Israel’s military chief resisted the prime minister, who then pressed in recent days for a separate action, short of an overt strike, according to an official and a person briefed on the matter.
Maybe you’ve seen the ad: A man and a woman are loading a shopping cart. The woman tells the man he must return a carton of eggs. “We have to set that $7 aside for killing Palestinians.”
The woman explains that grocery prices are rising because the United States gives so much aid to Israel. “It’s costing us a lot of money to drop bombs on Gaza,” the woman explains. “Don’t they get universal health care too?” the man asks. “We’re paying for that, too, probably,” the woman responds, at which point the man puts back the bananas.
The ad was produced by an independent political-action committee to support the Senate campaign of the Michigan Democrat Abdul El-Sayed. During the Democratic primary, El-Sayed regularly denounced American supporters of Israel as a shadowy, sinister special interest. Since winning the nomination, he has distanced himself from his earlier language. Now a super PAC is reviving it for him only a week before the general election.
The legendary journalist Hunter S. Thompson explained the ad half a century before it was produced. In his book Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail ’72, he described “one of the oldest and most effective tricks in politics,” which may have played a role in one of Lyndon Johnson’s early campaigns in Texas:
The race was close and Johnson was getting worried. Finally he told his campaign manager to start a massive rumor campaign about his opponent’s life-long habit of enjoying carnal knowledge of his own barnyard sows.
“Christ, we can’t get away calling him a pig-fucker,” the campaign manager protested. “Nobody’s going to believe a thing like that.”
“I know,” Johnson replied. “But let’s make the sonofabitch deny it.”
In the case of the ad supporting El-Sayed, the sonofabitch targeted by the false accusation is not El-Sayed’s theoretical opponent, the Republican Mike Rogers—not really. The ad concludes, “Mike Rogers is for”—ironic chuckle—“they/them.” We all know who they are, and they are the real target of the ad.
The accusation that Israel is to blame for America’s economic problems is not some unique quirk of El-Sayed supporters. During his campaign to become New York City’s mayor, Zohran Mamdani toldPolitico in 2025 that the dilapidated state of the city’s housing was the fault of the same villain: “The government refuses to fund public housing, all while we continue to find billions of dollars to drop bombs that kill tens of thousands of Palestinians over more than a year now.”
That same year, Marjorie Taylor Greene drew a similar link. American aid, she charged, typically accounts for up to a fifth of Israel’s defense budget, “even though Israel, nuclear-armed Israel, has universal healthcare for their citizens and subsidized college for their citizens. Here in America, we’re $37 trillion in debt.”
On Meet the Press in August, El-Sayed insinuated that U.S. aid for weapons in Israel was somehow an impediment to health care at home. “This campaign was a referendum on whether or not we want health care here or bombs somewhere else.”
Do supporters of Israel have to deny the false accusation? Okay, here goes. U.S. military aid to Israel is set at $3.8 billion a year from 2019 to 2028—about one-20th of 1 percent of the total federal budget. In 2024, Congress approved a $95 billion aid package for Ukraine, Israel, and other allies—of which, nearly two-thirds went to Ukraine, about $15 billion went to Israel, and about $9 billion was directed to humanitarian relief, including assistance for Gazan civilians displaced by the war that Hamas started. (The rest went to Taiwan and other allies in the Indo-Pacific region.)
Almost all U.S. assistance to Israel takes the form of credits that Israel can use only to buy American-made equipment. This assistance provides at least two direct and immediate benefits to Americans. First, it buys the United States access to Israeli military technology. By partly underwriting the development of Israel’s Iron Dome missile-defense system, the U.S. has gained the use of battle-tested systems that also protect American lives. Second, this assistance lowers the per-unit cost of U.S. systems. The United States buys up to 48 F-35 fighters a year. Israel has bought 75 and is considering an estimated 25 more. Foreign orders allow U.S. arms manufacturers to improve their economies of scale. At a time when other NATO allies are canceling their orders of American equipment because they no longer fully trust the U.S. as an ally or supplier, Israeli orders enhance the efficiency of American defense production.
