Saturday 7th of November 2026
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the one thing which is not on the list is the most important....

It took less than 24 hours after the polls closed for the Vice President of the United States to say what the President would not. “The reason we lost is the war,” JD Vance posted on X on Wednesday. Donald Trump, meanwhile, told Fox News he did not view Tuesday’s rout as “a hit on me” and congratulated the Democrats on doing “a good job.” Gracious in defeat, and serene in denial.

While Washington argues over who lost the midterms, Moscow and Tehran are doing something more interesting. They are talking, at length and at the top. And Israel may be about to change governments. Put the three stories side by side and you can see the outline of what comes next.

Vance reads the room

Vance did not just blame the war. He relayed a prescription from pollster Rich Baris, whom he called “one of the smartest people I know in politics.” To win back the Trump voters who went Democratic on Tuesday, the party must do four things:

  1. End the war in Iran.
  2. Focus on the cost of living and inflation.
  3. Put “America First” again, meaning the original version, not the one that comes with aircraft carriers.
  4. “Change our relationship with Israel.”

 

The first three are the 2024 campaign platform, returned to sender. The fourth is the one that will set Washington’s hair on fire. A sitting Republican Vice President just said in public that the party’s relationship with Israel is a political liability. That is not a sentence Republican vice presidents usually say out loud.

Vance also made a point that should end the usual post-election excuse making. The problem, he argued, was not that Republicans stayed home. It was that a large number of 2024 Trump voters showed up and voted for Democrats. Those people did not forget to vote. They changed their minds, and they told the party why. Fox News reports that Vance is now quietly courting exactly those voters ahead of 2028, under the banner of a “new right” that wants out of foreign wars, cheaper groceries and a closed border. Call it the Republican Party in exile, waiting for its own party to come home.

Meanwhile, in Moscow

Now look east. Earlier this week, Vladimir Putin spent 85 minutes on the phone with Mohsen Rezaei, the secretary of Iran’s Supreme National Security Council. Heads of state do not usually give that much telephone time to another country’s national security adviser. The official readouts were the usual diplomatic oatmeal: “regional and international developments,” with a focus on West Asia, and continued strategic cooperation under the “roadmap” agreed by the two countries’ leaders.

Then, on Thursday, Rezaei turned up in Moscow to see Putin in person. He brought a message from Iran’s Supreme Leader, Mojtaba Khamenei, which Rezaei said the Leader wanted delivered “as soon as possible.” You do not fly your top security official to the Kremlin days after an 85-minute call to swap pleasantries.

Iranian accounts of the meeting say they discussed post-war regional security arrangements and Russia’s support for ending the conflict. According to Rezaei, Putin said he “would provide any assistance to end the war” and condemned the bombing of Iran’s nuclear facilities. The two sides also reached an agreement in principle to build gas pipelines from Russia to Iran. That would ease Iran’s domestic gas shortage and let it resell Russian gas to its neighbors. Pipelines take years. Nobody plans one for a country they expect to be at war indefinitely.

Something big is moving

Put the pieces together. In September, Rezaei went on Al Jazeera and set out Iran’s terms for ending the war, sent to Washington through Qatari mediators. Iran wants the war stopped on every front, including Lebanon. It wants its frozen funds released, the naval blockade lifted, and an end to US attacks on Iranian territory and US meddling in Iranian politics. Six weeks later, the man who wrote those terms has a long call with Putin, then flies to Moscow carrying a personal message from the Supreme Leader that cannot wait.

In my experience, that sequence means one thing. Iran is preparing for a negotiation and wants Russia in the room, or at least standing behind the chair. Moscow has every reason to oblige. Putin gets to play peacemaker in a war Washington started. He also gets to lock in a pipeline and transit corridor that will tie Iran to Russia for a generation. The timing is no accident either. Tehran has just watched American voters repudiate the war at the ballot box. It now has a counterpart in the White House who is newly aware that the war is costing him Congress.

Iran is not suing for peace on its knees. Rezaei said this week that Western responses to Tehran’s demands “had not been satisfactory.” But the diplomatic traffic tells you more than the rhetoric. When the security chief of a country at war spends this much time with the Russian president, he is not discussing the weather. He is discussing the terms of the next phase.

