Bibi’s Political Insurance Lies in His Never-Bibi, Conceptzia Adoring Opposition

Peloni

Adam Scott Bellos, founder and CEO of The Israel Innovation Fund, penned an insightful article on the choices facing the Israeli public on election day.  Though the current opposition parties might prefer to describe the article as inciteful, Bellos details the truth that Benjamin Netanyahu’s greatest political advantage is the weakness embodied in the parties and opponents forming his opposition, which have largely chosen to define themselves as being little more than “not Netanyahu” rather than offering a compelling governing vision on which the nation might actually find a legitimate election choice.

While Netanyahu bears political responsibility for having ruled during the failures surrounding October 7 and in no small part the conceptzia doctrine that allowed Hamas to become a major threat, Bellos explains that accountability should not erase his achievements in having transformed Israel into the powerful military, technological, economic, and diplomatic state as it stands today.

Indeed, Bellos goes on to argue that replacing Netanyahu should require a leader capable of preserving those achievements while addressing his failures. Such a leader would necessarily possess strategic clarity, diplomatic sophistication, international credibility, and the ability to effectively project Israeli interests on the international stage. Bellos pay particularly attention to the need for anyone hoping to replace the tenured Prime Minister to also reject the continued promotion of a two-state solution, explaining that October 7 demonstrated the impossible to ignore untenability of the dangers inherent in the establishment of Palestinian sovereignty, which would likewise create an unacceptable security threat to Israel.   Indeed, The old Conceptzia has lost its political basis of support in Israel, that is, except among those who seem to want to replace Netanyahu in leading the country. Notably, none of this is lost on the voting electorate which will be choosing the next Israeli government on October 27, but it seems to be squarely ignored by the entire Never-Bibists thus far forming Netanyahu’s opposition.

Ultimately, Bellos argues that the opposition must offer a comprehensive alternative encompassing security, economics, diplomacy, and national confidence, as simply opposing Netanyahu is insufficient to either effectively replace Netanyahu or to gain the support of the Israeli public. Israel needs a genuine governing alternative to Netanyahu rather than the political vacuum which today forms the collection of “I’m Not Bibi”s which oppose him today.  Hence, the best which the opposition might hope to do is to deny Israel the possibility of forming a ruling government, which was the same strategy that was pursued in the 4 elections which followed the fall of Netanyahu’s government in 2018.  Is this not the basis for the wellspring of new, never to pass the minimum vote threshold, parties being formed right now?

Is it merely a coincidence that, if successful, this strategy of simply blocking Netanyahu from forming a new government will prevent Israel from acting as a meaningful partner in the second half of Trump’s second term, much as was the case in the second half of Trump’s first term?

Well, whatever happens, it will be certainly be interesting, as that is the true earmark of Israeli politics, with only the public having the final say on what the future might embody.

See Bellos’ article at the link below:

https://www.jpost.com/opinion/article-904671

August 7, 2026 | 8 Comments »

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  1. IDF, Shin Bet acknowledge for first time special mission to hunt down and kill all Oct. 7 terrorists
    Officers in ‘Nili’ unit confirm facial recognition, artificial intelligence, detainee interrogations, humint being used in operation to track down every participant in Hamas-led October 7, 2023, invasion, massacre, abductions

    “The Nili unit was named after the World War I-era Jewish underground spy organization Nili.”

    “Israeli officials have also invoked the aftermath of the 1972 Munich Olympics as a precedent for the retribution campaign against the October 7 terrorists, The Times of Israel reported last month, pointing to the years-long and partially successful Mossad-led effort to track down and eliminate anyone linked to the massacre of 11 Israeli athletes during the Games.” {Whom Steven Spielberg and Tony Kushner defamed in “Munich” (2005)

    {How fervently I wished for something like that after the unpunished lynchings of Yankel Rosenbaum, the ring leader of the mob that stabbed him to death was acquitted first of murder then of violating Yankel Rosenbaum’s civil right 10 years later by an all black Jury in the same venue where the pogrom took place, and Leon Klinghofer whose murderers were glorified in an opera that was shown at the Metropolitan Opera and whose ring leader was released by Italy only to be captured by the Americans during the Iraq War, which I will always fervently support, and who died in prison a year later. Our enemies and the world must be made to know that Jewish blood is not cheap.}

    https://www.timesofisrael.com/idf-shin-bet-acknowledge-for-first-time-special-mission-to-hunt-down-and-kill-all-oct-7-terrorists/

