of the most extremist MKs in the Knesset. Today he would be just another Netanyahu-coalition lawmaker. The day before, Eisenkot had said that an eighteen-year-old in the IDF is not everyone’s child. He is a soldier, sent to do what the state sends him to do. That was the provocation.

Eisenkot now leads the polls against Netanyahu. In August, Netanyahu-appointed Shin Bet Chief David Zini turned down his party’s request for a Shin Bet detail, telling the Central Elections Committee the agency held no intelligence that anyone intended to harm him. The advisory committee recommended protection anyway.

The man who was threatened with Rabin’s fate and has been physically confronted during this campaign continues to campaign with private unarmed security guards his own party pays for.

On Saturday, two days before Yom Kippur, Isaac Herzog announced he was expunging Azaria’s record, citing the time that has passed, the sentence served, the statute of limitations, and a man’s wish to work.

The army had told him not to.

The Military Advocate General’s office, the Personnel Directorate and the chief of staff all reviewed Katz’s request and came back the same way. Ten years on, Azaria has never expressed regret or taken responsibility. Rivlin refused an earlier version of the same request, arguing it would damage the resilience of the army and the state.

No one is disputing what Azaria did. Palestinian Abdel Fattah al-Sharif stabbed a soldier and was then shot. That is when Azaria entered the scene, about eleven minutes afterward, when al-Sharif lay on the ground with six bullets in him, and Azaria put one more in his head. The court concluded that Elor Azaria had not fired out of any sense of danger. He fired because he had decided the man deserved to die.

Katz says the expungement tells soldiers and their families that we do not abandon our own and do not leave anyone behind. Interesting…

On August 29, 2024, the security cabinet voted to hold the Philadelphi corridor rather than agree to a hostage deal. You’ll remember Netanyahu said that corridor was of utmost importance. Then-defense minister Yoav Gallant was the only minister who voted against. Two days later, the army recovered six bodies from a tunnel under Rafah. Hersh Goldberg-Polin. Eden Yerushalmi. Carmel Gat. Alexander Lobanov. Almog Sarusi. Ori Danino. Forensic investigations found that they had been shot at close range within 48 to 72 hours of the troops reaching them. Three of them, Goldberg-Polin, Yerushalmi and Gat, were on the humanitarian list under the framework Israel had agreed to that July.

They were left behind.

Israel hasn’t left the corridor since, and there’s been no indication it plans to.

Now, President Herzog called his decision one made in the spirit of these days, alluding to the High Holidays, when Jews traditionally ask God for repentance. The Hebrew word is teshuvah. Teshuvah has a sequence; I remember learning it in elementary school at Vancouver Hebrew Academy. You recognize what you did, you regret it, you say it out loud, you undertake not to do it again. The army’s objection, after a decade, is that Azaria has never done the first three. It is not Herzog’s job to do; it is Azaria’s, and he has refused to. Elor Azaria broke the IDF rules in the IDF uniform, and the army is still saying so this week.

But the case wasn’t just about Azaria. It was about who ultimately decides, it was about where the IDF was headed and what it meant to be an IDF soldier. Azaria made the call that this man deserved to die, and the verdict was that call was not his to make. On Saturday the state reversed itself, over its own objection, with the IDF opposed, five weeks before an election.

Itamar Ben-Gvir, who protested for Azaria after his arrest, called Saturday’s announcement moving and joyful, asked the chief of staff to put him back in uniform, and told Herzog to pardon the prime minister next.

Days after the verdict against Azaria back in 2017, Israelis were called to Rabin Square for a rally against incitement, after the threats against Eisenkot and the judges. “We must all go out tonight,” Herzog wrote beforehand, urging people to attend, “to issue a clear and unequivocal call to stop the madness and fervor, and restore sanity and tolerance to this country.” He was the opposition leader then, and now he's the one who cleared his record. That, more than anything, is a powerful indication of where we are.

