Global polls find Israel is the least popular country on Earth, disliked by 67% of people
The comprehensive study found that Israel is the most disliked country on Earth — with an even lower approval rating than North Korea and Afghanistan.
Among young Americans, the trend is even clearer. Only 18% of people aged 18-29 have a favorable view of the Israeli regime. A mere 12% of young Democrats see it positively, while just 28% of young Republicans support it.
By Ben Norton, 20 Oct 26, https://geopoliticaleconomy.com/2026/10/19/polls-israel-least-popular-country-disliked/ Excellent graphics and charts
Comprehensive global polls show Israel is now the most unpopular country on Earth, following its thoroughly documented genocide against the Palestinian people in Gaza.
The organization the Alliance of Democracies conducts a comprehensive study every year called the Democracy Perception Index.
This group is by no means biased against Israel; it is in fact funded by Israel’s closest allies, including the European Union, US government-financed organizations, Ukraine, Taiwan, and major US corporations like Microsoft and Palantir.
Nevertheless, despite its dubious financial sponsors, the Alliance of Democracies publishes interesting polling data.
For its 2026 survey, the Alliance of Democracies interviewed tens of thousands of people in 85 countries, and asked them for their opinion on 132 foreign states and international organizations.
The comprehensive study found that Israel is the most disliked country on Earth — with an even lower approval rating than North Korea and Afghanistan.
The United States, the main sponsor of Israel, is the fifth-most hated country.
The same survey also asked people in 98 countries if they agree more with Palestine or Israel. The majority said they support Palestine. Only a small minority (17%) backed Israel.
Palestine is especially popular in the Global South, which represents the majority (approximately 86%) of the world population.
Global support for Israel has collapsed in recent years, as the settler-colonialist regime has carried out horrifying atrocities in Gaza.
A United Nations independent international commission of inquiry concluded that Israel has committed genocide against the Palestinian people.
This was the one of the most well documented genocides in history. Many of Israel’s atrocities were livestreamed on social media.
The International Criminal Court issued an arrest warrant for Israel’s longest-serving prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, charging him with crimes against humanity.
Pew study found 67% of people across 36 countries oppose Israel
The US-based Pew Research Center similarly found that Israel is now widely disliked worldwide.
Pew surveyed adults in 36 countries in the spring of 2026.
A median of two-thirds (67%) of people have a negative view of Israel, whereas only 25% have a positive view.
Israel is extremely unpopular across Europe, North America, Latin America, and Asia.
India is the only major Asian country where Israel has a plurality of support — and even then, it is a mere 32% of Indians, compared to 28% who oppose Israel.
In the Global South, there is one exception when it comes to Israel: Africa.
Several countries in Africa have significant populations with favorable views of Israel. This is largely due to the spread of Evangelical Christianity on the continent, particularly by US missionaries.
Views of Israel predictably follow political ideology, Pew found.
Leftists across the world have an overwhelmingly negative perception of Israel, whereas the settler-colonialist regime’s main base of support is the right wing — although unfavorable views are growing among conservatives as well.
Support for Israel has collapsed in the US; most Americans now oppose it
The principal sponsor of the Israeli settler-colonialist regime, historically, was the United States.
However, the extremely well-documented Israeli genocide in Gaza has caused a massive shift in opinion among the US population.
More than three-fifths (62%) of North Americans have a negative view of the Israeli regime, according to a Pew poll conducted in May 2026. This is up from 43% in 2022.
Left-leaning Americans are much more critical of Israel, and supportive of Palestinians.
Just 16% of Democrats and left-leaning Americans have a favorable view of the Israeli regime. On the other hand, 51% of Republicans support it.
Among young Americans, the trend is even clearer. Only 18% of people aged 18-29 have a favorable view of the Israeli regime. A mere 12% of young Democrats see it positively, while just 28% of young Republicans support it.
The only remaining significant base of support for Israel in the United States is Republicans over the age of 50.
Israel’s Right Fights Over Who Gets To Rule The Jewish State
SCHEERPOST, October 22, 2026, Mohammad Al-Ayoubi, The Cradle.
Regardless of who becomes prime minister.
With a week to go before Israel’s 27 October election, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his principal challenger, Gadi Eisenkot, are competing for the authority to govern a state whose Jewish identity neither contests. Their camps remain short of a parliamentary majority. Yet the political deadlock is already prompting discussion of arrangements both sides had presented to voters as unacceptable.
Recent polls put the prime minister’s bloc and the Zionist opposition close to a tie, with neither securing the 61 seats needed for a majority in the 120-member Knesset. Another election remains possible, especially while opposition leaders reject governing partnerships with Palestinian parties.
The struggle over who can assemble a coalition is sharpening a more fundamental competition: who can best defend Jewish security and administer the Jewish state.
Understanding that contest requires looking at the transformation of Israeli society, Suleiman Bisharat, director of the Yabous Center, tells The Cradle.
That shift toward the right took hold roughly a decade ago, rather than emerging only during the past two or three years. The electorate has continued moving toward the right and far right, narrowing the political ground on which the main contenders compete.
For Bisharat, the claim that Netanyahu represents the right while Eisenkot stands outside it misreads this transformation. Netanyahu represents the far right or extreme right; Eisenkot also belongs to the right and far right. Their rivalry concerns who can take a harder line on Jewish identity and the principles underpinning the state.
The right competes with itself
The campaign revolves around the identity of the state, enshrined in the 2018 Nation-State Law, and its religious-national character. These questions concern the future organization of a Jewish religious nation-state, including the relationship between its military, religious institutions, and political leadership.
Bisharat argues that Netanyahu and Eisenkot are competing to make their respective right-wing visions more convincing to far-right parties. Netanyahu brought extremist National Security Minister Itamar Ben Gvir into his governing coalition after the previous election and is trying to work with the same electoral logic again. The two candidates’ rhetoric, despite their rivalry, remains within the same ideological orbit.
Dr Saad Nimr, a political science professor at Birzeit University, offers a similar assessment. These elections pit the right against the right, he tells The Cradle, with both contenders operating within the right and far right. He sees little substantive disagreement over the nature of the state: both invoke a Jewish and democratic nation-state.
Their dispute centers on its management. Eisenkot regards Netanyahu as an overbearing leader with whom he cannot work, Nimr says. But both pursue broadly the same direction and share the same general ideas.
Opposition to Netanyahu has brought together politicians whose disagreements over coalition partners exceed their differences over the state they seek to govern.
Netanyahu bargains for survival
Netanyahu enters the election under legal and political pressure, while remaining the dominant figure in his camp. His campaign turns the vote into a referendum on national security and the Jewish identity of the state, presenting him as the indispensable guarantor of both. His emphasis on the multi-front “War of Redemption” also serves to minimize his responsibility for the intelligence failures exposed by Operation Al-Aqsa Flood.
Appealing to his religious and nationalist base, Netanyahu uses the unfinished war to deflect scrutiny of his corruption trial and responsibility for 7 October, casting his removal as a threat to the state’s security and Jewish identity.
At the same time, Netanyahu has begun putting distance between himself and Ben Gvir. Likud signed a surplus-vote agreement with Religious Zionism, leaving Ben Gvir’s Jewish Power outside that arrangement. Netanyahu has also said Likud would retain the defense, national security, and justice portfolios, rejecting Ben Gvir’s ministerial demands.
Culture Minister Miki Zohar has gone further, publicly proposing a rotation government with Eisenkot, with Netanyahu serving first. President Isaac Herzog has also pledged to work to prevent another election. These signals leave open the possibility that Netanyahu’s pressure on Ben Gvir serves a second purpose: making room for an agreement with Eisenkot after the vote.
Nimr says Netanyahu may dispense with Ben Gvir if a broader political arrangement offers a better route to power. Much will depend on Likud’s seat count. With divisions running through the prospective coalitions, Netanyahu will calculate how many partners he needs and what he must concede to secure them.
If his bloc falls short, he will try to gather the necessary votes despite his partners’ conditions, including those of the religious parties. Nimr argues that Netanyahu’s overriding objective is a government he heads, even when the price conflicts with the preferences of his own party.
Eisenkot’s security alternative
Eisenkot has emerged as Netanyahu’s strongest challenger. A 16 October Maariv poll put him ahead on suitability for the premiership, with 48 percent support to Netanyahu’s 41 percent, and projected his Yashar party to win 21 seats against Likud’s 18. Other surveys differ in their margins, but repeatedly leave both camps without a governing majority.
Drawing on his tenure as military chief of staff between 2015 and 2019, Eisenkot presents himself as the candidate of security and unity. His program includes a state commission of inquiry into the October failures, a new national security doctrine, and a comprehensive service law covering Haredim and Palestinians with Israeli citizenship. For the Palestinians, the proposed obligation includes national civilian service, rather than universal military enlistment.
His alternative remains firmly within the state’s Zionist framework. He has made recognition of Israel as a Jewish and democratic state, adherence to the Declaration of Independence, and acceptance of service obligations conditions for coalition partners. He has excluded Palestinian parties on that basis.
Netanyahu and Eisenkot agree on preserving the Jewish state and its security doctrine. They disagree over who should lead it, which parties should share power, and who must serve in its armed forces.