    Hunters is an American conspiracy drama thriller television series created by David Weil. It premiered on February 21, 2020, on Amazon Prime Video.[1][2] In August 2020, the series was renewed for a second and final season, which premiered on January 13, 2023.[3][4]

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hunters_(2020_TV_series)

    Al Pacino and The Hunters cast discuss antisemitism in America

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sNHhQBjJb_k

    Israel’s Unknown Heroic Spies of World War I

    “Today, the Aaronson house is a museum dedicate to the amazing accomplishment of the NILI spy ring. Among other documents and artifacts, it houses a letter from British Captain Baron William Ormsby-Gore acknowledging that Britain could not have won without the aid of the NILI spies.”

    https://aish.com/israels-unknown-heroic-spies-of-world-war-i/

    My comment: I’m waiting for the tv mini-series like “Turn: Washington’s Spies (2014)

    Television Matters.

    Idea for a slogan: “I’m silly for NILI”

  2. Melissa Steinberg Brodsky on FB:

    Pyatigorsk, Russia. 1880.

    Joseph Trumpeldor’s father Wulf had spent twenty-five years as a cantonist, a Jewish boy conscripted into the Tsar’s army under Nicholas I’s policy of drafting Jewish children as young as twelve to convert them to Christianity and sever their connection to their people. Wulf survived it. He kept his faith. He raised his son to be both a committed Jew and a Russian patriot, which was a complicated thing to be in the Russian Empire of 1880.

    Joseph trained as a dentist. Then in 1902 the army drafted him and he went to Manchuria.

    At the Siege of Port Arthur in 1904, one of the bloodiest land battles of the Russo-Japanese War, a piece of shrapnel hit his left arm. The arm had to come off. He spent more than a hundred days in the hospital. When he was well enough to sit up, he called for his commanding officer.

    He wanted to go back to the front.

    His commanding officer told him he couldn’t. He’d lost his arm. He had every right to be sent home.

    Trumpeldor looked at him and said: “But I still have an arm to give.”

    They sent him back.

    He fought through the rest of the siege with one arm. When Port Arthur fell and he was taken prisoner by the Japanese, he organized the Jewish prisoners in the camp into a Zionist cell, teaching Hebrew and discussing the idea of a Jewish homeland. The Tsar awarded him the Cross of St. George four times. He was the most decorated Jewish soldier in Russian Imperial history.

    In 1912, he emigrated to Palestine and lived for a time at Deganyah, Israel’s first kibbutz, farming the land he had been dreaming about in a Japanese prisoner of war camp. The Ottoman authorities told him he had to become an Ottoman citizen to stay. He refused. They expelled him.

    He ended up in Egypt at the start of World War One. There he met Vladimir Jabotinsky and they proposed forming a Jewish fighting unit to fight alongside the British against the Ottomans.

    The British didn’t want Jewish combat soldiers. They offered them a mule transport corps instead.

    Jabotinsky was furious. Trumpeldor accepted on the spot.

    He said: “It doesn’t matter where we fight. What matters is that we fight under a Jewish flag.”

    The Zion Mule Corps was born. Six hundred and fifty Jewish volunteers transported ammunition and supplies to Allied forces at Gallipoli under fire. Trumpeldor led from the front and was wounded again, this time in the shoulder of his remaining arm. He kept going.

    After Gallipoli, the Corps was disbanded. Trumpeldor went to London and lobbied for a proper Jewish fighting force. Eventually the Jewish Legion was formed, the first Jewish military unit in nearly two thousand years. Future Israeli Prime Ministers David Ben-Gurion and Levi Eshkol served in it as ordinary soldiers.

    Trumpeldor went back to Russia. He witnessed the Revolution. He organized Jewish self-defense communities and founded He-Halutz, a pioneering youth movement that trained young Jews for agricultural settlement in Palestine. Thousands passed through it. Then he went back to Palestine himself, for the last time.

