Singapore (Special to Informed Comment; Feature) – Netanyahu’s response to the October 27 election has been extraordinary, even by his increasingly incendiary standards. Having failed to secure a governing majority, he and Likud have moved from contesting political opponents to questioning the legitimacy of the electorate itself.

Israeli Palestinian voters turned out in unprecedented numbers, helping the two “Arab-led parties”, as the Israeli government refers to them, win 19 seats. Netanyahu responded with allegations of widespread fraud, bribery and foreign interference, without producing a shred of evidence of systematic electoral manipulation.

The distinction matters. Israel’s Central Elections Committee said there was no basis for claims that the integrity of the vote had been systematically compromised. The Shin Bet likewise stressed that its narrowly focused investigation into possible foreign interference did not implicate Israeli-Arab voters collectively. President Isaac Herzog warned against tarnishing an entire community. Yet Netanyahu’s political machinery continued to portray the result as a “stolen election” and an “assault on Israel.” 

It was a new low to a shrewd veteran politician who has sustained his career on incendiary campaigns. But this is not simply a sore loser refusing to leave the political stage. It is an attempt to redefine legitimate democratic participation according to ethnic and ideological criteria – and to pre-tarnish those Israeli parties willing to cooperate with the “Arab parties” and perhaps to set the stage for a new attack against Iran, to foster domestic support.

An Israeli Palestinian citizen’s vote is constitutionally valid when it supports Netanyahu’s political survival; apparently, it becomes suspect when it threatens it.

Qatar: Another convenient scapegoat

Netanyahu’s latest accusation introduces a familiar foreign villain: Qatar. Likud alleged that Doha, possibly alongside Turkey, financed organizations mobilizing Palestinian voters, thereby helping manufacture the electoral defeat of the Israeli right. 

Like most calculated nonsense, the accusation is politically convenient. Qatar hosts Hamas’s political leadership, has mediated negotiations over Gaza, and has become an established target of Israeli nationalist rhetoric. Yet the evidence presented so far does not establish that Qatar financed electoral fraud or manipulated the Israeli vote.

Qatar categorically denied interference, describing the allegations as a disinformation campaign. More damaging to Netanyahu’s narrative, the Central Elections Committee’s acting director-general, Dean Livne, rejected claims of widespread electoral fraud as baseless. The committee stated that there was no basis for alleging systematic damage to the election’s integrity. 

The Shin Bet confirmed that, while its foreign-interference investigation was limited, originated in its own intelligence rather than information supplied by political parties, it did not implicate an entire community of Palestinian voters. 

Investigating possible foreign interference is legitimate; converting an unfinished intelligence inquiry into proof that its “Arab citizens” stole an election is political manipulation. Netanyahu has transformed a narrowly defined security investigation into an expansive political indictment. 

Qatar may be a convenient suspect, but it cannot substitute for evidence. And foreign interference, even if established in individual cases, cannot invalidate the lawful votes of hundreds of thousands of Israeli citizens, which is what Palestinians are.

The coalition arithmetic behind the incitement

The numbers explain the desperation. Likud emerged as the largest party, with 27 seats, but Netanyahu’s nationalist-religious bloc secured only 53 in the 120-seat Knesset, eight short of a majority. Gadi Eisenkot’s opposition bloc won 48, while Israeli Palestinians’ Joint List and Ra’am together secured 19. The arithmetic is devastating for Netanyahu. The Palestinian parties could help an alternative government reach 67 seats.

Netanyahu therefore has two problems. He must find eight additional seats or prevent his opponents from assembling the 61 required to replace him. The second problem is potentially easier to address through political intimidation than parliamentary negotiation.

His campaign against Palestinian participation serves precisely this purpose. By depicting “Arab parties” as illegitimate, Islamist, foreign-influenced or sympathetic to Israel’s enemies, he raises the political price of cooperation with them. He is effectively demanding that the opposition disqualify a substantial portion of the electorate before it can exercise its parliamentary mandate.

There is an additional irony: Likud had already sought to disqualify both Arab-led electoral lists. The Central Elections Committee initially accepted the petitions in September, but the Supreme Court overturned those decisions on October 2, allowing both lists to contest the election. The voters subsequently delivered their answer. 

Netanyahu is now attempting to contest that answer by other means. 

Three possible governments, three different political outcomes

Scenario 1: A Netanyahu-led reconstruction. Netanyahu attempts to attract defectors from the opposition, exploiting disagreements between his main rival Gadi Eisenkot, the new-right Naftali Bennett and Avigdor Liberman promoting Russian Jews’ interests. He needs eight additional seats. This is difficult but cannot be discounted: political survival has always been one of his strongest negotiating skills.

Scenario 2: An Eisenkot-led minority government. Eisenkot’s Yashar bloc, Bennett’s B’Yachad, the Democrats representing the left and labor and Liberman’s Yisrael Beiteinu would need external Arab support to reach 67 seats. The principal obstacle is not parliamentary arithmetic but political cowardice and ideological resistance. Several opposition leaders have already ruled out cooperation with Palestinian parties, even as their support could end Netanyahu’s tenure.

Scenario 3: A national-unity government or renewed elections. A Likud-centered unity arrangement with centrist and right-wing opposition figures could command approximately 66 seats, but would require Netanyahu to abandon or marginalize his far-right partners. Alternatively, prolonged deadlock could lead to another election. Neither outcome is assured. 

The essential question is whether Israel’s opposition can translate its electoral rejection of Netanyahu into a governing alternative without reproducing the very exclusionary politics it claims to oppose.

The mainstream media’s election story misses the larger story

Much of the mainstream coverage concentrates on dark election techniques: alleged bribery, suspicious cash, foreign interference, voter mobilization and the counting of absentee ballots. These matters deserve investigation. 

But they risk obscuring the far more consequential political development: the systematic marginalization of Palestinians, both inside and outside Israel’s internationally recognized borders.

The effort to exclude Palestinian parties from the election was not an isolated incident. Likud petitioned to disqualify them; the Central Elections Committee initially complied; and only Supreme Court intervention restored their right to participate. Netanyahu’s subsequent attacks on Arab turnout are part of the same political continuum.

Meanwhile, the destruction of Gaza has been accompanied by an accelerating campaign of displacement in the West Bank. In February 2026, the UN Human Rights Office warned of ethnic-cleansing concerns in both territories. More recently, Human Rights Watch documented the displacement of 107 West Bank communities since January 2023, attributing the pattern to settler violence enabled by the Israeli state. 

The election controversy is therefore unfolding against a much larger struggle over who has the right to inhabit, govern and politically represent this land. The attempt to delegitimize Israel’s Palestinian voters and the displacement of Palestinians from their homes in Gaza and the West Bank are different instruments, but they belong to an increasingly coherent political environment.

De-legitimizers, conditionalists and partners

There is a useful rule of thumb for mapping Israel’s political parties against the question of Arab representation. Three categories emerge: outright de-legitimizers, conditional gatekeepers and advocates of political partnership.

The de-legitimizers include Netanyahu’s Likud, and the two far-right Messianic parties, Itamar Ben-Gvir’s Otzma Yehudit and Bezalel Smotrich’s Religious Zionism. Avigdor Liberman’s Yisrael Beiteinu belongs politically in this category when it comes to coalition exclusion: Liberman has explicitly ruled out a government with the Joint List, declaring that he would sit neither with Netanyahu nor with Ayman Odeh’s “Arab-led alliance.” These parties differ in ideology and intensity, but their political positions help institutionalize the principle that Palestinian representation may be tolerated in parliament without being accepted as an equal partner in government.

