On October 27, a judge in New Cairo ordered Mada Masr closed. He fined its editor-in-chief, Lina Attalah, three million Egyptian pounds, the maximum the law allows, and ordered the confiscation of its equipment once the verdict becomes final. Security personnel then detained her in the courtroom. She was held for more than seven hours, until supporters crowdfunded the fine. Mada’s appeal against the closure is set for November 25.

While her lawyers processed her release, they found a sentence nobody had told her about. A court had convicted her in absentia in 2024 and given her a year in prison for spreading false news and running a website without a license. Her lawyers objected, which forces a retrial. On Wednesday, November 11, Attalah goes before a criminal court on those charges. “Spreading false information” carries up to a year in prison. The license charge carries a fine of two million pounds. Amnesty International, having watched how the judge ran the first trial, warns there is a serious risk she will be sent to prison.

Mada Masr is the most important independent newsroom in Egypt. It was founded on 30 June 2013, days before the coup that brought Abdel Fattah al-Sisi to power, and it publishes in Arabic and English. It checks what the state says and prints what it finds. TIME named Attalah one of its 100 most influential people in 2020. Reporters Without Borders gave her its courage award the same year. In 2023, the governments of Canada and the United Kingdom gave Mada Masr their Media Freedom Award.

Watch: why Lina’s retrial matters, in under three minutes.

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The crime is publishing

In 2017 the authorities blocked Mada’s website. Mada kept reaching readers through social media and proxies, which were shut down again and again. Sharif Abdel Kouddous, who worked there for four years, called it “this cat-and-mouse game.” In November 2019, plainclothes security forces raided the office and took Attalah and two senior colleagues in for questioning after Mada reported that Sisi’s son had been moved out of the intelligence services and sent to Russia.

The charge that closed Mada last month is “operating an unlicensed website.” Mada applied under the 2018 media law in 2018 and again in 2020. The law gives the regulator 90 days to answer. It never did. In 2022 Mada learned, during an interrogation, that its application had been rejected without reasons. It sued and lost. In 2023 the regulator finally named its grounds, and Mada resubmitted with every document the regulator said was missing. It has heard nothing since.

The state refused the license for eight years, then convicted the editor for not having one. “We’re not against regulation,” Attalah told AFP. “We have a problem when the licensing becomes a tool of control, a tool of exclusion.”

The false news charge fails the law too. In 2017, the UN and regional rapporteurs on free expression declared in a joint declaration that general bans on “false news” have no place in international law. Egypt is a party to the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, and the UN Human Rights Committee has said the covenant forbids blanket bans of this kind.

The trial moved at a speed Egyptian courts rarely reach. Attalah was summoned by State Security on October 21 and sent to trial six days later. It was her sixth interrogation in a few years and her first referral to court. The judge refused to adjourn, refused to let the defense submit documents or call witnesses, and, according to reports from the hearing, appointed a lawyer for her over her objection while her own eight-member legal team sat in the room. Journalists were kept out during key stages. Amnesty’s secretary general, Agnès Callamard, called it a masquerade of justice. Attalah was pulled out of the room before the judge finished.

“It felt like I was being kidnapped from the courtroom,” she told AFP. “I did not hear the verdict as I was being pulled by the cops.”

A newsroom called “Don’t Believe It”

When State Security summoned her, Attalah was reporting on six of her peers, some of whom she had mentored. Between September 28 and 30, the authorities arrested the entire newsroom of Matsadaash, an independent fact-checking and investigative platform whose name means “Don’t believe it.”

For five days nobody would say where they were.

They are Abdullah Qadri, 35, an investigative journalist arrested twice before. Mohamed Ashraf Abu Emaira, 30, who had worked at Mada Masr and Raseef22. Mohammed Adel, 29, whose economics reporting fed into investigations due out this month. Islam Barakat, 39, a former human rights researcher. Mohamed Mahmoud, 26, the social media manager, who had not finished his second month in the job. And Omar Hilal, 21, an intern, arrested before his first byline.

Their lawyers at the Egyptian Initiative for Personal Rights say most of them told prosecutors they were bound, blindfolded and beaten in National Security facilities, stripped, given electric shocks and threatened with harm to their families. EIPR says officers forced them to record fabricated “confessions.” The Interior Ministry denies it, and the prosecution says a forensic examination of three of the six found no injuries.

The prosecution calls Matsadaash a Muslim Brotherhood media platform and calls the journalists’ salaries foreign funding. EIPR points out that the prosecution’s statement does not identify a single Matsadaash report as false. The six are charged with joining a terrorist group and spreading false news. The terrorism charges carry the death penalty. A colleague in Cairo told RSF that “all journalists are accused of that here.”

On November 5, thirteen UN experts, among them the special rapporteurs on torture, on freedom of expression and on human rights in counterterrorism, condemned the arrests. They said the six were forcibly disappeared for five days, denied access to lawyers and allegedly tortured during interrogation, and that terrorism charges carrying the death penalty fall short of the threshold international law sets for “the most serious crimes.” They wrote that “the torture and ill-treatment of these journalists is an egregious example of a severe and relentless crackdown on independent voices.”

Ben Saul, the UN’s special rapporteur on counterterrorism, named it directly on X: “the abuse of terrorism charges.” The experts also raised the transnational repression of Matsadaash’s founder, Abdelrahman Mansour, who lives in exile in the United States. After the Interior Ministry publicly branded him a “fugitive,” he faced threats, a smear campaign and violations of his privacy.

After the arrests, Mada joined other Egyptian and regional outlets in a solidarity flash newsroom to cover what Matsadaash no longer could. Shortly after, Attalah was interrogated and referred to trial. “It’s hard to separate between those two incidents,” she told AFP. The journalist Rasha Azab has since been summoned for questioning, and pro-government commentators have gone after the Journalists Syndicate for defending the six. Its head, Khaled Elbalshy, has refused to back down: “What happens to one colleague affects us all.”

Most people don’t grasp how far this has gone

Egypt has jailed journalists for years. In December 2013 it arrested three journalists from Al Jazeera English, where I later worked: Peter Greste, Mohamed Fahmy and Baher Mohamed. They spent more than a year in prison. Twenty-six journalists are behind bars in Egypt today, Attalah wrote on Monday. Hundreds of news and civil society sites are blocked.

What changed this autumn is the target. For a decade the state harassed a handful of independent outlets and human rights groups and let them survive on a narrow margin. Mada Masr has faced six criminal investigations in six years, and this is the first one sent to trial. Hossam Bahgat, who heads EIPR and sat in the courtroom, says the security agencies are “moving from years of harassing independent media to wiping them out completely.” PEN International says the referral to trial shows “a clear intent to entirely shutter the independent media space.” The UN experts wrote that the case against Matsadaash reflects “a widespread and escalating practice of the unlawful detention of journalists in Egypt.” Attalah calls it “a new chapter in trying to limit the already-limited space that there is for independent media.”

Since August, Sisi has spoken more and more often of a conspiracy to destabilise the country and of “traitors, criminals, and saboteurs.” The Matsadaash journalists were picked up while the government prepared a staged national conference to “listen to citizens’ views.”

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Who signed off

On September 4, Secretary of State Marco Rubio signed a memo waiving the human rights conditions on $320 million in US military financing for Egypt. Congress attached those conditions so that a slice of the $1.3 billion Washington sends Cairo every year would depend on democracy and human rights. Rubio’s memo cites Egypt’s “helpful role” after Operation Epic Fury, the American war on Iran. The letter informing Congress went out on September 21. A week later, the Matsadaash journalists disappeared.

Senator Chris Murphy, who sits on the Foreign Relations Committee, drew the line himself: “The minute that money was released, the crackdown began in an absolutely devastating way.” The State Department told the BBC the waiver reflected Egypt’s “importance to US national security interests” and declined to discuss its private conversations with Cairo.

Washington did this under both parties. In 2024, Antony Blinken waived the same conditions and released the full allocation because the Biden administration wanted Cairo’s help mediating the war on Gaza. Egypt’s security cooperation has been bought, every year, with the understanding that its prisons are none of our business.

Europe signed its own deal. In 2024 the European Union committed €7.4 billion to Egypt through 2027, up to €5 billion of it in loans, and has kept paying in tranches. Egypt is a key EU partner in curbing migration. After Mada was ordered closed, the EU’s diplomatic service issued a vague statement that did not condemn Egypt. Timothy Kaldas of the Tahrir Institute put it plainly to the BBC: “Egypt is getting signals from both sides of the Atlantic that human rights and the rule of law are no longer a priority, and they’re testing the limits of that.”

Attalah sees the same calculation from Cairo. Egypt, she told AFP, “is celebrated for being a haven of stability,” and its foreign backers treat stability as something that “can happen by just investing in power and the status quo.” She calls that “the wrong bet.”

Our own countries

Last week much of the world exhaled. Democrats swept the midterms, taking the House and the Senate and flipping seats in places the party hadn’t won in decades. I understand the relief. But the people who decide whether Egypt pays any price for jailing journalists sit in that same Congress, and both parties have signed the waivers. A new majority changes nothing for Lina Attalah unless it chooses to.

The attack on speech runs through our own countries too, and much of it has been about Palestine. Last year, immigration agents detained Rümeysa Öztürk on a street in Somerville, Massachusetts, after the Tufts doctoral student co-wrote a campus op-ed about Gaza. In Austria, the public broadcaster ORF declined to renew Karim El-Gawhary, who had run its Middle East bureau in Cairo since 2004, after years of campaigns against his reporting on Gaza. ORF called it a “generational change.” El-Gawhary says he was smeared as an antisemite and a friend of Hamas for writing about Palestinians as people, and that the campaigns stopped the moment ORF announced he was leaving.

Governments that look away when their own journalists and students are punished for words will not lose sleep over a closed newsroom in Cairo. Egypt’s rulers know it. Kouddous told the Observer the timing was deliberate: “If ever they’re going to do it and not worry about getting pressured from Europe or the US on this, it would probably be now.”

In her words

On Monday, Attalah published her own account in Drop Site News. She was summoned a week before the October 27 hearing and convicted in an afternoon. “Just like that, 13 years of journalism practice had ended in a five-minute judicial performance,” she wrote.

She described a newsroom that kept reporting while the state and its commentators told it to stop. “At Mada Masr, we simply chose to ignore the shouting, and do the work.” On Wednesday she will argue that “journalists should not be jailed, not only as a moral position, but also as a right inscribed in Egypt’s constitution.” She is asking for the charges to be dropped. “Journalists should not be in jail. I should not go to jail,” she told AFP. “The Matsadaash journalists should not be in jail. The rest of the 26 journalists should not be in jail.”

She also described what the courtroom has already taken. “We should be allowed to go back to our newsrooms and not spend our days in courtrooms,” she said. Until the cases are resolved, “there isn’t much journalism.”

To the governments that made this easy

In 2019, when security forces raided Mada and took Attalah away, she was released after a strong response from diplomats, many of whom read Mada every day. “Some very, very high-level calls were made,” Kouddous told the Observer. “That pressure, I think, saved it.” Introducing Attalah’s essay on Monday, he wrote that “global solidarity was crucial in helping to keep Mada Masr alive and Lina out of prison.”

I know that charge. When I was held in prison for 52 days, the authorities there also tried to justify my abduction and imprisonment by claiming I had practiced journalism without a license. Public pressure got me out in the end, as it got Lina out. We have to make it work again.

To the State Department: you waived the conditions Congress wrote to protect people like Lina Attalah, and the arrests followed within weeks. Say publicly that a prison sentence on November 11 will cost Cairo something. To the new Congress: the next waiver goes through you. Hold hearings on this one.

To the European Union: you are paying Egypt in installments. Tell Cairo, out loud, that the closure of Mada Masr and the jailing of the Matsadaash six put the next payment in question.

To London and Ottawa, who gave Mada Masr your Media Freedom Award three years ago, and to Paris and Berlin, whose embassies in Cairo honored Attalah in 2022: send your diplomats to the courtroom on Wednesday, and make the kind of calls that were made in 2019 if you really honor her work, and want anyone to honor you.

What you can do before Wednesday

Mada Masr is asking journalists everywhere to cover the story and to ask their own governments, on the record, whether this crackdown has affected relations with Egypt and what they have done to defend press freedom there. You don’t need a press pass to ask. Call your representatives. Write to your foreign ministry. Share Mada’s work, and say the six names of the Matsadaash journalists out loud.

Nearly 140 press and rights organisations have already signed their names. Mada’s senior editor, Mohammed Hamama, says Egypt’s independent outlets have kept working for years “in part because of the solidarity of their fellow journalists around the world.” Lina Attalah walks into court on Wednesday. Those calls have to be made before then.

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On the night of November 3, a plainclothes officer walked into Abed Abu Shhadeh’s bedroom in Jaffa while his wife, Haneen Eghbariya, lay there with their two sons. She said the man “came in like a thief.” Shin Bet agents and police took Abed, questioned him through the night and refused him a lawyer. They called it “contact with a foreign agent.” The contact was an interview. Before Israel’s October 27 election, Abed sat down with Azmi Bishara, the exiled former Knesset member, for Al-Midan, his podcast on Arab48. Abed has covered Israeli politics for more than a decade, in Arabic, Hebrew and English, for Arab48, Local Call and +972 Magazine.

In court the police called him a journalist, took a recess, and came back calling him a “political adviser.” His lawyers asked for any evidence of something beyond a recorded conversation, and the police pointed to a secret file. The judge extended his detention anyway. He spent five days alone in a cell two meters by two. Then the police skipped their own remand hearing and let him go without charge, and the Shin Bet, asked whether the case is closed, said nothing. Six months earlier, Haneen says, fifteen officers came to the same house for no stated reason, stood around for ten minutes and left.

Ran Shimoni describes himself as a good, law-abiding citizen who tends to trust the state’s institutions. On Sunday he wrote in Hebrew to the Israelis who had kept quiet about Abed and admitted that if it had been anyone else, he might have kept quiet too and waited for things to “become clearer.” It was Abed, “whom I know inside and out,” a man Ran would have suspected himself before suspecting. “And suddenly I understood, suddenly I saw it.”

Ran wrote that this “happens every week, and has for years. To Jews, to Arabs, to Palestinians, to asylum seekers.” Palestinians have known it for seventy-eight years. The state that took Abed governs us by sorting us: citizens inside the Green Line, permanent residents in Jerusalem, West Bank Palestinians under military courts, Gaza under siege and bombardment, refugees barred from going home. Each category gets its own laws, its own permits and its own prisons, and the categories exist to keep us apart. Abed’s offense was a conversation across those lines. A Palestinian citizen of Israel sat with a Palestinian leader in exile and played the recording for Palestinians everywhere. The state calls that contact with a foreign agent.

Ran saw all of this clearly, and then he wrote: “Until then, I don’t suggest losing trust in the state’s institutions.” He had just watched those institutions take a man he would vouch for over himself, hold him alone, deny him a lawyer and justify it with a file no one could read. He said the head of the Shin Bet should have resigned four times in a single week, and he kept his faith in the Shin Bet.

Yousef Munayyer called the arrest “a clearly political motivated abuse of government power.” The motive was political. The power was used as designed. The Shin Bet, the remand courts and the sealed evidence are how Israeli democracy has always worked for Palestinians, going back to the military government that ruled Palestinian citizens until 1966. Israeli liberals keep calling each new case a crisis of governance. Their conscience is real, and it stops at the state, and the state knows it can count on that.

Americans watched the same demand on 60 Minutes a week earlier. Ross Douthat asked Abdul El-Sayed whether Palestine has a right to exist. El-Sayed said yes. Douthat asked about Israel. “Yes, if there is a shared understanding,” El-Sayed began, and Douthat cut in over the condition. El-Sayed asked to finish. He said he would back two states if both peoples chose that, or one state shared in a different way if they chose that.

Days later he told ABC that the state of Israel cannot stay as it is and still give everyone equal rights to peace, dignity and self-determination. The right-wing press treated his condition as a scandal. Because his condition was equality. Douthat wanted from El-Sayed the pledge Ran made without being asked: faith in the state first, and questions about its conduct later, if ever.

But the state’s conduct is on the record. In Gaza, Israel has killed Palestinians by the tens of thousands, starved them and flattened their cities. The International Criminal Court has issued arrest warrants for its prime minister and its former defense minister. Soldiers and settlers raid West Bank villages every day. No Israeli official has paid for any of it, and a state that pays nothing for mass killing will not think twice about one journalist in Jaffa.

On November 8, hours after Abed walked out, President Herzog handed Gadi Eisenkot the mandate to form Israel’s next government. The Western press will introduce him as the opposition, the sober general who will repair Israeli democracy. In 2008 Eisenkot laid out the Dahiya doctrine, promising disproportionate force against any village Israel is fired on from, because “these are not civilian villages, they are military bases.” Gaza has lived under that doctrine ever since. As army chief he oversaw the 2018 Great March of Return, when Israeli forces killed 189 Palestinians and wounded more than 6,000 with live fire, according to the UN commission of inquiry. He rejects a Palestinian state. Eisenkot is what the institutions Ran trusts produce at their most respectable, and the election that raised him gave Israelis a choice of managers for the occupation. I wrote about that vote in The Occupation Won Israel’s Election.

Abed walked out of the cell and talked about the future. “Between the river and the sea there are Jews and Arabs, and we need to learn to live together,” he told the crowd in Jaffa. He thanked the Arabs, Jews and foreigners who stood with him, the lawyers and the Adalah team, and said their support “is not to be taken for granted.” He said the cell taught him to value what people take for granted, family and each other. “We will continue our struggle for justice and equality for everyone,” he said.

