I understand they’re about to vote again in the House. So let’s see how it goes.

On yesterday’s vote, Politico reports that Jordan’s strong-arm intimidation tactics backfired. See also Michelle Cottle, Jim Jordan Is a Lousy Strongman.

Update: There are 12 Republican votes for people other than Jordan and they’re still in the Gs. Ain’t gonna happen for ol’ Gym today.

Update: There are now 21 not-Jordan Republican votes, and they are still in the Ss. Gym’s doing worse than yesterday.

Update: I’m reading that Jodan expects another roll call vote tomorrow. We’ll see.

Gym’s roll call vote fell short by 17 votes, as 20 Republicans voted against him. That’s a bigger margin than what McCarthy lost by on his first vote, I believe. It’s unclear what’s going to happen next. I take it Gym expected to either win outright or be short by a much smaller margin. The bullying tactic failed. So Gym and his supporters are off huddling somewhere deciding what to do next. Some sources are reporting that Jordan supporters want to try another roll call today. There are “renewed discussions” of empowering temp Speaker McHenry with more power until the Republicans get their act together.

I’m not familiar enough with all of the GOP House members to know if the not-Gym votes are all from a particular faction or not. The NY Times is reporting that among the holdouts are senior GOP members of the Appropriations Committee and a bloc of Long Island Republicans.

In other news, there are reports that an Israeli air strike hit a Gaza hospital and killed hundreds of people. Israel cannot afford to do things like that. There are also reports of Israeli bombs dropping in the area in south Gaza where Palestinians were told to flee. Again, Israel needs to take care. We may learn these reports aren’t accurate, but I’m seeing the hospital story all over the place. President Biden is heading there tomorrow.

The text of Judge Tanya Chutkan gag order on Trump has been released. Trump’s lawyers have “launched” a notice they will appeal, it says here. The notice of appeal does not include any legal arguments. The lawyers probably are still trying to find some.

Update: Some analysis of the not-Gym Jordan Republicans by Philip Bump at WaPo:

There was a pattern to those rejections. If we consider the House GOP caucus on two measures — ideology and 2020 presidential vote — you can see that the cluster of opponents to Jordan overlapped more with the less-conservative, less-Republican range. (Ideology is measured using Voteview’s DW-NOMINATE score, which ranges from -1 (most liberal) to 1 (most conservative). 2020 vote by district calculated by DailyKos.)

If we run averages, the point is more obvious still. The opponents of Jordan averaged an ideology score of 0.348; his supporters landed at 0.529. His opponents represent districts that supported Trump over Joe Biden in 2020 by an average of 8.5 points. Jordan’s supporters represent districts that backed Trump by an average of 21.6 points.

Update: They’re saying on MSNBC that the House Republicans have called off holding another vote today. They may give Gym another shot at the speakership tomorrow.

Update: The Israeli military said its intelligence indicated that a misfired rocket from an Islamist group aligned with Hamas was responsible for the explosion.

Update: The Jersusalem Post is reporting that the Gaza hospital was destroyed by rockets fired from factions in the Gaza strip.

Judge Tanya Chutkan, who is overseeing Jack Smith’s J6 case, has issued Trump a limited gag order. He is restricted from “making public statements attacking the witnesses and specific prosecutors or court staff members involved in the federal case concerning his efforts to overturn the 2020 election,” the NY Times says. Trump has “truthed” that he will appeal the order. His campaign also sent out emails claiming that President Biden is behind the gag order. Judge Chutkan did not specify what penalties Trump might face if — excuse me, when — he violates the order.

On to the House Circus. Many news articles have said that a core group of Republicans are saying they will not vote for Gym Jordan, which if true would seem to kill his chances of being elected Speaker. Some have said that if Jordan tries to force a roll-call vote tomorrow, they will block it. We’ll see.

It’s also said Jordan has been urging his MAGA supporters to bully the holdouts into submission. Josh Marshall writes that most of the resisters are establshed but conservative Republicans who are tired of Jordan’s act. And some of them are flipping.

