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For my birthday I’m fundraising for UNRWA who is still working to help Palestinian Refugees despite Israel passing laws to try to block their work, and the US cutting their funding based on a disinformation and propaganda campaign.

Thinking

This image displaying vote distribution in the NJ 11 Special Election relative to the political party registrations in those towns. It shows how in typical Democratic strongholds like Livingston and Millburn, and to a lesser extent Montclair, South Orange, and Maplewood, the Republican candidate, Joe Hathaway, got far more support than the number of registered Republican would suggest was likely.

But in a far larger swath of the district, Analilia Mejia, the Democratic candidate, derided as far too radical by many Democrats, got far more support in areas that are not Democratic strongholds. The data is a bit murky, as many folks still register as Independents, suppressing the baseline of both parties.

In a normal year, Democrats have a significant head start in this district. In a Trump mid-term year, in a Special Election, largely conducted while Trump Terror Squads were occupying Minnesota, and murdering residents in the streets, and wrapping up as Trump killed Iranian children without justification (public or otherwise) it was pretty obvious what was going to happen. And the outcome did not disappoint.

The story of the two maps is that despite some Republican bounce vs the party registration baseline, towns like Montclair, South Orange, and Maplewood and to a lesser extent Dover are just too Democratic, North Jersey’s Commie Corridor. Voters across the district registered overwhelming support for Mejia, and her policy positions, despite a few folks who drifted right. And the real kiss of death for any Republican in this district, and across any remotely fairly districted part of the country, the blue areas of the map are far more populated than the red.

But in Livingston and Millburn there was less Democratic support, and even a few districts that voted for Hathaway over Mejia. Why would that be? Palestine.

Don’t take it from me, take it from a former CEO of an area JCC.
Deep breath, just try to get through this, if not, see you at the bottom of the block quote…

And with Israel now facing a three-front war, the only  Democratic voice of support for the war in the Senate is John Fetterman.

So now we have the race to represent us in the 11th Congressional District. Analilia Mejia was national political director for Bernie Sanders’ 2020 presidential run, who is pushing resolutions in the Senate for an arms embargo against Israel. She calls for Medicare for All, which will be insolvent soon if Congress doesn’t act to repair its finances. As head of the Working Families Party, she called for defunding the police. Alone among her Democratic candidates she insisted that Israel committed genocide and, according to the New York Post, opposes giving it “even a penny.” She even has cast doubt on the right of Jewish self-determination.

On the other side, we have the moderate Republican Joe Hathaway, who has pragmatic solutions to control the high cost of living in New Jersey as manifested in property taxes, health insurance, student loans, and the like. I have met him, and he is firm in his conviction to implement the goals stated in his platform, not hewing to Republican orthodoxy. He supports military and security assistance for Israel as a bulwark against radical Islam and as our key democratic ally. He will push for acceptance by New Jersey of the IHRA definition of antisemitism already accepted by dozens of other states.

I share the link because I don’t want anyone to claim I’ve cherry-picked quotes or misrepresented the full text.

So because the Democratic candidate stated the nearly universally agreed upon rational and fact based analysis that Israel is committing genocide in Gaza, a bunch of folks should vote for a Republican “just this one time.” She “has cast doubt on the right of Jewish self-determination” because she believes you can’t have a democracy and be an ethno-state, not a controversial position if you… understand words. You can’t claim democracy but run an apartheid state, in the Middle East, Africa, or the US.

But this isn’t about “Jewish Voters.” There were several prominent groups of Jewish voters vocally supporting Mejia. It’s about Zionist, or if you prefer, “pro-Israel” in Kleinman’s language, voters. Purportedly non-partisan, but vocally Democratic, Livingston elected officials were using their platforms to advocating voting for someone who doesn’t support the interests of their constituents. They allowed wild statements to go unrefuted on their Facebook posts, or even liked and shared the folks calling people to vote against Livingston’s, NJ’s, and Jewish interests, in support of someone who would support more Zionist US policy.

Zionists are famously not all Jewish, including in their ranks Joe Biden and a whole slew of deeply disturbed Christians who think rounding up Jews in Palestine and killing those who fail to convert will allow Jesus to return to Earth. With friends like those… But this isn’t about religious belief, or bad foreign policy takes, because oppression, apartheid, ethnic cleansing, and genocide are not religious issues, and supporting those policies is a political issue. As I’ve noted before, “God is not a real estate agent.”

