Now US support for Israel no longer is bipartisan, and that became obvious during the Biden administration – or actually it started to be obvious with Obama. Now it’s even more true, because there is significant anti-Israel sentiment on the right as well, although nowhere near as much as on the left.

So it’s in Israel’s interest to become even more militarily self-sufficient.

No more aid to Israel would seem to rob the Israel-haters and Jew-haters of a talking point, but not really. First of all, they will lie, and second of all, they have plenty of other anti-Israel talking points to lie about. There’s an almost insatiable appetite for such things.

But anyway, Trump made this announcement today:

“We give them more than anybody else, and they no longer need it. We’ve been doing it for years. I’ve been doing it, but Israel is a very thriving country. They don’t need it. If they did need it, I would say keep it going.”

The president said the idea came from Netanyahu himself, suggesting that the agreement was also made to stop Democrats from using US funding to Israel as ammunition to criticize Republicans. …

“Why should we suffer the slings from lunatics like El-Sayed?” he asked, referring to Michigan Democratic Senate nominee Abdul El-Sayed. who has made Israel aid a flagship issue of his campaign.

“You take that off the table,” Trump said. …

Netanyahu has been publicly pushing to end the aid since at least January, when he told The Economist he hoped Israel could stop relying on American military funding entirely within a decade. By May, he was telling CBS’ “60 Minutes” that he didn’t “want to wait for the next Congress.”

Days before Israel’s Oct. 27 election, he went further, telling Israel’s Channel 10 that the aid “won’t keep coming because America has changed, not because Israel has. It’s over and it will be over; it’s just a question of time.”

That conforms to what I recall in the post-10/7 world. But of course, as I said, it won’t stop the haters.

NOTE: The bulk of that four billion comes back to the US anyway because it has been used to buy our arms (the haters conveniently leave that out). There’s a long post at Ace’s today on the entire subject that I recommend reading.

The post On ending aid to Israel appeared first on The New Neo.

Likud: The elections in the State of Israel were stolen by Arab parties that support terrorism and the elimination of the Jewish state through serious criminal offenses of bribery, threats, violence, forgeries, and the use of prohibited software to mobilize voters.

The Likud party is transferring to the police, the Shin Bet, and the Central Elections Committee hundreds of testimonies and pieces of evidence regarding election theft in many Arab polling stations—thousands of envelopes with cash and Ra’am slips, threats and violence against polling station members, multiple voting behind the curtain, voting with double identities, discrepancies between the number of envelopes and the number of voters, the use of prohibited mobilization software, and more.

We demand from the police and the Shin Bet a thorough investigation into the election theft by the Arab parties and the full prosecution of the criminals.

We demand from the Central Elections Committee an immediate response to investigate these criminal offenses that have severely damaged the integrity of the elections in Israel and the election results.

This is a serious blow to Israeli democracy and the voting rights of Israeli citizens. The law enforcement agencies must act with an iron fist and in an immediate manner.

There are interesting comments at the link, mostly of the “loser, loser!” variety. And yet Netanyahu didn’t actually lose, although he lost seats compared to his majority win in the 2022 election. That majority victory, however, was a rare event in recent Israeli elections; a stalemate has been much more common. His party is the leading party now and his coalition the leading bloc and therefore may be the most likely to be able to form some sort of coalition government.

Twenty percent of Israeli citizens are Arabs, something the Israel-haters ignore except when they want to say that Israeli Arabs are persecuted. But they vote and have Knesset representation. In the recent election the Arab parties did much better than expected, and the question is why.

If there’s evidence of fraud, it needs to be heard. Of course, the left says it’s racist to even consider the question.

The post Did the Israeli Arab parties commit election fraud? appeared first on The New Neo.

It’s interesting, isn’t it? – the “better than expected” part. The not reaching a majority part was completely expected. It had been widely predicted that neither coalition would reach a majority in the election.

The results so far: It seems that the Netanyahu bloc has 53 seats and his opponent Eisenkot’s bloc has 48, with the Arab parties having 19.

