melted-donkey's Notes

Amid an unforgiving global news cycle – and as nations weigh their options in responding to the yet unbuilt West Bank settlement project that would “bury the idea of a Palestinian state” – a telling sanctions-related development in Israel passed largely unnoticed outside Israeli media. In Tel Aviv, the new year began with a protest by a violent extremist settler group that has faced UK sanctions since October 2024.

The trigger was a new Israeli banking directive, rushed out to placate Israel’s hardliners, that they said did too little to shield Israelis from international sanctions.

The protest – and the response from the pro-settlement extremist finance minister Bezalel Smotrich, who himself faces sanctions from Australia, Canada and the UK – makes one thing clear: sanctions on extremist Israelis are working, and this remains true even after the Trump administration rolled back all Biden-era sanctions on Israeli settlers last year.

From the start, this is a war that has not gone according to plan. The idea was to assassinate the supreme leader and as many of the religious and Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) leadership as possible, in order to damage the power of the state so the theocracy would collapse. That failed miserably, as one US intelligence assessment had predicted. The regime has a new leader and there will no doubt be one or more “reserves” already selected in case Mojtaba Khamenei is assassinated.

The other element – much more significant – is concentrating more on Israel’s traditional approach in such circumstances: destroying an enemy’s domestic support. This is the Dahiya doctrine: if an insurgency cannot be ended or the leadership of a state cannot be subdued, the route to victory lies with the relentless punishing of the civilian population.

It is being used in Lebanon, as Israel’s destruction of Hezbollah’s stronghold in the southern Beirut suburb of Dahiya gets under way, the suburb having given its name to the doctrine back in the 2006 war against Hezbollah.

Critics point out that the doctrine has been used on a huge scale against Hamas in Gaza over the past 30 months. That resulted in at least 70,000 Palestinians being killed, an even greater number wounded and most of the territory reduced to ruins. Yet Hamas survives, and parts of Gaza are still under its control.

Despite this, the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) and the US air force are now applying the doctrine to the war on Iran, with mounting evidence of attacks on infrastructure. The US defence secretary, Pete Hegseth, warned on Tuesday that it “will be our most intense day of strikes inside Iran”, and “Iran stands alone, and they are badly losing on day 10 of Operation Epic Fury”.

Is America actually divided, or does it just look that way online?

In this episode, Mike Allen and Jim VandeHei unpack one of the biggest myths in American politics: that the country is hopelessly divided. The data tells a different story.

Most Americans agree on immigration, education, healthcare, and even the role of government. But a loud minority, amplified by algorithms, cable news, and social media, distorts what we think the country believes.

Watch TV, scroll social media or listen to politicians, and the verdict seems clear: Americans are hopelessly divided and increasingly hateful.

It's a ubiquitous, emphatic, verifiable ... lie. Why it matters: Most Americans are too busy for social media, too normal for politics, too rational to tweet. They work, raise kids, coach Little League, go to a house of worship, mow their neighbor's lawn — and never post a word about any of it. This isn't a small minority. It's a monstrous, if silent, majority. Most Americans are patriotic, hardworking, neighbor-helping, America-loving, money-giving people who don't pop off on social media or plot for power.

The hidden truth: Most people agree on most things, most of the time. And the data validates this, time and time again.

We've been manipulated by algorithms and politicians amplifying the worst of humanity. Our feeds and screens spread a twisted, inaccurate view of America. It makes it seem like the nation is hopelessly broken ... Political enemies are evil ... Facts are no different than fiction ... Morality, honesty and service don't matter ... And salvation can only come from magical technologies or a powerful few. What if we told you it's a big lie that makes you stop believing your own two eyes?

Every day, people battle over outrageous things said on X. Did you know that four out of five Americans don't use X, and therefore don't see what you see? Pew Research Center found last year that only 21% of U.S. adults use X, and just 10% visit it daily. The loudest platform in politics reaches barely one in five Americans. But what about the wacky claims made on cable TV? Did you know that during most hours of most prime-time nights, less than 1% of the country watches Fox News, CNN or MS NOW, combined? Maybe, just maybe, it's the very people on these platforms who are the crazy ones.

Maybe, just maybe, most people are simply normal, sane, real. A Gallup World Poll out last week found Americans are more anxious about their political system than citizens of almost any other country — yet the data consistently shows this anxiety is driven by the noise, not the neighbors. The system feels broken. The people are not.