The Haredi price of power
Shas and United Torah Judaism, polling at roughly 14–16 seats between them, sit at the sharpest point of disagreement. They remain central to Netanyahu’s coalition calculations, while their opposition to compulsory military service clashes with Eisenkot’s platform.
Their parliamentary weight makes any settlement over conscription inseparable from negotiations over the next government. Netanyahu has repeatedly sought to shield their constituency from the draft to preserve their support.
The legal basis for blanket Haredi exemptions was struck down in 2024. By October 2026, Israeli reporting put the total number of people classified as evading military service at around 110,000, approximately 80 percent of them Haredim.
The widening pool of draft evaders has made the religious parties’ exemptions increasingly difficult to separate from the burdens imposed on serving soldiers and reservists………………………………………………………………………………………………………………. https://scheerpost.com/2026/10/22/israels-right-fights-over-who-gets-to-rule-the-jewish-state/
Caitlin Johnstone – The Trumpanyahu Administration Is Preparing Another Iran Attack, And Other Notes
Caitlin Johnstone, 23 Oct 26, https://www.caitlinjohnst.one/p/the-trumpanyahu-administration-is-179?utm_source=post-email-title&publication_id=82124&post_id=221731326&utm_campaign=email-post-title&isFreemail=true&r=1ise1&triedRedirect=true&utm_medium=email
Well, it looks like they’re going to attack Iran again. Might be after the US midterms. Might be sooner.
President Trump is telling the press that he is done negotiating with the Iranians and that something will be happening “fairly soon”, while America’s other president, Benjamin Netanyahu, proclaims that the time has come to topple Tehran once and for all.
Haaretz reports that Netanyahu is calling for “preemptive strikes” on Iran, which is empire-speak for “attack completely out of the blue without any provocation or justification whatsoever”.
The New York Times reports that the US and Israel are preparing for an attack after the midterms, with sources claiming that “targets would likely include Iran’s energy infrastructure, nuclear facilities, and missile and drone arsenal” inflicted with the goal of collapsing the Iranian economy.
All this could perhaps be dismissed as empty bluster, except that NBC News is reporting that US troops are being evacuated from their posts in the middle east — exactly what happened in the lead-up to the US-Israeli attack on Iran last February.
Iran is warning that it will hit new targets and expand its strikes geographically in the event of a US/Israeli attack, saying “cables, data centers, artificial intelligence facilities, and numerous other sites will be destroyed” in order to damage US economic interests.
So I guess this is happening. Another brazen assault in an evil war of aggression that makes life harder for people all around the world.
The US empire must end.
Another choice quote from the Bell review on “antisemitism” in British schools which I missed in my write-up yesterday:
“British attitudes relating to Jewish people and Israel show two broad trends. AntiJewish attitudes are typically less prevalent and have remained more stable, whereas anti-Israel sentiments are more prevalent and have been increasing.”
The report explicitly acknowledges that hatred toward Jews is not on the rise, and that only anti-Israel sentiments are increasing. And yet they still published a 107-page review claiming that “antisemitism” is a major problem in British schools.
This tells you everything you need to know about what the word “antisemitism” actually refers to in today’s world. It just means criticism of Israel.
Hat tip to Nate Bear on Twitter for highlighting this quote.
Double Down News has a great report out explaining that the “antisemitism” review was based on heavily manipulated data, ultimately citing the claims of just 29 individuals to justify its outlandish claim that anti-Jewish discrimination is running rampant throughout the British school system.
Anyone who talks about “left wing antisemitism” like it’s a real thing should be immediately and permanently labeled a bad faith actor and an ideological enemy without any further discussion.
❖
Zionism is not a religion, it’s a political ideology which indisputably gives rise to apartheid and ethnic cleansing. You can tell me that your personal religious beliefs compel you to be a Zionist, but then I’ll say your religious beliefs are bad and you should change them. Your religion does not magically exempt you from the basic requirements of human decency.
It should not be taboo to say this. If your religious tolerance prohibits you from telling someone they shouldn’t espouse a racist political ideology which inflicts endless war, genocide, ethnic cleansing, apartheid and abuse upon your fellow human beings, then you have too much religious tolerance.
The Normality of Evil: Reflections on the “NAZA” Documentary
Yakov M. Rabkin 10/19/2026, https://www.juancole.com/2026/10/normality-reflections-documentary.html
Montréal Informed Comment, – Hannah Arendt’s characterization of Eichmann as representing “The Banality of Evil,” the subtitle of her book Eichmann in Jerusalem, shocked many people. It was later criticized in the wake of the discovery of her protagonist’s antisemitic pronouncements, unknown during his trial.
The new film NAZA, documenting the inner mechanisms of the Gaza genocide brings the concept of the banality of evil front stage again. Except that this time we have the testimonies of two dozen perpetrators who, unlike Eichmann, do not face a tribunal but share their experience mostly in a casual and relaxed manner, some with pride in their accomplishment, others with remorse. They sound like normal middle-class men and women conscientiously doing their challenging hi-tech job. These Israelis embody something different from the Nazis who tried to hide their crimes from their own people, whom they feared would not support them. The new film is about the normality of evil in a society that has largely accepted the genocide taking place less than forty miles south of Tel Aviv.
The twenty-four perpetrators interviewed in the film belong to elite intelligence units that harness the power of AI and total surveillance to destroy Gaza. They are not “Arab haters,” remarks one of the interviewees. Yet he believes he killed more women and children than the fiercest Arab hater. However abhorrent the ongoing West Bank pogroms against Palestinians by Zionist squatter-settler vigilantes taking place under the sympathetic gaze and occasional assistance of the IDF—the magnitude of mass murder of civilians in Gaza is incomparably greater.
The perpetrators come from privileged classes of upscale, glittering Tel Aviv, the visual background of the entire film. Among the leitmotifs of the testimonies are the readiness to obey orders and the delight of overcoming difficult technical challenges (technodélice, as the late Jean-Jacques Salomon defined it). “It was fun (kef),” admitted one of the perpetrators.
NAZA is a Hebrew acronym for collateral damage. The association with “Nazi” is not fortuitous; one of the perpetrators compares his experience with that of Nazis engaged in industrialized, albeit less sophisticated, mass murder in the early 1940s. When, like many young Israelis (and Jews from elsewhere), he was taken to visit Nazi extermination camps, he wondered how these Nazis could switch to normal life after killing thousands of people a day. Now, he admits, he knows. He would meet friends after a day of killing mostly women and children and enjoy his night out.
Initially, neither the Nazis nor the Zionists intended to commit genocide. In their exclusivist nationalist fantasies, German National Socialists wanted to expel the undesirables, to make the “purified,” expanded Germany great again and, in the case of the socialist Zionists in power in 1948 and 1967, when massive expulsions took place, to turn Palestine into a “Jewish state.” Both had land lust: the Nazis wanted fertile land in Eastern Europe ‘cleansed’ of most Slavs and all the Jews—while critics and political figures alike have described Israel’s territorial strategy as a pursuit of ‘a maximum of territory with a minimum of Arabs.’
From the turn of the 20th century, Zionist pioneers laid strong emphasis on breeding the intrepid and valiant New Hebrew Man who had broken with the victimhood of the past. In his eulogy for Theodor Herzl in 1904, Vladimir Jabotinsky, who established and shaped the now dominant stream of Zionism, defined the new creature thus:
Our starting point is to take the typical Yid of today and to imagine his diametrical opposite … because the Yid is ugly, sickly, and lacks decorum, we shall endow the ideal image of the Hebrew with masculine beauty. The Yid is trodden upon and easily frightened and, therefore, the Hebrew ought to be proud and independent.
It was only later, faced with resistance kindled by the settler movement, that Israelis assumed the role of innocent victims, forced to defend themselves. Visits to the Nazi extermination camps are essential components of the didactic tools used to forge hard-nosed fighters. No wonder most of them called the attack on southern Israel in October 2023 “the largest massacre of Jews since the Holocaust.” Totally lost was the difference between powerless Jewish civilians targeted by the Nazis and the powerful Jewish state that had expelled and confined Palestinians in an open-air concentration camp in Gaza. Referring to the violence they unleash, the Israelis often use the expression ein brera (“there is no choice”), which preserves their self-image and justifies excesses. This is how the genocide has metastasized from Europe to West Asia.
The film’s protagonists explain how they use sophisticated technology to survey every telephone communication of the Palestinians. One of the phrases AI extracts from millions of conversations is “When does daddy come home?” This is how the decision is made to destroy the suspect’s home along with his wife and children. Behind their computer screens, those who determine such targets can later hear the cries of those wounded children who were waiting for their fathers a few minutes earlier.
Israel, many of whose politicians overtly advocate and pursue fascist policies, is justly proud of being a world leader in technological innovation, a “Start-up Nation.” Its qualitative edge over its neighbours, guaranteed in American law, involves close cooperation with the U.S. military-industrial-digital complex. Forthcoming legislation will formally embed the Israeli military in it. Unlike Ukraine, which serves mostly as a testing ground for Palantir and other Western facilitators of hi-tech warfare, Israeli scientists and engineers actively contribute to the development of new systems such as Lavender, which are widely used against the Palestinians. All this happens within the larger ecosystem of U.S. financial, material, and strategic support. Not only Washington, Berlin, and London but even Belgrade maintain the lifeline, or rather the deathline, of munitions, materiel, and cloud services to Israel. These enable it not only to oppress and kill Palestinians but also to attack other countries, doing, as Chancellor Merz of Germany candidly admitted, “the dirty work for all of us.” There is little doubt that Merz and his Western counterparts were aware all along of the methods that the new film exposes to the public.