The conditional gatekeepers feature Gadi Eisenkot’s Yashar and the Bennett-Lapid Yachad alliance. They oppose Netanyahu and are prepared to negotiate among themselves, but most resist relying on “Arab parties” to establish a government. Revealingly, they may welcome Palestinian votes when those votes weaken Netanyahu, yet hesitate to recognize the parliamentary legitimacy of the parties and constituencies providing them. This is not equivalent to Likud’s direct campaign of delegitimization, but it preserves much of the same exclusionary political arithmetic.

The partners are principally Yair Golan’s Democrats and the Jewish-Palestinian Hadash-Ta’al alliance, alongside the Palestinian-led Ra’am and Joint List. Golan has distinguished himself as the only Jewish-led opposition leader openly advocating a government that includes Arab parties. Following the election, he met Mansour Abbas of Ra’am, as well as Eisenkot and Lapid, and called for cooperation to establish an alternative government. Eisenkot, meanwhile, met Bennett and Golan, while Golan’s meetings with the Arab leadership represented a more consequential political opening. As of October 29, there was no comparable public commitment from Bennett, Lapid or Liberman to include “Arab parties” in a governing coalition.

The distinction matters. Political coordination among Jewish opposition leaders is not the same as political partnership with Palestinian citizens. Nor should conditional parliamentary support be mistaken for acceptance of equal political representation. The 2021 Bennett-Lapid government, which included Ra’am, demonstrated that such cooperation is institutionally possible. The current opposition’s reluctance to repeat that precedent reveals how far the political center has shifted toward far-right.

Ultimately, the Democrats and Hadash-Ta’al represent the clearest Jewish-Palestinian political alternatives to ethnonationalist exclusion. Even here, however, cooperation with Palestinian parties should not automatically be equated with a shared commitment to Palestinian statehood. A durable two-state settlement demands more than parliamentary arithmetic. It requires recognition of Palestinian national rights, territorial self-determination and political equality.

As Israeli observer Gideon Levy argued before the election, “If you want change, vote Arab parties.” He is right. The deeper challenge is whether Jewish Israeli parties are prepared to accept the democratic consequences of that choice. It would seem that the alternative, the Netanyahu government’s current course, is far worse.

The bitter debate on national identity

Netanyahu’s far-right partners, particularly Itamar Ben-Gvir and Bezalel Smotrich, have made little secret of their territorial ambitions. Their political project goes well beyond conventional Israeli nationalism or security policy. 

It seeks to consolidate Jewish sovereignty over the entire territory between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea, while denying Palestinians an equivalent right to national self-determination.

The 2018 Nation-State Basic Law already established that national self-determination within Israel is exclusive to the Jewish people and designated Jewish settlement a national value. The present coalition’s settlement and displacement policies have given this ideological principle an increasingly territorial expression. 

The controversy did not begin with Netanyahu’s latest government. For more than a decade, Israel has been engaged in an increasingly bitter debate over its constitutional identity: is it a Jewish nation-state that guarantees equal citizenship, or a state in which Jewish national supremacy takes precedence over universal democratic principles? Do Israelis live in a democratic state that’s Jewish, or a not-so-democratic Jewish state?

The 2018 Nation-State Basic Law brought this contradiction into constitutional law. Passed by 62 votes to 55, it established that national self-determination in Israel is unique to the Jewish people, designated Jewish settlement a national value and downgraded Arabic from its previous official-language standing to a language of special status. Most controversially, it omitted any explicit commitment to equality among citizens. Critics argued – and rightly so – that it set the stage for an apartheid state.

The Supreme Court upheld the law in 2021, arguing that its provisions did not extinguish the constitutional principle of equality or Israel’s democratic character. But the political controversy never disappeared. The judicial overhaul initiated in 2023 intensified the struggle over the courts, constitutional safeguards and the limits of majority power – sparking huge mass demonstrations against the Netanyahu government. 

As I argued in The Fall of Israel, the danger is not simply religious extremism or Netanyahu’s personal ambitions. It is the gradual institutionalization of an ethnonationalist conception of democracy in which political equality is increasingly subordinated to Jewish collective supremacy. 

Messianic project: Judaizing the territory, marginalizing its people

I described that conception as the danger of Herrenvolk democracy: a political system in which democratic institutions and electoral competition remain operational, but their substantive benefits accrue disproportionately to the dominant national community: the Jews only.

The October election illustrates the contradiction. Palestinian citizens retain the formal right to vote, yet their political representatives are increasingly treated as illegitimate partners in government. Beyond Israel’s borders, Palestinians face an even more extreme denial of political self-determination. The constitutional question and the territorial question are therefore inseparable: who is entitled to vote, who is entitled to govern, and who is entitled to belong?

The implications extend beyond the West Bank and Gaza. Israel’s annexation of the Golan Heights, its territorial ambitions in the occupied Palestinian territories and its expanding security footprint in Lebanon and Syria raise the prospect of a regional strategy built around territorial control, strategic buffer zones and demographic engineering.

A young Palestinian man from the Arab Israeli town of Umm al-Fahm enjoys shisha at Caesarea. Public Domain. Via Wikimedia Commons

This is not to suggest that every Israeli security deployment is evidence of a predetermined annexation plan. But the cumulative direction is unmistakable: territorial expansion and the fragmentation of Palestinian political and geographical continuity.

The ultimate contradiction is glaring. A state claiming democratic legitimacy while consolidating exclusive national sovereignty for one people over a territory inhabited by two peoples is not a liberal democracy. The destination is a unitary, Jewish-dominated political order from river to sea, with Palestinians denied equal collective rights. 

The politics of scapegoating and the threat ahead

There is a particularly disturbing symmetry between Netanyahu’s domestic and territorial strategies. At home, Arabs, Palestinians, the peace movement and the Israeli left are portrayed as threats to national survival. 

Abroad, Palestinians are increasingly treated as obstacles to territorial consolidation. In both cases, political opposition becomes an existential enemy rather than a legitimate participant in public life.

This politics of permanent emergency has several functions. It mobilizes Netanyahu’s electorate, divides his opponents, intimidates potential Jewish-Palestinian cooperation and diverts attention from the government’s failures, including the October 7 security catastrophe and the consequences of its subsequent wars. It also gives the far-right ideological cover to pursue policies that would otherwise face much greater domestic and international resistance.

The threat is not another Netanyahu government. It is the possibility that a new coalition, however constituted, will inherit a political system increasingly conditioned to accept the exclusion of Palestinian citizens, the dispossession of Palestinians and the normalization of permanent territorial domination.

There is a reason to be very wary of the language of national survival. Historically, projects of exclusion have rarely presented themselves as projects of exclusion. From Nazi Germany and Italian fascism to apartheid South Africa, they invoke security, demographic balance, historical entitlement and national redemption. The list includes Netanyahu’s pursuit of a territorial and demographic order in which Israeli Palestinians have no meaningful place.

Israel’s election has exposed a profound democratic crisis. The question is no longer simply who will govern the country. It is whether democracy can survive when a substantial part of its electorate is treated as illegitimate, and when an entire people is treated as an obstacle to the state’s territorial ambitions. 

Netanyahu may yet lose office. The toxic project he has helped unleash is considerably harder to defeat.

( Foreign Policy in Focus ) – On a recent Piers Morgan show, the guest was Robert Pape, a University of Chicago political scientist. The subject was a set of wars that now feed each other: Russia and Ukraine, the Yemen and Saudi Arabia, the United States and Israel against Iran.

Pape, who founded the Chicago Project on Security and Threats, turned to the danger of moral certainty in war. He began with the protesters killed in Iran:

Whether the numbers are several thousand protesters that were killed by the Iran regime, or higher than that, the fact of the matter is, killing protesters is not something we think of as just OK.