Meanwhile, all U.S. aid to Israel amounts to a fraction of what Israel’s critics wish to spend domestically. Despite the implications of that El-Sayed ad: Americans spend $1.1 trillion a year on groceries. Canceling aid to Israel would deliver the equivalent of about 30 hours of that spending. Per Mamdani’s complaint that Israel is to blame for bad housing in New York City: The city’s housing authority estimates its backlog of deferred maintenance at almost $80 billion, or about 20 years’ worth of U.S. assistance to Israel at present levels. Expanding Medicare to cover all American citizens would cost perhaps more than $32 trillion in additional federal spending over the first decade. Covering even one month of this plan would take 70 years’ worth of aid to Israel.
By blaming the Jewish state for the price of bananas in Michigan, the super-PAC ad calls to mind political tricks older and more disturbing than the one attributed to Johnson. In 1899, Karl Lueger, the mayor of Vienna and one of the most notorious anti-Semites of the 19th century, gave a speech blaming the Habsburg empire’s economic troubles on its Jews. “Here in our Austrian fatherland the situation is such that the Jews have seized a degree of influence which exceeds their number and importance,” he argued. “And in this respect the Jews operate a terrorism of a kind that could hardly be worse. For us, in Austria, it is a matter of liberating Christian people from the hegemony of Jewry.”
As with the rising cost of living in the U.S., the problem Lueger was concerned with was real. His voter base of artisans and craftspeople was coming under immense pressure from factory competition. There was not much Lueger could do about his voters’ distress. But he could point them toward a politically useful target. Now, with a modest update of Lueger’s language, an outside PAC’s closing argument in one of the most watched Senate races of 2026 blames a familiar “they/them.”
Two Catholic bishops have expressed regret that they agreed to a White House meeting that produced a publicly distributed photo of them praying with President Donald Trump.
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Examining President Trump’s praise of a rallygoer who punched a protester last week, David E. Sanger, a White House and national security correspondent for The New York Times, studied the atmosphere at Mr. Trump’s recent events. What he found was a faint echo of the moments that made Mr. Trump’s 2016 rallies so shocking.
Lula vince il ballottaggio, gli studenti serbi mandano a casa Vučić, le piazze d’Europa scendono in strada contro la guerra: in un solo fine settimana il mondo ha prodotto tre esempi, e nessuno viene da Washington o da Bruxelles. A Levante, lunedì 26 ottobre 2026, Margherita Furlan dialoga con Alessandro Volpi, storico dell’economia, e Angelo D’Orsi, storico del pensiero politico e biografo di Gramsci, sui BRICS come esempio e non come blocco, sull’interregno in cui il vecchio muore e il nuovo non può ancora nascere, e su un’Europa che non sa più dare l’esempio a nessuno. Affrontiamo insieme: Brasile: Lula al 51,8%, oltre 64 milioni di voti, contro il candidato ricevuto nello Studio Ovale. L’ultimo grande Paese dell’America Latina a non essere di proprietà Il continente trumpiano: da Buenos Aires a Bogotá, da Santiago a La Paz, e il Venezuela sotto tutela dopo la cattura di Maduro Serbia: la Lista studentesca al 52%, affluenza al 70%, Vučić che ammette la sconfitta. Un popolo che cambia governo senza cambiare padrone Von der Leyen rivendica Lula e Belgrado in un’ora, ma né Lula né gli studenti serbi votano le sanzioni a Mosca Roma, Milano, Torino: «Fuori l’Italia dalla guerra», 4.292 identificati in un giorno, 110 minorenni in questura, idranti a Santa Susanna I BRICS come «carrello del giudizio»: non un’alleanza, non una moneta, ma la dimostrazione che un altro ordine è possibile