Moreover, Israeli expertise in surveillance and population control is in demand around the world. This portends dangers to privacy and democracy elsewhere. Tools of total surveillance may tempt rulers concerned about potential social turmoil and even revolutions against the growing—and unprecedented—economic polarization. Sprouts of fascism have been noticed in a good part of the Political West. ICE activities to target undocumented immigrants in the United States may be just the beginning. The ruling classes’ need to protect their privilege foments connivance with Israel and thereby contributes to the country’s impunity.
Similarly, the penetration of Hezbollah with booby-trapped pagers, which led to the murder and mutilation of thousands of people in Lebanon and Syria in 2024, shows how vulnerable anyone may become by using deceptively inoffensive civilian gadgets. (NAZA does not mention this gruesome episode, which is the subject of another recent documentary.) Israeli officials have bragged that for them the stage is the entire world, and they are the main players on it. Ominously and proudly, Prime Minister Netanyahu said that everyone in the world carries a piece of Israel in his pocket.
The Nazi genocide of Jews, Slavs, and many others shocked Europeans mainly because the victims were fellow Europeans. Their genocides in Africa and the Americas had provoked no comparable revulsion. Another important cause of the shock is the rational organization of the Nazi genocide. Israelis in Gaza used hi-tech, including AI, to raise the level of organization to unprecedented levels. IDF specialists and snipers admit feeling like gods capable of killing people practically at will. Israeli media reported cases of depression when soldiers returned to civilian life. For some, the cause was the loss of the sense of omnipotence. They felt they were no longer gods but just nobodies lost in the crowd. Other IDF veterans experience depression in the face of world opprobrium, which they, convinced of their innocent victimhood, cannot comprehend and attribute to antisemitism.One of the Israelis interviewed in the film was assigned to the political wing, which had to use electronic media to besmirch, discredit, and undermine critics of Israel. (After NAZA was released in cinemas, Israelis promptly produced a fake misleadingly named “Naza: The Real Story. Full Film” in an effort to divert viewers from the original, which, unlike the fake, is so far not available online.) This operation contributes to repressive measures even against political, let alone material, support for the Palestinians in several European nations and in the United States. Criticism of Israel is criminalized as antisemitism. Israeli agents in these countries provide target data — most probably collected by the Israeli intelligence—to police, employers, and universities, which promptly move to intimidate, arrest, deport, sack, and expel the critics. While Israel undermines fundamental freedoms of speech and assembly in most Western countries, it nonetheless is losing the battle for public opinion.
Facing growing public disaffection in Europe and in the United States, Netanyahu promises to turn Israel into a “super-Sparta”—a heavily militarized, self-sufficient society capable of standing alone amid growing international isolation. Israeli politicians and military experts have long concluded that the official definition of Israel as a “Jewish and democratic state” is rent with tension between the two. Liberal democratic values —ostensibly cherished by Western democracies—have to yield to Jewish supremacy. Consequently, peace is no more than a temporary policy option for Israel. To paraphrase von Clausewitz, politics is the continuation of war by other means.
States are inanimate but are operated by individuals. While the psychological and political range among the Israelis is broad, the film NAZA illustrates the striking success of breeding the New Hebrew Man liberated from the moral constraints of Jewish tradition and humanity tout court.
One of Francisco Goya’s famous works is titled “El sueño de la razón produce monstruos.” It is usually understood as “when reason falls asleep, monsters appear.” But the Spanish sueño also means “dream” or “fantasy.” The Zionist state embodies the phrase “Wenn ihr wollt, ist es kein Märchen” (“When you will it, it is no fairy tale”), written by Herzl, the founder of political Zionism, over a century ago. (It bears a striking resemblance to the title of the Nazi cinematographic masterpiece Triumph des Willens, or The Triumph of the Will.) The project that appeared like a fantasy and a fairy tale came true by rational use of political, financial, and human resources. Israel’s actions show that instrumental rationality—a characteristic trait of modernity—can also produce monsters. Moreover, such monsters are convinced that they are normal, and so are most Israelis around them. This makes Israel a serious danger to the region, to the world and, of course, to itself.
Yakov M. Rabkin is Professor Emeritus of History at the Université of Montréal. His publications include over 300 articles and a few books: Israel in Palestine, Zionism Decoded in 101 Quotes Science between Superpowers, A Threat from Within: a Century of Jewish Opposition to Zionism, What is Modern Israel?, Demodernization: A Future in the Past and Judaïsme, islam et modernité. He did consulting work for, inter alia, OECD, NATO, UNESCO and the World Bank. E-mail: yakov.rabkin@umontreal.ca. Website: www.yakovrabkin.ca
The Language of Extermination: NAZA, Artificial Intelligence and Gaza
18 October 2026 Dr Binoy Kampmark AIM Extra, https://theaimn.net/the-language-of-extermination-naza-artificial-intelligence-and-gaza/
The 80-minute documentary NAZA, directed by Yuval Abraham and Rachel Szor, is chastening. It examines the conduct of the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) during its ferocious, unremitting war in Gaza, drawing upon the interviews of 24 anonymised military and intelligence personnel. The interviews were filmed on Tel Aviv rooftops at night, with profiles and voices appropriately altered. The name of the documentary draws on a Hebrew acronym for nezek agavi or collateral damage, an obscene term used when counting the estimated number of civilians who will perish in a military strike. Last month, the film won the Special Jury Prize at the 83rd Venice International Film Festival, receiving a standing ovation lasting 25 minutes.
The interviewees focus on the terrifyingly relevant role played by artificial intelligence (AI) targeting systems used in guiding the bombing campaign launched in response to the Hamas-led attacks of October 7, 2023. In Abraham’s words, “the Israeli intelligence officers we spoke with talked to us about how this mass killing is systemic: not by accident, but by design, actions of murder and policies that are based on the total dehumanization of Palestinians.” One of the interviewed subjects speaks of the goal being “quantity, not quality.” Another notes the conscious decision to target Hamas members, some even in the lower echelons, when they would be at home even if it meant killing family members and neighbours. In one recalled instance, the phone of a 12-year-old girl was hacked to learn when her father would arrive home. The subsequent strike killed her. The cold logic is revealed in the rhetorical question posed by one of the interviewees: “When people talk about ‘flattening Gaza,’ what do you mean if not executing people?’
Despite being placed in a “too hot to handle” category by prominent indie studios, the self-distributed documentary managed to pass the US$500,000 mark in the United States after two weeks of release. Eight days after premiering at New York’s IFC Center, it went on to earn US$125,000. A further 85 theatres across 30 cities across North America then showed the film. Michelle Goldberg, writing in The New York Times, was impressed by the drawing power of the production when attending Walter Reade Theater for a screening. The venue, seating 268, was at capacity. “This is, in my experience, very unusual for documentaries of any sort, even those that, like ‘NAZA,’ win the Special Jury Prize at the Venice Film Festival.”
Militaries specialise in euphemised killing. A dedicated process of terminology and assessment sanitises and exsanguinates: death and murder become justifiable, necessary measures against an enemy bloated with wickedness and venality. In that process, mock tributes are paid to the canon of international law, notably international humanitarian law and doctrines of targeting. The more honest generals do us a favour by boasting about high casualty figures and mass mortality: they are not hiding matters and lurking behind worn ceremonies and the emperor’s non-existent clothes. Take the remarks of a former head of Israeli military intelligence made in a leaked audio: “For every one person [killed] on Oct. 7, 50 Palestinians must die.” Those militaries with a heavily staffed legal department supposedly providing guidance in striking a target, largely to reassure the squeamish that they are not implicated in acts of murder, are always suspect. In that regard, the IDF provides a model example, always claiming to do things differently from other powers in the region, yet resorting to the selective language of exculpation.
The reception of the film in Israel has been markedly hysterical. This was to be expected: the film unmasks and discomfits. It demolishes shibboleths. The IDF chief of staff Eyal Zamir vowed to use “every tool at our disposal” against the production. The Israeli Culture Minister Miki Zohar thought the film treasonous. Abraham and Szor were “willing to harm their homeland in order just to get applause from antisemites around the world.” The irate minister was keen to “act immediately to revoke the Israeli citizenship of these despicable creators for treason against the state,” he thundered in a social media post. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu also called upon the passing of legislation stripping the duo of their citizenship, a curious point given the existing provisions of Israel’s Citizenship Law. (Making German Jews stateless was a specialty of the Third Reich: that the Jewish state would consider this to its citizens is a distinct, bitter irony, yet sadly permissible in light of the Israeli Supreme Court ruling in 2022 validating revocation for acts done in “breach of loyalty to the State of Israel”.)
Activists and members of the far-right party Jewish Power (Otzma Yehudit) led by National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir protested outside the parents of Szor’s house, with a speaker calling for both directors to be executed and the homes of their families to be demolished (collective punishment remains a great inspiration for tribal sentiment).