Then he asked how wars cross their own thresholds:

How do you break thresholds and get cycles of violence? Where you get wars of the cities, … and how you get this is moral certainty on each side, which causes then civilians to be attacked more and more and more aggressively as if they (the civilians) deserve it.

His research on suicide terrorism, in Dying to Win and Cutting the Fuse, finds foreign occupation to be the leading driver. “Moral certainty is the fuel for the escalation trap,” he said, naming the framework he uses to anticipate how wars widen.

Moral certainty identifies who is to blame. It cannot predict who is about to get hurt.

What Is Documented, What Is Not

On February 28, the first day of the Iran war, a missile hit the Shajareh Tayyebeh elementary school in Minab, in southern Iran. The AP counts about 120 children among the dead, Iranian state media put the total at 168, and AFP reported at least 155 killed, most of them children. Reporters have had limited access, so the exact toll is still disputed.

The school stood beside a Revolutionary Guard compound, visibly separated from it since 2016. The Congressional Research Service reports that a Tomahawk hit the school and that a preliminary U.S. military investigation found the United States responsible, working from outdated targeting information. Secretary of State Marco Rubio said that the United States “would not deliberately target a school.” Months later, AP reported that the Pentagon had still not published its findings.

The details that stay with me are small ones. The AP found that teachers phoned parents to collect their children before Iran’s government ordered schools closed that morning, and some parents did not make it in time.

You can blame Tehran’s repression and its nuclear program, or you can blame Washington’s decision to strike. Either way, the children in that building chose neither, were responsible for neither, and paid the ultimate price.

Minab was also not the last time. In early September, Reuters reported that Iran counted 18 civilians dead in U.S. strikes, including four at a wedding, and the UN secretary general said he was deeply alarmed. Iranian missiles and drones have also hit Gulf cities, with airport strikes in Dubai and Abu Dhabi. Civilians on every side of this war have paid for decisions they did not make.

The Next Building

On PBS’s Amanpour & Company on March 25, Robert Pape said that “even with smart bombs, there’s going to be collateral damage of a serious nature,” and that the anger it leaves behind has consequences: “we are setting in train exactly the anger for how you get indiscriminate terrorism and you get people willing to die (in order) to kill.” In his weekly Escalation Trap conversations, he has said he expects that the next wave of violence will come from inspired attackers rather than centrally directed ones.

The distinction matters. Counterterrorism scholar Bruce Hoffman told KERA’s Think on March 18 that in the war’s first nine days, “we’ve seen three serious attacks in the United States, one in Austin, of course, where two people were murdered,” and that the attackers seemed “completely self-motivated outside any kind of identifiable terrorist command and control chain.”

The Austin gunman killed two people and wounded 14 on March 1. He wore a shirt with an Iranian flag, and the FBI said it was investigating terror links, but police said it was too early to name a motive, and an internal counterterrorism update noted a history of mental health conditions. In mid-March, a man drove a vehicle into Temple Israel, a synagogue near Detroit, with about 140 people inside, roughly 106 of them children; no attendees were reported hurt. An anonymous Lebanese official told the AP that the attacker’s two brothers and their two children had died in an Israeli strike days earlier. The AP could not verify that, and officials had not established a motive.

Neither case proves that the war caused the violence. There is also a serious counterargument: CSIS analyst Daniel Byman noted in April that Iran has not used terrorism in this war, and offered several explanations, including lost capacity, fear of escalation and the usefulness of missiles and shipping disruption. He also warned that this restraint may be a pause, not an ending. The American Conservative likewise argued that Iran has few incentives to orchestrate attacks, while Hoffman warned that the risk of lone-actor incidents rises the longer the war lasts. The dispute is about who and when. Almost no one claims that the risk shrinks as the war goes on.

Nor does the harm stop at Iran’s borders. In Yemen, the UN human rights chief said on September 24 that civilians are “bearing the brunt of this latest upsurge in fighting,” with 32 civilians killed since August, 15 of them children. In Ukraine, the UN has documented 15,280 civilians killed or injured in the first eight months of 2026.

Why Diplomacy Loses the Room

On September 17, the UN’s fact-finding mission on Iran found reasonable grounds to believe that U.S. forces committed war crimes in two February strikes, including Minab. It said the school was clearly civilian, that the intelligence behind the strike was not adequately verified, and that the attack went beyond negligence. In the same report, the mission found that Iran’s crackdown on protesters since late December amounted to crimes against humanity. Iran’s own official toll is 3,038 dead, which the mission believes understates the real number.

Both findings stand together. The U.S. government has not accepted the first: President Trump said in June that “nobody” purposely attacked the school, and the Pentagon has not published its findings. Anyone who wants a single villain has to look away from one of them. That is exactly what Pape meant by moral certainty. Each side sees only the victims the other side made.

Speed is the second problem. The Pentagon relied on an AI targeting platform called Maven to strike more than 13,000 targets in the first 38 days of the war. “For U.S. military officials, Maven’s speed in selecting and reselecting targets represents a distinct combat advantage, allowing U.S. forces to disable Iranian combat capabilities swiftly and incessantly, preventing their reconstitution,” writes Michael Klare at Arms Control Today.  Politico reported in March that Pentagon staff focused on reducing civilian casualties had fallen from about 200 to fewer than 40. One former official told the AP that the Minab strike was a natural result of those cuts and of Secretary Hegseth’s emphasis on lethality.

Early in the war, Hegseth said that the operation was “just getting started” and “accelerating not decelerating.” Force comes with a slogan and a victory lap. Diplomacy comes with compromise, and compromise has no one to cheer it. A debate about who is right will always make more noise than a question about who is next.

What It Would Take

Five shifts would help in preventing the next Minab.

It’s important to change the first question. Hosts and producers of news programs can ask “who is most likely to be hurt next, and what would stop it?” before they ask “who is right?” They can seat civilian-protection investigators, humanitarian workers, and mediators beside the partisans. They should likewise make civilian harm a standing story. Minab returns to the headlines only when a new document leaks. Washington cannot keep ignoring Minab, but to do so lawmakers and citizens must demand accountability. An independent review and a public explanation must be required after there is credible evidence of grave harm from an AI-assisted targeting system.

Photo by Raamin ka on Unsplash

To fight against amnesia, it’s critical to remember the names of the victims. The AP calls the ruined school in Minab a memorial: “This will never be a school again.” In March, Win Without War laid children’s backpacks on Capitol Hill for the dead. Ordinary people can keep such memorials in front of lawmakers who would rather not look.

Diplomacy is essential. A Pakistan-brokered ceasefire in April, which FPIF’s Imran Khalid described as “a shift in the center of the diplomatic world,” showed that diplomacy can still find a way. Pape has said that a deal resembling the 2015 nuclear agreement is still possible, with low enrichment, sanctions relief and inspections. Voters can tell their representatives that this is the outcome they want.

Finally, multiple truths must be upheld simultaneously. The UN found grounds for war crimes at Minab and crimes against humanity against Iranian protesters. Saying so is accuracy, not equivalence, and it is the primary method of challenging the moral certainty that Pape describes.

The next building is somewhere. It is not yet a headline. There’s still time to make sure it never becomes one.

( Yale Climate Connections ) – Who among us has not been at least momentarily awed by an image or video of a whale breaking through the ocean’s surface, connecting the sea and the sky in such a glorious, mammalian, and utterly alien way – a glimpse, if only for a moment, into another dimension of the world?

Whales are some of the biggest and most majestic creatures on Earth, and scientists and conservationists say they are also climate heroes. During their lifetimes, they release enormous amounts of waste into the ocean that is rich in nitrogen, phosphorus, and other elements that nourish phytoplankton, which in turn release oxygen into the atmosphere while absorbing climate-warming carbon dioxide through photosynthesis.

