There’s still considerable disagreement over where the algae originated. Government officials say the contaminants can be traced to the Nile, while others have raised the possibility that they were carried from Gaza.

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Today, the Water Authority attempted to neutralize the algae by adding chemicals to the water, creating a controversy of its own. Questions are now being raised about what chemicals were used and who authorized their release into the sea. In the meantime, nearby beaches have been officially closed.

For the moment, Israel has managed to compensate by drawing on water from the Kinneret and wells, along with whatever the desalination plants are still producing. There has been no significant disruption to the public water supply, and at least some agricultural needs are still being met. How long Israel can keep this up is uncertain. But one thing is already clear. We need a better backup plan for disruptions like this.

LEBANON

There have been several developments involving Lebanon. First, Israel announced that it would release five prisoners in exchange for assistance in recovering the remains of Lebanese Jewish communal leaders still held in Lebanon.

At the same time, there are reports that Iran has threatened to attack Israel if Israeli forces continue striking Hezbollah’s underground stronghold at the Ali Taher Ridge. If those reports are accurate, Hezbollah may be trying to draw Iran more directly into the confrontation. All of this is taking place, of course, while Israel and Lebanon are supposedly still under a ceasefire.

Tonight, the IDF announced that all Hezbollah members had been cleared from the fortifications beneath the Ali Taher Ridge.

THE PRESSURE ON IRAN IS WORKING. WILL TRUMP STICK WITH IT?

What is going to happen between the United States and Iran? President Trump continues to issue contradictory statements, but one thing does seem to be working: the economic pressure on Iran. My fear, of course, is that the United States will abandon that strategy too soon.

JEWISH TERRORISM AND THE POLITICS OF DENIAL

Last night, I heard Simcha Rothman interviewed on television. He is a member of the Religious Zionist party and someone I have written about previously. Today, Moshe Feiglin, whose fanatical far-right Zehut party has now joined forces with Smotrich’s Religious Zionists, was interviewed as well. Both Smotrich and Feiglin offered essentially the same response when asked about Jewish terrorism.

Feiglin said, “Has Jewish terrorism killed anybody? It hasn’t killed anybody at all. Name me the people it killed.” This is an effective rhetorical tactic because it exploits something Feiglin can safely assume: most Israelis, including me, cannot name the Palestinians who have been killed by Jewish terrorists. But our inability to name the victims does not mean they do not exist. There is a documented list of Palestinians who have been killed in acts of Jewish terrorism. Feiglin is using their relative anonymity to deny that those killings ever happened.

ELECTION CAMPAIGN UPDATE

A poll released by Israel’s Channel 13 News showed, for the first time in quite a while, the opposition and the parties supporting the current government tied at 53 seats each, with the Arab parties winning the remaining 14 seats. For supporters of the opposition, it was a sobering poll after months in which the electoral arithmetic had generally looked much more favorable.

The poll still showed Eisenkot with a ten-point lead over Netanyahu when voters were asked who was better suited to lead the country. So why did the overall numbers suddenly look so different? Because in this poll, both Ofer Winter’s new right-wing party and the Religious Zionist party crossed the electoral threshold. Winter’s party, however, just barely made it.

So it remains far from clear what will actually happen on Election Day, let alone what all the polls between now and then will show. In the end, one of the biggest variables will be turnout, something these polls cannot really capture.

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EDUCATION NEWS

Israel’s Teachers Score Below Teachers Worldwide

Israeli teachers score below those in the 18 comparison countries in literacy, numeracy, and adaptive problem-solving, and do so across all age groups, according to a study by Yael Melzer of the Shoresh Institution published in August. The paper draws on the second cycle of the OECD’s Program for the International Assessment of Adult Competencies, conducted in 2022 and 2023. PIAAC measures how adults process information and handle everyday and work-related tasks on a scale of 0 to 500. It does not measure teaching.

Part of the gap is formal education. Some 37% of Israeli teachers hold a graduate degree, against 49% across the comparison countries. But holding education constant does not close it, and what remains is stranger than a simple deficit.

Among Israelis without academic degrees, teachers score above other workers with the same schooling. Among those with degrees, the order reverses. Israeli teachers with academic degrees score below Israelis with degrees working elsewhere, and the gap is largest among men. In the comparison countries there is almost no difference between teachers and everyone else, in either direction.

The relationship between education and skill also breaks down. In the comparison countries, teachers’ scores climb with each additional degree. In Israel they hardly move at all: teachers with a bachelor’s average 258, two points below teachers whose schooling ended at upper secondary, and a master’s adds ten. Melzer’s second finding is the STEM inversion.

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Almost everywhere, science and engineering graduates are the highest-skilled workers in the economy. Israeli teachers with STEM degrees score the lowest among academically educated teachers in literacy and problem-solving, and the highest-scoring Israeli teachers are those trained in the social sciences.

Melzer’s explanation is worth reading closely, because it is a claim about credentials rather than about people. Teaching, especially in secondary school, requires a degree as a formal threshold and pays more for advanced degrees. That structure induces lower-skilled candidates to acquire degrees, while the private market screens on demonstrated skill rather than the certificate. Public-sector pay keys to seniority and education; the private sector pays for skill, and skilled workers sort accordingly.

There is a corollary the paper states plainly. Among people trained in education, those who go into teaching score higher than those who go elsewhere. 64% of Israel’s academic teachers were trained in education, against 54%in the comparison countries. The system takes the best of the education graduates and loses the competition for everyone else.

The gaps inside Israel are wider than the gap with the world. In literacy, secular Jewish teachers averaged 275 and religious non-Haredi teachers 277, Haredi teachers 266, and Arab teachers 226. In numeracy the spread runs from 277 down to 238. Melzer attributes part of the Arab-stream result to lower investment and thinner resources in the schools where those teachers were themselves educated, and part to Arabic diglossia, since the distance between spoken and written Arabic cannot be cleanly separated from the skill PIAAC is trying to measure.

Age of pupils matters as much as sector. Upper-secondary teachers scored 10% above preschool teachers in literacy, 9% in numeracy and 7% in problem solving. Primary teachers came in 3% above preschool in literacy and slightly below in numeracy. University graduates outscored college graduates. Among kollel graduates the usual pattern flips, and those who teach score higher than those who do not.

Melzer’s recommendations follow the diagnosis. Candidates should earn a degree in the subject they mean to teach and then take a short course for certification, rather than studying education. Compensation should tie pay to skill rather than to credentials and seniority. Priority goes to the Arab stream and to early childhood, the two weakest points in the system.

The timing is awkward. This month the Education Ministry opened a temporary track letting schools hire up to 8,000 teachers on personal contracts, including people with no teaching experience, at salaries reaching around NIS 20,000 a month. Melzer’s paper argues that the credential is the wrong filter. The ministry, facing a shortage in three weeks rather than a labor market in ten years, is hiring without it.

A VOTE FOR CONFIDENCE IN SCIENTIFIC EXCELLENCE

Two Technion faculty members, Dr. Nir Hananya and Dr. Haggai Maron, have been awarded prestigious European Research Council (ERC) Starting Grants. The ERC Starting Grant supports outstanding early-career researchers who are establishing their own independent research teams or programs. The scheme operates on a strictly bottom-up basis, funding ambitious, high-risk/high-gain frontier research across all fields of science, engineering, medicine, and the humanities, with scientific excellence as the sole evaluation criterion.

Dr. Nir Hananya, of the Schulich Faculty of Chemistry, received the grant for his research in chromatin biology- the study of how DNA is packaged within cells and how this packaging influences gene activity and cell identity. Genes are switched on or off through chemical modifications added to the proteins around which DNA is wrapped.

However, our understanding of how these modifications regulate gene activity remains limited. Dr. Hananya’s project will introduce “designer chromatin” (laboratory-produced chromatin carrying precisely defined chemical modifications) directly into living cells. This approach will create a controlled starting point for studying the effects of these modifications in their natural cellular environment.

Using this system, his laboratory will investigate how chemical modifications to chromatin proteins shape gene activity and how these modifications are faithfully maintained as cells divide. The findings are expected to reveal fundamental principles of gene regulation, with important implications for understanding diseases such as cancer, in which these regulatory mechanisms are often disrupted.

Dr. Haggai Maron, of the Andrew and Erna Viterbi Faculty of Electrical and Computer Engineering, received the grant for his research in deep learning, specifically the emerging field of weight-space learning. Today, neural networks form the foundation of most artificial intelligence systems and are typically viewed as tools for processing data such as images, text, or speech. Dr. Maron’s project takes a different perspective by treating trained neural networks themselves, including their weights, parameters, and other outputs they produce (known as neural artifacts), as a new type of data that can be analyzed, edited, and learned from.

The project will develop both theoretical foundations and practical models capable of “reading” other neural networks, analyzing what they have learned, improving and adapting them efficiently, and even generating entirely new networks. His laboratory will investigate how to process weight space while respecting the unique structure and symmetries of neural networks. The research is expected to establish fundamental principles for this emerging field, with practical implications for making AI models more accessible, improving and controlling them more effectively, and deepening our understanding of how they operate.

BUSINESS

Huskeys

Huskeys, a Tel Aviv cybersecurity company founded last year, has raised $27 million in a Series-A round led by Blackstone Innovations Investments. The round brings the company’s total funding to $35 million, following an $8 million seed round closed in March. The Wall Street Journal, which reported the financing first, put the valuation at more than $100 million.

Skinos Ventures, the fund run by Shlomo Kramer and Yishay Yovel, took part, along with the venture arms of Okta and Zscaler, Merlin Ventures, Bright Pixel Capital and SV Angel. The Okta and Zscaler investments come paired with strategic partnerships. Executives from Google, Microsoft, Palo Alto Networks, Cloudflare, AWS, Check Point and Intel invested individually, as did Eran Reshef, who invented both the web application firewall and the CAPTCHA. The Israeli actor and comedian Assi Cohen and the mentalist Lior Suchard, who also advises the company, are among the private backers.

The product sits on the WAF layer, a technology invented and built in Israel close to 30 years ago to filter traffic to web applications as the internet expanded. It has changed remarkably little since. Huskeys adds an agentic AI layer on top of that infrastructure rather than replacing it, connecting and orchestrating CDNs, firewalls, cloud-native security tools, load balancers and network configurations through what the company calls a Unified Data Model, which it has patented. Huskeys has given the category a name of its own, Network Edge Security Management.

The pitch rests on a change in who is doing the browsing. Autonomous agents are becoming legitimate users of enterprise applications while attackers use the same tools to find and exploit vulnerabilities faster, and security teams have to tell one from the other without generating false positives that break the business. Huskeys cites forecasts that non-human traffic will account for 70 percent of all web traffic by 2027.

The company was founded in 2025 by Itai Gafni, the chief executive, and Roy Weisfeld, the chief technology officer, both alumni of Unit 8200, where Gafni led artificial intelligence work and Weisfeld was a security researcher on web security. Huskeys says it now analyzes more than a trillion web requests a day. Its customers include TikTok, Hugging Face, Legoland, Ro and Blackstone

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Gafni said the company left stealth five months ago intending to build a new network security category for the AI era, and that he expects most identities operating on the internet before long to be autonomous agents, which will require organizations to run infrastructure capable of identifying, securing and managing them.

Catch

Catch, a Tel Aviv startup building an AI assistant to handle executive administrative work, has come out of stealth with a $5 million seed round co-led by Entrée Capital and Pitango, with Seedcamp and Factorial Capital participating. The company employs six people.

Catch was founded by Nir Sabato, the chief executive, and Yoav Ramon, the chief technology officer. Sabato spent several years as an early-stage investor at Entrée Capital, which now co-leads the round, and before that ran strategy at Fiverr and at BLEND. Ramon has worked with machine learning systems for more than a decade.

Most of the money and attention flowing into AI agents has gone toward writing code and building software, while executives either absorb the administrative load themselves or hire someone full-time to manage a calendar, an inbox and a stream of routine tasks. Catch is aimed at that gap.

The system requires no new interface, no prompt writing and no manual workflow configuration. Once connected to a company’s systems, it builds a profile of the executive within minutes, learning who they work with and how they prefer meetings and travel arranged, then begins acting on its own through text message, email, Slack or phone. It schedules meetings, handles email and follow-ups, and looks for holes in the calendar, offering to book a room at the executive’s usual hotel once it sees a flight reservation.

Sabato said executives do not want to build agents themselves or sign off on every small step an assistant takes, and that the market has been waiting for something that does the administrative work correctly and reliably around the clock.

Ramon said the product was designed around privacy from the start. The company meets the SOC 2 standard and submits to independent outside audits. Its architecture uses what he calls splinter agents: each agent sees only the data required for one defined task, which limits exposure while keeping response times fast and costs down. Data is anonymized and used to post-train open-source models through supervised and reinforcement learning.

The service launched roughly four months ago and, according to the company, already has hundreds of paying customers, among them founders of AI companies and senior lawyers. Catch says it has scheduled more than 12,000 meetings, handled over 200,000 emails and completed more than 20,000 delegated tasks. Sabato names Howie, Superhuman and Jace as direct competitors and argues that most rival products stop at reminders and suggestions.

Medtronic

Medtronic has signed an agreement for a strategic investment of up to $80 million in Pi-Cardia, a Rehovot company that has developed a device for one of the harder complications in transcatheter aortic valve replacement. The agreement also gives Medtronic an option to acquire Pi-Cardia outright if predefined milestones are met.

If the option is exercised, the estimated upfront purchase price could reach $210 million, subject to customary adjustments, with additional earn-out payments possible afterward that could raise the total consideration considerably. Both transactions remain subject to regulatory approval and standard closing conditions.

Pi-Cardia’s ShortCut system is used in valve-in-valve TAVR, the implantation of a new valve inside a biological valve placed in an earlier procedure. In some patients, the leaflets of the existing valve can be pushed toward the openings of the coronary arteries during the procedure and block blood flow to the heart.

ShortCut splits the leaflet in a controlled way before the new valve goes in. Split, the leaflet opens to either side instead of being pressed toward the artery opening as a single piece, which helps preserve coronary access. The approach is also meant to leave the door open for future interventions if the coronary vessels need to be reached again.

Medtronic says ShortCut is the first FDA-cleared leaflet modification technology for valve-in-valve TAVR in patients at risk of coronary obstruction. In the clinical data reviewed by the FDA, the company says, leaflet splitting succeeded in every patient in the pivotal trial, with a safety profile it described as favorable. The announcement does not say how many patients that figure rests on.

Beyond the investment and the purchase option, Medtronic is expected to become the exclusive global distributor of ShortCut during 2027. It plans to use its structural heart organization to widen physician access to the device in the United States, Europe, Japan and other markets.

Erez Golan, Pi-Cardia’s chief executive, said the company’s aim has been to make leaflet modification a standard part of complex TAVR. Jorie Soskin, vice president and general manager of Medtronic’s structural heart business, said the investment reflects an effort to build a portfolio aimed at patients with complex anatomy.

Pi-Cardia is a private company developing leaflet modification technologies for structural heart disease. The deal was announced on September 1 from Medtronic’s Galway headquarters and from Rehovot.

The terms of the investment, the acquisition option and the clinical claims come from Medtronic’s announcement of the agreement.

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TODAY IN JEWISH HISTORY

Revolt in Lopatin Ghetto

On September 2, 1942, word reached the ghetto at Łachwa that the Germans had ordered farmers outside the town to dig large pits. Everyone understood what pits meant. In August the ghettos at Łuniniec and Mikaszewicze had been emptied, and the news had come back with the Jews sent out on labor details.

The ghetto had existed for five months. It was two streets and forty-five houses behind barbed wire, holding about 2,350 people, roughly one square meter each. In that space a group of thirty young people had organized themselves into cells of five under Isaac Rochczyn, who ran the local Betar branch, and had collected axes, knives and iron bars. They tried to get firearms from the partisan bands in the marshes and got almost nothing, because those bands did not much want Jews.

Dov Lopatin, a former Zionist activist who chaired the Judenrat, was summoned before the liquidation and offered a deal. The ghetto doctor, the members of the council, and thirty craftsmen of Lopatin’s own choosing would be spared. He is said to have answered that either they all live or they all die.

The argument over the hour … There was a disagreement inside the ghetto that deserves to be remembered alongside the fighting. Rochczyn wanted to breach the fence at midnight, when the darkness would give people a chance to run. Others refused, because running at midnight meant leaving behind the old and the children, who could not run at all. Lopatin asked that it wait until morning, and it waited until morning.

On September 3 the Germans arrived with Ukrainian and Belarusian police and ordered everyone into the streets for resettlement. Lopatin set fire to the Judenrat building. Other buildings went up after it, and the underground came at the Germans with axes and sticks and their hands. Rochczyn killed a German soldier with an axe and was shot as he jumped into the Smierc River.

Around 650 died in the fighting and the flames. Another 500 or so were taken to the pits and shot. Six German soldiers and eight policemen were killed, which in the arithmetic of 1942 was a great deal. The fence came down and roughly a thousand people got out.

What was left … Most of them did not last long. Some were hunted down within days, some were handed over by local farmers. About six hundred reached the Pripet marshes, and about 120 of those managed to join partisan units and fight. When the Red Army took Lakhva in July 1944, something like ninety people from the ghetto were still alive. Lopatin was not among them; he had joined a Soviet partisan unit and was killed by a landmine that February.

This was seven months before Warsaw, and it is generally counted the first ghetto uprising of the war. It has none of Warsaw’s scale and almost none of its fame, and there was no illusion in it that anyone was going to win. What Łachwa decided was narrower and harder: that the choice offered to Lopatin was not a choice, and that the hour of the breakout would be set by who could run rather than by who could survive.

This latest clash between the United States and Iran was significant, but I do not think it is likely to spiral out of control. Neither side wants a larger war at the moment. At least that is what we think.

There are those who believe that, as the economic pressure on Iran continues to take its toll, Tehran may decide to take more extreme action. It could return to a kinetic confrontation, where, for some reason, it seems to believe it has an advantage.

Iran does have one important source of leverage. It can inflict significant damage on the Arab Gulf states, which could in turn push the United States toward a settlement. Beyond that, however, I have trouble seeing what Iran expects to gain from another round of combat. But I am not a member of the Revolutionary Guard, and I certainly do not think the way its leaders do. So we can only hope that the current confrontation does not escalate further.

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There are reports today that people around Trump in the White House are urging him to calm things down and avoid a larger confrontation before the midterms. It is not clear whether Trump still thinks he can win the midterms. Let’s hope he does. Not that he necessarily wins, but that he thinks he can, and therefore has an incentive to keep things quiet, at least until then.

Putin admitted that Russia has been helping Iran develop more effective missiles. I would refer readers back to Friday’s podcast, where my guest and I discussed why Israel should change its position on Ukraine and begin actively supporting it against Russia.

I have felt from the beginning of the war that Israel should have made the moral choice and sided more clearly with Ukraine. At the time, however, there were arguments for caution. Russia’s presence in Syria had to be taken into account, as did concerns about Russian military and technological capabilities. Whatever validity those arguments once had, they carry far less weight today.

Now is the time to tell Moscow: either you end your military cooperation with Iran, or Israel will provide Ukraine with missile-defense systems. If Israel can produce enough interceptors, they could make a significant difference in the war. It is a credible threat, and one Israel should be prepared to carry out. For some reason, however, Netanyahu’s relationship with Putin may keep him from making it.

ELECTION CAMPAIGN UPDATE

On the political front, all eyes are on possible mergers ahead of next week’s deadline for submitting party lists. Most of the pressure is on the right-wing parties. Last night, Smotrich agreed to run on a joint list with Moshe Feiglin and his Zehut Party.

Feiglin is a figure on the far, far right. Early in the war, when asked about the number of civilians being killed in Gaza, he said Israel was not killing enough and should be killing more. I’ve met Feiglin, and he makes Itamar Ben-Gvir seem rational.

The agreement with Feiglin should help ensure that Smotrich crosses the electoral threshold and returns to the Knesset. The pressure is now on Ofer Winter to join forces with an existing party as well. But Winter is a harder nut to crack, and it remains unclear whether he can be persuaded to make a deal.

Lastly, Erdan and Edelstein also remain on the sidelines, with no indication yet that the pair will join another list/ has found another political home.

GERMANY INVENTED THE BALLISTIC MISSILE; NOW ITS BUYING ONE FROM ISRAEL

Sometime late Tuesday night, in the waters between Ireland and Iceland, a German frigate launched an Israeli ballistic missile. Two German frigates had been sent to the area for the test. Air and maritime traffic had been warned away forty-five days earlier, which is how these things stay secret without actually being secret

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The missile was the LORA, built by Israel Aerospace Industries. Vice Admiral Jan Christian Kaack, commander of the German Navy, said afterward that the test had made naval history and involved a range beyond anything the German Navy had previously operated. Berlin will now move ahead with procurement, although neither the number of missiles nor the number of launchers has been disclosed.

Those waters are not an accident of geography. That stretch of the North Atlantic is the approach to the GIUK gap, the chokepoint NATO spent forty years wiring with hydrophones and patrolling with Orions to catch Soviet submarines coming south. For most of the Cold War the German contribution to that theater was anti-submarine work in shallow northern seas. Now a German warship has launched a ballistic missile there.

Germany owns no ballistic missiles at all. Its long-range strike capability consists of roughly 600 Taurus cruise missiles built by MBDA, launched from a combat aircraft, with an official range above 500 kilometers. Cruise missiles fly low and slow and can be shot down by an alert air defense; ballistic missiles arrive on a high arc at speeds that make interception a different problem entirely.

LORA is a short-range ballistic missile, quoted by IAI at 400 kilometers with accuracy inside ten meters, and by the German defense ministry at up to 500. It ships inside a launch container, which is the whole point. You do not need a purpose-built missile ship; you need deck space and a container, which is how IAI first demonstrated the thing from a vessel back in 2017.

The timing was not subtle. The launch came hours after Berlin publicly blamed Russia for last month’s attempted drone attack on Leipzig/Halle airport. Germany is also pursuing American Tomahawks and participating in European long-range programs, and it has now added a fourth path that can be bought off the shelf and installed on hulls it already owns.