If Eisenkot were to form a government it would need to include the Arab coalition. Would he and his allies do so? I don’t think it’s likely, although it depends on how nakedly ambitious they are and how strongly they’re dedicated to stopping Netanyahu. Several of them have gone on record prior to the election as saying they wouldn’t agree to a coalition with the Arab parties, but will they adhere to that? The other alternative would be a coalition government with Netanyahu.

In an opinion piece by an Israeli – in the Netanyahu-hating Guardian – the headline reads, “A bitter night in Israel for all who craved a fresh start. Netanyahu survives for now – and we are more divided than ever.”

An excerpt:

At 10pm Jerusalem time, three television stations published their exit polls by veteran pollsters showing a stinging loss for Netanyahu’s current government. In all three, his current coalition won just 50 out of 120 parliamentary seats, with 70 for the opposition. It was small consolation for Netanyahu that his Likud party held a slight lead over the main challenger, the Yashar party led by former IDF chief of staff Gadi Eisenkot.

Millions of Israelis who voted for opposition parties felt exhilarated. Together, four Zionist lists within the opposition ran a two- or three-seat lead over Netanyahu’s bloc, though neither of those groupings was close to a 61-seat majority. Eisenkot gave a passionate speech about the defeat of the “coalition of failure”, by a “larger and stronger Zionist majority”. ….

Then the counting began. Within hours, Netanyahu’s bloc staged a reversal, pulling significantly ahead of the four opposition Zionist parties many hoped would replace him. The Arab parties retained a strong showing but lower than the original heady projections. But three of the four Zionist parties preferred to exclude them for coalition-building purposes. As a result, even if the total opposition vote outweighs support for the outgoing government, Netanyahu might have done it again.

It is not yet clear if any one group of parties can reach a 61-seat majority. Negotiations to form a coalition will take dizzying twists in the coming weeks; maybe a minority government or a stalemate will be the unsatisfying result.

More here:

Parties opposed to Netanyahu have a clear majority … But they are fractured and divided between right, left and center, and between Jewish and Arab parties.

Eisenkot’s Yashar party is the largest in the opposition, projected to win 21 seats, but his path to power runs through cooperation with the Arab parties, … a scenario not all the party leaders in the opposition are willing to accept.

We’ve seen this sort of thing (or something like it) before in Israel. Netanyahu often has managed to pull out a coalition but in 2019 he failed to do so:

Israeli lawmakers have voted to dissolve parliament after Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu failed to form a coalition government.

The vote triggered a fresh election, which will be held on 17 September.

Mr Netanyahu was unable to reach a deal for a fresh right-wing coalition following last month’s election.

At the heart of the impasse was a military conscription bill governing exemptions for ultra-Orthodox Jewish seminary students.

The upshot was that no one could form a government, and the Knesset once again dissolved itself and there was a third election in March of 2020. Here’s how that went:

The result was initially a stalemate, which was resolved when Likud and Blue & White reached a coalition agreement. Under the terms of the agreement, the premiership would rotate between Benjamin Netanyahu and Benny Gantz, with Gantz given the new position of Alternate Prime Minister until November 2021. …

Netanyahu and the new Israeli government were sworn in on 17 May. On 23 December, the Knesset again dissolved, resulting in the need for new elections.

In that next election in March of 2021, Bennet and Lapid took power by allying with the Arab parties So there is precedent for that, but the whole thing didn’t last very long; in November of 2022 there was still another election and Netanyahu won an outright majority.

The thirty-sixth government, a national unity government formed between eight political parties following the 2021 elections, held the narrowest possible majority (61 seats) in the 120-member Knesset. In April 2022, MK Idit Silman left the governing coalition, leaving it without a majority.

On 20 June 2022, following several legislative defeats for the government in the Knesset, prime minister Naftali Bennett and alternate prime minister Yair Lapid announced the introduction of a bill to dissolve the 24th Knesset, which was approved on 30 June. Simultaneously, in accordance with the rotation government agreement that was part of the 2021 coalition deal, Lapid became prime minister and led a caretaker government until a new government took office.

