The Week in Israel — Israel Brief for Guerre and Shalom (First Edition)

Uriel Zehavi, Israel Correspondent
Friday 16 October 2026

Andy Burnham told the Commons on Monday that the plot at RAF Fairford was "almost certainly" an Iranian scheme. That's the Gloucestershire base American bombers flew to Iran from. Britain summoned Tehran's ambassador and promised more sanctions, and fair enough. What the prime minister left out is where the warning came from. Netanyahu had already told Fox News at the start of the month: "We gave the Brits the intel," and then, "pretty much the next day they slapped sanctions on us."

A day after Burnham spoke, Ken McCallum, who runs MI5, said Iranian-linked operations had produced more than 50 arrests in Britain in a year, and that "much of this aggression has been aimed at British Jewish communities." He means the arson against Jewish ambulances, synagogues, and shops this spring. He means the two Iranian men charged in Manchester, who prosecutors say scouted the Jewish Museum and Heaton Park Synagogue for a homemade bomb on orders from someone in Iran. That's the shul where two men were killed on Yom Kippur last year. Police picked these two up on the eve of this year's. The government has now sent the Heaton Park deaths to a public inquiry, because an inquest can't hear MI5's material in private. And the Home Office's own figures put anti-Jewish hate crimes up 10 per cent, to 3,162 in a year. Per head, that's about nine times the rate for Muslims.

The regime Israel has been at war with since February is running arsonists and bomb plots against Jews in London and Manchester. Israel passed London a warning about a British airbase. And in September London announced it would ban goods from Israeli towns in Judea and Samaria and stop British firms building, financing, or advertising there. I'd love to know how the Foreign Office explains that order of business to a family in north Manchester.

There's some movement. Burnham told Prime Minister's Questions on Wednesday that the Greens' "Zionism is racism" motion is "wrong" and "antisemitic," and that Labour will have nothing to do with a party that holds it. Good. A week earlier he was still asking them nicely to take it back.

Israelis, meanwhile, vote on 27 October with Iran in the room. Netanyahu has sent word to Washington that he'd rather any new campaign against Iran wait until after the count. He didn't dress it up on Army Radio. A strike before the vote "is not convenient for us," he said, and "even if Iran fires missiles at us they will blame me." He's probably right about that. Trump, by American officials' account, told him to "go ahead and get ready," and committed to nothing. Tehran is working to America's midterms on 3 November, and its boats sank two more ships near Hormuz this week.

Israelis may well vote with Home Front Command's emergency powers still in force. Britain is counting Iranian arrests in Manchester. It's the same regime in both places, and Whitehall's sanctions lawyers are still working on Judea and Samaria.

You Should Know

• Jerusalem Post: The Shin Bet says it broke up a five-man cell in Segev Shalom, outside Beersheba, that was planning shootings at a police station and the city's central bus station.

• Ynet News: Colombia opened its embassy in Jerusalem, the tenth in the capital, and its foreign minister used the reception to take Bogota out of the Hague Group.

• Ynet News: An Ethiopian Airlines cargo jet bound for Israel had to turn back when an Indonesian pilot turned up on a crew list that only arrived after take-off.

• Algemeiner: A Statistics Lebanon poll of 800 Shia adults finds two in three want Hezbollah's guns handed to the state, and most would accept some kind of deal with Israel.

• Ynet News: Gaza's private merchants stopped deliveries after Hamas arrested a trader's son over a levy of roughly 10,000 shekels per truck, and COGAT expects Hamas to pin the shortfall on Israel.

• JNS: Herzog sat down with Bahrain's foreign minister and Azerbaijan's president in Baku, on the edge of an Asian summit, to talk about the Abraham Accords.

• JNS: A clay sealing sifted out of soil the Waqf dumped from the Temple Mount in 1999 reads "Yeda'yah (son of) Asayahu," and the father may be King Josiah's adviser.

Israeli Politics

• Davidi Ben Zion quit eighth place on Ofer Winter's list, fearing it misses the threshold, and Netanyahu and Smotrich told the rest of the list to follow him.

• Ben-Gvir won't sign a surplus-vote deal with Winter, which leaves Otzma Yehudit without a partner anywhere in Netanyahu's bloc.

• Ronen Bar is suing Netanyahu for NIS 3 million over his October 7 accusations, and wants the pre-war intelligence assessments opened up in court.

• Yair Golan tore into Herzog's reported push for a Netanyahu–Eisenkot unity government after the vote, calling it "four more years of destruction."

• Haredi rioters tried to break into the Bnei Brak building where haredi soldiers in the army's Kodkod tech track work, for the second time in a week. Police arrested two.

The Diaspora

• A Dublin hotel dropped 70 rooms booked for a conference of antisemitism envoys, after its manager asked whether the IDF would be involved.

• Reggio Emilia's mayor now says the city never required Jewish preschool teachers to sign its Gaza pledge. More than 70 had already cancelled the trip.

• Faber has stopped selling Sally Rooney's novels in Britain, because she pledged her earnings to Palestine Action, a proscribed terror group.

• At least ten Jewish families have pulled their children out of San Francisco's University High School, where a teacher who turned a lesson into a denunciation of Israel came back to a standing ovation.

Uriel Zehavi is Managing Director of the Mitzpe Institute, which publishes the Israel Brief from Monday to Thursday. Read it at israelbrief.com.

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