It’s Tuesday, April 28, and Iran is beginning to crack. Vindicating Donald Trump’s weekend claim that Iranian officials could “come to us, or they can call us,” Iran has reportedly presented a new proposal, offering to “reopen” the Strait of Hormuz and end the current hostilities, provided that U.S.-Iran nuclear negotiations are postponed to a later date.

Trump responded that while this offer is “much better” than previous proposals—which demanded Iranian sovereignty over the strait—it remains “not enough.” It goes without saying why surrendering Washington’s primary point of leverage over the regime before securing ironclad guarantees on the nuclear issue is a nonstarter.

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It’s Monday, April 27, and it’s happening again. In 2013, Naftali Bennett and Yair Lapid joined forces to demand an end to Haredi draft exemptions, forcing Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to exclude the ultra-Orthodox from his coalition. In 2021, they teamed up a second time to build a short-lived government that successfully forced Netanyahu into the opposition. Now, this final alliance is intended to finish the job and expel him from politics for good.

Last night, the two leaders officially merged their factions into a new joint party called Beyachad (“Together”). With Lapid’s backing, Bennett is now the undisputed prime ministerial candidate set to challenge Netanyahu at the ballot box this October.

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At 9:32 a.m. on February 28, Mojtaba Khamenei stepped outside of the family compound to “do something,” according to an Iranian official. Seconds later, the compound was struck, and Khamenei vanished.

Confirmed dead from that strike was his father, Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei, abruptly leaving Iran’s top job open for the regime’s favorite nepo baby. Still missing, Khamenei ran a highly successful campaign—bolstered, naturally, by his campaign advisers, the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC). Despite Israeli kinetic arguments to the contrary, on March 8, the Assembly of Experts—with many members voting safely online—declared him the new Supreme Leader unanimously.

In lieu of an inauguration speech, four days after his appointment, a written message attributed to Khamenei was read on state TV. No audio. No video. The next day, the son of President Masoud Pezeshkian assured the public that despite the glaring lack of proof of life, the leader was “safe and sound.” Meanwhile, Iranian officials spun a tale of minor facial and leg injuries, insisting he remained entirely lucid.

The narrative has essentially frozen there. For the last month and a half, the regime has subsisted entirely on ventriloquism—statements attributed to the new Supreme Leader without a single visual confirmation—while foreign reports have described his condition as ranging between severely mutilated and dead.

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It’s Thursday, April 23, and the war with Iran is no longer about oil or gas; it is a battle over a single resource: time. The questions that will determine the fate of the Middle East are who controls the clock, who can afford to wait, and who is simply out of time?

Currently, the ayatollahs boast that their dictatorial regime will allow them to hold out indefinitely, while the closure of the Strait of Hormuz imposes an expiration date on U.S. aggression. Meanwhile, President Donald Trump claims to be in an equally comfortable position: Iranian ports are blockaded, some commercial ships are still navigating the strait despite the closure, and fresh U.S. military assets are on their way.

The question is, who’s bluffing?

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What are these days all about? Why were they grouped together? What are Israelis actually marking in this period? The answer is a journey into Israel’s founding experience and culture, and how different it is from the cultures of commemoration in the West.

The people remembered in these holidays, the victims of the Holocaust, wars, and terrorism, can seem like abstractions from the other side of the world, or from four generations later. But the nine-day arc of these national holidays is all about reifying these lost souls. In gatherings throughout the country, names are read out. Stories are told of specific loved ones remembered and lost. Historical abstractions and distant cultural touchstones that a nation’s fallen inevitably become over time are pulled back into our consciousness as real remembered human beings. It is commemoration through specificity and intimacy.

That’s how the date of Yom HaShoah was chosen. Israeli leaders rejected the obvious choices: The Ninth of Av—Tisha B’Av—a traditional Jewish fast day that marks the destruction of the two Temples in Jerusalem, the expulsion from Spain, and other disasters of Jewish history. The legislators of the early Knesset were loath to lump the Holocaust, unique in scope and result, with the rest of that history. They considered the eve of Passover, when the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising was launched in 1943. They wanted to center the commemoration on that act of desperate defiance and doomed courage, rather than on vulnerability and helplessness. But that date, too, was rejected. It would interfere with the celebration of Passover.

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It’s Monday, April 20, and according to Donald Trump, talks with Iran are scheduled to resume tomorrow, although the Islamic Republic has stated it will not send a delegation. Despite the posturing, a senior official confirmed to me that a six-point outline is currently under discussion between the United States and Iran.

