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(Washington Post) Rachel Chason - Since their deadly attack on the airport in Saudi Arabia's capital on Saturday, Houthi militants have struck Aramco, the state-owned oil company, and the presidential palace of the Saudi-backed government in Yemen. Amid the Houthi strikes, Saudi Arabia has mounted a military campaign in Yemen to reclaim territory seized by the Iranian-backed militia. Rayed Krimly, Saudi Arabia's deputy minister for public diplomacy, thinks the escalation by the Houthis is being driven partly by Iran as it seeks leverage in its continuing war with the U.S. Krimly said Thursday that Riyadh believes Iran is unwilling to make concessions in its war with the U.S. and "encouraged" the Houthis to escalate. Ali Shihabi, a Saudi author and commentator, said that after the Houthi attack on "an airport of civilians," which killed 13, Saudi Arabia is reprioritizing its air defenses and focusing on hitting the Houthis hard. "Saudi Arabia is going to inflict pain on the Houthis to make them be more reasonable," he said. Mohammed al-Basha, a Yemeni American risk adviser, noted that the Houthis want compensation from the Saudis for the years-long war and for its members to be paid government salaries. There appears little room for negotiation, al-Basha said, as the Houthis cross "every red line imaginable" with attacks on civilians, including Muslim pilgrims who were hit in the airport attack.

(Wall Street Journal) David S. Cloud - Just as the U.S. has struggled to defeat a seemingly overmatched Iran, the Houthis have built a fleet of mobile missile launchers and deeply buried missile-production facilities that it has used to withstand airstrikes. The Houthis are likely to be able to absorb attacks, while continuing to deliver blows deep in Saudi territory against softly defended targets, analysts said. Before the recent surge in Houthi missile and drone attacks, Saudi leaders were more concerned about strikes from Iran and the Iraqi militias Tehran backs. Saudi Arabia struggled to cover the vast country against these attacks, shifting air-defense batteries around to try to protect palaces and energy infrastructure. The kingdom shares a rugged, mountainous, 800-mile border with Yemen, giving Houthi mobile launchers ample cover to fire and quickly relocate. Saudi forces have successfully intercepted more than 90% of the Houthi missiles targeting areas protected by its U.S.-built Patriot antimissile systems, according to a senior U.S. official. But over half of the Houthi attacks since the war resumed have been against undefended locations. Guarding every potential target simultaneously with fixed missile batteries is logistically impossible.

(Israel Hayom) Shirit Avitan Cohen - Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu presented Israel's updated security doctrine on Sunday, identifying a nuclear-armed Iran as Israel's greatest threat. "We are prepared to take the initiative," he said. "We must prevent the enemy from delivering the first blow. The objectives I set do not depend on American approval. I always seek it, and we have also reached extraordinary understandings that people never believed were possible. But it has never been a precondition." "Our need to eliminate the nuclear threat and the broader threat posed by Iran, by the ayatollahs' regime, stands on its own. To the extent necessary, we will also act independently. We have done so before, and if necessary, we will do so again....We must bring this regime down once and for all." Netanyahu emphasized a shift away from containment and defensive measures toward offensive operations and preemptive strikes. He also stressed the need for Israel to develop independent weapons production capabilities and reduce its dependence on American arms exports and funding. He stressed that Israel must maintain military superiority, stop tolerating the buildup of enemy capabilities, and prepare for war without relying on assessments of the enemy's intentions. Netanyahu ranked drones as Israel's second-greatest security threat, warning that coordinated swarms could strike infrastructure, radar installations, political and military leaders, and command-and-control systems. Precision-guided missiles ranked third on his list, followed by cyber threats, artificial intelligence, quantum computing, and illegal weapons inside Israel.

(Times of Israel) Emanuel Fabian - Three Hamas weapons depots were destroyed in airstrikes in Gaza on Thursday, the IDF announced. They contained dozens of weapons, including Kalashnikov rifles, rocket launchers and rockets, and RPGs. Ahead of the strikes, the IDF issued warnings to civilians in their vicinity.