Gramsci e l’interregno: «il vecchio muore e il nuovo non può nascere», e i fenomeni morbosi che abbiamo davanti Il Golfo che negozia la propria sicurezza senza Washington, il Pil saudita in caduta, Hormuz sotto veto iraniano Spesa sociale contro spesa militare: il Brasile vince con gli sgravi alle famiglie, l’Italia governa con due decreti e il riarmo al 3,5% La domanda dura: la piazza ha ragione anche quando fa cadere Vučić, amico di Mosca e Pechino? E la sinistra europea, che festeggia Lula, perché non ne produce uno? LIBRI DEGLI OSPITI Alessandro Volpi, La finanza è colpevole, Einaudi, 2026 Alessandro Volpi, La guerra della finanza, Laterza, 2025 Alessandro Volpi, I padroni del mondo, Laterza, 2024 Angelo D’Orsi, Gramsci. La biografia, Feltrinelli, 2024 Angelo D’Orsi, Gramsci. Una nuova biografia, Feltrinelli, 2017 CASA DEL SOLE TV | Informazione libera e indipendente Casa del Sole TV non ha editori privati né finanziamenti pubblici: siamo sostenuti da voi, il nostro pubblico. 35.000 euro entro il 29/11/26 DONA ORA Dona tramite bonifico bancario: IBAN IT63P0326822300052392596590, intestato a LA CASA DEL SOLE EDIZIONI, causale Erogazione liberale Casa del Sole TV Dona tramite PayPal: paypal.me/casadelsoletv Sostegno ricorrente: casadelsole.tv/sostienici Anche un piccolo contributo fa la differenza. Grazie di cuore! I LIBRI DI MARGHERITA FURLAN BRICS Scacco Matto (disponibile in italiano, inglese, russo) SEGUI CASA DEL SOLE TV YouTube: @CasadelSoleTVChannel Sito: casadelsole.tv #Levante#CasadelSoleTV#MargheritaFurlan#Geopolitica#Multipolarismo#Lula#Brasile#Serbia#BRICS#Gramsci#AlessandroVolpi#AngeloDOrsi
Voters in Idaho and Massachusetts face contrasting gun-related ballot questions that highlight the national tension between firearm freedoms and restrictions
The Bezos Earth Fund and eight other organizations have pledged more than $500 million over five years to help rescue some of the world’s most threatened plants and animals, giving species recovery greater attention in global conservation funding. The Species Recovery Alliance, announced Oct. 16 at the United Nations biodiversity summit, or COP17, in Yerevan, Armenia, will coordinate funding and conservation efforts rather than establish a single pooled fund. Cristián Samper, managing director and leader of nature solutions at the Bezos Earth Fund, said the initiative grew out of concerns that efforts to expand protected areas were overshadowing the urgent needs of threatened species. “We’re forgetting some of the other targets, in particular, the Target 4 on recovery of endangered species,” he told Mongabay in an interview at COP17. Target 4 of the Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework calls for urgent action to halt human-induced extinctions and help threatened species recover. Yet biodiversity continues to decline. WWF’s 2026 “Living Planet Report” found that populations of monitored vertebrate wildlife declined by an average of 73% between 1970 and 2022. Africa recorded an 80% decline. A new U.N. assessment also found that fewer than half of assessed biodiversity targets are on track. “Setting up protected areas and dealing with the other issues is not enough,” Samper said. Many threatened species, he added, require targeted interventions to recover. The Species Recovery Alliance includes Re:wild, Rainforest Trust, Fondation Segré, and five other organizations alongside the Bezos Earth Fund. Its members will coordinate investments and support…This article was originally published on Mongabay
Au Mali, treize civils, dont six enfants, ont été tués, dans la nuit de dimanche à ce lundi 26 octobre, par une frappe de drone de l'armée malienne, près de Lerneb, dans la région de Tombouctou, selon des informations vérifiées par RFI auprès de nombreuses sources locales. L'état-major n'a pas communiqué sur cette frappe.
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