Naming Killing Machines After Native American Tribes Is Degeneracy

By Nate Bear

October 18, 2026

Source: ¡Do Not Panic!

I wrote an off-hand tweet the other day and it did not go down well with MAGA chuds or imperialist liberals. Which tells me it was a good tweet. This was the tweet, which has now clocked one million views.

Responses ranged from ‘“eurofag” (funny) to “retard” (basic) to explanations that tribal leaders themselves approve of and even bless military equipment named after them.

Which is true. But it doesn’t change my opinion. It doesn’t make the practice any less odious. In fact, it makes it worse. Much worse.

The practice of naming imperial killing machines and munitions after native American tribes and their weapons apparently started in the 1940s and was softly codified by an army regulation in the 1960s which mandated all newly commissioned equipment was named to “suggest an aggressive spirit.” This, after consultation with tribal leaders, led to new equipment, primarily helicopters, being named after tribes. In some instances, ceremonies are held in which tribal leaders bless these steel and plastic monstrosities. The practice, which continues to this day, means significant amounts of US army equipment is named after indigenous tribes, from Apache Longbow helicopters, to the C-12 Huron fixed wing plane to “Navajo-class” rescue ships. In 2024 a new ship in this class was named the Narragansett. Then of course you have the Tomahawk missile and the Longbow Hellfire missile. In total, almost thirty pieces of US military equipment bear the names of native tribes.

I would think it’s quite obvious why this practice is so odious: the names of a genocided and mass murdered people have been appropriated by their murderers to genocide and mass murder other people.

The fact that some tribal leaders give their blessing for this practice is hugely depressing, not uplifting or exculpatory.

The missile that slammed into a girls school on the first day of the attack on Iran killing 156 people, including 120 children, was called a tomahawk.

Do the indigenous people in the United States really want to be named after weapons of infanticide? Does it really honour native Americans that a weapon bearing their name operated by the people who genocided and dispossessed them rains out of the sky to kill 156 people? Does a missile launched hundreds of miles away from a civilian target really honour the fighting spirit of the Algonquian who originally created the tomahawk? Of course not. The tomahawk missile is a cowardly stand-off weapon used to mass murder in cold blood.

There is no evidence that the tomahawk missile was ever blessed by tribal leaders, nor that the US Navy consulted with tribes over the name. But it is true that equipment has been blessed by tribal leaders, and that tribes do appear supportive of naming practices (or at least don’t oppose it in any significant way). Indeed, this past April, after the “tomahawk” had mass murdered Iranian children, the new US army attack aircraft the Cheyenne was blessed in a ceremony involving the Northern Cheyenne Tribe and the Cheyenne and Arapaho Tribes.

This really is a very dispiriting component of native assimilation into the society of their oppressors. And of course, leaders are leaders in any hierarchy. It may not say much about the general feeling of a group. And it doesn’t take into account the still deeply unequal relationship between the two parties. Tribal leaders may feel they have no choice. But the fact that the practice continues with any native consent at all is dispiriting and depressing, not least because of the massive inequality between tribal communities and non-tribal communities in the US.

Native Americans have the highest poverty rate of any racial group in the United States at somewhere between 25% and 30%. South Dakota, home of the Sioux Nation, which comprises the Nakota, Lakota and Dakota peoples, is the state with the highest poverty rate of any single group in the US, at 45%. The Sioux attack helicopter and the Lakota light utility helicopter are named in their supposed honour, and in 2012 Lakota elders blessed helicopters at a ceremony on the Standing Rock Reservation. It’s hard to escape the conclusion that in this case tribal leaders have settled for performative gestures over any true justice. Colonial society has bestowed assimilation on native American tribes by assigning their names to killing machines, in lieu of progress, justice or equality. Poverty rates on reservations can be as high as 50%, with unemployment rates approaching 90%.

Of course some native nations, and especially tribal leaders, have little reason for complaint, having done very well from their arrangements with various state governments via their operation of casinos and gaming resorts.

And acceptance of this appropriation appears significant, but is not total. The first nations activist Vernon Bellecourt led a campaign against US sports teams using tribal land nicknames, and also opposed the naming of the “Black Hawk” helicopter. In 2011, the “Geronimo” code name for the operation that killed Osama Bin Laden was also widely condemned by tribal leaders. As well as this, resistance to US colonial society by indigenous groups is by no means dead, exemplified by the 2017 Standing Rock protests against the DAPL pipeline which saw 200 tribes mobilise to protect a sacred water source.