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Ran came to Abed’s side because he knew him. Most Palestinians in Israeli cells have no friend like that, no welcome party, and no one outside their family who knows their name. The Shin Bet still has not said whether Abed’s case is closed, which leaves the file open over his head.

Since his arrest, several friends have told me, as a compliment, that Abed and I look like brothers. I have caught myself tracing our families back, looking for the place where the lines might cross. My grandfather was from Jaffa, so I am from Jaffa too, the way exiles are from somewhere. On Sunday the city welcomed Abed home.

Abed was held for five days. I was wrongfully arrested and held for interrogation for fifty-two. I know what those days are built to produce, and it outlasts the cell. The raid at night, the isolation, the sealed file and the release with no charge and no closure all aim at the same result: a man who comes home and keeps his voice down, and a community that watches him and learns to do the same. Detention like this is meant to teach silence, and the people who order it never say so. That is the quiet part. Abed said it out loud within hours of walking free, into a microphone in Jaffa: “They want us to be afraid.”

He called the arrest political and told Arab48 what comes next: “I will continue to fulfill my role, practice my profession and serve the people and the community. There is no place for fear. We are walking the path of truth, for equality and justice for all.”

On Tuesday night, Abdul El-Sayed thanked AIPAC. “To AIPAC, who spent $42 million against us: Thank you for giving me the opportunity to beat you twice,” he told the crowd after defeating Republican Mike Rogers for Michigan’s open Senate seat. The son of Egyptian immigrants becomes the first Muslim elected to the Senate. He won in a state Donald Trump carried twice, after Trump and Ted Cruz spent the final week calling him a “jihadist,” and after the Democrat he beat in the primary, Haley Stevens, endorsed his Republican opponent.

Two weeks before the vote, the most feared lobby in Washington asked to be left off its own receipts. AIPAC told its members it would stop endorsing candidates, stop writing PAC checks and stop earmarking donations. Its super PAC, United Democracy Project, kept spending. The same week, the New York Times reported that UDP was sending up to $9 million to a group backing Rogers, money that landed after the federal disclosure deadline, and that Rogers’s own allies had asked AIPAC to keep its name out of the race. The name came off. The money kept flowing. AIPAC lost Michigan anyway.

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The Numbers

AIPAC and UDP spent $84.1 million in races decided by Wednesday. According to Eli Clifton at Responsible Statecraft, $55.3 million of it went to races where AIPAC’s side lost. That is 34 percent of its money on winners. In 2022 the figure was 69 percent. In 2024 it was 87 percent.

Michigan was the largest loss: $31.5 million from UDP alone, across the primary and the general. El-Sayed puts the total spent against him at $42 million. In Illinois’s 9th District, UDP spent $6.3 million against Daniel Biss, and Biss won with 75 percent of the vote. “Because of AIPAC’s involvement, the $7 million and more they spent, it was a core issue in this race,” he said. In Maine, Susan Collins, a long-time beneficiary of pro-Israel money, lost her seat to Troy Jackson, who opposes unconditional military aid to Israel. Earlier this year Dan Goldman in New York and Diana DeGette in Colorado lost their primaries, in part because they wouldn’t condemn AIPAC.

After every recent election, AIPAC has spent a day or two congratulating its candidates. This time its accounts went silent at 2:28 in the afternoon on Election Day, Mother Jones reported. When AIPAC finally posted, it claimed more than 234 winners and described them as candidates “supported by AIPAC members.” Even in a victory lap, the lobby kept its own name off the list.

A wave of viral posts this week claimed AIPAC had “changed its name” to United Democracy Project. UDP has been AIPAC’s super PAC since 2021, so the name is old. The instinct behind those posts is right. UDP is now the only name AIPAC wants on its money.

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The truth is the aid deal was already winding down. Trump simply moved its end date up and announced it with the polls open to take a losing issue off the ballot. The plan he and Netanyahu built to replace it moves American military support for Israel into the Pentagon budget, where voters can’t easily see it, and a lame-duck Congress takes it up in the weeks after this election.

Israel’s government has been pushing that plan since the spring. On June 5, Israel’s Defense Ministry announced formal talks with the Trump administration on a framework to take over from the 2016 memorandum of understanding when it expires in 2028. The ministry said the goal was to “gradually transition from aid to a completely reciprocal relationship.”

Ambassador Mike Huckabee had already posted the outline: “New MOU w/ Israel ends aid & will be based on trade.”

On June 1, Netanyahu wrote to Indiana Republican Marlin Stutzman to back a House resolution phasing out the money. “The time has now arrived for us to move from aid recipient to partner,” he wrote. Trump told Fox that he and Netanyahu made the deal months ago, and the paper trail agrees with him.

Section 219 of the House defense bill, which passed 216 to 212 this summer, would write that partnership into law through a permanent United States-Israel Defense Technology Cooperation Initiative inside the Pentagon. It covers joint research, co-production and folding Israeli systems into American supply chains, across artificial intelligence, autonomous weapons and cybersecurity. The Senate version, Section 1217, directs the Secretary of Defense to build the program in consultation with Israel’s defense minister. That puts a foreign government inside the process the U.S. uses to develop its own weapons.

Supporters say none of this counts as aid. AIPAC’s memo says the initiative does not authorize “a single dollar of new aid.” The American share of cooperative projects comes out of the Pentagon’s annual budget, spread across programs, with no single figure for a candidate to name at a rally. Former CIA analyst Paul Pillar has described Israel’s strategy as trading the price tag of grant aid for forms of integration that draw less attention and face less accountability. Even J Street, which supports U.S.-Israel security cooperation, opposes the provision as written over its weak oversight. On Tuesday, Julian Andreone wrote that the aid will move behind closed doors and out of the appropriations process.

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Trump named his own reason for the timing, and the polling backs it up. In a Times/Siena poll from September, voters under 30 preferred a candidate who opposes military aid to Israel by 62 percent to 15. In the same pollster’s May survey, opposition among Republicans climbed to 37 percent by May, up from 28 percent the previous September, with younger Republicans leading the shift.

Marjorie Taylor Greene called the announcement a last-ditch effort by a president who expects Republicans to lose badly, and noted that her amendment to cut the aid drew six votes in the House last year. Yaakov Katz, who defends the aid, said the timing was no coincidence and that the issue now splits Republicans as well as Democrats.

The Senate stalled its version of the defense bill in July, and negotiators from both chambers still have to reconcile Sections 219 and 1217 in the lame-duck session after the election. Senators Van Hollen, Sanders, Warren, Markey, Merkley and Welch oppose the provision, and Massie and Khanna tried to strip it in the House. Trump’s announcement lands days before that fight resumes, with the $3.8 billion figure already declared dead and the integration plan presented as the sensible next step.

On October 27, Netanyahu lost his majority. His bloc won 53 seats, Gadi Eisenkot’s won 48, and Arab-led parties took a record 19. Netanyahu and his allies have since claimed Arab parties stole the vote, and Israel’s Central Elections Committee dismissed the claim as baseless. During the campaign, Netanyahu sold the end of aid as Israel standing on its own two feet. A week after losing his majority, he received the American president’s public endorsement of that program, credited to him by name, while he fights to hold on to power.

The $3.8 billion was also only the predictable part of the money. In 2024 Congress passed an emergency package with $14.1 billion in military aid for Israel, on top of the memorandum. Brown University’s Costs of War project counts $21.7 billion in U.S. military aid and arms transfers to Israel since October 7, 2023. Trump said Tuesday that Israel can still buy American weapons, and nothing in his announcement touches the supplemental route Congress used during the war.

Most people who saw Tuesday’s headline will think American support for Israel just got smaller. The documents describe the same commitment moving out of the foreign aid budget and into the Pentagon’s, through a permanent framework that ties the two militaries together for decades. The vote on that framework falls to a lame-duck Congress, in the weeks after an election where the old aid line became a liability.

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Whoever governs Israel after Tuesday’s election, Palestinians will live under the same occupation, the same siege and the same settlements. The two blocs fighting over the Knesset agree on all three. They fight about Netanyahu, about drafting ultra-Orthodox men and about the power of the courts. On the question that decides whether millions of people live free, Israeli politics settled its answer long ago, and the answer is no. Diana Buttu said it plainly in Al Jazeera two days before the vote: the election may change “the face of the government, not the policy.”

The exit polls promised a close race, and the count delivered a stalemate. With 84 percent of ballots counted on Wednesday afternoon, the Central Elections Committee gave Netanyahu’s bloc 54 seats, Gadi Eisenkot’s opposition bloc 49 and the Arab parties 17. Neither bloc comes close to the 61 needed to govern. Turnout reached 77.7 percent, the highest since 1999. Saul Sadka saw only two paths: a unity government of Netanyahu and Eisenkot, or Netanyahu as caretaker until another election in the spring. For weeks, Washington, London and Brussels will read the coalition talks as a test of Israeli democracy.

Watch: The Quiet Part Out Loud on Israel's election.

The Joint List and Ra’am are on track for 17 seats, up from 10 in the outgoing Knesset, the most Palestinian citizens of Israel have ever sent to parliament. They won those seats against a state that worked to keep them home.

On election day, Muhammad Shehada reported what he saw: incitement from the top of government, Ben Gvir’s police at Arab polling stations, election workers obstructing Arab voters, Hebrew-only ballots, and Likud activists sent to film and intimidate.

A month before the vote, the Central Elections Committee, whose voting members come from the parties of the outgoing Knesset, voted 18 to 5 to disqualify both Arab lists. In past elections the committee went after single candidates, or a single party like Balad in 2022. This year it moved to strike every Arab-majority party from the ballot at once, while it rejected the petitions against Ben Gvir’s Otzma Yehudit and Smotrich’s Religious Zionism. The Supreme Court overturned the ban unanimously on October 2. Palestinian citizens had to win their place on the ballot before they could cast one. When the exit polls came in, Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich told his supporters he could see Arabs celebrating on the screens. “We won’t let them celebrate,” he said.

Amjad Taha posted on X that the ballot box had exposed the apartheid charge as a lie, since Arab turnout topped 70 percent in town after town and Arabs now hold about 14 percent of the Knesset, more than Muslim MPs hold in Britain. “Odd kind of apartheid,” he wrote. The Israeli state wants the world to take exactly that reading from Tuesday night. It counts the votes of some two million Palestinian citizens and asks everyone to forget the millions more left outside the count.

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About five and a half million Palestinians live under Israeli rule in the occupied West Bank, East Jerusalem and Gaza, by Palestinian official estimates. Israel decides who enters and leaves their towns. It controls their water, their roads, their population registry and the sky over their heads. Its soldiers raid their homes at night, and for three years its army has bombed Gaza into rubble. Not one of them voted on Tuesday. Most Palestinians in occupied East Jerusalem hold only residency permits and cannot vote for the Knesset either. Meanwhile, more than half a million Israeli settlers living on that same occupied land voted, many at polling stations inside their settlements. Two peoples share the same hills and the same roads, and only one of them chooses the government that rules both. Beyond them are the refugees, the families Israel expelled in 1948 and has barred from returning ever since.

In an exchange with Emma Vigeland, the official Israel War Room account asked what country on Earth would let non-citizens in “neighboring territories” vote. Vigeland answered that those territories have been illegally occupied and controlled by Israel since 1967. The account replied that West Bank Palestinians are free to vote in Palestinian Authority elections, if Mahmoud Abbas ever holds them again.

The phrase “neighboring territories” turns land Israel has ruled for 59 years, land it keeps filling with its own voting citizens, into a foreign country next door. It turns people living under Israeli tanks into strangers who happen to live nearby. Then it hands their political life to an authority that controls none of its borders and has not held a national election since 2006. A state that admitted it governs these people would have to explain why they cannot vote, so the state calls them neighbors.

Eisenkot, the man much of the world hopes will replace Netanyahu, set his terms for coalition partners: accept Israel as a Jewish democratic state, the values of its Declaration of Independence, and an obligation of service. He later added recognition of Hamas as a terrorist group that must be dismantled, and said no Arab party meets his conditions. In April he called for a “Zionist majority.” Naftali Bennett said the Arab parties are not Zionist, so he will not rely on them, and Avigdor Liberman will not sit with them at all. Buttu points out that not one opposition candidate supports a Palestinian state. Eisenkot himself is a former army chief of staff who in 2008 gave the Dahiya doctrine its name, a plan to flatten civilian neighborhoods with deliberately disproportionate force until the enemy’s society breaks.

People on X spent the night casting the Arab parties as kingmakers, in a Knesset where both blocs that might govern have already ruled their seventeen seats out. Eisenkot’s 49 seats and the Arab parties’ 17 add up to 66, the only majority on the board that leaves Netanyahu out. Yair Golan of the Democrats urged the bloc to take it. Taking it would mean breaking every condition Eisenkot set. Nadav Eyal, one of Israel’s best-known political commentators, set out the arithmetic the way the Israeli center sees it: Eisenkot lacks the 61 seats for “a cohesive, centrist, Zionist coalition,” as if Zionist were a measure of coherence. Eyal also wrote that Arab citizens turned out over their rights as citizens, over Ben Gvir’s police and the crime left to spread in their towns, more than over Gaza or a Palestinian state. They had every reason to. The ballot lets Palestinians inside Israel defend the narrow ground the state allows them, and asks them to leave the rest of their people at the door. The last time an Arab party sat in a coalition, Ra’am in the Bennett-Lapid government of 2021 and 2022, that government kept building settlements and kept Gaza under siege. The limits on what their votes can buy were written into the system long before Tuesday.

Israel has no written constitution. It has Basic Laws, and they state plainly what the state exists to do. The 2018 Nation-State Law declares that the right to national self-determination in Israel is “unique to the Jewish people.” It downgrades Arabic from an official language and names Jewish settlement a national value. Basic Law: Human Dignity and Liberty, the closest thing Israel has to a bill of rights, never uses the word equality. Basic Law: The Knesset lets a list be barred for rejecting Israel as a Jewish and democratic state, the clause the elections committee reaches for every cycle against Arab parties. The law of the land tells Palestinians, in writing, what place they hold.

Democracy promises equality, the idea that every person living under a government has an equal say in it. Between the river and the sea, Palestinians and Jewish Israelis are roughly equal in number. One people chose the government. Most of the other watched from behind checkpoints, from refugee camps, from tents pitched on the rubble of Gaza. Frantz Fanon named this arrangement in The Wretched of the Earth: “The settler makes history and is conscious of making it.”

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Netanyahu is wanted by the International Criminal Court. Israel faces a genocide case at the International Court of Justice. Gaza’s death toll runs into the tens of thousands, and its hospitals, universities and homes lie flattened. None of it was on the ballot. Buttu traces the reason: since 1948, she writes, Israeli society has never faced consequences for land theft, killing, imprisonment, collective punishment or genocide. A society that has never paid a price for these crimes stops treating them as crimes. They become campaign slogans. One of this year’s, she notes, was “Occupy. Expel. Settle.”

The leader of the opposition ran on a Zionist majority. The governing coalition tried to strike every Arab party from the ballot, and its finance minister promised to spoil their celebration. Second on that minister’s list sits Moshe Feiglin, who went on Israel’s most-watched news show in 2024 and quoted Hitler to argue that Gaza must be emptied of what he calls “Islamo-Nazis.” Earlier this month he said even newborn babies must leave Gaza. With his party on track for six seats, he is headed back to the Knesset. Ben Gvir’s longtime chief of staff, Hanamel Dorfman, ran seventh on his list, and Otzma is on track for seven seats, enough to bring him in if the final count holds. In July, Israeli media reported that investigators had arrived at the ministry with an arrest warrant for Dorfman, over allegations that he tried to influence investigations into Jewish extremist violence. Muhammad Shehada’s thread on incoming members lists more like them. Three years of genocide in Gaza produced an election where no major Jewish party offered Palestinians anything at all. Every coalition now under discussion, from a Netanyahu caretaker to an Eisenkot unity deal, keeps the occupation, the siege and the settlements in place.

Buttu argues that change will reach Israel only from outside, through sanctions that teach Israelis they hold no special right to commit atrocities. The governments that could impose them are already drafting their congratulations. Washington and Berlin will keep shipping the bombs. Brussels will keep the trade deal whose own terms demand respect for human rights. They will call the next government, whoever leads it, a democratic partner, as they called the last one through three years of starvation in Gaza.

Jaffa voted on Tuesday too. My grandfather’s city has polling stations now, in a place most of its Palestinian families were forced out of in 1948, and the people voting there chose between men who agree he and his descendants must never come home. The colonists queued at schools and community centers to decide who will hold the keys to our cages for the next four years, and the commentators called it drama. Palestinians have watched this ritual for seventy-eight years. We were never on the ballot. Any child in Jabalia or Jenin or the camps of Lebanon can name her family’s village. She learned it the way her grandmother taught it, and she will teach it to her own children.

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Watch: Albanese, Israel and the United States at the UN Third Committee, 26 October 2026. Footage: UN Web TV.

On Monday afternoon at the United Nations, Francesca Albanese presented a report on how Israel has destroyed the press in Gaza and how Western newsrooms helped it look acceptable. Israel’s ambassador answered by calling her “a fraud,” “a liar” and “a stain on the United Nations,” then held up a mock letter of resignation he had written in her name. The US representative called her “a moral fugitive” and “a liar and a lunatic” and told the room “Albanese must go.” Between the two, the chair of the Third Committee had to remind delegates to focus on the substance and not on individuals.