If they give way you’ll be left with a handful of vulnerable Republicans like the newly elected members from New York state and a few others sitting in Biden districts. If it’s down to them I’m fairly certain they just fold.

If it plays out like that you could have a Speaker Jim Jordan in place by tomorrow.

This would be quite bad for the country. But it’s hard for me to see how it isn’t pretty bad for the GOP in terms of the 2024 election, at least in the House.

Late Update: Now another, Ann Wagner (MO), has flipped. The rationale is refusal to be forced to work with Democrats to elect a Speaker. Steve Womack seems to be the only high profile NeverJim who’s holding tough. My assumption now is the Jordan probably wins this. Though we need to see more to know.

Later Update: I think this is close to done. Jordan is going to be Speaker. Maybe not tomorrow but soon. And in all likelihood probably tomorrow.

In other news: I feel I have to mention the 6-year-old boy in Illinois who was murdered by his mother’s landlord. The statement from the county sheriff’s department is just anguishing. “The six-year-old boy was stabbed twenty-six (26) times throughout his body. The knife used in this attack is a twelve-inch serrated military style knife that has a seven-inch blade.” Joseph M. Czuba (age 71) has been charged.

On a more cheerful note, the DoJ has filed notice that it wants the US Court of Appeals in DC to impose longer sentences on Enrique Tarrio, Joseph Biggs, Zachary Rehl, Dominic Pezzola and Ethan Nordean, all Proud Boys I believe.

Over this weekend I’ve found some excellent commentaries on the Israel-Hamas War, which seems to be the name people are settling on. Okay, then,

Start with Paul Waldman, Israeli-Palestinian conflict needs moral consistency, not moral clarity. (And note that we’re not quite half way through October and I’m already almost out of Washington Post gift articles. So enjoy this one.)

While war rages in Gaza, many Americans have turned their attention to each other. As politicians, organizations and even ordinary people declare their positions on the conflict, everyone else leaps in to judge what was said. The result is a kind of sympathy meter to assess whether each statement properly places the needle between Israelis and Palestinians.

People are getting slammed for being insufficiently pro-Israel or pro-Palestinian. For example, “After Rashida Tlaib (D-Mich.) — the only Palestinian American member of Congress — released a statement saying ‘I grieve the Palestinian and Israeli lives lost yesterday, today, and every day,’ she was attacked for focusing too much on the fate of Palestinians. Fox News then sent a reporter to demand that she condemn Hamas.”

At the New York Times, please see this op ed by Nir Avishai Cohen. He is a major in the reserves of the Israel Defense Forces and is defending Israel now.

I am now going to defend my country against enemies who want to kill my people. Our enemies are the deadly terrorist organizations that are being controlled by Islamic extremists.

Palestinians aren’t the enemy. The millions of Palestinians who live right here next to us, between the Mediterranean Sea and Jordan, are not our enemy. Just like the majority of Israelis want to live a calm, peaceful and dignified life, so do Palestinians. Israelis and Palestinians alike have been in the grip of a religious minority for decades. On both sides, the intractable positions of a small group have dragged us into violence. It doesn’t matter who is more cruel or more ruthless. The ideologies of both have fueled this conflict, leading to the deaths of too many innocent civilians.

Going back to Paul Waldman’s opinion piece, it’s noticable that an Israeli can say that but an American saying the same thing might be skewered for being insufficiently pro-Israel.

This war, like others before it, will end sooner or later. I am not sure I will come back from it alive, but I do know that a minute after the war is over, both Israelis and Palestinians will have to reckon with the leaders who led them to this moment. We must wake up and not let the extremists rule. Palestinians and Israelis must denounce the extremists who are driven by religious fanaticism. The Israelis will have to oust National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir, Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich and their far-right circle from power, and the Palestinians will have to oust the leadership of Hamas.

Sounds like a plan to me. Let’s hope it happens.

David Faris, Yes, You Can Be Pro-Palestine and Anti-Hamas, at Slate. This really brings home that the real fight here is not between Muslims and Jews, or Palestinians and Israelis. It’s between hard-right religious conservatives who want to keep the fires of anger stoked and everybody else.