Given the choice of winning the election by enforcing existing US and international law, or losing by continuing to support a genocide, Harris doubled down on the later. Post election, the Democratic Autopsy, confirmed what we were screaming at the time. Palestine cost Harris the election. Look no further than everyone still trying to blame voters instead of the candidate and the party for another piece of evidence this was the case.

But this is part of a larger trend. Democrats have repeatedly lost elections where they ran as Diet Republican. And in the NJ 11 Special Election, the Republican tried to portray himself as Democrat Lite, and lost too. Hathaway didn’t identify himself as a Republican on his web site nor many of his pieces of campaign literature. And look at how Kleinman describes him, “moderate Republican Joe Hathaway, who has pragmatic solutions” and “not hewing to Republican orthodoxy.”

Those things are, of course, not true. Hathaway voted for Trump 3 times, with no regrets, the 3rd time after Trump led an insurrection on January 6, 2021. He wasn’t moderate on anything, just like his stance on global US military dominance, and unwavering support for Israel isn’t moderate.

Nor was his support for IHRA in NJ, a Bill that would suppress free speech, a moderate position. IHRA is internally inconsistent, calling for no double standards for Israel, but also listing several factual things you can’t say about Israel. Town level Resolutions with the IHRA language have already been used to try to accuse speakers or protestors of wrongdoing, or claim that the Town has declared those statements antisemitic, even though Resolutions are not legally binding.

And is it not a double standard to say that all other hate crimes can be covered by a broad and widely enforced hate crime law (under which IHRA supports will point out that antisemitic incidents are already the second most prevalent in the state), but anti-Israel speech needs its own law. A law that conflates Israel and Jewishness, nonetheless.

But, Hathaway lost. Resoundingly rejected by voters from across the political spectrum. But I think it’s troubling that a subset of voters decided, largely from their personal position of privilege, that they could survive another few months or years of Trump destroying institutions, trampling on rights, cutting societal supports, and brazenly breaking the law. Consequences be damned.

Mejia campaigned strongly against ICE, including know your rights and ICE response trainings in her campaign events. That resonated with affected communities and allies a alike. That’s because our democracy is built not on voting for our own self interests, but our collective interests. However, we’re seeing a dangerous fragmentation around that principle. Once the Bad Orange Man is gone, organizing against that fragmentation will be an uphill battle, without the overwhelming draw that opposing Trump provides.

“We all live here” so let’s vote and organize like it.

Watching

Congresswoman Analilia Mejia, immediately after being sworn in, points out that ICE, like the KKK, is violating people’s Constitutional rights as it attempts to sow terror.

Reading

Israeli Settler Violence Is So Out of Control Even Western Activists Can’t Stop Them by Theia Chatelle

Before Oct. 7, the displacement of a Palestinian community in Area C was a rarity. Now it is a common occurrence, to the point that both Israeli and American Jewish establishment figures have acknowledged that unmitigated settler violence in the West Bank calls into question the rule of law in Israel itself. Last month, the Israeli Ministry of Defense announced that an entire battalion would be diverted from fighting in southern Lebanon to rein in settler violence in the West Bank.

And yet the violence is only intensifying. Last Saturday, a Palestinian man was killed in the village of Deir Jarir, northeast of Ramallah, the latest in a surge of attacks that has left at least 22 Palestinians dead in the West Bank since the war in Iran began on February 28.

Before Oct. 7, the displacement of a Palestinian community in Area C was a rarity. Now it is a common occurrence, to the point that both Israeli and American Jewish establishment figures have acknowledged that unmitigated settler violence in the West Bank calls into question the rule of law in Israel itself. Last month, the Israeli Ministry of Defense announced that an entire battalion would be diverted from fighting in southern Lebanon to rein in settler violence in the West Bank.

And yet the violence is only intensifying. Last Saturday, a Palestinian man was killed in the village of Deir Jarir, northeast of Ramallah, the latest in a surge of attacks that has left at least 22 Palestinians dead in the West Bank since the war in Iran began on February 28.

Ranging from 20-year veterans of protective presence activism who watched the separation wall be built and the Oslo Accords signed, to younger Israeli activists who became involved only after Oct. 7, there is an emerging consensus that they have reached the limits of nonviolent resistance in the West Bank.

https://zeteo.com/p/israeli-settler-violence-is-so-out

‘Erasing the lines’: How settler outposts are seizing new regions of the West Bank by Oren Ziv, Ariel Caine

The Palestinian village of Al-Mughayyir lies about 30 kilometers northeast of Ramallah. While most of its residents live in a section of the village that falls within Area B, the majority of its lands are in Area C — including 42,000 dunams of grazing areas and farmlands that have been taken over by settlers. The village is now surrounded on nearly all sides by eight outposts, including one inside Area B.