The substance is a 29-page UN document, A/81/249, titled Truth under the rubble: media in the time of genocide. Albanese, the Special Rapporteur on the occupied Palestinian territory, gives what she documents a name: mediacide, the systematic destruction of the media’s public function. By the report’s count, Israeli forces have killed nearly 300 journalists since October 2023, in what she calls the deadliest conflict for journalists ever recorded. They have also killed around 710 of those journalists’ relatives, 436 of them in the first four months.

The report’s central claim is the one the ambassadors stepped around. Killing the people who document a genocide, and destroying the means to document it, is itself evidence of the intent to commit one. “Accountability depends on the survival of the record,” she writes, and the record is what Israel has spent three years trying to bury.

The press vest became a target marker. Journalists in vests and helmets, in marked cars and marked tents, were identified and then struck. In October 2023 the Israeli military reportedly set up a “legitimization cell” to recast Gaza’s journalists as Hamas operatives, a pretext before each strike and an excuse after it. In October 2024 the army accused six journalists of being “operatives in Hamas’ military wing.” Two of them were later killed. Hossam Shabat left a statement published after his death: “If you’re reading this, it means I have been killed – most likely targeted – by the Israeli occupation forces.” Anas Al-Sharif was killed with five colleagues in a drone strike on a journalists’ tent near Al-Shifa hospital on 10 August 2025. At Nasser hospital that same month, a first strike killed a Reuters cameraman and a second killed four more journalists who ran to help. Israel said it had targeted a “Hamas camera.” It was Reuters’.

The Israeli ambassador accused Albanese of ignoring evidence that Hamas uses press credentials. Her report answers that directly, with the law. Journalists are civilians. They lose protection only when they take a direct part in hostilities, and the attacker has to prove it. Working for Al Jazeera, holding political views or being labelled a terrorist by the army that kills you changes none of that.

The witnesses who survived the strikes lost the means to be heard. The Palestine Tower, home to seven media outlets, was destroyed on the first day. By the report’s count, Israel has completely destroyed 81 percent of Gaza’s information and communications infrastructure. On 10 June 2025 it struck the last working cable serving central and southern Gaza. Independent foreign journalists have been barred from the Strip since October 2023, and the ban has outlived the so-called ceasefire.

Then Israel paid to fill the silence. In May 2025 it renewed the aid blockade that helped produce famine, and it signed roughly $50 million in advertising contracts, including with Google and X, to tell the world in many languages: “There is food in Gaza. Any other claim is a lie.” On Israeli television, Channel 14 broadcast a singer calling to “erase Gaza, don’t leave a single person there.” The International Court of Justice ordered Israel in January 2024 to prevent and punish incitement to genocide. Albanese finds it did neither, and that the outlets doing the inciting were rewarded with access.

The part of the report Western readers most need is about their own news. Albanese set aside the openly partisan outlets and examined twelve of the most trusted names in Western journalism, the ones policymakers treat as authoritative. Only three answered her requests for comment. She found a New York Times instruction to use “Palestine” only “in very rare cases,” and a CNN directive to “remind our audiences” that Hamas caused the conflict. She found that BBC headlines omitted or softened Israeli responsibility 83 percent of the time, and the Times’ 65 percent of the time. The BBC’s headline on Hind Rajab, the six-year-old killed by Israeli forces, still says she was “found dead in Gaza.” Palestinian children were about 99.7 percent of child fatalities, yet they appeared in just over half of CNN’s personal stories about child victims.

The platforms did the rest. Leaked Meta data shows around 38.8 million Facebook and Instagram posts removed, banned or suppressed since late 2023. TikTok complied with 99.2 percent of Israeli takedown requests and Meta with 94 percent. Albanese calls requests that win near-total compliance what they are: removal orders that skip any legal process.

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Her legal findings climb in steps. Killing identified journalists and bombing media and telecom infrastructure are war crimes. Done at this scale against Gaza’s civilians, they are crimes against humanity. Killing the witnesses is evidence of genocidal intent. Calls on national television to wipe out Gaza meet the bar for direct and public incitement to genocide, a crime complete the moment it is broadcast. Newsrooms that print one side’s unverified claims as fact share responsibility for the harm, and platforms that took money to run famine denial contributed to it.

That is the report the ambassadors faced, and they answered it with insults and a prop. Albanese answered them when the floor came back to her. The Israeli ambassador, she said, is so good at writing letters of repentance that he should write one for his prime minister, wanted by the International Criminal Court for war crimes and crimes against humanity. To the United States, whose representative called her a lunatic, she said she takes it very seriously, “given the experience of the country with the lunacy.” Then she read the Israeli ambassador a passage on colonization that, she said, came from Ze’ev Jabotinsky, one of Israel’s founding fathers, and suggested he refresh his history.

The United States and Israel had nothing to say about nearly 300 dead journalists, about a famine denied in paid ads, or about newsrooms that wrote Israeli forces out of a six-year-old’s death. They spent their time on the woman who counted. That choice is part of the pattern her report describes, carried out in the General Assembly itself.

What she asks for is concrete. She wants the General Assembly to set up an independent mechanism to collect and preserve evidence of crimes against journalists. She wants Israel to free detained journalists, account for the two who disappeared on 7 October 2023, and let foreign reporters into Gaza. She wants the ICC prosecutor to investigate Israeli officials and media figures for incitement to genocide. And she tells newsrooms and platforms they must stop laundering propaganda through the journalistic form, starting with verifying a warring party’s claims before they print them and running corrections as prominently as the error. Every one of those demands is about keeping the record alive. The people still filming in Gaza are doing that work today, with less protection than anyone in that room.

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“Based on a stratified sample, it is clear that we have lost this election,” he told the room. “The student blockade list won.”

Watch: how Serbia’s students beat Vučić, in two minutes.

By his own count, the Student List will hold between 135 and 140 of the 250 seats in the National Assembly, his Serbian Progressive Party about 105, with three seats for the Vojvodina Hungarians and one for an Albanian list. Even in defeat he reached for an accusation: “Many people will be surprised, and you will realise just how much some people have lied.”

Within minutes, flares lit the streets of Belgrade under the giant screens that had carried his face all campaign.

Only once in thirty years, in 2008, had Serbian turnout passed 60 percent, Thomas van Linge noted that morning. On Sunday it passed that mark by late afternoon. By 5 p.m. turnout stood at 60.9 percent, against 47.2 percent at the same hour in 2023, according to the CeSID and Ipsos figures compiled by Europe Elects. By 7 p.m., the students’ own sample put it at 66.8 percent, 4.31 million people, about half a million more than voted in the whole 2023 election. The lines formed abroad first. Serbs in New York were lining up at 1:30 in the morning, at polling stations the students had accused the foreign ministry of keeping to a minimum. In Vienna, the line filled the street outside the consulate.

The movement that won began with a slab of concrete. In November 2024, the newly renovated canopy at the Novi Sad railway station collapsed and killed sixteen people. Students asked for the documents on the renovation, for the prosecution of the men who attacked them at a vigil for the dead, and for charges against arrested students to be dropped. The government refused, so the students blockaded their universities. They walked from Belgrade to Novi Sad to honor the dead and brought 300,000 people into the capital in March 2025. When it was clear their demands would never be met by the men in power, they demanded an election and built something to win it. In plenaries at their faculties they chose 250 candidates, doctors, lawyers, teachers, farmers and lecturers. None of the students ran, and they named no leader, which left a government that rules by smear with no face to smear.

The state answered every stage with force. Police and party loyalists beat them. The ruling party built a camp of fake “students” in central Belgrade. Citizen Lab found NSO’s Pegasus spyware on a student activist’s phone, and this month on the phone of Belgrade’s university rector, Vladan Đokić, who stood with them. On the eve of the vote, pro-Trump influencers posed at Saint Sava to tell Americans that Vučić was defending Christian Europe, and pro-government accounts called the election a “color revolution,” the name autocrats give their own citizens when those citizens vote against them.

Election day brought all of it into the open. Access to the Republican Electoral Commission was blocked, so citizens could not walk in to report irregularities, Una Hajdari reported. In Lazarevac, people from the ruling party’s local office attacked an election observer, and residents surrounded the office until police had to hold a cordon at its door. In Pančevo, masked men attacked young men near a polling station, BBC News in Serbian reported. Half an hour after the record turnout came out, the police and gendarmerie began to move. Buses of gendarmes entered the National Assembly and Stari Dvor, the seat of Belgrade’s city government, a reporter for Izlaz reported, and police massed outside the electoral commission. Gendarmes with riot shields were filmed heading for RTS, the state broadcaster while people still had a few hours left to vote.

The students refused the fight they were offered. When the polls closed they told the country not to come to Belgrade: stay calm in your own cities, guard the independent observers, and wait for the protocols, the signed tally from every polling station. Dejan Bodiroga, the basketball great who ran on their list, asked Belgrade to keep away from a city center filling with police and masked men. “We must not allow anyone to jeopardize what citizens have fought for in these final hours,” he said. The regime had prepared for a riot in the capital. The students kept their people home and made the night about the count, and the count is what beat Vučić.

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For Serbia, the hardest part starts now. The electoral commission still has to certify the result, and the party that has run the country since 2012 still has its people in the police, the prosecution and the press. A list whose members disagree on Kosovo, the European Union and nationalism has to agree on a cabinet without a leader to broker it. Slobodan Bubnjević, number 103 on the list, calls the refusal to name a prime minister “constitutional patriotism”: the office belongs to any citizen, and accountability matters more than a name. The demands that started all of this, the documents on the Novi Sad station and the prosecution of the men who beat the mourners, now belong to the government the students built.

Young people across Europe are filling squares right now, in the lycées of Paris, the streets of Turin and the boulevards of Tirana, and they should pay attention to how the students of Serbia won. The square is where a movement learns it exists. It survives the police only if every arrest is answered together. Its demands have to become a program, and its program needs people the country already trusts, chosen in the open, with nobody at the top for the state to smear or buy. It has to go door to door wherever state television is the only voice. And on the night it matters most, it has to refuse the provocation and guard the count.

Serbia’s students did each of these things, in order, for two years, and on Sunday the strongman read out the result himself.

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On October 22, Qatar, one of the largest gas exporters on earth, signed a deal to buy gas. The buyer was QatarEnergy, and the seller Cheniere Energy, the largest exporter of LNG in the United States: up to four million tonnes annually, two from Sabine Pass in Louisiana and two from Corpus Christi in Texas, deliveries beginning in 2031 and running through 2054. Deliveries will be on an FOB basis, meaning Qatar lifts the cargoes itself. It is the country’s first such American offtake deal.

The timing carried its own context. The same day, the International Monetary Fund’s regional outlook put Qatar’s economy on course for a 15.6 percent contraction this year, the damage of a war that has choked off a fifth of global LNG supply. Qatar, among the biggest winners of the global gas trade for two decades, is now a buyer, on a twenty-three-year contract, from the industry of the government whose war emptied its tanks.

What the purchase actually buys depends on the reader. An energy analyst reads the deal as insurance: a producer state that lost liquefaction capacity secures alternative supply on the Gulf of Mexico for a generation, with FOB terms preserving discretion over how cargoes are traded. The 2031 start date fits that reading; QatarEnergy expects the damaged trains back within three to five years, by 2031 at the latest.

A political analyst reads the same signature differently. The state whose export facilities were damaged in a war launched by its protector is purchasing supply from the protector’s merchants, and the contract formalizes the dependency the earlier documents only implied. The twenty-three-year term is the strongest evidence for the second reading: insurance covers a gap, and this contract covers a generation.

The Cheniere deal also has company. QatarEnergy is in advanced talks with Venture Global for at least three million additional tonnes a year, discussions reported a day after the Cheniere signing, and Venture Global was already the supplier of necessity: after Hormuz closed in the war’s first days, QatarEnergy bought 33 spot cargoes of American LNG to keep its customers supplied, most of them from Venture Global.

Beneath both contracts sits equity. QatarEnergy owns 70 percent of Golden Pass LNG on the Texas coast, where the first train has been ramping since spring 2026; its first cargo sailed in April aboard the Al Qaiyyah, a tanker QatarEnergy owns, and the train now ships American gas that Qatar largely controls. The portfolio Qatar spent two decades assembling spread its exposure across rivals; the one it is assembling now concentrates it inside the patron’s economy, contracts on the patron’s coast, equity in the patron’s terminals, cargoes that never need to pass Hormuz at all.

On September 9, 2025, senior Hamas officials gathered in a residential compound in Doha’s Leqtaifiya district to consider a ceasefire proposal the United States had backed. Qatar was hosting, as it had hosted for the Taliban, for Hamas, and at various moments for Tehran, because hosting those conversations was the service it performed inside the American alliance. At 3:46 in the afternoon, Israeli missiles struck the compound in an operation the Israeli military called Summit of Fire. Six people were killed: Humam al-Hayya, the son of chief negotiator Khalil al-Hayya, his father’s office director, three bodyguards, and a member of Qatar’s Internal Security Force. The leaders the strike targeted survived.

Three weeks later, on September 29, President Trump signed an executive order pledging to guarantee “the security and territorial integrity of the State of Qatar against external attack.” The order raises the question its authors avoided: protect Qatar from whom? Iran’s one strike on Qatari soil, a missile barrage at Al Udeid in June 2025, had come with hours of warning and was almost entirely intercepted. The order followed an attack from the arsenal of the American government’s closest regional ally, delivered against a negotiating session built around a US proposal, in a country that hosts the largest American air base in the region. Neither government has explained what the guarantee is meant to protect against. No Qatari official has publicly named Israel in connection with it. The omission is consistent across both capitals, and the timeline does the explanatory work the governments decline to do.

The war arrived five months after the guarantee and tested it from inside. On February 28, 2026, the United States and Israel opened the campaign against Iran, killing Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei on the first day; one strike hit a girls’ school in Minab, near Bandar Abbas, where Iranian authorities reported more than 170 dead. Iran retaliated across the Gulf. In mid-March, after Israel struck the South Pars gas field, Iranian missiles hit energy targets in Saudi Arabia and Qatar, and QatarEnergy reported significant damage at Ras Laffan, the industrial city through which nearly all Qatari LNG passes.

The company’s chief executive, Saad al-Kaabi, put the accounting on record: LNG Trains 4 and 6 down, 12.8 million tonnes of annual capacity, roughly a sixth of what Qatar sells the world, close to twenty billion dollars a year in revenue, three to five years of repair work, force majeure declared and renewed month by month. At Pearl GTL, the Shell-QatarEnergy complex that converts about 1.6 billion cubic feet of gas a day into roughly 140,000 barrels of synthetic fuels, a direct hit disabled one of the complex’s two trains. Shell partially restarted the plant this month and expects repairs to the damaged train to finish in the first quarter of 2027.

Analysts at Wood Mackenzie estimated the plant contributed around 750 million dollars to Shell’s revenues last year, which gives a sense of what the strike put at risk. The Strait of Hormuz has been largely closed since the war’s first days, cutting off the route for a fifth of the world’s oil and gas trade.

Qatar expelled the Iranian military attachés after the Ras Laffan strike, and its intelligence chief said at Doha’s Global Security Forum in October that the entire defense posture had to be re-arrayed within six hours of the first attacks.

American producers captured the margin the war created: in the war’s first week, feed gas priced near three dollars per MMBtu was selling for sixteen to nineteen in Asia and Europe, March set a record for US exports, and Venture Global, the second-largest American exporter, reported a 69 percent jump in its average liquefaction fee in a single quarter. The shock was absorbed in the Gulf and monetized in Louisiana; and in Doha it was converted into a twenty-three-year purchase agreement.

The Trump administration declared an energy emergency it cannot fix, its officials have failed to articulate a stabilizing strategy for the region, and by August the vice president was calling lower gas prices “goal No. 1” of the war, an objective that sits badly with engineered scarcity.

In 2017, Trump called Qatar “a funder of terrorism at a very high level.” In 2025 his administration announced that Qatar would build a facility for its air force on American soil, at Mountain Home Air Force Base in Idaho. The Boeing 747 worth a reported 400 million dollars sits between the two statements, a jet the Qatari government had been trying to sell since 2020, as Forbes first reported, which Trump toured in Palm Beach in February 2025 and the Pentagon formally accepted as a gift that May. It had flown 1,069 hours in the five years before it went on the market, and found no buyer in five years of trying. Eight years separate the accusation from the base in Idaho; the plane sits between them, and since October, the gas follows them.

At a June bilateral meeting with the emir on the margins of the G7 summit in Evian, France, Trump offered the geography: “Qatar is the closest to Iran, physically,” he said, adding that other countries’ leaders had to travel forty-five minutes while “you could walk right across the border.” Qatar and Iran share no land border; a maritime boundary runs through the Persian Gulf between them, and Ras Laffan lies roughly 120 miles from the Iranian coast across it. The man issuing the guarantee placed his client within walking distance of the neighbor whose missiles had burned its export plants three months earlier.

For two decades Doha ran a portfolio state: the Taliban’s political office and Hamas’s office in the capital, Al Udeid air base in the desert outside it, Iranian gas in the shared waters, a sovereign wealth fund with positions on three continents. Each relationship hedged the next. Washington described the arrangement as adventurism in moments of tension and indispensable plumbing in moments of negotiation, and both descriptions were accurate: the back channels the United States could not publicly maintain ran through a partner that could.

