Today, Likud held its primary, and the results announced this morning gave Prime Minister Netanyahu plenty of reason to be pleased. Most of the candidates he backed finished high on the list. Those he wanted removed from the top ranks were successfully demoted, while most of the candidates he hoped to see out of the Knesset altogether now appear unlikely to return. That, of course, ultimately will depend on how many seats Likud wins. Current polls put the party at 22.
It is worth noting that Likud’s primary was conducted very differently from the Democrats’ primary, which used electronic voting by phone. Nearly twice as many Democrats cast ballots, with turnout approaching 90%, compared with just 52% or 53% among Likud members.
More important, however, is understanding how the Likud primary system works. There are essentially two kinds of voters: what Israelis call “free voters” and “organized voters.” A free voter decides independently whom to support, goes to the polling station, and casts a ballot. Organized voters are part of groups that coordinate their votes, either by making deals among themselves or by following instructions from someone who has made those deals on their behalf.
This kind of organized voting can take several forms, and some of what was reported yesterday was particularly striking. According to Israeli media reports, at places such as Israel Aircraft Industries, long considered a Likud stronghold, workers were handed envelopes containing instructions on whom to support and then quietly made their way to a nearby building to vote. In one television report, a young ultra-Orthodox man about to cast his ballot said he did not vote for Likud in national elections but had been paid 400 shekels to participate in the primary. He said he had no idea whom he was voting for. He was simply going to cast the ballot he had been given.
Here are the top 25 places on the Likud list following the primary:
Benjamin Netanyahu 2. Eli Cohen 3. Reserved* 4. Yisrael Katz* 5. Gideon Sa’ar 6. Amir Ohana 7. Yariv Levin 8. Miri Regev 9. Reserved* 10. Ofir Katz 11. Oren Dobronsky* 12. Yoav Kisch 13. Miki Zohar 14. Almog Cohen 15. Reserved* 16. Amichai Chikli 17. David Amsalem 18. Haim Katz* 19. Moshe Saada 20. Tally Gotliv 21. Shlomo Karhi 22. David Bitan 23. Boaz Bismuth 24. Nir Barkat 25. Gila Gamliel.
* Appointed by Benjamin Netanyahu, or reserved for a Netanyahu appointee
And then there are the losers. A number of well-known Knesset members and ministers failed to make the top 25, meaning we will sorrowfully be saying goodbye to them, at least if Likud wins anything close to the number of seats it currently has in the polls. They include former Shin Bet chief Avi Dichter and Environmental Protection Minister Idit Silman, whose defection from the coalition helped bring down the Bennett-Lapid government.
Yesterday’s Radio Show
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TRUMP: NO IRAN TALKS ARE UNDERWAY
President Trump began the morning with a blunt message on Iran, declaring that there are no talks underway and none scheduled:
There are no talks or conversations going on, or scheduled, with the Islamic Republic of Iran. The Naval Blockade remains in full force and effect. The Hormuz Strait is open and operating. All water mines have been removed or detonated. Thank you for your attention to this matter! President DONALD J. TRUMP
This comes after Iranian officials said they would no longer remain on the defensive and were preparing to go on the offensive. What that offensive might look like, we simply do not know. Trump’s post, meanwhile, suggests that for now he intends to rely on the blockade and the economic pressure it creates rather than launch another attack. There are those who believe that strategy could work, but only over time. How much time? No one knows. And therein lies the danger: while Washington waits for economic pressure to take its toll, Iran could use that time to race toward a nuclear weapon
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SEARCHING FOR A GAZA PLAN
It remains unclear what, if anything, was decided at yesterday’s four-hour meeting between Netanyahu, American officials, and other representatives to discuss the future of Gaza. The most tangible outcome was the creation of two working groups. There are reports that Israeli forces have pulled back from their most advanced positions to the original line, leaving Israel in control of roughly 53% of Gaza, down from as much as 70% reportedly held in recent weeks.
At the same time, Israel has continued its attacks on Hamas. This evening, Israeli forces killed several Hamas commanders in the Gaza port area. Palestinian sources claim that a child was also killed in the attack.