    He organized Jewish self-defense in the Galilee, moving between isolated settlements in the north that had almost no protection. On March 1, 1920, Arab raiders attacked the remote settlement of Tel Hai in the upper Galilee. When the farmers called for help, Trumpeldor arrived with twenty reinforcements.

    During the battle he was shot through the hand and the stomach.

    His fighters carried him to a first aid station. He died of his wounds that evening. He was thirty-nine years old.

    His last words, recorded by those present, were in Russian. Translated into Hebrew they became one of the most quoted phrases in Israeli history.

    “Never mind. It is good to die for our country.”

    The city built near the site of Tel Hai was named Kiryat Shmona. City of Eight. For Trumpeldor and the seven others who died that day.

    The man with one arm who asked to go back to the front. The soldier who accepted the mule corps because what mattered was the flag. The farmer who died in the Galilee at thirty-nine so that something worth dying for could eventually exist.

    It does exist.

    https://m.facebook.com/story.php?story_fbid=pfbid0fzaLMmUEh3DeUBtXP1iNCLqmpnDtY3nZ9CMXgVYfJkvmDS3ApkZtwDy2jZxNP1vvl&id=607788716

  3. “My position is unambiguous. I do not support the establishment of a Palestinian state, and I do not believe it is realistic under present or foreseeable conditions. Palestinians should not be denied dignity, prosperity, civil government, or a future.* But sovereignty is not a humanitarian program. It carries armies, borders, treaties, weapons, international standing, and the ability to invite hostile powers into strategically dominant territory.”

    * My comment: Why not?

    The last time I spoke to an erstwhile Palestinianist friend who asked me, “Do you want the Palestinians to suffer?,” I replied, “yes, they were all in on it, yes.”

    • “So what”

      Posted text:
      “#Watch_and_you_won’t_regret”
      A girl from Khan Yunis, in the south of the Gaza Strip, supports the stabbing operations (i.e., terror attacks) by the young people of Hebron.
      #so_what?”

      Video transcript:
      “Israeli”: “[Palestinian] youth are throwing stones at us [Israelis]”
      Girl: “So what!”
      “Israeli”: “”[Palestinian] youth are running after us [Israelis] with knives”
      Girl: “So what!”
      “Israeli”: “Muhannad Halabi stabbed us” (i.e., terrorist who stabbed two Israeli civilians to death)
      Girl: “So what!”
      “Israeli”: “Fadi Alloun stabbed us” (i.e., terrorist who stabbed an Israeli civilian)
      Girl: “So what!”
      “Israeli”: “What do you tell [Palestinian] youth in the West Bank?”
      Girl: “Stab! Stab! Stab! Stab! Stab!”
      Click to view bulletin

      This video and the term “so what” is a reference to a hashtag appearing on Palestinian social media as a slogan used to encourage Palestinians to continue rioting, throwing rocks and using violence against Israelis. “#so_what” is a Palestinian response that makes light of Israel’s alleged crimes, showing that Palestinians don’t care. It also implies that no matter what Israel does, the Palestinians will continue not to care, and they will continue to riot, throw rocks, carry out stabbing attacks etc. The words refer to a video that went viral, showing an elderly Palestinian man arguing with Israeli soldiers. A soldier points to rioting Palestinians, saying: “They’re throwing rocks at us.” The old man replies: “So what, let them throw rocks.”

      Muhannad Halabi – 19-year-old Palestinian terrorist who killed 2 Israelis, Rabbi Nehemiah Lavi and Aharon Bennett, and injured Bennett’s wife, Adele, and their 2-year-old son in a stabbing attack in the Old City of Jerusalem on Oct. 3, 2015. Following the attack, he was shot and killed by Israeli security forces. Prior to his attack, in a post to his private Facebook page, the terrorist referred to recent terror attacks as part of a “third Intifada,” and said that it was a response to Israel’s actions at the Al-Aqsa Mosque and that the Palestinian people would not “succumb to humiliation.” This is a reference to the PA libel that Israel is plotting to take over and destroy the Al-Aqsa Mosque and to the PA’s portrayal of Jews praying on the Temple Mount as “an invasion of the Al-Aqsa Mosque.