Survival itself is also resistance.

But the truth is, through exhaustion, co-option and the brutality of the dominant society, a truly inequitable landscape remains.

The naming practice, then, is a grim indictment not of the oppressed, but of the oppressors.

And it is, quite honestly, a very yankee thing to do.

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Fighting Germany’s Military-Industrial Complex

By Thomas Klikauer

October 18, 2026

Z Article

Source: IGM-union

October 2026 marked a turning point for German unions in the car industry. With the years of boom for cars seemingly over, a new boom has been called. This time for Germany’s arms industry. It will benefit arms companies and, so the hope goes, Germany’s labor market too. 

German corporations are converting backwards, from civilian production to the military. Yet arms have done Germany and the world so much “good” – twice: in 1914 and again in 1939.

Large German arms companies such as Rheinmetall, Krauss-Maffei Wegmann, Hensoldt, Diehl and Heckler & Koch will benefit, as will European manufacturers such as Airbus and the guided-weapons maker MBDA. They profit from Germany’s new super defense budget, which has washed big cash into the coffers of Germany’s growing “military-industrial complex” (MIC). Germany’s conservative government hopes to crank up the industry of the world’s third largest economy: Germany.

Billions of – German – euros will also go to US military companies like Lockheed Martin and Boeing. However, industry experts point out that the blessing of state money will not bring a sudden improvement in the equipment of Germany’s army, the Bundeswehr.

The construction of a new battle tank by Krauss-Maffei Wegmann (KMW, now part of KNDS), for example, will take two or three years. It is an oversized weapon that has been of no use in Ukraine’s defense against Russia. Undeterred, and spurred on by “tough-guy macho images” of German politicians posing in battle tanks, KMW and Rheinmetall can hope that another 230 “Puma” infantry fighting vehicles will be ordered.

Car maker Audi, meanwhile, lends employees to the Bavarian arms companies Diehl, Airbus, MBDA and KNDS on a voluntary basis. In the face of a – frequently rehearsed – “growing international threat” (meaning: Russia), the German arms industry is booming, also in Bavaria.

Audi now wants to support Germany’s armament with personnel, and to expand prospects for its own employees. Years of management literally “asleep at the wheel” ensure that the German auto industry is in crisis. Many arms companies, by contrast, can hardly cope with the flood of orders and the expected profits. An Audi spokesman recently confirmed that the car manufacturer has launched a scheme for the temporary regional deployment of personnel together with partners from the Bavarian metal and electrical industry.

There was, as Audi said, great interest, yet participation in the scheme is voluntary. As part of the temporary employment, Audi employees willing to change can work for a limited time at the arms makers Diehl, Airbus, MBDA and KNDS. Audi’s target group was engineers, quality assurance engineers, project managers and employees working in technical development. The borrowed Audi employees remain employees of Audi AG for the entire time.

Audi organized a major information event, and the scheme has already met with great interest among the workforce – most likely pushed by the daily barrage of apocalyptic news about the impending loss of tens of thousands of jobs in Germany’s car industry. Audi has announced it is “reducing” 9,500 jobs in Germany over the next five years, while saying that the regular workforce is “secured” until 2029.

At the same time, arms maker Rheinmetall is negotiating the takeover of the Alstom locomotive plant in the regional city of Kassel, with 900 employees. The takeover is becoming more real by the day. Rheinmetall already operates a plant in the immediate vicinity, in the industrial “park” of Kassel’s Mittelfeld district (no real park there), and is also looking for a site and personnel to expand its tank production.

The works council does not want to give up locomotive construction in Kassel without a fight, as its deputy chair recently emphasized. In a recent interview, the works council and IG Metall announced a protest against the possible takeover. The works council convened an extraordinary meeting and plans to coordinate with the union, and union actions are planned. 

Meanwhile, the works council and workers learned from the newspapers that the management-to-management talks had progressed. Workers were surprised that the interested party was once again the MIC’s Rheinmetall. All the while, the works council had been (mis)led to believe that the talks with Rheinmetall had ended without result and that Alstom was now negotiating with a new interested party. Deliberately misinforming works councils is perhaps not an entirely new strategy of management.