SYRIA
Last night, Israel reportedly struck a Syrian airbase in northern Syria. Israel did not initially take responsibility for the attack and still has not officially done so. However, following criticism from the United States and elsewhere, Israeli officials said they had shared sensitive intelligence about the operation with Washington in advance. Exactly what was targeted remains unclear.
The larger problem is Israel’s strategy toward Syria. I continue to believe we could have accomplished far more through engagement with the new Syrian government than we have through continued military strikes. In this case, honey might have served Israel better than vinegar.
Tonight, Prime Minister Netanyahu’s office issued the following statement:
The Prime Minister’s Office:
Israel and Syria agreed to a status quo in security matters, which Syria was on the verge of breaching by permitting Turkish troops to deploy at an airbase near Aleppo.
Israel repeatedly warned Syria that such a deployment would pose a threat to Israel’s security. Syria chose to ignore these warnings. Israel will not tolerate threats to its security, and would welcome a return to the status quo.
THE BEN-GVIR PROBLEM
Ben-Gvir continues to compound the enormous damage already done to Israel’s image abroad. In an interview this week, he said Israel should kill 30 to 40 Palestinians in Gaza every night. The comment was quickly picked up internationally, and it was not long before people were sending it to me and asking what I thought. There is much about Israel today that I am prepared to explain and defend. However, Itamar Ben-Gvir is not one of them.
ISRAELTECH INTERVIEW
Thanks to our partnership with IsraelTech, here is this week’s video: “The $100B Industry You’ve Never Heard Of,” featuring Hila Goldman-Aslan of RUNI Ventures. Goldman-Aslan’s first startup ran headlong into the 2008 financial crisis. Her second encountered a technical barrier and returned its remaining capital to investors. Her third was acquired by Philips.
Hila Goldman-Aslan did not start out with a particular industry in mind or a single defining idea. What she did have was the conviction that building companies was what she wanted to do. That journey took her from law to gene therapy, security technology, digital health, and eventually venture capital. Today, as Managing Partner at RUNI Ventures, she evaluates founders from the other side of the table.
In this conversation with Yoel Israel, Hila explains why investors begin assessing founders from the first meeting, what Israeli entrepreneurs often fail to prepare for, and why optimism is essential when building against the odds. They also discuss RUNI Ventures, Israel’s strength in medtech, and why Israeli founders are exceptionally difficult to convince that a company is finished.
You can view the entire video here, or check out an excerpt below.
SCIENCE NEWS
Where the Future is Frozen
The coldest place in Israel this August is not on Mount Hermon. It is a laboratory on the Tel Aviv University campus, where machines hold small slivers of matter at ten millikelvin, a temperature colder than deep space. Inside those machines, Israeli researchers are running a race that gets no headlines, no cabinet crises, and no protests outside anyone’s home
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This week we got our first real look at how that race is going. Calcalist published previously unreleased activity data from the Israeli Quantum Computing Center, the national facility that opened at Tel Aviv University in June 2024, operated by the Israeli firm Quantum Machines with backing from the Innovation Authority. The numbers arrive as the Authority prepares its next move: a 100 million shekel call, issued in July, to build a second and far more ambitious national quantum infrastructure.
What the numbers show … The center now serves more than thirty customers, and the list reads like a census of Israeli science. Every one of the country’s research universities is on it, from the Technion to Ben-Gurion, alongside a cluster of startups working at the edge of what physics allows. One of them, Qamcore, uses the center to run thousands of component measurements at those ten-millikelvin temperatures, part of its push to build a complete quantum processor.
The foreign names matter as much as the local ones. NVIDIA chose this facility to develop the first working bridge between quantum and classical computing, the hybrid architecture the whole field believes comes next. The center was also the first in the world to deploy processors from Qolab, the company founded by John Martinis, who shared the 2025 Nobel Prize in Physics. When the newest hardware from a fresh Nobel laureate makes its debut in Tel Aviv rather than in Santa Barbara or Zurich, something is working.
The model is now being exported. Quantum Machines is building a sister facility in Chicago, inside the Illinois Quantum and Microelectronics Park, based on the systems and know-how developed here. Two years ago Israel was buying its way into this field. Now a piece of it carries an Israeli design.