Within the context of the 2018–2022 Israeli political crisis, this was the fifth Knesset election in nearly four years,

After that experience, it seems to me that there will be a lot of pressure for the two sides to have a unity government and avoid seemingly-endless repeats. Then again, I don’t know that the spirit of compromise looms large.

The post Israeli election results: reports of Netanyahu’s political death seem to have been premature appeared first on The New Neo.

Trump has endorsed him, and Israel is one of the few countries where that would seem to be a plus. The elections are on October 27, and as usual, they promise to be complicated because of the challenges of forming a coalition government no matter who wins:

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu expressed concern over the possibility of failing to win the upcoming election during an interview with Radio North on Sunday.

“We need to make sure we win. I am not certain of my victory, and I am very worried,” he said.

Netanyahu also addressed the possibility that he might fail to form the next government. Asked whether he would retire from politics if he lost, Netanyahu replied, “No, I will not retire from politics.”

Netanyahu alPso criticized his political rivals, including Gadi Eisenkot, Naftali Bennett, and Avigdor Liberman, claiming that a government led by them would depend on the support of Arab parties.

Polls – for what they’re worth – generally say that Eisenkot leads. But in the sort of parliamentary system Israel has, that’s not necessarily all that important:

With just nine days left until the election, Gadi Eisenkot’s Yashar party has maintained a consistent lead over Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s Likud in four recent election polls, but neither political bloc comes close to securing the 61 seats needed for a Knesset majority, according to surveys published by Maariv, Channel 13, Kan News, and Channel 12.

The four surveys paint an almost identical picture: the Zionist opposition averages 51.25 seats, compared with 51 for Netanyahu’s bloc, a virtual tie that leaves the Arab parties and smaller factions hovering around the electoral threshold in key positions ahead of election day.

Netanyahu has held the position of prime minister longer than anyone in Israel’s history: from 1996 to 1999, from 2009 to 2021, and from 2022 till now. So I would never count him out. He’s seventy-six years old at present, but that doesn’t seem such an advanced age these days for a head of state.

The post Elections are coming up in Israel appeared first on The New Neo.

Mamdani’s plan is to have DCWP [Department of Consumer and Worker Protection] work with the City Council on new legislation that would stipulate landlords could require either a credit check — paid for by the landlord or broker — or proof that an applicant’s income meets the common 40-times-the-rent standard, but not both. …

The 68-page report laid out an ambitious slate of tenant-focused proposals, including legally recognizing tenant unions, directing HPD to investigate every heat complaint citywide and requiring landlords to disclose any AI-generated or digitally altered images and videos in rental listings so applicants are not misled by doctored apartments.

The report’s ideas came from “Rental Ripoff Hearings” where 2,300 of tenants across the five boroughs detailed housing conditions, fees and landlord practices they wanted City Hall to change.

The idea, as many people have said, is to reach the endpoint of city confiscation of these rental properties. Freeze rents on rent-stabilized apartment and make it almost impossible for landlords to get the money to pay for repairs and all the rest, and then as landlords pull out of the business entirely the city can take over. There seems to be little to no public acknowledgement by the present city administration that landlords are not money fountains, but that the rental business is subject to market forces and landlords have to make money in order to keep apartments in working order.

Oh, and Mamdani has some other plans of the more international variety:

New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani (D) says he is reviewing whether his administration could arrest Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu during his anticipated visit to the city for the U.N. General Assembly this fall.

The mayor made these comments an interview with Lulu Garcia-Navarro on Saturday episode of The New York Times’ “The Interview” podcast.

“I believe that Prime Minister Netanyahu belongs in The Hague,” Mamdani said. “He’s a war criminal who has been charged by the International Criminal Court, and what you will find is that is an opinion that is held by many, purely because of what his actions have wrought over these past many years.”

