---
title: "Middle East Roundtable: Votes and Bombs."
description: "Neither side can win: Iran can't export oil, Washington won't lift the blockade, and a third carrier group points to strikes after the midterms. The panel also weighs Netanyahu's pre-election gamble."
url: https://fronts.co/podcast/middle-east-roundtable-votes-and-bombs.md
canonical: https://fronts.co/podcast/middle-east-roundtable-votes-and-bombs/
datePublished: 2026-10-23T19:14:26.000Z
dateModified: 2026-10-23T19:14:35.000Z
author:
  - name: Fronts Staff
    url: https://fronts.co/authors/fronts-team/
publisher: Fronts
image: "https://media.fronts.co/cdn-cgi/image/width=1200,height=630,fit=cover,gravity=auto,quality=80,format=auto/images/articles/middle-east-roundtable-votes-and-bombs-51d81513.png"
type: NewsArticle
language: en
audio: https://media.fronts.co/audio/middle-east-roundtable-votes-and-bombs/d18a247f347243df077d9e22f6b5cd8e21f18ff3370bc0d2606c1bc995bca2d7.mp3
tokens: 9139
---

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Hello and welcome to the Middle East Roundtable here from StockTroll. This is Evan Maloney. I am here with Kyle Moran.

And ladies and gentlemen, everybody listening, it has been a rather busy week, a very tense week in the Middle East as more and more indicators kind of circulate that the region will be headed back to NATO conflict imminently. So biggest thing to talk about, we've seen a lot of discussion from the Israeli and American side, all implying or stating outright, depending on the terms that you look at, that either after the midterms or possibly before, right, the U.S. midterms, the Middle East is going to be under assault from that us is very cool it should be yeah we saw a demonstration of strength by israel on wednesday so several dozen israeli warplanes kind of flying right up in an attack pattern toward iran then turning around and coming home kyle what do you make of what we've seen recently and what can you tell us about where the situation seems to the head yeah we're not getting sleep for a very long time at this point, if these indications are correct. I think that at this point, this has reached just such a point of deadlock where each site is sort of maxing out its own strategy on poor moves.

So the United States continues to have a blockade going on against Iran while helping escort ships across the Strait of Hormuz. This has had some beneficial impact. So more oil is to be added to the Persian Gulf than before the Iran war, which is certainly a win that I'll take.

But overall, this is at massive cost. Because Iran is going all out trying to hit whatever ships it can. I believe just this week alone, we're recording this Thursday, they've hit seven.

Last week, they sunk two, which is the only they've only sunk three through a whole war, two of which were last week. And unless I missed anything so far this week, I think it's still sitting at a total of three. But overall, we're at this like, stalemate where Iran is doing everything they can, but it cannot export oil.

And it also seems very limited in its ability to actually control the straight-up core moves in terms of preventing these ships from getting past. Meanwhile, the United States, despite committing massive amounts of resources and whatnot to the effort here. It is similarly up against it.

Seven ships in one week is insane. My hats are off to all the sailors who are brave enough to go about this. I believe they are getting handsomely paid for this effort, but nevertheless, not something anybody should have to be staring down on an day-to-day basis.

And so when you reach that ultimate conclusion of nobody's really winning this thing again, you reach the potential of, okay, somebody's going to try to turn over the table, and I think we're sort of at that point. Hi, Avery, and I think it's telling that there's been such a surge of shipping traffic out of the street right now. We've talked about it many times in the podcast really the biggest thing that controls whether or not ships pass through the strait is risk insurance.

And at the start of this conflict, that was a big issue because premiums, obviously, were spiking. Companies didn't really know if they wanted to absorb that cost or kind of the way this conflict dealt. We're now in a situation where I think the map for global oil exports has changed a lot, where now this has been shown to be a conflict of more than half a year already.

Countries and companies cannot expect this freight to be opened. And if it happens to be open at any given time, they certainly can't expect a tuba main open. So right now, it seems at least by my reading of it, as if the markets have kind of figured out that we're going to be headed from shortage to shortage for a little while.