The Peenemünde line … Boaz Levy, IAI’s chairman, could not resist and should not have. He noted that the achievement took place in Germany, the country where the ballistic missile was invented.

Levy is right, and the specific history is stranger than the remark. In 1944 the Peenemünde team worked on a scheme to fire V-2s at sea, towing sealed launch containers behind U-boats across the Atlantic toward New York, with three containers reportedly close to finished when the war ended. It never happened. Eighty-two years later, a ballistic missile went up off a German deck in the North Atlantic, and the container came from Israel.

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Levy connected the test to the Arrow 3 batteries already on German soil, the export deal that Calcalist puts at around $6.5 billion across two agreements. IAI, run by Guy Bar Lev with Levy as chairman, also signed an air-defense package with Greece two days ago worth roughly €3 billion, built with Rafael around David’s Sling, Spyder, Barak MX and Elta radars.

Israeli defense exports have spent the past three years running against a steady current of European political hostility, embargo motions and canceled ceremonies. The current has not reversed. What has happened is that the fear of Russia has become larger than the discomfort of the source, and ministries are now buying what works and absorbing the domestic argument afterward.

1994 From Between Hope and Fear

HEALTH & SCIENCE NEWS

Beyond the Gluten-Free Diet: Teva’s Celiac Experiment

Teva reported this morning that its experimental antibody prevented gluten from damaging the intestines of adults with celiac disease. The stock rose about 2.5 percent in Tel Aviv. Beneath the headline is a small, precisely designed experiment worth understanding on its own terms.

The molecule is TEV-’408, a human monoclonal antibody Teva discovered in-house, aimed at interleukin-15. IL-15 is a signaling protein that sits upstream of the immune reaction, and in celiac disease it drives the intraepithelial lymphocytes that chew up the intestinal lining after gluten arrives. The drug does not touch gluten itself. It blocks the alarm the body raises in response.

Fifty people and a controlled provocation … The Phase 2a trial enrolled 50 adults with celiac who were already on a gluten-free diet and had minimal symptoms. They received a single subcutaneous injection of either the antibody or placebo. Then, for the final six weeks of an eight-week period, they ate a measured daily dose of gluten on purpose.

This is what a gluten challenge study is: you give people the poison you have spent years teaching them to avoid, and you find out whether the drug holds. At week eight, everyone gets an endoscopy.

The primary endpoint was the villous height to crypt depth ratio. The villi are the finger-like projections that absorb nutrients; the crypts are the pits at their base. In active celiac disease the villi flatten and the crypts deepen, and the ratio falls. Teva says the treated group’s ratio held up against placebo with statistical significance and a difference large enough to matter clinically. The antibody was well tolerated, with no safety signals so far.

The argument about the dose … The interesting exchange came on the analyst call. Competing programs have challenged patients with six to eight grams of gluten a day; Teva used less. Analysts wanted to know whether that made the result easier to achieve.

Teva’s answer was that a tolerable dose keeps patients in the study, and a trial nobody finishes proves nothing. That is a defensible position for a Phase 2a. It is also a debt that comes due, and the company said as much: to bring the FDA data strong enough

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I hope you’ll consider ordering a copy. And if you were among those who received an advance copy, I would be especially grateful if you would take a moment to leave a review on Amazon.

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IRAN

The United States carried out multiple strikes against Iranian targets near the Strait of Hormuz tonight. Iran retaliated with strikes against American bases in Jordan, despite President Trump’s warning that it should not respond. Washington then warned Tehran against any further retaliation.

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ISRAEL KEEPS UP PRESSURE ON HAMAS IN GAZA

A Hamas official responsible for internal security was captured in Gaza today and brought to Israel for interrogation. According to reports, Israel used one of the anti-Hamas militias operating in Gaza to carry out the raid, although other reports claim that Israeli special forces were directly involved.

The operation apparently ran into trouble, forcing the Israeli Air Force to intervene and provide support. The extraction was ultimately successful and the Hamas official is now presumably sitting in a Shin Bet interrogation room.

Separately, Israel eliminated another high-ranking Hamas operative in Khan Younis today. Exactly how high-ranking, I do not know.

What we are seeing, however, is a clear pattern. Israel is systematically going after anyone believed to have been involved in October 7, including those on its periphery. The United States, for the most part, appears willing to look the other way. As long as Hamas refuses to disarm, Washington seems prepared to allow Israel to continue.

Will this succeed in undermining Hamas’s control of Gaza? Not without an alternative to take its place. And that still seems a long way off.

A DESALINATION CRISIS ISRAEL WASN’T READY FOR

The situation at Israel’s desalination plants remains problematic. Four of the five affected plants are still out of operation. The cause does seem to be some form of biological contamination in the sea. Apparently, a microorganism small enough to pass through the first stage of filtration is being caught at the second, where it rapidly clogs the filters and effectively shuts down the entire plant.

The source has not yet been identified. Currents along much of Israel’s Mediterranean coast generally run from south to north, which points attention toward either Egypt or Gaza. However, Gaza would seem the more obvious possibility. The more likely one is pollution from Gaza. Since the war began, much of Gaza’s sewage and other waste has gone untreated, creating an environmental problem that Israel has largely ignored.

Whether we like it or not, the people of Gaza are our neighbors, and what happens there inevitably affects us. By failing to address the problem of untreated sewage and waste, for which Israel may also bear responsibilities under international law, we may now have helped create a problem for ourselves.

Unfortunately, Israel did not build a large enough water reserve to cope with a disruption like this, and some farmers are already being affected by the shortage. Most agricultural water used in the Negev is recycled wastewater rather than fresh water. Some crops and areas, however, still depend on fresh water, and at the moment they are not getting enough of it.

Once again, the source of the contamination has not been established. And, in keeping with the pattern of the current government, there has been virtually no official communication about what is happening. No one has even asked the public to cut back on water use. After all, it’s an election year.

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SARA NETANYAHU AND THE OCTOBER 7 CONSPIRACY

A political storm erupted last night after Sara Netanyahu was interviewed on Israel’s Channel 14. During the interview, she implied that Yair Golan must have known about the October 7 attack in advance. Otherwise, she asked, how could he have put on his uniform and headed south to rescue people near Gaza before her husband even knew what was happening?

Of course it isn’t true. There is one rather large problem with that suggestion: the timeline. Even by the most conservative account, Benjamin Netanyahu was informed of the attack at around 6:20 a.m. that morning. Golan did not reach the Gaza area until around 10:00 a.m.

But the implication was unmistakable: Golan must somehow have been connected to Hamas or involved in a conspiracy surrounding the attack. Sara Netanyahu appears to have embraced, and helped promote, the conspiracy theory known as begida mibifnim, “treason from within.” According to that false, far-fetched theory, Israelis inside the country collaborated with Hamas or otherwise helped facilitate the October 7 attack.

This claim of treason is part of a broader, baseless conspiracy theory that people in Netanyahu’s political orbit began spreading within days of October 7. And it has been remarkably successful. Opinion polls have found that as many as 40% of Israelis believe there must have been some form of treason from within. For them, nothing else can explain how the catastrophe of October 7 was allowed to happen. There is no credible evidence to support the theory. But politically, it serves Netanyahu’s interests very well.

Netanyahu, meanwhile, gave an interview in which he was asked what would have happened had he been informed in time. He claimed that, had he known, the entire army would have been there in the Gaza envelope and the invasion would have been stopped.

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I am not even going to try to count the lies within that statement. But it fits neatly into the broader Likud narrative: Netanyahu was not responsible because Netanyahu did not know. The army kept information from him. In fact, he explicitly said in the interview that information had been withheld from him.

Taken together, the Likud’s message is clear. October 7 was not a failure for which Netanyahu bears responsibility. It was the result of others keeping him in the dark, perhaps even as part of a conspiracy against him. As I said before, the disturbing part is how many Israelis have come to believe some version of this fabricated story.

ECONOMY

The Bank of Israel cut its benchmark rate by a quarter point on Tuesday to 3.25%, its lowest level since November 2022. It was the third consecutive cut and the fourth this year, after reductions in January, May, and July. The last time the bank moved three meetings in a row was at the end of 2008, in the depths of the financial crisis, when it cut rates five times running. Roughly half of analysts had expected the move, so the decision surprised no one, but it tells you that the bank no longer fears an inflation breakout.

The numbers give Amir Yaron room. Annual inflation is running at 1.5%, while expectations for the coming year sit at 1.4%. Domestic growth, stripped of production abroad that flows mainly through Nvidia, limped along at about 1% in the first half of 2026 compared with the second half of 2025. What still worries the bank is the war: public spending keeps climbing, while the number of men pulled out of the labor force for reserve duty keeps the supply side tight. Both could reignite inflation, which is why some economists expected the bank to wait until October.

ISRAELTECH INTERVIEW

As part of our continuing partnership with IsraelTech, we’re pleased to share this week’s in-depth interview: “He Wrote the First Check in Cursor, featuring, Michael Fertik of Verdict Capital. Most venture investors wait for traction. Michael Fertik invests before the company is incorporated, before there is a product, and sometimes before the category has a name.

Michael, Managing Director and Founder of Verdict Capital, joins Yoel Israel to explain what “first check” means in practice and why he believes the earliest investor can have a distinct advantage. He shares the story of backing Anysphere before its merger with Cursor, how he evaluates founders with almost no conventional signal, and why most venture firms are reluctant to invest that early.

The conversation also turns to Israel. Michael discusses the risks of using Israeli pilot customers as proof of demand, why he encourages Israeli founders to think about their US company structure from day one, and what he has learned from building his first team in Israel through Model Code AI.

They also discuss legacy code, AI’s effect on work, purpose, capitalism, the cultural changes taking place in America, and why Michael remains bullish on Israeli founders during wartime.

You can watch the entire video here, or check out an excerpt below.

BUSINESS

Elbit Systems

Elbit Systems Ltd. announced today that it has signed contracts with an international customer, in an aggregate value of approximately $270 million, in the field of advanced ISR & Targeting payloads, to be performed over a period of up to six years.

Under the contracts, Elbit Systems will supply systems from its SPECTRO™ family of multi-spectral electro-optic Intelligence, Surveillance, Target Acquisition and Reconnaissance (“ISTAR”) solutions. The SPECTRO systems integrate Mid-Wave Infrared (MWIR), Visible and Short-Wave Infrared (SWIR) high-definition imaging channels, advanced laser designation capabilities and AI-based analytics technologies, enabling advanced target identification, tracking and long-range intelligence gathering capabilities for airborne, naval and ground applications, while maintaining a compact configuration operable day and night and in adverse weather conditions.

In addition, Elbit Systems will supply AMPS™ NG systems from the SPECTRO family for airborne Intelligence, Surveillance and Reconnaissance (“ISR”) and Targeting missions featuring advanced imaging channels. The AMPS NG systems provide extremely long-range target acquisition, surveillance and geo-location capabilities through the integration of MWIR, Visible and SWIR sensors, together with advanced image processing and highly accurate geo-pointing technologies, supporting strategic ISR and Targeting missions in complex operational environments.

HiBob

HiBob raised $166 million today in a round led by Salesforce, the largest in the company’s history. The valuation came in at about $3.5 billion, up from $2.7 billion three years ago. Total funding since founding now runs past $700 million.

The Tel Aviv company builds Bob, a workforce management platform. It has 5,500 customers across 170 countries and competes with Workday. That is worth pausing on: an Israeli HR platform going directly up against one of the largest enterprise software companies in the world.

The previous round closed in September 2023, when HiBob raised $150 million in a round led by Farallon Capital, the fund’s first investment in an Israeli company, alongside Alpha Wave Global. The investor list behind HiBob reads like a roll call of the industry: General Atlantic, Bessemer, Battery, Eight Roads, Index, Norwest, Entrée Capital, Vintage, and Arbor.

CEO Ronni Zehavi told Bloomberg that the money will go toward the HR platform itself, acquisitions, and geographic expansion. His explanation of why Salesforce wrote the check is the part that interests me: SaaS is not dead, he said. It is reinventing itself because of AI.

Does he see a company vibe-coding an HCM system that could replace his? Absolutely not. HCM is highly complex, and the data involved is extremely sensitive.

That argument runs against a common prediction. The expectation has been that cloud software companies lose their importance as AI matures. The counter-case, which this round represents, is that companies holding reliable data, a deep understanding of organizational structure, and embedded permissions and workflows are positioned to expand what they sell rather than be displaced.

Zehavi met Salesforce properly at last year’s Dreamforce conference in San Francisco, and got to know the company through Bob’s integration with Slack. They share the same vision, he said: people and agents, digital workers, operating side by side.

No IPO before 2027. Zehavi says the company will not look at a public offering until it has completed its AI integration, and is keeping the options open after that.

What strikes me about this round is the bet it represents. Much of the conversation about AI and software assumes that applications will eventually be swallowed by the models. Zehavi is betting on the opposite: that the real value lies in knowing who works where, who reports to whom, and who is permitted to see what. Without that context, he argues, an AI model cannot do the job. Whether he is right will show up in HiBob’s revenue long before it appears in an IPO filing.

DataAgent: Fix it first, ask why later

DataAgent came out of stealth today with $10 million in pre-seed funding, led by MizMaa Ventures and Alicorn Venture Partners. The Tel Aviv company builds AI agents that live inside a customer’s own cloud infrastructure and repair failures without waiting for a human.

The founders have done this before. CEO Ishay Yaari and CTO Nati Shalom worked together at Cloudify, the cloud orchestration company Dell acquired in 2023. The company has 15 employees and is hiring go-to-market staff in the United States and Israel.

The pitch is a reversal of how software failures are normally handled. In the standard model, a system detects a problem, ships telemetry to an outside observability vendor, and eventually alerts an engineer, who then investigates and decides what to do. DataAgent wants to restore the service first and figure out the cause afterward.

Its platform reads the live state of a system, including its topology and configuration, identifies what caused an incident, and applies a verified fix. Once the service is back up, the deeper root-cause analysis can happen offline. The goal is to reduce mean time to resolution by fixing the immediate problem without waiting for a complete diagnosis.

There is a cost argument underneath the technical one. Modern observability systems generate staggering volumes of logs and metrics, and shipping all of it to an external vendor for analysis gets expensive as systems grow. Because DataAgent’s agents run inside the customer’s environment, the telemetry stays where it already is.

Air

An AI agent inside a large company was given a simple assignment: buy plane tickets. It kept getting defrauded. It went to the sites with the cheapest fares, which were also the sites least likely to be real, and it had no instinct for the difference. A chief information security officer told that story to Yair Saban, and Saban has been repeating it since.

Saban is the chief executive of AIR, which came out of stealth on Tuesday with $50 million in the bank. The money arrived in two rounds that closed within weeks of each other, $10 million led by Sequoia and then $40 million led by Greenoaks. Saban founded the company with Niv Hoffman, his friend from Unit 8200, where both worked on offensive operations. Saban left the army last summer after about eleven years; Hoffman left at the end of 2025 after roughly a decade and serves as chief technology officer.

The cap table reads like a list of people who have already been through this cycle once. Swish Ventures, Omri Casspi’s fund, is in. So is Netz Capital, along with Yinon Costica of Wiz, Ofir Erlich of Eon, Anne Neuberger, and, improbably, the singer Omer Adam.

The product is a firewall for agents, and the metaphor is doing real work. An agent is only as safe as the things bolted onto it: the skills and plugins an employee downloads, the websites the agent visits on its own, and the corporate data it can reach once it is inside. AIR sits between the agent and all three, screening skills before they load and refusing connections it does not trust. It also runs a catalog of add-ons that have been checked.

The company’s own research is the argument for why anyone would buy this. AIR says it found more than 17,800 public AI add-ons tied to untrusted outside sources, accounting for some 6.7 million installations. Some of them impersonated products from Anthropic and OpenAI, which is a fast way past a security review and into arbitrary code execution.

The field is already crowded with Israeli companies. Onyx, Zenity and Noma have each raised well over $100 million, and older firms like Wiz and Cyera have moved into the same territory. Saban’s pitch is that coming last is the advantage. Some of the AI security companies, he says, were founded before Claude Code existed and before downloading a skill file was a security risk at all.

He puts the combined annual revenue of every AI security startup at roughly $50 million today and expects a billion by the end of 2027. Executives at large multinationals are frightened of what their own AI deployments can do and are actively evaluating products. No one has won the category yet, which is the part that matters to him.

Today the market wants skill filtering. Saban thinks that by 2027 it will want website filtering, because soon most of the traffic on the internet will be agents browsing on someone’s behalf, and attackers understand that better than defenders do.

AIR has about forty employees. Scan their LinkedIn profiles and a pattern emerges: many are recent 8200 discharges, several of whom went from the induction base to the company’s offices without much of a pause in between. Saban is unapologetic about it. He says AIR has the best people in the market, that they hired friends they knew to be good, and that no one has been talked out of uniform to join.

The claim is easy to make and hard to check, and it is also the entire bet. In a category with no leader and a two-year window before the money decides who won, the only durable asset is the speed at which forty people can ship.

Saban’s comments and the account of the company’s founding come from Ofir Dor’s report in TheMarker. Funding details, the roster of angel investors and AIR’s research on public add-ons come from the company’s announcement and from TechCrunch’s coverage of it.

There is something worth sitting with in the flight-ticket story. For thirty years, security meant drawing a line around the network and deciding what crossed it. The line has moved inside the machine now, and what has to be defended is the judgment of a system that cannot tell a bargain from a trap.

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TODAY IN JEWISH HISTORY

The Khartoum Resolution

On September 1, 1967, less than three months after Israel’s victory in the Six-Day War, the leaders of eight Arab countries concluded a summit meeting in Khartoum, Sudan, and adopted what became known as “The Khartoum Resolution”. The Arab states were attempting to formulate a common policy following the devastating defeat of Egypt, Jordan and Syria and Israel’s capture of the Sinai Peninsula, Gaza Strip, West Bank, East Jerusalem and Golan Heights.

The resolution became famous for what were soon called the “Three Noes”: “no peace with Israel, no recognition of Israel, no negotiations with it.” At the same time, the Arab governments agreed to pursue diplomatic efforts aimed at securing Israeli withdrawal from the territories captured in June and reaffirmed Palestinian claims. The summit also sought to repair divisions within the Arab world and provide financial assistance to Egypt and Jordan, whose economies had suffered as a result of the war.

In Israel, the Three Noes were widely interpreted as evidence that the Arab states remained unwilling to accept Israel’s existence or negotiate a settlement. They also reinforced Israeli skepticism about exchanging the newly captured territories for peace. American diplomatic records similarly described Khartoum as establishing the parameters of the Arab negotiating position after the war.

Yet the resolution was somewhat more complicated than its famous slogan suggests. Arab leaders continued pursuing diplomacy through the United Nations, and Jordanian officials later told American diplomats that the Three Noes were partly a concession to Arab public opinion that allowed Arab governments subsequently to accept UN Security Council Resolution 242.

The Khartoum position would not prove permanent. Egypt gradually moved away from it following the 1973 Yom Kippur War. A decade after Khartoum, Egyptian President Anwar Sadat traveled to Jerusalem and addressed the Knesset; in 1979, Egypt became the first Arab country to sign a peace treaty with Israel. The progression from the Three Noes of 1967 to Egyptian-Israeli peace twelve years later became one of the most dramatic diplomatic transformations in the history of the Arab-Israeli conflict.

He traces the path that led here: an Apple developer in the early Mac days, CD-ROMs on American history, a website launched before the 1996 election, an email list of a few hundred readers that eventually scooped CNN on the Syrian reactor. Then the move back to Israel in 2011, the Newsweek partnership that began during the 2014 Gaza war, ten years of the column, and the Substack that grew from weekly to daily on October 7th.

He explains why the book starts where it does, why he chose straight chronology over a thematic structure, and what that choice cost him. He is candid about the parts he isn’t sure he got right — the rift with the ultra-Orthodox, the religious Zionist project since Gush Katif, the Supreme Court and the accusations the right keeps making about it.

And he lays out what he took away from writing it: that extremists on both sides wrote the story of these decades. Hamas working from the beginning to kill the peace process, and a Jewish extremist who murdered a prime minister — an assassination Marc calls one of the most successful in world history, because it changed the direction of a country.

The hope in the title has shifted meaning over 33 years. It began as the hope for peace. It has become the hope that technology will save us. The fear was there the whole time.

Between Hope & Fear

The possibility of renewed fighting with Iran is back in the news today. Last night, the United States attacked an Iranian missile site that was reportedly preparing to launch mines into the Straits of Hormuz.

Iran responded by firing eight missiles at American bases in Jordan, all of which were intercepted, as well as a number of drones at U.S. bases in the UAE. President Trump today promised a strong response to the Iranian counter-assault.

Why was Iran laying mines in the first place? Because it had grown frustrated with the apparent success of the United States in reopening the Strait of Hormuz to significant shipping. The current estimate is that oil is once again flowing through the Strait at roughly 50% of its prewar volume. Another 25% of the prewar volume is now being moved through pipelines, meaning that roughly 75% of the oil that previously passed through the Strait is once again reaching the world market.

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That still leaves a shortfall, but increased production from the United States and Venezuela appears to be more than enough to offset the gap. That helps explain why oil prices have remained elevated but manageable.

From the Israeli perspective, something that has received far less attention in the American media, the U.S. economic squeeze seems to be working. Conditions inside Iran continue to deteriorate, and even members of the Iranian government are now acknowledging that the economy is in a precarious state. The key is to keep up the pressure.

Iran would prefer a return to a kinetic confrontation. That would give it a pretext to attack the Gulf states, which would then have every incentive to pressure the United States to reach a settlement. As long as the confrontation remains primarily economic, Iran appears to be losing.

Does the United States have the patience to keep this up for an extended period? Does Trump? I don’t know. And what happens if the Democrats gain control of Congress? I don’t know that either.