No surprise there.

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“In light of Lebanon’s repeated requests to open direct negotiations with Israel, I instructed at the Government meeting yesterday to open direct negotiations with Lebanon as soon as possible,” he said in a statement. “The negotiations will focus on the disarmament of Hezbollah and the establishing of peaceful relations between Israel and Lebanon.”

Ahead of Prime Minister Netanyahu’s statement, Lebanese President Joseph Aoun had called for ‘direct talks’ with Israel, setting an immediate ceasefire as a precondition, the BBC reports:

Netanyahu also said there is no ceasefire and that attacks on Hezbollah will continue.

It’s not the first time the two countries have talked. But I wonder how weakened Hezbollah is at this point, and if it will matter. I think Lebanon would like to be rid of Hezbollah and be its own country for a change, but Hezbollah isn’t on the same page (an understatement).

Does this merely have to do with damping things down in order to facilitate the Iran talks?

The Associated Press reported that the talks would be led on the U.S. side by Ambassador to Lebanon Michel Issa and on the Israeli side by Israeli Ambassador to the U.S. Yechiel Leiter. It’s not clear who would represent Lebanon.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said in a post on the social platform X on Thursday that he directed his government “to open direct negotiations with Lebanon as soon as possible.” The Israeli leader said the talks would focus on the disarmament of Hezbollah and establishing peaceful relations between the two countries.

President Trump on Thursday said he told Netanyahu to scale back Israel’s deadly strikes, as they threaten to upend a tenuous ceasefire between the U.S. and Iran.

“I spoke with Bibi and he’s going to low-key it. I just think we have to be sort of a little more low-key,” Trump said.

In other news, Fetterman says he will vote against a resolution to halt strikes on Iran:

Fetterman, a staunch supporter of Israel, said on Fox News’s “Hannity” that he will vote no on the measure.

“We have to stand [with] our military to allow them to accomplish the goals of Epic Fury,” he told host Sean Hannity, referring to the operation in Iran.

“I’m old enough to remember we used to root for our military, and we would all agree that Iran is the world’s leading terrorism underwriter.”

You can be a toddler and be old enough to remember that.

The post And speaking of negotiations … appeared first on The New Neo.

However, at the outset I want to say that, although a lot of people give the answer “It’s the money, stupid,” I don’t think that’s correct. Or, rather, although that may be part of the reason Carlson says and does what he presently says and does, it is not the main reason, IMHO. Tucker not only has quite a bit of other money, but I think he did not sell himself (to Qatar, for example) and do some sort of reversal for pecuniary reasons because it isn’t all that hard to trace the evolution of his thoughts in a rather straight and consistent line over the last twenty years or more and arrive at where he is today.

Commenter “chazzand” wonders:

The fall of Tucker Carlson has been so disheartening and surprising. And in such a short time. … It’s like someone who was a great friend who then went off the deep end. You can’t bring yourself to rip into him but you let it be known that a wide chasm has formed and puzzling things have to be answered before (if ever) it goes back to normal. I wonder what caused it?

Actually, I don’t think Carlson’s descent was especially sudden, although it may appear that way. I was never a big Tucker fan nor was I a big TV news watcher, network or cable, but I used to watch TV news more than I do now – which is just about never. So, over the years, I’ve watched Tucker Carlson many times in all. For years I considered him okay on many domestic issues, although he always had a smirky snarky quality that seemed juvenile to me, accentuated by the fact that he has consistently looked young for his age (he’s 56 at present).

However, I never thought Carlson was particularly good on foreign affairs; he started reminding me of Pat Buchanan a long time ago on those issues. But I didn’t think too much of it. I considered him a paleocon and an isolationist, but really didn’t think about him all that often for a long long time.