      Fadi Alloun – 19-year-old Palestinian terrorist who stabbed and injured Israeli citizen Moshe Malka (15) near the Old City of Jerusalem on Oct. 3, 2015. Alloun fled and was shot and killed by Israeli police. Before his attack, Alloun had written on his Facebook page: “Oh Allah, my goal is Martyrdom-death (Shahada) or victory for Allah… Allah is great.”

      » View analysis citing this item
      Categories in this Translation
      Topic
      Violence & terror » Violence and Martyrdom for Kids, Wars & Terror Campaigns » PA Terror Wave (2015-2016) | Education, Culture and Sports
      Sources
      Videos | Media / Schoolbooks » Social Media » Facebook | Jerusalem Intifada’s Young People Coalition, Facebook

      Stabbing for kids: Palestinian girl gives demo
      Jerusalem Intifada’s Young People Coalition, Facebook|Nov 12, 2015

      {Video on page}

      https://palwatch.org/page/9132

      “The Palestinians are suffering!”

      My comment: SO WHAT!

      “Compassion for the cruel leads to cruelty to the compassionate.” – Maimonides (Rambam)

      Fact is, their suffering – which is minimal considering this is a war they started and they have less hunger than Finland, according to UNICEF- is caused by Hamas which they support and all the fake statistics come from Hamas. Because the IDF really is the most “moral” army in “modern history” (actually, all of history) even at the risk of their own people!

      And for one simple reason:

      I’m not in charge. 😀

      {Trump is playing, “bad cop,good cop” of late. I think “good cop, crazy cop” was much more effective. Ben-Gvir is clearly somebody who understands this 😀 Bibi and Trump both have a lot to learn from him.}

      “good cop crazy cop Generals Sherman and Patton, Mcarthur, Teddy Roosevelt, Andrew Jackson effectiveness ”

      ” +16 These American military and political figures relied on aggressive, uncompromising, and larger-than-life personas to achieve high effectiveness, often operating as the ultimate “crazy cop” style enforcers of state or military will, leveraging fear, showmanship, and brutal efficiency to break stalemates.William Tecumseh ShermanRole/Context: Union General during the American Civil War.Effectiveness: Highly effective master of total war. Sherman recognized that breaking the Confederacy’s economic and psychological capacity to fight was faster and more humane in the long run than endless traditional attrition.The “Crazy/Aggressive” Edge: His March to the Sea and the burning of Atlanta terrified the Southern populace, earning him a reputation as a madman to his enemies, but achieving rapid, decisive strategic collapse of the South.George S. PattonRole/Context: U.S. Third Army Commander in World War II.Effectiveness: Exceptionally effective operational tactician. He understood fluid, high-speed armored maneuvers and pushed his men relentlessly to outflank German forces.The “Crazy/Aggressive” Edge: Cultivated an eccentric, profane, and theatrical “blood and guts” persona. His aggressive drive was vital at the Battle of the Bulge, though his volatile temperament frequently threatened his career (such as the slapping incidents).Douglas MacArthurRole/Context: Five-star General in World War II and the Korean War.Effectiveness: Brilliant operational strategist in the Pacific and an effective administrator who successfully rebuilt postwar Japan.The “Crazy/Aggressive” Edge: Highly egotistical, dramatic, and insubordinate. His grandstanding style bordered on megalomania, which made him a brilliant icon during wartime but led to a dangerous clash with civilian authority over using nuclear weapons in Korea, resulting in his firing by President Truman.Theodore RooseveltRole/Context: Rough Rider Colonel in the Spanish-American War and 26th U.S. President.Effectiveness: Highly effective at mobilizing national will, projecting hard power abroad, and breaking corporate monopolies domestically through sheer force of personality.The “Crazy/Aggressive” Edge: Embraced a “strenuous life” philosophy and aggressive imperial foreign policy. While his charge up San Juan Hill was more chaotic than tactically sound, it served as a masterclass in political theater and national myth-making.Andrew JacksonRole/Context: Major General in the War of 1812 and 7th U.S. President.Effectiveness: Militarily brilliant at utilizing unconventional forces to secure stunning victories (like New Orleans), and politically effective at consolidating populist executive power.The “Crazy/Aggressive” Edge: Utterly ruthless, combative, and prone to personal duels. His willingness to ignore institutional norms and Supreme Court orders enabled the brutal enforcement of Indian Removal, making his brand of aggression deeply destructive to marginalized groups while maximizing raw political and military leverage.Would you like to explore how strategic doctrine or civilian oversight constrained or amplified the effectiveness of these specific leaders?”