The proposed framework includes:

1. A 15-year suspension of enrichment. The United States originally demanded a 20-year freeze, while Tehran pushed for significantly less; the two sides eventually settled on 15.

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Fair enough. That’s a serious claim. It deserves a serious engagement. So I listened.

I expected a hard conversation. I was hoping for a challenge. Israelis need to have a serious conversation about the millions of people living under our military rule. Yes, this issue defined our politics for a generation—but that was years ago. And the problem, with all its moral and political consequences, has only deepened. There are plenty of explanations for how we got here, many of them valid and important. Some of my own essays and videos on the subject have been widely consumed over the years. But none of them make the daily reality of occupation vanish.

So I expected to sympathize with a call not to look away, with an honest grappling with the fact that millions of Palestinians have lived under Israeli military rule for decades. With a call to reshoulder the task of finally ending this wrong.

I even expected to sympathize with an outsider telling us: Enough with the history—look at what is.

Instead, I found a man hiding from the very realities he claims to expose. Klein markets himself as the king of difficult conversations—and this particular difficult conversation has been the backdrop of my entire life, so let’s have it.

But it was not to be.

What I heard from Klein wasn’t a man talking about real people, but about an imagined moral journey he wants Americans to take, a performance of American moral awakening that manages to avoid discussing the hardest realities facing Israelis, Palestinians, and Lebanese—and that even included a familiar sleight of hand: insisting that an issue dominating American discourse has somehow been ignored until his intervention.

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The shekel-U.S. dollar exchange rate has fallen below 3 NIS/USD for the first time in 30 years. It’s been so long that around the last time the shekel was this strong, Benjamin Netanyahu was prime minister, Aryeh Deri was the head of Shas, and the Israel Defense Forces were in southern Lebanon.

The strength of the shekel has its pros and cons. Let’s start with the downsides.

For Israeli exporters, a strong shekel acts as a direct tax on competitiveness. Because companies earning foreign currency must convert it to pay local shekel expenses, a massive chunk of their profit margin simply evaporates in the exchange rate. This is also true on the macro scale: Israel’s sovereign wealth fund generated an impressive 18.4 percent profit in U.S. dollars in 2025. However, because the dollar weakened against the shekel, that return shrank to just 3.8 percent in shekel terms, wiping out NIS 1.1 billion. Returns on other foreign investments face similar contractions.

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It’s Wednesday, April 15, and Israel’s national security minister, Itamar Ben-Gvir, faces the High Court today, with his political survival on the line. But should Attorney General Gali Baharav-Miara succeed in ousting him, she may find it a Pyrrhic victory.

But first, some context.

Israel’s attorney general is seeking the national security minister’s removal by invoking the “Deri Doctrine.” In the 1990s, the High Court compelled Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin to dismiss Shas leader Aryeh Deri from his cabinet following a criminal indictment. The doctrine mandates that a prime minister is legally obligated to fire a minister if they are charged with offenses involving “moral turpitude.” The underlying rationale is that the public’s confidence in the government’s integrity is so fundamental to democracy that it must override a prime minister’s executive discretion to maintain his cabinet.

So, has Ben-Gvir been indicted? Not exactly.

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Among those standing was Haim Shiloh, a 100-year-old survivor of both the Holocaust and the October 7 attacks. When the sirens blared that morning at his home in Kibbutz Nirim, Shiloh sought refuge in his shelter as rockets devastated the buildings around him. Shiloh survived the onslaught and was evacuated that night. Despite stating in an interview after October 7 that he did not believe he would live to see his home again, he returned to his kibbutz six months ago.

Shiloh’s experience is part of a larger tragic reality: About 2,500 Holocaust survivors were directly exposed to the October 7 attacks, and approximately 2,000 were forced to evacuate. While most survived the initial violence, the toll of displacement was heavy; roughly 86 of those evacuated survivors died in the months that followed.

The most enduring label of the October 7 massacre is “the worst slaughter of Jews since the Holocaust.” The reality is that, despite millennia of persecution, the Holocaust is so immense in its scale that it comprises the entire vocabulary through which the Jewish people process catastrophe.

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All of which prompts a series of questions: Who are these settlers? How should we understand their relationship with Palestinians—and with the Israeli government? And what will it take to stem the violence?