Workers and the union agree that the car of the future is not a tank. Yet management’s restructuring includes layoffs and plant closures. In other words, “restructuring” is yet another piece of jargon in the playbook of the language of managerialism.

Pushed by corporate management and Germany’s conservative Merz government, the European automotive industry is faltering and switching its production to armaments. Perhaps more profit can be made from making things that kill.

Workers are exposed to a daily barrage of corporate media news that can be summed up as “the European automotive industry is in a deep crisis.” However, there is almost never a necessary clarification of what kind of crisis it is.

This is not primarily a resource crisis. Shareholders of all these corporations are literally swimming in money. Yet more profit can be made elsewhere. Corporate CEOs and their entourage of apparatchiks have been generously compensated in recent years. In the period after COVID-19, the majority of European car manufacturers recorded a significant increase in profits.

The European automotive industry – and especially the German automotive industry – has been based on three pillars for decades:

1. many years of experience with internal combustion engines,
2. a focus on the premium segment with large SUVs and models with high profit margins, and
3. the exceptional profitability of the Chinese market.

Today these patterns are reversing. German cars used to be synonymous with technology and quality; today they are criticized and sometimes even mocked. In test reports and the trade press, Germany’s car makers are ridiculed for a technological lag, especially in electric mobility, battery technology, on-board software and autonomous driving. Perhaps German car makers have taken to heart what is commonly attributed to Alfred P. Sloan, the longtime boss of General Motors (nybooks.com): 

“The business of General Motors is

not to make cars, but to make money.”

For a long time, the Chinese market made it possible for Germany’s auto bosses to sell a production far beyond the needs of the domestic market and to make considerable profits in the process. This is now developing into its opposite. China is no longer the engine of profitability, but the place where the technological lag created by German auto bosses is revealed – the proverbial emperor has no clothes. In the face of this “self-made” crisis, an increasingly large part of the European (mostly German) automotive industry is now entering two new dead ends:

1. It is further slowing the transition to electric vehicles in order to extend the life of the internal combustion engine as long as possible.
2. The second impasse is the militarization of the production apparatus. Several manufacturers are now looking for new “growth” (read: higher profit) areas in the militarization of their production. The MIC is where corporate profits can be made.

Yet this is not merely a technological crisis. It did not fall from the sky. It is the result of a capitalist logic in the age of Uber-monopolies: a handful of car bosses choose to keep an outdated technology in order to secure their monopoly-created profits for as long as possible.

As always, managers operate with two strategies. These are the two Golden Rules (those who have the gold make the rules!) of management. When things go right and others have done the work, take the credit. When things go badly – in particular when you are responsible for your own mismanagement – blame someone else: workers and trade unions, for example.

Now corporate bosses are making workers pay for the consequences of their managerial decisions. Against corporate mismanagement, a different logic should be enforced. First, dividends and share buybacks from profitable years must be taken into account. If a company has distributed billions to shareholders, it cannot present the bill to workers afterwards. A special tax must be levied on the dividends and share buybacks that the major automotive companies have paid out in recent years. These funds must be channeled back into:

• research and development,
• the transition to electric and autonomous vehicles,
• employee training and job security.

This also means that not a single euro of state “subsidies” – the much-welcomed state cash, despite or perhaps because of free-market ideology – may flow to corporations that lay off workers, close plants or pay dividends to shareholders.

Second, a genuinely Europe-wide industrial plan for the electrification of transport is needed, drawn up jointly by the EU, trade unions and management. This means not just cars but, above all, electric public transport: electric buses, trams, metros and other trains. This would ensure pollution-free inner cities.

Third, an affordable electric car should no longer cost over €61,000 ($70,500). The goal is to produce electric vehicles that are smaller, simpler, repairable, material-saving and affordable. The objective is also to develop electric buses, e-bikes and electric motorcycles. In addition, massive investment must be made in the material requirements of electrification: low-CO₂ power generation, power grids, charging stations, batteries, recycling, public transport and democratic mobility planning.