The strike of September 2025 broke that division of labor. Israel attacked a mediation infrastructure its own patron depended on, and the attack demonstrated something every Gulf capital noted: the patron responded to the bombing of its partner by selling the partner protection. Within the region, the question quickly became what the hedger actually owned.

Qatar, meanwhile, kept mediating. A negotiating team traveled to Tehran in May; through the autumn, Doha has coordinated with other mediators on bridging proposals, and its foreign ministry spokesman confirmed engagement from both Washington and Tehran as recently as October 20, in the same news cycle in which the US defense secretary warned Iran of “destruction.” The emir’s formula, playing on a loop in Doha’s Pathway to Peace museum, has not changed: “We will never regret to be a mediator.”

The sentence is sincere, and it is also the only one of its kind Doha has left. Mediation is the one role in the Gulf that runs on trust rather than on bases and contracts, and its counterparties include the patron’s enemies. That may be why it survives everything else. But its terms have changed underneath.

No official in Washington or Doha will state in public what the documents state in sequence: that the guarantee took shape against a threat the guarantor’s ally posed, and that the gas purchase functions as the premium on it. Saying it aloud would require both capitals to concede that what they call an alliance has the structure of something older, a protector collecting rent from a protected. The hedge is ending because the war demonstrated that diversification in this region stops at the edge of the American security umbrella, and that the umbrella’s price is now quoted in molecules, annually, through 2054.

Serbia supplies the control case, and it is running on a much faster clock. The country’s gas contract with Russia was due to expire on September 30, 2026; that day it was extended by three months, on the same terms, through the end of the year, and no long-term successor has been signed since the previous three-year deal lapsed in the summer of 2025.

The American alternative is already under construction: a pipeline connection south through North Macedonia toward the Greek coast, where American LNG comes ashore, is being pushed on an accelerated schedule, and Vučić has pitched Serbia’s energy sector, long dominated by Russia, as an opening for American investment.

The price of conversion is legible in the tariff schedule: Washington suspended its 35 percent tariff on Serbian goods in July, against the threat of tariffs running as high as 100 percent if the Russian purchases continue.

Serbian arms sales to Israel grew from about three million euros in 2023 to 114 million euros in 2025, a nearly fortyfold increase carried on airlifts from Belgrade to Israel’s Nevatim airbase. In August 2025, Elbit Systems signed a five-year, 1.63 billion dollar contract with a customer it initially withheld from disclosure, who turned out to be Serbia. On September 17, five weeks before the snap election and ten days before his own resignation from the presidency, Aleksandar Vučić opened a drone-assembly plant that BIRN and Haaretz tied to Elbit, saying it would build “state-of-the-art equipment” for the Serbian military and the armies of other countries, and announced plans for at least three more plants.

In June 2025, a day after students marched in Belgrade against the arms trade, Vučić announced a halt to all military exports. But the trade did not stop: Haaretz and the Balkan Investigative Reporting Network established that Serbia shipped more to Israel in the first half of 2025 than in all of 2024, and the year closed at its record. The student movement that produced the announcement, organized originally around the Novi Sad railway canopy collapse of November 2024, entered the October 25 election as a single list, three days after the Cheniere signature dried in Doha.

The patron’s family has already been in the country: Jared Kushner’s Affinity Partners planned a hotel on the site of the bombed former army headquarters in Belgrade until it withdrew in December 2025, after prosecutors charged the culture minister over how the site lost its protected status; that trial opened in February. The umbrella’s price is quoted in molecules in Doha, and in tariffs, pipelines and property in Belgrade; but the umbrella is the same.

A state expecting a short war buys its way through the disruption on the spot market, the way Qatar bought thirty-three cargoes through the Hormuz closure, roughly a billion dollars, cargo by cargo, for as long as the strait stayed shut. A state expecting its fields back signs for the repair window, three to five years at Ras Laffan, and stops there. Qatar signed for twenty-three years: deliveries beginning in 2031, at the far end of the repair window, the tail running a generation beyond it.

However the war ends, the buyer has told the market how long it expects the destabilization to last, in the most binding language available to a state, and both capitals have let the term stand as the closest either has come to saying it aloud.

Serbia’s students started the youth revolt now spreading across Europe, and they are the only ones so far who have turned it into a real threat at the ballot box. This week they converge on Belgrade for one last show of strength before Sunday’s vote.

Marchers left Zaječar in the east on October 16, Gornji Milanovac on October 18, and Valjevo and Šabac on October 19, and the final column set out from Novi Sad on October 20. Some of them will have walked more than 200 kilometers by the time they arrive. Walking is how this movement speaks. In January 2025, students walked from Belgrade to Novi Sad to honor the victims of the station collapse, and they have since cycled and run across Europe to put their demands before European institutions.

On Thursday at 6 p.m., the columns meet in Belgrade’s Slavija Square for a final rally called “Victory Calls,” just before the campaign silence begins. Sunday’s main contest pits Aleksandar Vučić’s Serbian Progressive Party against the Student List, which grew out of two years of protests led by university students. On October 16, Vučić held his first rally in Novi Sad since the collapse, trying to show his party’s strength in the city at the heart of the resistance to his rule.

The three-minute version, if you would rather watch.

The first lesson is in the street. A young person shows up, looks around, and sees thousands of people who feel what they feel. That discovery mobilizes people faster than any program. Serbia’s students began blockading their universities after the canopy at the Novi Sad railway station collapsed in November 2024, killing sixteen people. High school students soon joined the blockades. In March 2025, about 300,000 people came to Belgrade, and almost 200,000 more came last May. Today, France, Italy and Albania are following in suit and living this lesson out now.

Aleksandar Matković, a researcher at Belgrade’s Institute for Economic Sciences who was nominated as a Student List candidate before taking up a research scholarship in Spain, says Serbia’s students moved through this stage faster than most. Many of the students had probably already been in the streets with the movement against lithium mining, he told me, so “they instantly blockaded the faculties.” Because they were physically present inside their faculties, he said, they could “take time to think through the democratic procedures and link up with other faculties, and that’s how it started.”

The second lesson arrives with the police. Every government that cannot answer its young people tries to break them, with arrests, beatings, expulsions and lies. In Serbia, police and pro-government thugs attacked the students.

Before the March 2025 protest, the ruling party organized people to pose as students who opposed the blockades, some of them well past student age, and set them up in a camp in central Belgrade. The European Parliament later condemned the encampment as illegal and raised concern about people with criminal backgrounds being mobilized by the ruling party to attack protesters with pyrotechnics. French students suspect police of posing as Arab teenagers on Snapchat. Serbia’s government built a whole fake student body. The pressure has not stopped. On October 20, two days before the final rally, students said police were searching premises used by one of their colleagues, in what Vreme, a liberal independent weekly news magazine, described as a hunt for “terrorists.” A movement survives this stage only if it answers each arrest together, gathers again and again, and refuses to let fear scatter it.

Matković knows this stage from the inside. In August 2024, he received death threats against him and his family over his opposition to Rio Tinto’s lithium mine in the Jadar valley. The government had targeted him since 2020, and he says that on some occasions he broke. What held him together was public support from academics, from intellectuals at home and abroad, and from social movements. “These threats function as long as you internalize them,” he said. He later learned that some 60 other activists had been targeted. Pro-government media branded them ecological terrorists, released their private data and photos, and had them followed.

When they protested together outside Serbia’s state broadcaster, he said, “this gave us all additional strength.” His answer was to make every part of the attack public, through protests, articles and talks, which he believes made the state and Rio Tinto think twice. “When somebody spends so much time and money trying to cause you harm,” he said, “there is something in you that literally decides to resist.”

The third lesson is about demands. Governments in France and Italy can absorb protests in their streets every day and keep governing as usual, because they have police and they hold power. The street pressures a state, it cannot replace one.

Serbia’s students made concrete demands from the start: publish the documents on the station’s reconstruction, prosecute those who attacked students mourning the victims, drop charges against arrested students, and fund higher education. A government that wanted peace could have met them. This one refused, and the students concluded their demands would never be met, so they added another: early elections.

That move from the blockade to the ballot box is why outsiders struggle to describe the movement, Matković says. “This is much more than a protest and much more than an election,” he said.

The fourth lesson is the hardest. If the political parties are part of what broke the country, a movement cannot hand its demands to them and hope. It needs its own program and its own people, and someone has to build both. In Serbia, the young did it themselves. They held plenaries at their faculties to choose candidates, and none of the students are running for office. The list of 250 names is made up of lawyers, university lecturers and civil society figures, and the students persuaded almost every opposition party to step aside so the vote would gather behind it. They campaign under the slogan “Serbia or Mafia,” naming corruption, para-police gangs and ties between the state and organized crime.

The students set one test for every candidate. Besides expertise, each had to have taken on the government of their own free will, on their own initiative, without parties, business backers or foreign sponsors, and with nothing to gain. Slobodan Bubnjević, a physicist and number 103 on the list, had already been fighting corruption in his workplace and in the citizens’ assembly in Pančevo, where he lives with his wife and two daughters. He took part in one of dozens of expert working groups the students convened to draft their program, and his group alone produced a 218-page action plan. The plan rests on three words, justice, knowledge and development. Its measures run from a prosecutorial police, tax checks on assets, lustration and freeing the media to investment in housing, a doctor in every village, and an end to workers’ dependence on fixed-term contracts. Bubnjević describes it as a medical protocol for a patient on the edge of a heart attack, whose body is being eaten away by corruption.

Matković went through that process himself. About eight faculty plenaries put his name forward, and three approved him. He told each of them that he had applied for a scholarship abroad, in case things in Serbia went downhill. When it came through, he left for Spain, knowing others could carry on the same work. “It’s not about the person, it’s about the idea that they represent,” he said. “Each one of us can be replaceable.” He still campaigns from abroad through his own social media, in coordination with the movement, which he says has enlisted about 900 influencers with a combined 41 million followers to break through the media blackout.

Each faculty invented its own procedure. Any student could nominate anyone, and if other students agreed, the candidate was invited to introduce themselves. At the Faculty of Technical Sciences, one of the country’s largest with about 16,000 students, two students interviewed Matković and then sent him a questionnaire. The Faculty of Political Sciences rented a hall in a Belgrade cultural center and put him on stage with five other candidates, asking each the same questions, such as what they saw as Serbia’s biggest economic problem.

At his own Faculty of Philosophy in Novi Sad, he faced about a hundred students, one candidate at a time, and they could ask him anything. Once a faculty chose its candidates, every other faculty in the country could veto them or demand changes, and the whole process took about a year, meaning the veto had teeth. In September, faculty plenaries voted 43 to 42 to strike the rector of Belgrade University, Vladan Đokić, whom much of the public had expected to lead the list. Matković says many students now think the lack of a single voting system may have been a mistake, since they built the procedures as they went.

That is a long way from how Serbia’s parties choose their people. Matković was a member of the Green-Left Front, the main left-wing opposition party in parliament, where, he said, the party’s leaders drew up the candidate list themselves and traded places with coalition partners.

The students also knew that regime-controlled media had never mentioned them in the countryside and small towns, so they went door to door. Their “Student in Every Village” group says it has visited more than 400 communities and 40,000 households in the past year.

This week’s marches carry the same purpose: crossing the heart of the country to win voters one at a time. That work took two years of meetings under pressure, with messages that were sometimes confused and an organization that held anyway. It produced the most advanced experiment of this whole generation of revolt, and the farther you stand from Belgrade, the easier it is to miss.

The risks are real. Vučić resigned the presidency on September 27 to run for prime minister, and the election is unfolding under allegations of irregularities and unfair conditions. Earlier this month, the Student List protested outside the Electoral Commission, alleging fraud. On October 19, Ilija Srdanović, the first name on the list, told reporters the students had called for no tensions anywhere in Serbia and wanted the campaign to end peacefully and with dignity.

Asked by Vreme in September whether the list had a plan if the government refused to accept defeat, Bubnjević answered with one word: yes. The list has also declined to name a candidate for prime minister, which Bubnjević defends as “constitutional patriotism,” arguing that the office belongs to any citizen and that accountability matters more than a name. The list is ideologically diverse, and it remains unclear how it would turn protest energy into changed institutions. Experts warn that winning power would be only the start of the challenge.

Matković, who comes from the left, admits the list is no coherent structure. It inherited many of the positions that divide Serbia, and because it is not a party, he said, it can afford its contradictions for now. The students settled their disagreements by negotiation, and those who lost had to accept compromise, so the program is the product of that bargaining. “We were afraid that this might break up the movement,” he said, “but it managed to hold through.” He hopes the students will one day form a party of their own, which would mean reworking the program, and he is already looking past Sunday.

The old opposition is the other unknown. Matković’s former party, he said, had only about 500 members, and the others are no bigger. Most opposition parties now back the students, but one pro-European party is running against the list, a choice he expects voters to punish as betrayal. Behind the scenes, he said, tension between the parties and the students ran high. It was settled only for now: the parties stepped aside expecting the list to open the way to future elections in which they can run again. He does not know whether that support will hold after Sunday, or give way to “chaos and contestation.”

Polls suggest the list could win. If it does, a movement that began with sixteen dead at a train station will have carried its grief into government, and every student blockading a school in Créteil or Turin will have seen where the road can lead. If it loses, the students will still have built what the uprisings of 2011 never managed: an organization that outlived the squares.

Matković has been carrying the story abroad. He recently lectured in Barcelona on Yugoslav and Serbian history, and he says people there are fascinated. He refuses to treat Serbia as a Balkan exception, and he reaches for a line from Julian Assange, who told the daily Blic a decade ago that Serbia is one of the countries “in between,” where the future comes first and whose fate is to be misrepresented. Across Europe, he said, states are run by corporations led by corrupt politicians, “and it’s no wonder that we see self-organization resurging in France, Belgium, Spain and elsewhere.”

His advice to a student blockading a school in Paris, Turin or Tirana is to follow Serbia closely, for Serbia’s sake and their own.

“The moment that you start to challenge corrupt governments, capital, corporations and markets in your own countries,” he said, “this sort of knowledge will be vital.”

This is the pilot of The Quiet Part Out Loud, short videos on what the week's news leaves out. Tell me in the comments if you want more.

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Crude

The Strait of Hormuz has been choked since the war on Iran began in late February. Tankers keep getting hit. Iran says its mines struck three more this week.

Gulf oil exports are higher than before the war anyway: more than 24 million barrels a day, according to the Wall Street Journal. The industry piped crude across Saudi Arabia and the Emirates, around the strait. When that wasn't enough, it pumped oil from one tanker into another in open water off Oman. That's how badly the world wanted this oil to move.

Generator oil

Gaza's intensive care units run on generators, and generators run on oil. On 21 October, the health ministry said the oil had run out. It asked for oil and spare parts. Israel decides what enters Gaza, and neither is getting in.

Gaza is supposed to be under a ceasefire. Israel has killed more than 1,500 Palestinians since it began. Nobody is moving oil tanker to tanker for a hospital.

Olive oil

The third kind grows on trees. It's harvest season in the occupied West Bank, and the UN counted at least 160 settler attacks on olive harvesters in the first two weeks of October.

The UN's response was to urge governments to "increase international and diplomatic field presence." Translated: send foreigners to stand next to Palestinian farmers and hope the settlers hold back. Brad Lander, a congressional candidate in New York, went. Israeli forces detained him near Bethlehem on 20 October and released him with a warning. Several dozen people detained with him stayed in custody.

The pardon

Julio Herrera Velutini, a Venezuelan billionaire banker, was charged in a scheme to bribe Puerto Rico's governor. He pleaded guilty to a campaign finance charge and wanted a pardon. His family signed Alina Habba, Trump's former lawyer, to a deal worth more than $50 million, the New York Times reported. She started in January. He had his pardon weeks later.

By then Habba was a senior adviser to the attorney general, at the same Justice Department that announced this week it will pay up to $30,000 for tips on government fraud. Habba says the job had nothing to do with the pardon.

Milan

In Italy, where I teach, people have been protesting the cost of living. The government sent 500 soldiers to Milan. Under its new rules, join a group of more than five at a protest carrying a stone, a stick or a firework, and you face up to five years in prison and a €20,000 fine.

Governments found a new route for crude in wartime, $50 million worth of access for a billionaire, and 500 soldiers for Milan's protesters. Gaza's hospitals got a statement that the oil had run out. Every one of those outcomes was a choice.

Footage: thatdayin1992, SMohyeddin, HatsOffff, QudsNen, +972 Magazine and Brad Lander on X. Photos: Wikimedia Commons (US Navy, Syama Prasad Mookerjee Port, Jaber Jehad Badwan, محمد شراونة, Tessa Bury, US Department of Justice, slgckgc).

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On Friday and Saturday, young people filled the streets of Paris, Rome, Madrid, Brussels, Berlin and Tirana. Each government is busy describing its protests as a domestic matter, a dispute over school budgets or a tuition reform or a housing shortage. But the past forty-eight hours describe something larger: a generation has looked at the future Europe is building for it and refused it, and its governments have sent the police to make it accept that future anyway.

It started in France with a modest list. On September 21, students walked out of the Lycée Saint-Exupéry in Créteil demanding more resources, replacements for absent teachers, repaired buildings and smaller classes. The French state answered with handcuffs. Police have held 7,950 people in custody since the blockades began, 6,773 of them minors. The ministry calls these gardes à vue. In plain language, the Republic has locked up nearly seven thousand children in a movement that began with a demand for teachers. During the 2023 riots, the comparable figure was 1,319 minors over about ten days. Franceinfo calls the current number something France has never seen. On Saturday, unions, former yellow vests and people crushed by the cost of living joined the students, riot police fired tear gas on the square before the march had even started, and a second protester lost a hand.