If there’s one thing that you would hope all factions on the progressive left could agree on, it’s that the hard-line religious fanatics who took suicide terrorism global in the 1990s, targeted civilians indiscriminately, bore enormous responsibility for the collapse of the Oslo peace process, and now operate a repressive, single-party authoritarian regime in Gaza are beyond the pale. More than any other single entity, Hamas (an Arabic-language acronym for the Islamic Resistance Movement) helped destroy the Israeli left and, with it, any meaningful prospect of a two-state solution to the conflict.

The group had plenty of help, of course, from Jewish extremists in Israel and maximalist right-wing politicians like Netanyahu himself. Not long after the famous 1993 handshake between Palestinian Liberation Organization leader Yasser Arafat and Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin on the White House lawn that kicked off the doomed Oslo peace process, an Israeli extremist gunned down dozens of Palestinians in a mosque, Rabin was dead from a Jewish assassin’s bullet, the settlements in territories that would need to be handed back to the Palestinians continued to inexplicably expand, and then, in 1996, Netanyahu was elected.

But there is also no meaningful factual dispute about what Hamas has done and what role the group played in the obliteration of peace prospects. Beginning in 1993, the organization perpetrated dozens of suicide attacks in Israel, killing thousands of innocent people and plunging Israeli society into a maelstrom of fear and escalation that produced reactionary governments unwilling to take even rudimentary steps toward a negotiated peace. The Palestinian national movement did not then require—and does not now need—the slaughter of innocent civilians on buses and in dance halls and in family homes.

The relationship between the Israeli Right and Hamas is complicated. Alice Speri at the Intercept:

Hamas, in that sense, has been a convenient presence for Israel, whose leaders have favored the militant group over the Palestinian Authority, or PA, the pseudo-government established during the Oslo peace process to administer the Palestinian territories until the details of a sovereign Palestinian state could be negotiated. While Hamas has been enemy No. 1 in Israeli rhetoric for years, offering a cover for Israel to maintain its blockade and periodically kill hundreds of Palestinian civilians in Gaza, it has also offered Israel an alibi to avoid abiding by its supposed commitment to Palestinian statehood.

Israeli leaders seemed to believe this strategic calculation could hold indefinitely.

“They have determined that this situation of constant political instability and violence is preferable over making some kind of larger political agreement that would actually lead to a final status outcome to bring peace between Israelis and Palestinians,” Palestinian political analyst Yousef Munayyer told The Intercept’s Deconstructed podcast this week. “And they’ve chosen this path over that, and I think we are seeing the results of that on full display in recent days.”

Indeed, some Israeli officials have at times been explicit about their preference for Hamas over the PA. Israel’s Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich, one of the most extremist members of the most extremist Israeli government coalition to date, offered an unusually frank assessment of the government’s approach to Hamas in a 2015 interview.

“The Palestinian Authority is a burden, and Hamas is an asset,” Smotrich said at the time. “It’s a terrorist organization, no one will recognize it, no one will give it status at the [International Criminal Court], no one will let it put forth a resolution at the U.N. Security Council.”

I’ve seen other commentaries this week that have said Netanyahu’s policies have actually reinforced Hamas. I take it this was a political calculation on his part. I confess I don’t pay enough close attention to Israel to fully appreciate the nuances there.

Michael Hirsch, Foreign Policy, Netanyahu’s Road to War:

No one can excuse the horrific atrocities committed by Hamas in the last several days, nor deny Israel’s right to a response, which very likely will entail a full or partial reoccupation of Gaza and the methodical destruction of Hamas. But it’s also clear that Netanyahu’s policies helped create the conditions that led to the bloodiest few days in the history of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

“The horrific event we’ve just experienced—and the prolonged, massive Israeli counteroffensive to follow—cannot be fully understood in isolation from what I consider … a two-layered Netanyahu strategic failure,” said Nimrod Novik, the former senior advisor to the late Israeli Prime Minister Shimon Peres, who eagerly tried to pursue the Oslo process. First, Netanyahu and his current coalition —“the most extreme ever,” in Novik’s words—downplayed or ignored warnings from Arab signatories under the Abraham Accords about addressing Palestinian grievances, Novik said.