(Middle East Forum) Meir Ben-Shabbat - Israel has not yet won in the minds of its enemies. A sustainable resolution of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict will come only when the Palestinians lose the hope of subduing Israel and imposing their will on it by force. The Oslo Accords were meant to end Palestinian terrorism and set the conflict on a path to resolution. They did the opposite. They taught the Palestinian public and its leaders that pressure extracts concessions from Israel, and they read Israel's readiness to compromise as weakness. 33 years after the Oslo Accords, the Palestinian Authority (PA) has violated nearly every commitment it made. It has never prosecuted a single Palestinian for terrorism against Israel; it pays terrorists and their families $470 million a year, 7.6% of its budget; its schools teach the Oct. 7 massacre as a model; and its security forces have grown from a 30,000-man police force to 70,000 armed troops. Cognitive defeat is a deep and lasting change in the enemy's perception that leads it to understand that it cannot achieve its goals by force, and that trying will cost more than it is worth. It requires a military decision so unequivocal that it changes the enemy's mind. The Six-Day War, the Yom Kippur War, and the Abraham Accords each shifted the Arab world's assessment of whether Israel could be destroyed or isolated. Terrorist organizations are harder targets: they count survival as victory and hold an ideology that treats every setback as temporary. Postwar Gaza should stand as lasting testimony to the price of attacking Israel. The terrorist attack from Gaza and the war that followed it fixed, among most of the public and the leadership in Israel, the risks of the existence of a hostile entity in territory saturated with terrorists and weapons, within and next to which lie Jewish communities, infrastructure, and vital Israeli centers. The Palestinian leadership failed to make the transition required from a violent nationalist movement to a functioning and responsible leadership of an autonomous political entity living in peace alongside the State of Israel. Israel has not given up its aspiration to peace, but it is no longer willing to indulge in illusions of peace. The writer, head of the Misgav Institute for National Security and Zionist Strategy, served for three decades in the Israel Security Agency, and as Israel's national security adviser and head of the National Security Council from 2017 to 2021.

(Jerusalem Center for Security and Foreign Affairs) Oded Ailam - For years, we became accustomed to thinking that, in Israeli-Turkish relations, Erdogan controlled the thermostat: turning up the heat when enthusiasm on the street was needed, and cooling things down when economic and diplomatic interests required it. The expulsion of the Israeli ambassador in 2018 did not prevent the restoration of ambassadors in 2022. But in 2023, Erdogan publicly defended Hamas after the Oct. 7 massacre and abduction of civilians, declaring that it was not a terrorist organization but a "liberation group." He later compared Netanyahu to Hitler. This is no longer only about Erdogan. The anti-Israel and antisemitic virus has penetrated deep into the Turkish mainstream. The secular, social-democratic CHP, Erdogan's principal rival, demanded an end to trade with Israel. Turkey is rebranding itself as a champion of terrorist movements. Through its open and practical support for Hamas, its deep involvement in Syria and Gaza, and its undisguised aspiration for hegemony in the Eastern Mediterranean, it is turning from a hostile state into an enemy state. Turkey is a formidable military power, with an active-duty army of 355,000 personnel, the second largest in NATO, and a modern navy. Turkey is also a major arms producer, including advanced UAVs. From the Turkish perspective, Israel is an impediment, a regional actor that must be moved out of the way. A public taught to regard Israel as a threat to its homeland cannot be returned so easily to the status quo ante. Israel must stop counting on the next reconciliation and prepare for a Turkey that increasingly sees confrontation with Israel as part of its aspiration for regional hegemony. The writer, former head of the Counterterrorism Division in the Mossad, is a researcher at the Jerusalem Center.

(The Dispatch) David Daoud - The IDF's current deployment in southern Lebanon has a "forward and offensive defense" posture: Troops occupy commanding terrain inside Lebanon, using those positions to monitor and strike Hizbullah targets farther inland. At the Ali al-Taher Ridge, Israeli forces spent three months isolating the Hizbullah underground command complex and cutting its supply routes. Israeli forces then destroyed more than two km. of tunnels, along with weapons stores and a command center. Rather than establish a permanent garrison on the ridge, Israeli troops redeployed to nearby commanding positions from which they could monitor the area and strike Hizbullah fighters attempting to return. Three years after Hizbullah opened what may prove to be the most disastrous war in its history, Israel's victory will be secure only when Hizbullah can no longer rebuild its military power. The writer is a senior fellow at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies.

(Times of Israel) Zev Stub - Syria's school curriculum has undergone significant changes since the fall of the Assad regime in 2024, promoting an Islamist national identity, glorifying jihad and martyrdom, and portraying Jews through antisemitic stereotypes. This was reported by the educational monitoring organization IMPACT-se, which analyzed 130 textbooks used in the 2025-2026 school year. The new approach replaces Assad's pan-Arab nationalist narrative with an Islamist worldview. Iran and its Lebanese proxy Hizbullah, formerly presented positively as Assad allies, are now condemned for their role in supporting the former regime, while praise for Iran and the 1979 Islamic Revolution has been removed. Jews are repeatedly portrayed through antisemitic stereotypes of betrayal, hostility, and dishonesty, while Syrian Jewish history, which stretched thousands of years, is entirely absent. In one Grade 6 lesson, students are explicitly taught that "treason and backstabbing are among the traits of the Jews." Israel's right to exist and Jewish national identity are rejected, with Palestinian violence justified or glorified as resistance. Maps continue to label Israel as "Palestine." "The textbooks show a very concerning shift from one damaging ideological framework to another," says IMPACT-se CEO Marcus Sheff. "This report should raise serious concerns among international leaders who hope to see Syria emerge as a partner in building a peaceful and prosperous Middle East."