The revolt travels the way 2011 traveled, from screen to screen and street to street. Fifteen years ago, Tunisians posted advice to Egyptians on surviving tear gas, and the chant for the fall of the regime crossed from Tunis to Tahrir in weeks. Today French high schoolers organize their blockades through TikTok, Snapchat, Instagram and X, the same platforms French deputies voted in January to close to anyone under fifteen. They wall off school gates with green municipal bins, and school blockades have since spread to Turin, Brussels and Berlin.

The movement found its slogan on Snapchat. Since the blockades began, students say strangers have been messaging them, fishing for their identities and the locations of blockades. The students suspect plainclothes police, though nothing has been confirmed. According to franceinfo, the accounts were easy to spot: usernames meant to sound North African, Algerian flags dropped between sentences, French stitched with Arabic. Whoever wrote them had a clear picture of what a rebellious French teenager looks like, and it was an Arab Muslim kid.

The students recognized the caricature at once and they mocked it across TikTok, and then they carried it into the street. “Bismillah, c’est les ténèbres,” roughly “In the name of God, it’s darkness,” now appears in marker and paint on cardboard at blockades and marches across France. One sign credits the line to “Mamadou, undercover cop.” In one photo, the student holding it is wrapped in a keffiyeh.

France has spent two decades legislating what Muslim girls may wear to school, from the 2004 ban on headscarves to the 2023 ban on abayas, and policing its suburbs as a security problem. Its idea of the enemy within has become so familiar that teenagers can parody it on sight. A generation of students took the profile the state built for them and wrote it on their banners.

Italy followed the French lead and said so. On Friday, students called a “No Meloni Day” against crumbling schools, against funding for the arms industry, against a cap on immigrant pupils in classrooms, and in solidarity with their French peers.

Organizers counted more than 400,000 young people in the streets from Turin to Cagliari. A placard in Turin summed up the national budget better than any finance minister could: no money for our schools, plenty for their wars. Education Minister Giuseppe Valditara had a name for teenagers asking for ceilings that stay up: “political hooliganism.”

In Madrid, between 35,000 and 60,000 people marched on Friday, the third day of an indefinite public education strike. The march ended at the Puerta del Sol, where young people priced out of their own city have kept a housing encampment since September 26.

In Brussels on Saturday, police turned water cannon and tear gas on students protesting education cuts and higher fees. Belgium’s interior minister announced that events had gone beyond protest and promised every necessary means against “rioters.”

In Berlin on Friday, students barricaded the gates of the Andreas-Gymnasium against the government’s preparations for compulsory military service, declared solidarity with France and raised Palestinian flags. Police called the protest peaceful and sent as many as 150 officers anyway.

Albania has gone furthest and fastest. Thousands of students rallied in Tirana on Saturday for a fifth straight day to force Edi Rama out, and riot police met them with stun grenades and tear gas.

They had protested peacefully for nearly three months, and the government ignored them and ran smear campaigns instead. When the anger finally boiled over, Rama blamed “foreign hands.”

Strip away the national details and one line runs through all of it. In France Sophie Binet, the leader of the CGT, one of the largest and most influential trade union confederations in France, pledged that her members would turn out to protect high school students, called the movement the verdict on ten years of Macron, and called a general strike for November 5. The yellow vests returned on Saturday with a simple complaint: fuel, groceries and rent keep costing more while life gets no better. Students in Bari marched against war and the cost of living. Spanish student groups are building youth committees for a general strike against rentierism. In Albania, the grievance is corruption and joblessness. The young are told there is no money for teachers by governments that keep finding money for weapons, for landlords and for themselves. These students are up against a political class that has arranged the economy around its own security and enrichment and sent the bill to people too young to have voted for any of it.

That is the throughline to 2011, and the reason the label sits in quotation marks. Western commentators coined “Arab Spring,” and many in the region came to reject it, because a spring implied a winter, and the winter story let the counter-revolutions off the hook. It was Europe’s word for other people’s revolt. In 2011, young Arabs rose against austerity, unemployment and rulers who had grown rich while their countries stalled, and Mubarak and Ben Ali called them rioters steered by foreign hands. European capitals called the same young people heroes of dignity. Now their own children make comparable demands, and those capitals speak in Mubarak’s vocabulary and answer with police brutality.

Europe rehearses this reflex repeatedly on Palestine. In May, Israel seized thirty-seven French citizens from a flotilla carrying aid to Gaza. France’s own foreign minister, Jean-Noël Barrot, reported sexual violence, beatings and humiliation against them and referred the matter to prosecutors. Marie Mesmeur, a sitting MP, filed a torture complaint after her own detention on an earlier flotilla. Two years earlier, when students raised Palestinian flags at Sciences Po and the Sorbonne, the same president’s government sent in riot police. Solidarity with Gaza became, in the language of ministers, a threat to public order, and that phrase has now moved into the classroom.

Outside the Lycée Jean-Rostand in Strasbourg, students chanted for school funding and for Palestine in the same crowd. They have understood what their governments would prefer they didn’t: a continent that rearms, cuts schools and arrests children has decided whose future counts.

The Arab revolutions also leave a warning, written in the blood of the people who made them. In Egypt, the crowds brought down a president and left standing the state that had served him, and within two years the army had taken everything back.

Tunisia held longest because its national labor union, the UGTT, carried the street’s demands into negotiations and stayed organized after the squares emptied, and even there Kais Saied dissolved parliament in 2021 and is undoing much of what had been won.

Europe’s governments have quieter ways than tanks to end a revolt. A minister resigns. A national consultation is announced. A promise is pushed into next year’s budget. An election arrives and turns the anger of the street into votes for whoever promises the most order. France has watched each of these wear down movements far larger than this one.

The students have already learned to outrun the police. Outlasting the state asks more of them. It needs organizations that survive the school holidays. It needs the student blockade and the workers’ strike bound together, the alliance France glimpsed on Saturday and Spain is building now. It needs demands concrete enough that no cabinet reshuffle can be sold as victory. And it needs coordination across borders as deliberate as the coordination of the governments policing it. The first tests are close. The CGT has called a general strike for November 5, and students have called an international strike for November 20. diarioestrategiaorizzonteinsegnanti

Palestinians have a word for what that asks: sumud, steadfastness. It means refusing the future that others have drawn up for you, staying when you are told to leave, and continuing to live and organize under a power that wants you gone or silent. The boats that sailed for Gaza in May called themselves the Global Sumud Flotilla. Palestinians have practiced sumud for generations under an occupation that Europe arms and excuses. Germany alone approved almost €800 million in arms export licenses to Israel in the first five months of this year, more than in the previous twenty months combined.

Palestinians keep showing that refusal survives repression when it lives in schools, unions, families and memory, long after the crowds go home. That spirit is what the keffiyeh on a student holding the movement’s slogan carries, what the chant for Palestine outside a Strasbourg lycée carries, what the Palestinian flags at a Berlin school blockaded against the draft carry. The scale of what is being done to Gaza has no equivalent in a French classroom. The logic is one these students recognize: a generation told its future has been settled elsewhere, and met with police when it says no. In Palestinians, they have found a people who have answered that logic since 1948 and are still here. Still resisting.

On Friday morning, around 80 masked men came down from a hilltop settlement into an olive grove near Abu Falah, north of Ramallah. Palestinian families were picking olives there. The settlers threw rocks, fired slingshots and gas canisters, and set the trees on fire. Gunfire could also be heard. At least two Palestinian men were wounded, and four more were hurt in attacks nearby. The Palestine Red Crescent treated a 63-year-old Palestinian woman and a 40-year-old man the settlers had beaten. Israeli military vehicles arrived during the violence, Reuters reported, and the attack continued. Soldiers then fired tear gas toward Palestinians who had moved away from the jeeps.

Heidi Levine was in that grove with her cameras. She is 63, an American photographer for the Washington Post with four decades of war coverage behind her, and she wore a helmet and a vest with PRESS across it in bright blue. The settlers knocked her into the dirt and kept kicking her anyway. They tore the cameras off her body, ripped away her bag and her passport pouch, and snapped the cord that held her phone around her neck. The journalist Jasper Nathaniel filmed it. Her colleagues found her lying on her side. In the video she sits bloodied on a dirt road. Asked if she is all right, she says no. “I’m going to die,” she says, and when people urge her to run, she says she can’t. She was taken to the Ramallah Government Hospital and is now stable.

“Luckily I had my flak jacket and helmet; otherwise I probably wouldn’t even be here, because they just kept kicking me and kicking me,” she said afterward. Levine, who was born Jewish, called her attackers Jewish terrorists. Her son Michael has always told her his biggest fear is that settlers will kill his mother. In the same statement she added: “Sadly, none of them will be prosecuted. I am sure of it.”

Levine has covered the occupation for more than thirty years and was attacked once before, about fifteen years ago. She knows the record:

• Shireen Abu Akleh, a Palestinian American who reported for Al Jazeera Arabic for more than two decades, was shot in the head in May 2022 outside the Jenin refugee camp, in a helmet and a vest marked PRESS. Within weeks the Associated Press, CNN, the New York Times, the Washington Post and Bellingcat had each traced the fire to Israeli troops, and the UN human rights office agreed. Forensic Architecture and Al-Haq later found that the shooter would have seen her press markings. The army blamed Palestinian gunmen, then conceded a “high possibility” that a soldier had killed her by mistake and opened no criminal case. The FBI opened an inquiry and Israel refused to cooperate. By May 2025 it had run thirty months without a result, and the ICC prosecutor had opened no case. A Zeteo documentary named the soldier it says fired the shot, a sniper who had been killed in Jenin the year before. No one was ever charged.

• Between 2001 and 2022, Israeli forces killed at least 20 journalists, 18 of them Palestinian. At least 13 were clearly identified as press or were in marked vehicles. CPJ found that no one was ever charged or held accountable.

• In Gaza, CPJ counted at least 189 Palestinian journalists and media workers killed by Israel as of late September, among 241 killed across the region. It calls this the deadliest war for the press it has documented. Israel barred foreign journalists from entering the Strip on their own, which left Palestinian reporters to film the war, and it often announced afterward that the dead were militants. Much of the American press ran the claim in the headline and the doubts in the ninth paragraph.

• In the West Bank, the Israeli rights group Yesh Din monitored 1,664 police investigations into Israeli violence against Palestinians between 2005 and 2023. Of the 1,615 that concluded, police closed 93.7 percent without an indictment, and around three percent ended in a conviction. Most of those files died of police failures: suspects never questioned, evidence never collected, cases closed as “assailant unknown.”

Nadav Weiman served as a combat soldier in an elite unit in the West Bank and now runs Breaking the Silence, which has collected thousands of testimonies from Israeli soldiers over two decades. In a post on X he called the IDF spokesperson’s statement on settler violence a lie. “The IDF is not trying to stop Jewish terrorism in the occupied territories,” he wrote. “In fact, it protects Jewish terrorists and arms them with US-made M16 rifles.”

In 2023 the national security minister, Itamar Ben-Gvir, handed out assault rifles to a new civilian guard unit in Ashkelon and set out to build 600 more rapid response squads, in a country where 86 of the 100 towns with the highest share of gun licenses are West Bank settlements. Washington threatened to hold back 20,000 rifles his ministry had bought from American suppliers, and Israel promised they would go through the police or army, which can still pass them to the squads. An investigation by the Israeli state into settler violence means the state examining a policy it built.

The investigation absorbs the first wave of outrage and stretches the timeline until attention moves on. When the evidence leaves no room, it concedes error, blames the fog of a raid, and closes the file. Washington takes the findings and adopts them.

Matt Murray, the Post’s executive editor, followed the script. He said the paper was outraged by an “unwarranted attack” on a journalist doing her job and urged “a thorough investigation and follow-through from authorities.” The authorities in question are Israel’s, and its Prime Minister’s Office answered within hours. It said Levine was “allegedly assaulted” and that the facts “remain unclear.” It cited reports of “some 200 Arabs and far-left activists” confronting “approximately 40 Israeli youths,” and said other footage appears to show Levine knocked down and then helped up at once by an unidentified individual. The investigation, it said, must establish “who initiated the violence,” and those responsible “will be held accountable.”

Eighty masked men burning a grove became forty youths. Palestinian farmers on their own land became a mob of Arabs and leftists. A beating on video became an allegation, and the kicking became a man helping a woman up. The government published that account within hours of the attack, as police opened an investigation.

Murray went back online to restate what he called indisputable: his photographer was clearly marked as press and clearly beaten. He asked again for a thorough investigation and accountability, in a post quoting the office that had just called the facts unclear.

In 2018, after Saudi officials killed its columnist Jamal Khashoggi, the Post’s editorial board said the kingdom should be treated as outlaws. It called on Congress to block arms sales, asked businesses to shun the crown prince and lobbyists to refuse his cash, and urged Congress to impose sanctions on those responsible, Mohammed bin Salman included if the evidence pointed to him. That demand came with a price attached, and the paper kept making it for months.

The requests for Levine go to Israeli authorities and stop there. They name no arms sale to block, no sanction to impose, no official in Washington to call out. The Post is one of the newsrooms that traced Shireen Abu Akleh’s killing to Israeli troops. So are the AP, CNN and the New York Times. More than four years of those findings have produced no charges.

Ten days earlier, armed settlers beat AFP photographer Jaafar Ashtiyeh near the village of Aqraba. AFP said Israeli security forces watched and made no attempt to intervene, and its global news director demanded “a full investigation.”

A year before, settlers had thrown stones at Ashtiyeh and set his car on fire. Reporters Without Borders says settler attacks on journalists are carried out with complete impunity and are becoming more frequent. The Post’s request for Levine went to the same authorities.

Heidi Levine is an American citizen, beaten in territory the United States helps Israel hold, by settlers an American-armed army protects. Washington has the tools to act: the Leahy Law bars US aid to foreign security units that commit gross human rights violations, and the White House can restore the sanctions on violent settlers that it lifted in January 2025. The International Criminal Court already has jurisdiction over the West Bank. None of that depends on the goodwill of the Prime Minister’s Office.

The Post knows how to attach a price to a demand. It has reporters, lawyers and a front page. It can ask the White House, by name and every day, what it will do about an American journalist beaten by settlers under the army’s watch. It can call on Congress to enforce the Leahy Law and hold up arms deliveries. It can report on the 63-year-old Palestinian woman and the 40-year-old man beaten in that same grove with the same verbs it used for Levine. It can go back through Shireen Abu Akleh’s file and the 189 names from Gaza and ask why they never drew the outrage Levine’s beating did.

I hope The Post does the right thing. The record reveals to us that it won’t.

I worked at Al Jazeera on and off for a long time. I’ve sat in its newsrooms, logged onto its networks, and flew to Doha for the Al Jazeera Forum and dozens of other work events. On Wednesday I learned that Israeli spyware had been sitting inside 45 of the network’s computers, having arrived through banner ads for phones and earbuds, bought on the open market and shown on everyday websites. Nobody had to click. The ad loaded and the computer was taken. Every newsroom security training teaches people to avoid strange links, and that training was useless here.

Researchers call it the first proven case of zero-click spyware spread through targeted ads, and they named the method AdFection. Citizen Lab and Confiant traced it to Discover-Tech, an Israeli ad firm, and to Candiru, a spyware maker based in Tel Aviv. Al Jazeera’s own security team caught the intrusion first, called in Citizen Lab, and handed over its logs. On Thursday the network said it condemns the targeting of its employees’ devices and will keep protecting its staff and systems. Several of the journalists hit, it said, had been reporting on sensitive subjects.

The infections ran through 2024 and 2025. Those were also the years Israel killed at least a dozen of Al Jazeera’s journalists in Gaza. In the same period an Israeli military intelligence unit, which +972 Magazine called the Legitimization Cell, built files casting Gaza reporters as Hamas operatives. Anas al-Sharif was named in those files. The army’s Arabic spokesman attacked him by video. Then Israel killed him in a tent outside al-Shifa hospital, along with his colleagues. While Israel hunted Al Jazeera’s reporters in the field, someone was reading over the shoulders of the people at their desks.

I don’t know whose computers were among the 45. I keep thinking about the people sitting at them. They read the names of their dead colleagues on air, went back to their screens, and typed the next story into a machine someone else was watching.

Citizen Lab has not named the government that bought the operation. Gulf states hacked 36 of the network's journalists with Israeli Pegasus spyware in 2020, so other governments have gone after the network this way before. Every company in this chain is Israeli, and Israel's Defense Ministry licenses every foreign sale of this kind of weapon. Israel is the world's leading exporter of spyware. Of 74 governments known to have bought these tools between 2011 and 2023, 56 bought them from firms based in or tied to Israel. When Washington blacklisted Candiru and NSO in 2021, Israeli officials moved to lobby Washington for their removal, calling the firms critical to Israeli foreign policy. Israel owns this whichever government's name ends up on the invoice.

Discover-Tech sat on the ad industry’s approved and certified vendor lists and ran its ads through Google, Comcast and Yandex, the same exchanges every major brand uses. It reached more than 120,000 websites and 70,000 apps.

Confiant’s Jerome Dangu told Reuters the firm could reach hundreds of millions of people. Its ads turned up on networks at the Pentagon, NATO, the United Nations, the European Commission, and the International Criminal Court, the same court that issued a warrant for Netanyahu’s arrest. For years the industry let it run because it looked like any other advertiser. The platforms took their cut on every ad.