The Israeli army has closed the main entrance to Al-Mughayyir from the east for over two years, since the start of Israel’s war on Gaza. Last August, following an incident in which a Palestinian gunman allegedly opened fire on Israeli settlers grazing sheep on the village’s land, the army worked with settlers to seal off the town entirely. Over the course of the three-day siege, they uprooted thousands of olive trees, stormed homes, and dug trenches around the village to make it even harder for people to come and go. Since then, settlers have grazed their flocks on village land almost daily.

Local activist Rabee Abu Na’im described these events as part of what he saw as a deliberate strategy. For two years, he said, authorities had been “closing off the village and tightening control over it as much as possible,” because it is “the last village remaining in the Ramallah area that borders the Jordan Valley” — the West Bank’s eastern flank over which Israel is rapidly consolidating control.

“The policy of population expulsion is a pre-planned strategy,” he said. “Now they are advancing toward the villages between the valley and other areas, like Al-Mughayyir and Duma.” Referring to the trenches dug around the village, he added: “It’s a total siege; it’s like we’re in prison here.”

EXCLUSIVE: Documents Reveal US Contractor’s Modifications of Spy Plane Just Before Flights Over Gaza by Jason Paladino, Tobias Burns

CROOK12 was modified with a communications device that allows military air traffic control systems to identify aircraft as friendly or potentially hostile, and to determine aeronautical information like speed and heading. The device is marked in the FAA paperwork as “For Military Use Only,” and requires special FAA permission to be tested.

The equipment, called an APX-119, is produced by RTX Corporation (formerly known as Raytheon Technologies) subsidiary Collins Aerospace and works with more than 100 types of vehicles and other systems used by the US Department of Defense, as well as multiple international users, per the company documentation. The system requires cryptographic input to protect against spoofing and misidentification, military aviation experts told Zeteo.

“It’s a coded signal that can go from a ground station to an aircraft and determines whether that aircraft is a friend or foe,” Jim Cardoso, senior director for the University of South Florida’s Global and National Security Institute, told Zeteo. “If you’re what we call ‘squawking,’ you have a certain code in the [system], then the ground system knows that you are a friendly aircraft.”

Military contractors note that the APX-119 transponder has a special designation under the State Department’s international trafficking in arms regulations (ITAR) regime. The equipment “counts as not only a defense article under ITAR jurisdiction, but is also Significant Military Equipment,” according to a training brochure from defense contractor PSI. This designation, reserved for equipment that is deemed “warranted because of their capacity for substantial military utility or capability,” according to federal regulations.

These devices are also used by the Israeli military. On Nov. 17, 2025, Department of Defense documents show that the US planned to transfer APX-119 units to Israel as part of an $18.82 billion arms deal that included new F-15IA fighter jets. The devices were mentioned in a joint resolution of disapproval of the arms transfer filed by Senator Bernie Sanders (I-VT).

The disclosure of the Beechcraft’s flight path over Gaza was due to what a UK military source told The Times last year was a “schoolboy error.” While aviation analysts have speculated that this error could be related to pilots’ use of the transponder, it’s unclear whether the APX-119 system was directly involved in the accidental disclosure.

According to the FAA documents, the aircraft had a civilian transponder system removed just before the APX-119 was added. The unit advertises that it can be used to broadcast civilian transponder signals as well as military identifiers.

The second aircraft, CROOK11, was outfitted with a Wescam MX-15, a powerful high-definition camera system built by L3 Harris, according to publicly available images of the aircraft. This system can capture heat and night vision imagery. Marketing materials advertise the system as “An Ideal Surveillance Solution for: ISR – Medium-Altitude Covert Intelligence, Surveillance & Reconnaissance.”

That same aircraft was captured on an aviation enthusiast’s YouTube channel three years ago at an airshow in Hagerstown, Maryland, where Sierra Nevada Corporation operates a hangar. In the video, a placard displays the surveillance capabilities of the aircraft. Alongside the retractable MX-15 camera, the aircraft is outfitted with a jam-resistant GPS system. Israel has been known to jam GPS signals, creating safety issues for local commercial aviation.

The placard also lists “provisions for 7 different SI [signals intelligence] systems,” extended fuel tanks to allow for 7 hours of flight time, and provisions for “multi-level secure networks,” most likely for transmission of live data, in this case to the Israeli military.

https://zeteo.com/p/exclusive-documents-reveal-us-contractors