Shana Tova! Thank you for all of your support in 5786. Your generosity has allowed me to push out more content and even hire, yes, a real, human editor (you’ll see no AI slop on this Substack). To celebrate the new year, I’d like to offer 36% off paid subscriptions, now through the end of September. Paid subscribers get access to Notes From Tel Aviv, my weekly series of personal dispatches from Israel for the price of two shawarmas. I’m excited to see what we can do at the Middle Ground in 5787.

— Eli

At a dinner with friends on Monday night, over a plate of pasta at Taverna Romana in Tel Aviv, I was expecting to get a break from talking about elections, the conflict with the Palestinians, and the future of our country.

I was meeting two friends, both American. One of them—I’ll call him David—is being forced to leave Israel.

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It was 25 minutes of applause, something that even prime Netanyahu couldn’t achieve when addressing Republican members of Congress. That was the ovation filmmakers Yuval Abraham and Rachel Szor received after winning the Special Jury Prize at the Venice Film Festival on Saturday. Back in Israel, ministers and politicians on both sides issued sharp condemnations. Avigdor Liberman called them two Israel-haters selling out their country for a moment of glory at antisemitic festivals.

I have some thoughts. The first thing that came to mind was Nadav Lapid (no relation to Yair), who I posted about a few months back. Nadav Lapid is a leftist Israeli filmmaker; he made a film about Ahed Tamimi. Lapid was removed from the jury of a festival in Marseille for being Israeli.

Venice gave two Israelis a prize, so maybe the difference isn’t nationality; it was something else. It was that Lapid’s film didn’t serve the purpose leftist Israeli filmmakers are supposed to. His was a surrealist, wartime satirical drama entitled Yes! It was about a struggling jazz musician named Y. and his dancer wife, Yasmin, who abandon their artistic principles and sell out to the nation’s elite following the October 7 attacks by composing an ultra-nationalist anthem. It dealt with Israel’s right-wing nationalist trends in a satirical way, but it didn’t fully bolster the case of Israel’s detractors. There was no genocide verdict or confirmation of ethnic cleansing.

Nadav Lapid was dropped, and Yuval Abraham won the award. Yuval offered what the people wanted. His film, NAZA, offers real testimony from over two dozen Israelis about how the IDF changed its collateral damage protocol following October 7. I should say I haven’t seen it. It premiered in Venice on Thursday and opens in New York next month. When an Israeli is confessing to the crimes they are wanted for, nationality is not a problem. Notice where this appetite for a confession stops. No festival is touring testimonies from October 7. You’ll remember that TIFF pulled a film about a heroic October 7 rescue story, and only reinstated it after the outrage.

The unpleasant fact for supporters of Israel is that the film deals with a real issue: at the start of the war, the IDF increased the limit on the number of civilians it would allow to be killed before carrying out a strike, and decisions were made quickly. The officers describe a system that had civilian deaths already factored into its calculations.

But the film also makes more serious allegations. It accuses Israel of carrying out systematic home destruction to prevent the return of Palestinian residents, without weighing that Hamas spent years booby-trapping houses and building the tunnel network beneath them, which often made destroying them unavoidable. It also accuses Israel of deliberately targeting journalists and medics, another claim that is not established.

The arithmetic also has issues. Around 80 percent of the buildings in Gaza have been damaged or destroyed. The death toll, which includes Hamas fighters, is roughly 3 percent of the population. Those two numbers don’t sit together without the evacuation warnings. An army trying to kill the people inside those buildings would have brought them down on them.

On top of the allegations in the film, the Holocaust parallel the filmmakers themselves draw is just as disturbing. Several pro-Israel advocates have spoken about the letters NAZA, but that is a weak argument when there is a substantial one available.

Jonathan Glazer is the executive producer, and the filmmakers cite Glazer’s line about his award-winning film The Zone of Interest: “victims out of sight but never out of mind,” as shaping how they approached Israelis who did the killing. Zone of Interest was Glazer’s film that told the story of Rudolf Höss, the commandant of Auschwitz, and life next to the death camp. Their own festival statement asks how one group of people allows the total dehumanization of another, and invokes their grandparents’ generation.