And there may be these windows of tide left we're seeing now, where you can actually put more in, where even though it costs quite a bit extra, whether that's in terms of crew costs, crew prepayments, or risk insurance, that it costs much more right now to try and do those crossings than it would in ordinary times. But you can't really think here into ordinary times, right? You're carrying to the next cycle of extended hostilities, where right now, as much as it costs a lot more than we would expect it's a lot cheaper and a lot less risky now than it might be in a few weeks when this conflict is back at the full pitch yet so i do think it's important to read these shit crossings in that way which is that the risk industry has not gone down.

If anything, it's continuing to remind little shippers and countries that risk absolutely does still exist. You're right, Cal, it's only been three shit seconds total, but you said seven traditional shit states within the last 24 hours as of the time of recording this episode. So, really, it's kind of a question of what can you get through the strait now to find an offset and try to extend this period of global strain on energy prices, but not yet a crash, and prolonging and staying away from that crash has been of paramount importance.

We've seen China really, really reduce its imports for a while to try and accommodate. We've seen the U.S. start this deal with Russia, which we can talk about all day. This is a Middle East roundtable, not the Ukraine roundtable, so I'll keep that to myself for now.

But other countries have made it very, very obvious they want to try and minimize the danger of this war as long as they can. And right now, I think what we're seeing is a surge to try and get ahead of this latest round of violence that seems to be coming. Yeah.

And I have to say the overall lack of planning by both sides on this has been pretty staggering to me. So we've talked quite a bit about the United States and all of this. And while there is encouraging news, at least on the energy side of things, the overall situation remains quite bleak.

I am pretty pessimistic about whether anything productive can come out of another bombing campaign. The first round was not, this was not something that, oh, well, it maybe if you had just bombed a few more targets, then, you know, the Islamic Republic would fall or something, it wasn't even close. So ultimately, it's sort of a question of, well, what do we get from renewed round in this?

And there really is no great answer there. Nothing is within imminent reach. Nothing is a few more bombs away from being achieved.

If anything, that would probably make the runnings even more resistant to any negotiated deal. Not that they're particularly willing to engage in one now. So latest developments on the negotiation fronts is that it's basically off.

Iran is continuing to insist that they will not engage in negotiations until and unless the United States lifts the blockade of Iranian ports, this is essentially a non-starter. The United States will not be doing that without Iran see some fire on civilian shipping. And that is exactly the type of stalemate that I'm talking about here.

Neither side is willing to do what it takes to actually get something on the table. And I understand why the resulting return to Kinetic Strikes would be potentially, like, I understand the thinking. I just don't think that this will actually result in any benefit for a U.S. vertigo.

So that is unfortunately where things sit today and we're certainly have to keep our eyes out on that in the days and weeks to come i still think it's on it's less likely that these strikes actually start for the midterms but you know you never know yeah i think it's worth probing into like what really is the intent here because to my eye it seems like the things that will for sure not happen because of this are iranian capitulation all right some kind of economic collapse that would be exponentially worse than what iran is already seeing and moving through also any attrition of support for the world within the iranian population i mean after the it was strikes on like the first couple of days of this operation, it seems like the Romanians have resolved that regardless of what they think about the regime, certainly it is worth continuing to at least band together and kind of tolerate day-to-day in the face of the destruction that the US initially brought. We saw the strike on the girls' school line on leave day two. And since then, public opinion in Iran seems to have hardened really, really resolutely in a way that it doesn't seem like more U.S. strikes are ever going to reverse.

What might happen, obviously the Iranians have been able to reconstitute some of their long range missile and drone strike capability. You could kind of trim that down a little bit. You could go after missile launchers again.

You could try and make it more difficult for it all to strike into the street, which would really be kind of a return or I guess an extension to a lot of the kind of more raw and trimming the grass strategy that we saw for Israel for a long time in Lebanon and Gaza and elsewhere. But for a long time, Israel's thinking has been, well, if you establish some kind of dominance over these along back adversaries and you kind of ship them every once in a while, you get rid of any new capabilities that they're developing and you just kind of trim and trim and trim. You can hold them in some kind of defensive posture basically indefinitely and reduce their ability to create real harm to israel i can certainly see the argument for people who really believe in that strategy within the israeli and the u.s defense apparatus to say oh we can just do that here we can kind of trim and continue to make sure that iran's ability to strike out into the straight doesn't exceed what we're willing to tolerate but at the same time, that's no path to a peace settlement and certainly no path to a military victory, as he said to me.