The IDF has marshalled its own response in a document accusing the filmmakers of presenting “a distorted, misleading and disingenuous picture of the IDF’s target planning and striking process.” The narrative of the documentary drew upon “substantial factual errors stemming from manipulative misrepresentations of reality.” Worth noting here is the lower register of critique that does not entirely repudiate the targeting practices of the IDF, dressed up in the apologetics of collateral damage. Concessions and confessions are always evident from those in and of power who resort to such dismissive language as “misrepresentative” and “disingenuous.”
Be that as it may, the agitated response is illuminating. The Lavender database, to take one objection, was apparently not one of targets, merely “a database that assists intelligence analysts.” This represents a distinction without a difference. The faith placed by militaries in the divinities of technology are hard to shake; there is nothing here to say that such analysts do not treat these data sets as unimpeachable. AI and religious deities serve to do the imagination for others; they discourage independent thinking and verification. Why bother when you have someone, or something else, doing it for you?
The response remains weak in claiming that the IDF believes itself “bound by and committed to international humanitarian law, its operational procedures are designed to implement those legal obligations, and it operates dedicated units and mechanisms to mitigate civilian harm.” The staggering death toll in Gaza, always sneered and jeered at by the Israeli authorities and their defenders, would suggest otherwise. NAZA serves to, as the Israeli American historian Omer Bartov points out, address a “state of denial” by “actually speaking about the issue of what happened in Gaza rather than refusing to speak about it.”
Worried About Russian Meddling In UK Politics? Wait Till You See What Israel Is Up To
Burnham’s exclusive focus on Russian influence almost laughably beside the point. This furious finger-pointing at the Kremlin is designed with one purpose in mind only: to distract the British public from where the real external meddling in our politics is coming from.
October 16, 2026, Jonathan Cook Substack
Andy Burnham’s government is rolling out a new “Centre for Information Defence”. But the outside actors most aggressively undermining what little remains of British democracy are nowhere in its sights
Russia “interfered” in the 2016 Brexit vote by running some “anti-EU” articles on its RT channel and promoting a few internet trolls. Even MI5 has to admit that this activity had no tangible impact on the referendum campaign.
No matter. British prime minister Andy Burnham has once again revived the incendiary claim that Russian disinformation is an especial threat to British democracy. At the United Nations a few weeks ago he announced plans for a National Centre for Information Defence “to detect, attribute and disrupt these kinds of hostile state information attacks”.
For the new British prime minister, as for his predecessors, this is all about Moscow and the UK’s favourite bogeyman, Vladimir Putin. At the UN, Burnham promised British expertise to other European nations to protect them from Kremlin disinformation.
Meanwhile, evidence continues to mount that another foreign actor is meddling even more aggressively in British politics – and neither Burnham nor MI5 have a word to say about it.
Any evidence of Russia disinformation-peddling in the UK pales in comparison to Israeli influence operations – and that’s just the ones we know about. The head of MI5, Ken McCallum, noted that Russian disinformation was neither sophisticated nor successful. The same cannot be said for Israel’s handiwork.
Israel has been using “hasbara” trolls on social media platforms to manipulate public debates in Britain for years – the thrust of the accusation against Russia. But in Israel’s case, it goes much further than that.
This year the Israeli state massively increased its public diplomacy budget to $730 million to expand its influence operations. That includes flying even more politicians, clergy, academics and influencers to bombard them with pro-Israel propaganda they are then likely to spread back home. According to foreign minister Gideon Saar, Israeli advocacy should be treated “like investing in jets, bombs, and missile interceptors”.
”.
There was already plenty of evidence through the late 2010s, as I reported at the time, that Israel was helping to organise, stoke and amplify a campaign to smear its arch-critic, Jeremy Corbyn, as an antisemite, in order to prevent him from reaching No 10 Downing Street.
Not least, Israel did so by advancing a new, bogus definition of Jew hatred through the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA). Usefully, for Israel, that definition largely ignores hatred of Jews to focus instead on criticism of Israel.
That was the most blatant meddling possible in what remains of Britain’s democratic processes. UK politicians and media not only failed to oppose it, but actively sought to amplify the smears.
Civil war
This week the fanatically pro-Israel US lobby group the Anti-Defamation League revealed that it had been working with leading AI firms, which are increasingly being integrated into social media platforms, to suppress what it calls “antisemitism” – or what the rest of us would refer to as criticism of Israel.
CEO Jonathan Greenblatt observed: “We’ve had excellent collaboration with Silicon Valley.” The platforms, he said, would tackle content the ADL doesn’t like “right in the source code” – that is, before users can see it.
That is likely not only to remove criticism of Israeli atrocities and criticism of western governments, such as the UK’s, for colluding in Israel’s genocide but turn social media into a playground for bots and Israel apologists, giving them free reign to spread their propaganda without challenge.
We also know, thanks to the work of the French security services – maybe MI5 was too busy chasing Russian bots to notice – that an Israeli cyber agency called Blackcore targeted the SNP in May’s Scottish elections, as well as meddling in elections in France and New York.
Israeli tech firms, especially those dealing in spyware, intelligence and influence operations, are typically closely aligned with the Israeli state and its military. Most of the founders of tech start-ups are alumnae of the Israeli army’s 8200 intelligence unit.
Alongside the SNP, New York mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani and a leftwing French party headed by Jean-Luc Melenchon were targeted. Why? Because, unlike their political rivals, all had dared to speak out against Israel’s genocide in Gaza
With echoes of what happened to Corbyn, Blackcore’s campaigns were designed to smear candidates. In the case of the French elections, fake accounts were created to accuse one candidate of rape and another of paedophilia.
A new documentary, NAZA, shows how Israel has paved the way in using AI in pioneering new ways to kill on a mass scale in Gaza. It selected banks of targets for assassination, often by murdering those “suspects” when they are in family compounds, slaughtering large numbers of bystanders in the process.
It is therefore hardly surprising that tech firms in Israel have been caught using AI in similarly innovative and indiscriminate ways online, to target western publics with disinformation.
In the summer it emerged that the Israeli government had created a website for a fake “scholarly” think-tank. In a short period of time, it produced prodigious quantities of AI-generated content on Israel, optimised for common search terms, that promoted Israeli talking points and constantly suggested criticism of Israel risked fuelling antisemitism.
It was set up not only to influence internet chatbots into echoing its pro-Israel disinformation but also to integrate its content into what experts call the “underlying training data”: that is, the unquestioned assumptions on which chatbots operate.
Back in May 2024 Meta identified fake Israel-based accounts, “posing as Jewish students, African Americans and other concerned citizens”, peddling pro-Israel content in the US and Canada in support of Israel’s slaughter of Palestinians in Gaza.
Two months ago, Meta again found the same kind of dirty tricks emanating from Israel, this time targeting Britain, France and Australia among other countries. The AI-generated accounts posed “as local, civically-engaged brands, news sources, religious organizations, and political activists”.
Notably in the case of the UK and France, the influence campaigns were designed to stoke “anti-immigrant and anti-Muslim” sentiment. Israel has been critically involved in advancing Islamophobic content, fuelling fears of a supposed “Muslim takeover” of Europe to mobilise support for Israel as a bulwark in the Middle East against Islam, and thereby encourage sympathy for its genocidal attacks on Gaza.
As a consequence, the political landscape in Britain has been disfigured. Support for the far-right has been artificially inflated, polarising British society. The path is being paved towards deeper authoritarianism and the possibility of civil war.
Death knell
None of these dire outcomes, the death knell for what little remains of British democracy, is attracting even the mildest interest from the Burnham government or MI5. Instead, they are chasing what so far appears to have been far more marginal Russian output.
But it isn’t just the influence of Israel we should be worried about. The problem runs much deeper, with a host of other noxious outside actors trying to warp and disfigure British politics in ways that closely accord with Israel’s malign intent. Burnham’s Centre for Information Defence will do precisely nothing to tackle any of it.
Here are two other powerful external actors aligned with Israel in distorting British politics.
The billionaire class, a transnational elite that has no loyalty to Britain, interfere in our politics by making our political parties dependent on their donations. They use their money to buy influence with the main parties – which is why for decades it has made little difference whether we vote for the Conservatives or Labour. We get austerity either way, while the billionaires get permission for their forever wars, directing public wealth away from public services into the arms industries and resource grabs.
Jeremy Corbyn tried to break with this model by funding Labour with small donations from ordinary people instead of the billionaires. As a result, he was destroyed by a confected campaign run by the billionaires, in association with Israel and its trolls, to smear him as an antisemite.
Sir Keir Starmer, Corbyn’s successor, went right back to begging for money from Big Business, got the billionaires behind him, and rolled on with the austerity programme.
Is Nigel Farage’s Reform different? Of course, not. Even before reaching power, he’s dependent on crypto-billionaires living in Thailand and Hong Kong.
Meanwhile, the sometime US trillionaire Elon Musk is busy rallying Britain’s new blackshirts, led by serial fraudster Tommy Robinson, to chase after a few “illegal” migrants rather than identifying the real criminals tearing apart Britain: the super-rich like Musk.
The billionaires both wield and conceal their influence through their ownership of the corporate media. They use the media to aggressively promote their own causes – political and economic policies ensuring their further enrichment – by normalising the extreme ideology of neoliberal capitalism, with its promotion of endless resource extraction through forever wars and the fuelling of needless consumption.
The consequence is the destruction of the conditions for human life on the planet. The billionaires hope they can ride out the catastrophe in their bunkers, or cryogenically freeze their bodies until a point in the future when they can be uploaded to the cloud.