What’s more, the substantial amount of carbon in their massive bodies remains out of the atmosphere for their entire lifetimes and even centuries after they die. Yet as Earth’s oceans warm, these climate heroes need more protection from changes in habitat that have diminished their food supply and otherwise threaten their survival. 

Chris Johnson, a marine scientist and conservation strategist who leads the World Wildlife Fund Protecting Whales & Dolphins Initiative based in Melbourne, Australia, described his work with whales, their role in protecting the climate, and ways to help protect whale populations in a wide-ranging interview with Yale Climate Connections.

This interview has been lightly edited and condensed. 

Yale Climate Connections: What first drew you to whales and this work? Was there a particular experience or realization that made you want to focus on them?

Chris Johnson: I am a bit of an “accidental scientist.” Growing up in New England, the sea was part of the culture, but I never felt the pull to become a marine biologist. I was more interested in creative work, studying music at college and later moving into technology in the mid- to late 1990s.

The turning point came in 1998, when I met Dr. Roger Payne. Roger helped the world understand that whales are intelligent, social beings with complex lives, and that their conservation matters. He was a big thinker who looked for creative solutions to some of the most challenging threats facing the ocean. That meeting changed the direction of my life and career. 

YCC: Your organization has described whales as “wildlife climate heroes.” What are the main ways they help combat the effects of climate change?

Johnson: Whales help by keeping the ocean healthy and productive in several ways.

The first is nutrient recycling, often called the “whale pump.” Whales feed at depth or in productive feeding areas, then release urine and nutrient-rich fecal plumes nearer the surface. These contain nitrogen, phosphorus, iron, and other elements that can support the growth of phytoplankton – the microscopic organisms that form the base of marine food webs, produce much of the oxygen in the atmosphere, and absorb carbon dioxide through photosynthesis. 

Whales also carry nutrients across the ocean during their long migrations. Many species move between high-latitude feeding grounds and lower-latitude breeding areas, connecting ecosystems that may be thousands of kilometers apart. Scientists sometimes call this the “great whale conveyor belt.” 

Whales also accumulate carbon in their bodies during their lives. When a whale dies and its carcass sinks to the deep seafloor, a process known as a whale fall, some of that carbon may remain out of the atmosphere for centuries. The carcass also provides food and habitat for a succession of deep-sea animals and microbes. Whale falls are ecologically important, although their contribution to carbon storage at a global scale is modest and uncertain.

YCC: Are there certain whale species you might highlight either because they play especially important ecological roles? 

Johnson: I’ll focus on great whales, although the science is still evolving. Blue and fin whales stand out because of their sheer size: blue whales, the largest animals ever to have lived, with fin whales as the second-largest whale. Their feeding and nutrient recycling may influence productivity across vast areas. 

Sperm whales are the largest toothed whales and extraordinarily deep divers. They spend much of their lives foraging offshore for deep-water squid, moving nutrients between the deep ocean and the surface. They also live in a world shaped by sound, which makes them particularly sensitive to underwater noise pollution. Their complex social structures are changing how many of us think about culture in the ocean.

Humpback whales are a success story. Some populations have recovered strongly since the ban on commercial whaling. However, in the Southern Hemisphere, climate modeling suggests that climate-driven changes to Antarctic krill could place renewed pressure on humpback whale populations and potentially reverse some of that recovery by 2050.

The critically endangered North Atlantic right whale is a cautionary story. As ocean warming changes the distribution of their prey in the Gulf of Maine, the whales have moved into areas where they face greater risks from ship strikes and fishing-gear entanglement in the gulf of the St. Lawrence River. Climate change is amplifying exposure to existing human threats.

YCC: What are the main challenges facing whales?

Johnson: Climate change is altering the ocean conditions that have shaped whale behavior and movement over time.

For many species, the most immediate effects are impacts to their prey. As waters warm, currents shift, sea ice declines, and marine heat waves intensify, prey may move or become less predictable. Whales may have to travel farther, spend longer searching for food, or change the timing of their migrations. This is particularly important for baleen whales, which must build large energy reserves during relatively short feeding seasons. A female’s ability to reproduce is closely linked to how successfully she feeds.

Entanglement in fishing gear remains one of the most serious global threats to whales, dolphins, and porpoises. Fisheries bycatch kills an estimated 300,000 cetaceans each year, but this estimate is now more than 20 years old. The true scale is difficult to assess because monitoring and reporting remain limited across many fisheries.

Other pressures have not gone away. Ship strikes, underwater noise, chemical and plastic pollution, poorly planned offshore development, and, in some places, commercial whaling continue to affect whale populations.

I am most concerned about the cumulative impact of these pressures. A whale might cope with one stressor, but reduced prey, increased noise, growing entanglement risks, and ship traffic together can gradually erode its resilience and health. 

YCC: Given everything we’re learning about whales’ role in ocean ecosystems, what kinds of conservation efforts or solutions are most important right now? What can people do to help whales?

Johnson: Whale conservation needs to work at the scale of the animals’ lives and range. We need to treat the ocean as one system and work to strengthen its ecological connectivity.

A whale moves thousands of kilometers across their critical habitats. We call these connected habitats and migratory pathways “blue corridors.” They can extend across national waters and the high seas, often overlapping with growing impacts from shipping, fishing, pollution, and climate change.

Much of our work involves mapping these habitats and migratory journeys so they can be considered by governments, policymakers, and industry as areas for improved ocean management and protection. We created BlueCorridors.org as a mega collaboration to make this evidence easier to access and easier to take action.

Many of the solutions are already available. Slower ship speeds in high-risk areas can reduce the likelihood and severity of vessel strikes. Changes to fishing gear and practices, such as “on demand” or ropeless systems, can help reduce entanglement. Well-designed protected and managed areas can safeguard important habitats, while quieter shipping and other noise-reduction measures can help whales communicate, navigate, and feed. Strong climate action is also essential. We need to move to a low-carbon future to protect the prey and habitats whales depend on.

We know that whale recovery is possible if we make this a global priority. The global moratorium on commercial whaling allowed some populations to recover, including humpback whales, but there is much work to be done. 

On an individual level, people can support strong ocean and climate policies, choose sustainable seafood, reduce their use of plastic, and ask questions about how fishing practices impact marine wildlife. They can also support communities and organizations developing whale-safe solutions, reduce pollution, and follow responsible whale-watching guidance. These actions are especially valuable when they build wider political and market support for change. 

Johnson: I hope people understand that whales are important indicators of ocean health and inspiring icons of the wonder of life on Earth.

Do whales need us? Whales have been around longer, much longer, than us. They thrived long before commercial whaling and other human pressures turned their ocean into a complex obstacle course. Today, they need us to manage our impact on the ocean better.

Photo by Todd Cravens on Unsplash

Do we need whales? Absolutely. We depend on the healthy, resilient ocean that whales, other marine life, and ecological processes help sustain. A world with thriving whales is richer and healthier for future generations. By protecting whales and their blue corridors, we also protect something essential – something greater than ourselves.

This article first appeared on Yale Climate Connections and is republished here under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. 

Via Yale Climate Connections

A year and a half ago, the peace sign held a set of small multicolored, triangular-shaped banners, which have since faded and fallen from the center of the peace sign, in what are now shreds of barely visible cloth.  

Initially I had imagined the small colored cloths as mementos of diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI), a pathway to interracial peace in our own country, which the Trump administration has now gutted as a profligate and wasteful program (dead, eliminated, and ineffectual).  The most fateful impact of canceling DEI has been on Black students.  Significant monies in scholarships to expand educational opportunities for Black and other underrepresented students have been withdrawn by the federal government as well as the federal government investment in historically black colleges and universities (HBCUs).