Without abundant, clean and affordable energy, electrification will remain unstable (e.g., Trump’s attack on Iran – an endless war that washes billions into oil corporations) and unevenly distributed. There is a very real risk that the transition away from fossil fuels will be reserved for those who can afford it. Workers will be excluded from the new car market or doomed to keep using their aging vehicles.

Finally, the crisis in the automotive industry must not be used to push Germany’s industry towards a war economy. The skills of employees in the automotive industry are of great value. They extend to metallurgy, electronics, software, batteries, assembly, logistics and maintenance. 

These skills should serve to produce goods that benefit the European population, not to drive Europe into a logic of militarization, the military-industrial complex, constant armament and military conflict. German arms have never done the world any good. Corporate Germany should know this much.

Thomas Klikauer

Thomas Klikauer has over 1200 publications (including 16 books) and writes regularly for Cross Border Talks ( Europe), Countercurrents (India), and ZNet (USA) on global warming, labor relations, and Germany’s far right.

 

Post-Genocide Israel 2026: Fragmented, Divided, Segregated Election with Few Alternatives

Israel’s political center of gravity has shifted sharply toward security and military power. And with the new segregation of its Arab parties, the fragmented election offers no real change – except a march toward increasing apartheid.

By Dan Steinbock

October 18, 2026

Source: Originally published by Z. Feel free to share widely.

President Donald Trump and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu shake hands after joint press conference, Monday, September 29, 2025, in the State Dining Room of the White House. (Official White House Photo by Joyce N. Boghosian)

Israel’s 2026 election is occurring in a highly polarized and incendiary political atmosphere that recalls 1995. Then, the Oslo process had split Israeli society between an increasingly radicalized right and a peace-oriented government. As the incendiary political climate was condoned by the right-wing Likud’s Benjamin Netanyahu, Labor’s Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin was publicly branded a traitor and assassinated by a Messianic Jewish extremist. 

The analogy has its limits. In 1995 the central political question was whether Israel should negotiate with the Palestinians. In 2026, the argument is taking place after October 7, three years of war, the obliteration of Gaza, intensified West Bank settlement and displacement, and Israeli military operations involving Lebanon and Iran. 

In the past 10-15 years, the country’s political center of gravity has shifted sharply toward security and military power, documented in my The Fall of Israel (2024). 

Recent polls have the Netanyahu and opposition blocs tied at about 50 seats. Neither side has a reliable governing coalition, while the Israeli Arab parties held the balance – until their representation was undermined. 

International media muses about the “knife-edge Israeli elections” between the incumbent Netanyahu and his rivals, tacitly suggesting that the latter offer “hope” and “change.” In reality, the Israeli vote is not a conventional left-right election, but a referendum on who controls the Israeli state after years of permanent war—and what kind of state emerges from it.

It’s not a pretty picture.

Two major blocs and the unaligned

In the 120-member Israeli parliament, the Knesset, no single party has a majority. Effectively, the rivalry is between two blocs of parties: the Netanyahu-led harsh-right and the rival bloc, led by former IDF chief Gadi Eisenkot, that is portrayed as centrist (though it, too, is slanted toward right). 

Current polling suggests that the election may produce no clear outcome. Each major bloc attracts about 50 seats. Garnering up to 20 seats, the smaller unaligned groups are expected to have a critical role in the next government coalition. Or so the conventional wisdom goes.

Benjamin Netanyahu’s Likud remains committed to military primacy, opposition to Palestinian statehood and a security-centered conception of Israeli sovereignty. 

Once again, Likud’s campaign presents him as the indispensable protector of Israel in a hostile region, despite the catastrophic October 7 failure occurring under his watch. That depiction is fully misaligned with the war crimes he remains accused of. 

In the absence of effective opposition alternatives, Netanyahu’s main rival, the centrist-populist Yashar (“honest”) bloc, has promoted itself as a more moderate option. Yet, its leader Gadi Eisenkot is a security hawk and the architect of the Obliteration Doctrine that was first tested in Dahiya, Beirut in 2006-7 and perfected in the Gaza genocide 2023-26. Eisenkot regards Palestinian statehood as effectively “irrelevant.”

Recent reporting, however, reinforces the limits of the promised alternative: the opposition says it would curb extremist settler violence, dismantle illegal outposts and restore some cooperation with the Palestinian Authority, yet its leading figures still reject Palestinian statehood. A change of government could alter methods and international relations without changing the underlying territorial consensus.