That Holocaust comparison always has an audience. The ultimate crime committed against Jews, reversed and handed back. Israelis who object are usually told the parallel is being forced on them by their enemies. In this case, two Israeli Jews built it in Israel, and the audience ate it up.

And there are also legitimate questions about the issue of collateral damage and why such a film is unique to Israel. Before a targeted strike, it is common practice for militaries to estimate how many civilians are likely to die. NATO countries call it a collateral damage estimate, or CDE, and every professional Western army does it. It’s important to be clear that the number attached to it isn’t permission to kill that number of people. It’s the ceiling on who can approve the strike. If under 20 civilians are at risk, a lower-level commander can sign off. When it’s greater than 20, it goes up the chain of command. The commander still has to weigh the expected harm against the target’s military value and take feasible steps to reduce it.

One of the most quoted moments in the film has an IDF soldier describing how Israel mapped Gaza before the war and knew who lived in which apartment. The film treats that as proof of intent. What’s the alternative? Should the IDF not map the area, not bother knowing who lives where, and bomb without checking who is inside? The knowledge is the precaution, and it’s being used as the charge.

This threshold, which was increased in response to October 7, was also lowered during the war. According to a New York Times investigation published in December 2024, the army halved it to 10 on November 5, 2023, and required special permission above that. By late January, permission was needed for nearly all such strikes. The film, not surprisingly, leaves that out. But it doesn’t restore the prewar standard either, when most strikes were approved only if no civilians were expected to die.

Two lines from the film have been widely quoted since the premiere. A soldier says the work was fun. Another says these are not human beings, they are NAZA. They are 2 men out of 24, and 24 out of an army of hundreds of thousands. The film doesn’t establish that they speak for anyone but themselves. It still lands. We tell the world our army is different, the most moral in the world, and that is not a claim you can make on paper.

This saga is an important reminder of a point I often make and something I realized after spending the year after October 7 between Israel and North America. From both places, I saw the two different publics and the alternate realities they’ve lived in since that day. For Israelis, almost three years of October 7 footage, funerals, hostage videos, and almost nothing of Gaza that wasn’t Hamas. Outside Israel, October 7 was a week, and then almost nonstop footage from Gaza.

Both audiences responded rationally to what they were shown, and both missed out on half. To me, this helps explain the reaction to the film, both the international praise and the Israeli condemnation.

Israelis see it as a betrayal because, to them, what happened in Gaza was a justified war on Hamas resulting from October 7, whereas for critics in the international community, October 7 was just an excuse Israel used to kill Palestinians.

There are many things this Netanyahu government has done that I cannot defend, but this film is different. There is a defense available here, and Israel’s supporters aren’t making it. Nothing is unique about NAZA, about CDE, or about proportionality, and a NATO member reacting to a similar threat likely would have behaved similarly.

Of course, Liberman didn’t dispute this, nor did he cite a threshold, a strike, a number, or explain himself. He called them a small and wretched minority looking for work as moral emissaries at antisemitic festivals. Culture Minister Miki Zohar said he would act immediately to revoke the citizenship of “these despicable creators” for treason, citing their “burning self-hatred.” Bennett, to his credit, at least made an argument: human shields, the warnings before strikes, the house-to-house fighting that cost Israeli soldiers their lives, the polio vaccination campaign. He asks what anyone else would do, and says a terrible war is not genocide. But he called the film a blood libel rather than answering what is in it, and he didn’t mention a threshold either. Most of the online response spent its energy on the fact that NAZA sounds like a mashup of Nazi and Gaza. I guess we’re in election season and anything goes. But this was a film built entirely on Israeli testimony, and the Israeli response was to litigate the Israelis who made it.

And yet that does not absolve those in Venice who applauded for 25 minutes without knowing what a CDE is. And nobody in Israel explained it, and that is our problem.

We have stopped answering criticism, we just deny it. We refuse to engage the merits of the case. If you call us out, you must hate us. If you’re one of us and call us out, you must hate yourself, like Yuval Abraham and Rachel Szor.