In 2025-26, the freshman class of reporting colleges and universities underwent a significant loss of Black student enrollment compared to the two previous years.  Initiatives that foster mentorship and academic guidance – critical to academic success and retention for minority students – no longer exist.  And the jobs lost, with the gutting of DEI programs, are largely those of Black women.  

The opportunity to build peace within our country, whose pernicious legacy of slavery is persistent racism, is one thing I pray for, beholding the peace sign.

The larger peace crisis, that afflicts much if not most of the world, which I meditate on, is the ongoing presence of conflict between governments and within countries on every continent; and its impact on the victims.  My overriding sense that conflicts are increasing was confirmed in reading that brutal conflict and war are on the rise worldwide, with “the highest number of conflicts between states in 2025 since the World War II.”  

The Russia-Ukraine war is the deadliest conflict in the world; the U.S. role has at many points made it worse; Israel’s genocide in Gaza aided by the United States and western European countries, has diminished but never ended; and it has targeted children especially, an atrocity crime according to the UN.  Israel has ongoing military operations in southern Lebanon, Syria, Iran and the West Bank leading to mass detentions of Palestinians and the theft of Palestinians homes and land people as well as the death and displacement of hundreds of thousands of people in these other Middle Eastern countries.  

Sudan suffers internal conflict between government forces and the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces (RSF)) since April 2023 and it leads the world in terms of violence against civilians, including extensive sexual violence against women, with tens of thousands of Sudanese civilians massacred by the RSF.  About thirteen million civilians have been displaced from their homes with many, especially women with children, fleeing to nearby countries.  Millions are surviving on one meal per day or less.

Photo by Danielle Suijkerbuijk on Unsplash

The United States, never free of war since WWII, has “used its global military network to invade or intervene in 96 countries” over the last 80 years.  And it is currently involved in seven military conflicts across six different wars. 

Leaving the peace shrine to finish my walk, I searched for lessons of peaceful cultures to give hope and counter our conflict-ridden world as inevitable.  I remembered the Lithuanian-American archeologist and anthropologist Dr. Marija Gimbutas’ significant work, which inspired me a few years ago to launch a movement of peace signs in store windows in downtown Greenfield.  Dr. Gimbutas’ research has provided us an expansive epoch of time, from 6500 BC to 3500 BC when peace prevailed among early European peoples, with a culture of egalitarianism and no male domination over women.  People were buried in communal graves indicating no obvious difference in status or wealth. 

Today, there are societies, once warlike and now peaceful such as the Nordic countries and the five tribal nations of the Iroquois Confederacy.  Costa Rica has no standing military since the mid-1940s, in a hemispheric region where conflict has been rife.  We desperately need more countries – if not all – to do likewise.

John F Kennedy’s inspirational peace speech given in June 1963 as a Commencement Address at American University carried a realistic but peaceful message: “For peace is a process – a way of solving problems.  There is no simple key, no grand solution.  World peace, like community peace, does not require that each man love his neighbor – it requires only that they live together in mutual tolerance, submitting their disputes to a just and peaceful settlement.”

Over time, however, that distinction gave way to the belief that all Israeli leaders were essentially the same. This is not pessimism. It is experience.

Consider, for example, the expansion of illegal Jewish settlements during the Oslo peace process under Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin.

Between 1992 and 1995, the number of Israeli settlers in the West Bank, excluding East Jerusalem, increased from 111,673 to 140,235 – a rise of more than 25 per cent, according to the Palestinian Central Bureau of Statistics (PCBS), drawing on Israeli statistical records.

The same pattern continued under the Labour government of Prime Minister Ehud Barak.

Within his first six months, Barak’s government issued tenders for 3,196 settlement housing units, exceeding the annual average under his right-wing predecessor, Benjamin Netanyahu.

When Naftali Bennett formed a coalition government in June 2021 that included the Arab party Ra’am, settlement expansion continued unabated.

According to the Israeli settlement watchdog Peace Now, the Bennett–Lapid government advanced plans for 7,292 settlement housing units during its first year, a 26 per cent increase over the annual average recorded under previous Netanyahu governments.

The settlements are themselves a driving force behind the occupation. They require land, and therefore land confiscation; protection, and therefore an expanded military presence; water, roads and infrastructure, and therefore the appropriation of Palestinian resources. Together, these elements deepen dispossession and generate further Israeli violence.

According to the PCBS, the West Bank contained 645 Israeli settlement sites, outposts and other occupation installations by the end of 2025, including 350 settlement outposts.

The Palestinian Colonization and Wall Resistance Commission, a Palestinian Authority body, reported that Israeli authorities targeted approximately 29,335 dunums of Palestinian land through declarations of so-called “state land” between October 2023 and August 2026 – one of the largest waves of such land appropriation since Oslo.

By September 2026, the Commission had also documented the advancement or consideration of plans for more than 18,000 additional settlement housing units across the West Bank and occupied East Jerusalem.

Alongside this expansion is the violence unfolding across the West Bank.

By the end of 2023, the West Bank had experienced its deadliest year for Palestinians since the UN began systematically recording casualties in 2005.

The Colonization and Wall Resistance Commission documented 23,827 attacks by Israeli forces and settlers against Palestinians and their property during 2025 alone. In the first seven months of 2026, settler attacks increased by 63 per cent compared with the corresponding period of the previous year.

Typically, this violence, carried out by the Israeli occupation army and armed illegal settlers, is contextualised within the ongoing genocide in Gaza. But violence in the West Bank also serves another purpose beyond collective punishment: the confiscation of Palestinian orchards, the annexation of land, the expansion of settlements and the crushing of Palestinian resistance, including non-violent opposition to this colonial enterprise.

Any Israeli candidate in the 27 October elections who supports settlement expansion does so with full knowledge of its consequences: further dispossession, military occupation, annexation and violence.

The difference between Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich and National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir, and politicians presented as less extreme, is often one of language, strategy and timing.

Former Israeli military chief and Yashar party leader Gadi Eisenkot, for example, openly supports the expansion of Israeli settlements in the occupied West Bank, despite his reputation as a more “moderate” alternative to Netanyahu.

What, then, about Gaza?

Who among Israel’s leading political figures is promising to end the genocide, lift the siege, ensure unrestricted humanitarian aid, restrain the army or investigate violations of international law? None.

Israeli media have spent the past three years reporting on major disagreements between the government, military establishment, intelligence agencies and political opposition over what should happen in Gaza.

Yet Eisenkot has pledged to end Hamas’s rule in Gaza within 18 months of taking office, whether through US President Donald Trump’s framework or through continued war.

For his part, Yesh Atid leader and former Prime Minister Yair Lapid has proposed placing Gaza under Egyptian administration for up to 15 years, effectively shifting responsibility for Israel’s actions onto Arab states.

Former Prime Minister Naftali Bennett, meanwhile, supports continued Israeli military control until Palestinian groups are disarmed.

The disagreement, therefore, is often over how Israel should achieve its objectives, rather than whether those objectives should change.

Other major disagreements primarily concern Israeli society: the conscription of ultra-Orthodox Jews, judicial reform and accountability for the failures of 7 October.

Via Picryl

But these disputes should not be confused with the questions that matter most to Palestinians.

If Netanyahu succeeds in forming another right-wing coalition, the policies of occupation, settlement expansion and military confrontation will continue, potentially with renewed momentum.

If Israel produces a broader coalition, its members may reach compromises over judicial reform, conscription and other domestic disputes. The occupation, however, is unlikely to become the central point of disagreement.

More troubling still, even a government leaning towards the centre-left might succeed in presenting Israel to the international community as a country ready to move beyond the image it acquired during three years of genocide, without fundamentally changing its conduct on the ground.