And now, Jerusalem

The third piece of news may matter most. Out of Israel comes word that Gadi Eisenkot may have the numbers to replace Benjamin Netanyahu. In the October 27 election, Netanyahu’s bloc won 53 seats, short of the 61 needed to govern. The opposition bloc won 48, and the Arab-led parties won 19. Naftali Bennett, Yair Lapid, Avigdor Liberman and Yair Golan have agreed to recommend Eisenkot to President Herzog. Haaretz reported Thursday that Eisenkot has now secured a parliamentary majority, giving him the clearest path to form a government.

Nothing in Israeli coalition politics is done until it is done. Eisenkot’s majority depends at least on the outside support of the Arab parties, and Liberman wants nothing to do with them. Netanyahu, who has never met a defeat he would accept, is already crying fraud and phoning Eisenkot’s members. Whoever Herzog taps gets 28 days to form a government, plus a possible 14-day extension.

But consider what an Eisenkot government would mean for the war. Netanyahu has spent this year pushing for regime change in Tehran and lobbying Washington for more strikes. Eisenkot, a former army chief of staff, campaigned on economic pressure, limited military action and “more diplomacy alongside any military steps.” He told the Wall Street Journal he would back military action only against “direct and immediate threats to Israel.” He also wants Israel to lean less on the United States for its security planning.

That is the piece that ties this column together. The loudest voice urging Trump to renew the attacks on Iran has been Netanyahu’s. Take him out of the prime minister’s office, and the pressure on the White House to “finish the job” drops sharply. It happens just as Vance is telling Republicans to change their relationship with Israel. Washington may find Israel changing the relationship first.

Two roads out

Here is the irony. Vance’s first demand, end the war in Iran, may be fulfilled by Vladimir Putin and Mohsen Rezaei before the Republican Party gets around to it. If a settlement emerges with Moscow as its midwife, Trump can claim the peace, and Vance can claim he called it. Everybody wins, except perhaps the people in Washington who are still drafting target lists.

The alternative is the one the war party keeps whispering about: another round of strikes to “finish the job.” That would tell the voters who just fired the Republican Congress that nobody was listening. It would also tell Tehran and Moscow that the only negotiations Washington takes seriously are conducted with bombs.

Trump now has a choice he did not have on Monday. He can read the election returns and the diplomatic tea leaves and take the off-ramp. Or he can keep insisting the midterms were not a hit on him. The voters have already given their answer. Vance has written it down in four points. Putin and Rezaei appear to be drafting the treaty. And Israel may soon have a prime minister who is not lobbying to tear it up.

https://sonar21.com/peace-is-breaking-out-everywhere-except-the-white-house/

 

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BELOW: THIS WRITTEN BY CAITLIN JOHNSTONE IN 2024, HOLDS TRUE, EXCEPT TRUMP WANTS TO MAKE A BUCK OUT OF UKRAINE AND "HE NEEDS PEACE THERE" TO DO SO —:

 

One of the dumbest things about US politics today is the way both parties constantly attack each other for holding foreign policy positions they don’t actually hold in order to create the illusion that they have meaningful disagreements on foreign policy. 

Donald Trump has been campaigning on the cartoonishly ridiculous claim that Biden and Harris have been unsupportive to Israel even as they continue to unconditionally support its genocide in Gaza, which is a perfect mirror of the way Democrats spent years falsely claiming that Trump is a secret agent of the Kremlin even as he ramped up cold war aggressions against Russia. They need to campaign on these completely fictional disagreements regarding the enemies and allies of the US government, because they do not actually have real disagreements regarding the enemies and allies of the US government.

https://caitlinjohnstone.com.au/2024/07/29/falsely-accusing-biden-and-harris-of-hating-israel-falsely-accusing-trump-of-loving-russia/

Mossad mud....