For the moment, however, if the United States can hold firm and maintain the pressure, Iran may eventually return to the negotiating table prepared to make meaningful concessions. The Iranian alternative is to hang tough and risk the survival of the regime by allowing the country’s economic situation to deteriorate to the point where it begins to completely come apart.

CAUGHT ON CAMERA, STILL NO ARRESTS

Another day has passed, and none of those who attacked the Palestinians or the American television crew in the West Bank on Saturday have been arrested. I don’t expect that to change, but who knows.

WHAT HAS HAPPENED TO RELIGIOUS ZIONISM?

A few days ago, sixteen soldiers from the Givati Brigade, all students at a hesder yeshiva, refused to board an armored vehicle for a combat mission in Gaza. The reason? The medic assigned to accompany them was a woman. Yesterday, nearly all of the soldiers were sentenced to between five and twelve days in military jail, with the twelve-day sentences going to those who organized the refusal.

Finance Minister and Deputy Defense Minister Bezalel Smotrich came to the soldiers’ defense today, saying that he stood behind them for their willingness to remain true to their principles.

A troubling shift has taken place in the Religious Zionist world. The Religious Zionist world I knew growing up has changed profoundly. When I was young, boys and girls, young men and women, danced together. Israeli dancing, certainly, but not only that. Over the years, however, significant parts of the Religious Zionist community have become increasingly stringent, extreme particularly when it comes to relations between men and women. What was once considered perfectly normal has gradually become unacceptable.

That growing separation between men and women has now reached the point where the mere presence of a woman in a transport vehicle, not in sleeping quarters or some other intimate setting, but simply in a vehicle carrying them into Gaza, was enough for them to defy a combat order. And the woman in question was their medic.

Today’s Radio Show

ISRAEL AND GREECE DEEPEN THEIR STRATEGIC ALLIANCE

Israel and Greece officially announced a defense deal today that had been rumored for some time. Under the agreement, Israel will help build Achilles’ Shield, a multi-layered air-defense system designed to protect Greece against a wide range of aerial threats.

The deal is valued at $3.5 billion and will include David’s Sling and Rafael’s SPYDER system, as well as the Barak system manufactured by Israel Aerospace Industries. For now, it does not include the Arrow system. It will mark the first time Israel has supplied another country with a complete, integrated air-defense system.

Israel and Greece have steadily deepened their defense cooperation in recent years. Israel trains Greek pilots, while Israeli technology helps monitor the skies over Greece and the surrounding seas. The two countries hold joint military exercises several times a year, and last year Greece purchased Elbit Systems’ PULS rocket artillery system for $739 million.

It is impossible to ignore the geopolitical implications. Greece and Turkey have a long history of rivalry and periodic confrontation, despite both being members of NATO. At the same time, relations between Israel and Turkey have deteriorated sharply, with increasingly hostile rhetoric coming from Ankara. Against that background, the growing strategic relationship between Israel and Greece is hardly surprising.

AUGUST RAIN AND TROUBLED WATERS

It rained in Tel Aviv this morning. That would hardly be news, except that today is August 31, and this was reportedly the heaviest August rainfall here in fifty years.

There was another unusual consequence of the storm. All of Israel’s desalination plants south of Hadera were shut down today, apparently because of extreme turbulence in the sea. That explanation strikes me as a little strange. After all, we have had plenty of much stronger storms in the middle of winter without anything similar happening

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The Water Authority was quick to insist that the shutdown was not caused by a cyberattack, but by the unusual sea conditions. Perhaps so. Let’s hope they are telling the truth.

SEGALOVITZ JOINS RA’AM AND BREAKS NEW POLITICAL GROUND

Knesset Member Yoav Segalovitz, formerly of Yesh Atid, will officially join Ra’am tonight as the party’s number two. In the previous government Segalovitz was responsible for the program to combat crime in Arab-Israeli communities, which produced significant results. A former deputy commissioner of the Israel Police, Segalovitz is widely respected for his work in law enforcement.

This will mark the first time a Jewish Zionist politician has joined an Arab party, and it will be fascinating to see what effect his candidacy has on the election. The expectation is that Ra’am will attract more Arab votes than it has in the past. Crime remains one of the most pressing concerns in Arab-Israeli communities, and many voters are looking for someone who can produce results. Segalovitz has already shown that he can.

There is little doubt that Netanyahu will use Segalovitz’s move during the campaign, arguing that Eisenkot is trying to legitimize Ra’am and pave the way for its inclusion in a future government. The irony is that, whatever the intention, Segalovitz’s presence does make that easier. If Ra’am were needed to form a future coalition, Segalovitz himself could vote for the government, meaning that every vote formally establishing it could still come from a Zionist member of the Knesset.

More broadly, the move could help open the door to greater political cooperation between Jewish and Arab Israelis. In that sense, it is a potentially significant development.

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SCIENCE NEWS

A detector built to find nothing found the Sun

Tens of billions of neutrinos from the Sun pass through every square centimeter of your body every second, and almost none of them touch anything. That indifference is what makes them so hard to catch. It has also made them one of the enduring problems of experimental particle physics.

The XENON Collaboration announced this week, at a seminar at Italy’s Gran Sasso National Laboratory, that it has observed low-energy solar neutrinos scattering off electrons in its XENONnT detector. The threshold reached was about 17 keV — the lowest neutrino energy ever directly observed. The signal comes mostly from pp neutrinos, produced in the proton-proton fusion that powers the Sun and accounts for nearly all of its neutrino output.

The Israeli piece of this is the group of Prof. Ranny Budnik of the Weizmann

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Between Hope & Fear

THE VIOLENCE IS FILMED, WHERE ARE THE ARRESTS?

Over Shabbat, extremist settlers once again descended on the Palestinian village of Kusra. They also attacked an NBC News crew, wounding four members of the team, as well as a Palestinian woman they had come to interview. The woman, who was seriously wounded, had planned to tell them how settlers had forced her from her home.

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The attacks have continued to receive widespread international coverage, and they have also received significant attention in the Israeli press. Prime Minister Netanyahu was finally forced to condemn the violence, while insisting that only a small group of extremists is responsible. Estimates suggest, however, that the hard core involved numbers at least 500 people, and possibly more.

What has drawn particular attention in the Israeli press today is that, despite many of the attackers showing their faces and being extensively filmed, no one had been arrested twenty-four hours later. It is a pattern that has repeated itself time and again. According to figures I have seen, only about 2% of cases involving Jewish Israelis who attack Palestinians in the West Bank ultimately result in a conviction. Most cases are never seriously investigated, and even when they are, charges are rarely brought.

For the moment, let’s leave aside the immorality of what these people are doing to Palestinians, although it is difficult to do so. The damage they are doing to Israel’s already tarnished international reputation is significant.

As one West Bank resident said today, if Israel is ever forced out of the West Bank, it will be because of actions like these and the images of them being shown around the world. They certainly will not help Israel make the case against sanctions on products from West Bank settlements.

ANOTHER SHABBAT, ANOTHER BATTLE OVER PUBLIC SPACE

Over Shabbat, there were a number of clashes between the ultra-Orthodox and everybody else. On Thursday night, there was another riot over construction of the light rail along Bar-Ilan Street in Jerusalem. It has never been entirely clear to me why they object so strongly to a light rail line running through the neighborhood, particularly since it will not operate on Shabbat. Among the arguments raised is that women who are not dressed according to ultra-Orthodox standards might ride it, along with several equally unconvincing objections. Of course, those same people already ride buses through the neighborhood where there is no light rail.

The ultra-Orthodox also blocked the entrance to Jerusalem toward the end of Shabbat, trying to stop buses that might have begun their journeys before Shabbat was actually ended. It has long been common for buses traveling from distant parts of the country to begin their routes shortly before the end of Shabbat so that they can reach Jerusalem afterward.

In Bnei Brak, meanwhile, the municipality itself blocked the main road leading into a new neighborhood before Shabbat. The neighborhood has both Orthodox and secular residents, and it is not entirely clear why the city decided to close the road.

Finally, ultra-Orthodox men blocked a road in the West Bank to protest the arrest of a draft dodger. Except he had not been arrested for evading the draft. He was arrested, I believe, for stealing a car. He also happened to be a draft dodger, which was apparently enough to bring demonstrators into the streets on his behalf.

ELECTION CAMPAIGN UPDATE

There are just nine days until the party lists must be finalized and submitted, and the pressure is mounting on parties polling below the electoral threshold or hovering dangerously close to it to merge. The problem is particularly acute on the right, where several parties are competing for the same pool of voters. With Ofer Winter’s entry into the race, there is growing concern that Smotrich’s party could fall below the threshold, along with several smaller parties. Whether the necessary mergers can actually be worked out in the next nine days is far from clear.

There is also talk of Benny Gantz merging with Gilad Erdan’s new party. That combination strikes me as particularly strange. Erdan has positioned himself quite firmly on the right, while Gantz insists he is not and continues to pursue that mythical all-encompassing coalition. I still have a hard time imagining Netanyahu abandoning his long-standing alliance with the ultra-Orthodox parties, even though they are now threatening to abandon him. So who knows.

I was listening to veteran, award-wining journalist, Raviv Druker on Nadav Perry’s podcast. In my opinion, Raviv is one of the best political correspondents in Israel. He has been doing this for roughly twenty years and has broken a remarkable number of major stories, including important revelations surrounding the investigations of Netanyahu that ultimately led to the criminal cases against him, as well as the submarine affair.

In the past, Raviv said, he always looked forward to elections. Political correspondents matter most during a campaign, and this was their moment. This time is different. He wishes he could simply go to sleep and wake up when it is all over. He does not expect Netanyahu to win, but he is deeply worried about what would happen if he somehow does.

On a more personal level, Raviv shared that if Netanyahu does win, he is not sure he would want his two sons to remain in Israel after completing their army service. One is serving now, and the other is about to enlist. Then again, he added, he and his wife would kill them if they moved too far away.

That contradiction captures something a great many Israelis are feeling right now. We remain optimistic about the future, but deeply worried about where it may lead.

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TRANSPORTATION NEWS

A few hours before Ben Gurion Airport collapsed into chaos on Thursday, August 20, an email arrived in the inbox of Israir CEO Uri Sirkis. It was the final approval from the U.S. Federal Aviation Administration, clearing the airline to begin commercial service between Israel and the United States. Months of pilot recruitment, cabin crew hiring, safety certification, and the purchase of two wide-body Airbus A330-200s for $85 million had all come down to that message.

The aircraft themselves have a history. Both flew for US Airways starting in 2010 and passed to American Airlines in the 2015 merger. Israir has scheduled its first Tel Aviv–JFK departure for October 19, and Sirkis says the company has secured takeoff and landing slots at both congested Ben Gurion Airport and Kennedy. A new maintenance hangar for wide-body aircraft is also going up in Larnaca.

Israir will be joining a route that is suddenly crowded. Delta resumes daily service to JFK on September 6, and United returns to Newark with two daily flights on September 8. American Airlines has pushed its return back to spring 2027, and Air Canada will not return before then either. Even so, five carriers will be flying between Israel and North America by late October.

What that ends is one of the stranger economic artifacts of the war. El Al accounted for 92.3% of transatlantic traffic out of Ben Gurion in the second quarter of this year, according to its own financial report. In the same quarter of 2025, the figure was 75.7%. In the second quarter of 2023, before any of this, it was 35.3%. A war that emptied the skies handed one company a monopoly it never had to win.

The obvious question is whether all this competition will finally bring fares down. It is an enormously important route. The United States is the second most popular direct destination from Ben Gurion after Greece, with more than 1.6 million passengers traveling in each direction in 2025. The traffic comes from everywhere: Israeli tourists, evangelical pilgrims, families divided between the two countries, large ultra-Orthodox families, and a steady stream of tech and business travelers. And travel has only become easier since most Israelis stopped needing a visa to enter the United States.

Aviation sources are hedging. Some expect fares to begin falling modestly after November; others say the real change will not come until 2027, and even then it may not be dramatic. Gil Han, CEO of the tourism company Eshet Tours, points to a calendar that will sound familiar to Israelis: prices should begin to fall in November, once the elections are over and the summer and holiday travel peaks have passed. A source at Ben Gurion put it more bluntly. There is room on the route for everyone, even ten carriers. Perhaps then fares might actually come down.

I have my doubts that the added competition will make a dramatic difference. Competing with El Al is much harder today than it was before the war. For one thing, many Israelis now prefer El Al because it kept flying when other airlines stopped. Israelis, myself included, have learned that if you have an El Al ticket, you can be reasonably confident that you will get home. That kind of loyalty is difficult for a competitor to overcome.

El Al also has the advantage of a relatively new fleet, while the aircraft Israir has purchased are considerably older. More competition is certainly good, and I hope it brings El Al’s fares down. I suspect it will, but probably not by very much.

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DEFENSE BUSINESS NEWS

Finland has been among the sharper European critics of the Gaza war. Finland has also, it emerges, quietly extended its defense cooperation with Israel through 2034. The Finnish public broadcaster Yle reported the memorandum this weekend, and the Defense Ministry had made no public announcement of it.

The agreement itself is not new. The original framework dates to 2013 and had since been renewed in five-year increments. What was different in early 2024, several months into the war, was that Finland itself proposed the renewal and sought to double its duration from five years to ten. According to Yle, the 2024 extension, unlike the previous renewal in 2019, was never referred to the Finnish Foreign Ministry for review.

The memorandum covers joint research, development, and procurement of defense equipment and establishes a coordination group that meets at least once a year. Israeli officials say there are currently some 23 defense projects involving the Finnish military and Israeli defense companies.

By far the largest is David’s Sling. Finland agreed to purchase the system in November 2023 for approximately €317 million, becoming its first foreign customer. The deal was approved under the government of Sanna Marin, and the system is expected to enter service next year. Developed by Rafael and Raytheon under the Israeli and American missile defense agencies, David’s Sling is designed to fill the gap between Iron Dome’s short-range defenses and the long-range Arrow systems. Its two-stage interceptor destroys incoming threats through direct impact and is guided by both radar and an electro-optical sensor.

There is also Trophy, Rafael’s lighter active protection system (APS) for armored vehicles. The Finnish manufacturer Patria is integrating Rafael’s active protection system onto its AMV XP 8x8 vehicles. The Trophy system has been operational since 2010, was purchased for U.S. armored forces in 2018, and was selected for Germany’s Leopard tanks and Britain’s Challenger tanks in 2021. It is now fitted to 16 different platforms worldwide.

But nothing has tested Trophy on the scale of the current war. Hundreds of systems have been deployed in combat against what defense specialists describe as an unprecedented concentration of anti-tank missile threats.

The Finnish disclosure landed badly in Helsinki. Green League chair Sofia Virta called the government’s Israel policy a “historic shame.” While the opposition was demanding greater pressure on Israel, she said, the government was instead deepening its cooperation. The Left Alliance is submitting a parliamentary question seeking to determine who knew about the agreement and when. Defense Minister Antti Häkkänen responded that Finland maintains similar agreements with some forty countries and that Israel has long been one of them.

Virta tied the memorandum to a second decision announced the same week: Finland will not renew its UNRWA funding, €5 million a year and €20 million over four years, when the current agreement expires. Aid to the Palestinians ends; the arms relationship extends for another decade.

From here, the pattern looks familiar. An Israeli Defense Ministry official told the Jerusalem Post that Finland serves as Israel’s gateway to NATO and European markets. A country that shares a 1,340-kilometer border with Russia needs air defense more than it needs moral consistency, and it has concluded that the country it criticizes also builds some of the best air-defense systems in the world.

BUSINESS

Check-Cap

Check-Cap spent years trying to solve a specific and unglamorous medical problem: how to screen for colorectal cancer without a colonoscopy. Its answer was an ingestible imaging capsule. As of August 26, that company effectively no longer exists. Check-Cap has completed its merger with MBody AI, and the former shareholders of MBody now hold roughly 90% of the combined entity.

What survives is the Nasdaq listing and the corporate shell. The stock continues to trade under the symbol MBAI, out of offices in Isfiya and Las Vegas, an unusual pairing for an Israeli public company. The company’s new business is embodied AI: software that manages fleets of robots.

MBody’s product is called Orchestrator, and its selling point is that it doesn’t care who made the robot. Companies buying autonomous machines from multiple manufacturers currently need a separate control interface for each one. Orchestrator sits above the hardware as a single coordination layer, handling task assignment, monitoring, and fleet management under long-term subscription agreements. Its customers operate in hospitality, gaming, and commercial real estate, and the company says Fortune 500 operators are among them.

The financial mechanics deserve attention. On August 13, the company executed a 1-for-7 reverse stock split, a maneuver required to clear Nasdaq’s $4.00 minimum bid price for a new listing. On August 27, it closed a $10 million underwritten offering, selling 1,538,462 shares at $6.50 each, with the proceeds earmarked for deploying additional robots with enterprise customers. The combined company now has approximately 15.3 million shares outstanding. Shareholders had approved the merger with roughly 98% support in November 2025.

What this represents is a familiar transaction dressed in new clothes. A medical device company that could not commercialize its technology has been recycled into a listing vehicle for a robotics startup that wanted to go public without an IPO. The reverse split, the concurrent offering, and the retained ticker are all part of the standard sequence. And it is happening more often as money flows toward physical AI.

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TODAY IN JEWISH HISTORY

1944: The Last Train from Łódź

German forces entered Łódź on September 8, 1939, and the restrictions on the city’s Jews began at once. The decree establishing the ghetto came the following February; it was sealed on April 30, 1940. By then it held 165,000 of the 230,000 Jews who had lived in the city on the eve of the occupation. The other 70,000 had already fled, been expelled, or been murdered. Over the next four years roughly 205,000 people passed through it, including Jews from the Reich, from other occupied countries, and from the ghettos of the district.

Four square kilometers. Concentrating the Jews in so small an area made them easier to guard, control, and strip of their property. The Germans issued a ghetto currency bearing Rumkowski’s signature; a receipt for real money surrendered, usable for provisions inside and worthless anywhere else. It was also an efficient weapon against smuggling: no one held currency that meant anything beyond the fence.

What began as temporary became permanent. Łódź outlasted every other ghetto of the Holocaust, and its complete isolation produced total dependence on the two authorities that controlled it, namely, the Germans and the Judenrat.

By August 1940 it was clear the Jews of Łódź would not be expelled, and the decision was made to exploit their labor for the Reich and for the private enrichment of district officials, Biebow and Greiser among them. Thirty “resorts” were operating by the end of that year with 10,000 workers. In 1942 and 1943, more than 90% of the ghetto’s adult population depended on 117 factories, workshops, and sorting warehouses.

The conditions inside them are best measured against the city outside. Workers stood for more than twelve hours at a stretch, and quotas ran to 300 or 320 wooden soles a day; Polish workers in Łódź were expected to produce 180 to 200. Wages of 2.40 marks a day went to the Ghetto Administration, which kept 65% to 70% and taxed what remained for clothing, housing, and food. On October 31, 1944, Biebow reported a profit of 3,993,420.32 reichsmarks to the Reich commissioner in Poznań, almost certainly after concealing more.

A loaf of bread officially cost between 0.60 and 1 mark. With savings exhausted, wages gutted, and no other way to obtain necessities, hunger and disease did the arithmetic: 43,734 people, 21% of the ghetto’s residents, died of the conditions themselves.

Mordechai Chaim Rumkowski ran the internal administration until the end, and no figure of the Holocaust remains harder to judge. He was organized and unpretentious with ordinary people; he also built a one-man absolutist regime and cultivated the personality cult around it. He tried to make the ghetto valuable enough to survive, administering it during the Final Solution as rescue through productivization.

He also built something real for the children. An elementary school system and a gymnasium that ran until the fall of 1941; colonies where children received supplemented rations; agricultural farms in Marysin for the youth movements, closed when the Jews of the Reich and the Roma arrived and needed the space. He extended the working age and set up vocational training for children in the resorts.

And he crushed opposition. When the conditions of 1941 produced demonstrations, protests, and strikes, he suppressed them; he removed rivals by sending them to the camps and pursued suspected smugglers by canceling their ration cards. He made Yiddish the ghetto’s official language and took for himself the authority to perform marriages. After the deportations, and particularly after September 1942, his standing collapsed.

The end came in August 1944. The Germans rerouted the transports from Chełmno to Auschwitz-Birkenau and emptied the ghetto between August 7 and August 30. By that last day, more than 74,000 Jews had been sent from the Radegast station; about 1,200 remained in two assembly camps in the city. Rumkowski went on one of the final transports and was murdered at Auschwitz with the last Jews of the ghetto.

Łódź was the last major ghetto in occupied Europe. When the trains stopped on August 30, the largest surviving Jewish community outside the camps had ceased to exist. It was the closing act, as Lech Kaczyński said at the sixty-fifth anniversary, in the annihilation of a Jewish presence in Poland that reached back to the twelfth century.

Weiss begins with the remarkable story of Mahal, the thousands of foreign volunteers who came to fight for the newly established State of Israel in 1948. Many were World War II veterans whose experience proved especially important in building the fledgling Israeli Air Force. Weiss also recounts the extraordinary life of Stan Andrews, an American bomber pilot who volunteered to fight for Israel, helped create the emblem of the IAF’s 101 Squadron, and was killed in action in 1948.

The conversation then turns sharply to the present. Weiss argues that Israel needs to reconsider its longstanding caution toward Russia and develop a much closer relationship with Ukraine. With Russia’s position in Syria weakened, he believes Israel could assist Ukraine with missile defense while learning from Ukraine’s battlefield experience combating drones. Such cooperation, he argues, could also help repair Israel’s strained relations with Europe and strengthen Israel’s strategic importance to Washington.

Finally, Marc and Weiss examine a larger and increasingly urgent question: Is Israel losing its traditional strategic appeal in the United States? Weiss argues that the familiar case for Israel as America’s “unsinkable aircraft carrier” is becoming less persuasive, particularly among younger Americans. His prescription is a fundamental change in the conversation—positioning Israel not simply as a Middle Eastern ally confronting Iran and its proxies, but as a technological and security partner capable of contributing to the defense of Europe.