Next come labor, far-right, religious and Arab parties, which each could attract about 7-11 seats.

Led by Yair Golan, the labor Democrats are the clearest major Jewish-Zionist force advocating a negotiated Palestinian settlement, while still maintaining a strongly security-oriented posture. For a year or two, the popular Golan has tried to consolidate and expand Israeli left. His dream is to restore the broad labor front that governed Israel until Likud’s election triumph in 1977. But that’s a tall order.

Since the mid-2010s, Israel has shifted toward the Messianic far-right, thanks to hardened domestic sentiments and billions of U.S. dollars in annual military aid and conservative American-Jewish funding. When the country is consistently rewarded for policies that international law considers crimes, this is hardly surprising.

The far-right, secular and religious not-so-centrists

B’Yachad (“Together”) is an Israeli political alliance led by former Prime Minister Naftali Bennett in partnership with the centrist opposition leader Yair Lapid. Bennett is a veteran far-right religious leader, a technology millionaire. They challenge Netanyahu’s leadership and differ over diplomacy, governance and relations with Washington, but opposition to Palestinian statehood remains widespread. Lapid’s party Yesh Atid (“There Is a Future”) is a centrist, secular-liberal political party founded in 2012, before the far-right tide.

Aligned with religious Zionists and far-right extremists, Bennett explicitly rejects statehood on security grounds. During the Gaza conflict, he championed total blockade. When asked about civilian collateral damage, Bennett responded: “We’re fighting Nazis.” Lapid has historically supported a two-state framework. Yet, in crucial Israeli votes, he has been absent. 

Avigdor Lieberman’s Yisrael Beiteinu (“Israel is our home”) is supported by the secular Russian immigrant population. The small party depicts itself as “a national movement with the clear vision to follow in the bold path of Ze’ev Jabotinsky”, the founder of Revisionist Zionism and the hero of the Israeli harsh-right. In the interwar period, Jabotinsky built ties with Fascist Italy.

During the Gaza genocide, Lieberman iterated there are “no innocents in Gaza.”

There are also two religious parties, the mainly Ashkenazi United Torah Judaism (UTJ) and the largely Sephardi Shas. These are the main ultra-Orthodox (Haredi) political parties, representing religiously observant communities. Despite holding a minority of seats, they have served as crucial power-brokers in coalition governments.

The Messianic far-right and Kahanite racists

Spearheading the new far-right is Itamar Ben-Gvir’s racist anti-Arab Otzma Yehudit (“Jewish Power”). As Israel’s minister of national security, Ben-Gvir has advocated intensified killings in Gaza and policies combining siege, military force, Palestinian emigration and settlement. Recently, he said the entire West Bank “belongs to Israel,” while threatening to dismantle Palestinian Authority.

Outside Israel, Ben-Gvir is despised. He is a follower of the late Rabbi Meir Kahane’s violent, Messianic and racist doctrines. In the 1980s, he might have been imprisoned. Today, he is a key player in the far-right. 

Bezalel Smotrich’s Religious Zionist Party is annexationist, settlement-oriented and explicitly hostile to Palestinian statehood. Smotrich has advocated Israeli control and settlement of Gaza. 

Outside Israel, Smotrich is widely scorned. In Israel, his party remains influential and his support is rising.

Ben-Gvir and Smotrich are popular among the settlers and their powerful political and financial supporters.

The striking fact is that the political spectrum’s mainstream has moved so far toward militarized security that opposition to Netanyahu does not necessarily mean opposition to the underlying territorial and military logic.

Except for the Democrats, Israel’s parties would more or less gladly condone a singular Jewish Israel with Gaza and the West Bank annexed permanently.

Excluding Israeli Arabs from election, democratically

Israel’s 21% Arab/Palestinian population is constitutionally entitled to vote. Yet its political representation is being juridically suppressed. 

Israel’s main Arab-majority parties feature 

• Ra’am (United Arab List) stressing civic issues and pragmatism; 
• the joint Arab-Jewish left-wing party Hadash; 
• secular Ta’al focusing on civil rights and socio-economic issues; 
• and the Palestinian nationalist Balad. 