      “The phrase “good cop crazy cop” does not have an official historical or literary link to Abba Kovner or the post-World War II revenge group Nakam. Instead, it appears to be a casual internet or meme-style juxtaposition describing the radical, extreme nature of Nakam’s plans relative to mainstream post-war realities.Background on Abba Kovner and NakamThe Leader: Abba Kovner was a charismatic poet, resistance fighter, and leader of the United Partisan Organization in the Vilna Ghetto.Plan A (The Water Supply): After the Holocaust, Kovner and a group of about 50 Holocaust survivors formed Nakam (Hebrew for “Vengeance”). They plotted to kill millions of Germans by poisoning the municipal water supplies of large German cities like Nuremberg and Hamburg. Kovner was arrested by the British before Plan A could be executed.Plan B (The POW Camp): Following Kovner’s arrest, remaining members enacted Plan B in April 1946—infiltrating a bakery supplying an American-run POW camp (Stalag 13) near Nuremberg and coating thousands of loaves of bread with arsenic. While over 2,000 (Waffen Ss) German prisoners fell ill, no definitive fatalities were recorded, and the grand scale of retribution was abandoned as members shifted focus toward the building of Israel.”

      • The glorious other half of the story:

        Melissa Steinberg Brodsky on FB

        “The war ended in May 1945.

        The Jews of Europe who had survived it had nowhere to go.

        Their homes had been taken. Their neighbors had taken them, in many cases, or watched them be taken and said nothing. In Poland, Jews returning from the camps came back to find strangers living in their apartments, their furniture, their lives. Some of those strangers were not happy to see them. In July 1946, in the Polish city of Kielce, a mob attacked a building housing Jewish survivors, killing forty-two people. The war had been over for fourteen months.

        The message was clear. There was nothing to come back to.

        So they left. Not in an orderly way or through official channels, because the official channels were nearly all closed. The British, who controlled Mandatory Palestine, had capped Jewish immigration in 1939 at 75,000 over five years, a number so low it amounted to a death sentence for the Jews of Europe who had nowhere else to go. The United States wasn’t opening its doors either.

        They left anyway.

        The movement that formed to move them was called the Bricha or Brihah. In Hebrew it means flight, or escape. It started the way the best resistance operations always started, with the people who had already survived the worst deciding that survival wasn’t enough and getting to work.

        The first organizers were former partisans and ghetto fighters, people who had spent years moving in secret, crossing borders that weren’t supposed to be crossed, keeping networks alive under conditions designed to destroy them. Abba Kovner, the poet and partisan commander who had led the resistance in the Vilna ghetto, was one of the early leaders. He gathered a conference of young Polish Zionists in Lublin in December 1944 before the war had even ended and began planning how to move the surviving remnant of European Jewry toward Palestine.

        The Jewish Brigade, soldiers of the British Army who had fought in Italy and were Jews from Mandatory Palestine, joined the operation. The Haganah sent operatives from Palestine. The American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee provided funding. What emerged was a network of safe houses, forged documents, bribed border guards, and guides who knew the mountain passes.

        The routes ran west. From Poland and the Soviet Union through Czechoslovakia and Hungary, through Austria and Germany, toward Italy and France, toward the Mediterranean ports where ships were waiting. The Alps were the hardest crossing. Groups descended through mountain passes in total darkness, no lanterns, no lights, because British officers patrolled the Italian border and a single lamp in the wrong place could end everything. They moved through the dark carrying children, the elderly, people still weak from the camps, people who had never climbed a mountain in their lives, down through the ice and the cold toward whatever waited on the other side.