The honest caveat … Here the historian in me insists on precision. The 2024 center was Israeli in its brains but not in its heart: the quantum processors themselves came from abroad, a superconducting chip from the Dutch firm Quantware and a photonic system from Britain’s ORCA. Israel’s genuine strength was the control layer, the electronics that orchestrate a quantum computer’s operations, which is Quantum Machines’ specialty. Calling that technological independence would be premature, and the Innovation Authority has quietly admitted as much.
That admission is written into the new tender. The 100 million shekel call requires whoever wins it to integrate at least three distinct quantum technologies, superconducting, trapped ions, photonics, or others, into a single national facility. No one on earth knows which architecture will win, so Israel is declining to bet on one horse. For a small country, that is the only rational wager.
A very old habit … Israel has made this kind of premature-looking bet before. In 1954, when the state was six years old and rationing eggs, Chaim Pekeris convinced the Weizmann Institute to build WEIZAC, one of the first computers anywhere in the world. Skeptics asked what a country without highways needed with an electronic brain. Within a generation, the answer was the entire Israeli economy.
The sums involved today are modest by global standards. A hundred million shekels is about 33 million dollars, roughly what the United States or China spends on quantum research before lunch. Israel’s advantage has never been the size of the check. It is the shortness of the distance between a university basement, a startup, and a national decision.
While no one watches … I find something steadying in this story, and I say that as someone who has spent the past years writing about war. The same country that argues itself hoarse over judges and hostages and conscription is also, without fanfare, assembling the infrastructure of the next computing era at temperatures near absolute zero. States are judged by what they build in their worst years, not their best ones.
The race will take a decade or more, and Israel may yet lose it. But this week’s numbers suggest the first bet paid off well enough to justify a second, larger one. In a season when so much of our public life feels frozen, it is worth remembering that in one Tel Aviv basement, frozen is exactly where the future is being made.
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TODAY IN JEWISH HISTORY
2005 The Evacuation of Gaza’s Jewish Settlements
Twenty-one years ago this week, Israel began one of the most painful operations it had ever carried out against its own citizens. Under Ariel Sharon’s disengagement plan, Israel was leaving the Gaza Strip, and every Israeli settlement there was to be dismantled. Thousands of residents had already left voluntarily, some reluctantly and some in despair. But by mid-August 2005, the deadline had passed. Those who remained would now be removed by Israeli soldiers and police.
For the men and women sent to carry out the evacuation, the mission was unlike almost anything the IDF had asked of them before. They were not confronting an enemy. They were entering Jewish homes and synagogues, facing families who regarded the land as their own and, in many cases, as sacred. Most of the evacuations were wrenching but peaceful. In a few places, however, resistance turned into confrontation.
Kfar Darom … The most intense confrontation erupted on August 18, 2005 in the settlement of Kfar Darom. Hundreds of far-right youths had barricaded themselves on the roof of the synagogue, refusing to come down. As riot police climbed ladders to reach them, the protesters pelted officers with paint, sand, eggs, and caustic acid.
Several policemen screamed in pain as burning liquid splashed on their skin, forcing some to tear off their uniforms. The substance was later identified as industrial caustic soda. More than forty people were injured in the clash, most of them police and soldiers.
“This is a disgrace,” muttered IDF Southern Command chief Dan Harel as he watched his forces come under chemical attack from fellow Jews. Despite the provocation, security forces largely exercised restraint. They subdued the rooftop resisters with water cannons and arrests, bringing the ugly standoff to an end without the use of firearms or any form of serious retaliation.
Neve Dekalim … At Neve Dekalim, the largest Gaza settlement, a similar scene unfolded. Approximately 1,500 protesters, many of them non-resident activists, had crowded into the main synagogue. Troops eventually broke through the barricades and carried them out one by one in a grueling but largely nonviolent operation that took many hours.
Elsewhere in Neve Dekalim, holdouts set fire to trash piles and tires, briefly clashing with soldiers before being removed without significant injuries. The images of burning debris in the streets of a Jewish settlement, of young men struggling with Israeli soldiers, captured the anguish of the moment.
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