A wide-ranging discussion of Zionist history, Russia and Ukraine, missile defense, U.S.-Israel relations—and how Israel might rethink its place in a rapidly changing world.

#Israel #Ukraine #Russia #Mahal #Zionism #History #IDF #AirForce #America #Europe #Defense #Geopolitics #Diplomacy #TelAviv #Podcast

The Board of Peace chairman, Nikolay Mladenov, presented a report to the United Nations Security Council yesterday, in which he complained about Israeli restrictions on the entry of supplies and the continued killing of Palestinians. Mladenov added that despite Hamas having theoretically agreed to disarm, disarmament remains in the realm of theory.

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Reports this morning alleged that an additional entry point to Gaza would be opened and that the IDF was preparing for it. Benjamin Netanyahu and Defense Minister Yisrael Katz both quickly said it was never going to happen until Hamas disarms. Clearly, nothing is going to happen until after the Israeli election on October 27th. Period.

ELECTION CAMPAIGN UPDATE

Last night, I mentioned that Ofer Winter had announced the start of his party’s Knesset campaign, and that he had publicly stated his solution to Gaza was based on his premise that all the Gazans would leave. He did not use the word “transfer,” but that’s what it meant.

There has been an interesting discussion today in parts of the Israeli media about mainstream media figures speaking positively about Winter’s announcement that he will establish a new party and run for the Knesset. Several veteran journalists praised the well-orchestrated campaign launch and the quality of the new people he brought in. However, they did not offer a single word of criticism on the very essence of what Winter said.

Twenty years ago, if you had talked about forcing the emigration of Gazans, or any other Palestinians from their land, you would have been considered a fringe element in Israel; practically beyond the range of who would be welcomed into a TV studio, or even shown on television. Today, there has been a normalization of those radical terms, as there has been a desensitization regarding many other terrible concepts and ideas.

The Challenges Jewish Democrats Face

Other than AI, which I’ll get to in a minute, the one disturbing concern I want to discuss today is the challenges that American Jewish Democrats now face. David Frum had an interesting interview with the Attorney General of Michigan, who is Jewish, regarding how she’s dealing with the election of a clearly anti-Israel, and ultimately, (in my personal opinion), anti-Semitic candidate for Senate. As an official Democratic Party member, the Attorney General is supporting him. This presents many American Jews with a very serious dilemma, especially those who think that President Trump is a danger.

Like usual, American-Palestinian journalist and activist, Ahmed Fouad Alkhatib has articulated the situation better than I can, with greater clarity. Coming from a Palestinian, Alkhatib’s arguments are even more compelling:

The insufferable Hasan Piker, who has campaigned with NYC mayor Mamdani, Michigan Senate candidate Abdul El‑Sayed, and several other Democratic candidates, claims that Jewish Americans who feel any affinity for Israel or support the Jewish state somehow invite violence onto themselves. He presents this as normal and even sensible. Many immediately condemned the remark as incitement and as an ignorant portrayal of Jews as responsible for the violence directed at them at a time when hate crimes are at historic highs. Others rushed to defend him, insisting he was not antisemitic and was merely criticizing “the Zionists,” even though the framing clearly targeted Jewish Americans as an entire group.

What stands out is the double standard applied only to Jews. Do Palestinian Americans or Muslim Americans who support Hamas, a Jihadist and fascist organization, invite violence upon themselves? Do Muslims who advocate for Sharia Law, including interpretations used to justify beheadings, mass rape, and other crimes against humanity, invite violence upon themselves? Do Chinese Americans who do not speak out against Beijing’s treatment of Uyghurs or Tibetans invite violence upon themselves? Do leftists or Iranians who support the Islamic Republic, the Cuban regime, or Maduro’s Venezuela invite violence upon themselves? Do Lebanese Americans in Dearborn, Michigan, who support Hezbollah invite violence upon themselves? Do Yemeni Americans who support the Houthis and their brutal, regressive ideology invite violence upon themselves?

The list can continue, yet one truth is unmistakable. There is a fixation on treating diaspora and American Jews as uniquely deserving of violence or hate crimes because of their perceived or actual views on a foreign policy issue. No other community is subjected to this logic. Never allow anyone to convince you that this has anything to do with the Palestinian people, their cause, or genuine pro‑Palestine advocacy.

THE FEAR OF EVER MORE FABULOUS AI

I generally leave my AI discussions to my podcast. However, I have a guest tomorrow, so there won’t be time to talk about it there. I think it’s important that readers take the time to read the interview Bill Gates gave to the New York Times, or coverage elsewhere in the press (such as CNN, in which Gates talks about his apprehension of AI and his overwhelming fear that no one is taking his concerns, and those of others, seriously.

As you all know, I am a major user of AI, but I am also someone who is anxious that AI may very well threaten our civilization.

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BUSINESS

A disappointing exit for the company that put a lab in your pocket

CropX is buying SCiO, the Israeli company whose technology reads the quality and composition of food and farm produce in the field, without sending samples to a laboratory. It is not a good outcome for SCiO’s investors. The company has raised about $64 million since it was founded, and the purchase price is estimated to be below that figure.

SCiO started in 2011 as Consumer Physics, founded by Asaf Carmi and Damian Goldring, neither of whom is still with the company. Its molecular sensing technology is covered by 44 patents and lets a user measure what is actually in a crop on the spot. OurCrowd led or took part in nearly every funding round. Khosla Ventures, Vinod Khosla’s firm, was among the first institutional investors, and Dov Moran also put money in.

CropX was founded in 2015 and now works in more than 70 countries, having raised over $60 million from a mix of strategic and financial backers, including OurCrowd, NEC, Aliaxis, Innovation Endeavors and Finistere Ventures. This is its eighth acquisition and the largest. The company has built its platform around soil and in-season crop management, and SCiO extends it past the harvest into the quality of what comes off the field.

Tomer Tzach, CropX’s chief executive, described the logic in terms of a feedback loop: agronomy that only issues recommendations can’t learn from what those recommendations produced. Connecting the advice given during the season to the yield and the quality measured afterward is what he says the acquisition buys.

Fifteen years is a long time to spend proving that a handheld spectrometer works, and SCiO did prove it. The consumer version, a pocket scanner that promised to tell you what was in your food, was one of the more widely covered Israeli hardware stories of the last decade. What the company could not do was find a market that would pay for it.

Perion Network

Perion Network is buying its way into the last few feet of American shopping. The Israeli ad-tech company announced this week that it will acquire PRN, which operates advertising screens inside North American stores, for up to $12 million in cash, paid at closing. The seller is STRATACACHE, PRN’s Ohio-based parent. Markets shrugged: the stock slipped about 1.2% in Tel Aviv and dipped slightly on Wall Street.

The asset is real estate of a peculiar kind. PRN runs 4K screens in more than 750 branches of a warehouse club chain, roughly 4,500 stores of a major big-box retailer, and about 2,200 pharmacy locations — Perion declined to name the chains. The company holds multi-year exclusive agreements with several of North America’s largest retailers.

The logic is simple enough. Perion already sells advertising on connected TVs, outdoor screens, e-commerce sites, and social networks; what it lacked was the moment when a shopper stands in the aisle deciding between two brands. Perion estimates the American retail advertising market at more than $70 billion, and this deal puts its technology in front of customers at the point where money actually changes hands.

The financial expectations are modest by design. Perion projects PRN will add roughly $3 million to adjusted EBITDA in 2027, a figure that excludes any revenue or savings from combining the operations. The deal is expected to be accretive from closing but won’t materially change 2026 guidance. PRN will be renamed Perion Retail Networks, and Perion says its existing relationships with retailers and advertisers will continue unchanged.

The longer plan is integration: connecting PRN’s screens to Perion’s advertising systems so a brand can run one campaign across television, phones, and the store aisle itself. The retailers will keep the final word on which ads run, how often, and in which parts of the store. For a mid-sized Israeli company competing against giants, owning the screen a customer sees while reaching for the shelf is a distinctive place to stand.

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TODAY IN JEWISH HISTORY

1941: The Massacre at Kamianets-Podilskyi

Eighty-five years ago today, in a fortress city on the Smotrych River in western Ukraine, the Holocaust crossed a threshold. On August 27 and 28, 1941, German Police Battalion 320, the Einsatzgruppen under SS General Friedrich Jeckeln, and Ukrainian auxiliary police shot 23,600 Jewish men, women, and children on the outskirts of Kamianets-Podilskyi. It was the first massacre of the war to exceed ten thousand victims. Babi Yar was still a month away.

The road to the killing fields began in Budapest. After Hungary joined the war against the Soviet Union, its authorities decided to deport Jews who could not prove Hungarian citizenship — mostly Polish and Russian Jews, along with refugees from western Europe, though many Hungarian Jews without papers were swept up as well. Whole communities in Hungarian-controlled Transcarpathia were loaded into freight cars and taken east. By August 10, some 14,000 had been handed across the old border into German hands, then forced to march from Kolomyia to Kamianets-Podilskyi, where they joined a local Jewish community of about 12,000.

The killing itself took place in broad daylight. Early on the morning of August 27, troops began emptying the ghetto, loading Jews onto trucks or marching them to the fields just beyond the edge of town. A Hungarian transport unit happened to pass through that week, and a truck driver named Gyula Spitz understood what he was seeing. He hid his camera behind the steering wheel and photographed the deportees on their final march — among the earliest visual evidence of the Holocaust taken by someone other than a perpetrator.

Jeckeln reported the figure of 23,600 to Berlin with bureaucratic precision. The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum describes the action as the first large-scale mass murder in pursuit of the Final Solution. The death camps did not yet exist. What Kamianets-Podilskyi proved to the men planning them was that entire communities — families, not just men of military age — could be annihilated in two days, and that the world would not notice.

When the Red Army liberated the city in March 1944 and opened the mass graves, inspectors found that more than a third of the victims had been buried alive. Jeckeln was hanged in Riga before four thousand spectators; the German case against Police Battalion 320 went nowhere. The killing fields today are a rectangular public park, ringed by trees and apartment buildings. I have spent my life teaching that dates matter. This one deserves to be better known: the day the murder of a people stopped being a series of atrocities and became a system.

Whatever Hamas’s intentions on October 7, it clearly succeeded in derailing what had appeared to be a path toward normalization between Israel and Saudi Arabia. Israel’s actions in the West Bank are now pushing that possibility even further away.

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ELECTION CAMPAIGN UPDATE: OFER WINTER DECIDES TO JOIN THE RACE
Last night, Ofer Winter officially announced the formation of his new party. Winter, a far-right former brigadier general, left the army after repeatedly being passed over for promotion to major general. Several former IDF Chiefs of Staff have said that his personality made him unsuitable for the rank. Winter, however, has claimed that he was denied promotion because he is religious. That argument is difficult to reconcile with the large number of religious officers who have risen to senior ranks in the IDF in recent years.

Netanyahu attacked Winter, warning that another right-wing party could destroy the right’s chances of winning. Winter responded that he has no intention of backing down and that he will remain in the race until the end.

Winter has also left little doubt about where he stands politically. He says that no one who held a position of responsibility on October 7 should remain in office, yet he has difficulty saying that he would not support Netanyahu and his bloc after the election. His solution for Gaza is emigration: he believes all Palestinians in Gaza should leave. He also has a longstanding personal dislike of Gadi Eizenkot dating back to their years in the army. Strangely enough, however, Winter reportedly has an excellent relationship with Yair Golan.

Winter served as military secretaries to Avigdor Lieberman and Naftali Bennett when they were defense ministers, and Winter reportedly has a good working relationship with both men. It is not yet clear what effect Winter’s entry into the race will have. I imagine the first poll or two will show him winning enough support to enter the Knesset. That is usually the pattern with new parties. They start strong, and then the numbers begin to fall. But who knows? Tonights first poll actually did not show him reaching the threshold

The other effect could be to push Smotrich out of the Knesset altogether. With Winter competing for many of the same voters, Smotrich may have an even harder time crossing the electoral threshold.

Netanyahu, meanwhile, does not trust Winter. By some calculations, Winter’s candidacy could actually help Netanyahu. But Netanyahu does not like people he cannot control, and Winter is certainly one of them. That is part of the reason Netanyahu never chose Winter to serve as his military secretary.

IRAN REPORTEDLY PLOTTED TO KILL YAIR NETANYAHU

Prime Minister Netanyahu revealed in an interview yesterday that Iran had plotted to assassinate one of his children. The existence of the plot has been known in Israeli media circles, but the military censor has prohibited publication of the details. Today, American sources identified the target as Yair Netanyahu. They said that after the plot was uncovered and Iranian agents were discovered on the ground, Yair was quickly flown out of Miami and returned to Israel.

SCIENCE NEWS

A Lasting Scar That May Explain Chronic Bowel Disease

Researchers at the Weizmann Institute of Science have discovered a possible explanation for why temporary intestinal inflammation can sometimes develop into chronic diseases such as Crohn’s disease and ulcerative colitis. Although the cells lining the intestine are replaced every three to five days, the researchers found that the material surrounding those cells can retain a lasting “memory” of an earlier injury. The study, published in *Immunity*, suggests that this damaged environment can alter the behavior of intestinal stem cells long after the original inflammation has disappeared.

The research, led by scientists in the laboratories of Prof. Irit Sagi and Dr. Moshe Biton, focused on the extracellular matrix, or ECM, the network of proteins and sugars that surrounds and supports cells. Using mice with short-term intestinal inflammation, the researchers found that while the animals appeared to recover within a month, their ECM did not return to normal. The matrix became more porous and lost some of its characteristic stiffness, with structural abnormalities remaining as long as 400 days after the initial illness. When healthy intestinal stem cells were subsequently grown in this damaged environment, they failed to develop normally and instead became cells that produce signals promoting inflammation.

The researchers found evidence that the same process may occur in people. Comparing their results with biopsies from patients with ulcerative colitis, they identified similar pro-inflammatory epithelial cells in inflamed areas of the human intestine. They also identified a protein called collagen 18 as a major factor in the process. Collagen 18 accumulates in the damaged extracellular matrix and appears to interfere with the signals that normally tell stem cells how to regenerate healthy intestinal tissue. When the researchers suppressed collagen 18 in mice, the ECM did not suffer the same permanent damage and chronic intestinal disease was prevented.

The findings could eventually lead to new approaches for diagnosing and treating inflammatory bowel disease. Current treatments largely target the immune system once inflammation has developed, but the Weizmann researchers suggest that the underlying problem may begin earlier, with damage to the extracellular matrix that subsequently alters stem cells and triggers the immune response.

Collagen 18 could therefore become a target for drugs designed to prevent recurring inflammation. The implications may extend beyond intestinal disease: because extracellular matrix surrounds cells throughout the body, the researchers believe similar forms of biological “memory” could play a role in other chronic diseases and potentially provide new markers for detecting them before symptoms become severe.

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Israel Plans One of the World’s Largest Desalination Plants

Israel has launched the tender process for what is expected to become one of the world’s largest desalination plants, with a planned capacity of 400 million cubic meters of water a year. The special government tender committee on Wednesday published the pre-qualification documents for the international project, which will involve the design, financing, construction, operation and maintenance of a new seawater desalination facility in the Emek Hefer industrial zone. The plant is expected to take seven to eight years to complete and would produce an amount of water equivalent to roughly 40% of the current annual freshwater consumption of Israeli households and industry

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The facility is planned for a roughly 200-dunam site and could include its own natural-gas-powered generating station with a capacity of up to 300 megawatts. Electricity is

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The images have now spread around the world, providing yet another picture of Jews destroying Palestinian property. And this time, it wasn’t just any Israeli. It was a member of the Knesset.

The parties on the right criticized Sukkot, but cautiously. They may need his support to form a coalition after the election. Their criticism therefore focused not on his destruction of the memorial, but on the fact that he had misled the army about his intentions. They stressed that decisions like this should be left to the military.

The opposition was far less restrained. Gadi Eisenkot made clear how much damage he believes Sukkot’s actions are doing to the country.

I fear that over the next two months we will see more and more outrageous actions from politicians on the right, each trying to outflank the others and win a few more votes from the most extreme parts of the electorate. Never mind the impact on the country. Who cares about that? It’s election time.

FOR ISRAEL, THE IRAN OUTCOMES RANGE FROM BAD TO WORSE

There were reports today that the United States has decided to return many of its embassy staff to the Middle East, a clear sign that Washington believes the chances of renewed war have receded. It also suggests that President Trump has no intention, at least for now, of returning to the fighting.

Another report claimed that Trump has essentially agreed to Iran’s demands in return for reopening the Strait of Hormuz. That seems entirely possible. It would, of course, be a terrible outcome for Israel. But it has been clear for some time that the possible outcomes of this war for Israel range from bad to worse.

ISRAELTECH INTERVIEW

As part of our partnership with IsraelTech, this week’s interview, “Is Israeli Directness Killing Your Startup?” featuring Helen Gottstein of Loud and Clear Training.

Helen Gottstein of Loud and Clear Training helps founders, CEOs, and executives communicate more effectively in meetings, interviews, and presentations. In this episode of IsraelTech, Helen joins Yoel to discuss how Israeli communication differs from American and other business cultures, and why habits that feel natural in Israel can create the wrong impression abroad.

Yoel and Helen address:

• How Israeli founders should approach their first investor meeting

• Why respect and ambition can exist in the same conversation

• What international business leaders may find surprising about Israelis

• Why interrupting can hurt a professional conversation

• How long a founder story should take

• Why presenters should create two different pitch decks

• and more.

You can watch the entire interview video here, or check out an excerpt below.

CAN HAIFA BECOME ISRAEL’S BACKUP AIRPORT?

Last Thursday, as Ben-Gurion Airport was grinding to a halt, passengers in Cyprus and Greece found themselves divided into two groups. Most waited for hours for flights that would not leave. A smaller group walked past them and boarded Air Haifa flights that departed on schedule for northern Israel. The airline operated about 32 flights that day, carrying some 2,200 passengers. According to Globes, nearly all departed on time.

That is the kind of experience people remember. It also revived a question that surfaces every time Ben-Gurion Airport fails: Could Haifa Airport be developed into a reliable backup for the country’s main airport?

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What has already happened there … The numbers are startling. In 2024, before Air Haifa began operating, about 53,600 passengers passed through Haifa. In 2025, the airline’s first full year, the figure was roughly 282,200. By August 24 of this year it had already reached about 250,000, of whom 192,000 were on international flights.

The airport is drawing infrastructure behind it. A week and a half ago the Airports Authority announced a new 20-dunam car park with 900 spaces, built because the overflow had passengers leaving cars on sidewalks and in unofficial lots. In 2023 the National Infrastructure Committee approved a plan to extend the runway, add taxiways and aircraft stands, expand the terminal and regulate the general aviation area. Terminal construction is scheduled to begin at the end of 2027.

The number that decides everything … The runway at Haifa is about 1,300 meters, and it will still be about 1,300 meters after the approved expansion. Ilana Shafran, who heads the transport division at the Planning Administration, told Globes that a short runway means small aircraft and limited range, which is why the field currently serves Greece, Cyprus and Bulgaria and nothing further.

The planners looked at lengthening it and ran into geography. The new Haifa seaport sits at the seaward end of the runway, and extending the strip would mean demolishing it. Shifting the runway’s angle was considered, but as Shafran put it, the constraint at the other end is Mount Carmel.

Yehuda Zafrani, an aviation and tourism specialist at the Hot consumer club, made the operational version of the same argument. The site has no land reserves, and expansion would require expropriations on a twenty-year timetable. Adding hundreds of parking spaces is useful, he said, while an airport of national scale needs tens of thousands. And the fallback logic fails at the first test: when there is a general strike at the Airports Authority, Haifa shuts down with everything else.

What the airline says it could do … Gonen Ussishkin, chief executive of Air Haifa, does not disagree, which is the most interesting part of the story. With minimal effort, he told Globes, the airport could grow 50% next year, to 600,000 or 650,000 passengers. A planned effort could double activity within eighteen months, to between 1.2 and 1.5 million. A sustained investment by the Airports Authority could reach 2.5 to 3 million a year.

Getting there means extending the runway by hundreds of meters, building a new terminal, laying in aircraft stands and support infrastructure, and five or six years of work. Even then, Ussishkin puts the ceiling at three million and says plainly that his airport is not a substitute for Ben Gurion. What it is, in his phrase, is a sport field: you park close, and ten minutes after landing you are outside.

Set that against the demand forecast. Shafran said the Planning Administration projects roughly 80 million passengers a year in Israel by 2050. Three million is under four% of that.

Yesterday’s Radio Show

BUSINESS

Alice & Minimus

Yesterday I wrote about Minimus, the Israeli cybersecurity company that shut down with most of a $51 million seed round still in the bank and handed the remainder back to its investors. Today, Calcalist reports that Alice, formerly ActiveFence, has raised $140 million at a valuation between $700 and $800 million. Both companies sell security. Only one of them found something the market was already paying for.

Apax Digital led the round. Samsung, SentinelOne, Maj Invest, MoreTech and Phoenix came in alongside existing investors including CRV, Grove, NVP, Highland, Vintage, Resolute, Claltech and NFX. The company has now raised $280 million since 2018 and says it is approaching $100 million in annual recurring revenue.

What the company actually does … Alice was founded in 2018 as ActiveFence by Noam Schwartz, Yiftach Or, Alon Porat and Eyal Dikan. For most of a decade it worked on fraud, coordinated manipulation, and hostile behavior on the platforms — the unglamorous business of watching how bad actors change tactics to get around whatever was blocking them last month. Schwartz told Calcalist that the company sits on the dirtiest data on the internet, which is both a boast and an accurate description of the asset.

The pivot came from recognizing that the same data describes the threat surface of a language model. Alice now red-teams AI systems before launch, working with labs including Anthropic and Cohere to find weaknesses, and then monitors the deployed systems for data leakage, compliance violations and behavior the operator didn’t authorize. It runs a research lab with more than 150 people whose job is to make models break their own rules. By the company’s account it protects eight of the ten largest AI labs in the world.