Carlson was still on Fox News in early 2022 when Ukraine was invaded by Russia, and from the start his stance was isolationist. That would not have surprised me; it was in keeping with the general approach he’d had to these things for many years. But that’s not all he was. He was a noticeable Putin apologist and perhaps even admirer, and seemed to hate Zelensky with an intense venom right from the start, which seemed strange considering that Russia had done the invading. At the time, I was only tuning in to Carlson every now and then, but I saw several examples of Carlson’s hatred of Zelensky; I no longer remember the exact quotes, and I didn’t witness this particular episode, but it’s a good example of the genre:

“Now you see [Zelensky] on television, and it’s true you might form a different impression. Sweaty and rat-like, a comedian turned oligarch, a persecutor of Christians, a friend of BlackRock.”

There’s a big clue there. But to explain it, I’ll need to go back in time.

I think I first saw Carlson on CNN’s Crossfire, which he co-hosted from 2001 to 2005. Those were the bowtie years for Tucker, if I’m not mistaken. He seemed a fairly typical conservative at first, and one of the things I recall fairly vividly was that he supported the invasion of Iraq during the Bush administration, but then changed his mind. He felt he’d been duped into supporting it, and he was both angry and embarrassed about that. Not a good combination.

Please take a look at this from 2004, when he said the following [emphasis mine]:

I think it’s [that is, the Iraq War is] a total nightmare and disaster, and I’m ashamed that I went against my own instincts in supporting it,” he said. “It’s something I’ll never do again. Never. I got convinced by a friend of mine who’s smarter than I am, and I shouldn’t have done that. No. I want things to work out, but I’m enraged by it, actually.”

Obviously that was a huge regret of his, and a source of anger towards those he believes talked him into it. It’s become customary to use the word “neocon” to refer to the people who urged Bush to undertake that war, and although many of them were not the least bit Jewish (nor were they “newly conservative,” one of the original meanings of the term), the phrase “neocon” rather quickly became a kind of code word for “Jew” and even “warmongering Jew.” I believe that in Carlson’s mind, the term “neocon” came to stand for all the people he was angry at because he believed (and continues to believe) that they had led him astray into what he considers his major error of judgment on Iraq, and he thought many of them were Jews and were working on behalf of Israel’s interests.

I’m not going to re-argue the reasons for the Iraq War here; I’ve got plenty of posts on the subject already and the subject is well-aired. But the reason I am bringing it up now is that it seems clear to me that for Tucker, it was an intensely painful turning point. I date his reaction to that war as the start of his more extreme stance of isolationism, and his distrust of anyone with even a hint of advocacy of American entry into wars or even financial or political support of wars. These people were automatically suspect, and he also identified a great many of them with Jews, or with non-Jews sympathetic to Jewish and especially Israeli interests.

Recently Carlson had Jeffrey Sachs on his program and showcased Sachs’ point of view, which is that Israel – and Netanyahu – has pushed the US into many wars, including the Iraq War. Sachs – an economics professor at, yes, Columbia – is a Jew himself but primarily a leftist, and as such he falls into the category of those who detest Netanyahu with a passion, thinks Israel is committing genocide, is a China admirer, and is one of Soros’ allies. However, while it is true that Netanyahu did indeed initially support the Iraq War, so did much of the Western world (including Carlson), and Netanyahu was speaking as a private citizen at the time he spoke in the US Congress on the topic. However, people in the Bush administration who were involved in talks with Israeli government officials in the buildup to the war (Sharon was prime minister at the time) claim that the Israelis warned against attacking Iraq. You certainly won’t hear that from Carlson, who focuses on Netanyahu’s statements prior to the war.

I don’t think it’s possible to overemphasize how important the Iraq war was in forming Carlson’s point of view toward “neocons,” Israel, Netanyahu, and even American Jews whom he believes have “dual loyalties.” But when he was still hosting his show at Fox News, for a while he kept those things somewhat under wraps for the most part. To the best of my recollection, he focused more on domestic issues, and Israel didn’t come up all that often. That may have been mostly because his bosses at Fox kept him in line in that regard – or he himself felt he had to keep in line – and not get too rabidly anti-Israel. Plus, things were relatively quiet in that region compared to now, post 10/7.