In Gaza and the West Bank, Palestinian Arabs live in an apartheid state, but the openly segregationist practices are spilling over within Israel itself. In light of the effective goal of a single Jewish state, that’s logical.

Until recently, Israeli election season had a familiar routine. First, the Central Elections Committee (CEC), a political body, disqualifies Arab candidates and lists. Then, the Supreme Court (SC) restores them to the race. This year the ritual ended. Recently, the CEC voted to bar major Arab-majority lists (Ra’am and the Joint List) from the election. Party leaders and rights groups like Adalah denounced the bans as racist, political, and anti-democratic maneuvers, designed to silence Palestinian citizens of Israel and stop them from influencing the vote.

The SC overturned the committee’s bans on Ra’am and the Joint List, allowing both lists to contest the October 27 election. But it was inclined to disqualify Balad leader Sami Abu Shehadeh, who then withdrew. The episode highlights the increasing politicization of Israel’s judicial checks and the continuing pressure on Palestinian political representation.

Effectively, the SC ruling set different rules for Arabs and Jews – which is consistent with an apartheid state, not with a democracy.

Why this rush to deny Palestinian representation? 

Polls have consistently demonstrated that Arab parties could act as kingmakers in a tight election race where neither major Jewish bloc is guaranteed a clear majority. Consequently, the major blocs, particularly the Netanyahu constituencies, have sought to marginalize Arab parties from the election, to ensure another harsh-right victory. Moreover, even Netanyahu’s rivals shun reliance on Arab parties, although that could ensure them a lead.

The exclusion has an obvious political consequence apart from its constitutional implications. It takes Israel a step closer to an exclusively Jewish apartheid state where other ethnic and religious groups are merely second-class citizens – exotic tokens to sustain the semblance of thriving democracy.

Toward apartheid democracy

Israel’s Arab citizens face a peculiar democratic paradox: they may vote, but the principal Jewish blocs increasingly insist that their representatives cannot govern. 

In The Fall of Israel, I characterized this trend as “Herrenvolk democracy”; that is, a political system that functions as a democratic state for the dominant ethnic or racial group (the “master race”), but operates as a severe tyranny or apartheid system for disenfranchised minority groups. It used to typify the Antebellum and Jim Crow United States, Zimbabwe (Rhodesia, 1965–1979) and apartheid-era South Africa (1948–1994).

Tragically, as most nations struggle to move forward to the future, Israel is stumbling its way into the past. With the effective support of Washington, it is building a regime of state and local laws, rules and customs reminiscent of racial segregation in the pre-civil rights America. 

Indeed, Israeli political discourse increasingly distinguishes between Jewish and Arab political legitimacy. One is prioritized; the other is suppressed.

That is more consequential than inflammatory campaign rhetoric. It concerns the institutional question of who is permitted to participate in determining sovereignty. Whether one calls this racism, ethnonationalism, exclusionary democracy or something else depends partly upon one’s analytical definition. But the underlying facts are difficult to evade.

The world may not be black and white. But the apartheid state always is.

The absent Gaza genocide

In fall 2023, Israel began to engage in genocidal atrocities in Gaza. Yet, it is only today, several years later, that mainstream news organizations are ever so slowly beginning to use the term that they shunned for too long, thus contributing to these atrocities. 

The UN Independent International Commission of Inquiry concluded in 2025 that Israel had committed genocide against Palestinians in Gaza and reiterated that conclusion in June 2026. Israel rejects the allegation. 

Separately, the International Criminal Court has issued arrest warrants for Netanyahu and his former defense minister Yoav Gallant alleging war crimes and crimes against humanity, including starvation as a method of warfare. 

The UN Human Rights Office has also reported concerns over ethnic cleansing in Gaza and the West Bank, citing forcible transfer, destruction and policies apparently aimed at permanent demographic change. In September 2026, the UN reported continuing displacement, settlement expansion and unprecedented settler violence in the West Bank. 

In the final days before the vote, this violence became impossible to treat as a distant or abstract concern: on October 16, masked settlers severely beat Washington Post photojournalist Heidi Levine in the West Bank; the next day, a European diplomatic delegation was assaulted near Taybeh while joining the olive harvest. The incidents drew condemnation from Israeli and U.S. officials, while Netanyahu’s office stressed that the facts were still under investigation. Their timing has made settler impunity a direct election issue.