So do you, by just looking at this, do you think that there's any kind of outside angle the U.S. and Israel are looking to take the hand for, or is this just starting to try and turn the grass on? Yeah, I, to be honest, I am struggling to make sense of it either. I think part of it may be a growing impatience, as well as a sense that if they hit some more strategic sites in particular the nuclear program so Israeli intelligence has shown that there is a return to activity at certain nuclear facilities and keep in mind so pickaxe mountain is a particular concern here because this was the one site that the United States Industrial did not hit.

There's a myriad of reasons, mainly being that it's so deep and so difficult to hit. But that's sort of a hanging question mark as to what's going on there. And because it wasn't hit, the thinking in specifically Israeli circles is that Iranians not feel as though that's off limits to the Americans, where Iran can essentially do whatever and is sort of untouchable.

And hitting that would, in certain people's eyes, provide strategic assets. So on that front, I do see the line of thinking there. But overall, in terms of the grander war issue, not really sure this is going to make much of a difference.

The biggest thing for me, being straight for moves, getting shipping flowing again is simply really not in the cards through this. The one thing that very specifically targeted strikes could accomplish is once again degrading Iranian military positions, specifically IRGC positions along the coast. There have been significant successes on that, but we are already seeing them rebuild.

And if we just perpetually go down this road, we're going to have to be mowing the lawn, so to speak, on a weekly, bi-weekly, monthly basis here, where whenever everyone starts firing their ships again, we just have to go in and stop them, which I mean, at this point, this is just like Forever War 3.0 in the Middle East. Yeah, and pickaxe non in particular is really just such a high-risk, high-reward composition because, like you said, the U.S. didn't hit it in the first round. Iran has taken from that, well, maybe it's too deeply buried that we can kind of do what we want to do here indefinitely.

That may or may not be true, but you then go and use these heavy American buffer busters on it and say that doesn't work. Now you've confirmed for Iran that, yeah, no, the facility that they built to pick axes is really just not something the US can get to. And then you've seen some conversation on the U.S. side that Kelp is now looking at deploying the, what's called the Molad, so the mother of all bombs is what it's referred to as like it's a nickname, but these are like really, really high yield financial bombs that kind of burrow in and blow up and they've been used, that one in particular was used to great effect in Afghanistan, but that was a very different situation where it was a lot of these like relatively shallow cave tunnels that are very different than what Iran has what you would really want in the US our soul to get into Big Ass Mountain if you we're gonna do it would be the massive massive ordinance kind of trigger so these are the ones that the U.S. used in that previous round of strikes in, I believe, 2025, when a bunch of B-2 Spirit stealth bombers flew across basically the world without landing from the U.S. over Iran.

They kind of dropped these penetrators in so they would basically they would hit one bomb that would burrow down and then they would send a second bomb through that first bomb hole to like dead even deeper and that did achieve some results the prevailing wisdom on how that actually went is that it more just collapsed tunnels than it really destroyed iran's nuclear facilities so some stuff is destroyed down there but the bigger issue is i'll have to dig out all of the all the things that have been buried the issue when that is the u.s has thought to have a very small number of those bombs still available. I've seen estimates as low as 8 to 10, certainly fewer than 20, according to most of the expert analysis that I've read. So the question then is twofold.

First off, what does it mean for the U.S. to now be extending even more of these munitions when it doesn't have very many to spare? And then two, what does it mean if you extend those munitions and it just doesn't work? We had mentioned way back in the first few weeks of this war how this conflict has really reinforced iran's entire philosophy toward nuclear weapon that it would be useful to have one as a deterrent measure against the u.s and its other adversaries and considering that this war has really confirmed that it kind of does seem like a real unforced error for the u.s to then demonstrate and remove any plausible denied military, but no, it really can't get to some of these H-2A facilities if these strikes on Bayfast Mountain were to go sideways.