The international community must therefore remain vigilant. It cannot allow a future Israeli government to present itself as a peacemaker, or sell the illusion of a newly reformed Israel, while continuing to invest in settlements, occupation, war and genocide.

The views expressed in this article belong to the author and do not necessarily reflect the editorial policy of Middle East Monitor or Informed Comment.

Unless otherwise stated in the article above, this work by Middle East Monitor is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.

(The Conversation) – When voters enter polling booths across the United States next week to cast their ballots in the midterm elections, very few will be thinking explicitly about foreign policy.

In a recent survey by the Chicago Council on Global Affairs, many people across the political spectrum named inflation and the cost of living as the issue which would affect the way they planned to vote (37% overall). This was followed by corruption (19%) and control of Congress (19%). The war in Iran barely registered, with just 2% putting it top of their list.

At first sight this appears to support the conventional wisdom that US voters generally don’t care about foreign policy. But traditional understandings of the electoral importance of foreign policy often reflect misunderstandings about the way in which voters assess candidates for office.

One reason a president’s foreign policy might lose him or his party votes is when their administration’s choices directly affect the daily lives of voters. War is the most obvious example of this. International politics may be complex and far removed from the daily lives of most citizens. But when blood and treasure is being invested in overseas conflict, the public tends to sit up and pay attention.

This does not always show up in polls. Historically, the proportion of voters who rank international affairs among the most important problems facing the country has averaged around three times lower than the proportion who identify economic issues as their primary concern. But what these polls miss is the degree to which voters today are blaming the administration’s foreign policy choices for the poor state of the economy.

According to a recent survey by the Institute for Global Affairs, an overwhelming majority of Americans (81%) say the war in Iran has increased the cost of living. When YouGov asked survey respondents why gas prices were going up in their area, the top three answers were the war in Iran (41%), Trump (18%), and war in general (17%).

Trump’s tariff policy also comes at a political price. According to the Yale Budget Lab, the current effective tariff rate is 11% – almost quadruple what it was when the president assumed office in January 2025. And voters are feeling the pinch. According to the Chicago Council survey, a strong majority of respondents (81%) say tariffs have been bad for the cost of living at home. And three in four say tariffs will be important to their vote, according to a Cato Institute survey.

Issues like the price of gas and groceries which affect people’s wallets will still play an outsized role in shaping the outcome of the midterm elections. But many Americans now hold the president’s conduct abroad responsible for the affordability crisis. With the president’s approval ratings already at a historic low of 36%, and support for his handling of several foreign policy issues even lower, Trump’s record is an albatross around the necks of many of his Republican colleagues.

Reckless leadership

Even voters who aren’t that interested in international affairs still form judgments about the competence of their leaders based on the way in which they execute their duties as commander-in-chief.

Few people entered polling booths in November 2024 with the American withdrawal from Afghanistan in the front of their minds. Yet the way the Biden administration handled that episode did lasting damage to perceptions of the president’s image. Biden’s approval rating dropped almost overnight, and never recovered.

Two years ago, Trump exploited this on the campaign trail, developing a reputation as a strong leader who would stand up against adversaries while keeping the country out of wars. In survey questions asking respondents which candidate would do a better job of handling foreign policy writ large in the run-up to the 2024 election, he regularly prevailed by at least five percentage points.

Today, however, foreign policy is no longer a winning issue for Trump or his party. According to a New York Times/Siena survey, Democrats now enjoy a ten-point advantage over Republicans on the question of which party voters trust to do a better job handling foreign wars. In an Economist/YouGov survey, Democrats had a 24-point advantage on the question of which party would do a better job of keeping the US out of wars.

Worse still, the political damage has spread into broader perceptions of the president’s leadership style. When the war began, a YouGov survey found that 56% of respondents said the word “reckless” applied “a lot” to President Trump – up five points from a year earlier. The proportion of Americans who described Trump as a “strong leader,” meanwhile, dropped four percentage points.

With midterms traditionally understood as a referendum on the performance of an incumbent president, the picture looks bleak for Republicans.

The cost of wars

Trump’s recent decision to temporarily lift US sanctions on diesel imports from Russia indicates the White House knows how much gas prices could cost it at the polls.

But his decision to adress this by accommodating Vladimir Putin has only served to place the spotlight on another of Trump’s foreign policy weaknesses: his failure to bring the war in Ukraine to a close.

Official White House Photo by Molly Riley. Public Domain. Via Picryl

And it could backfire. With experts doubting whether Trump’s moves will have any meaningful impact on gas prices, public opinion remains strongly in favour of Ukraine in its conflict with Russia.

In 2006, a backlash to George W. Bush’s handling of a costly war in the Middle East handed the president’s party a “thumping” defeat, as Democrats rode a “blue wave” to claim majorities in both chambers of Congress.

With voters now feeling the pain of yet another war in the Middle East and Trump’s trade wars, Republicans may be about to learn a similar lesson about the political perils of an unpopular foreign policy record.

Andrew Payne, Senior Lecturer in Foreign Policy and Security, City St George's, University of London

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

This is the most consequential task the Israeli president performs, and a huge responsibility: His first pick has 28 days to form a coalition, with a possible 14-day extension. If that fails, Herzog can appoint the other party leader with the same 28-day timeline. Failure to form a government doesn’t automatically trigger a new election, but that might well be the outcome of a deadlock. Another possibility would be for the president to allow Benjamin Netanyahu to form a caretaker government, though that step would be a Faustian bargain.

What’s bad for Israel isn’t necessarily bad for Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. His selfish urgency to remain in office is dragging the nation down as never before.

The current results show the far-right wing Likud Party with 27 seats, and its projected coalition at 53. Gen. Gadi Eisenkot’s center-right Yashar Party stands at 21 seats, with his overall coalition at 48. The total seats projected to be held by the opposition parties add up to 67, a number that includes the 19 seats garnered by the Palestinian-Israeli parties of the secular Joint List headed by Yousef Jabereen, and Ra’am––the Islamically oriented United Arab List of Mansour Abbas.

The unprecedented 19 seats won by the Palestinian-Arab parties are a wild card. In most countries, that showing would make them kingmakers. They say they are willing to engage with anybody committed to Netanyahu’s ouster, but it seems improbable that Eisenkot’s coalition would be willing to allow them to join it. Prof. Juan Cole notes that the “19 seats in the 120-seat Knesset, nearly 16% of seats . . . isn’t quite equal to their 21.7% proportion of the population, but it is closer than they’ve been before.” He noted, “This rejection of political participation for over a fifth of the population illustrates the oxymoronic character of the phrase ‘Jewish and democratic.'”

Both major Zionist blocs are fractured, with tenuous, unpredictable alliances, as illustrated by the abrupt withdrawal from Eisenkot’s opposition coalition of Avigdor Lieberman, the leader of the right-wing Yisrael Beytenu (“Israel is our Home”) Party. He has cut off contact with his opposition allies, including Eisenkot and Naftali Bennett, chairman of the center-right B’Yachad (“Together”) Party. Lieberman says he wants a national unity government of Netanyahu and Eisenkot. He will not join a solely Netanyahu-led coalition, however, because of his visceral dislike for the latter.

If the two Zionist blocs refuse to form a national unity government, the numbers dictate that neither alone can put together a government without the Palestinian-Israeli parties. Given the revulsion against this idea expressed by Eisenkot, by Lieberman, and by Bennett, it seems most unlikely that the opposition will bring the Joint List and Ra’am aboard.  

If Netanyahu prevails, it will be due to the demographics of the Haredim and religious parties, who tend to have very large families. Netanyahu enjoys overwhelming support in those Ultra-Orthodox towns, kibbutzim and neighborhoods. This popularity arises from his record of doing their political bidding, along with religious considerations.  “Haredi” is derived from the Hebrew word meaning “to tremble,” as in trembling from fear of God. Their unwavering support for Netanyahu makes me tremble.