Second, for decades, Netanyahu pursued what Novik called the “illusion” that even under his draconian policies—which turned Gaza into what Human Rights Watch calls “the world’s largest open-air prison”—Hamas would abstain from the kind of attacks on Israel that might jeopardize its hold on power in Gaza, said Novik, who is currently a fellow with the Israel Policy Forum.

“His so-called ‘separation strategy’ rested on two legs: one, solidify Hamas control over Gaza, so that we have ‘an address’ and a governing entity with which to reach understandings over easing of closure in return for cease-fire. Second, weaken the Palestinian Authority, lest it emerges as a viable partner for negotiations, something Netanyahu has been determined to avoid,” Novik said. An Israeli official did not respond to a request for comment.

Netanyahu also pushed a controversial policy of weakening the judiciary inside Israel, in part to prevent the courts from protecting Palestinians from Israeli human rights abuses, which they did only occasionally. That push—described by Netanyahu’s critics as a judicial coup—set off waves of protests in Israel that have continued for months.

I keep seeing headlines saying that Israel is planning to attack Gaza or is preparing an invasion of Gaza. It is completely understandable that Israel now wants to smash Hamas. But this invasion will be ugly and messy and morally compromising. See David French, The Moral Questions at the Heart of the Gaza War.

As a former JAG (or Judge Advocate General’s Corps) officer embedded with a combat arms unit in Iraq during Operation Iraqi Freedom, I know that you can’t simply merge law and tactics and declare that everything that is legally and tactically sound is also moral, much less wise. We veterans know that the challenge for the Israel Defense Forces in Gaza isn’t simply to win the fight with Hamas within the laws of war. There is a third imperative, one that will define the soldiers who fight and the nation they defend for years to come: Do not destroy your soul.

This is much easier said than done. To shrink from evil because the fight will be hard and complex and fraught with risk to soldiers and civilians alike is to both reward barbarism (it sends the signal that sufficient savagery will be rewarded with impunity) and to forsake the sacred duty of protecting your citizens from harm. To lean into the fight, to stretch your violent reach every bit as far as the law allows, can create both an ocean of anguish and bitterness in civilian populations and leave a “bruise on the soul” of the combatants themselves, altering their lives forever.

Perilous times. And the U.S. House is still dysfunctional.

In other news: Speaking of which, CNN is reporting —

A number of House Republicans are in talks to block Rep. Jim Jordan’s path to the speakership as the Ohio Republican tries to force a floor vote on Tuesday, according to multiple GOP sources.

One senior Republican House member who is part of the opposition to Jordan told CNN that there he believes there are roughly 40 “no” votes, and that he has personally spoken to 20 members who are willing to go to the floor and block Jordan’s path if the Ohio Republican forces a roll-call vote on Tuesday.

In more other news, Lauren Boebert spent $317.48 of campaign money in late July at Hooch Craft Cocktail Bar in Aspen, Co., according to her most recent campaign finance filings. That the bar owned by her date at the infamous Beetlejuice theatrical event.

And “If special counsel Jack Smith succeeds in his quest for a gag order on Trump, prosecutors could lose one of their best sources of incriminating information — Trump’s mouth.” That’s from How candidate Trump’s claims boost legal risks for defendant Trump at WaPo. 

House Republicans have now officially nominated Gym Jordan to be speaker. He defeated Rep. Austin Scott of Georgia, about whom I know nothing, by a vote of 124 to 81. That’s somewhat better than Steve Scalise did against Jordan earlier this week, which was 113 to 99. The magic number to get the gavel is, of course, 217, and no one is saying Jordan’s going to get 217. Several mainstream Republicans have said they would not support him, the NY Times reports.

Four Dems of the House “problem solvers” caucus, led by the odious Josh Gottheimer of New Jersey, are floating a proposal to give temporary speaker McHenry “expanded authorities” that would allow some bills to be voted on.