By contrast, the genocide of Gaza is systematically suppressed in Israel’s election campaigns. This creates an uncomfortable political reality: large sections of the political system either support these policies, defend them as necessary security measures, or treat them as politically marginal.

As a result, the electoral debate has largely been conducted within the boundaries established by a militarized conception of security. Gaza and ethnic cleansing are effectively absent in the campaigns.

Jewish supremacy via permanent emergency

In September 2026, the UN Secretary-General again described a Palestinian state along the pre-1967 lines as the credible route to lasting peace, while warning that settlement expansion, evictions, land seizures and displacement are systematically eroding its territorial viability. 

The international community still overwhelmingly treats the two-state solution as the principal diplomatic framework. Yet the Israeli electoral mainstream regards Palestinian statehood as unacceptable, premature or irrelevant.

That is strategically consequential. If there is no Palestinian state, the alternative becomes some enduring combination of occupation, annexation, fragmented Palestinian autonomy, unequal sovereignty—or forever conflict.

The election therefore concerns not merely Netanyahu. It concerns whether Israeli politics still regards territorial separation from the Palestinians as a strategic possibility. To ensure the latter response, Netanyahu’s most powerful electoral instrument is not just Likud, but the politics of emergency.

The “October surprise” question has now become explicit. On October 14, Netanyahu said he did not favor a pre-emptive strike on Iran before election day, after rivals accused him of seeking a military confrontation for electoral advantage. That denial is not evidence of a planned attack; nevertheless, the fact that the possibility has entered the campaign underscores how easily regional escalation could reshape the vote.

As long as Israel remains engaged in multiple conflicts, the prime minister can campaign as the man confronting Iran, Hezbollah, Hamas and an increasingly hostile international environment. (The prime minister position is vital for Netanyahu to retain immunity against persistent corruption charges.)

The current election demonstrates how emergency politics can become self-reinforcing. A government fighting wars retains enormous security authority, as security crises elevate the incumbent’s preferred issue. The resulting fear makes effective political alternatives harder to articulate.

Escalation in Iran, Lebanon, Gaza or the West Bank could generate another national-emergency atmosphere during the election period. The conservative prime minister has a dark track-record in manufacturing or exploiting convenient crises – as evidenced by the “inconsistencies” surrounding the Flydubai Flight FZ1073 on September 30, 2026.

Washington—and the world—will feel the result

The election will not simply determine Israel’s next cabinet. For Washington, the central question is whether the alliance remains strategically bipartisan. It is already becoming less so. 

A September 2026 Senate vote on reporting requirements concerning West Bank abuses split almost entirely along party lines. Yet, growing Democratic opposition to Israeli policy and increasing concern that Netanyahu’s close alignment with Republicans is turning Israel into a partisan American issue. 

For Europe, settlement expansion and Gaza have already produced increasing diplomatic friction. Israel’s international isolation is no longer confined to traditional critics. Several long-standing Western allies have adopted sanctions relating to settlements. Nonetheless, this debate is subject to the far broader friction on European rearmament.

For the Middle East and internationally, the costs have already escalated dramatically. Worse, an Israeli government committed to permanent military presence, settlement expansion or annexation would make Palestinian statehood progressively harder to implement while keeping Lebanon, Syria, Iran and Jordan entangled in Israel’s security architecture.

And for Israel itself, the fundamental choice is deeper than Netanyahu versus his opponents. It is whether the country continues down a model of permanent mobilization, territorial consolidation and military deterrence. 

In the absence of international pressure, it is hard to see why the Israeli political system would reopen the key question: How could security ultimately be achieved without a political settlement with the Palestinians?

Unlike 1995, the answer will now be judged not only by the Israelis, but by an international community increasingly prepared to judge Israel’s conduct through the language of international law, as it should.

There can no longer be any lasting political settlement without increasing international pressure – unless Jim Crow is deemed to be the worthy future of the world community in the 21st century.

Dan Steinbock

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Dan Steinbock is the author of The Fall of Israel. He is the founder of Difference Group and has served at the India, China and America Institute (US), Shanghai Institute for International Studies (China) and the EU Center (Singapore).