One of the media’s most important jobs is to use smear campaigns to destroy anyone, such as Corbyn and now Zack Polanski, who threatens the billionaires’ privileged position by offering a mildly socialist programme of wealth redistribution..
Vassal state
If the UK media wasn’t entirely captured by the billionaire class – serving as its PR division – then we might know more about the role of the United States in meddling in our politics.
The recent claims of a supposed “terrorist plot” outside RAF Fairford – really a US airforce base pretending to be a British base and one from which the US has waged an illegal war of aggression against Iran – should have reminded us that the Pentagon is largely in charge of UK foreign policy.
The US has some 15 major military bases on British soil, plus half a dozen smaller intelligence sites. As the rightwing US podcaster Tucker Carlson recently observed, the fact that Britain has foreign troops crawling all over it makes us little more than an occupied “vassal state”.
The US recently announced a $4 billion upgrade of its UK bases, including establishing storage sites for its nuclear arsenal. The plan caused barely a ripple of interest among British politicians or the media .
Although our political and media class pretend the UK is an equal partner in a western defence alliance, the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation, the reality is very different. Nato takes its orders from the US, doing Washington’s bidding. That’s why Nato has been pivoting towards America’s biggest economic rival, China, which is, of course, nowhere near the North Atlantic.
When the US snaps its fingers, Britain stands to attention and hikes its spending on the war industries. Along with European governments, the UK is willing to drain its national coffers and scythe through public spending with yet more austerity cuts to support Washington’s military agenda for “full-spectrum global dominance”.
Hidden influence
Much of the US influence on British politics is carefully concealed from view, operating behind closed doors.
In the early 2010s, the US was desperately seeking a pretext to extradite Julian Assange from the UK and lock him up in a super-max jail, hiding him out of sight after his organisation Wikileaks revealed US and British war crimes in Afghanistan and Iraq. It was during this period that Starmer, as the director of public prosecutions, repeatedly jetted off to Washington for secret meetings with US officials.
We will never know what was discussed. Freedom of information requests discovered that his own officials destroyed all records of those meetings.
Once he became a politician, Starmer was recruited to the shadowy Trilateral Commission, originally founded in the 1970s by officials in Jimmy Carter’s administration to deal with the supposed problem of “an excess of democracy” in the US. The commission’s view was that voters were becoming dangerously less passive, at that time over the Vietnam war, and ways needed to be found to return them to docility.
A similar British-American Project cements ties between rising stars in British politics, business and journalism and Washington elites. The power imbalance between the two sides ensures up-and-coming British leaders are readily groomed into an Atlanticist worldview in which the UK is very much the junior partner.
There are a plethora of other “respected’ think-tanks and organisations whose chief role is to embed US policy ideas, especially those relating to foreign policy, in the thinking of British elites. They include the Bilderberg Group, Chatham House, the Council on Foreign Relations, the Atlantic Council, The British-American Parliamentary Group, and BritishAmerican Business.
The US uses its financial muscle through these organisations and many others to manufacture consent for its extreme neoliberal and neoconservative ideologies. The latest example are massive grants to organisations willing to export Trump’s MAGA ideology to the UK, masquerading as a “public education” initiative.
There is plenty of evidence to show that it was pressure from the Trump administration that led to the unprecedented decision by Starmer’s government to proscribe a civil disobedience group, Palestine Action, for the first time in Britain’s history as a terrorist organisation.
Palestine Action had incensed Israel by targeting its weapons factories on UK soil, highlighting another aspect of British collusion in the Gaza genocide, and had infuriated Trump personally by spraying one of his golf courses in Scotland with the words “Gaza is not 4 sale”.
In truth, the ways that the US meddles directly in British politics are so numerous it is virtually impossible to quantify them. Britain is little more than a colony of the US, receiving diktats on important foreign policy issues – especially regarding US and Israeli interests – that the UK is invariably too frightened to oppose.
Burnham is already rolling over to reverse the UK’s decision to honour a ruling from the International Court of Justice and other international tribunals that Britain has no claim to sovereignty over the Chagos Islands and must return them to Mauritius. The UK has faced a temper tantrum from Trump on the matter because the US operates an illegal military base on one of the islands.
Disobedience by the UK is the exception, not the rule. Which makes Burnham’s exclusive focus on Russian influence almost laughably beside the point. This furious finger-pointing at the Kremlin is designed with one purpose in mind only: to distract the British public from where the real external meddling in our politics is coming from.
Caitlin Johnstone: Netanyahu’s Attack on Truth in ‘NAZA’
October 13, 2026, https://scheerpost.com/2026/10/13/caitlin-johnstone-netanyahus-attack-on-truth-in-naza/
The 24 soldiers interviewed for the film are being prosecuted not because they told lies about Israel, but because they told the truth.
Israel is so evil that it’s actually illegal for Israelis to tell the truth about it.
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has just ordered Israel’s military, its attorney general, and its security agency Shin Bet to investigate and prosecute the soldiers who anonymously shared their experiences in the Gaza Strip with the award-winning investigative documentary “NAZA.”
According to Haaretz, Netanyahu accused the soldiers of “serious information security offenses, criminal defamation and harm to Israel’s diplomatic and security interests,” adding that “there is concern that those involved in the defamatory film committed serious criminal offenses by exposing highly classified information and creating a breach in the information security of a highly sensitive intelligence unit.”
Netanyahu’s accusations of “defamation” are contradicted by his other accusation of “exposing highly classified information.” The 24 soldiers interviewed for the film are being prosecuted not because they told lies about Israel, but because they told the truth. The prime minister is claiming the truth causes “harm to Israel’s diplomatic and security interests” because Israel is a state that can only exist on a foundation of endless lies.
If Israel considers the truth a national security threat, then Israel should not exist.
“That which can be destroyed by the truth should be.” This quote by the American writer PC Hodgell certainly applies to an apartheid state which assassinates Palestinian journalists, bans the foreign press from witnessing its atrocities in Gaza, constantly attacks press outlets that report on its abuses, spends hundreds of millions of dollars a year on foreign propaganda and prosecutes soldiers who tell the truth about its war crimes.
It also applies to the U.S. empire, which prosecutes whistleblowers, imprisons journalists for exposing U.S. war crimes, shrouds its actions in a veil of government secrecy, exerts extensive control over the flow of information via Silicon Valley and manipulates the minds of the public using the most sophisticated propaganda system ever devised.
It also applies to abusive relationships that would collapse if the community could see what was happening, or if the victim fully understood what was being done to them.
It also applies to marriages where one spouse isn’t being truthful about who they are and what they do in secret.
It also applies to worldviews that would crumble if contradicting facts were heard and deeply listened to with courage and intellectual honesty.
It also applies to the psychological constructs we hold within ourselves that were built when we were too young to understand the traumas we were experiencing and the maladaptive coping habits we were subconsciously forming to deal with them.
It also applies to the ego itself, which dissolves when sufficient attention and clarity has been brought to its mechanisms through rigorous self-inquiry.
At all levels, human dysfunction is held in place by untruth and dispelled by truth. The lies we hold onto as individuals, as communities, and as a society are what allows suffering and abuse to continue at whatever scale you’re looking at.
Humanity’s collective quest is to become a truth-driven species with a truth-based relationship with reality, because if you’re not dealing with reality as it actually is then you’re not able to respond to your challenges with wisdom and efficacy. We move in this direction by seeing through the mental narratives and perceiving reality as it is actually happening: as individuals, as a society and as a species.
Tell the truth uncompromisingly, come what may. Let all that would crumble under untruth do so as swiftly as possible. May all be revealed. Let us face the ever-expanding light of truth with heroic courage.
Huckabee aide suppressed, doctored US cables to whitewash Israeli crimes: Report
Reports on slain Palestinian US citizens and rampant settler violence were buried or rewritten to praise Netanyahu instead
News Desk, OCT 8, 2026, https://thecradle.co/articles/huckabee-aide-suppressed-doctored-us-cables-to-whitewash-israeli-crimes-report
A senior aide to US Ambassador to Israel Mike Huckabee has been blocking and rewriting embassy reports to Washington to whitewash Israeli crimes in the occupied West Bank and Gaza, the New York Times reported on 8 October.
David Milstein, who joined the US embassy in Jerusalem in April 2025 and serves as a de facto chief of staff to Huckabee, oversees much of the mission’s work on the West Bank and Gaza.
According to a dozen people who deal with him in Jerusalem and Washington, he has used that role to repeatedly suppress or doctor cables on illegal Israeli settlement expansion, settler attacks, the killings of Palestinian US citizens, and deadly aid distribution in Gaza.
Among the reports Milstein buried was a March embassy review of the killings of nine Palestinian US citizens by Israeli settlers and soldiers in the West Bank over four years. The latest, 19-year-old Nasrallah Abu Siyam, was shot dead by a settler in February as he tried to stop the theft of his village’s livestock.
The review was compiled after 30 members of Congress, led by Senator Chris Van Hollen, pressed Secretary of State Marco Rubio for answers. It found that most investigations had gone nowhere, some had been closed, and not one person had been charged.
Rather than send it, Milstein pushed for a reply assuring lawmakers that Israel was handling the cases properly. The State Department letter that reached Van Hollen on 4 May withheld the findings, pointing instead to the embassy’s wartime focus on security cooperation with Israel.