Specifically, the Democrats are proposing to let McHenry bring up any emergency aid for Ukraine or Israel, a short-term bill that extends government funding through Jan. 11, or general consideration of fiscal 2024 spending bills. Those powers should be limited to 15-day increments, they proposed, with extensions possible if the House GOP continues to remain without a leader.

In exchange, the Democratic quartet suggested, their party would be allowed to fill up 50 percent of the House’s suspension calendar — which is reserved for noncontroversial bills and requires two-thirds votes for passage, not simple majorities.

Better than nothing, I guess.

The polls in Israel show that a huge majority of Israelis blame Prime Minister Netanyahu and his government for the Hamas attacks. A smaller majority, 56 percent, think Netanyahu must resign.

Of all the stupid and senseless killings of black men by police, none were more stupid and senseless than the killing of Elijah McClain, 23, in Colorado. Yesterday a jury found one of the police officers involved in the death guilty of criminally negligent homicide and assault. Another officer was acquitted. A third officer and two paramedics who treated McClain with a probable overdose of ketamine have yet to be tried. It doesn’t seem quite enough to me.

Steve Scalise resigned as a candidate for the Speaker. The House Republicans clearly are light years away from choosing a Speaker. Congress is broken. MAGA broke it. This could go on for days.

I’ve read comments in several sources today saying that Bibi Netanyahu will not survive the crisis in Israel, politically. See, for example, Netanyahu Is Losing the War at Home: Incompetence against Hamas and indifference to Israeli suffering has the public boiling over, by Noga Tarnopolsky at New York magazine. At the New Republic, see A Majority of Israelis Think Netanyahu Should Resign by Ellie Quinlan Houghtaling.

See also Fred Kaplan, Trump Somehow Manages to Make the Israel-Hamas Conflict All About Him, at Slate. Trump flaps his lips and shows the world how ignorant he is, but his culties don’t see it because they are just as ignorant as he is.

Let’s have some not-war news. Not that it’s necessarily more cheerful.

House Republicans are going to put Steve Scalise forward as potentially the next Speaker. He beat Gym Jordan in a secret ballot vote, 113 to 99. And he’s going to have to win nearly all of those Jordan votes to get the Speaker’s gavel. It’ll happen when it happens, maybe. Not holding my breath.

Yesterday Aaron Blake wrote about A tantalizing detail in a new Trump legal filing. It appears Jack Smith and crew have a theory about Trump’s motivations for hanging on to classified documents. “The government apparently thinks it knows ‘what Trump intended’ with the documents,” Blake wrote. “And it’s signaling that it plans to prove that intent.”

Of course, we don’t know what Jack Smith knows, yet. I tend to go with the “beautiful mind” theory of Trump document boarding, that he kept his hands on all those secret documents because something about them symbolized the status of POTUS for him, and he couldn’t let them go. An alternate theory is that there is information in them that Trump thinks he might use against his opponents.

George Santos has been hit with new charges.

The 23-count superseding indictment alleges Santos took financial information from his donors and ran their credit cards for more cash during last year’s election cycle. Per the federal prosecutors, Santos “repeatedly, without their authorization” charged the credit cards of his contributors before siphoning the money off to himself, his own campaign, and other election operations. 

Santos was previously indicted in May on fraud and money laundering charges related to his alleged efforts to receive unemployment benefits while he was employed. At the time, prosecutors accused Santos of having “pocketed campaign contributions and used that money to pay down personal debts and buy designer clothing.” There are 10 additional counts in the new superseding indictment, including aggravated identity theft, access device fraud, wire fraud, conspiracy, false statements, and falsifying records. 

Santos denies he is guilty of anything and says he will refuse to take a plea deal. Of course, we don’t know that he’s been offered a plea deal. House Republicans from New York are either about about to introduce a resolution to expel Santos from Congress, or maybe they have done that already.

The rationality-challenged Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., announced on Monday that he would run for President as an independent. Instantanteously, all the Republicans who had been encouraging him to run changed their minds. The Republican National Committee dismissed Kennedy as “just another radical, far-left Democrat.” RNC Chairwoman Ronna McDaniel called him “a typical elitist liberal.”