The new money goes to the Israeli development center and to sales and marketing. The company employs about 400 people, most of them here, with offices in New York, London and Hanoi.

The contrast worth noticing … Minimus was selling a better version of something the market already understood, into a category where Chainguard and the cloud providers were already competing. Alice is selling into a category that did not exist four years ago, to buyers who cannot yet describe what they need and therefore cannot comparison-shop. That is a more comfortable place to raise money and a harder place to stay.

The Israeli cyber sector reads as uniformly hot right now, and the same publication carried a second story today that complicates it: At Bay, an Israeli-founded cyber insurance company, is being bought by a German insurer for $575 million, which Calcalist notes is less than half its valuation five years ago. Two companies making news on the same day, one tripling its money and one taking a haircut, in the same national industry.

What Schwartz is describing … The thing worth pausing on is the underlying claim. Schwartz says the value of years spent cataloguing fraud, spam, deepfake campaigns and manipulation is that it is now a map of what a capable model can be made to do. The people who spent a decade studying the worst behavior on the internet turn out to have been building the training set for the safety problem.

That is a genuinely Israeli kind of company, in the sense that the expertise came from a decade of adversarial work that nobody thought was a growth industry. Whether $800 million is the right price for it is a question the next eighteen months will answer. What’s clear is that the buyers exist, which is the thing Minimus could not find.

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Nayax

Nayax, the Israeli payments and processing company, has signed an agreement to acquire IPS Group of the United States for $350 million in cash. The stock rose about 9% in Tel Aviv on turnover of more than NIS 14 million. It had been down 7% since the start of the year.

IPS is currently held by Windjammer Capital and sells smart parking and urban space management technology. It manages more than 250,000 parking spaces for over 550 customers, among them municipalities, universities and private operators in the United States, Canada, Britain and Ireland. The company is projected to close 2026 with about $90 million in revenue, organic growth of roughly 20%, and adjusted EBITDA of about $21 million, with more than 60% of revenue recurring.

The price … The deal values IPS at roughly 17 times projected 2026 adjusted EBITDA, or about 12 times once expected synergies are counted. Closing is expected in the fourth quarter of 2026, subject to regulatory approval.

Nayax will pay from cash on hand plus about $150 million in new net debt. That pushes net debt to EBITDA to roughly 3.8 at closing, a level the company says will fall below 3.0 by the end of 2027.

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TODAY IN JEWISH HISTORY

1918: Birth of Leonard Bernstein

The Conductor Who Kept Coming Back … Leonard Bernstein was born on August 25, 1918, in Lawrence, Massachusetts, to Samuel and Jennie Bernstein, immigrants from a shtetl near Rivne in what is now Ukraine. His father ran a beauty supply business and expected his son to take it over. When the boy wanted to study piano, Samuel refused to pay for lessons, and Bernstein taught bar mitzvah students to cover them himself.

The father’s objection was not simple philistinism. Samuel Bernstein was a Talmudist’s son who had run from a life of Torah study to America, and he understood the musician’s life as poverty with a tuxedo. Asked years later why he had opposed his son’s career, he gave an answer that survives in every biography: how was he supposed to know the boy would turn out to be Leonard Bernstein.

What he was doing while the state was being born … Bernstein first came to Palestine in the spring of 1947, at the invitation of the Palestine Symphony Orchestra, and conducted ten concerts. He came back in October 1948, in the middle of the war, and stayed nearly two months. He conducted more than forty concerts, many of them for soldiers.

In November 1948 he took the orchestra to Beersheba, captured from the Egyptians three weeks earlier, and played in the open air for several thousand troops. The photographs show a piano on a makeshift platform in the desert and men sitting on the sand. He played the Rhapsody in Blue and conducted Beethoven’s Second, and when the shelling was audible the program continued.

He was offered the music directorship of what had by then become the Israel Philharmonic and turned it down, unwilling to give up America. He remained its most constant foreign presence for the next four decades. He conducted the inaugural concert at the Mann Auditorium in 1957, returned after the Six-Day War in 1967 for a concert on Mount Scopus, and came again in 1978 and repeatedly after. The orchestra named him laureate conductor.

The Jewish music … The concert works are where his Jewishness stopped being biography and became material. The First Symphony, Jeremiah, completed in 1942, sets the Hebrew text of Lamentations for mezzo-soprano in its final movement. He wrote it while the news from Europe was arriving in fragments and dedicated it to his father.

The Third Symphony, Kaddish, of 1963, is an argument with God written in the form of the mourner’s prayer. The speaker accuses the Almighty of breaking the covenant, and the Aramaic doxology of praise continues underneath the accusation. He finished it weeks before Kennedy’s assassination and dedicated it to his memory, but the quarrel in it is older than that.

The Chichester Psalms of 1965 set Hebrew texts on commission from an English cathedral, which Bernstein found funny and did not soften. He kept the Hebrew, refused to translate, and wrote the Twenty-Third Psalm for a boy treble in a line that any synagogue would recognize.

The complications … He was not a simple partisan. He conducted in Germany and Austria after the war when other Jewish musicians would not, taking the position that the music was not the property of the people who had misused it. He fought with Israeli officials over programming Wagner and Strauss and mostly lost. In his later years his politics ran well to the left of the Israeli mainstream, and he said so.

None of it interrupted the relationship. When the Israel Philharmonic marked its fiftieth anniversary in 1986 he was there. He conducted his last concert with the orchestra in 1988, and he died in New York in October 1990, five days after announcing he would stop conducting.

The only significant news today is that Israel has continued to strike Hamas targets in Gaza. Only one or two targets a day, but the attacks have been consistent.

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The other development came this evening, Israel time, with the announcement of exactly what the American economic campaign against Iran will entail. After the announcement, the details remain unclear. President Trump once again said that Iran is falling apart and that its collapse is only a matter of time. Iran, meanwhile, is threatening war unless the American blockade and sanctions are lifted. That’s possible, but an Iranian decision to go to war seems even less likely than Trump carrying out his own threats of military action.

WHAT REMAINS OF THE ALTALENA

Heritage Minister Amichai Eliyahu announced this morning that the wreck of the Altalena had been found. The ship was located shortly after midnight, 20 kilometers off the Israeli coast and at a depth of 503 meters, by a survey vessel working for the Survey of Israel. Eliyahu, a member of Itamar Ben-Gvir’s Otzma Yehudit party, made the announcement alongside Ben-Gvir. Few objects in Israel’s history carry more symbolic weight for the Israeli right.

The first statements said the ship had been found intact. That description did not survive the morning. The Altalena’s superstructure had been cut away before the burned-out hulk was towed out to sea and scuttled. What sits on the seabed today is essentially the hull and bottom of the vessel, and not an intact ship. Ynet reported the correction within hours of the announcement

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What Actually Happened in June 1948 … On June 1, Israel Galili signed an agreement with Menachem Begin to dissolve the Etzel and fold its units into the IDF. Etzel battalions were to enter the Alexandroni and Givati brigades, while its units in Jerusalem, which was not yet legally part of Israel, would stay separate. One clause required the Etzel to stop buying arms on its own.

The Altalena was already at sea. She was formerly USS LST-138, a tank landing ship bought as American surplus and named for Ze’ev Jabotinsky’s pen name, an Italian word meaning “seesaw”. She sailed from France under Captain Monroe Fein, a former U.S. Navy lieutenant, with the Etzel commander Eliyahu Lankin aboard, carrying 940 fighters, 5,000 rifles, 250 Bren guns, five million rounds, fifty bazookas and ten Bren carriers.

Ben-Gurion agreed to let the ship land in secret, in violation of the UN truce that had begun on June 11. He refused to let her enter Tel Aviv port, where observers would see everything, and directed her to an unlit shore. Begin wanted twenty% of the arms kept for the Etzel, and Ben-Gurion refused, on the principle that there would be one army.

Three Days, Not One … The ship anchored off Kfar Vitkin, north of Netanya, on the night of June 20. The 940 passengers came ashore and were taken to an army camp for induction, and unloading went on through the night. About 2,000 rifles, two million rounds, 3,000 shells and 200 Bren guns came off and went to the IDF, where they went into the war against the Arab armies.

On June 21, the Alexandroni Brigade sealed the area and gave Begin an ultimatum to hand over the rest. Fighting broke out on the beach. Six Etzel men and two soldiers were killed, and Fein took the ship back out to sea with Begin aboard.

On June 22, the Altalena anchored off Tel Aviv and negotiations collapsed. Ben-Gurion ordered her shelled, and a field gun on the beach, in a sector under Yitzhak Rabin’s command, set her on fire. Ten more Etzel men and one soldier died. Nineteen dead in all, sixteen from the Etzel and three from the IDF, and no passengers among them.

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What Became of Her … The ship did not sink off Tel Aviv. She burned and ran aground at the foot of Frishman Street, where the wreck sat in plain view of the city for about a year. She was then refloated, towed roughly 15 miles out, and deliberately sunk, after which the position was lost. That is why the search took months and why the hull turned up at 503 meters.

Begin went on the radio that night and ordered his men not to return fire. Around 200 Etzel members were arrested, some of them charged with treason. The organization’s Jerusalem units stayed independent until September, when the Etzel was dissolved for good.

Who Gets to Tell the Altalena Story? … Ben-Gvir posted that disagreements are legitimate, but a war of brothers is not. It is the correct lesson, and hardly a new one. He is, however, the first to draw it from a shipwreck located at state expense during an election campaign, in a search commissioned by a minister from his own party.

There is nothing improper about looking for the Altalena. The Heritage Ministry budgeted about a million shekels for the search last year, and the technical achievement belongs to the Survey of Israel and the crew that did the work. The questions are why the announcement came from two politicians rather than the agency that found it, why the word “intact” was used before there was any basis for saying so, and what a right-wing government intends to do with a relic whose most important lesson is that Begin chose not to shoot back.

Last year Eliyahu and six other ministers asked Defense Minister Katz to move the cannon that fired on the Altalena from the IDF Command and Staff College at Glilot to the Begin Heritage Center in Jerusalem. They argued that displaying it at a military college teaches the wrong lesson from the affair. Now both the cannon and the hull are in play, and the men handling them are among those who talk most about brotherhood while doing the least to practice it.

BUSINESS

Twistlock

Anyone who went looking for hardened container images (A container image is a frozen snapshot of a filesystem) this morning found a farewell letter instead. Minimus, the cybersecurity company founded by the three men who built Twistlock, posted a note on its site saying it is ending operations. The founders wrote that the business and investment climate had left them unable to continue.

The shutdown comes with a calendar. A sixty-day maintenance window opened Monday, during which the company says it will keep fixing bugs and pulling in upstream updates. On October 22 the registry goes dark, and images already pulled will keep working without ever being patched again.

The résumé that raised fifty-one million dollars … Ben Bernstein, Dima Stopel and John Morello founded the company in October 2022. Their previous venture, Twistlock, pioneered container security and was bought by Palo Alto Networks for roughly $410 million in cash, a figure that appears in Palo Alto’s own SEC filing. Morello co-authored NIST Special Publication 800-190, the American government’s

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It’s not clear how much one can believe the military correspondents these days, but their account might be true. After the attack, the United States announced that it was establishing a deconfliction center in Jordan to help resolve any differences. Meanwhile, it was reported today that the head of the Mossad met with the Syrian foreign minister in an effort to defuse the situation. The Syrian foreign minister said that Syria does not trust Israel but wants to live in peace with it, and suggested that the two countries reach an agreement.

I don’t want to sound like a broken record, but our policy toward Syria needs a serious re-evaluation, assuming there was ever a serious evaluation to begin with.

AN OMINOUS REMINDER FROM GAZA

Another major story today was the discovery of several kites at Kibbutz Kfar Aza, apparently sent from Gaza. It was an immediate reminder of the years before October 7, when incendiary balloons and kites from Gaza repeatedly set fire to fields in the envelope. At the time, the kites were treated largely as a nuisance rather than a warning. In retrospect, that was a serious mistake.

The army sent mixed messages about today’s reappearance of kites. It said they seemed to be a Hamas experiment to see whether kites could once again reach Israel. The kites were attached to long cords stretching all the way back to Gaza, but the IDF claimed children were controlling them. In effect, the message was, “We can’t kill the kids because they’re kids.” That still leaves the question of how Israel should respond.

More importantly, the incident shows that Hamas is busy. Instead of moving toward disarmament, it appears to be rebuilding its capabilities and preparing for the possibility of fighting again.

WEST BANK TENSION AND THE UPCOMING ELECTION

Friday morning “tours” as the settlers call them, into Palestinian villages have also continued, in what are clearly intended as provocations. In Qusra, which has drawn worldwide attention, settlers continue to move around freely and intimidate residents, despite the village being declared a closed military area.

It is clearly the policy of the part of the government that controls the West Bank to encourage these settler actions, despite Netanyahu’s statements to the foreign media. The actions themselves are doing tremendous damage to Israel, quite apart from the moral questions they raise.

I also believe that greater tension in the West Bank works to the political right’s advantage as the election approaches. With defeat looking increasingly possible, there is every incentive to keep tensions high.

I was just listening to an interview with Moshe Feiglin, a far-right politician whom I interviewed many years ago. He has started a new party, hoping to win votes to Netanyahu’s right. It’s not clear how much room there is for him there, especially with others competing for the same voters.

Feiglin just described the people who have been attacking Arab homes in Qusra as “chalutzim,” appropriating one of the most honored words in Zionist history. Young chalutzim. Think about that choice of words. He says that people who break the law should be arrested, but to Feiglin, they are not lawbreakers. They are young chalutzim, fighting for Jewish rights and defending us.

EISENKOT AND THE QUESTION OF SHIN BET PROTECTION

There was another controversy today over whether Gadi Eizenkot, the prime candidate for PM in the opposition, should receive Shin Bet protection. The rules governing who qualifies for protection are complicated. Shin Bet chief David Zini initially suggested that the decision not to protect Eizenkot had been made by the chairman of the Central Elections Committee. The committee quickly denied that, saying the decision had been Zini’s. Tonight, Zini acknowledged that he was the one who had determined that protection was unnecessary.

When it comes to Eizenkot, the obvious approach would seem to be to err on the side of caution, especially given the heightened political violence Israel has experienced in recent years. But Zini, who was appointed by Netanyahu and is considered close to him, decided otherwise.

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ECONOMY

How a €5.50 Bottle of Wine Becomes 70 Shekels in Israel

In a Monoprix in central Paris, a bottle of La Vieille Ferme sits near the bottom of the shelf for €5.50, roughly 19 shekels. It is an ordinary table wine, the kind bought for student parties, and better Paris wine shops often don’t carry it at all. In Israel, the same bottle, with its familiar rooster label, sells in wine shops and delicatessens for 50 to 70 shekels. Calcalist, Israel’s leading financial newspaper, set out to explain the enormous difference in price. What it found offers a useful lesson for anyone who has ever wondered why so many things in Israel cost far more than they do elsewhere.

The Israeli importer, Shaked, owns the Derech HaYayin wine-store chain and holds the exclusive rights to La Vieille Ferme in Israel. According to industry estimates, it pays the winery about 10.4 shekels per bottle, roughly what a French wholesaler pays. Getting the wine to Israel adds another 3.36 shekels for trucking to Marseille, sea freight, and insurance.

Kobi Shaked, the company’s import manager, says shipping costs actually range from two to five shekels per bottle, particularly because refrigerated containers are necessary during much of the Israeli summer. And those costs have been rising. Lali Shomer of Hillebrand Gori, which handles about 95% of Israel’s wine imports, says the cost of moving a container within Europe alone has risen from about $1,500 three years ago to between $2,500 and $3,000 today.

Then the bottle lands. Port handling and customs clearance add another 2.77 shekels per bottle, while licensing and labeling add 1.38 shekels. Israel classifies wine as a “sensitive food,” excluding it from import reforms that allow many products meeting European standards to enter the country under a simplified process. As a result, every wine label requires separate approval and laboratory testing, at a cost of roughly 1,000 shekels.

One small importer put the problem simply: ten different Rieslings from the same winery require ten separate approvals, while ten varieties of Barilla pasta require only one. The Health Ministry says customs clearance takes less than a day on average and preliminary approval takes 16 days. It says it is unaware of any direct effect these requirements have on prices.

The tariff is where the arithmetic really changes. Israel charges 12% plus 1.41 shekels per liter, with a minimum tariff of about 3.9 shekels per bottle. On an expensive wine, that minimum barely matters. But on a bottle that left the winery at 10.4 shekels, it amounts to nearly 38% of the original price. Among the countries examined by Calcalist, only Brazil imposes higher tariffs on European wine.

Israel does have a duty-free quota for European wine under its agreement with the EU, but it is tiny: about 285,000 liters a year in a market that consumes close to 40 million bottles. That amounts to just 0.8% of the market.

From there, the costs compound. Importers and retailers calculate their margins on a price that already includes the tariff. The importer’s margin, together with marketing and distribution, adds about 11.68 shekels per bottle. The retailer then adds roughly 30%, and VAT adds another 8.6 shekels. By the time the bottle reaches the shelf, the calculated price is 56.4 shekels, more than five times what the winery originally received for it.

The final markup does not appear on any invoice. A cheap French wine, once placed on an Israeli shelf, is simply perceived as a French wine. Shomer’s explanation for the 70-shekel price is straightforward: sellers charge it “simply because they can.” She argues that the high prices of Israeli wines also make expensive imports seem reasonable by comparison.

Gal Zohar of the W Wine School says this is partly the price Israel pays for having a relatively young wine market. Consumers who have never seen that bottle sitting on a Monoprix shelf for €5.50 have little reason to know that 70 shekels is far more than it sells for elsewhere.

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BUSINESS

Nofar Energy Turns Profitable, Raises Long-Term Forecasts

Nofar Energy’s shares rose 5.6% on Thursday after the renewable energy company reported second-quarter results that moved it into the black. Revenue for the quarter came to NIS 164 million, up 69% from NIS 97 million a year earlier, and the company posted a net profit of NIS 16 million. EBITDA from electricity generation rose 79% to NIS 133 million. The gains came from projects newly connected to the grid in Israel, the United States and Europe.

For the first half, revenue reached NIS 307 million, an 87% increase over the same period last year, with EBITDA up 68% to NIS 201 million. Nofar left its 2026 guidance unchanged at NIS 1.1 billion in revenue and NIS 900 million in EBITDA. That leaves close to three quarters of the year’s target to be earned in the second half, which is how a business built on connection dates tends to work revenue arrives when a project switches on, not evenly across the calendar.

The further-out forecasts were what moved the stock. Nofar raised its 2027 outlook to NIS 2.4 billion in revenue and NIS 2 billion in EBITDA, and its 2028 outlook to NIS 3.9 billion in revenue and NIS 3.3 billion in EBITDA. It issued its first 2029 forecast: NIS 6.2 billion in revenue and NIS 5.2 billion in EBITDA. Behind those numbers sits a mature project backlog, including connected projects, of 16 gigawatts.

Nofar has also been expanding through acquisitions. Just after Tisha B’Av, it agreed to acquire a 47.5% stake in the Reindeer power station in the Sharon for NIS 855 million. This week, it acquired 92.5% of Highlight, a company that installs solar panels on moshavim and kibbutzim in southern Israel, for NIS 200 million. Nofar is controlled and managed by Ofer Yanai.

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TODAY IN JEWISH HISTORY

The Judengasse emptied: Frankfurt, 23 August 1614

The trouble in Frankfurt began as a quarrel over money that had nothing to do with the Jews. The city’s guilds wanted to know what had happened to nine and a half tons of gold, the equivalent of the city’s missing debt. The patricians who controlled the city council could not produce the accounts. In May 1613, a crowd stormed the Römer, Frankfurt’s city hall, and seized the keys to the treasury. A year later, Vincenz Fettmilch, a grocer and gingerbread baker, occupied the city gates, declared the old council dissolved, and jailed its members.

Having taken control of the city, Fettmilch turned against its Jews. On August 22, 1614, his mob broke into the Judengasse, the single walled street where between 1,400 and 2,000 Jews lived, crowded into houses that had been divided and subdivided until there was scarcely any room left. The Jews sent their children and elderly to the cemetery at the far end of the street, then gathered at the entrance to defend it. Two Jews and one attacker were killed before the defense collapsed. The mob spent the night looting the Judengasse and burning what it could not carry away.

The next morning, Fettmilch chose expulsion over slaughter. Word was sent to those waiting among the graves that they were to leave the city. The Fishers’ Gate was opened, and the Jews were put into small boats and carried away along the Main in both directions. Rabbi Yosef Yuspa Hahn, who was among the exiles, recorded the date as the 27th of Elul. Frankfurt’s Jews would fast on that date thereafter. It fell just three days before Rosh Hashanah, during the week when a community is meant to be taking stock of itself.

The empire did not accept what Fettmilch had done. Emperor Matthias declared Fettmilch and his followers outlaws and retook control of the city. On February 28, 1616, Fettmilch and several of his followers were beheaded in the Rossmarkt, their heads displayed on spikes above a city tower.

That same day, imperial soldiers escorted the Jewish exiles back into the Judengasse. A stone eagle was placed above the gate, with an inscription declaring that the street stood under the protection of the Roman Imperial Majesty and the Holy Empire.

The returning Jews went first to the desecrated synagogue and the ruined cemetery and restored both to use. Elhanan Helen, an eyewitness, recorded the story in a Yiddish poem. Frankfurt’s Jews thereafter observed the 20th of Adar as Purim Vinz, chanting his account as a megillah to the melody of a popular battle song.

Until the 1930s, it was the worst calamity to befall a Jewish community in Germany since the Black Death. The community that survived it wrote both the fast and the feast into its calendar, ensuring that the same street would remember both the leaving and the return.

Ben-David lays out some stark numbers. Roughly half of Israel’s children, he argues, are receiving an education that will leave them unable to sustain a modern developed economy. Only a small portion of the workforce drives Israel’s extraordinary high-tech economy, while a relatively narrow segment of society carries much of the country’s tax burden. If enough of Israel’s doctors, academics, engineers and high-tech workers decide to leave, he warns, the country could enter an economic “spiral of collapse.”