We live in interesting times. Things that once belonged to the realm of science fiction are here. And no, I’m not talking about AI and self-driving cars; I’m talking about the Israeli government and the BDS movement in agreement. Both think that boycotting wine from Psagot in the West Bank is the same as boycotting Tel Aviv. One side calls that antisemitism and the other calls it a good start, but not nearly enough.

British Foreign Secretary Ed Miliband, who announced a ban on settlement goods in the Commons on Tuesday, thinks they’re both wrong. That makes him a Zionist, whether or not he’ll use the word to describe himself, and both sides are going to have to deal with it.

Miliband is Jewish and a member of the Labour Party. I remember when he was the next big thing in British politics, before he disappointed greatly in the 2015 general election.

Ed’s older brother, David, also served as foreign secretary. I always preferred how David spoke about Israel. When the Gaza war started in December 2008, David, then foreign secretary, opened his statement with the rockets being fired at Israel. Two years later, in his first conference speech as Labour leader, Ed called for lifting the Gaza blockade without mentioning the rockets at all.

Ed seemed to be pandering to the left flank of Labour, the same left that made Jeremy Corbyn leader after Ed’s resignation as party leader. Under Corbyn, antisemitism in Labour got so bad that the UK's equality watchdog found the party had broken the law. During a 2013 Q&A with a British Jewish audience, Ed Miliband was asked if he was a Zionist. “Yes,” he answered, before adding that it “doesn’t mean I support everything Israel’s government does.”

Miliband’s office walked back the statement the next day, and he’s avoided the Z-word since.

The Zionist label has been hijacked, made toxic, used by critics of Israel in an attempt to paint the entire country as ethno-supremacist colonizers.

So Miliband’s announcement on settlements this past week was a pleasant surprise. It wasn’t pandering, and it didn’t avoid the justice and legitimacy of the Jewish state’s existence.

Of course, the loudest critics didn’t bother to watch Miliband’s full speech in the House of Commons. It is easier to post a picture of him eating a bacon sandwich, as pro-Israel advocate Eylon Levy did. Perhaps Levy has forgotten that David Ben-Gurion admitted to eating a ham sandwich, and Theodor Herzl had a Christmas tree.

Miliband spent the first part of his speech on the settlement-product ban thanking Israel for sheltering his grandmother after the Nazis murdered his grandfather and sixty other relatives. He declared that anyone who denies Israel’s right to exist as the Jewish homeland is wrong and highlighted their eliminationist motivations. He sanctioned Hezbollah’s financing arm, reimposed sanctions on Iran, rejected BDS, and left trade with Israel inside the Green Line untouched.

The Israeli government naturally rejected Miliband’s move out of hand. Israel’s case depends on the Smotrich-led West Bank policy being an integral part of Zionism. When Smotrich approved E1, he called it “Zionism at its best – building, settling and strengthening our sovereignty in the Land of Israel.” Any measure taken against this policy is one directed against Zionism and the Jewish people. US Ambassador to Israel Mike Huckabee did the same thing when he accused Britain of Jew-hatred days before the ban, and then called the ban itself discrimination against Jews.

Interestingly, the BDS movement also depends on this definition of Zionism; if the Smotrich-led West Bank policy is Zionism, then Zionism is an illegitimate settler-colonial movement that must be defeated as a whole.

Miliband is making things harder for both the Israeli government and the BDS movement. He is saying that there is a difference between Israel within the Green Line and the settlements on the other side; he is accepting Israel’s right to exist as a Jewish state. Miliband’s speech rejects their definition and that is exactly why neither can afford to let him count as a Zionist. Only a few fringe radicals have noticed Miliband’s Zionist bona fides (Ali Abunimah at Electronic Intifada has already attacked the foreign secretary’s speech as fake support for Palestine).