Yeah, it really is a limited return that the U.S. would be going after here. Again, so, I mean, I was describing that's the opinion of many in Israeli circles and some more hardliners and stakes as well. But I am personally not of the opinion that this will be either worth it, specifically because of the munitions stockpile.

I mean, we've explained them so much, interceptors and whatnot, that we've discussed quite a bit here on the pod as well as on war fronts. but overall i just i am quite bearish on where this would ultimately go and i think that we would be risking a much more protracted longer term situation if we do go for it yeah i very much agree and that's kind of the other side to this you know at this point that striking deep into a lot is going to cause again another kind of retaliation against the beliefs against the gold states iran does still have lots of them left to escalate here. Certainly, they can double down on Saudi Arabia now that the Houthis have kind of shown new attack patterns and exposed new air defense vulnerabilities. De-salination class still are a way for Iran to really scale up its retaliatory strikes.

Those were threatened a few times over the course of the prior conflict but not really destroyed in any significant numbers and that remains something that i'm not being more than able to do so then i am left wondering whether this is worth kind of the price of retaliation at this point we mentioned the israeli kind of fly over or fly toward operation that happened yesterday. Again, that's the time of recording. It's all the 21st of October in which a whole bunch of Israel warplanes when over attack over Syria and Iraq, you know, to attack Canada and then kind of pull back from the border.

There are a couple of reasons why you would do that. One, you want to kind of signal strength to Iran. You want to show, Hey, we'd like to do this.

Hey, we're practicing, you know, you can get your pilots or, although it's, it's not clear that Israel would really need to do that, but Israeli pilots have become accustomed to flying over Iran and for you to find out the other reason why you would do that is to expose it on interfaces where you want to get close enough so that iran starts kind of lighting up its radar systems and starts tracking these world princes that come in so that then you can identify where those sites are and then in a follow-up strike you can then do a signal i think a lot may be decided now by whether or not Iran responded to that or fell for it, so to speak. Because if Iran did turn off all of its radar and showers, that does kind of lay the foundation for a, another series of precision structures and self letters to have take out the air defense systems that around rely on, and then you've cleared the way again for these much heavier fighter and bomber craft to go in and kind of lay ways to conventional Orion capabilities. That being said, it's not clear to me that Iran would necessarily be unaware of that strategy.

And I don't have any indication on this either way, but I would be very interested to know whether Iran didn't disclose the positions of its air defenses, especially air defenses that it couldn't really relocate quickly, or whether Israel may not have gotten what it wanted from that probing action. Yeah, unfortunately, I think that's going to be something that's so classified that we won't find out about that for a while to come, but I think it leans more towards the latter than the former. At this point, it's pretty clear Iran's ability to stop the Israeli Air Force is essentially zero, they really don't have sophisticated air defenses, what defenses they did have were mostly destroyed both back during Operation Rising Lion in 2025 and Roaring Lion earlier this year.

In both cases, the Israeli Air Force achieved air superiority over essentially every major Iranian city in a matter of 24 hours each time. So really not a stellar performance by the Iranians. Again, this is why they've placed such an enormous emphasis on Kormoros because their otherwise lackluster military performance is certainly compensated for on this front. as well as by the way, the Israel continues to want and buy more and more f 35.

I don't know exactly how many they have currently, but I know that they're in the process of building up to a total of 100 of them, which I don't take over one has a very good chance of shooting them. So overall, I think, definitely something where they were sort of testing. Yeah, just to provide a bit of info there so as of now it was real possessions 48 i30x they had found 32 i thought we for that's in addition to 66 f15s and a little 50 on the way but 107 173 s16s all of those that you just know that off the top of your head, by the way, I only have the I have the list and probably yeah, after a few years in this job, I am never far from the list of what country has what aircraft my other question to you would be who attacks first and when do they attack?

