Screen capture from CBS News posted to X.

+ The opposition to Netanyahu prevailed in the Israeli elections by winning 67 seats to the Netanyahu bloc’s 53. But Netanyahu may yet prevail because of the opposition coalition’s stubborn–some may say, racist–vow not to form a government with the Arab parties. It was a bizarre, and self-defeating, concession to make because no poll showed any possible route for the opposition gaining more than 60 seats, including the Arab parties. This is why so many Israeli Palestinians questioned the wisdom of participating in an election where both sides want to seem eliminated.

+ Pre-election polls in Israel showed the Arab Parties winning 13 seats. Exit polls show they may win as many as 19 seats and may decide the future of the Israeli government. They’d never won more than 15.

+ Israel’s finance minister Bezalel Smotrich, who leads the Religious Zionism Party, on why the Arab parties in Israel should be banned: “Parties that are unable to condemn the massacre of Oct. 7 and are not willing to declare Hamas as a terrorist organization are not legitimate actors in Israeli politics.”

+ In Trumpian fashion, Netanyahu claimed that voter fraud perpetrated by Israel’s Arab citizens prevented him from winning a clear victory in the country’s election.

+ Israel has committed genocide in Gaza and is continuing to do so even after signing a ceasefire agreement. It has committed “crimes against humanity” in the West Bank and has deliberately targeted children for killing across Palestine. These are the conclusions of a UN Commission of Inquiry on the Occupied Territories.  

“The intentional killing and injuring of Palestinian civilians and destruction of homes in the West Bank combined with Israel’s persistent denial of responsibility form part of a broader strategy to exterminate and displace Palestinians and impose conditions of life that are unliveable,” said Srinivasan Muralidhar, Chair of the Commission. “Meanwhile, Israel’s expansion of territorial control in Gaza continues to result in the killing and harming of Palestinian civilians who approach or cross the Yellow Line.”

The report also accuses Israel of using torture and sexual violence “with the intent to displace, subjugate and destabilize the Palestinian people.”

+ Since January, Israeli forces and settlers have killed 331 Palestinians in the West Bank, including 77 children, and inflicted injuries on 6,135 Palestinians, 972 of them children. By comparison, there have been 21 Israeli fatalities in the West Bank, including a single child. Eight of those deaths were members of the Israeli security forces. There have been 3,684 attacks by Israeli settlers that have resulted in Palestinian casualties or damage to property owned by Palestinians. At least 42,322 Palestinians, including 16,060 children, have been displaced from their homes.

+ Using the slogan “Dockworkers do not work for war,” longshoremen and dockworkers in 22 countries went on strike this week, demanding an end to the US/Israeli war on Iran and the Israeli-run genocide in Gaza. At least 110 ports on five continents were shut down, idling the transport of at least $2 billion worth of goods worldwide.

+ Ron Lauder, former spokesman for Netanyahu:

I’ve been silent for 20 years, 30 years,” he says. “One of the things that made Israel so special compared to other countries is that they had a real democracy. What we’re seeing now feels more like a banana republic…What you have is a dictator, a one-person show. Israel is a democracy, but Netanyahu is not playing by the rules of democracy,” Lauder says, adding, “I spoke with the king of Jordan a few weeks ago. Jordan has been one of the most loyal countries to Israel that we have out there, and we turned the most loyal country into a hater of Israel because of what Ben-Gvir has done. And when [his supporters] beat up a photographer for The Washington Post – how stupid can you be? The Washington Post will hate Israel because of this! Hate! For what purpose?

+ On October 28, armed Israeli settlers assaulted the Russian videographer Andrey X in the West Bank village of Umm al-Khair, as he was documenting attacks on Palestinian villagers. Andrey suffered a concussion and lost consciousness multiple times. The settlers blocked an ambulance trying to take him to a hospital. The same gang of thugs beat up the American journalist, Jasper Nathaniel. Israeli security forces were on the scene but refused to intervene and instead of arresting Andrey and Nathaniel’s attackers, they pepper-sprayed Nathaniel and took him into custody.

+Amira Hass on the use of Israeli soldiers to carry out the expulsions of Palestinians in Hebron under the guise of “military operations”: 

This isn’t an “operation.” Stop this collaborationist use of military jargon that throws sand in people’s eyes. Forcing people out of their homes, even if it’s “until further notice,” is not an operation. What the most moral army in the universe is perpetrating in Hebron since last Friday is another stage, another circle of hell in Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich’s “Decisive Plan.”

+ During its 8-day (and counting) siege of Hebron, Israeli forces have driven more than 5,000 Palestinians from their homes. The displaced include 441 geriatric people, 44 disabled people and 336 infants.

+ Twelve former Biden officials, calling themselves the Gaza Resignees, who quit the administration over the Israeli genocide in Gaza, published a statement urging 2028 presidential candidates to refuse to hire any administration ⁠official “directly responsible for enabling Israel’s military actions in Gaza”…

We, who resigned from our positions, call on candidates for the 2028 Presidential Nomination to commit to not hiring any administration official directly responsible for enabling Israel’s military actions in Gaza…We want candidates to be aware that the officials who enabled Israel’s genocide in Gaza are politically toxic. If they try to hire them, they will face consequences from voters. 

By my count, that list should at least include: Kamala Harris, Anthony Blinken, Jake Sullivan, Avril Haines, John Kirby, Brett McGurk, Tom Donilon, William Burns, Lloyd Austin, Linda Thomas-Greenfield, Jeff Zients, Ron Klain, David Satterfield, Lisa Grande, Samantha Power, Amos Hochstein, Barbara Leaf, Tina Flournoy, Karine Jean-Pierre, and Philip H. Gordon …

+ RFK Jr. has now outed himself as a full-blown bigot: “There’s five hundred million Arabs in the world. And yet they don’t produce science. They don’t win the Nobel Prize. They don’t win the Fields Prize. They don’t win the Wolf Prize. They don’t produce literature.”

Ahmed Zewail. Nobel Prize in Chemistry, 1999

Omar Yaghi (Palestinian), Nobel Prize in Chemistry, 2025, Wolf Prize in Chemistry 2018

Naguib Mahfouz, Nobel Prize in Literature, 1988

+ Bari Weiss is succeeding in her mission to destroy 60 Minutes. Last Sunday’s show drew only 5.64 million viewers (and just 558,000 in the key demographics), the lowest-rated in more than a quarter-century. The viewership for Sunday’s show was down 60% in total viewers and 81% in the key demographics prized by advertizers from last year’s show on the same Sunday.

+ Eyal Weissman on NAZA, the documentary on Israel’s algorithmic killing machine:

Israel’s automated targeting system allows for the responsibility for “industrialized annihilation” to be shared between coders, operators, legal officers who pre-set the level of collateral damage, officers who approve the strike, officers who choose the bomb and the pilots or drone operators who launch it. “I am just a small screw in the system,” one of the interviewees says, quoting Eichmann’s defense during his trial in Jerusalem. The system that begins with a phone number being put into a computer system ends with an entire family crushed under the rubble.

In an op-ed for USA Today, Jacob “Ya’akub” Ira Vijandre describes being arrested and detained by ICE for speaking out on behalf of Palestinians…

As I pulled out of my home on an otherwise ordinary October morning, I suddenly found myself surrounded by a dozen armed agents, 1 of them pointing a gun at my face, shouting obscenities. I was shackled and, after a few weeks, transferred to an Immigration and Customs Enforcement processing facility in Folkston, Georgia, far away from my family, my community and my home, in what I believe to be retaliation for my protected speech on Palestine, upholding due process rights and refusing to betray my community.