(Telegraph-UK) Nicole Lampert - "Dear Dad, I miss you so much and I wish I could hug you and see you victorious," 10-year-old Ibrahim Sinwar wrote to his Hamas leader father Yahya. "I wish I could grow up, hold the Kalashnikov and shoot the Jews." The radicalization of Gaza's children starts in schools, shockingly often financed with money from British taxpayers. There are Arabic lessons which bring in the words "explosive belts" worn by suicide bombers, comprehension with texts about slashing the throats of Jews, and Islamic classes in which self-sacrifice and martyrdom are encouraged. At its heart is a culture of continued "resistance" against the Jewish state. This is a curriculum of terrorism, the radicalization of hundreds of thousands, and one reason why it is so hard to fight Hamas. Controlling the minds of children has always been key to the success of the totalitarian state. The Nazis had the Hitler Youth: young ideologues who were so infused with propaganda that some of them would turn on their own parents. They are taught not to be frightened of death but to look forward to paradise. Ideologue mothers are encouraged to produce more and more martyrs for the cause. Death notices from Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad from the past three years of fighting have seen boys as young as 13 and 14 in full military garb. When you think about the dead children in Gaza, remember that Hamas and other terrorist organizations have been encouraging children to die for their futile cause for the past 20 years. How is it possible to make peace with a people who have been brought up not just to hate but to continue to "resist" no matter the pain? There is the Palestine of the imagination where, if those nasty Israelis would just stop being so cruel to the poor victims then there would be peace. And there is the Palestine of reality - glimpsed in the letter from a son to his father - where at least two generations have been taught to stop at nothing to kill Jews.

(Wall Street Journal) Elisha Wiesel - Last week former President Barack Obama said of the Jewish people that after millennia of persecution, "they took land off people, and they were excessive. And those people understandably said, 'This is injustice and I want my land back.'" Was it excessive for Jews to buy land, at fair or often inflated prices, from absentee landlords in Beirut and Damascus who were glad to sell malarial swamps? Was it excessive for the Jews of Hebron, a community that had prayed there for centuries, to be slaughtered by rioters in 1929, nearly 20 years before there was a Jewish state to blame? Was it excessive for Jews to accept the UN's 1947 partition plan while facing an impending invasion by five armies in 1948? To offer peace at Camp David in 2000, and again in 2008? To pull every soldier and settler out of Gaza in 2005? Is it excessive to want to live in peace? And what does "understandably" demanding one's land back look like? There can and should be no understanding of Hamas's ambitions. The deeper problem is the story itself. In Mr. Obama's telling, Jews were oppressed in Europe and then arrived somewhere else and took too much. Jewish history in the land disappears. My father drew a line when he wrote in the New York Times in 2001: "To compromise on territory might seem, under certain conditions, imperative....But to compromise on history is impossible." That is the line Mr. Obama crossed. My father's life was a testimony to what words can do. History is replete with speeches, lectures, editorials and textbooks turning neighbors into intruders and murder into justice. Mr. Obama's place isn't with those who call Jewish survival excessive. The writer is chairman of the Elie Wiesel Foundation.

(National Review) Richard Goldberg - America will only win the century over the Chinese Communist Party if it dominates super intelligence (SI), quantum computing, critical supply chains, and defense technology. Israel is one of the world's most important centers of innovation in every one of these areas - with both a capability and will to align its own strategic investments for the benefit of the U.S. Americans should want Israel to invest billions of dollars into SI and quantum research and development in full cooperation with the U.S. Notably, Israel's innovation ecosystem also includes research and commercial activity in advanced chemicals, synthetic materials, critical mineral recovery and refining, and the development of substitutes for scarce raw materials. Israel is already a member of the State Department's Pax Silica, a diplomatic alliance aimed at building out an American-led ex-China supply chain for critical minerals. The U.S. 2026 National Defense Strategy recognizes Israel as a "model ally," already spending a higher percentage of its GDP on defense than any NATO ally. After the U.S., Israel is the most innovative country in the world when it comes to defense technology. It battle-tests American platforms and makes them better. It co-develops missile- and laser-defense systems that help keep both countries safe from threats beyond the Middle East. Moving from a foreign aid paradigm to an interest-based joint venture will deliver massive economic and security return on investment and help guarantee another American century. That's a U.S.-Israel relationship every American should support. The writer, a former U.S. National Security Council official, is a senior advisor at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies.