Michael Scherer writes at WaPo,

The attacks came as Democrats remained largely silent on Kennedy’s shift, reflecting a relative optimism among the party’s top strategists that Kennedy poses little threat to Biden as an independent candidate. Kennedy’s polling in the Democratic nomination fight had fallen in recent months, and current national polling shows higher approval ratings for Kennedy among Republican voters than Democratic voters.

In other words, it dawned on them that Kennedy could take more votes from the Republican nominee than from President Biden. Whoops!

What can one say about what’s going on in Gaza but that it’s all just horrific, and there  is little hope of anything but continued horror and death there in the near future.

A U.S. aircraft carrier, the U.S.S. Gerald R. Ford, is on its way to Israel with some cruisers and destroyers. This is supposed to be a kind of show of force to Iran to not try anything, plus it can offer surveillance and other support to Israel.

Turkey’s President Erdogan is telling people the carrier will be the base of U.S. attacks on Gaza. I trust this isn’t true, but whatever happens many will believe it. This is not helping.

Rep. Rashida Tlaib for some time has had a Palestinian flag outside her office, and she’s refusing to take it down, and of course Republicans are going nuts over this. It needs to be remembered that “Palestinians” are not “Hamas.” Hamas is a militant group of Palestinians, but not all Palestinians support them. There’s a proposal to not allow any foreign flags in Congress. And let me say further that the mental habit of sorting humanity into “good guys” and “bad guys” is the source of all human atrocity.

A pro-Palestinian rally in New York on Sunday apparently went over the line into anti-semitism, and now the Democratic Socialists of America — which promoted the rally but did not organize it — is taking heat for it. This has always been my beef with big lefty protests; there are always a few who do something stupid and outrageous that get all the attention.

In other news: If you need a break from news about war, you may enjoy reading After years of exaggerating his business assets, Trump confronts them in court. No paywall.

Over the weekend the Wall Street Journal reported that the Hamas attacks were coordinated with and authorized by Iran in a series of meetings in Beirut. Josh Marshall points out that this information appears to have come entirely from Hamas. And I can’t tell that any other news outlet has independently verified it. That doesn’t mean Iran wasn’t involved, but as Josh Marshall says, everybody should be very cautious about this. Rash decisions based on faulty information easily could turn the situation into something more widespread.

In her newsletter, Joy Vance says it’s a bleeping shame Twitter is so bleeped up.

In the past, in a crisis of this magnitude, we were able to get at least some real time reporting on social media and on Twitter specifically. It was easy to search for reporting from a wide variety of news organizations all in one place. With some discernment, and the use of blue checks with trusted experts weighing in, it was possible to get a sense of what was accurate and what was disinformation. But of course, that functionality is a casualty of Elon Musk’s X/Twitter.

No one who is serious would pretend that Twitter or any other social media platform was ever perfect, but that’s not the point. In the past, we could use the platform to obtain reliable news, often from firsthand reporting. That happened, for instance, at the start of the Russian invasion of Ukraine, when reporting was murky. But now Twitter is awash in a sea of misinformation and hate. And we see, in its absence, how important having an international public square is in a moment like this.

Speaking of Twitter … er, X … Reuters reported recently that the social media company not only is worth a ton less money than Elon Musk paid for it, at this point it probably is worth less than the debt held by banks on it. Its value is underwater. You’ll remember that Musk paid $44 billion for the company, and he got $13 billion of that from banks. Meanwhile advertisers have fled the network like rats off a sinking ship.

Put it all together, and X isn’t just worth less than Musk paid for it, but likely less than its debt. Assume that the company’s revenue last year was $4.7 billion, based on results before it was taken private. If advertising has dropped by half, then this year’s sales should be a bit over $2.5 billion. Put that on the same enterprise-value-to-sales multiple as Snap, which is down to a mere 3 times, and X is worth around $8 billion.

He’s still able to make the interest payments on the $13 billion, but this can’t go on indefinitely, I don’t think.