These are the questions Haviv Rettig Gur explores in his essay today. As with so many issues involving Israel, he writes, the reality is more complex than it first appears—but as the country continues to grapple with existential threats beyond its borders, its long-term future depends just as much on its willingness to confront the struggles at home. —The Editors

When it comes to Israel, the term settler is a word generally applied pejoratively. In some circles, it is used to describe all Israelis in an attempt to deny the Jews’ right to a state. More commonly, it describes a group of people who live in the West Bank, who right now are causing Israel a large and growing headache.

The first thing to understand is that the “settler movement” is enormous and enormously diverse. Calling it a movement does not quite do it justice. Many settlers live in Jerusalem, in neighborhoods that are technically beyond the borders established after the Six-Day War in 1967, but are very much attached to Jerusalem—just part of the urban sprawl and a cheaper place to live than the rest of the city. There are Haredi settlers and secular settlers, moderate religious-Zionist settlers, and even left-wing settlers in different parts of the West Bank.

Then you have the more ideologically fervent, who not only preach a religiously inflected form of Zionism, but who take the idea to its messianic edge. And on the extremes of that last group, you find a cadre of violent extremists eager to catalyze their version of redemption through violence—usually violence against Palestinians, but surprisingly, often also violence against the Israeli state and the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) soldiers.

The problem when the world uses the word settler is that it fails to encompass any of that diversity. The diversity matters not only to win some imagined brownie points in international debates, but to understand the phenomenon and available policy responses. For example, it explains why three-quarters of the Israelis living in Gaza in the run-up to Israel’s 2005 withdrawal from the strip accepted government compensation ahead of time, and left their homes peacefully. Only about a quarter of this population—one of the most ideologically intense among the settlers—actually resisted removal in any meaningful sense.

To understand the problems that some settlers are causing Israel, you need to understand who they are and what drives them: their origins, their cheerleaders in government, and how they are working against the interests of the rest of the country.

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There is a cardinal rule in diplomacy: Everything that happens before a deal is closed—the threats, the slammed doors, the declarations that “it’s over”—is simply negotiation by other means. Donald Trump’s recent move to blockade the Strait of Hormuz falls squarely into this category.

Even when the strait was effectively closed during earlier military operations, Iranian, Russian, and Chinese tankers sailed through unimpeded. Although the U.S. Navy could have easily stopped them, increasing the pressure on Iran and its key sponsors, Trump deliberately chose not to escalate. The president was walking a tightrope: maintaining heavy pressure on Tehran without triggering a catastrophic spike in global oil prices. At the time, a total blockade would have instantly removed millions of barrels of oil from global circulation. Now, however, with the countervailing force of negotiations calming the energy markets, Trump has the freedom to ratchet up the pressure.

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That isn’t to say war will become a biannual event. Roaring Lion was a significant operation, but success isn’t binary. It delivered a substantial reduction in nuclear capabilities, an even greater crippling of ballistic assets, and a potentially fatal blow to the regime’s long-term survival. Iran now resembles a movie character, but one from a comedy, not an action film: the armless, legless Black Knight from Monty Python and the Holy Grail, threatening to bite at Israel and the U.S.’s shins.

Its funding apparatus in ruins and sanctions still in place, the regime’s resources are stretched incredibly thin, forcing an agonizing financial dilemma. With its still-depreciated rials, it must choose between rebuilding a ballistic missile industry, outfitting a brand-new navy, or investing in air defense. It could also try investing in improving the lives of its population, but that is far less likely.

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Since Israel’s War of Independence in 1948, Israelis have dreamed of a lasting end to fighting with their neighbors, and of the advent of permanent peace. Successive generations cherished the song “Yes, It’s Possible,” written by the Palmach self-defense force veteran Haim Hefer in 1948, which enshrined their longing:

Yes, it’s possible. Yes, it’s possible

That it will simply happen tomorrow.

It’s possible that in the jeep passing by,

The boys will roar, “It’s over.”

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Israel’s lesson from the attacks of October 7 is that intentions do not matter—capabilities do. For years, its Defense Forces ignored the terror monster rising on its borders and instead focused on whether the enemy intended to attack or whether it was in its interest to do so. Similarly, although it is tempting to dwell on the current sentiments in Tehran, it is ultimately irrelevant. The critical question is whether Iran currently has the capability to pose a real threat to Israel.

The answer, after 39 days of war, is: less than it did 39 days ago.