“If you don’t get accountability, you endanger more American citizens,” Van Hollen said.
In the summer of 2025, Palestinians seeking food were being shot dead en masse at the sites of the so-called Gaza Humanitarian Foundation (GHF), a US-Israeli scheme that turned aid distribution into a death trap and killed at least 1,400 aid seekers.
As the killing went on, embassy diplomats warned Washington that the operation risked further mass casualties; however, Milstein rewrote the cable to hail it as a success, erasing the dead from the record entirely.
In April – after senior Israeli commanders warned that surging Israeli settler attacks across the occupied West Bank could spark a new Palestinian uprising – Milstein blocked staff reports relaying the warning, and Washington instead received a cable under his name crediting Netanyahu with cracking down on the violence.
In February, when Israel revoked long-standing legal barriers to Israeli land purchases in the occupied West Bank, a move condemned internationally as fast-tracking annexation, the embassy told Washington the policy served settlers’ “humanitarian needs,” without explaining further.
Milstein also reportedly subjected colleagues to loyalty tests, demanding to know whether they were “pro-Israel” or “pro-Hamas,” four officials said, leaving staff afraid to speak.
Under his watch, some stopped writing reports altogether rather than see them censored, and cables on Palestinian affairs dwindled from several a week to a handful a month.
The Gaza genocide permanently diminished the power of pro-Israel propaganda
Since October 7 and the Gaza genocide, U.S. opinions on Israel and Palestine have drastically shifted. The power of Zionist propaganda has been permanently weakened, and the U.S.-Israel relationship is in a more precarious position than ever before.
Mondoweiss, by Michael Arria, October 6, 2026
For nearly 40 years, Gallup has been asking Americans a series of questions about the Middle East and U.S. policy in the region.
One of those frequent questions is, “In the Middle East situation, are your sympathies more with the Israelis or more with the Palestinians?“
In 2003, just 16% of Democrats said that they sympathized more with Palestinians than Israelis. When the annual survey was carried out this past February, that number had ballooned to 65%.
There are many reasons for this dramatic shift.
2003 was the year that the United States launched its war on Iraq, spurred by government lies and a post-9/11 bloodlust that permeated a sizable chunk of U.S. society. 2026 also saw the United States launch a war in the Middle East, but this one is broadly unpopular with the population, which has naturally grown skeptical of foreign conflict after 20-plus years of disastrous Forever Wars.
The tireless work of Palestine activists has also increased support for the cause, as Americans have developed a deeper understanding of Israeli apartheid and occupation. These efforts found particular resonance during the Black Lives Matter protests of 2020, as many activists stressed the connections between liberation at home and abroad.
However, the biggest reason for the jump is obviously the Gaza genocide and U.S. support for it. Since Israel’s war on Gaza began three years ago, conservative estimates say 74,000 Palestinians have been killed, and more than 175,000 have been injured. More than 1,400 have been killed and nearly 5,000 injured since the Trump administration declared a “ceasefire” on October 10, 2025.
Those Gallup results are just a small part of a vast trove of polling showing that Americans have completely flipped on the issue, and although Democratic voters have soured on Israel at a higher rate, the shift is certainly not limited to one political party.
Here’s some more:
- A Pew report from this past spring found that 60% of U.S. adults have an unfavorable view of Israel, up from 53% in 2025. The country is viewed unfavorably by 41% of Republicans, but that number is 57% among Republicans aged 18-49.
- In addition to Democrats, the aforementioned Gallup poll shows that Independents sympathize with Palestinians more than Israelis, 41% to 30%, for the first time since the analytics company began conducting the surveys.
- A recent Marquette Law School poll found that favorability toward Israel has been steadily declining for the last 20 months.
……………………………………………………………………………. https://mondoweiss.net/2026/10/the-gaza-genocide-permanently-diminished-the-power-of-pro-israel-propaganda/
Israel Could Collapse Soon—Leaked CIA Report Says!
Lee Camp, Oct 07, 2026, https://realleecamp.substack.com/p/leaked-cia-report-says-israel-headed
Dropsite News is reporting that a classified CIA report warns that Israel is at a high risk of civil war and state collapse. Many factors have come together to create a perfect storm crashing down on the apartheid state. (Apparently, committing long-term genocide really takes a toll.)
Some of the problems they’re facing include:
- A completely corrupt political establishment. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is trying desperately to hang on to power because he knows losing the October 27th election could mean prison time.
- Soaring military spending. Not a surprise considering they’ve dropped the equivalent of sixteen Hiroshima atomic bombs on Gaza. (Yes, that’s accurate.)
- A heavily armed populace that is almost completely riddled with psychological trauma. Every Israeli (except the ultra-orthodox) is forced into the military, which means that every Israeli within a certain age range is somehow part of the genocide in Gaza.
- A struggling economy with average households bearing the brunt of the costs of Israel’s multiple wars. Food prices have reached record highs.
- Ever-growing fury among non-Jewish Israelis, who make up 20% of the population.
- Growing global isolation as a dwindling number of people around the world support Israel’s genocide in Gaza and their other belligerent attacks on neighboring countries like Lebanon and Iran.
- Collapse of support even within the US. A record 60% of Americans now view Israel unfavorably. And for the first time since polling began, more Americans sympathize with Palestinians than with Israelis.
- An ultra-orthodox community that is exempt from the military and therefore hated by other Israelis.
- Israel may be facing its “South Africa moment” when global popular culture fully turns against it. The Macklemore catastrophe showed that the world sides with those who speak up for Palestinians, and even hugely popular artists like Ed Sheeran, who claim they love and support everyone, can’t actually hide from accountability.
- Furthermore, as Dropsite makes clear, this leaked CIA report is no collection of fanciful imaginings.
“The writers of this are Israel experts,” a source in the intelligence community noted, “this isn’t a fantastical what-if—with the upcoming election and the fissures in Israel, we should take seriously their conclusion that Israel is one spark away from real internal conflict.”
The genocidal apartheid ethnostate is a powder keg, just one fiery ember away from a truly bloody civil war or even collapse. The propaganda that upheld Israel for decades has shattered into 1,000 pieces. The military dominance that defended the apartheid state while it killed hundreds of thousands of innocent people has been proven weak and fragmented. And the United States, which has served as Israel’s guarantor and enforcer since its inception, is wobbly and unhinged like every late-stage empire.
For all these reasons, Israel may be on the cusp of collapse and even the CIA knows it.
Israel is rewriting the Palestinian curriculum in East Jerusalem to erase Palestinian identity
Now, these tens of thousands of Palestinian children, for the first time since Israel illegally annexed and occupied the city in 1967, are using the Israeli curriculum as part of an effort to “Israelize” the schools.
Nearly 38 percent of Palestinian students in East Jerusalem now study the Israeli curriculum, while the rest of the students’ textbooks are being censored line by line, stripping mention of Jerusalem, prisoners, the Nakba, and freedom fighters.
By Aseel Mafarjeh Mondoweiss, October 5, 2026
Sally Assi, 34, recalled watching her 11-year-old daughter, Aline, a third-grader at Nour al-Huda School in the town of Beit Hanina in occupied East Jerusalem, arrange her drawing supplies before asking her, “Do you know why we draw Jerusalem?”
“Because it’s beautiful… right?” Aline answered.
Assi smiled, but her question to her daughter wasn’t really about drawing. “Jerusalem isn’t just walls and the Dome of the Rock,” Assi told Mondoweiss. “Jerusalem, to our generation and the generations before us, is a living history. It has cities, people, prisoners, stories, dreams.”
What Assi is describing from her kitchen in the town of Betunia, adjacent to Ramallah, is not an isolated worry among Palestinian parents whose children attend schools in East Jerusalem, under the control of the Israeli Ministry of Education. It is the front line of a rapid, Israeli-driven transformation of Palestinian education in the occupied city, where the Israeli curriculum has become mandatory for every first- and seventh-grade class as of this school year, affecting well over a third of Palestinian students in East Jerusalem.
Now, these tens of thousands of Palestinian children, for the first time since Israel illegally annexed and occupied the city in 1967, are using the Israeli curriculum as part of an effort to “Israelize” the schools. In addition, the remaining two-thirds of the Palestinian student body have been subjected to invasive Israeli alterations to the existing Palestinian curriculum, which has included the wholesale deletion of phrases, images, and symbols that denote Palestinian national identity, most significantly references to the Nakba of 1948 and altered phrasings around themes such as Jerusalem, prisoners, and Palestinian heritage.
It’s this quiet encroachment on Palestinian textbooks, as much as the wholesale replacement, that worries Assi most. “We don’t want our children to learn hatred, and we don’t want them to carry pain without meaning,” she said in an indirect reference to Israeli claims that Palestinian textbooks teach children to “hate.”
“But we want them to know the truth,” she added.
…………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………… A trajectory decades in the making
Israeli affairs analyst Esmat Mansour says this shift didn’t begin this year, nor was it imposed by sudden decree. It’s a trajectory that has accumulated for decades, starting with early attempts to impose the Israeli curriculum after the 1967 occupation of East Jerusalem, which was blocked by parent and teacher resistance, keeping the Jordanian curriculum in place for years.