Meanwhile — as the U.S. shifts military assets — mostly ships, I think — closer to the Middle East, Sen. Tommy Tuberville continues to keep the U.S. military hamstrung for stupid reasons. A retired U.S. Navy Commander posted on the sinking hulk of X that there is no chief of naval operations at the moment because of Tuberville.

Well, try to enjoy Indigenous Peoples Day, anyway.

Update: I see the Biden White House is being slammed from the Right for holding a scheduled barbeque for White House staff while Israel is at war. Of course, the White House has continued to hold all sorts of gala functions since Ukraine has been under attack, and the Right didn’t mind about that. There have been, in fact, a number of wars and insurgencies and other armed conflicts going on around the globe for some time, and sometimes Americans are killed in those conflicts. And the Right doesn’t blink an eye.

The attack by Hamas against Israel appears to have caught both Israel and the United States by surprise.  At The Atlantic, Gal Beckerman reports that just a week ago, National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan was touting increasing stability in the Middle East. “The Middle East region is quieter today than it has been in two decades,” he said.

In the coming days, Sullivan’s Pollyannaish view will undoubtedly be subjected to great scrutiny. Hamas, and its Iranian and Hezbollah allies, has not made a secret of its ultimate aims. Beyond wishful thinking, the cause of the hopefulness articulated by Sullivan might be this: the developing deal to establish formal relations between Israel and Saudi Arabia—a developing deal that is most likely developing no more.

The Biden administration and Netanyahu have been deeply invested in such an agreement, and the desire for it might have created a blindness among Israelis and Americans alike about what was happening just over the border in Gaza. “We wanted to try and pretend that this conflict was isolated and contained and didn’t need our attention,” Yaakov Katz, the former editor in chief of  The Jerusalem Post, told me today hours after the invasion.

The only predictable thing about this is that Republicans blame Joe Biden for the attack.

Note that there seems to be a lot of assuming that Iran is behind the attack, but that’s not something we actually know at this time. So let’s not assume.

Josh Marshall:

One big mystery about today’s events in Israel, which I alluded to in the previous post, is how exactly Israel was caught quite this unprepared. An attack of this scale required very large numbers of people to be read into the preparations if not the operational planning for the attack. Israel has long had a dense network of informants and collaborators in the territories. That’s layered over with signals intelligence and various forms of surveillance. And yet Israel appears to have been caught totally unawares and unprepared. It’s not just that they didn’t know something like this was happened today. They don’t seem to have known that an operation of this scale and audacity was even being considered.

That’s an intelligence fairly that’s hard to overstate.

Why Hamas did this also requires some explanation. A friend rightly described this as an organization-scale suicide operation. For the why you have the unsettled business of 1948 and 1967. You have the fact that Mahmoud Abbas won’t live forever. You have Israel’s looming normalization with the Gulf Arab states. Particularly the last factor provides a decent explanation of the ‘why now?’ Indeed, I’m seeing a lot of foreign policy and security analysts confidently declaring that Hamas planned this attack with Iran to break the momentum for normalization with the Gulf states.

But then Josh goes on to remind us that we don’t know if Iran was in on this or not.

The Washington Post is reporting that this shouldn’t have been such a surprise.

Hamas, which rules the Gaza Strip and carried out Saturday’s attacks, said the operation was in response to the blockade, as well as recent Israeli military raids in the West Bank and violence at al-Aqsa Mosque, a disputed religious site in Jerusalem known to Jews as the Temple Mount.

“Enough is enough,” the leader of Hamas’s military wing, Mohammed Deif, said in a recorded message Saturday, the Associated Press reported. “Today the people are regaining their revolution.”

As of Sept. 19, before Saturday’s outbreak of violence, 227 Palestinians had been killed by Israeli troops or settlers this year, according to U.N. figures, with most of those deaths — 189 — occurring in the West Bank. At least 29 Israelis, mostly in the West Bank, were also killed this year as of the end of August, according to the same U.N. database.

I don’t pay enough attention to the Middle East to know how this might impact Netanyahu politically.