So there's been some discussion back and forth, according to various reports on the issue about whether Israel might launch an attack prior to the US midterms, whether the US will launch an attack prior to the midterms. Neither thing will go away. It seems to me that it would be more likely an Israeli operation early prior to the midterms and then the U.S. coming in afterward, unless there were potentially some large Iranian attack that the U.S. Could then kind of frame as a unify issue or kind of as a political tool I had at the midterms.

I think as an out of sight positively especially because Iranian sources are dedicated to kind of law the u.s. I'll cast in the term elections so that the Impact of the war now contingent. You don't have the trouble insertion Do you anticipate that there's any risk of Israel doing crime in the terms, even if the U.S. doesn't? And then if so, how do you anticipate the fallout from that, looking both for in political terms for the U.S. and also for comfort itself?

So for the next week and a half, we have an interesting series of events. So a few different hypotheticals here. So hypothetical one is that Israel goes at this before or the United States and Israel, or just the United States goes at this before the Israeli elections, Israeli elections being on October 27.

The US midterms are a following week later. So November 3, if, if Israel goes at this, or if the U S initial goes at this before the Israeli election, this would be pretty significant because Israel would, as long as the conflict was big enough, they would likely have to postpone the election. This would be massively controversial in Israel.

We're already seeing opposition leaders, opposition figures. So I'm thinking Yair Lapid and Gadi Eizenkot in particular who have come out swimming against these reports that he wants to return to war. I believe Lapid has outright come out and said that there is no intelligence suggesting that there's any imminent danger.

I don't mean like longer term. I mean like right now that would warrant a pre-election strike. And he's essentially suggested he's potentially doing this just for election stuff, you know, stave off the election ticket down the road.

Doing it from after the Israeli elections, but before the US ones would be particularly strange to me. I don't necessarily think it would be much to gain because Israel will have already voted. Netanyahu has something to gain from delaying the election.

Donald Trump does not, nor does he have much to gain from a renewed return to the conflict here. So if we don't see anything by October 27th, then I think we will probably not see anything until November 4th. Until the 27th, we may, just given that Netanyahu does have something of benefit for if he has any kind of signing offs.

He's really wore him on Exorcist, just posted in our last Emoji last night about Ron not so suggest not so subtly suggesting that there was actual return of concept imminent. And I believe Netanyahu himself posted an AI video of him dancing with Trump on TikTok. You know, so certainly not being very subtle here.

Yeah. My question then, because I don't really know the Israeli political side of it very well. Do you assess that Netanyahu's situation right now is so desperate that he would really seriously need to consider this?

Or is there enough of a chance that he either you know preserves his mandate or reaches some level of coalition that he might not have to do this well so this is a very complicated question because all things israeli politics are never simple when it comes to where he currently stands it sort of gets into what you would mean as so desperate because on the one hand his coalition is not looking like it's going to reach 61 at the same time there's there's sort of a question as to does he actually gain any vote from going back to this because keep in mind there's something like 92 percent of Israelis think that Iran won the first round so if we if we are correct here and saying okay well even if we do have another round it's not really going to change much I don't think many Israelis are going to come around and start seeing this as a victory so you know I'm not really sure that how much is actually going to be gained by it. It will allow Bibi to present himself as continuing to fight the enemy, continuing to stand up for his country, which is popular there. Iran's support for the Islamic State, I would estimate, pulls somewhere around negative 20 in the country.

I think that I can see the logic. I don't necessarily know how it will play out. I also think that it will be seen as politicizing the military, which is not popular there.

The opposition, as I was saying, is already saying that if he goes that route, it will be because of that reason. So I don't think he's going to gain as much as he may think he would. And I still think it's more likely than not, but if we have her turn to strike, she will be absolutely alert.