In a quick search, the only relevant article I found about Carlson’s isolationist views in those Fox News days but prior to the Ukraine War in 2022 was this one from 2018, when Tucker interviewed Colonel Macgregor (a man who later became a pro-Russian “expert” on the invasion of Ukraine; see this). In 2018, during Trump’s first term, Carlson’s interview with Macgregor was about the idea (incorrect) that the US was about to go to war against Iran. Much later that became a big theme of Tucker’s, who said (incorrectly) prior to the more recent US strike on Iran’s nuclear facility that it would cause a huge and costly war that would kill many Americans. But he was already singing that tune in 2018, interestingly enough:

On 1 May, Tucker Carlson of Fox News Channel interviewed retired Colonel Douglas Macgregor on Fox News about Iran’s relations with the U.S.

Macgregor endorsed the horribly flawed Iran nuclear deal and essentially implied that the U.S. is but a puppet for Israel and Saudi Arabia.

Disappointingly, Carlson made no effort to challenge Macgregor’s statements and contributed with some straw man arguments of his own that appeared to back up what Macgregor was saying.

The straw men start to appear at the :45 mark of the 5 minute video below when Carlson asks the question of Macgregor, “Is it in our strategic interests to have a conflict with Iran?” …

Carlson then essentially accuses U.S. U.N. ambassador Nikki Haley of calling for war with Iran, something that she never said. Carlson goes on with this line of reasoning by claiming that “many Republicans in Congress and a lot of Democrats believe that it is essential that the United States goes to war with Iran.”

Carlson is either profoundly confused or he is dishonest. No one in Congress has said or written anything close to approaching that it is essential that we go to war with Iran.

The template was certainly set already for Carlson’s present point of view.

The next turning point for Carlson was Russia’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine, when some of these same themes came together and intensified in Carlson’s coverage. Unlike previously, he focused on Ukraine and made many of his shows revolve around the topic of that war, and that’s when most viewers probably first noticed his extreme isolationism. But it had already been well-established.

That’s it for Part I, but there’s much more. To be continued in Part II …

[ADDENDUM: Part II can be found here.
Part III can be found here.]

The post Whatever happened to Tucker Carlson?: Part I appeared first on The New Neo.

Some excerpts follow:

October 7 presented the Israeli left with a daunting challenge: how to prevent the Hamas massacre from sounding the death knell of its most cherished dream, the so-called two-state solution. …

But how could the left leverage an event that showed its side was wrong in its fundamental assumptions about Israel’s neighbors against the right, whose position was vindicated? The answer is simple: Lay Oct. 7 at Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s feet.

That was the tactic from the start. As the article points out, the New York Times has been pressed into the service of attacking Netanyahu and presenting him as a monster:

A recent example of this revisionism is an 11,000-word New York Times Magazine piece by Patrick Kingsley, Ronen Bergman, and Natan Odenheimer, titled “How Netanyahu Prolonged the War in Gaza to Stay in Power.” …

The piece puts forward a neat storyline that echoes the Israeli left’s articles of faith: Netanyahu could have ended the war with a hostage deal in April 2024. However, he keeps prolonging the war to satisfy the radical, irrational hawkish wing of this coalition, all to stay in power. The real reason Netanyahu is desperate to remain in office, the piece argues, is so that he can appoint a new attorney general and thereby quash his prosecution on corruption charges.

Only, there isn’t a single true link in this imaginary chain of political logic.

The article goes on to demolish every one of the points the left makes against Netanyahu – who of course isn’t perfect but is hardly guilty of the charges the left mounts. It’s well worth reading for an overview. But perhaps the most poignant and mendaciously twisted lie by the left regarding Netanyahu and the war is this:

But the piece’s most egregious deception is its distortion of the historical record regarding the responsibility for the immense intelligence failure that led to the Hamas invasion. Kingsley, Berman, and Odenheimer exonerate the security officials directly responsible and blame the man whom these officials didn’t bother to brief until after the attack was underway.