The US government treats this pipeline as a threat when it touches its own people. After learning that troops in the Middle East were being tracked through commercial ad data, parts of the military switched off ad tracking on their devices. In June the Pentagon's Defense Intelligence Agency raised Israel's spying threat against the US to critical, its highest level, after American personnel in Israel reportedly found software on their devices built to tap their communications. The New York Times reported that Israel now rates above every other US ally as a spying threat, and above some adversaries. An Israeli firm used the ad pipeline against a newsroom Israel was bombing, and Washington has announced no response.

Citizen Lab is calling for investigations, and the ICC has standing to examine attacks on journalists covering Gaza. If nobody investigates, the people who ran this face nothing, and the same tools stay on sale to the next government that wants inside a newsroom.

On May 15, India’s Chief Justice Surya Kant sat on the Supreme Court bench and compared unemployed young people to cockroaches and parasites. Those who cannot find work, he said, become journalists, RTI activists and social media users and “attack the system.” The next day he said he had meant people with fake degrees. By then Abhijeet Dipke, a 30-year-old political strategist, had founded the Cockroach Janta Party, a play on the name of Narendra Modi’s BJP. Membership required being “unemployed, lazy, chronically online.” Dipke built the branding and manifesto in 24 hours with AI tools. Within a week the party had more than 19 million Instagram followers, nearly double the government’s.

The joke landed because the choice of animal mattered. A cockroach has no claim on the household. Nobody asks what it needs or why it came. It is managed, kept out of sight, sprayed when it multiplies. The chief justice gave a name to a posture that governments far from Delhi now share. Governments are not treating a generation’s demands as political questions to be settled. They treat the generation itself as a problem to be kept under control at the lowest possible cost. And they will soon learn to regret this approach.

India’s young people are refused the role cast for them. By July the party’s marches over leaked entrance exams had forced the education minister to resign, and this month it is back on the streets over alleged changes to voter rolls.

The same refusal is moving through France, where high school students blockading their schools over missing teachers have been met with mass arrests, 87% of them minors.

It is moving through Spain, where the eviction of an 87-year-old tenant named Maricarmen Abascal by a vulture fund filled the streets with people in their thirties who still cannot leave their parents’ homes. And it is moving through Chile, where students marched on La Moneda under the slogan “Ni un peso menos para la educación” the day after President José Antonio Kast presented his first budget.

Containment

Each of these movements is fighting over a rung of the same ladder: the public things a society builds so that a child born without money can still arrive somewhere. Every one of these governments has looked at that ladder and made the same calculation. A teacher costs a salary for thirty years. A riot officer costs overtime for a week.

In Delhi the young are cockroaches. In Paris the interior minister calls the blockades urban violence and the cameras call them riots. At Columbia, the administration accused Mahmoud Khalil of being a terrorist sympathizer. So the demand is absorbed as a disturbance, the children who voice it are arrested, and a party, a religion or a foreign hand is found to carry the blame. In Paris it is La France Insoumise, and Donald Trump has offered Islam. In Buenos Aires, where Javier Milei has cut university funding to its lowest share of GDP since 1989, his party called a march of hundreds of thousands an opposition stunt. In Delhi, the state cut the internet.

Ideology does not determine who reaches for this method. Emmanuel Macron is a centrist, Kast stands on the far right, Modi governs as a Hindu nationalist, and in Spain a left-wing coalition that tried to protect tenants was overruled by the right in parliament. All of them run the same arithmetic. France’s 2027 budget takes back thousands of teaching posts while giving its armed forces the largest increase of any ministry. Containment always finds the money for the instruments of control, while the future of the young that gets rationed.

Stanford researchers tracking U.S. payroll data found employment for 22- to 25-year-olds in the jobs most exposed to AI running about 19% below where it would otherwise be, because companies are hiring fewer of them.

Automation arrives with an alibi built in. The disappearing first rung gets credited to the machine, and the people who chose to buy it disappear from the story. A shrinking future starts to look like weather, something that happens to a generation and can only be endured. That story is containment’s most efficient tool, because it asks young people to police their own expectations before the police are ever called in.

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On October 1, police across France arrested 1,949 people as the high school movement spread to 1,027 schools, more than three times as many as the day before. By the end of the first week, Interior Minister Laurent Nuñez said, more than 5,000 people had been arrested, and 85% of them were minors. The state closed more than 400 schools and had prefects ban gatherings outside them.

In Saint-Ouen-l’Aumône, a police grenade launcher hit Eden, 14, in the face during a blockade at his school, leaving him with a double jaw fracture, every upper tooth broken and four lower teeth missing. In Lens, a grenade tore off a 15-year-old’s hand outside a high school.

Jonno Hull, writing from Paris, describes a girl in Alençon, dragged away in a chokehold, who was filmed afterward telling the officer through tears, “I’m fourteen years old!”

According to Hull, teachers started this. He traces the movement to the Saint-Exupéry high school north of Paris, where on September 17 teachers walked out because the school had no math, French or history teacher, no nurse and no social worker. When nobody answered them, their students blockaded the school. Within weeks the education authorities sent new teachers, and classes are running again. Hundreds of schools learned the same lesson from Saint-Exupéry. The strike got ignored, and the blockade got results.

The students are demanding what any school should have. In Lille they listed classrooms too hot in summer and too cold in winter, bedbugs and broken showers in the boarding school, an expensive canteen and too few staff. Across the country they are denouncing unsanitary schools and teacher shortages, and calling for the end of Parcoursup, the platform that sorts them into universities. France has gone through seven education ministers in four years. A report by Anthony Boulogne, a National Rally deputy, examined by the National Assembly’s finance committee last week, found that 20 million hours of teaching never happened in public middle and high schools in 2024-2025.

The government’s answer is in its 2027 budget. Education gets €1.2 billion more, for a total of €64 billion, while the ministry plans to take back more than 9,600 teaching posts, citing falling enrollment. Teachers’ unions warn inflation could reach 2.9% by year’s end, which would eat that increase alive. The armed forces get €6.4 billion more, the biggest increase of any budget. Macron set out to double the military budget, from €32 billion in 2017 to €64 billion in 2027. In 2027, France will spend the same on its soldiers as on its schools, and only the soldiers are getting a real raise. Hull sets this beside the advanced weapons France keeps sending to Israel, the UAE and Saudi Arabia. The government has given up one thing so far. It withdrew a measure that would have charged non-scholarship students to enroll in BTS and preparatory classes, the same evening it was announced. Le Monde reported that the prime minister’s office had pushed it through without the support of either the education minister or the higher education minister.

One clip from these protests has been traveling widely. Vincent Lapierre, a reporter who came up through Égalité et Réconciliation, Alain Soral’s movement, before starting his own outlet, went to interview students in the 9th arrondissement of Paris, one of the city’s wealthier neighborhoods. A teenager in a keffiyeh told him the movement’s demand “isn’t only at the level of the high school. It’s institutional.” He wanted Macron gone, along with the prime minister and an education minister he mocked for botching a simple dictation. “We don’t want these successive governments that are absolutely useless.” When Lapierre balked at the idea of a radical left, the boy said France had already tried the far right. “We already tested fascism. It was 1940.”

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He traced the national police back to Vichy and said it never made the break it needed. Lapierre asked whether this was only a social question, and what could justify hitting a police officer. The boy answered with poverty. Kids who turn violent are living in distress, he said, and if they had a five-room home and enough to eat they would be in class every day. Then he told Lapierre, “La fin justifie les moyens, Vincent.” Hunger justifies the means. Lapierre came looking for a culture war and the boy kept handing him a budget.

French media has mostly gone along with Lapierre. The media watchdog Acrimed timed France 2’s news bulletins from September 28 to October 1. Of nearly 25 minutes spent on the movement, the students’ demands got less than two, and three quarters of the coverage went to violence and damage. The government blamed La France Insoumise and its ultra-left “proxies” for the unrest. The far-right site Boulevard Voltaire went further and asked whether Islamist organizations were behind the “riots,” pointing to a Muslim student group it says a 2025 government report tied to the Muslim Brotherhood. So when 256,000 people marched across France on Tuesday, by the Interior Ministry’s count, Donald Trump had a story ready to pick up. He blamed mass migration and Islam and wrote, “What's happening in France is nothing less than out of control mass migration. This isn't about schools, this is about Islam wanting to take over a once great Country!" He offered no evidence, and the students’ demands are public. The day before, Glenn Beck had called the “riots in France” a warning to the rest of the West, and MAGA commentators have spent weeks passing footage around to sell their immigration message before next month’s midterms. Republicans are leaning on migration because they fear Trump’s unpopularity and his Iran war could cost them Congress.

Trump’s post follows a policy his government put in writing. Last December’s National Security Strategy warned that Europe faces “civilizational erasure” because of migration and EU integration. It committed Washington to “cultivating resistance” across Europe by supporting parties that fight migration and promote nationalism. Carl Bildt, Sweden’s former prime minister, said the document placed the US further right than Europe’s own extreme right. Most people still read Trump’s posts about Europe as noise. They come out of a stated strategy to move European politics toward the far right, and every protest on the continent now gets fed into it. French teenagers asking for teachers have become evidence in an American campaign about a civilization under siege.

On Tuesday, Iran summoned France’s ambassador, Pierre Cochard, and accused Paris of “violent treatment” of the protesters and flagrant human rights violations. Foreign Ministry spokesman Esmaeil Baqaei accused France of double standards, noting that Paris called for restraint toward protesters in Iran in January and has answered its own high schoolers very differently. He has a point, and his government is the last one that should be making it. During Iran’s protests in January, the authorities themselves reported more than 3,000 deaths, which they blamed on the United States and Israel, while foreign-based rights groups say security forces fired on protesters. Both governments are guilty of what they accuse each other of, which is exactly why the summons matters.

Governments treat human rights as a weapon, picked up when the other side’s police are swinging the batons and put away when their own are. France lectured Tehran about restraint in January, then sent riot police against fourteen-year-olds. Washington claims to defend free speech in Europe, with JD Vance accusing EU leaders of suppressing it. On Tuesday, the officer who fired at Eden was placed under formal investigation for violence resulting in mutilation or permanent disability. The students in Paris and the protesters in Tehran are up against the same thing: governments that only discover the language of rights when it can be used against someone else.

The boy in Paris was describing something far bigger than France. Carnegie counted at least 120 significant anti-government protests in no fewer than 73 countries in the year to March 2026, the most since 2017. Young people in Madagascar rose up over water and power cuts. In Morocco it was inequality in schools and hospitals, and in Kenya it was new taxes. Governments fell in Bulgaria, Madagascar and Nepal. Nearly everywhere, whether those in power gave ground or not, the state answered with violence. Hull points to Stephen Miller’s claim that the world is ruled by strength, force and power, and that has become the working creed of governments that answer schoolchildren with riot police. The grievances differ from country to country, and the shape stays the same. Young people say their governments have stopped working for them, the police come, and someone with a platform explains that the real problem is a scarf, a mosque or a migrant.

When the next clip of burning cars in France reaches your feed, find out who posted it and which election they’re working on. Look up what the students asked for and measure the coverage against it. Read the budget before you read the commentary, including the military one, and check how many of the people arrested are children. When a government speaks up for protesters in another country, look at how it treats its own. When a politician tells you a protest has nothing to do with what the protesters are demanding, ask what he gains from saying so. The students in France have said exactly what they want, in their own words, on camera.

Israeli Defense Minister Israel Katz called the flydubai incident “an attempted jihadist terror attack” within hours of the plane touching down, before anybody had investigated a thing. Netanyahu released a video. Transportation Minister Miri Regev demanded a ban on every flydubai flight to Israel.

Flight FZ1073 left Dubai for Tel Aviv on Wednesday morning with 174 passengers, 166 of them Israeli. Somewhere over Jordan, something went badly wrong in the cockpit. The plane dropped 17,400 feet in under two minutes, transmitted a hijack code, and landed in Tabuk, in Saudi Arabia. Passengers say one pilot stabbed the other. Both pilots were taken to hospital. The airline says only that an altercation occurred in the flight deck and that its own crew traveling on the flight secured the aircraft.

That’s all anyone knew when Katz handed down his verdict. It went around the world anyway, printed beside an airline statement that claimed far less.

I don’t know what happened in that cockpit. Katz doesn’t either. He picked a motive before anyone had finished questioning the crew, and the motive was the part his government needed. A government with Israel’s record of staging attacks and inventing stories has no benefit of the doubt left. Every claim Israel makes should arrive with a question stapled to it.

Almost everything we’ve been told about the attacker comes from one side. The claim that he was the co-pilot and an Omani national reached the world through Israeli officials briefing CNN, one of them anonymously. Flydubai has not named its pilots or said where they are from. The Israeli outlet JFeed reported that he was handed to Saudi authorities, with Israeli intelligence involved in the questioning. He hasn’t said a word in public, and so far every motive pinned on him has come from Israeli officials.

How did he get into that seat at all? Israeli sources told the Jerusalem Post that flydubai’s agreement to fly into Israel requires its pilots to hold passports from countries with diplomatic ties to Israel. Oman has none. Israel National News reports that crew from Arab and Gulf states go through individual security screening before they are cleared to land. CNN noted it is not yet clear how an Omani pilot got that clearance, and an Israeli official told the network it is one of the main questions investigators are asking. Israeli authorities say they are now checking whether he held a second passport. Flydubai still has confirmed none of this. So either Israel’s screening cleared him, nobody screened him, or he flew on another passport. Each of those is its own scandal. If Israeli security vetted and approved him, I’d like to know what they saw. If nobody checked, how long has a rule on a route this sensitive been sitting unenforced? And if he came in on a second passport, whose was it, and who waved it through? Why it took a stabbing for Israel’s transportation minister to care is a question of its own.

Israeli officials told CNN the Omani co-pilot stabbed the captain. Nick Schifrin, a PBS correspondent, posted that a senior Israeli official told him the reverse: the Omani pilot tried to take over the plane, and his Emirati co-pilot stabbed him. Another official told the Jerusalem Post that authorities were still working to determine which pilot did the stabbing. Ynet reported the captain was Indian; other outlets called him Emirati. The off-duty pilots who took the controls were a South African and a New Zealander in one account, a Russian and a Ukrainian in Israel Hayom’s, and “former pilots” in the PBS post. Some of that is just the fog of a breaking story, and I’d cut anyone slack for it. The verdict, though, never moved. The same PBS source called it a “9/11 style attack” and “a miracle during Sukkot.” It didn’t matter which pilot held the knife. In every version the villain was Omani and the heroes were Israeli, and nobody ever stopped saying jihad.

Netanyahu said a passenger told him that he “somehow” managed to break into the cockpit with a crew member and subdue the attacker as he tried to sabotage the aircraft’s systems. Since 9/11, cockpit doors on commercial jets are reinforced and locked in flight, built to stop exactly that. On most airliners, crew outside can enter an emergency access code, and the pilots inside can let them in or keep them out. So how did they get in? Maybe the wounded captain opened it himself, or off-duty crew knew the code, or the door failed. Nobody has said. And then there’s the knife. Pilots are normally screened before boarding, so how did a blade end up in the cockpit of a flight to Israel?

CNN reports investigators will examine how the door was opened, how the weapon came on board, and the co-pilot’s medical and training history. Netanyahu has already told Israel’s security establishment to prepare for “potential additional threats,” which stretches Tuesday’s warning a little further before anyone has answered a single one of these questions.

Everyone on that plane survived. But something about the way this story has been put together feels wrong to me. The suspect is in Saudi custody, Israeli intelligence is reportedly in the room, and the only story reaching the public is the one Israeli officials settled on within hours. This needs an independent investigation by civil aviation investigators answerable to none of the governments with a stake in the story, with the flight recorder data and the findings made public. Until that happens, treat every account of FZ1073, including Israel’s, as unverified.

On Sunday, three days before the flight, Netanyahu flew secretly to the UAE, with the head of the Mossad and his national security chief in the delegation. Israeli officials told Reuters the meeting with Mohamed bin Zayed lasted six hours and focused on Iran. The AP reported that Netanyahu went to ask the Emirati president to deny reports that bin Zayed had warned him about a Hamas attack days before October 7, a story his rivals have seized on four weeks before the vote.

Israel’s Channel 14, citing an Emirati source, reported that the Abu Dhabi talks widened into a second session with officials from ten countries, among them Saudi Arabia and Oman, to discuss a regional defense front against Iran and the Houthis. None of those governments has confirmed it, and other Israeli outlets reported a different guest list. Ynet reported that the Mossad chief arranged the meeting after Saudi Arabia asked for Israeli help against the Houthis. Three days later, a flydubai jet left the UAE carrying 166 Israelis, an Omani pilot and, by Ynet’s account, an Indian captain, and it came down in Saudi Arabia. The UAE, Oman and Saudi Arabia, three of the countries reportedly at that table, each ended up with a part in Wednesday’s story. That’s a tidy cast for a story nobody has finished investigating.

On Tuesday, the day before the flight, Netanyahu stood in front of a fighter jet at Tel Nof air base and filmed a warning: “We have indications that, ahead of the elections, our enemies will try to attack us.” He gave no details. Israelis vote on October 27, and a recent poll shows a tie between his bloc and the opposition. Opposition leaders demanded assurances that the warning was no attempt to undermine the election, and Yair Lapid called it fearmongering. Lapid, who was briefed by Netanyahu’s office that day, said nothing in the briefing resembled what happened on the plane. The next morning a plane full of Israelis plunged over Jordan, and the warning looked like prophecy. So which was it? If Netanyahu’s indications pointed at aviation, why did a Tel Aviv flight carrying 166 Israelis take off with no extra precautions anyone has described? If they didn’t, why should anyone treat Wednesday as proof he was right?