Eisenkot favors ending the draft exemption for Haredi young men, which makes them tremble. He also wants to keep all legal West Bank settlements in place and secure, but wants to dismantle the illegal ones. The International Court of Justice, however, has ruled that all Israeli squatting on the land of the Palestinian West Bank is illegal in international law.

Haaretz columnist Yossi Verter characterized the election as “a rout for both sides.” With his often amusing cynicism, Verter points out that Netanyahu has a history of accepting all manner of “criminals, Kahanists, racists, anti-Zionists by definition who do not recognize the state, who vilify the IDF and legitimize mass draft-dodging, people who mock fallen soldiers while calling them Nazis. Everyone has room in Uncle Bibi’s cabin.” That’s a succinct summation and nice nod to Harriet Beecher Stowe. Ronald Reagan had his “Big Tent,” with no room for liberal Republicans. Netanyahu has his world where he “does not agonize over values or ethical issues. All [Zionist] partners are legitimate and suitable as far as he’s concerned.” That doesn’t leave any room for the 19 delegates of the Palestinian-Israeli parties.

Following the template of his Siamese twin in criminality, Donald Trump, Netanyahu is loudly claiming that the election was rigged, even before all the results are in. That claim is an effort to sabotage any government that includes the Palestinian-Israeli parties. Undermining confidence in elections is a time-honored tradition of authoritarian dictators. But Israeli police have found no evidence to support the Likud Party’s allegations.

Among my American friends and associates who have immigrated to Israel, most share a deep devotion to Orthodox Judaism in some form. (“There are all kinds of Jews in this world,” I’ve often been told.)  They comprise the full ideological spectrum, including Netanyahu supporters, “Anybody but Bibi” voters; and long-term, committed anti-Zionists. Netanyahu is facing unprecedented opposition over numerous issues, including his three criminal indictments and his administrative failures. But his ignoring security warnings, which led to the October 7 Hamas attacks, fuels the most vigorous objections.

An Eisenkot government would initiate a formal investigation into what led up to Oct. 7, the sort of inquiry that Netanyahu has repeatedly blocked and which he deeply fears.

An irony of history is that Ze’ev Jabotinsky, the founder of Revisionist Zionism, and a forebear of the Likud Party, once proposed that “in every Cabinet where the Prime Minister is a Jew, the vice-premiership shall be offered to an Arab, and vice-versa . . .” Zionism arose in a variety of forms and functional goals, including a visible faction rooted in secular, agrarian ideals. The recent embrace of Christian Zionism is also counterintuitive to original Jewish Zionism because of its apocalyptic model of a world without Jews, a pesky fact the Likud Party and right-wing American Jews prefer to ignore. That mindset has fueled the current predicament. 

File photo, Benjamin Netanyahu. State Department photo by Ron Przysucha. Public Domain. Via Picryl.

During the campaign leading up to the election, Eisenkot was dismissive of a potential coalition with the Palestinian-Israeli parties, but they are his only viable negotiating partners now. At the moment, it appears that he will fail to seize the opportunity to lead a government and dispense with Netanyahu, who primally fears being prosecuted for his three indictments when he’s eventually out of office.

Haaretz columnist Amos Harel said, “Merely avoiding a loss is a win for Netanyahu.” Netanyahu’s aspirations may be to emulate Trump, who after all escaped removal from office after two impeachments, and nevertheless won the presidency again. Harel notes that, given the deadlock, Netanyahu “gets to continue to be prime minister for now, and another election serves him since it’s likely that his rivals have exhausted their electoral capabilities in the present round.”

This election demonstrates how far right the Israeli electorate has moved. The “liberal” Zionists, who still hold to the “secular, agrarian-socialist ideals,” have been entirely eclipsed and sidelined. Conceptual Zionism was never a simple monolith, and was born with different, competing visions of social and religious goals. It’s never been more shattered.

Right now, the United States is unhappy enough to need a lot of heroes – and during this election year, many have emerged. Here are five of the notable ones.

 **  Abdul El-Sayed

No other major candidate this year has been the target of so many shameless and racist smears as Abdul El-Sayed, a 41-year-old Muslim American who is one of the most articulate and persuasive campaigners to arise since Zohran Mamdani. The former health official in Michigan is in a toss-up race for the U.S. Senate against former Rep. Mike Rogers, who is a nonstop fountain of MAGA talking points and deceptive campaign messaging – reinforced by President Trump – that tries to cast El-Sayed as a terrorist “jihadist.”

Countering this barrage is a grassroots campaign that El-Sayed started to build during the Democratic primary, which he won by overcoming a nearly 10-1 funding deficit, including more than $30 million spent against him by AIPAC. Whether explaining Medicare for All (which he literally wrote the book on) or the genocide in Gaza or the affordability crisis at home, El-Sayed conveys a strong progressive agenda with clarity, depth and wit. While Republican donors and AIPAC are dumping vast amounts of money into propping up Rogers and attacking El-Sayed, some corporate or Israel-aligned Democrats evidently wouldn’t mind if El-Sayed loses.

 **  Angie Nixon

A longtime community activist, labor organizer and fighter for human rights, 42-year-old Angie Nixon is now fighting for a seat in the U.S. Senate from Florida. In November 2023, as a member of the Florida legislature, Nixon sponsored a Gaza ceasefire resolution that went down to defeat, 104-2. Absurdly vilified as “antisemitic,” she stood firm, insisting that caring “about thousands of innocent lives lost makes nobody antisemitic.” Prophetically, Nixon said: “Continued attacks will only lead to more suffering and more death.”

In 2024, Nixon opened a remarkable bookstore/coffeehouse as a community hub in Jacksonville’s African-American community, offering books banned by Florida school districts thanks to Gov. Ron DeSantis and the state legislature. Five months ago, Nixon was arrested for civil disobedience while trying to meet with DeSantis over the state’s new gerrymandered congressional maps.

Aligned with the Working Families Party and Democratic Socialists of America, Nixon was a longshot in the Democratic Senate primary against the establishment favorite. Vastly outspent, she outorganized the opposition and stunned the power structure two months ago to become the Democratic nominee. If she were to win another upset victory on Nov. 3 in a state that Trump carried by 13 points in 2024, she’d be a force to reckon with on Capitol Hill.

**  Melat Kiros

In early summer, when Melat Kiros defeated a 15-term incumbent Democratic congresswoman in Denver’s deep-blue district, the win by the democratic socialist sent political shockwaves nationwide. Her victory crushed the myth that a socialist electoral insurgency could only succeed in the Northeast.

Kiros, who arrived in the U.S. from Ethiopia as an infant, is an attorney who will enter the U.S. House of Representatives in January at age 29. She lost her job at a major law firm over her advocacy for pro-Palestinian protests. She chose as a keynote for her campaign: “Establishment Democrats are beholden to the same billionaires who keep our prices high, burn our planet, and profit from a genocide. We can change that. It starts by changing who we send to Congress.” Kiros has not committed to supporting Hakeem Jeffries for speaker if Democrats take over the House, where she says she’ll push for a full progressive agenda, including federal rent control and a moratorium on data centers.

**  Mai Vang

For the first time in memory, a genuine progressive is on the verge of ending the Matsui dynasty that has represented the Sacramento area in Congress since the 1970s. Doris Matsui has held the congressional seat for 21 years, ever since her husband Robert Matsui died after 27 years in office. In sharp contrast, 41-year-old Mai Vang is committed to upsetting the pro-corporate, pro-war apple cart instead of riding on it.