In the authors’ rendering, military and Shin Bet intelligence saw the attack coming, but Netanyahu refused to heed their warnings. …

Israel’s responsible adults, such as former IDF Chief of Staff Herzi Halevi, the piece adds, “tried to reach Netanyahu, in a previously unreported effort to get the prime minister to read Saar’s findings,” to no avail. Netanyahu stubbornly ignored repeated, written warnings by the security establishment. Shin Bet head Ronen Bar also tried to convince Netanyahu that real danger was looming, the piece adds. Netanyahu turned a deaf ear to his warnings, too.

This is not a misinterpretation. It is a falsification of the record. … These officials were so confident that no danger from Gaza was imminent that, even after the signs of an impending invasion were accumulating during the night between Oct. 6 and 7, they dismissed them and left the soldiers in the perimeter sound asleep to be slaughtered in their beds by Hamas.

The security chiefs’ mutiny against civil authority persisted until 6:29 a.m. on Oct. 7, as they did not inform the minister of defense or the prime minister of what was happening throughout the night. We now know from the little we can glimpse of their considerations that they seemed to have been more worried about “miscalculation”—a euphemism for their fear that their hawkish boss would overreact to intelligence and start a war—than they were about an impending Hamas attack. …

We now know that IDF intelligence had the full Hamas plan of attack and that the intelligence brass dismissed it as “fantasy.” The women at the scouting centers watching the border up close, some of whom were slaughtered or taken hostage on Oct. 7, likewise warned of Hamas training in plain sight at the border fence. The confidence of the security chiefs in their mistaken assessment never wavered. They overruled this evidence, too.

They were far more worried about Netanyahu than about the slaughter.

The left clings to its delusions, because giving them up is too difficult and too filled with guilt and shame. As I’ve said before, a mind is a difficult thing to change – especially if it involves saying you were wrong.

The post The Israeli left, the <i>NY Times</i>, and Netanyahu appeared first on The New Neo.

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Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has reached a decision for the full occupation of the Gaza Strip, including operations in areas where hostages are held, a source in the Prime Minister’s Office told The Jerusalem Post on Monday.

Additionally, on Tuesday morning, an Israeli official told the Post that Netanyahu will convene an extensive meeting on Gaza and a hostage deal, noting that “the prime minister is considering all available options regarding the next steps.”

The Israeli official added that US President Donald Trump’s Special Envoy Steve Witkoff returned to the US to meet with the president and “a broad consensus that a deal must include all the hostages.”

I think there is zero chance that Hamas will ever make a deal for all the hostages. The hostages are worth their weight in gold a million times over. If not for the hostages, Hamas would have been destroyed much earlier in this war. The hostages are power to Hamas – power to torment Israelis and to pressure Israel immensely.

The supposed plan to occupy Gaza may be a threat designed to pressure Hamas. I certainly don’t know. But if real, it represents a change that may end up causing Hamas to murder the remaining hostages. Perhaps Netanyahu has finally decided that there is no way to get them back, so they will be sacrificed in order to achieve victory, but I actually doubt that is the strategy. What the strategy may be I don’t know, but so far Israel has had quite a few surprises up its sleeve.

As for world opinion of such an occupation, look what the world thinks of Israel even though it has taken pains – and many losses of members of its military – in order to wage the most population-sparing of any guerrilla war, and to do this in an area where the enemy would like more of its civilians killed. The world condemns Israel whatever it does, so it may as well do what’s best for Israel.

Occupation is one thing – but how long? And how many personnel would be needed? I don’t have the answers to those questions either, but I do have the questions.

NOTE: There’s also a report that Israel has a plan to redevelop the southern areas of the country attacked on 10/7, and to make them more resistant to attack:

The financial decision includes two main plans: one focused on strengthening and developing the city of Ashkelon, and the other on advancing the broader development of the western Negev region, according to a joint statement from the Prime Minister’s Office and the Finance Ministry.

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