In practical terms, Iran promised it would not sign a temporary ceasefire—and it did. It said the Strait of Hormuz would not reopen—and it reopened. It swore to include ending the war in Lebanon—and Hezbollah suffered hundreds of casualties yesterday. This is what remains of the Iranian axis that once cast a long shadow across the Middle East.

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At the end of the Passover story, there is a scene that might be familiar. Standing on the edge of the Red Sea, with the Egyptian army approaching, the Bible records that many Israelites wanted to turn back. According to rabbinic sources, one leader of the Jewish tribes, Nachshon ben Aminadav, stepped forward, throwing himself into the water, at which point the sea miraculously split. This is the miracle Jews will celebrate tonight during the last nights of Passover.

While rabbinic sources place the time of this historical event at midnight, this year’s point of no return will occur at 3 a.m. in Israel, when Donald Trump’s ultimatum to open the Strait of Hormuz—or incur his wrath—expires.

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Donald Trump has issued a 24-hour extension, giving the Iranian regime until tomorrow at 8 p.m. ET to reopen the Strait of Hormuz. The extension appears to be tied to the prospect of negotiations. According to sources familiar with the talks in Islamabad, Pakistan, the United States and Iran are discussing terms for a potential 45-day ceasefire that could lead to a permanent end to the war.

The mediators are discussing a two-stage framework:

• Stage 1: A 45-day ceasefire during which negotiations would take place to end the war.

• Stage 2: A final agreement to officially end the conflict.

This proposal strikes a somewhat dissonant tone. For the past two weeks, reports of negotiations have spanned from outright denial to thoroughly unenthusiastic. Apart from Trump’s triumphalist rhetoric claiming Iran is begging for peace, there has been very little indication that a deal is actually forthcoming. The sources familiar with the talks are largely in harmony with previous statements: According to them, the chances of reaching even a partial agreement in the next 48 hours are low.

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In Iran, more than almost any of the generals and military figures, there is one man whose elimination might truly cause the regime to topple. The man could have been a Silicon Valley billionaire; instead, he joined the Revolutionary Guards: Babak Zanjani, the architect of Iran’s crypto-based sanctions-evasion system.

Zanjani’s is a fascinating story: the son of a railway worker who became a businessman and built a global empire of dozens of companies across Turkey, the United Arab Emirates, Malaysia, and Tajikistan—designed specifically to bypass sanctions. In 2013, he was arrested for allegedly embezzling $2.7 billion from Iran’s oil revenues and sentenced to death in 2016—but the sentence was never carried out. It turned out the architect of its shadow economy was more valuable to the regime alive than dead. Before and during his arrest he was a media fascination, and was the most famous prisoner in the history of the Islamic Republic. After his gamble on the explosion of crypto netted major returns for the regime, Zanjani was released under supervision in 2025.

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The media has spent the past year playing a terrible game of Mad Libs. When faced with the headline “Donald Trump set to announce . . . ,” it tends to fill in the same kinds of answers: “he is sick of Bibi,” “ending the war early,” or the classic, “he is done with Israel.” Usually, Mad Libs answers are either accurate or funny; so far, the media has been neither.

Tonight at 9 p.m. ET, Trump is set to deliver an “important update on Iran.” At 4 a.m. Israel time, most Israelis, including the leadership, will be away from their phones, either asleep or still celebrating the first night of Passover. When they eventually wake or finish the Passover meal and check their updates, I am certain they will not be blindsided by the announcement.

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“If you had a time machine,” I asked a senior Israeli minister, “and you knew a month ago that this is what would happen, would you still vote in favor of war?”

“First of all, yes,” he replied. “You have to understand, this was a cold and calculated gamble. The Iranians were planning to move their entire nuclear and missile industry underground, in a way that would have made it nearly impenetrable. In any case, we would have attacked this year—but with the Americans by our side, there was no question.”

“The main achievements of the war are the severe damage to ballistic missiles and their production. This time, after hitting the entire production chain, it will be much harder for them to recover.”

“It’s also worth remembering,” the official added, “that for years, the nightmare scenario in Israel was a multifront war with hundreds of casualties on the home front. Last year, in Rising Lion, in 12 days of war against Iran alone, there were 30 [Israeli] fatalities. Now, in a war with three times as many fronts and three times as many enemies, there are 20. What is that if not proof that Rising Lion was not in vain—and neither was Roaring Lion?”

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