 

Mossad’s Intelligence Gamble: When Civilians Become Pawns in the Secret War Against Iran

Ricardo Martins, November 06, 2026

The former head of Israel’s intel service has admitted that Mossad deliberately exposed its clandestine operations in order to trigger a wave of arrests in Iran. What was intended to be a clever piece of intelligence work raises a far more troubling question as to how far a state will go in order to achieve its strategic aims when the inevitable outcome is to have completely innocent people arrested

The most telling stuff about the secret war between Israel and Iran doesn’t necessarily come from a military briefing or an official government statement. It can come out of a closed-door meeting, a leaked recording and an intelligence chief who is quite at ease talking about the minutiae of clandestine warfare.

On 25 October 2026, The Jerusalem Post published a remarkable report of comments by former Mossad head David Barnea. At a closed session of the Priority Summit, Barnea is reported to have said that Mossad did, in fact, release videos of its operatives at work inside Iran during the June 2025 military operation. The point was not simply to show off the capabilities of Israeli intelligence. The intention was to get the Iranians to arrest so many people that they would be completely unable to tell the difference between a real Mossad agent and an innocent person.

An Intelligence Operation Designed to Overwhelm

On 13 June 2025, as Israel launched Operation Rising Lion against Iran, Mossad released three videos of its covert operations targeting ballistic missile infrastructure, air defences and attack preparations. The agents’ faces were all covered up, but there was no doubt it was Mossad.

Barnea says the decision to release the footage was in part a move to protect the agents. The Iranian authorities would respond with a wave of arrests, which would create such confusion that it would be very difficult to work out who the real Israeli agents were.

Barnea reportedly said that the IRGC arrested some 21,000 people on the second day of the fighting. He went on to suggest that once you have that many people in custody, you’re going to end up with the situation where you can’t possibly tell who the actual agents are and who aren’t, and so you’re going to have to release them.

The former Mossad chief also admitted that a large number of those arrested or executed as alleged Israeli agents had absolutely no connection to the organisation whatsoever.

The 21,000 figure is Barnea’s figure, not an independently verified count of arrests as a result of the videos. It doesn’t in any way establish that every arrest or execution was a direct result of the Mossad’s publicity campaign. Nevertheless, his strategy does raise a very fundamental question: if an intelligence service deliberately incites mass repression in an adversary state, can it just walk away and say the resulting suffering of the civilian population is someone else’s problem?

The strategy may have been designed to protect the Mossad personnel. It seems to have been predicated on a fairly predictable reaction from the Iranian security establishment: a wave of suspicion, detentions and the indiscriminate targeting of people who might have had absolutely nothing to do with Israel.

That’s not just an intelligence success story. It’s a deliberate gamble involving human lives and will make it harder for Mossad to hire local agents in the future in any part of the world.

The Legal and Moral Limits of Covert Warfare

States have for decades used espionage, sabotage, deception and clandestine networks as instruments of national security. Mossad is by no means unique in this. But secrecy does not create a legal vacuum. Nor does the label of national security provide unlimited protection from scrutiny.

International Humanitarian Law makes a clear distinction between combatants, civilians and individuals taking part in the hostilities. The status of an intelligence officer is very much dependent on the circumstances in which they operate, including the nature of their activities, their relationship to the armed forces and whether they are, in fact, entitled to combatant status. Spying in itself does not make an operative a lawful combatant and a captured spy may well be subject to prosecution under domestic law. Conversely, a civilian is not automatically a legitimate target simply because an intelligence agency has operated in their country.

The Mossad strategy as reported by the Jerusalem Post raises a rather more specific point about responsibility for foreseeable harm.

If an intelligence service is going to publicise its clandestine operations in a situation where it knows the other side is going to respond with a wave of arrests and possible murder, it can’t just sidestep the ethical issue by saying that the other side did the arrests. Whether or not such conduct would amount to an international crime would require a much more detailed analysis of intent, knowledge, causation and the relevant law. Barnea’s reported comments hint a war crime has been committed.

The moral issue is there. A strategy which treats the predictable detention of the innocent as an acceptable means of operational deception is clearly a strategy which crosses a very fine line.