At the center of the discussion is Israel’s rapidly changing demography, particularly the growing Haredi population and the consequences of an education system that often fails to provide basic mathematics, science and English. Ben-David argues that Israel cannot continue funding schools that refuse to teach a full core curriculum or subsidizing a way of life that leaves large numbers of adults outside the workforce.

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A surprise strike began at Ben Gurion Airport at around 11 a.m. today, when ground workers walked off the job. Check-in counters stopped accepting passengers, while arriving aircraft were left with luggage that could not be unloaded. By 2 p.m., the airport was officially closed to both incoming and outgoing flights.

Several flights already en route to Israel were forced to turn around, including an Air France flight from Paris that reversed course in midair and returned to France. The disruption came on one of the busiest travel days of the year at Ben Gurion, with more than 100,000 passengers scheduled to pass through the airport.

How did we get here? Although only 49 airlines are currently operating at Ben Gurion Airport, compared with more than 100 before October 7, 2023, the overall volume of activity has not declined. Israeli carriers, including El Al, Israir, and Arkia, have stepped into the vacuum left by foreign airlines, as has Blue Bird, a Greek airline owned by the Israeli Kavei Hofsha Group. Together, they have added routes to destinations they did not serve before the war. At the same time, while foreign tourism remains a fraction of what it once was, Israelis are traveling abroad in growing numbers—especially since the war ended, many are flying more frequently.

There are some interesting factors behind the strike. Airport employees called the walk out because they claimed to be overworked and that the airport needs additional staff. That may well be true. But the shortage of workers at Ben Gurion is also part of a much broader problem in Israel today: there simply are not enough people to fill many available jobs.

Restaurants routinely close early because they cannot find enough staff, and the same problem can be seen across other parts of the economy. Airport work, moreover, is demanding, with long and often irregular hours, making it particularly difficult to recruit and retain employees.

We know that the Workers’ Union has been demanding additional staff. However, there is also a political dimension that makes the situation more complicated. The union is closely associated with Likud, and its chairman is a significant Likud power broker who helps mobilize votes in the party’s primaries. Yesterday, Transportation Minister Miri Regev, on her way to a week-long vacation in Morocco, posed for photographs with the union chairman and publicly praised him.

The timing is certainly striking. Just one day after the union chairman met with and was praised by Miri Regev and the prime minister, the union decided that it had no alternative but to strike. The resulting shutdown disrupted the travel plans of tens of thousands of passengers and made Israel seem even less attractive as a destination for foreigners.

Tonight, Prime Minister Netanyahu announced that the head of the airport workers’ union would be expelled from the Likud for orchestrating the surprise walkout that brought Ben Gurion Airport to a standstill.

SUPREME COURT STOPS GOVERNMENT’S CLOSURE OF BELOVED ARMY RADIO

The Supreme Court ruled tonight that the government’s decision to shut down Army Radio must be overturned. The decision, made late last December, was supposed to take effect on March 1, but was halted by a Supreme Court injunction. A hearing was subsequently held, giving the government an opportunity to defend its decision. Today, the court unanimously found that the move was based on “extraneous considerations,” specifically the decision-makers’ dissatisfaction with the station’s broadcasts and political views. The court did find that the government has the authority to close the station, but ruled that it must do so through a proper process and on the basis of legitimate considerations.

TRUMP DECLARES ECONOMIC WAR ON IRAN, BUT CAN HE MAKE IT STICK?

President Trump announced today what he called “D-Day” against Iran, promising economic warfare and isolation on an unprecedented scale. What does that mean? According to Trump, the United States will impose severe economic consequences on any country whose banks, businesses, or other institutions continue to provide Iran with an economic lifeline.

That will be a tall order. Iran continues to trade with China, Turkey, India, and a number of other countries, and forcing all of them to choose between doing business with Iran and maintaining their economic relationships with the United States will not be easy. If Trump can make the threat stick, however, it will place enormous additional pressure on an Iranian economy already under siege.

Can the Iranian government withstand that pressure? For a while, certainly. In the long run, probably not. But economic warfare of this sort takes time to produce political results. Is President Trump prepared to wait that long? That I doubt.

Meckano

Michpal, the payroll software company that went public last September, is buying 70% of Meckano for NIS 66 million. The shares are coming from Gil Cohen, Meckano’s founder, owner and chief executive, who started the company about twelve years ago. The deal values Meckano at NIS 100 million. Michpal and Cohen also agreed on an option mechanism under which either side can force the sale of the remaining 30%.

Meckano makes digital time clocks that run on computers, tablets and phones, with fingerprint recognition and NFC tap-in as the verification methods. Around that it has built a task management product that tracks hours and profitability, software that syncs attendance data to payroll, and a system for employees to file expense reimbursements. It is the same territory Michpal already occupies: attendance, hiring and payslip production accounted for 69% of Michpal’s revenue in 2025.

The numbers explain the appetite. That segment brought Michpal NIS 136 million last year at an operating profit of NIS 58 million, a 42% margin. Meckano earned NIS 15 million in 2025 at roughly 52%, better than the buyer’s own, and consolidating it alone lifts the segment 11% this year. Meckano closed 2025 with a positive balance of NIS 16.4 million and liabilities of about NIS 1 million.

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Michpal says Meckano has spent the past two years rebuilding its technology, largely around AI tools, and expects that work to finish in 2027, which should give the combined company room for new products. The purchase price can still move: the agreement carries adjustment mechanisms that could pay Cohen more depending on how Meckano finishes 2026. Michpal listed in September at a valuation of NIS 1.07 billion, short of the NIS 1.2 billion its parent, Formula, had been aiming for. This deal is the first sign of what it intends to do with the listing.

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TODAY IN JEWISH HISTORY

Switzerland Bans Shechita (Jewish Ritual Slaughter)

On August 20, 1893, Switzerland held a landmark national referendum that resulted in the constitutional prohibition of shechita, the traditional Jewish method of kosher slaughter. The measure, which required livestock to be stunned before slaughter, effectively prohibited the practice of shechita within Switzerland.

While the campaign was ostensibly championed by early animal welfare societies, it was also deeply intertwined with the antisemitic politics of the era. Fueled by rising xenophobia and public anxiety over an influx of Jewish immigrants fleeing persecution in Eastern Europe, the campaign used concerns over animal cruelty to target and marginalize the country’s Jewish community. The referendum passed with 60.1 percent of the vote.

The 1893 vote fundamentally altered Jewish life in Switzerland, creating significant religious and logistical challenges that persist today. Because the law banned the act of kosher slaughter rather than the consumption of kosher meat itself, Switzerland’s Jewish community was forced to rely on imported meat from neighboring countries to maintain its religious observance.

Despite various political debates, legal challenges, and changing attitudes toward religious freedom over the ensuing century, the original prohibition remains in force. Today, it stands as an important historical precedent for similar bans elsewhere in Europe and highlights the enduring tension between animal welfare legislation and minority religious rights.

Between Hope & Fear

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It was interesting to listen to the Israeli analysts talking about it today. The overwhelming majority of politicians avoided it completely. However, a number of people from the Israeli Democrats Party said what needed to be said: Israel seems to know only how to send messages militarily. Netanyahu himself said that was what the strike was intended to do: send a message. But not every message has to be delivered with a bomb.

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I heard too many analysts say, “We had to learn a lesson from October 7th, and that is that when we see a potential threat, we must eliminate it.” It’s strange. Two weeks ago, I heard an analyst predict that Syria would be the next front to heat up. My immediate thought was that I understood why: the risks seemed limited, and Netanyahu needed a success.

It turns out the risks may not have been so limited. From what we now know, we came dangerously close to a confrontation with Turkey. The last thing Israel needs is a war with Turkey. We have enough immediate enemies already.

Two days ago, President Trump said Israel should stop killing Palestinians in Gaza. Yesterday, his representatives met with Netanyahu for four hours. Today, Israel carried out two major attacks in Gaza that killed at least ten Gazans

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The IDF says those killed were all Hamas operatives and that one of them had participated in the October 7 massacre. Apparently, our current leaders have decided that what President Trump says and how our actions look to the rest of the world are secondary considerations.

ELECTION CAMPAIGN UPDATE

There were also a number of political developments today. First, Ofir Winter, a far-right former brigadier general, announced that he would form a new party. Winter, whose military career stalled after a series of controversial actions, says he supports Netanyahu remaining prime minister. At the moment, polls show that if Winter runs, neither his party nor Bezalel Smotrich’s would receive enough votes to enter the Knesset.

Second, both Avigdor Lieberman and Naftali Bennett attacked Gadi Eizenkot because he said that some ultra-Orthodox men would still be exempt from the military draft. Neither seems willing to accept that Eizenkot has emerged as the clear leader of the anti-Netanyahu camp. Tonight, one poll gave Eisenkot’s Yashar party 26 seats, making his party the largest in the next Knesset.

Third, three Arab parties, Hadash-Ta’al and Balad, have agreed to run together, reviving the Joint Arab List. The move is expected to increase turnout among Arab voters.

Finally, Yair Lapid, currently, number two in Bennett’s party, presented its national security platform. “The diplomatic crisis was created not only by circumstances, but also by the negligence, arrogance, and amateurism of the Israeli government,” Lapid said. “We must not give up on the MOU [with Iran—MS]. We need to fight for it. Netanyahu’s decision to give it up is a serious mistake.”

Here are the six goals Lapid laid out for repairing Israel’s relations with the world:

• Repair and redirect relations with the United States. Restore the bipartisan standing that Israel enjoyed until recent years.

• Repair and redirect relations with Europe. Rebuild relations with the European Union, deepen ties with NATO, and, despite the difficulty, address public opinion in countries such as Spain, France, and Ireland.

• Change and rebuild relations with Diaspora Jewry. World Jewry is our family. It is also a strategic and diplomatic asset that we need to preserve.

• Strengthen Israel’s integration into the region. Egypt and the United Arab Emirates are the key countries. An agreement with Saudi Arabia is, of course, a major objective for the coming years. We can and should advance a peace agreement with them, but with one reservation: Israel must prevent uranium enrichment on Saudi soil at all costs. Qatar should be declared an enemy state. Then there is the challenge posed by Turkey. We need to explore whether it is possible to lower the temperature. This confrontation is not good for us.

• Better and more effectively integrate economic policy with foreign policy.

• The public diplomacy front. We need to make sure that the people representing us abroad, around the world, are skilled, understand the spirit of the times, know the different arenas, know how to reach young people, and are professionals on social media. A lot more Noa Tishby, a lot less Orit Strock.

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IDF SPOKESPERSON REPORT ON INCIDENTS OF SEVERAL CIVILIAN DEATHS IN GAZA

The IDF Spokesperson’s Unit released its findings on several incidents in Gaza involving the deaths of non-combatants. The findings received widespread international coverage, including in The New York Times. Here is the IDF’s official statement:

Updates Regarding Several Incidents Examined by the IDF General Staff Fact-Finding Assessment Mechanism • August 19, 2026

For more than a thousand days, the IDF has been engaged in intensive combat on numerous fronts, carrying out a wide range of missions in an extremely complex operational environment. As part of the IDF’s obligations under international and Israeli law, the IDF investigates exceptional incidents that occur during combat. Several years ago, pursuant to a government decision, the IDF established the General Staff Fact-Finding Assessment Mechanism to examine exceptional operational incidents. The mechanism operates under the directive of the Chief of the General Staff, and its role is to conduct factual assessments of exceptional operational incidents using a variety of tools and methods.

Its investigations assist IDF commanders in making command decisions and also provide a basis for decisions by the Military Advocate General’s Corps regarding whether to open a criminal investigation. Since the outbreak of the war, the mechanism has completed investigations into approximately 150 incidents and referred them to the Military Advocate General’s Corps for review. Recently, legal decisions were reached regarding five incidents that received significant public attention. The decisions are detailed below.

1. Deaths of Seven WCK (World Central Kitchen) Employees and Damage to the Organization’s Vehicles in Deir al-Balah, April 2024

On April 1, 2024, during a World Central Kitchen operation to deliver humanitarian aid in the Gaza Strip, fire was directed at the organization’s vehicles, resulting in the deaths of seven WCK employees. The investigation found that earlier that day IDF forces had identified an armed individual on a truck in the humanitarian aid convoy as it traveled toward a warehouse where the aid was to be unloaded. They also identified vehicles surrounding the trucks in a manner that, in their assessment and based on the accumulated operational experience of those involved, was consistent with a scenario in which the Hamas terrorist organization had taken control of the convoy.

The investigation further found that WCK personnel had hired an armed security force to accompany the convoy until the operation was completed and to protect it against a takeover by armed groups in Gaza. This was done because the convoy’s departure from the pier where the aid had been collected was delayed until nighttime. The presence of this armed security force in the organization’s vehicles had not been coordinated with the IDF.

After the convoy arrived at the designated warehouse, several individuals were mistakenly identified—as later became clear—as armed men. They entered vehicles that began traveling south from the warehouse, deviating from the route that the organization had coordinated in advance with the IDF. Accordingly, and because the force on the ground assessed that Hamas operatives had taken control of the convoy before it reached the warehouse, the operational personnel mistakenly concluded that Hamas military operatives were inside the vehicles and therefore attacked them.

The investigation also found that during these events, IDF personnel attempted to contact WCK representatives to verify their assessment that the people in the vehicles were not members of the organization. These attempts, made during the approximately half-hour in which the convoy vehicles—believed to contain Hamas operatives—were being tracked, were unsuccessful.

After the findings of the initial investigation were presented to him shortly after the incident, and in light of its grave consequences, the Chief of Staff at the time decided to dismiss the brigade fire-support commander, an officer with the rank of major, and the brigade chief of staff, a reserve colonel, from their positions. In addition, the brigade commander, a colonel; the commander of the 162nd Division, a brigadier general; and the commander of Southern Command, a major general, received formal command reprimands.

Because of a prior professional acquaintance with one of those involved in the incident, the Military Advocate General recused himself from personally making the decision in this case, and the decision was instead made by the Chief Military Prosecutor. After reviewing all the findings of the factual assessment, it was determined that although there were failures in the process that led to the assessment that Hamas operatives were traveling in the vehicles, the commanders’ decisions did not cross the threshold of criminal conduct, given the sequence of suspicious indicators and the totality of the operational circumstances. It was therefore determined that there was no reasonable suspicion of a criminal offense that would justify opening a criminal investigation or taking additional measures against those involved beyond those already described above.

2. Firing at the Hamada Family Vehicle and an Ambulance, Resulting in the Deaths of Nine People, Including Hind Rajab, in Gaza City, January 2024

On January 29, 2024, media reports were published alleging that IDF forces had fired at a vehicle belonging to members of the Hamada family in Gaza City. The investigation found that IDF forces fired at a vehicle that approached them while traveling against the direction of evacuation announced in advance by the IDF Spokesperson to residents of the area. According to the published reports, the vehicle belonged to the Hamada family. Five of its occupants were killed in the shooting, while two survived—Hind Rajab and her cousin Layan.

In the hours following the shooting, after a telephone call with rescue personnel in which both girls initially participated and later Hind alone remained on the line, the movement of a Palestine Red Crescent ambulance was coordinated to evacuate the casualties. However, it was alleged that when the ambulance reached the scene, a shell was fired at it, killing the two paramedics inside. Several days later, the bodies of seven members of the Hamada family, including Hind and Layan, were recovered from the vehicle. The bodies of the two paramedics were also recovered from the ambulance.

After reviewing the findings, and in light of apparent failures concerning the coordination of the Red Crescent ambulance’s movement, it was decided that the incident would undergo further examination through an investigation by the Military Police Criminal Investigation Division (MPCID). In view of that decision, no further details can be provided at this stage regarding the issues raised by the mechanism’s investigation.

3. Deaths of 15 Palestinians, Including Medical Personnel and a UN Employee, in Tel al-Sultan, March 2025

On March 23, 2025, three shooting incidents involving different rescue vehicles—a fire engine, ambulances, and a UN vehicle—occurred during an ambush conducted by IDF forces against Hamas operatives. The factual assessment found that an IDF force was preparing to raid the Tel al-Sultan area in the early morning hours. As part of the operation, an IDF force was positioned in an ambush along a main access route in support of the planned raid. The force positioned at the ambush fired at a vehicle it identified as belonging to Hamas.

Approximately one hour later, the force was informed that five vehicles were approaching it at high speed. The vehicles subsequently stopped very close to the force, and their occupants rapidly exited them. A decision was made to open fire. Approximately fifteen minutes later, the force fired at another vehicle that arrived at the scene.

It was subsequently determined that the vehicles struck in the first and second shooting incidents were a fire engine and ambulances, while the vehicle struck in the third incident was a Palestinian UN vehicle. Fifteen Palestinians were killed in the three incidents, some of them medical personnel and paramedics. According to the investigation’s findings, six of those killed were identified as affiliated with Hamas. After the incident, the force decided to crush the vehicles and cover the bodies with metal mesh.

In light of the investigation’s findings, as presented to the Chief of Staff shortly after the incidents, the Chief of Staff ordered that a formal command notation be entered into the record of the commander of the 14th Brigade and that the deputy commander of the Golani Reconnaissance Battalion be removed from his position. After reviewing the findings, and because it was determined that the shooting during the incident raised reasonable suspicion that a criminal offense may have been committed, it was decided that the matter would undergo further examination through an MPCID investigation. In view of that decision, no further details can be provided regarding the issues raised by the mechanism’s investigation.

4. Deaths of Two MSF (Médecins Sans Frontières/Doctors Without Borders) Employees in the Khan Younis Area, February 2024

On February 20, 2024, an IDF force struck a building in Khan Younis that was subsequently determined to belong to Doctors Without Borders. Two women were killed in the strike and seven other people were wounded. The mechanism’s investigation found that during the evening, as operational forces were moving along a route near Hamas combat compounds—an area over which operational control had not yet been established and where enemy forces were expected to be present—the force observed a building situated at a topographical position overlooking the route along which they were moving.

Because operational personnel assessed that the building’s location posed a threat to them, a single shell was fired at one of its windows, from which the force believed it would be possible to observe their movement along the route and attack them. The investigation further found that, unlike other buildings in the area, the lights in the building were off, and no movement was observed in or around it before the shot was fired. At the time the decision to fire was made, operational personnel did not have up-to-date information indicating that the building was affiliated with Doctors Without Borders.

The investigation also found that the forces were unable to identify signs bearing the organization’s name and emblem on the front of the building because the force was traveling along a route behind the building. After reviewing the mechanism’s findings, it was determined that the forces had fired for a military purpose at a target they assessed, because of its location and under the circumstances described, to constitute a military objective.

Although a gap was identified in that the forces did not have updated information showing that the building was a known Doctors Without Borders site, it was determined that, under the operational circumstances described, there were no grounds for further examination through an MPCID investigation. Nevertheless, because certain failures were identified in the targeting process, the Military Advocate General’s Corps ordered an examination of whether command measures should be taken against any of those involved.

5. Deaths of Two MSF (Doctors Without Borders) Employees in Gaza City, November 2023

On November 18, 2023, shots were fired in the direction of vehicles in a Doctors Without Borders convoy, allegedly resulting in the deaths of two of the convoy’s occupants. The mechanism’s investigation found that the day before the incident, the movement of the organization’s personnel in a convoy from Gaza City to the organization’s clinic in Khan Younis had been coordinated with IDF officials.

The convoy, consisting of five vehicles, traveled along a one-way evacuation route that had been coordinated in advance and arrived at an IDF checkpoint around midday. Final approval for the convoy’s movement had been granted only shortly before it departed, before the force at the checkpoint had been informed of the approval.

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It is worth noting that Likud’s primary was conducted very differently from the Democrats’ primary, which used electronic voting by phone. Nearly twice as many Democrats cast ballots, with turnout approaching 90%, compared with just 52% or 53% among Likud members.

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More important, however, is understanding how the Likud primary system works. There are essentially two kinds of voters: what Israelis call “free voters” and “organized voters.” A free voter decides independently whom to support, goes to the polling station, and casts a ballot. Organized voters are part of groups that coordinate their votes, either by making deals among themselves or by following instructions from someone who has made those deals on their behalf.

This kind of organized voting can take several forms, and some of what was reported yesterday was particularly striking. According to Israeli media reports, at places such as Israel Aircraft Industries, long considered a Likud stronghold, workers were handed envelopes containing instructions on whom to support and then quietly made their way to a nearby building to vote. In one television report, a young ultra-Orthodox man about to cast his ballot said he did not vote for Likud in national elections but had been paid 400 shekels to participate in the primary. He said he had no idea whom he was voting for. He was simply going to cast the ballot he had been given.

Here are the top 25 places on the Likud list following the primary:

1. Benjamin Netanyahu 2. Eli Cohen 3. Reserved* 4. Yisrael Katz* 5. Gideon Sa’ar 6. Amir Ohana 7. Yariv Levin 8. Miri Regev 9. Reserved* 10. Ofir Katz 11. Oren Dobronsky* 12. Yoav Kisch 13. Miki Zohar 14. Almog Cohen 15. Reserved* 16. Amichai Chikli 17. David Amsalem 18. Haim Katz* 19. Moshe Saada 20. Tally Gotliv 21. Shlomo Karhi 22. David Bitan 23. Boaz Bismuth 24. Nir Barkat 25. Gila Gamliel.

* Appointed by Benjamin Netanyahu, or reserved for a Netanyahu appointee

And then there are the losers. A number of well-known Knesset members and ministers failed to make the top 25, meaning we will sorrowfully be saying goodbye to them, at least if Likud wins anything close to the number of seats it currently has in the polls. They include former Shin Bet chief Avi Dichter and Environmental Protection Minister Idit Silman, whose defection from the coalition helped bring down the Bennett-Lapid government.

