Nobody Has 61 Seats Yet

Obama on Israel's founding. In Belfast this week, Barack Obama said Jews were "oppressed, discriminated against, killed" for millennia, then added: "What is also undeniable is that they took the land of people and they were expelled." He said Israel has "ceded moral ground" and that he told Netanyahu so. He campaigns in Michigan for Abdul El-Sayed on Oct. 24. ¹

Talarico puts Gaza on Netanyahu. At a CNN town hall Wednesday, James Talarico, the Texas Democratic Senate nominee, said Israel has a right to defend its people but Netanyahu does not have "a right to wage war against civilians." He declined to call it genocide. He is running neck and neck with Ken Paxton. ²

Germany jails two men in an Iran-run plot. A Hamburg court on Thursday sentenced a Danish man to 8.5 years and an Afghan man to 4.5. Prosecutors said the Dane took orders from Iran's Quds Force and spied on a Jewish grocer's shop in Berlin. The targets included Josef Schuster of the Central Council of Jews in Germany and Volker Beck of the German-Israeli society. ³

Israel votes Oct. 27, and this week's polls give neither bloc the 61 seats it needs. A Times of Israel poll taken Oct. 14 and 15 gives Gadi Eisenkot's Yashar 26 seats to Likud's 20, with the Jewish-led opposition bloc at 54 and Netanyahu's bloc at 49. A Channel 13 poll a day earlier had Netanyahu's bloc ahead, 51 to 50. Arab-led parties and the Reservists hold the rest. ⁴

Netanyahu spent Thursday fencing off his own partner. At a campaign stop in Acre, he said Itamar Ben Gvir would not keep the National Security Ministry in his next government and would not be defense minister either. Otzma Yehudit answered, "The cat's out of the bag," and accused him of planning to bring in Eisenkot instead. Ben Gvir told Walla: "I will get more seats, and I will be defense minister." ⁵

Jewish Insider reports that U.S. Ambassador Mike Huckabee met privately with Eisenkot in recent days, the first known meeting between U.S. officials and him. Trump has endorsed nobody, Netanyahu included. ⁶

Also Thursday, about a dozen right-wing activists, among them Otzma supporters Mordechai David and Viktor Shriki, stormed the Tel Aviv building that houses the Joint List's campaign office during a screening of a film urging young people to refuse IDF service. "This here is the state of the Jews," David said. A Hadash-affiliated outlet reported that police showed up after they had left. ⁷

The backstory →

Faber, Sally Rooney's publisher, has stopped selling her books in Britain, in every format. Rooney backs Palestine Action, which the UK banned as a terrorist group in 2025, and has said she would give it her book money. Faber says British law now won't let it pass her UK earnings on, which it called "unconscionable," and that it acted "in full agreement with Sally." In 2021 she refused Hebrew rights to her Israeli publisher over BDS. This year she let Intermezzo come out in Hebrew, through a publisher the boycott activists approved. ⁸

On Wednesday night the Justice Department staged an antisemitism event at Congregation Shaarey Zedek in Southfield, Michigan: a recorded video from Trump, Mort Klein of the ZOA attacking Zohran Mamdani, and ZOA Michigan donation forms for the roughly 500 people there. The synagogue's rabbi, Aaron Starr, told JTA, "It wasn't our event." ⁹

Our view: this is a misuse of the Justice Department. Michigan's Jews have real reasons to worry this fall, and the Senate race there is fair game. A federal event that doubles as a fundraiser for one advocacy group, held in a shul, turns Jewish safety into a campaign prop and tells every Jew who votes the other way that protection comes with a party card. The administration's antisemitism task force can do its job without a donation form on the table. ⁹

In 2025 the ADL documented about 30 Wikipedia editors working together to push anti-Israel framing into the site, and Wikipedia banned some of them. A new ADL report out Thursday finds that 91% of one banned editor's contributions to six major Israel articles are still in the live text. The editor is gone and the edits stayed. Hamas's antisemitism and its use of human shields were moved in 2023 to a separate page called "Criticism of Hamas," which fewer people read. In 2024, a group of Wikipedia editors voted that the ADL is an unreliable source on this exact subject, so that's handled. ¹⁰

Hero: Ruby Chen. His son Itay, an American-Israeli soldier, was killed by Hamas on Oct. 7, and his body was held in Gaza until November 2025. After Wednesday's State Department memorial for the 46 Americans killed that day, Chen asked Congress to push for an investigation and to summon Israeli officials, members of Netanyahu's government included, to testify, because Israel still hasn't set up a state commission of inquiry. "Nobody should be afraid of the honest facts, including the prime minister." ¹¹

Villain: Macklemore. His "Free Palestine" concerts in London, Paris and Dublin will benefit the Palestinian Youth Movement, whose British branch thanked him publicly. The Jewish Leadership Council says the group called Oct. 7 a "prison break," and the Telegraph reported that a PYM Britain spokesperson called the hostage-taking "legitimate." Hamas took 251 hostages that day. Our view: he can sing about Gaza all he likes, and he still chose who gets the money. ¹²

This Shabbat is Parashat Noach, 6 Cheshvan 5787. It runs from the flood to the Tower of Babel, where God scrambles the builders' language before they can finish. With an Israeli election eleven days away, the table can decide which half applies. ¹³¹⁴