There’s also a wider contradiction. Israel and its Western allies will routinely invoke the defence of democratic values, the rule of law and the protection of civilians in order to justify their security policies. Those principles cannot be selectively applied. They cannot simply be set aside when the means are secret, politically expedient or directed against an adversary.

Israel’s Strategic Success and Its International Credibility

The Mossad strategy also has to be viewed in the context of Israel’s overall international standing. The fact that the agency appears to be able to penetrate the Iranian security apparatus is a clear demonstration of its capabilities. Effectiveness in the field is not the same as political legitimacy, though.

An intelligence operation can be a tactical success and at the same time create long-term strategic costs. It can damage the credibility of this and future operations; it can deepen the hostility; and it can reinforce the view that the lives of civilians are disposable in the pursuit of state objectives.

Israel’s soft power is already in a state of serious decline in the international arena, particularly as a result of the Gaza destruction, the occupation of Palestinian territory by brutal settlers and the ongoing regional conflicts. Its overall neighbour strategy is to have failed states to better control them. Iran would be just another one. Therefore, its relationship with various elements of the European political establishment and with various constituencies which have traditionally been pro-Israel are increasingly strained.

The criticism is no longer just coming from governments, human rights groups and activists. It’s also coming from within the Jewish and pro-Israel establishment.

Ronald Lauder (President of the World Jewish Congress and one of the most prominent figures in the international Jewish communal scene) has been very publicly disappointed with Israel’s political direction. In an interview with Haaretz he criticised what he sees as the country’s drive towards dominance rather than peace and has warned that Israel is too quickly losing ground politically with both of the major American parties.

Lauder’s criticism points to a significant development: concern about Israel’s policies is no longer the preserve of the traditional critics. It is now very much in evidence amongst those who have been on the Israel side for many years.

This is a strategic problem for Israel. Military superiority, intelligence and diplomatic protection can all be of use in the short term. They can’t in any way offset the damage to international credibility.

According to the 2026 Democracy Perception Index, Israel has the lowest net perception score in the world (out of 65 countries), below Afghanistan and North Korea. Pew Research independently confirms the extent of the negative international perception, with a median of 67% of respondents across 36 countries having an unfavourable view of Israel. In most European countries, this rate is around 90%.

The same is true of the political protection Israel gets from Washington and various European capitals. Western governments’ credibility is undermined when they invoke international law against an adversary yet are unwilling to apply the same rules to an ally. Germany and the UK, in the same way as the US, should be judged on the consistency of their positions rather than just on what they say.

The issue isn’t whether Iran’s security services have been guilty of abuses. One government’s misdeeds don’t give another government the right to use civilians as pawns.

The comments of David Barnea should therefore be met with more than just admiration for the operational skill of Mossad. They should be the catalyst for a proper examination of the responsibilities of the intelligence services, the protection of civilians and the political culture which enables covert warfare to operate with such complete impunity.

There’s a difference between outmanoeuvring an opponent and intentionally creating circumstances in which innocent people become expendable. When intelligence agencies, such as Mossad, start to see mass arrests as an operational asset, then the line between tactical brilliance and moral bankruptcy is very quickly erased.

The true test of an intelligence service isn’t how well it can deceive its enemies. It’s whether its methods stay within the line that separates intelligence work from the abuse of human life.

If Barnea’s version of events is to be believed, then Mossad has given the world an unusually frank look at the rationale behind its clandestine operations. The issue now is whether governments, the press and the international community will take that rationale seriously or whether once again the language of national security will be used to silence the victims.

 

Ricardo Martins – Doctor of Sociology, specialist in European and international politics as well as geopolitics

https://journal-neo.su/2026/11/06/mossads-intelligence-gamble-when-civilians-become-pawns-in-the-secret-war-against-iran/

 

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YOURDEMOCRACY.NET RECORDS HISTORY AS IT SHOULD BE — NOT AS THE WESTERN MEDIA WRONGLY REPORTS IT — SINCE 2005.

         Gus Leonisky

         POLITICAL CARTOONIST SINCE 1951.

         RABID ATHEIST.

         WELCOME TO THIS INSANE WORLD….