“When the Palestinian Authority was established, the Palestinian curriculum became the city’s reference text,” Mansour told Mondoweiss. “But it never entered classrooms without passing through Israeli review. Books were revised before approval, so the cover stayed Palestinian while the content was reshaped from within. Today, that has escalated into something bolder: direct expansion of the Israeli curriculum itself, not as a marginal alternative but as a primary track competing for the city’s children”.
That pattern of internal revision is exactly what Hebrew University researcher Samira Alian documented in a recent academic study
What Assi is describing, in her kitchen in the town of Betunia, is not an isolated worry among Palestinian parents whose children attend schools under the control of the Israeli Ministry of Education. It is the front line of a rapid, Israeli-driven transformation of Palestinian education in occupied East Jerusalem, where the Israeli curriculum has become mandatory for every first- and seventh-grade class as of this school year.
Now, thousands of Palestinian children in East Jerusalem, for the first time since Israel illegally annexed and occupied East Jerusalem in 1967, are using the Israeli curriculum, as part of an effort to “Israelize” the schools.
It’s this quiet encroachment, as much as the wholesale replacement, that worries Assi most. “We don’t want our children to learn hatred, and we don’t want them to carry pain without meaning — but we want them to know the truth.”
A conflict that moved inside the classroom
In East Jerusalem, the fight over education is now no longer about the number of schools or classroom seats alone. It has moved into the classroom itself, into the book students open each morning, the terms their eyes land on, the images they study, the history they’re taught, and the narrative that will shape how they understand themselves in their city for years to come.
With the start of the 2026-2027 school year, that shift entered a more decisive phase: the Israeli curriculum has been imposed ………………………………………….. https://mondoweiss.net/2026/10/israel-is-rewriting-the-palestinian-curriculum-in-east-jerusalem-to-erase-palestinian-identity/
‘NAZA’ Exposes Gaza’s Killing Machine—and the People Who Want It Hidden
October 5, 2026, Joshua Scheer, https://scheerpost.com/2026/10/05/naza-exposes-gazas-killing-machine-and-the-people-who-want-it-hidden/
Israel’s leaders have threatened the filmmakers. The documentary’s deeper challenge is to a society that treats technical expertise as an escape from moral responsibility.
A government confident in its account of a war should be able to withstand a documentary. Benjamin Netanyahu’s response to NAZA has been to threaten the citizenship of people who expose what Israeli soldiers say happened in Gaza.
According to Reuters, Netanyahu pledged to pursue legislation allowing citizenship revocation for those who defame Israeli soldiers, alongside sharply increased financial penalties. Directed by Yuval Abraham and Rachel Szor, NAZA draws on anonymous military and intelligence testimony alleging that civilian deaths were routinely incorporated into targeting decisions. Netanyahu and the military reject those allegations.
The threat raises an obvious question: If the testimony is false, why reach for the power to strip people of their citizenship?
The film’s significance extends beyond Netanyahu. In his October 2 essay for +972 Magazine, Israeli academic Sebastian Ben Daniel argues that NAZA challenges the comforting assumption that responsibility for Gaza’s destruction belongs exclusively to Israel’s openly extremist politicians and settlers.
His focus is on the prestigious institutions that make military violence possible: intelligence units, the Air Force and the professional culture connecting military service to Israel’s technology industry. The people operating that machinery can consider themselves educated, reasonable and politically opposed to the far right while participating in its devastating consequences.
That is a challenge Americans should recognize. We, too, have learned to discuss war through the reassuring vocabulary of expertise: intelligence assessments, precision weapons, operational requirements. The language sounds clean because it removes the people underneath the bombs.
NAZA confronts liberal Israel with an accusation it cannot comfortably assign to Netanyahu and the far right: The destruction of Gaza depends on prestigious institutions staffed by educated, secular professionals who consider themselves the extremists’ opposite. Political moderation does not erase responsibility, and expressions of anguish cannot redeem participation in mass killing. Ben Daniel also describes liberal media commentators attacking a film they have not watched and questioning anonymous testimony—the same kind of sourcing routinely accepted when it serves the military’s narrative. That selective skepticism protects the institutions under scrutiny while shifting attention away from the Palestinians whose lives those institutions have destroyed.
A targeting system does not bury a child. People authorize an attack, carry it out and defend its consequences. Dividing those actions among departments cannot make responsibility disappear.
For some viewers, the testimony has brought historical questions of obedience and accountability into immediate focus. Reporting for Vulture, Rachel Corbett quoted attendee Roland Lewis: “I couldn’t stop thinking about the Nuremberg trials.”
That comparison is an audience member’s reaction, not a judicial finding. Its force lies in the question it raises: How much moral shelter can anyone claim from a chain of command?
Palestinians should not have to wait for Israeli testimony to make their suffering credible. Their reporting, their photographs and their accounts of families destroyed deserve attention on their own terms.
What NAZA can do is confront another audience with testimony from inside the institutions whose assurances it has accepted. The obligation that follows belongs to viewers, journalists and governments—including Washington, whose support for Israel demands scrutiny alongside the conduct of the Israeli military.
Watching a documentary is a beginning. Accountability requires following the chain of responsibility beyond the screen.
This commentary draws on Sebastian Ben Daniel’s essay in +972 Magazine, Rachel Corbett’s reporting in Vulture and Reuters’ coverage of threats against the filmmakers. Readers can read them here Vulture, MS NOW and +972 Magazine.
Israel to divide central West Bank with settler-only highway
The move is expected to further fragment and isolate the central metropolitan West Bank governorate, which has already been fragmented by Israeli settlements, military outposts, checkpoints and gates.
Aseel Saleh, October 2 2026, https://breakthroughnews.org/2026/10/02/israel-to-divide-central-west-bank-with-settler-only-highway/
In late September, Israeli media reported that Netanyahu’s government intends to adjust access to key routes in the central West Bank. It plans to reopen Route 463 to settler-only traffic in the governorate of Ramallah and Al-Bireh.
Yisrael Gantz, the leader of the Yesha Council (an umbrella organization representing Israeli municipal councils across Israeli settlements in the West Bank and the Jordan Valley) confirmed that plans to reopen the road received preliminary approval and funding.
Preparations are also underway by the Israeli military to complete “the security, legal, and logistical” steps required to reopen the route (also known as Wallerstein Road).
History of the road
The road was paved in 1994 under the directions of Pinchas Wallerstein, a founder of the settlement movement, to connect the illegal settlements of Beit El (north-east of Ramallah and Al-Bireh) and Dolev (north-west of Jerusalem).
However, following the outbreak of the Second Intifada in 2000, the Israeli army barred Israeli people from using the road for security reasons. They also placed a locked iron gate on its end near Ein Qiniya village, northwest of Ramallah.
Why has the reopening of the route raised concerns among Palestinians in the West Bank?
Experts argue that Israel’s move will impact not only the governorate itself, but the entire occupied West Bank because of its central location, major metropolitan status, and role as a commercial hub.
To understand the repercussions of the route reopening, BreakThrough News spoke with Jamal Jumaa, a Palestinian activist, expert on Israeli settlement and apartheid-related issues, and coordinator of the Palestinian Grassroots Anti-Apartheid Wall Campaign (Stop the Wall).
Aside from dividing the governorate’s northern and southern halves, Jumaa noted that reopening the road is dangerous because it will block the center of Ramallah and Al-Bireh from two-thirds of its villages, which are situated to the west.
The prominent Palestinian activist added that when Israel builds such roads for settler traffic, it fences them off on both sides and prohibits the use of adjacent lands. The Israeli authorities consider those lands a buffer zone, citing the security of the settlers as their reason.
“This entails setting up military towers and checkpoints. The road will cut off continuously inhabited Palestinian villages north-west and south-west of Ramallah. Therefore, we are talking about the establishment of roughly four military checkpoints along the road,” he continued.
Jumaa pointed out that the road will complicate the life of Palestinians by restricting their access to vital healthcare and education facilities, including the Istishari Arab Hospital, Birzeit University, and the Arab American University.
He also noted that the intended reopening of the road “is part of dividing and dividing more Palestinians from each other.”
On the political level, Jumaa suggested that the road “hits the heart of the West Bank, which gives a clear signal to the Palestinian Authority that it has no sovereignty over anything.”
It is worth noting that since its establishment, the Palestinian Authority has designated Ramallah and Al-Bireh as a de facto administrative capital. Yet, this has not prevented the Israeli authorities from fragmenting and isolating the governorate by establishing illegal settlements, military outposts, checkpoints, and gates.
Israeli occupation forces near completion of ‘massive trench’ to partition Gaza: Report
Israeli forces are occupying around 70 percent of Gaza while intensifying the siege and continuing the genocide that is entering its third year
News Desk, OCT 5, 2026, https://thecradle.co/articles/israeli-occupation-forces-near-completion-of-massive-trench-to-partition-gaza-report
The Israeli military is expanding its blockade, occupation, and partitioning of Gaza by nearly “completing” the formation of a massive “earthen embankment” or trench across the strip, the Ynet news site reported on 5 October.
“Israeli forces are completing an anti-vehicle barrier consisting of a wide trench and an earthen embankment, while drilling into the ground at regular intervals to ensure no cross-border tunnels into Israel have been missed,” the Israeli outlet wrote.
“The work is taking place east of the Yellow Line, which divides areas under [Israeli occupation] from those controlled by Hamas,” it added.