(American Greatness) Lipton Matthews - America gives aid to many countries, but only its aid to Israel elicits controversy. American aid is military, Israel gave up the economic portion on its own initiative in 2008. American aid is not an act of kindness. It forms part of a long-term strategy in which the superpower strengthens its own position by strengthening its allies. Aid hands Washington leverage over Israeli policy, which narrows Israel's freedom of action and makes it more sensitive to every shift in American politics. Egypt is the beneficiary of $1.3 billion in military aid each year, and Jordan receives nearly half a billion. Both are paid for services rendered in support of American policy. Egypt's aid sustains its peace treaty with Israel, while Jordan's aid secures its cooperation on security and the fight against terrorism. In both cases, the money buys something Washington wants. Neither draws controversy. U.S. aid to Israel works largely as a purchase order placed with American industry. Of the $3.8 billion Israel receives each year, $3.3 billion is foreign military financing and $500 million supports joint missile defense, and nearly all of it is spent in the U.S. Israel is the most important foreign operator of the F-35, which it buys from Lockheed Martin's plant in Fort Worth, and the aircraft's supply chain stretches across 45 states. The ten-year structure of the aid gives American arms makers steady demand and the financial security to plan long production runs. Set against the facts, the controversy looks badly out of scale. The aid comes to 0.6% of the $649 billion the U.S. spent on defense in 2018, and for Israel it is about 0.5% of GDP. The real question is whether Washington should continue treating military aid as an instrument of foreign policy when its economic benefits are directed toward domestic producers.

(Telegraph-UK) Dr. Alice Jill Edwards - The whole of Kfar Aza, a kibbutz two miles from Gaza, was a horrific crime scene. More than a quarter of the inhabitants were either dead or had been taken captive. I had a knot in my stomach as the desperate mothers of two young women taken hostage led me through the shattered glass and rubble of their daughters' modest, single-floor houses. I tried to remind myself that I needed to avoid feeling too emotional. After all, I was a neutral observer - a UN special rapporteur. Yet the suffering of these mothers made me realize that we must consider hostage-taking as a form of torture. Not only were the victims themselves likely to be sexually abused, starved, shackled or confined in dark tunnels, but I could now see that the families of the hostages were also victims of psychological torture. Francesca Albanese, the UN's special rapporteur on the occupied Palestinian territories, and Reem Alsalem, the UN special rapporteur for violence against women, said nothing, even when the Hamas captors put videos online showing captives in horrifying scenes. In one, an emaciated hostage was digging what he said was his own grave. It was a form of abusing hostages' families so that they would put pressure on the Israeli authorities to give in to Hamas demands. That too is a form of torture. When I issued a report on what had happened on the kibbutzim on Oct. 7, and the slaughter of more than 370 young people enjoying a music festival, only one other special rapporteur had the courage to sign it. The others declined to sign, while several tried to get content in my report suppressed. I did manage to get the UN General Assembly to pass a resolution requiring states to designate hostage-taking as a form of torture. But it wasn't easy. The writer, an Australian lawyer and scholar, served as UN special rapporteur on torture from 2022 to 2026.

(Spiked-UK) Brendan O'Neill - Why do so many insist on referring to the thuggish usurping of the streets of Paris and beyond by gangs flying the Palestine flag as a "protest"? Entire boulevards were reduced to smoldering, ash-choked wastelands of incinerated vehicles and blown-out storefronts. There were running battles between the thugs and the cops. Socialist mayor Emmanuel Gregoire said vast swathes of Paris had been "devastated." Many in the mob were proudly draped in the Palestine colors. Young men sported the flag across their backs as they watched the bell tower burn and fall at the town hall of Limoges, built in 1883. The flag was hung in pride in Marseille city hall and was waved everywhere in Paris. The omnipresence of the Palestine flag matters because the so-called Palestine cause now embodies not concern for the Palestinian people but contempt for "the West." Not a desire for a ceasefire in the Middle East but a longing for fire here at home. The hysterical, disproportionate, bigoted and at times demented loathing for the Jewish State is proof that Israel has been made into the scapegoat of the West and all its supposed crimes. That the birthplace of the Enlightenment is now being burnt down by mobs draped in the Palestine flag proves this beyond doubt. As one commentator notes, the "Palestinian cause" seems to have become "a symbol of protest against Western institutions, national identities and political establishments," even in situations that "have nothing to do with Israel or the Palestinians." Many of these people long for the annihilation of the Jewish State as a proxy for Western sin.