        Between 1945 and 1948, the Brihah moved roughly 250,000 people.

        The British stopped as many as they could. Ships were intercepted at sea. Passengers were sent to detention camps in Cyprus. The Exodus 1947, carrying 4,515 Holocaust survivors, was boarded by British forces, its passengers beaten back, and returned to Europe. The photographs went around the world and destroyed British credibility in the Mandate almost overnight.

        The Brihah kept moving people anyway.

        When Israel declared independence in May 1948 and the British left, the floodgates opened. The survivors who had crossed the Alps in the dark, who had forged documents and bribed border guards and crowded onto overcrowded ships, arrived in a country that had just fought off five invading armies to exist.

        Abba Kovner, the man who organized the first conference in Lublin in December 1944, made it to Israel. He joined a kibbutz in the Galilee called Ein HaMifratz. He spent the rest of his life writing poetry about what he had seen and what he had done.

        He once said of the Brihah: “If we had been thinking only about our own escape, we would not have had to do so much patrolling and scout work. But foremost in our minds was how we could serve as an example and present the routes to the others, in order to motivate the surviving remnant to leave the land of ruin and set forth to Eretz Israel.”

        The land of ruin.

        They walked out of it in the dark, over the mountains, without lights.

        250,000 of them made it.”

        https://m.facebook.com/story.php?story_fbid=pfbid09v43SMLLv5i2CZu8sZDrsZbzGAbApwNsGxFqvPgP9YCUupQGB2X1Unu5vuWJMmVQl&id=607788716

  4. Ex-premier and B’Yachad party leader Naftali Bennett and Yisrael Beytenu chairman Avigdor Liberman are discussing a potential post-election union between their parties in the case that neither party wins the most seats among the opposition bloc, Channel 12 says in an unsourced report, in an apparent bid to prevent current frontrunner Yashar leader Gadi Eisenkot from becoming prime minister.

    According to the report, Bennett and Liberman are not looking to “make it easy” for Eisenkot to assume the premiership, even if his party wins the most seats, and instead are discussing a potential rotation agreement or a party merger to give them the most seats in the opposition bloc.

    The outlet says Bennett had previously supported the top spot going to the leader of the largest party, but once Eisenkot overtook him in the polls, he has shifted to advocating for the “most experienced,” or “most right wing” party leader within the bloc becoming prime minster.

    This will work only if the Bibi/Haredi block do not have more than 60 seats and the Bennett/ Lieberman/Eisenkot block do have 61 or more seats. Iffy.

    • Sword in the Desert is a 1949 American war film directed by George Sherman. It was the first American film to deal with the 1947–1948 Israeli War of Independence and marked the first significant feature film role for Jeff Chandler.

      Plot
      Freighter owner and captain Mike Dillon reluctantly smuggles Jewish immigrants into Palestine, making it very clear to the Jewish leader, David Vogel, he is only doing it for the money. Dillon is annoyed to learn that he will have to go ashore to get paid the eight thousand U.S. dollars he is owed. When a British patrol boat arrives sooner than expected, Dillon is forced to join the Jews in their flight for freedom. There are casualties on both sides before the refugees get away, including one of Dillon’s men.

      Cast
      * Dana Andrews as Mike Dillon
      * Märta Torén as Sabra
      * Stephen McNally as David Vogel
      * Jeff Chandler as Kurta
      * Philip Friend as Lieutenant Ellerton
      * Hugh French as Major Sorrell
      * Liam Redmond as Jerry McCarthy
      * Lowell Gilmore as Major Stephens
      * Stanley Logan as Colonel Bruce Evans
      * Hayden Rorke as Captain Beaumont
      * George Tyne as Dov
      * Peter Coe as Tarn
      * Paul Marion as Jeno
      * Marten Lamont as Captain Fletcher
      * David Bauer as Gershon (as David Wolfe)
      Production
      The screenplay was based on a short story by Robert Buckner, who came up with the idea after a visit to Palestine in 1934. Buckner later expanded this into a short story about Christmas in Palestine as experienced by a visiting American. In the 1940s he expanded this into a novel, then a screenplay, originally called Night Watch, then later Desert Legion.[3]
      Dick Powell had been considered for the role of the American,[4]then Stephen McNally was chosen to play the American pilot, while Paul Christian was to play a Palestinian Jewish leader. However, when Christian had to drop out due to an eye infection, McNally took over his role, and Dana Andrews played McNally’s part.[5] Ann Blyth was intended to play the female lead.[6] Buckner was originally announced as director, but George Sherman took over that task.[7] Blyth was reassigned by Universal to Once More, My Darling and the female lead given instead to Märta Torén.[8]