She grew up poor, the eldest of 16 children. After stunning achievements as a community organizer, she has been a pathbreaking member of the Sacramento City Council since 2020.

Vang is running on a platform that includes abolishing ICE, enacting improved Medicare for All, establishing a federal Renters’ Bill of Rights and taxing billionaires. If she wins her seat in Congress and Democrats win the House, Vang has said that she’s not committed to supporting Jeffries as speaker. 

With emphatic positions that include “stop the genocide in Palestine” and “repeal the blank check for war,” Vang explains: “My family fled the CIA’s Secret War in Laos as Hmong refugees. I carry the memory of what happens when our government chooses war over diplomacy: families torn apart and trauma that haunts generations. Today, as conflict devastates communities from Gaza to Iran to Ukraine to Sudan, our mission must be to protect life – not fund its destruction. We need a representative who refuses to profit from the industries fueling this violence. I will fight to redirect our tax dollars from endless wars abroad into healthcare and housing here at home.”

**  Ro Khanna

Along with his regular appearances in national media discussing the Epstein Files or his opposition to the Iran War, Rep. Ro Khanna has emerged as the most high-profile politician in California advocating for the billionaire tax measure on the state’s Nov. 3 ballot. Although his congressional district includes much of Silicon Valley, he has clashed with Big Tech billionaires and their supporters who want to defeat Proposition 40, which would generate state tax revenue to backfill the huge upcoming hole in California’s healthcare programs expected to reach  $100 billion in losses of federal Medicaid funding over the next five years due to the Trump regime’s draconian cuts. Khanna has been willing to publicly denounce Gov. Gavin Newsom for siding with billionaires against the measure that would raise tens of billions from those who can easily afford it.

Khanna has not shied away from clashing with establishment Democrats for lacking conviction and moral principle. When he toured the West Bank in July, Khanna was confronted and detained by armed Israeli settlers. He later said: “If you’re unwilling to speak up for Palestinian human rights, if you’re unwilling to speak up against the genocide in Gaza, the apartheid in the West Bank, then you are morally compromised.”

The news coverage of the most recent No Kings Day appeared significantly more subdued than in the past and the marches and rallies that day seemingly (or at least reportedly) were smaller than once upon a time. It evidently mattered not at all that we are now in a world where kingships (a politely outmoded word for dictatorships or autocracies) seem to be spreading. After all, two of the three greatest powers on the planet, the United States and Russia, certainly seem to have moved toward modern-day versions of kings with Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin, and the third one (Xi Jinping of China) isn’t exactly an elected leader.

As it turned out, my own version of No Kings Day reportage has put an emphasis on that “no” and may have proven all too personally symbolic of the moment we’re now in. Once upon a time, I went to the huge No Kings demonstrations/marches in New York City where I live and recorded and wrote about them in my own fashion. As I put it in October 2025 about the previous one I attended,

“Yes, in the ever more ominously unsettled (dis-)United States of Donald J. Trump, I recently went to the ‘hate America’ rally in New York City. Or at least that’s what Republican Speaker of the House of Representatives Mike Johnson insisted it was. Who knew that so unbelievably many Americans, millions of us across the United States, would “hate” this country enough to go out and march in the recent No Kings demonstrations, even in places where we might have feared being in distinct danger from the troops of “our” president? In the days before the latest No Kings demonstrations, no matter whom I talked to or where they lived, they seemed to be planning to go to their local version of that march/rally….”

However, in the days before the latest NKD (if you don’t mind my now abbreviating it), nobody in the Trump administration or among the Republicans in Congress had a nasty thing (or even anything) to say about it as far as I could tell. For that matter, just about no one I knew said much of anything about it either or was making plans to attend one of the NKD events in New York City.

I did, however, prepare for it myself in what has become my usual fashion. I carefully pocketed a couple of pens and the very modest-sized notebook that I had already used when I last interviewed and chatted with people (and scribbled down their endlessly inventive protest signs) at the No Kings rally I attended in October 2025 and about which I wrote a piece for TomDispatch (which I was then still running).

This time around, however, this 82-year-old guy was remarkably unprepared for what turned out to be — in terms of weather — the first real fall day in a New York City that had been warm as hell until that very moment on this ever-warming planet of ours. When I stepped out just in time (I hoped) to catch the scheduled beginning of the rally at one of the protest sites in downtown New York City, I was underdressed and found myself almost shivering and chilly as hell (or do I mean as a piece of food in an icebox). I had, of course, checked (I’d like to say carefully but evidently not) online to find the nearest No Kings protest to my apartment.

 

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Then, walking to the subway to head down to it, I experienced a first. A nearly all-white pigeon just about flew into me, its wing grazing my right jacket sleeve. I considered it a sign (but of what I hadn’t the faintest idea).

I then ran into an acquaintance on the subway platform, where on such days I would usually begin my coverage by writing down all the protest signs people on the subway were carrying to one of the demonstrations. On this day, however, I saw not one single homemade sign in anyone’s hands on the subway car I was riding in or in the station. She and I went downtown together until the train stopped at 57th Street (where she was also going) and we climbed the stairs to Columbus Circle, where I’ve often enough begun marches in the past.

Here, however, was the strange thing: when I stepped out, it was early afternoon in New York and that busy circle in the heart of Manhattan did indeed have any number of people passing to and fro on it, but there wasn’t a protest sign in sight or the typical cluster of demonstrators gathering for the start of any march. I circled that circle carefully, asking random people repeatedly about the No Kings march, but no one knew a thing. Finally, I came across an older fellow (like — hint, hint — someone I know all too well — and I mean myself, of course) and he pulled out his cell phone to check on the nearest march and showed me that I had ended up in the wrong place entirely.

And then, strangely depressed and shivering in the chill, I walked back to the subway station and headed home. Let’s hope I do better at the next No Kings Day demonstration, since, barring an act of nature, we’re all too likely to have both King Donald and me around for (at least) two more years.

The Symbol (Beyond All Symbols!) of Decline and Fall

In some strange fashion, however, my experience came to seem to me like the perfect protest moment in Donald Trump’s misbegotten version of America, where nothing turns out right anymore. If I had made a sign, I think it might have said: “This Land Is (Not) My Land” (or the world version of the same), since these days that’s the way it increasingly feels to this old man.

When I finally got back home, irritated at myself and thoroughly protest-less, and thought about what I had just experienced, it seemed like the perfect personalized protest symbol of Donald Trump’s America. After all, whether you’re trying to protest or not, nothing really seems to be going well in this country (or this world) of ours, does it?

File photo. “No Kings.” © Juan Cole

I mean, how the hell did my land ever get him a second time around? We’re talking — and I don’t care what you think of him — about a madman running what had not so long ago been the most powerful country on Earth. Someday, if we’re all still around on this ever-stranger planet of ours, he will undoubtedly be remembered as the symbol (beyond all symbols or, in noise terms, do I mean cymbals?) of decline and fall — not just of the most powerful nation on the planet but (no small thanks to him) of the planet itself (at least as a livable place for humanity).

Honestly, in this day and age, on this ever more disturbed and overheating world of ours, how could a near majority of Americans have re(yes re!)elected a man who denies that even the most obvious planetary changes are actually happening. In truth, it’s beyond madness. Or rather, I mean: he’s beyond madness and so, increasingly, is this world of ours.

At some deep level, none of this makes any sense whatsoever to me anymore. Climate change is not exactly a hard phenomenon to grasp, and a president of the United States who is determined to deny reality at such a basic level, in some ways the most basic imaginable, seems (or at least should seem) beyond comprehension. And yet here — and nowhere else — we are now, even if I can’t quite take it in.

I mean this is simply not the world I ever would have wanted to leave to my children and grandchildren. And yet, welcome to Donald Trump’s planet Earth.