Benjamin Netanyahu is the most dangerous man on the planet, and nobody needs a war more than he does. He has been on trial in his own country since 2020 for bribery, fraud and breach of trust, and he has asked for a pardon that has not come. The International Criminal Court has wanted him since 2024 for the war crimes of starvation as a method of warfare and attacking civilians, and for crimes against humanity including murder and persecution. A frightened country stops asking about any of that. Every threat, real or inflated, drags the conversation out of his courtroom and onto the battlefield, where he looks strongest. Anyone who treats that warning, and the speed with which his ministers cashed in on Wednesday’s flight, as a coincidence is an easy mark.

By Wednesday afternoon the machine was running. National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir used the flight to demand “total victory” in Iran, Lebanon, Gaza and the West Bank: four fronts hung on one knife on one plane. Even Avigdor Lieberman, no friend to any Palestinian, accused government officials of spinning the incident for political gain.

Israel wanted the pictures, too. According to Reuters, it asked Saudi Arabia to let its military fly the passengers home, and the Air Force readied Super Hercules transports. Israeli media reported three of them standing by. Hercules planes flew the 1976 Entebbe raid, where Netanyahu’s older brother Yoni was killed leading the assault force, and a senior Israeli official had already told Channel 12 that Wednesday could have ended as another 9/11 or another Entebbe. Riyadh, which has no diplomatic relations with Israel, said no. Saudi medics cared for the passengers at Tabuk, and flydubai sent its own plane to bring them home. Netanyahu, a man the International Criminal Court wants arrested, was already describing his meeting with one of the passengers now being hailed as a hero.

The war on Iran hangs over all of it. Washington and Tehran are trading proposals to end it, and Iran says it has received Washington’s response to its latest one. An alleged jihadist plot against a plane full of Israelis, flying out of the country Netanyahu had just visited to talk about Iran, is the kind of event that can sink a negotiation. Whether this flight turns out to be one man’s crime or something more, Wednesday handed Netanyahu a new enemy and a new pretext to escalate his war on Iran, four weeks before an election.

By Wednesday evening, Tehran was accusing Israel of plotting exactly this kind of attack. Fars, the news agency tied to Iran’s Revolutionary Guards, reported that Iranian intelligence had learned of a scenario the Mossad pitched to Netanyahu’s office: an attack on aircraft or airports in the region, designed to cause mass casualties and be pinned on Tehran. Fars offered no evidence. Meanwhile, Israeli security officials were examining possible Iranian involvement in the flydubai incident. Iran’s claim comes from a party to the war and should be weighed like one. Israel’s claims deserve the same scrutiny, and they almost never get it.

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Palestinian children in Gaza went back to school this month for the first time in three years, walking into what little remains. UNICEF says 98 percent of Gaza’s schools were damaged or destroyed, and some of the classrooms they returned to are just tents fixed in rubble. A girl in Gaza now does her lessons inside the physical record of what was done to her, of the genocide she is enduring. Seven thousand miles away, a board of education in Texas has already voted on how the history we are living will be taught.

Israel has been bombing schools for a long time. On the morning of April 8, 1970, Israeli Phantom jets struck a primary school in the Egyptian village of Bahr al-Baqar. Egyptian records report thirty children were killed, other accounts say forty six. Moshe Dayan, then Israel’s defense minister, said the school was a military site. No evidence was ever produced. According to Egyptian accounts, a pilot who flew the raid, captured three years later in the October War, admitted they had known it was a school.

Fifty six years later, on the first morning of the US-Israeli war on Iran, a strike hit a girls’ elementary school in Minab, in the country’s south. Early reports counted fifty dead. By the next day, Iranian state media said 165. Washington said it was looking into the reports. The excuses change with the decade. A weapons depot in 1970. A Hamas command center in Gaza. A promise to look into it in Minab. First the school is given another name, then it is hit, and the other name is what the world is asked to remember.

In Gaza, Israel stopped bothering with excuses school by school. In April 2024, UN experts warned of scholasticide, the systematic destruction of a people’s ability to educate itself. By the start of this school year, around 22,000 students and more than 770 education workers, 532 of them teachers, had been killed, according to Gaza education officials. UNESCO found 22 of 38 campuses completely destroyed. About 660,000 children were cut off from regular schooling. The libraries, the archives, the lecture halls and the professors who carried a people’s scholarship in their heads were among the first things taken.

On September 4, with Gaza’s children still waiting to go back to class, the Texas State Board of Education voted 8 to 4 to rewrite high school social studies. A final amendment requires students to identify 1948 as the year Israel was established “in the ancestral homeland of the Jews,” and Harry Truman as the first world leader to recognize it. By the time they reach high school, Texas children will already have studied the Promised Land and the Ten Commandments in an elementary unit on ancient Israel. The same board deleted a requirement to teach Muslim contributions to algebra and astronomy. In its place, students will learn early Islam through what the standards call Muhammad’s “brutal military campaigns,” slavery and female captives. Proclaiming Justice to the Nations, an evangelical Christian group, claimed credit for several recommendations that made it into the final standards.

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The theology behind that influence runs deep. In ‘Til Kingdom Come, the Israeli filmmaker Maya Zinshtein follows a Baptist church in a Kentucky coal town whose members give what little they have to Israel because they believe the Jews are crucial to Jesus’s return, and whose children are raised in the same belief.

The amendment names a Jewish homeland, a year and the American president who blessed the result. It does not name my grandparents or any of the other people already living there. It has nothing to say about the 750,000 Palestinians driven out in 1948, or about Deir Yassin, or about Jaffa, the city my family came from, emptied of most of its Arab people in a matter of weeks. Texas has taken the founding claim of a settler movement and turned it into a fact children will memorize for a test. These new standards begin reaching Texas classrooms in 2030, meaning the children who will be graded on them are already in elementary school today.

The Palestinians who managed to stay in 1948, and their children and grandchildren, now make up about a fifth of Israel’s citizens. Today, Israel’s Central Elections Committee voted 18 to 5 to bar the two main Arab-majority lists, Ra’am and the Joint List, from the October 27 election. The attorney general’s office told the committee the evidence did not meet the legal threshold, yet the committee voted anyway. The Supreme Court may still reverse it, as it has reversed most of these attempts before. For decades American politicians have called Israel the only democracy in the Middle East. Texas is about to teach its founding as settled fact, in the same season its election committee voted to hold an election without the parties of the people who survived that founding, people now watching the genocide of their own in Gaza.

Saudi Arabia is editing history in the other direction. A review of 136 Saudi textbooks found that Palestine has been removed from some maps, that “the Zionist enemy” has become “the Israeli occupation,” and that one sentence in an eleventh grade Arabic exercise, “Muslims will never give up Jerusalem,” has disappeared from every edition printed since 2024. The review was carried out by IMPACT-se, an Israeli-based group that has been grading Saudi textbooks for two decades, and the findings surfaced first in Israeli media, where they were read as a signal that normalization is back on the table. Publicly, Riyadh still says there will be no relations with Israel without a Palestinian state. Its schoolbooks have already moved on.

So in Austin, a claim is written into the record as fact. In Riyadh, a fact is written out, along with the sentence a child might once have used to argue back. In Gaza, the schools, the teachers and the archives, the places where a Palestinian child would learn her own history from the people who lived it, are still being bombed into ruin.

Legislation, omission, two thousand pound bombs. A genocide needs a history that makes it look necessary, and it needs the people who could contradict that history silenced or erased. All of it is being supplied at once, during the killing, while the world continues to watch.

This week I watched Abdul El-Sayed, Michigan’s Democratic nominee for Senate, sit beside Kamala Harris at a roundtable in Detroit. She endorsed him after he won the primary in August, and they spent the afternoon talking about Black maternal health. My first reaction was anger. Harris was vice president for the first fifteen months of the genocide, and she ran for president on a pledge to keep arming Israel. Then I had to be honest with myself. El-Sayed endorsed her in 2024, the day after Biden stepped aside. Anyone who backed him in this summer’s primary backed a man who had already made that choice, back when the anger could have counted for something.

In Detroit, El-Sayed said the election ended where it did because Democrats could not find places of agreement. His own campaign website is plainer. It cites the party’s autopsy finding that Harris’s Israel policy was a significant reason she lost. Last year he called Gaza a Rorschach test on your values. This week the conversation was about mothers and newborns, led by the vice president who spent those fifteen months defending the weapons that killed Gaza’s mothers and newborns. The forgetting that Texas is writing into its standards and Riyadh is printing into its schoolbooks happens on campaign stages too, one convenient silence at a time, and voters are being asked to call it “unity.”

This month a little girl in Gaza opened a notebook in a tent. In a few years a teenager in Texas will open a textbook and learn that the land under that tent was someone else’s ancestral homeland, decided in 1948, as if the old slogan were true: a land without a people. The teenager will be tested on it. The girl already carries the other version, in her family’s names, in the empty lot where her school stood, in the teachers she will never see again. Governments from Austin to Riyadh are working to make sure only one of those records counts as history. Writing hers down, and refusing to let it be renamed, is how the record survives. Art is another way. Annemarie Jacir’s Palestine 36, a film I’m proud to have a small part in, tells the story of the 1936 revolt against British rule, a chapter of this history the Texas amendment skips entirely. There are many ways to survive a genocide that too many people in power insist on supporting, directly or indirectly, even as it deepens. Never again has to mean never again for Palestinians too, or it means nothing at all. It’s not complicated. It’s that simple.

In December a satellite passed over Minab, a town near the Strait of Hormuz, and photographed dozens of children playing in a schoolyard. Two months later a Tomahawk missile hit that schoolyard. The file used to aim it listed the building as part of an Iranian naval base.

The UN fact-finding mission on Iran confirmed 157 dead at the Shajareh Tayyebeh primary school, 123 of them children aged thirteen and under. Iranian counts run higher. It was February 28, the first day of the American and Israeli war on Iran.

This week Bloomberg obtained the account of what happened from officials who worked on the Pentagon’s internal review, which describes a cascade of preventable failures. The review was finished months ago and has never been released.

The wall dividing the school from the base was painted with murals, visible in commercial satellite imagery since 2018. The school had a website, archived as recently as 2025, with photographs of the students and drawings they made. It was tagged in a local business listing. The Pentagon declined to comment to Reuters on any of it.

The story is a sobering foreshadowing of the full impunity the powerful seem to enjoy, assisted greatly by unregulated AI.

An analyst noticed in 2019 that the compound had been split and entered it into a system that does not feed the database CENTCOM uses to build targets, so the coordinates kept their old label for seven years. Pete Hegseth spent his first year as defense secretary taking apart the offices that assess civilian harm, dropping the program from just under 200 people to roughly two dozen.

CENTCOM, the command that fired on Minab, went from sixteen positions to one. The White House ordered more than a thousand strikes in the first 24 hours. Target lists that used to take hours and pass through analysts, imagery specialists, lawyers, targeteers, commanders and launch crews went through Palantir’s Maven Smart System in minutes instead, on a contract worth $1.3 billion. The people who remained assumed Maven would catch stale intelligence.

Nobody from the civilian harm offices looked at the school, partly because almost no one was left and partly because the planners did not include them. The commander who authorized the launch was told reasonable precautions had been taken.

The Pentagon’s investigators call this an over-reliance on AI. Let us be clear: A cabinet secretary abolished the staff who check targets for the presence of children. A president’s office ordered a thousand strikes in a day. Planners shut the survivors of that purge out of the room. All of those are decisions. Decisions have authors. A malfunction does not, which is why the Pentagon reached for one.

The office Hegseth abolished was called civilian harm mitigation. The department had already worked out how to say not killing children without saying it. Because even that was too much.

Palantir says it bears no responsibility for the underlying data or for identifying intelligence deficiencies. The Pentagon says its people leaned on the software too hard. Both are true and neither is an answer.

Whenever this happens, people post a page from an IBM training deck whenever a machine gets blamed for something. A computer can never be held accountable, therefore a computer must never make a management decision. It is dated 1979 and the original surfaced in a man’s father’s work papers, was lost in a flood, and IBM’s archivists say they cannot find another copy.

The sheet behind it shows through in the photograph, setting out what it calls the computer’s mandate.

Authority:
whatever authority is granted it by the social environment within which it operates.

Responsibility:
to perform as pre-directed by the programmer.

Accountability:
none whatsoever.

Someone in Washington granted Maven the power to collapse six stages of verification into a few minutes, in the same period the same building fired the people who were the verification.

The United States gave the UN mission nothing. No documents, no briefings, no version of events. The investigators worked from satellite imagery, munition fragments and survivor testimony, identified the weapon as a Tomahawk that only American forces fired in that war, and reached a conclusion the Pentagon’s own language is built to avoid. The failure to verify the target went beyond negligence.

The U.S. directed the strikes at the building of the school while being aware of a substantial risk of striking a civilian object and acting recklessly as regards the possibility that this would happen.

The mission found reasonable grounds to believe this was a war crime, along with a second strike the same day on a sports complex in Lamerd that killed 22 people, among them a two-year-old girl playing outside her house. The White House rejected the report without addressing a single finding in it.

A group of former senior American military lawyers wrote in April that calling the strike a war crime was premature and speculative, and that such a claim requires a credible factual foundation from a rigorous investigation. The rigorous investigation exists. The administration is sitting on it.

The mission found reasonable grounds to believe this was a war crime, along with a second strike the same day on a sports complex in Lamerd that killed 22 people, among them a two-year-old girl playing outside her house. The White House rejected the report without addressing a single finding in it.

A group of former senior American military lawyers wrote in April that calling the strike a war crime was premature and speculative, and that such a claim requires a credible factual foundation from a rigorous investigation. The rigorous investigation exists. The administration is sitting on it.

Two days after the school came down, Hegseth told reporters that America, regardless of what so-called international institutions say, was unleashing the most lethal and precise air power campaign in history. In July the president sat down with Fox News and was asked whether he would release the findings. He said he didn’t think anybody would ever be able to say what happened there. When the anchor noted that fragments recovered at the site appeared to come from an American Tomahawk, Trump offered that the images themselves might be AI-generated. His own probe had been complete for months.

So this is where we are landing? A government can kill 123 children in one building, withhold every document from the body investigating it, have its own reviewers file the cause under software error, and take no consequence? And of course the only states that will be told they cannot do this are the ones without the software.

Scrutiny at least exists … on paper. More than 120 House Democrats wrote to Hegseth in March, 46 senators sent a letter of their own, and Van Hollen and Warren opened an inquiry in April into the dismantling of the civilian harm programs. The department is investigating itself and decides when its findings surface, the inspectors general who might have forced the question have been fired, and no American has been named in connection with 157 deaths, which leaves no one for a committee to call.

Officials who worked on the investigation told Bloomberg that Hegseth’s advisers have one worry at this stage. They are concerned that political scrutiny of Maven could disrupt the benefits they expect from rolling it out further. The Pentagon is protecting Maven.

In the first 24 hours of Operation Epic Fury, American forces struck more than a thousand targets, which is the rate the Army has said it wants as a standing capability. Minab is the record of what that rate produces, and the program that produced it is being expanded despite it killing so many children.

While the president weighed annihilation, Saudi Aramco was weighing diesel prices in the Mediterranean. For weeks, the world’s largest exporter has been bidding through Platts for thousands of tons of fuel it used to sell. On Friday, the company told European refiners they will be allocated no crude at all in October. Aramco sells the world its fuel. This autumn, it is buying some back.

Its own plants keep getting hit. The Houthis say they struck a refinery at Yanbu this week, after going at the Jazan processing plant down the same coast. The East-West pipeline that runs crude across the kingdom, the line built so Saudi oil would never have to pass through the Strait of Hormuz, has been shut since drones hit its pumping stations on September 10. At least three European refiners have had late-September cargoes cancelled or pushed into November. Poland’s Orlen, which takes roughly 40% of its crude from Aramco, is out buying North Sea barrels instead.

Bloomberg dates the buying to the weeks before the September 10 strike, which points past the pipeline and toward the targeting of fuel plants themselves, which the Houthis have been hitting for months. Aramco has yet to say how much refining capacity the kingdom has lost and for how long.

On Thursday JPMorgan’s commodities team told clients it no longer has a baseline view of the oil market, the first time since this war began. “We simply don’t know how to model the endgame,” the strategists wrote.

The bank had once assumed there were economic red lines this administration would not cross: oil above $100 a barrel, gasoline near $5, the ten-year Treasury above 5%. Six months on, most of those lines sit far behind us. The bank that prices risk for a living has stopped pretending it can price this.

Chevron’s chief executive got there three days earlier, in Austin. Mike Wirth said the mechanisms that cushioned price and supply risk “have largely now played out,” and the system no longer holds the buffers it had when the fighting started.

Asked where prices go from here, he said he wished he could point to a reason things would ease and could not. Executives at ExxonMobil, Phillips 66, and Marathon Petroleum described the same exhausted system.

Administration officials are somehow still calling it a disruption, a word they have used that word since February, through a closed strait, a bombed pipeline, and the highest diesel price this country has ever recorded. Refining is the tighter constraint. American plants have served as the world’s refinery of last resort for months, running above 95% and touching 97.8% in early September, among the highest sustained rates in a quarter century.