      Jeff Chandler was cast in February 1949.[9] The role was originally intended for an older actor but was reconfigured once Chandler was cast.[10]
      Production took place on Universal’s backlot with location work at Monterey, California, the San Fernando Valley and Victorville in the Mojave Desert.[11]
      Even during filming, there was an expectation that the film would be controversial because it showed Jewish settlers fighting the British and not Arabs. Universal barred reporters from the set during the last week of filming because several London papers had carried adverse articles on the project.[12]
      Controversy on release in Britain and Australia
      The Evening Standard claimed that the film was “not for the eyes of Britons” and the Daily Telegraphinsisted that British audiences would be surprised to see the unwonted harshness with which the British troops in the film treated Jewish civilians. There were demonstrations and disturbances outside the New Gallery cinema, near Piccadilly in London, when the film opened there on 2 February 1950, and pamphlets supporting Oswald Mosley’s fascist Union Movement were distributed to people wanting to see it. The cinema also received a bomb threat.[13] Mosley threatened to picket other cinemas that showed the film.[14]
      Five days later, the Public Control Committee of London Country Council followed the advice of the Home Office and prohibited further public showings of the film in order to prevent further scenes of rowdiness by fascist elements. It ignored a protest from the National Council for Civil Liberties, which claimed that its action constituted a ban on free speech.
      The film was screened in Australia after some cuts, but was not shown in Tasmania because of its controversial content*.”

      https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sword_in_the_Desert

      * Those devils! (google Tasmanian Devils)

      The most famous film you never heard of.

      “Sword in the Desert premiere”

      https://youtu.be/V4ISWxjsVug?is=n7ziD1AxQEAK-0f1

      The full movie is on Youtube on a Russian site you have to join. I’ve seen it. Has a Chistian Zionist ending.

      Turner Classic Movies (TCM) has it for home viewing streaming but youhave to have the cable channel. I don’t have a TV anymore.

      “sword in the desert dvd or vhs ”

      ” +1 The 1949 film Sword in the Desert starring Dana Andrews has never received an official major studio DVD or VHS release. It is only available as a custom-made DVD-R or digital transfer from specialty and archive retailers like Loving The Classics or independent sellers on platforms like eBay.Format AvailabilityOfficial Release: None (Out of print / never pressed by Universal).DVD-R / Custom Copy: Available via online classic movie archives and specialty bootleg/reproduction dealers.VHS: No official commercial VHS tape was widely released by the studio.If you are looking to purchase a copy or stream this movie, let me know if you prefer a physical DVD-R or a digital file/download so I can guide you on where to find it.”

      Google AI Overview denies it was successfully suppressed just because it was shown in American theaters at the time.

      My comment: “No comment” – Jimmy Cagney in Billy Wilder, I.A.L. Diamond and Ferenc Molnar’s “One, Two, Three” (1961)

      https://youtu.be/DD5AQluWoIM?is=8L7tJF2M4mRkUenG

  5. August 6, 2026 — Economist Poll Tracker (Average of recent polls)
    (Not a single poll, but a composite updated Aug 6.) Opposition campaigning mostly on two points October 7 occurred on Bibi’s watch and the Haredi draft dodging is endorsed by Bibi.

    Likud 24

    Yashar 22

    Together 13

    Democrats 10

    Yisrael Beytenu 9

    Otzma Yehudit 8

    Shas 8

    UTJ 8

    Hadash–Ta’al 6

    Religious Zionism 5

    Ra’am 5

    Composite shows no side has enough seats to form a coalition.