Yesterday’s Radio Show

TRUMP: NO IRAN TALKS ARE UNDERWAY

President Trump began the morning with a blunt message on Iran, declaring that there are no talks underway and none scheduled:

There are no talks or conversations going on, or scheduled, with the Islamic Republic of Iran. The Naval Blockade remains in full force and effect. The Hormuz Strait is open and operating. All water mines have been removed or detonated. Thank you for your attention to this matter! President DONALD J. TRUMP

This comes after Iranian officials said they would no longer remain on the defensive and were preparing to go on the offensive. What that offensive might look like, we simply do not know. Trump’s post, meanwhile, suggests that for now he intends to rely on the blockade and the economic pressure it creates rather than launch another attack. There are those who believe that strategy could work, but only over time. How much time? No one knows. And therein lies the danger: while Washington waits for economic pressure to take its toll, Iran could use that time to race toward a nuclear weapon

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SEARCHING FOR A GAZA PLAN

It remains unclear what, if anything, was decided at yesterday’s four-hour meeting between Netanyahu, American officials, and other representatives to discuss the future of Gaza. The most tangible outcome was the creation of two working groups. There are reports that Israeli forces have pulled back from their most advanced positions to the original line, leaving Israel in control of roughly 53% of Gaza, down from as much as 70% reportedly held in recent weeks.

At the same time, Israel has continued its attacks on Hamas. This evening, Israeli forces killed several Hamas commanders in the Gaza port area. Palestinian sources claim that a child was also killed in the attack.

SYRIA

Last night, Israel reportedly struck a Syrian airbase in northern Syria. Israel did not initially take responsibility for the attack and still has not officially done so. However, following criticism from the United States and elsewhere, Israeli officials said they had shared sensitive intelligence about the operation with Washington in advance. Exactly what was targeted remains unclear.

The larger problem is Israel’s strategy toward Syria. I continue to believe we could have accomplished far more through engagement with the new Syrian government than we have through continued military strikes. In this case, honey might have served Israel better than vinegar.

Tonight, Prime Minister Netanyahu’s office issued the following statement:

The Prime Minister’s Office:

Israel and Syria agreed to a status quo in security matters, which Syria was on the verge of breaching by permitting Turkish troops to deploy at an airbase near Aleppo.

Israel repeatedly warned Syria that such a deployment would pose a threat to Israel’s security. Syria chose to ignore these warnings. Israel will not tolerate threats to its security, and would welcome a return to the status quo.

THE BEN-GVIR PROBLEM

Ben-Gvir continues to compound the enormous damage already done to Israel’s image abroad. In an interview this week, he said Israel should kill 30 to 40 Palestinians in Gaza every night. The comment was quickly picked up internationally, and it was not long before people were sending it to me and asking what I thought. There is much about Israel today that I am prepared to explain and defend. However, Itamar Ben-Gvir is not one of them.

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ISRAELTECH INTERVIEW

Thanks to our partnership with IsraelTech, here is this week’s video: “The $100B Industry You’ve Never Heard Of,” featuring Hila Goldman-Aslan of RUNI Ventures. Goldman-Aslan’s first startup ran headlong into the 2008 financial crisis. Her second encountered a technical barrier and returned its remaining capital to investors. Her third was acquired by Philips.

Hila Goldman-Aslan did not start out with a particular industry in mind or a single defining idea. What she did have was the conviction that building companies was what she wanted to do. That journey took her from law to gene therapy, security technology, digital health, and eventually venture capital. Today, as Managing Partner at RUNI Ventures, she evaluates founders from the other side of the table.

In this conversation with Yoel Israel, Hila explains why investors begin assessing founders from the first meeting, what Israeli entrepreneurs often fail to prepare for, and why optimism is essential when building against the odds. They also discuss RUNI Ventures, Israel’s strength in medtech, and why Israeli founders are exceptionally difficult to convince that a company is finished.

You can view the entire video here, or check out an excerpt below.

SCIENCE NEWS

Where the Future is Frozen

The coldest place in Israel this August is not on Mount Hermon. It is a laboratory on the Tel Aviv University campus, where machines hold small slivers of matter at ten millikelvin, a temperature colder than deep space. Inside those machines, Israeli researchers are running a race that gets no headlines, no cabinet crises, and no protests outside anyone’s home

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This week we got our first real look at how that race is going. Calcalist published previously unreleased activity data from the Israeli Quantum Computing Center, the national facility that opened at Tel Aviv University in June 2024, operated by the Israeli firm Quantum Machines with backing from the Innovation Authority. The numbers arrive as the Authority prepares its next move: a 100 million shekel call, issued in July, to build a second and far more ambitious national quantum infrastructure.

What the numbers show … The center now serves more than thirty customers, and the list reads like a census of Israeli science. Every one of the country’s research universities is on it, from the Technion to Ben-Gurion, alongside a cluster of startups working at the edge of what physics allows. One of them, Qamcore, uses the center to run thousands of component measurements at those ten-millikelvin temperatures, part of its push to build a complete quantum processor.

The foreign names matter as much as the local ones. NVIDIA chose this facility to develop the first working bridge between quantum and classical computing, the hybrid architecture the whole field believes comes next. The center was also the first in the world to deploy processors from Qolab, the company founded by John Martinis, who shared the 2025 Nobel Prize in Physics. When the newest hardware from a fresh Nobel laureate makes its debut in Tel Aviv rather than in Santa Barbara or Zurich, something is working.

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The model is now being exported. Quantum Machines is building a sister facility in Chicago, inside the Illinois Quantum and Microelectronics Park, based on the systems and know-how developed here. Two years ago Israel was buying its way into this field. Now a piece of it carries an Israeli design.

The honest caveat … Here the historian in me insists on precision. The 2024 center was Israeli in its brains but not in its heart: the quantum processors themselves came from abroad, a superconducting chip from the Dutch firm Quantware and a photonic system from Britain’s ORCA. Israel’s genuine strength was the control layer, the electronics that orchestrate a quantum computer’s operations, which is Quantum Machines’ specialty. Calling that technological independence would be premature, and the Innovation Authority has quietly admitted as much.

That admission is written into the new tender. The 100 million shekel call requires whoever wins it to integrate at least three distinct quantum technologies, superconducting, trapped ions, photonics, or others, into a single national facility. No one on earth knows which architecture will win, so Israel is declining to bet on one horse. For a small country, that is the only rational wager.

A very old habit … Israel has made this kind of premature-looking bet before. In 1954, when the state was six years old and rationing eggs, Chaim Pekeris convinced the Weizmann Institute to build WEIZAC, one of the first computers anywhere in the world. Skeptics asked what a country without highways needed with an electronic brain. Within a generation, the answer was the entire Israeli economy.

The sums involved today are modest by global standards. A hundred million shekels is about 33 million dollars, roughly what the United States or China spends on quantum research before lunch. Israel’s advantage has never been the size of the check. It is the shortness of the distance between a university basement, a startup, and a national decision.

While no one watches … I find something steadying in this story, and I say that as someone who has spent the past years writing about war. The same country that argues itself hoarse over judges and hostages and conscription is also, without fanfare, assembling the infrastructure of the next computing era at temperatures near absolute zero. States are judged by what they build in their worst years, not their best ones.

The race will take a decade or more, and Israel may yet lose it. But this week’s numbers suggest the first bet paid off well enough to justify a second, larger one. In a season when so much of our public life feels frozen, it is worth remembering that in one Tel Aviv basement, frozen is exactly where the future is being made.

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TODAY IN JEWISH HISTORY

2005 The Evacuation of Gaza’s Jewish Settlements

Twenty-one years ago this week, Israel began one of the most painful operations it had ever carried out against its own citizens. Under Ariel Sharon’s disengagement plan, Israel was leaving the Gaza Strip, and every Israeli settlement there was to be dismantled. Thousands of residents had already left voluntarily, some reluctantly and some in despair. But by mid-August 2005, the deadline had passed. Those who remained would now be removed by Israeli soldiers and police.

For the men and women sent to carry out the evacuation, the mission was unlike almost anything the IDF had asked of them before. They were not confronting an enemy. They were entering Jewish homes and synagogues, facing families who regarded the land as their own and, in many cases, as sacred. Most of the evacuations were wrenching but peaceful. In a few places, however, resistance turned into confrontation.

Kfar Darom … The most intense confrontation erupted on August 18, 2005 in the settlement of Kfar Darom. Hundreds of far-right youths had barricaded themselves on the roof of the synagogue, refusing to come down. As riot police climbed ladders to reach them, the protesters pelted officers with paint, sand, eggs, and caustic acid.

Several policemen screamed in pain as burning liquid splashed on their skin, forcing some to tear off their uniforms. The substance was later identified as industrial caustic soda. More than forty people were injured in the clash, most of them police and soldiers.

“This is a disgrace,” muttered IDF Southern Command chief Dan Harel as he watched his forces come under chemical attack from fellow Jews. Despite the provocation, security forces largely exercised restraint. They subdued the rooftop resisters with water cannons and arrests, bringing the ugly standoff to an end without the use of firearms or any form of serious retaliation.

Neve Dekalim … At Neve Dekalim, the largest Gaza settlement, a similar scene unfolded. Approximately 1,500 protesters, many of them non-resident activists, had crowded into the main synagogue. Troops eventually broke through the barricades and carried them out one by one in a grueling but largely nonviolent operation that took many hours.

Elsewhere in Neve Dekalim, holdouts set fire to trash piles and tires, briefly clashing with soldiers before being removed without significant injuries. The images of burning debris in the streets of a Jewish settlement, of young men struggling with Israeli soldiers, captured the anguish of the moment.

In this episode of Tel Aviv Diary, Marc Schulman looks at where Israel stands 70 days before the election. He examines the results of the Likud primary and what they reveal about Benjamin Netanyahu’s continuing control of the party, including the political downfall of former Jerusalem mayor Nir Barkat and the distinctive system of alliances and organized voting that shapes Likud primaries.

Marc then turns to the larger question hanging over Israeli politics since October 7: who has accepted responsibility—and who has not? With no state commission of inquiry and little serious public discussion of Israel’s future defense doctrine, the country is moving toward dramatically higher military spending while simultaneously maintaining forces in Gaza, Lebanon, Syria and the West Bank.

The episode also assesses the election campaign and the increasingly central role of Gadi Eisenkot, whose personal popularity and public image could prove decisive as the opposition tries to assemble a governing majority.

Beyond Israel, Marc looks at the uncertain standoff with Iran after the end of the 60-day ceasefire period, the growing political pressures surrounding America’s November congressional elections, and the problems Israel faces from increasingly hostile voices on both the American left and right.

Finally, the conversation turns to artificial intelligence. Drawing on his own experience using AI to help translate Between Hope and Fear into Hebrew, Marc discusses how quickly the technology is improving, why the economic case for AI may be stronger than skeptics believe—and why older generations in particular should learn to use these new tools rather than avoid them.

A wide-ranging snapshot of Israel and the world in August 2026: elections, war, accountability, Iran, American politics, and a technological transformation moving faster than almost anyone anticipated.

Part of the reason is that Netanyahu has demanded that eight slots be reserved for candidates he wants to add himself. The other is simple arithmetic: Likud currently holds 32 seats in the Knesset, but polling at present with only 22 seats. That leaves a lot of sitting MKs fighting over a shrinking number of seats, with the political careers of some prominent Likud figures hanging in the balance.

It gets more complicated because there are candidates Netanyahu wants to win, and others would clearly prefer to see lose. We will find out tomorrow morning, when the results come in, just how successful Netanyahu was in engineering the list he wanted.

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So far, turnout has been lower than in previous Likud primaries. which may indicate a lack of enthusiasm among party members, although it is too early to draw any conclusions. We will know more tomorrow morning, and I will cover the results in tomorrow’s daily update.

BETWEEN TRUMP AND GAZA, NETANYAHU WALKS A FINE LINE

Jared Kushner, Tony Blair and other members of the Board of Peace met with Prime Minister Netanyahu for several hours today. Both sides described the meeting as productive.

While the meeting was underway, President Trump posted that Israel must stop attacking Hamas in Gaza and that he would take care of the problem himself. Netanyahu’s office, however, said that Kushner had agreed that Israel could continue its attacks.

I am skeptical of those reports. Netanyahu cannot afford to appear to be yielding to American pressure on something as central as Gaza and Hamas. At the same time, he cannot afford a direct confrontation with Trump. His challenge will be to find a way to satisfy Trump without appearing at home to have given in to him.

Trump was asked today about the Israeli elections and said it would be best for him to stay out of them, although he left open the possibility of eventually endorsing someone. For Netanyahu, that is a long way from the support he was hoping for just a few months ago.

THE U.S.-IRAN 60-DAY CEASEFIRE ENDS; THE THREATS BEGIN

The 60-day ceasefire between the United States and Iran officially ended yesterday. Trump once again threatened Iran with renewed military action. He also threatened Oman, warning that if it reaches a separate agreement with Iran that does not reopen the strait, the United States will bomb it.

The Iranians, for their part, are threatening to take the initiative, saying that rather than remain on the defensive, they will go on the offensive against the United States and its allies. The threats keep escalating. The rhetoric gets louder. So far, nothing else has happened. I’m not sure it ever will.

From Washington’s perspective, any renewed fighting is unlikely before the November elections. But politics is not the only constraint. The United States also faces a very real shortage of munitions and needs time to replenish its stockpiles and dramatically increase production.

TRUMP’S LATEST CONCESSION TO KIM JONG UN

I tend not to write about American domestic politics or international politics unless they have some connection to the Middle East. But I can’t resist writing about President Trump’s announcement overnight that he has ordered the Defense Secretary to halt joint military exercises between the United States and South Korea.

Why? Because the exercises might upset his good friend Kim Jong Un, the dictator of North Korea. North Korea is a close ally of China and Russia. It is reportedly preparing to send as many as 50,000 additional troops to support Russia’s war against Ukraine, on top of the weapons and missiles it already supplies Moscow.

So why is President Trump so intent on courting the North Korean leader while leaving South Korea, one of America’s strong allies, out in the cold? It’s like so many things about this president, I truly don’t understand his logic.

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BUSINESS

Maytronics

The Kibbutz that owned half the world’s pool robots

Maytronics confirmed to the Tel Aviv Stock Exchange this morning that it is in preliminary talks with FIMI over the sale of control, and that it is trying to raise 300 million shekels. The money would go against 600 million shekels of bank debt and toward moving manufacturing out of Israel. FIMI, run by Ishay Davidi, holds a short exclusivity, which the fund requires before it will negotiate at all.

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On the surface, the two stories would seem to have nothing to do with each other. The first turned out to be a tremendous false alarm. The two women, it turned out, were not missing at all; they were deliberately trying to disappear. Why, we don’t really know. But there is nothing illegal about disappearing if you are not wanted in connection with a crime—and they are not.

By the time that became clear, however, the country had rallied around the search. The story led the news, the police were deeply involved, and even the security services became involved to some extent. There were hourly updates as Israelis waited for word that the two women had been found.

Why did the country react so strongly? Because the trauma of kidnapping is still very much with us. October 7 remains painfully alive in the hearts and minds of most Israelis, and little has happened since then to lessen its hold. So when two Israeli women suddenly vanished in Europe, the immediate fear was that they had been kidnapped. It turned out they simply wanted to disappear. But we did not know that, and Israel reacted as a country still conditioned to fear the worst.

So how is the second story connected? In the shadow of the war, this government, and particularly the right-wing ministers responsible for policy in the West Bank, have vastly expanded the Israeli presence there. Dozens upon dozens of small settlements and outposts have been established, creating facts on the ground intended to make any future Palestinian state increasingly difficult, if not impossible, to establish.

They are doing this with relatively broad public support. That does not necessarily extend to the actions of the most militant settlers, particularly those attacking Palestinians in their homes. Even there, however, I fear that much of the condemnation has less to do with the morality of what they are doing than with the damage their actions are causing Israel in the eyes of the world. But so much of what is going on in the West Bank has been tacitly approved by a high percentage of Israelis. The violence may be widely condemned; the larger project of changing the reality on the ground is not.

Why? Because the trauma of October 7 came on top of everything that had happened since the hopes raised by Oslo and the Rabin era, leaving most Israelis convinced that there is no realistic prospect of peace with the Palestinians. But I fear something deeper has happened as well. This is no longer only about whether Israelis believe peace is possible. It is also about whether we care what happens to the Palestinians themselves.

A few months ago, I had a conversation with one of the leaders of the Israeli left. Regarding the Palestinians he said “I wish they would just disappear. But I know they won’t simply disappear, and therefore we need a policy that allows us to live together in this land while maintaining Israel as a Jewish state.”

That is the view from the Israeli left. On the far right, there is no comparable search for coexistence; the preferred solution is for the Palestinians to leave and find homes somewhere else in the world. The vast majority of Israelis, however, are somewhere in between.

And then came October 7. It is worth remembering that the October 7 massacre came after years of rocket fire from Gaza, long after Israel had withdrawn from the territory. Before that came the suicide bombings of the Second Intifada, following a period in which Barak had offered the Palestinians a state in Gaza and 95% of the West Bank. In the Israeli collective memory, each attempt to move toward separation or compromise seemed to be answered with more violence and more Israeli deaths.

That history has taken a toll. Many Israelis have stopped believing that peace is possible, and that loss of hope has increasingly given way to indifference about what happens to the Palestinians.

Add to that the Palestinian response to October 7. In surveys conducted in the immediate aftermath of the attack, before the full consequences of the war became clear, overwhelming majorities of Palestinians expressed support for what Hamas had done.

Then there were the hostages. Despite offers of substantial financial rewards, along with promises of safe passage out of Gaza and resettlement elsewhere, not a single hostage was turned over by a Palestinian in Gaza. Not one was independently freed.

So when Israelis hear about terrible things happening to Palestinian families, they may think about it for a moment, or perhaps not at all. But for many, there is little sympathy. What happens to the Palestinians simply no longer feels like something they need to care about.

I understand how we got here. But that indifference costs us something. It takes away a measure of our humanity, and it makes it even harder to find a path, eventually, toward a peaceful future for both peoples in this land. And when I say eventually, I mean a long time from now.

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QUSRA

Over the weekend, it took an entire Golani battalion to protect the Palestinian families in Qusra from a group of settlers besieging them. The battalion left today to deploy north to Lebanon, only to be replaced in Qusra by another battalion.

At the rate things are going, the IDF would need an enormous number of additional troops simply to keep the peace between Israelis and Palestinians in the West Bank. And at this point, it is not Palestinian violence driving the need. It is the actions of Jews who, even when they stop short of violence themselves, are deliberately creating confrontations and inflaming tensions.

LEBANON

Hezbollah has no plans to go quietly into the night. The idea that the terror group was going to disarm was a fine one, but it increasingly seems to have little connection to reality

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The latest evidence came when Hezbollah sent a suicide drone to attack Israeli troops at one of Israel’s northernmost positions in Lebanon. The attack was a clear violation of the ceasefire, and Israel responded by striking Hezbollah positions and killing the commander said to have been responsible for the drone attack.

The United States is trying desperately to reestablish the ceasefire. For now, it is probably not in Hezbollah’s interest to see it unravel, and it is certainly not in the Trump administration’s interest. So whatever Israel might want to do, Washington is likely to constrain both the scale and duration of its response.

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JARED KUSHNER AND EGYPT

Jared Kushner, President Trump’s envoy, is in Egypt today, where he met with President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi. He also met with representatives of Hamas. Tomorrow he comes to Israel, with the goal of moving the Gaza peace plan forward.

There are reports today that the Trump administration has concluded that little meaningful progress on the Gaza plan is likely before the Israeli elections. I think that is a realistic reading of the situation. President Trump, however, will almost certainly want to show at least some sign of progress.

In the meantime, the Israeli government is making sure it does not appear to be yielding to American pressure. The IDF continues to actively hunt down those who took part in the October 7 massacres.

COST OF LIVING

Today I went to the supermarket, as I often do, and needed to buy some chicken. I picked up a package of what Israelis call filet [strips of boneless chicken breast] and was struck by how much more expensive it had become.

There has been endless discussion about Israel’s high cost of living, along with plenty of explanations for why prices here are so high. But chicken is one of the most basic staples of the Israeli diet. So why has it become so much more expensive? I decided to spend a little time finding out.

One of the key arguments Israeli suppliers make is that their costs have gone up and that they are simply passing those increases on to consumers. Well, it turns out that almost 70% of the cost of raising chickens is feed. And guess what? Over the last 10 years, the cost of feed has gone up by just 3%. The price of chicken? Up 30%.

According to an analysis by the Ministry of Agriculture, the amount paid to chicken growers has barely changed. So where did that 30% increase go? To the wholesalers and retailers selling the chicken.

Since the same wholesalers and retailers control the distribution of food throughout Israel, it is reasonable to assume that they are responsible for a significant part of the sharp rise in food prices here. The numbers become even harder to explain when you consider how much the shekel has strengthened and how much of Israel’s food is imported. an A stronger shekel should make imported goods cheaper. Yet somehow, more often than not, they manage to magically creep a little higher.

Prices, it seems, know only one direction in Israel: up. And Israeli consumers pay far more than they should in part because we have nothing like Costco, Sam’s Club or another major warehouse chain with the scale to challenge the existing retailers and keep prices in check.

TRAVEL NEWS

Transavia France is coming back to Ben Gurion a week earlier than planned. The Air France-KLM low-cost subsidiary had set September 8 for its return and has now moved the Paris route to August 31, when it will resume direct service between Tel Aviv and Orly. Marseille and Lyon follow on the original September 8 date.

The Paris schedule will run twelve weekly flights, with two flights a day Monday through Friday and one each on Saturday and Sunday. Calcalist reports September one-way fares starting at €58, with almost nothing left for the month. The airline had announced in June that it was cancelling all flights to Israel for the entire summer season on security grounds. That was ten weeks ago.

The €58 is the number worth sitting with. Israelis have spent three years in a market where El Al held more than half the traffic at Ben Gurion and 92 percent of North American routes, and where the Competition Authority has moved to fine the carrier NIS 121 million for what it characterizes as excessive pricing during a period when passengers had nowhere else to go.

A low-cost seat to Paris at €58 is what the other version of that market looks like, and the fact that September is already almost sold out says something about how much pent-up demand has been waiting to be released.

