Rosh Hashanah is eight days out, and you can tell who has been counting. Washington is still sitting on the counterterror money New York uses to put bomb squads outside its shuls. What runs to no date at all is the ground — charges going in on a hillside in south Lebanon, a division sitting on a line in Gaza — and that is the half of this morning that will look the same the day after.
Flash Brief: The Day in 90 Seconds or Less
Hormuz: Saudi Arabia blames Iran for the strike on its supertanker, and Trump asks whether to declare the war over. See The War Today.
Ali al-Taher: Iranian officers sit cut off under the ridge, and Tehran asks Washington to hold Israel back. See The War Today.
Gaza: Netanyahu stands on the Yellow Line and rules out withdrawal, the morning after an alert on the fence. See The War Today.
The draft: About 101,000 Israelis are evaders or under arrest orders, and a new fund pays them to sit in prison. See Inside Israel.
Eisenkot: Classified protocols from two closed discussions reach the press, and nobody briefing them puts a name to it. See Inside Israel.
Nazareth: Three men shot dead take Israel's murder count to 200, with the Shin Bet's crime unit still being stood up. See Inside Israel.
Britain: London's embargo and named sanctions are set to land across Rosh Hashanah, and Israel has no ambassador there. See Israel and the World.
Damascus: Israel's security talks with al-Sharaa fail over the buffer zone, and Erdogan threatens Greece over the Aegean. See Israel and the World.
Istanbul: Two Turkish groups map Israeli dual nationals off their families' posts and hand the files to prosecutors. See Israel and the World.
The BBC: The corporation concedes Katty Kay breached impartiality on Gaza, with no correction and no penalty. See Israel and the World.
Vienna: The IAEA tells member states it cannot say where 440.9 kilograms of 60-percent enriched uranium sits. See Developments to Watch.
The campaign against Israel abroad has stopped needing a bloc to move. Britain needs no European consent to write a trade ban, and a Turkish prosecutor needs no court in The Hague to open a file on an Israeli who served. Inside Israel the fight is over things that do not exist yet — a conscription law nobody has passed, a coalition nobody has formed — and both parties setting conditions on them mean to recommend the same man. The war itself is being run by a president who has not settled whether he is still fighting one.
Today: a hundred thousand draft files and a fund that pays for prison, Britain's package timed to the chag, and Tehran's price for reopening Hormuz.
This week's Watchwords
Senators Chris Van Hollen, Tim Kaine, and Bernie Sanders filed a privileged resolution on 27 August. Eight colleagues signed on behind them. It puts Israeli conduct in Judea and Samaria to a recorded Senate vote. Behind that vote sits the security assistance Congress authorized for Israel, most of which the law stops if the State Department will not answer. The American argument about Judea and Samaria now arrives with the aid attached to it.
A privileged resolution gets a floor vote whether the Foreign Relations Committee wants one or not, and eleven senators filed one on 27 August. Senators Van Hollen, Kaine, and Sanders wrote the resolution. It orders the State Department to report on the killing of American citizens by Israeli civilians and Israeli forces, and on Israel's detention of Palestinian children. The committee has ten days to take it up. If it does not, any one of the eleven can call the resolution to the floor, and every senator there has to vote on it by name. If it passes and the State Department misses the thirty-day deadline that follows, the law prohibits most of Israel's American security assistance. Forty-five of the Senate's 47 Democrats signed a letter to Netanyahu about it last week. Signing a letter costs a senator nothing. This one gets counted.
Below the line: the week's deployable language — what to say when the reporter asks, how to answer the donor worry, the claims you'll field, and the traps that lose the room. Members read the full brief.
The Jewish State — Mitzpe's eight-session live course on Israeli history from the Mandate to October 7, taught the way the brief reads. Cohort 1: eight Sundays from Oct 11. mitzpe.org/the-jewish-state