On Sunday afternoon ExxonMobil’s Joliet refinery outside Chicago lost all power, tripped its safety systems and shut down the entire plant, throwing flames and black smoke over Will County. Joliet runs 264,000 barrels a day, roughly 6% of everything the Midwest can refine, and turns out about 11 million gallons of gasoline and diesel daily by Exxon’s own accounting.

Power came back within four hours and IIR Energy expected a return to normal service by the end of this week. A storm knocked Joliet offline in July 2024, it stayed down for weeks, and the EPA had to issue emergency fuel waivers for Illinois, Indiana, Michigan and Wisconsin to keep gasoline moving.

The Federal Reserve raised interest rates on Wednesday for the first time since July 2023, on a 12-0 vote, to a target range of 3.75%-4%. Sixteen of eighteen participants expect another before the year is out.

Fed Chair Kevin Warsh told reporters the Fed cannot affect “any individual price,” naming oil and groceries, and said what it can do is stop those price changes from producing second and third order effects. Nobody can make the war cheaper, so the plan is to make you poorer.

Gasoline rose 3.9% in August and accounted for a third of the month’s entire Consumer Price Index increase. It is 27.4% higher than a year ago. Over Labor Day, regular averaged $4.14 a gallon, past the 2012 holiday record of $3.82. It is around $4.37 now.

Diesel, which keeps the U.S. moving, broke its 2022 record in early September and reached $6.23 on September 14, up 69% from $3.69 a year ago. Today, diesel prices in the U.S. reached yet another record high, averaging $6.44 a gallon (3.8 litres), according to the American Automobile Association. California is at $7.98. In Iowa, where the corn is coming in right now, a farmer fills his tank at $5.88, two dollars and change above what he paid last September.

Brown University’s tracker puts the diesel run-up alone at $46.7 billion in added fuel costs since the war began, that’s about $357 a household.

For seven months these numbers have been filed under temporary. The rate hike closes that file. A central bank tightening into a supply shock has decided the shock is permanent, and has decided who pays for it.

I am not an economist. But you do not have to be one to read a bank saying it cannot model the endgame, an oil man saying the buffers are gone, and a central bank raising the price of money in the middle of a war, and understand that nobody in a position to know expects this to get better.

On Thursday the State Department approved the sale of 48 F-35s to Saudi Arabia, with 49 engines, at an estimated $24.3 billion. The sale, the department said, “will not alter the military balance in the region.” That declaration comes at a time when drones launched from Iraqi territory struck pumping stations on the East-West pipeline on September 10, and Riyadh shut the line the next day. The pipeline carried up to five million barrels a day from the eastern fields to Yanbu. The strike stranded an estimated 2.5 million of them. Yanbu’s tanks held about four days of crude at normal withdrawal rates. The IEA put Saudi crude supply at its lowest level in more than three decades.

The East–West Crude Oil Pipeline went down on a Thursday. By Friday morning the Houthis had taken Perim Island, the volcanic rock that splits Bab al-Mandeb into its two shipping lanes, finishing a sweep down Yemen’s western coast. Yahya Saree announced that passage was safe for everyone except Saudi vessels. Riyadh spent a decade building ways around the Strait of Hormuz and lost the pipeline and the Red Sea exit inside thirty-six hours. Hence the tankers meeting each other off the Omani coast. Hence Aramco in the Mediterranean, bidding on somebody else’s diesel.

Which brings back Friday’s notice. Term contracts are the paperwork of energy security: a refinery signs one so it never has to wonder where next month’s barrels are coming from. European OECD countries were taking 577,000 barrels a day from Saudi Arabia as of June. In October there are none, at any price.

So Europe goes shopping. Orlen alone has put out more than ten tenders this week, each one a European refinery bidding against the others for the same replacement cargo, in a market where the physical barrel already trades above $130 and American plants are running at 97.8%. Then winter. Aramco is in that market too, bidding for diesel in the Mediterranean, competing with the customers it just stopped supplying.

Before the war more than 120 vessels transited Hormuz each day. This month it runs in the low double digits. American officials call the periodic strikes around the waterway “mowing the grass.” It is a phrase borrowed from lawn care, chosen to describe a thing you do forever because the alternative is admitting it does not end.

On Thursday UKMTO, the Royal Navy body that warns merchant shipping, issued Warning 137-26. Classification: ATTACK. A vessel hit 16 nautical miles northeast of Khasab, crew safe. Warning 133-26, the week before, logged four projectiles hitting two vessels and setting one on fire. Khasab is Omani, in the southern corridor this administration has spent months calling safe to transit.

The same day, Mohammad Bagher Zolqadr, adviser to Supreme Leader Mojtaba Khamenei, said Iran will not reopen the strait until Trump and Netanyahu are out of power. In August his conditions were an end to American operations, a troop withdrawal, sanctions relief. Now it is regime change. This all landed the same day Trump said Iran wanted a deal.

Markets do not need Zolqadr to speak for the state. All the need to do is look at the calendar and find no end-date in sight. Brent futures fell to $104.82 on Thursday after Saudi Arabia began offering Asian refiners extra cargoes by ship-to-ship transfer near Sohar. Futures are for barrels months out. Dated Brent is what a European refinery pays for a cargo arriving this week, and by Tuesday that assessment had pushed above $130 as buyers chased replacements for their cancelled Saudi barrels.

Images taken by American service members and passed anonymously to CBS News this week, obtained independently by ABC, show a Boeing E-3 Sentry with its rear section torn open at Prince Sultan Air Base in Saudi Arabia. Barracks hollowed out. Tents shredded. Trailers ripped apart at bases in Kuwait. A senior service member told ABC the facilities have been “irreparably damaged” and that rebuilding them would run for decades. He said he did not think Americans had any idea what their bases were absorbing. Another described standing there with his eyes closed, getting punched in the face.

The fastest route from an American air base to the American public ran through an anonymous leak to a television network. The Pentagon declined to comment.

A report released Monday found hundreds of buildings and structures damaged at American posts in Kuwait, Bahrain, Qatar, the UAE, Saudi Arabia, Iraq, Oman and Jordan, with dozens of US aircraft destroyed or damaged. The Defense Department put the cost of the war at $33.4 billion as of June 29, excluding infrastructure repair. The Congressional Budget Office says $38 billion. Since February 28, eighteen American service members have been killed and 824 wounded, and the House has voted three times to end it.

A Fox News poll taken September 11 to 14 found 71% of registered voters think the administration has no clear strategy for ending the war, including 83% of independents and 43% of Republicans. Sixty percent call the military action wrong against 37% who defend it, widening the margin from 17 points in June to 23 now. Forty-seven percent say the conflict will leave the country less safe in the long run, up from 39% in April.

Daron Shaw, the Republican pollster who runs the survey with a Democratic counterpart, noted that the public normally rallies behind a president during a foreign crisis and has not done so here, partly because Trump has never consistently made the case for the war. The president’s job approval stands at 39%, and his rating on foreign policy is underwater by 24 points because the war reaches most Americans now as a bill.

Some day the word temporary will be quietly retired, and the people who used it for seven months will not remember using it. There will be a consensus that the war went on too long, that the costs were regrettable, that in hindsight the signals were there. Seven months of war has moved the horizon from weeks to years, and the only institution still describing it as a “temporary disruption” is the one that started it.

I first saw Ed Sheeran play in Austin at SXSW in 2012, the year he broke through. He stood a few meters from me on a little platform. He could play the guitar well enough and I walked away without much of an opinion. Fourteen years later I landed in Los Angeles and saw him again, this time projected on the side of a building, giving Robert Kraft a massage.

Robert Kraft worked the phones for a week to keep Palestine off Ed Sheeran’s stage, and it has been a pleasure to watch it backfire. After Finneas quit Sheeran’s stadium tour and wrote that “artists must not be silenced when they speak up for the oppressed,” his sister Billie Eilish posted a story to Instagram in white handwriting on a black screen:

Billie took her brother’s sentence and changed “artists” to “we,” which puts the obligation on everyone reading it. Her fans skew young, the same audience Sheeran says he is protecting by keeping politics off his stage, and she spoke to them directly.

Within a day of Sheeran’s statement, every scheduled opening act had left his tour, and so had Beoga, the band that plays with him for part of every show. For years, supporting Palestinians in public could cost an actor a franchise role or an agent, and the safe move for a star was the one Sheeran made: say you’re sad for “both sides” and wait for it to pass. Today, some of the most famous people in music have decided that hiding behind neutrality costs more than telling the truth, and they’re saying so in front of millions of fans.

On September 4 and 5, Macklemore opened for Ed at MetLife Stadium and said Free Palestine in front of 90,000 people. He performed “Hind’s Hall,” named for Hind Rajab, the six-year-old Israeli forces killed in a car in Gaza City in January 2024 while she begged rescuers on the phone to come get her. Ten days later he was off the tour. Macklemore wrote that Kraft, who owns the New England Patriots and Gillette Stadium, called Ed personally and rallied the other stadium owners into an ultimatum: keep Macklemore and lose the venues.

Kraft is one of the most devoted Zionists in American sports. He has donated millions of dollars to pro-Israel and Jewish causes and bankrolls the Foundation to Combat Antisemitism, and he confirmed he barred Macklemore from Gillette. Ed spent the week trying to “build a bridge” with these men. Then he accepted their terms and released a statement, formatted in bullet points, that included this:

I am appalled by the conflict between Israel and Palestine.
The suffering and pain caused on both sides is a human tragedy. There are too many wars across the world causing immeasurable pain, none of which should be tolerated.

I have read a lot of cowardly statements about Gaza over the past three years, and this one still managed to offend me more than most. That the first word is “I” is very telling. Then he starts by calling it a conflict. A year ago a UN commission of inquiry found that Israel is committing genocide in Gaza. Israel has flattened Gaza’s hospitals, universities and mosques, starved its people, and bombed the zones it ordered families to flee to, much of it with American weapons. Palestinians in Gaza have no air force, no navy and no tanks. “Conflict” turns all of that into a fight between two parties, and “both sides” asks us to split the grief down the middle. By Ed’s math, Hind Rajab and the tank crew that fired hundreds of rounds into her family’s car share one human tragedy.

Nobody in those sentences does anything to anyone. The suffering is “caused,” by no one in particular. It is a “tragedy,” the same word we use for a flood or a car crash. Then he pans out to “too many wars across the world,” so Gaza becomes one sad entry on a long list, and he calls the pain “immeasurable.” Palestinians have spent three years measuring it. Gaza’s health ministry has published the names, ages and ID numbers of the dead because the world kept demanding proof of the systematic destruction happening in front of our eyes on our screens. Ed had all of that in front of him and called it immeasurable.

And “none of which should be tolerated” appears in a statement explaining why he tolerated a billionaire censoring his friend for opposing the genocide.

To make matters worse, in 2022 Ed headlined the Concert for Ukraine. The video for “2step,” shot in Kyiv, came out with his message standing with Ukraine, and he gave the royalties to the humanitarian appeal. He released a remix with Antytila, a Ukrainian band whose members were serving in the army. That August he brought them onstage in Warsaw in front of 80,000 people, Ukrainian flag and all. There were children in that crowd.

This week he wrote, “There is a reason I do not use my professional platform for politics,” because his audience includes young people and children. Either he forgot all of it, or he is lying to us, and I don’t believe he forgot.

When he stood with Ukrainians, for a European country, he was loud and proud and nobody in his camp worried that a flag might upset the kids. His rule against politics only shows up when the people under the bombs are Palestinian.

In private, according to Macklemore, Ed told him the words Free Palestine and the sight of the Palestinian flag were hurtful to a lot of the people he’d spoken with. Macklemore’s answer was that if those words offend people more than tens of thousands of Palestinian children killed by Israel, then he and those people stand in very different places. In Ed’s version of events, the flag caused harm and the children simply died.

Then there’s “I am not complicit.” In a statement prompted by a genocide, the first person Ed defends is Ed. He tells us he has private views and supports causes “in my own, personal way,” which is a lot like asking for credit for a donation nobody is allowed to see.

He wants his shows to be “a place of safety and sanctuary.” Gaza has none left. Israel has bombed families sleeping in tents inside zones it declared humanitarian. He also warns that “if we only focus on shouting the loudest, nothing will ever change,” and I keep coming back to that line. Palestinians hear some version of it every time we raise our voices: calm down, watch your tone, you’re making people uncomfortable. Macklemore said two words and performed a song named for a six-year-old girl Israel killed. The people who got their way this month never had to raise their voices at all, because they own the stadiums.

When Robert Kraft called, Ed Sheeran was holding one of the strongest hands in live music. The Loop tour had grossed nearly $99 million over its first 17 reported shows, every ticket for the stadium dates ahead was sold on his name, and a dark stadium on a night booked for Ed Sheeran earns its owner nothing. Ed could have told Kraft to find another act for Gillette and waited to see how many of the other owners were willing to lose those nights to back him up. He spent the week talking instead, accepted their terms, and then told his fans that removing Macklemore “was the promoter’s decision, it was not mine.” Macklemore’s contract was with the promoter, sure. The phone call went to Ed, and the tour goes on under Ed’s name.

Within hours of Ed’s statement, Aaron Rowe, the Irish singer-songwriter, quit the tour and said the Irish know “genocide, forced famine and violent occupation” too well to let billionaires silence people speaking up against Israel’s genocide. Lukas Graham, the Danish act behind “7 Years,” wrote that “nobody’s bank balance should decide who gets to speak.” Beoga co-wrote “Galway Girl” with Ed and have been his friends for more than a decade. They helped found Irish Artists for Palestine, and they said playing venues that silence people for advocating a free Palestine “is simply not an option for us.” They also reminded everyone that more than 1,000 Palestinians have been killed since the latest so-called ceasefire. Ms. Rachel, whose audience is the small children Ed claims to be protecting, said he “caved to people who refuse to accept what the world knows.”

Every one of these artists said they love Ed, and each of them walked away from a stadium tour, which for most working musicians is the biggest paycheck and the biggest audience they will ever get. Ed could afford to lose a few shows far more easily than any of them, and he wouldn’t risk a single date. Shame on him for folding for oligarchs, for leaving a friend of thirteen years out in the cold, and for letting a billionaire decide what gets said on his own stage.

Macklemore could have kept quiet for ten shows and collected the check. He could have agreed to drop the two words. He refused both, and he opened his statement by saying he is not a victim, Ed is not a victim, Pink is not a victim, because they all get to go home to their families. Hind Rajab’s family was killed in that car with her. Macklemore kept the rest of his statement on Gaza and the West Bank, on Palestinians being starved and displaced and killed while the rest of us argue over which words are allowed.

He was generous to Ed, calling him a friend and said he’d been put in an awful position. He still wouldn’t budge on the basics: criticizing Israel isn’t antisemitic, and opposing a genocide isn’t either.

He spoke at a demonstration for Palestine in Washington in November 2023 and released “Hind’s Hall” the following May, with proceeds pledged to UNRWA. Two years later, in the week he was thrown off the tour, “Hind’s Hall” climbed into the top five on US iTunes, and The Heist, the album that gave us “Thrift Shop,” came back into the top 10 with it. He has said Free Palestine at festivals and arenas for years, and he said it again at MetLife knowing exactly what it might cost him. I haven’t read anything better on this whole affair than his own summary: “I didn’t need 10 shows from Ed. I needed 2.”

Eli Clifton and Ian Lustick have a new book out, Israel’s Lobby, and one of its arguments is that the lobby, unable or unwilling to defend what Israel does, has turned to an antisemitism witch hunt to go after its critics. Kraft’s statement could have come straight out of that playbook. He called a demand for Palestinian freedom antisemitic and used the stadium he owns to shut it out, and according to the promoter, six other NFL stadium owners went along. The same pressure that has cost students their diplomas and politicians their seats landed this month on the opening act at an Ed Sheeran concert, through private calls between a handful of billionaires, and it worked on the biggest touring artist in the world. I don’t think most Americans have taken in what that means for their own right to speak.

The tour picks up again in Philadelphia on September 19, without Beoga and without the artists who walked. Today in Gaza, a damaged residential building housing six families collapsed, killing five Palestinians, including children, and wounding 13. Nearly a year into the so-called ceasefire, and almost three years into its genocide, Israel is still blocking reconstruction materials, mobile homes and durable tents from entering Gaza, so families who survived the bombing are sleeping inside buildings that fall on them.

On Tuesday, an Israeli double-tap strike killed at least two Palestinians, including a child, as people rushed to rescue a wounded man. Striking civilians while they save the wounded is a grave violation of international humanitarian law. Israel has done it again and again during this genocide, and Palestinians keep running toward the wounded.

Macklemore would be the first to say that nothing he lost this month compares to that, and he said as much when he refused to call himself a victim. He still showed everyone watching how a person does the right thing. He said two words he believed in front of 90,000 people, took the loss when the owners came for him, and kept the focus on Gaza the whole time. Within a day, Aaron Rowe, Lukas Graham, Finneas and Beoga had walked off the tour, and Billie Eilish was telling millions of young fans that we must speak up for the oppressed.

Even Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who took heat from the left last year over an Iron Dome vote, now says she’ll change the channel whenever Ed Sheeran comes on the radio. When a congresswoman that careful about Israel is flipping past “Shape of You,” neutrality has stopped working as a hiding place, and a rapper from Seattle reminded us what happens when one person takes the risk, and then the people watching found out they could take it too. Far more is possible than the men who own those stadiums want us to think. Free your mind.

Free Palestine.