Israel’s response showed how much the government will give up to defend its narrow definition of Zionism and made clear we are in the heart of election season. Within hours, it announced it would close the British consulate in Jerusalem and expel the British Support Team in Ramallah, the UK’s contingent in the American-led mission that has trained Palestinian security forces since 2005. The IDF has long called security coordination with the PA one of the few things keeping the West Bank from collapse. Britain wasn’t acting alone: eleven other countries, including France and Canada, announced restrictions on settlement trade the same day, but Israel aimed its retaliation at London.

Surprisingly, Huckabee’s boss in Washington hasn’t signed on to the Israeli government’s meltdown. Asked about the ban, Trump said he had just seen it and would speak to Israel to find out their thinking. A Western official says Trump was told about it in advance and didn’t ask Britain to wait. Marco Rubio declined to condemn it. If the ban is discrimination against Jews, the president Netanyahu calls Israel’s greatest friend has so far declined to say so.

Many Israelis make Miliband’s argument. E1 and the rapid settlement expansion in the West Bank are designed to make a Palestinian state impossible (Smotrich, who directs much of Israel’s West Bank policy, has said as much). Without a path to two states, Israel has no route to lasting security. Prime Ministers Yitzhak Rabin and Ehud Olmert both made that argument. When Miliband said Palestinians were being ethnically cleansed from parts of the West Bank, he quoted Olmert and Ephraim Sneh, a retired IDF general.

We can debate the effectiveness of Britain’s new approach as a matter of policy. I have serious questions as to whether such sanctions will actually push Israel toward two states.

I have critiques about the design of the British ban. It covers every settlement, so Modi’in Illit, a Haredi city just over the Green Line that the Geneva Initiative and Olmert’s 2008 map both left inside Israel, lands in the same category as Avigayil, an outpost in the South Hebron Hills. Even Mahmoud Abbas’s 2008 counteroffer left Modi’in Illit inside Israel. Just as the Israeli government and BDS erase the distinction between Israel and the West Bank, the settler movement deliberately erases the distinction between these major settlements along the border and outposts deep in the territories. A policy built on rejecting the settlers’ definition of Zionism shouldn’t adopt their map. The timing didn’t help either: Seven weeks before an election, Britain handed Netanyahu a foreign distraction on the day Haaretz reported that the prime minister had been warned before October 7, a report his office denies.

The timing also pushes Israel’s opposition leaders to play by Netanyahu’s rules and condemn the ban, as Yair Lapid did on Tuesday. Meanwhile, the phrasing could have been sharper. Instead of hammering repeated mentions of a two-state solution when support among the Israeli public is at an all-time low, the framing could have focused on the dangers of West Bank annexation and what that means for Israel. That is an argument that would resonate more with the Israeli public, and it would deflate the Netanyahu government’s argument that foreign governments are trying to reward the Palestinians for October 7 by granting them a state.

A British official said this week that the scope of the sanctions could depend on how the next Israeli government behaves. Whoever forms a coalition after October 27 will be dealing with a foreign secretary who believes in Israel and thinks the settlements are destroying it, which is what I think too. Keeping a two-state window open is essential, even if a negotiated solution is not immediately in the offing. Ultimately Israel will need to choose between two of three things: its Jewish character, its democracy, and its control of all the land. It needs to give up on one.

Shana Tova! Thank you for all of your support in 5786. Your generosity has allowed me to push out more content and even hire, yes, a real, human editor. To celebrate the new year, I’d like to offer 36% off paid subscriptions, now through the end of September. Paid subscribers get access to Notes From Tel Aviv, my weekly series of personal dispatches from Israel. I’m excited to see what we can do at The Middle Ground in 5787.

— Eli

The lists are closed, so we know exactly who’s running and who’s on each list. I went through the latest 9 polls and tried to build a government out of it.

Netanyahu gets to 56 at an absolute stretch and has nowhere to find the last five. Eisenkot has a path, but it runs through Ra’am or through one of the small right-wing parties missing the 3.25% threshold.

Fourteen minutes, party by party. Build your own scenarios here: https://kowaz.com/coalitionbuilder/