Ynet went on to say that Tel Aviv continues “targeted strikes” against “terrorists,” referring to the ongoing genocide which has killed over 1,000 Palestinians since the US-brokered October 2025 ceasefire agreement.
“We will act against operatives and kill them one by one. We wait patiently for the right moment to strike with very low collateral damage. There were opportunities when we did not strike immediately because of those considerations,” the report cites Israeli officials as saying.
The report also writes that Hamas remains intact and in control of parts of the strip despite three years of genocidal war aimed at defeating the resistance.
“Three years after 7 October, Hamas still rules Gaza,” the headline reads.
The construction of a massive barrier aimed at splitting the besieged strip in half was initially reported in July this year.
Satellite imagery at the time showed that occupation forces were building a ground barrier extending hundreds of meters beyond the so-called “Yellow Line.”
The barrier is mainly a trench that has allowed Israel to expand its control and occupation of Gaza.
In one part of southern Gaza, the barrier extends beyond the Yellow Line by more than a kilometer, according to Haaretz reporting from earlier this year.
In Khan Yunis, part of the new Israeli barrier extends about 400 meters beyond the line – stretching along the Salah al-Din Road that connects the northern and southern parts of the strip.
Haaretz said that in one area in Rafah, the barrier pushes beyond the line by approximately 1,300 meters. Tel Aviv has been steadily expanding the trench for several months.
The Yellow Line was meant to act as an initial perimeter to which troops would withdraw as part of the agreement last year.
Israeli occupation forces have been pushing beyond it and erecting permanent outposts along the line since the launch of the US October 2025 ‘peace plan’ and so-called ceasefire.
Further withdrawals are contingent on “progress” regarding the disarmament of Hamas, which the Palestinian resistance, as a whole, rejects until the formation of an independent Palestinian state.
Meanwhile, in violation of the US ceasefire plan, the siege of Gaza has intensified. The flow of aid into the strip remains critically low as Israeli forces continue to bar the entry of much-needed medical equipment and supplies – including wheelchairs and other items.
Haaretz said that in one area in Rafah, the barrier pushes beyond the line by approximately 1,300 meters. Tel Aviv has been steadily expanding the trench for several months.
The Yellow Line was meant to act as an initial perimeter to which troops would withdraw as part of the agreement last year.
Israeli occupation forces have been pushing beyond it and erecting permanent outposts along the line since the launch of the US October 2025 ‘peace plan’ and so-called ceasefire.
Further withdrawals are contingent on “progress” regarding the disarmament of Hamas, which the Palestinian resistance, as a whole, rejects until the formation of an independent Palestinian state.
Meanwhile, in violation of the US ceasefire plan, the siege of Gaza has intensified. The flow of aid into the strip remains critically low as Israeli forces continue to bar the entry of much-needed medical equipment and supplies – including wheelchairs and other items.
On 4 October, Israel killed the Palestinian head of a Turkish aid group in a strike on the vehicle he was riding in while in central Gaza’s Deir al-Balah.
Over 1,450 Palestinians have been killed since the US ceasefire plan took effect, according to the Gaza Health Ministry.
The Mask of Civilization, the Face of Apartheid: Netanyahu at the UN
October 2, 2026, Reza Fani Yazdi Informed Comment, https://scheerpost.com/2026/10/02/the-mask-of-civilization-the-face-of-apartheid-netanyahu-at-the-un/
From the heart of a Middle East that has bled for decades under the boots of colonialism, indiscriminate bombardments, systematic assassinations, and the medieval sieges imposed by the Zionist regime, Benjamin Netanyahu’s speech before the United Nations General Assembly was nothing less than the naked embodiment of “the most brazen form of inversion of truth, fascist propaganda, and systematic justification of genocide.”
Before being portrayed as a political event, this speech was a nauseating spectacle: an “accused man wanted by the International Criminal Court” making his escape, as it were, from the defendant’s seat in a criminal court to the podium of the United Nations General Assembly.
What follows is my examination of the criminal rhetoric of this man accused of genocide.
The Greatest Inversion in History: The Accused Perpetrator Posing as Prosecutor
The height of audacity in Netanyahu’s speech lies in his deliberate and deranged reversal of the roles of “perpetrator and victim.” A man for whom the Pre-Trial Chamber of the International Criminal Court (ICC) found reasonable grounds to issue an arrest warrant on allegations including the war crime of using starvation as a method of warfare and crimes against humanity—the killing and systematic infliction of suffering upon hundreds of thousands of people in Gaza—stands calmly behind the podium and calls the victims of his own war machine “terrorists,” while presenting himself as a “defender of civilization.”
This is linguistic colonialism at its most extreme: 78 years of occupation, the bombing of hospitals and refugee camps, and the massacre of tens of thousands of innocent women and children are called “legitimate self-defense,” while the resistance of a people fighting to reclaim their land and human dignity is branded “barbarism.”
An accused man who should have the handcuffs of justice around his wrists stares the world in the face and mocks every standard of human rights.
Invoking Ancient Myths to Legitimize Ethnic Cleansing
Netanyahu’s reliance on the Torah and on narratives dating back thousands of years to justify modern colonialism, illegal settlements in the West Bank, and the occupation of the Golan Heights is a blatant affront to the United Nations Charter and international law.
If geographical borders and the sovereign rights of nations are to be rewritten on the basis of ancient religious scrolls, then no place on Earth will ever be secure.
This approach lays bare the fascist, racist, and apartheid nature of the Tel Aviv regime—a regime founded upon the “dispossession of the indigenous population” and “ethnic cleansing,” and one that brazenly links its crimes to supernatural commandments in an attempt to portray the spilling of human blood as permissible.
Emboldened by Imperialism and Brazen Defiance of the International Community
Netanyahu’s arrogant and insulting tone toward representatives of countries who walked out of the United Nations chamber in protest against the presence of a war criminal—and his branding of them as “moral cowards”—is the product of years of ironclad immunity granted to him by the United States and by Western colonialism and global imperialism.
He proudly speaks of violations of the airspace of countries across the region, targeted assassinations, the bombing of facilities, and wars on multiple fronts.
Such a complete abandonment of even the pretense of diplomatic restraint demonstrates the extent to which the international legal order has surrendered before naked force and imperial vetoes.
The silence or implicit support of Western governments for such positions makes them complicit in every drop of blood spilled in Gaza, Lebanon, Iran, and throughout the Middle East.
Projecting Severe Domestic Crises into Regional Terror and Conflict
Netanyahu bellows about “strategic victories” and the “end of insecurity” while the settler society under his rule struggles with profound psychological crises, economic deterioration, structural protests, and political deadlock.
In order to postpone his domestic trials on corruption charges and prevent the collapse of his fragile coalition, he must keep the machinery of war permanently running and drag the region toward the precipice of a global war.
Bringing technological devices—such as Starlink—to the podium of the United Nations General Assembly and issuing threats against the great nation of Iran is a vulgar spectacle staged by a politician who knows that once the war ends, the final chapter of his political life and his inevitable downfall will begin.
Wait Until the Dawn of Your Downfall Breaks
History has demonstrated with unmistakable clarity that no occupying empire has ever achieved immortality through cluster bombs, indiscriminate killing, rhetoric at the United Nations, and the support of its Western patrons.
What came from the throat of this wanted criminal in New York was not the voice of strength or authority. It was the terrified roar of a declining project and a decaying structure confronted by the iron will of the peoples of the region.
Gaza, Lebanon, and a steadfast Iran stand as living witnesses that the Zionist killing machine will ultimately drown in the quagmire of its own structural crimes.
1 This Month
23-25 October – on Zoom – World BEYOND War’s annual global conferenc
Shut down the radiation-damaged Heysham nuclear reactors now
To see nuclear-related stories in greater depth and intensity – go to https://nuclearinformation.wordpress.com
Say No to NASA’s Reckless Nuclear Reactor on the Moon
Say No to NASA’s Reckless Nuclear Reactor on the Moon
-
Archives
- October 2026 (247)
- September 2026 (339)
- August 2026 (330)
- July 2026 (355)
- June 2026 (287)
- May 2026 (306)
- April 2026 (356)
- March 2026 (251)
- February 2026 (267)
- January 2026 (308)
- December 2025 (358)
- November 2025 (359)
-
Categories
- 1
- 1 NUCLEAR ISSUES
- business and costs
- climate change
- culture and arts
- ENERGY
- environment
- health
- history
- indigenous issues
- Legal
- marketing of nuclear
- media
- opposition to nuclear
- PERSONAL STORIES
- politics
- politics international
- Religion and ethics
- safety
- secrets,lies and civil liberties
- spinbuster
- technology
- Uranium
- wastes
- weapons and war
- Women
- 2 WORLD
- ACTION
- AFRICA
- Atrocities
- AUSTRALIA
- Christina's notes
- Christina's themes
- culture and arts
- Events
- Fuk 2022
- Fuk 2023
- Fukushima 2017
- Fukushima 2018
- fukushima 2019
- Fukushima 2020
- Fukushima 2021
- general
- global warming
- Humour (God we need it)
- Nuclear
- RARE EARTHS
- Reference
- resources – print
- Resources -audiovicual
- Weekly Newsletter
- World
- World Nuclear
- YouTube
-
RSS
Entries RSS
Comments RSS
