The Mitzpe Institute is a think tank working on Israeli security and the threats facing Jewish communities abroad. It's an educational programme of the Atlanta Israel Coalition. We publish the Israel Brief from Sunday to Friday, in two forms. The Flash Brief is free by email: a short scan of what moved overnight. The full Brief is for members on mitzpe.org, with our analysis of the war, Israeli politics, the region and the diaspora, and the shorter items in Briefly Noted. Each Friday this edition pulls the week together for Guerre and Shalom readers.
Uri's new book on Guerre and Shalom:
Seventy-eight per cent of Britons now say Israel is a serious threat to world peace, according to the National Centre for Social Research, and Iran gets 75. Russia is the one country that scores worse. The survey went out in the spring, weeks into a war America and Israel are fighting together, and the American figure shows what's being measured. It has more than doubled since 2024. What Britons are really measuring is who's fighting, and Israel is.
Iran, for its part, spent this week making its own case on British soil. The Americans moved refuelling tankers out of RAF Mildenhall over an Iranian threat, and Downing Street had to come out and tell people the bases were safe. Then Mohsen Rezaei, Iran's top security official, said that if the war starts up again, every base involved "from West Asia to Europe" is a target. And in Manhattan, prosecutors charged three men acting for Iran's proxies with plotting some 18 attacks on Jews in Europe and America, a London synagogue among them. "Light it up like a Christmas tree," a defendant allegedly told the man sent to bomb it. Two of the three are still at large.
Put all of that together and Iran still comes out three points safer than Israel in British eyes. I'd like to know what it would take to close the gap. Tehran seems keen to find out.
Washington, meanwhile, has settled into a pause and is calling it a plan. Marco Rubio told the G7 that the blockade gets America what strikes would. "That's not a stalemate," he said. Trump posted that the Gulf states would rather keep things as they are, and then took the file off JD Vance's desk altogether: "We don't need a deal with Iran." A blockade counts tankers. It can't count uranium, and the International Atomic Energy Agency admitted on Thursday that it doesn't know where Iran's Isfahan enrichment plant is, "or whether it contains nuclear material."
Back home, Israel is between governments and fighting over who signs off on the next round. Gadi Eisenkot, who holds the mandate and used to run the army, got a two-hour security briefing on Thursday after days of asking. Israel Katz, the defence minister, says he, Netanyahu, and the chief of staff "see eye to eye on the Iranian issue in all its aspects", which nobody outside the room can check. The haredi rabbis Eisenkot needs have their own terms — a deferment for every yeshiva student, a promise signed by all 48 of his MKs, and an override clause covering that one law so the High Court can't touch it. His own parties spent the campaign promising the opposite, so Israel's next government is stuck on yeshiva students while Tehran draws maps of Europe.
Britain could do worse than look at Leeds. On Wednesday its city council voted 81 to 11 that "Zionism is not racism", with the Greens' deputy leader in the chamber calling the racism charge an understatement. That's what the 78 per cent sounds like up close, and on Wednesday it got eleven votes.
You Should Know
Ynet News: Bat Yam wants NIS 250 million from Tehran for the 2025 missile that killed nine residents, and its mayor served the papers on an Iranian diplomat at a Manhattan traffic light.
Jerusalem Post: The IDF archive put 4,500 items from the 1956 Sinai Campaign online, Ben-Gurion warning his officers that Tel Aviv and Haifa would be bombed next time among them.
JTA: Israel's cabinet put NIS 100 million into getting more North American children into Jewish schools, with the federations matching half.
Nature: A Weizmann and Hebrew University blood test caught breast tumours under two centimetres with 95 per cent accuracy, dense tissue included, in a small first trial.
JNS: Jaroslawa Lewicka, who smuggled food into a Nazi ghetto as a child and was honoured as Righteous Among the Nations, has died in Haifa at 91. She was believed to be the last one living in Israel.
The JC: Iran won a seat on the UN committee that sets priorities on women's rights and disarmament. Britain "strongly regrets" it and won't say how it voted.
The JC: A former biker gang boss admitted organising the 2024 firebombing of a kosher deli in Bondi for AU$12,000. ASIO thinks Tehran likely ordered it, and the court never heard who paid him.
Israeli Politics
Speaker Amir Ohana set Tuesday's vote on his successor after 67 MKs signed, and Yashar's Matan Kahana is the bloc's pick.
Mansour Abbas reportedly offered to call Hamas a terror group in return for a "genuine political partnership" with Eisenkot's bloc.
Liberman will chair the Knesset's Foreign Affairs and Defence Committee, which writes the draft law, by a 13 to 9 vote on Wednesday.
Netanyahu's trial judges ordered the attorney general to appear in person on Wednesday, overruling her offer to send prosecutors.
The Diaspora
Labour ended its Sheffield coalition with the Greens over a councillor's post saying Muslims who condemned October 7 would "bear the shame of supporting the Jews."
Amersfoort's museum cancelled its show for the town synagogue's 300th year, citing "pressure," and the mayor is trying to put it back on.
Seven Jewish staff are suing New York's health department, which wouldn't let them form a Jewish employee group.
A kosher restaurant in Montreal was broken into, the third Jewish-owned business in the city hit in a week.
Uriel Zehavi is Managing Director of the Mitzpe Institute, which publishes the Israel Brief from Sunday to Friday. Read it at israelbrief.com.