Transavia joins a broader movement back, with Delta and United among the American carriers restoring service ahead of the Tishrei holidays, and Lufthansa, SWISS, ITA and British Airways having returned over the summer. Each one reduces El Al’s pricing power, which is why the record quarter El Al reported last week is unlikely to be repeated in this form.

Transavia has now left and returned to Israel at least four times since October 2023. It came back in January 2024, left again, returned in June 2025, pulled out again in June of this year with the entire summer cancelled, and is now returning at the end of August, a full season ahead of the schedule it had itself published in June.

For an airline, this is portfolio management. For a family trying to plan a wedding, a funeral, or a school holiday, a confirmed booking with a foreign carrier means that a confirmed booking is a statement of current intent rather than a confirmed plan. That gap is what El Al has been selling, and it is why Israelis keep paying a premium for it even when cheaper seats are visibly available on the same route.

Transavia returning a week early is good news. It is also the fourth time it has been good news.

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TODAY IN JEWISH HISTORY

Birth of Menachem Begin

On August 16, 1913, Menachem Begin was born in Brest-Litovsk, known to its Jewish residents as Brisk. The town sits on the Bug River. Over the course of its history, it passed from Russia to Poland and eventually became part of Belarus. Its Jewish community dated back to the fourteenth century.

Menachem was the youngest of three children. His father, Ze’ev Dov Begin, was secretary of the local Jewish community; his mother was Hassia Begin. He had an older brother, Herzl, and a sister, Rachel. The midwife who delivered him was Ariel Sharon’s grandmother.

In 1915, as the German and Russian armies fought in the region, the family fled east. They wandered for a year before finding shelter in Kobryn. Menachem’s parents and brother were later murdered by the Germans. Of the five members of his immediate family, only Menachem and Rachel survived the war.

Menachem Begin studied law at Warsaw University. He joined Betar, the Revisionist Jewish youth movement in 1929. After the fall of Poland, Begin was incarcerated by the Russians. In 1942, he was released and went to Palestine in the uniform of a Polish soldier.

In 1944, Begin became commander of the Irgun. This underground organization fought the British, and was often criticized for its extremist tactics. One of their most publicized actions was blowing up the King David Hotel in Jerusalem, which was serving as a British military headquarters. After the Declaration of Independence, Begin and his group submitted to the authority of the new state and agreed to disband their organization.

Begin was elected to the first Knesset as the leader of the Herut Party. He remained in the opposition until 1967, when his party joined a unity government. In 1969, Herut resigned from the government over a disagreement on negotiating platforms.

In 1977, the Likud, formed from the Herut and Liberal parties, was able to form a coalition government, and Menachem Begin became Prime Minister. Begin reacted positively to the historic visit of Egypt’s President Anwar el-Sadat to Jerusalem, and successfully negotiated the Camp David Accords, under which Israel relinquished the Sinai in return for full peace with Egypt. Together with Sadat, he received the Nobel Peace Prize. Menachem Begin resigned in 1983 after Israel’s incursion into Lebanon.

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In a remarkable display of tone-deafness, the army initially ordered residents of the surrounding houses to leave their homes so that it could carry out an operation in the village. The order was subsequently overturned by Central Command, which instructed the soldiers to use only unoccupied houses.

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The episode also shows how little some commanders in the field seem to understand the world beyond the immediate operation in front of them. Dozens of foreign news crews are in the area, watching what has unfolded over the past few days and reporting a story that is deeply damaging to Israel’s image abroad—and that’s an understatement. Yet in the midst of all that, commanders on the ground issue an order telling Palestinians to temporarily leave their homes.

People of my generation often have an outdated picture of who Israel’s younger army officers are. In our day, many came from the kibbutzim and the social and political milieu they represented. In contrast, a significant proportion of today’s IDF officers come through the national-religious seminaries or live in the territories. Their political outlook often differs sharply from mine and, more importantly in a situation like Qusra, they may have a very different understanding of the rights of Palestinians living under their authority.

It is worth noting that the situation reached the point where Ambassador Huckabee, one of the most pro-Israel and pro-settlement American ambassadors ever, publicly criticized the Israeli government for failing to act against people he described as Israeli terrorists. It was only after Huckabee intervened that the army finally took action. There was, however, another important detail: the Palestinian owner of the house is an American citizen.

Qusra is not an isolated case. There are believed to be at least six or seven other places where settlers are attempting to force Palestinians from their homes.

A JEWISH NUMBER TWO FOR RA’AM?

In one of the most interesting developments in Israeli politics, former Yesh Atid MK Yoav Segalovich met yesterday with Ra’am leader Mansour Abbas. Both said negotiations were moving forward, and according to reports, the emerging deal would place Segalovich number two on the Ra’am list. He would be free to vote independently on questions of personal status; an important concession given that Segalovich is a strong supporter of gay rights while Ra’am, an Islamist party, is not.

Segalovich’s joining Ra’am could have two significant effects. First, it will clearly bring the party additional votes in the Arab-Israeli community. Segalovich was responsible in the previous government for leading the effort to combat violent crime in Arab communities, and that effort was beginning to show impressive results. He has a reputation as someone who can get things done. Putting a Jewish former minister in the number-two spot could also reinforce Abbas’s argument that Ra’am is a pragmatic party focused on delivering results.

The second effect could be even more important politically. Having Segalovich near the top of the ticket could make it considerably easier for Ra’am to participate in the next government. And if the opposition can count on Ra’am’s support, its path to forming that government becomes considerably easier.

A RECORD DAY AT BEN GURION, AND A ROUTE THAT WON’T TAKE OFF

We are at the height of the summer travel season. A record 150,000 passengers passed through Ben Gurion Airport today, remarkable when you consider that there are still almost no tourists coming to Israel. The overwhelming majority are Israelis traveling abroad, and with many foreign airlines still not flying here, the planes that are operating are leaving at an average 95% load factor. In other words, nearly full planes and airlines making a great deal of money carrying Israelis in and out of Ben Gurion.

El Al, however, has been forced to cancel its planned new route to Vietnam. The airline had announced direct service beginning in October, and according to reports, tens of thousands of Israelis have already bought tickets. El Al has now concluded that it cannot meet the security requirements imposed by the Israeli government on Israeli airlines.

The problem appears to be that Vietnamese authorities will not permit an armed Israeli security contingent to operate in the country, although that has not yet been officially confirmed as the reason for the cancellation.

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RECOVERING FROM A TRAUMA THAT HASN’T ENDED

A new study of the research conducted since October 7 offers a broader picture of what two years of collective trauma have done to Israelis. The systematic review, published in Frontiers in Psychiatry, examined sixty-eight studies published between the attack and its second anniversary, selected from an initial search of 4,588 records.

Its central conclusion is that experiencing trauma is only part of the story. What matters is how intense the exposure was, how long it lasted, what other pressures accumulated around it, and what personal and social resources people had to draw on as they tried to cope. Bereavement, displacement, financial hardship and continued exposure to war can matter alongside the original traumatic event.

The review was led by Dr. Michal Cohen and Prof. Mario Mikulincer of the Israel Center for Addiction and Mental Health at the Hebrew University, together with doctoral student Maor Daniel Levitin. It is the first attempt to bring together the full body of Israeli research on post-traumatic stress, anxiety, depression and addiction since October 7.

What the sixty-eight studies show is that Israelis did not respond to October 7 in any single way. Symptoms declined over time in some populations and remained high in others, with the difference tied less to whether people had experienced trauma than to the nature and intensity of that exposure.

Post-traumatic stress was concentrated among those with direct, repeated or role-related exposure, such as first responders and reservists. Anxiety and depression were associated with a much broader set of pressures, many of which are not trauma in the clinical sense at all: bereavement, displacement, lost income, food insecurity, prolonged threat and heavy consumption of war coverage.

Persistent symptoms were most common among people living with continuing danger and accumulating strain. The implication is important for a country that has been at war for nearly three years: what wears people down may be less the memory of one terrible day than the gradual exhaustion of their ability to cope. The clearest protective factor was other people. Those who felt supported by friends and partners consistently reported lower levels of post-traumatic stress.

For Israel’s health system, the practical implication is clear: the need for mental-health care is not evenly distributed, and a system that treats it as though it were will inevitably miss some of the people who need help most. Screening that takes into account how long someone was exposed, whether they were displaced, what they lost financially and what support they have around them could direct scarce clinical resources more effectively than a uniform national response. And because these pressures frequently occur together, integrated care may be more effective than separate programs built around individual diagnoses.

The review also cautions against treating declining symptom scores as evidence of recovery. Anxiety and depression were associated with impaired daily functioning and reduced quality of life. Whether someone can work, care for a family and participate in a community is a different measure of recovery, and ultimately the one that will determine what this war costs Israel over the coming decade.

The authors are candid about what they still do not know. Most of the evidence comes from screening questionnaires rather than clinical diagnoses, most of the studies capture only a single point in time, and only three of the sixty-eight examined addiction at all.

The review followed PRISMA 2020 guidelines and searched four major databases for studies of Israeli populations published between October 7, 2023, and October 7, 2025. No meta-analysis was attempted because the studies differed too widely in their populations, definitions of exposure and methods to combine their results reliably.

There is also a more fundamental problem. Conventional trauma research assumes an event that ends, followed by an aftermath in which recovery can begin. Israel has not been given that structure. This review is an early attempt to understand what happens to a population expected to recover while many of the conditions producing the fear are still in place.

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FROM TEL AVIV TO THE SAHARA; THE MISSILE THAT HAD TO BE TESTED ABROAD

A cargo aircraft belonging to a carrier that specializes in moving weapons landed in Israel on August 3, loaded equipment, and set down the next day at Tan-Tan in southwestern Morocco, on the edge of the Western Sahara. Two business jets followed from Israel with the crews.

On August 6, the equipment turned out to be a cruise missile called Anthem, built by Covenant Industries, and the U.S. Army photographed the whole thing. The company was founded in 2024 by Michael Kaufman, an American who moved to Israel after working in investment in the United States, including at a Peter Thiel fund, and it has raised hundreds of millions of dollars from Founders Fund, Lux Capital, 8VC, Andreessen Horowitz and Lightspeed while telling the public almost nothing.

It is registered in America, with subsidiaries in Israel and Germany, and staffs its Tel Aviv development operation with veterans of the Israeli defense establishment. US Africa Command’s own account of the launch declined to name the company or give the missile’s range, speed or cost. The photo caption named it anyway.

The test was the first live fire at the Africa Multi-Domain Training and Experimentation Center, a facility the U.S. Army has been standing up near Tan-Tan under a memorandum signed with Morocco in July. American and Moroccan personnel built an expeditionary firing site from nothing and worked alongside Covenant’s engineers, checking communications, watching how the wings and launch trolley behaved in the field, and gathering weather and targeting data.

What that test was really demonstrating became clear the following day. Army Secretary Dan Driscoll told reporters at Camp Grayling in Michigan that the service is opening five ranges to private weapons companies that hold no military contract, promising access within thirty days of a request placed through a marketplace that went live that morning. The current wait can run eighteen months.

Covenant was the first company through the door, and Morocco is the only range on the list outside the United States. Abby Denburg, Covenant’s president, told reporters that the launch proved a repeatable pathway now open to any company, which is a fair description of what the Army was buying.

The commercial logic is straightforward. American stockpiles were drawn down by the war with Iran, a Tomahawk costs what a Tomahawk costs, and there is a market for something long-range and cheap that can be built quickly and in quantity. Politico reported in June that the German Defense Ministry is evaluating Covenant as it looks for alternatives to dependence on American systems, and TheMarker reports that MAFAT, the Israeli Defense Ministry’s research and development directorate, is conducting a staff study on acquiring long-range cruise missiles cheaper than those offered by the large arms manufacturers, at a scale that could reach hundreds of millions of shekels. Denburg has said the company expects to begin delivering production-ready components in early 2027.

Details here come from TheMarker’s reporting by Sagi Cohen, Africa Command’s release and Army photographs, the Associated Press account of Driscoll’s announcement, and Calcalist’s coverage of the test. Covenant declined to comment.

The part worth sitting with is geographic. An Israeli-staffed company cannot fly a long-range cruise missile anywhere in Israel, so it flew its hardware to the Sahara to shoot it over Moroccan sand under American supervision, at the same moment Israel’s own Defense Ministry is studying whether to buy the category.

The Abraham Accords were signed for many stated reasons: diplomacy, trade, tourism, security cooperation and the promise of a different kind of relationship between Israel and the Arab world. Turning the Moroccan desert into a testing ground for an Israeli-staffed company’s cruise missile was not among them.

BUSINESS

Israel Aerospace Industries (IAI)

Israel Aerospace Industries reported the best half-year in its history on Thursday. Net profit for the first six months came to $449 million, up 40 percent from $320 million a year earlier, and the second quarter alone produced $229 million against $156 million. Revenue reached $4.275 billion for the half and $2.189 billion for the quarter, the latter up from $1.618 billion. The order backlog, which is the number that actually forecasts anything, climbed to $35 billion from $27 billion in a single quarter. The Missiles and Space Division, which builds Arrow, passed a billion dollars in sales for the first time, growing 38 percent. Operating profit rose 35 percent, all four divisions turned a profit, and exports accounted for two-thirds of sales, with the foreign business growing faster than the domestic one even as domestic orders rose.

Boaz Levy, who became chairman of the board in May after five years as chief executive, said the long-discussed public offering is closer than ever. The obstacles being cleared are the sort that only a state-owned arms manufacturer faces. A confidentiality order is being negotiated with the Defense Ministry so that reporting requirements on sensitive transactions do not expose classified material, and the Israel Securities Authority is finalizing language. The harder conversation comes next, with the Finance Ministry, over how the proceeds get divided between the state and the company. That is not a technicality. Reuters has reported that privatization proceeds from IAI and Rafael are earmarked for the defense budget under the government’s plan for an additional 350 billion shekels over a decade, which means the treasury has a direct interest in the company keeping as little of the money as possible. The listing is planned for Tel Aviv at roughly 20 percent of shares, down from the 25 to 30 percent Globes reported in April, against a valuation previously estimated near $20 billion that Levy expects to be revised upward.

Levy made two other remarks worth separating from the earnings. He said IAI depends on neither French nor Spanish suppliers and has developed Israeli substitutes for nearly everything, which is a statement about the European arms restrictions of the past two years rather than about procurement, though he conceded that raw materials remain a problem. He also noted that IAI ranks second among Israeli employers in workplace surveys, behind Nvidia, which in a market where every defense firm is fighting the same shortage of engineers is a competitive claim rather than a pleasantry.

Remepy

Remepy, a Ramat Gan company with about sixty employees, closed a $36 million Series A on Wednesday, bringing the total it has raised to $62 million. O.G. Venture Partners led the round alongside M Ventures, the strategic venture arm of Merck KGaA of Darmstadt, with NFX, Vine Ventures, Qumra Capital, TechAviv, 97212 Ventures, Fresh Fund, PsyMed Ventures, Tadmor Group, Key1 Capital and IT-Farm all taking part. The money goes toward co-development deals with drugmakers and toward a global Phase III trial of the company’s lead program, scheduled to begin in the fourth quarter of this year.

What Remepy sells sounds at first like a category error. A doctor writes one prescription and the patient receives two things, a molecule and a piece of software, each meant to do half the work. The company calls these Hybrid Drugs and describes the software as adaptive, pushing physical tasks and cognitive exercises calibrated to the patient alongside the pharmacology. Its lead program, Hybridopa, targets Parkinson’s disease; Remepy reports that Phase IIa results showed improvement in motor and non-motor symptoms, with peer-reviewed papers examining the mechanism behind the effect. Hybridopa remains investigational and unapproved by the FDA. A separate development agreement with Merck KGaA begins with rare tumors. The founders will be familiar to Israeli readers: Michal Tsur, who co-founded Cyota with Naftali Bennett in 1999 and later Kaltura, serves as co-CEO with Or Shoval, and Prof. Amir Amedi of Reichman University’s Baruch Ivcher Institute for Brain, Cognition and Technology is the third founder. Bennett joined the board in February 2024.

Prescription software has been declared the future before, and the last attempt ended badly. Pear Therapeutics won FDA clearance for software treating insomnia and substance use disorder, then filed for bankruptcy in April 2023 after insurers declined to pay for it. The problem was never whether the software worked, but that nobody in the American reimbursement system knew which budget line a software prescription came out of. Remepy’s structure answers that directly by attaching its software to a drug and a pharmaceutical partner, inheriting a payment pathway instead of building one, and inheriting the drug’s regulatory clock along with it. Figures and the investor list here come from Remepy’s August 12 announcement and Meir Orbach’s report in Calcalist Digital the same day. For a country whose pharmaceutical reputation still rests on Teva and on generics, a Ramat Gan company telling Merck what belongs inside a prescription is an unfamiliar posture, and Phase III will decide whether it was the right one.

Google

Google has opened a new front in its Israeli silicon operation, and it staffed it by picking up the pieces of a company that failed. According to TheMarker, the company has formed a group in Israel to design AI chips for edge devices, processors that run models locally inside robots, vehicles and autonomous systems rather than sending the work to a data center. Guy Kaminitz, until recently vice president of R&D at Hailo, announced on LinkedIn two weeks ago that he had joined Google to lead the effort, and a number of Hailo hardware engineers came with him. The group is hiring dozens more. Separately, Ido Bukspan joined last month to run data-center networking silicon. Google built its Israeli chip operation in 2021 inside Google Cloud under Uri Frank, and it now employs an estimated 700 engineers in Tel Aviv and Haifa. Its flagship is Axion, the ARM-based server processor announced in 2024, the first CPU Google designed itself, alongside networking components for the TPU accelerators.

The provenance of the new hires is the story. Hailo raised somewhere above $340 million, passed a billion-dollar valuation, then ran short of cash, cut staff, watched a planned SPAC merger collapse as its valuation fell under $500 million, and took emergency loans from Delek Automotive, which has said it will write off most of its investment. Microchip Technology signed an agreement to buy the company on July 24 and expects to close by the end of September, pending regulatory approval. Google, in other words, is acquiring the expertise without acquiring the company, and it is doing so while the sale is still open. Kaminitz and his engineers spent years building precisely the thing Google now wants, edge AI accelerators for what the industry has started calling physical AI, and Google’s job listings for the group ask for autonomous systems, computer vision and sensor experience.

Bukspan’s route is the more revealing one, because it runs in a circle. He spent more than twenty years across Mellanox and Nvidia, rising to senior vice president of chip design, then became CEO of Pliops. In February, Astera Labs bought Pliops’s assets and intellectual property, paying roughly $70 million against the $210 million the startup had raised and hiring about half its hundred employees. Astera Labs put its new Israeli center under Guy Azrad, who had until months earlier run communications chip development at Google Israel. Bukspan was to work for Azrad and left within months, taking at Google approximately the job Azrad had vacated. Details here come from TheMarker’s report, from Microchip’s July announcement, and from Calcalist’s and Globes’ coverage of the Astera Labs transaction. Israel has perhaps a few hundred people who can lead a chip organization at this level, most of them formed at Mellanox or its descendants, and they are now circulating among a small number of American employers faster than any of those employers can train replacements.

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TODAY IN JEWISH HISTORY

2020 The Abraham Accords Announced

The Israeli government had wanted to annex parts of the West Bank and thought it had the support of the Trump administration, but to its surprise, an agreement on annexation failed to materialize. What emerged from that failure would transform the Middle East. On July 1, 2020, on the drive home from Reagan Airport after returning from Israel, Berkowitz received a phone call from Yousef Al Otaiba, the UAE’s ambassador to Washington.

Al Otaiba had an idea to save the situation: How about the UAE recognizing Israel in return for Israel agreeing not to annex any part of the West Bank? Berkowitz responded: “I had the same idea.”

The United States had been quietly exploring the possibility of UAE-Israel normalization for months. However, the proposal linking normalization directly to an annexation freeze turned an abstract concept into an actionable deal. Work moved quickly. By mid-July, the main points had been agreed upon. It took another month to formalize the announcement, delayed in part because Netanyahu repeatedly got cold feet, fearing the political consequences of abandoning his annexation promise.

On August 13, a three-way call between President Trump, Abu Dhabi’s Crown Prince Sheikh Mohammed bin Zayed, and Prime Minister Netanyahu produced a joint statement:

This historic diplomatic breakthrough will advance peace in the Middle East region and is a testament to the bold diplomacy and vision of the three leaders and the courage of the United Arab Emirates and Israel to chart a new path that will unlock the great potential in the region.

The UAE issued a separate statement clarifying that Israel had agreed to suspend all discussion of annexation. The normalization agreement was comprehensive: full diplomatic relations, extensive trade and tourism, mutual air links. Implementation required overflight rights from Saudi Arabia and Oman, which were eventually granted, enabling not only flights to the UAE but also significantly shortening travel times between Israel and the Far East.

The agreement with the UAE was soon followed by Bahrain, then Sudan, then Morocco. Together, they became known as the Abraham Accords. In doing so, the accords overturned a foundational assumption of Middle Eastern diplomacy: the longstanding belief that Israel could not achieve normalization with Arab states without first resolving the Palestinian conflict. The Arab Peace Initiative of 2002 had made Palestinian statehood an explicit precondition. The Abraham Accords bypassed that premise entirely.

For Netanyahu, the transformation was remarkable. Having campaigned on annexation only months earlier, he now agreed to freeze it in exchange for peace. He recast himself not as the architect of permanent conflict, but as the builder of regional integration. Critics warned that the agreements risked encouraging Israeli complacency on the Palestinian issue, removing the pressure for a two-state solution while the occupation continued. The Palestinians felt abandoned by their Arab allies.

Nevertheless, there was no denying the historic significance. Four Arab nations had recognized Israel in a matter of months. Commercial flights now connected Tel Aviv to Dubai. Israeli tourists flooded Abu Dhabi. Business relationships that had existed quietly for years could now operate openly. The Middle East had changed. Whether the change would ultimately benefit or harm the prospects for Palestinian self-determination remained to be seen.