So it's not before, but all that said just because he does not reach 61 does not mean that he's, or excuse me, his coalition does not reach 61, does not mean that there's no hope here for Likud writ large, because the, somebody has to be PM, you can't not have a PM. So he would stay on as caretaker and if nobody gets to 61, you could be staring down a long period of time in which he's just sort of hanging on with a minority government as well as and the furby kicked us down the road you can start seeing okay well what parties are willing to break off given that there's a very modest 37 of them on the ballot the chess and all of them will surpass the 3.25% threshold to make it into the Knesset but many of them will so if BD can break off even a few of the less hardline anti-Likud parties perhaps after weeks of having no clear majority then you know we could be looking at fast forward yeah that's a really stunning number that you mentioned that even the 90 plus percent of Israelis believe that Iran got the better of the first go around I wasn't familiar with that statistic but that's really telling I think the other thing that I want to watch in this regard both in the U.S. and in Israel, is a response to the latest round of Iranian retaliations, where, yes, it's difficult to justify on the U.S. side, right, and even on the Israeli side, a return to conflict right now as the oppressor, so to speak. Possibly a different story if you can frame Iran as the oppressor right I almost do wonder a bit whether there was any you know not hope necessarily on the on the truth is that any awareness of the possibility that oh you know they're lashing all of these you know saying all these warplanes to kind of throw into the periphery of Iran's air defenses, you know?

Does Iran try to strike the warplanes? Does it use its air defenses and potentially gain some kind of pre-test for retaliation there or some kind of military action? I do wonder whether there will be any effort in the States or Israel to transform this based strikes on ships into that same kind of pre-test, I'm not seeing anything to suggest that right now, but that does feel worth watching.

My only other question for when we move on to a couple other topics would be the involvement of this third u.s carrier strike group which is moving to the region and apparently is going to be used as reinforcements rather than tend to replace it to cycle out one of the two aircraft areas that are in the area now so three aircraft carriers from the u.s in total at the same time on the same adversary, are really an incredible house of traditional force, especially when you add all of the other U.S. and larger Thailand region. Does that suggest to you that the U.S. might be looking to broaden this, if that's the value of it, whether it's ground operations or whether it's kind of a preparation for a more, perhaps a lighter target list for the U.S. than the, perhaps a wider range variety of responses that will happen in anything in that area, do you anticipate the U.S. wanting to escalate? And do you anticipate the presence of that third carrier group being an indicator of that?

I do, yeah. So I think if you had to put me down as like, is something going to happen, and if so, when, I would say yes, and it will be after the midterms. Again, this is sort of crystal ball gazing, but this buildup is not an accident, in my opinion.

Like you said, we're not replacing, we're expanding, and just given everything else that's going on defense sector of Texas, just recently met with that, yeah, himself, that is what, and is now pushing for a return to kinetic strikes. So I think it's just a question of getting through the venture rooms and then returning to some form of conflict. And I wanted to turn to the other conflict in the Middle East as well, where obviously the Kumpi rebels in Yemen are continuing to attack Saudi Arabia at long range.

Most recently today, they hit another airport. They forced the headquarters of Saudi Iraq to order an evacuation. The U.S. Embassy has said it's going to be withdrawing its non-essential staff and families pre-elementally.

So clearly the U.S. anticipates at least continuation, if not expansion, of those strikes. On the other side, though, Saudi Arabia recently has gotten a few extra helping hands. So Egypt in the past week, al-Sisi over there has said that he wants to deploy Egyptian military forces to Saudi Arabia.

This would not be an on-the-ground machine-dance scam, and this would be kind of the best-assist thing in line with what Afghanistan and Turkey are doing. Britain as well has sent a number of typhoon aircraft, So fighter jets, along with an air to air refueler France just yesterday indicated that it will also commit forces to a defense of Saudi territory. So do you see this as a major improvement for Saudi Arabia's positions?

That's just kind of more of the same nod to military support that we've seen from Saudi Arabia's treaty allies. Like how should we interpret this? I definitely think this is more significant than the very lackluster support it's received from all of the Mecca Pacts so far.

Overall, Saudi Arabia has really been a man with few friends on the world stage lately. Despite having decent ties with a lot of countries, it's just very few have been willing to step up and say, yes, sign me up on the fight against the Houthis, which, you know, I mean, they're not even the most, as Houthi evidently can attest to, not even the most militarily sophisticated group in the region. You know, they do have a decent stash of gifts from iran but overall not the not the most cutting edge force but despite that very few have been willing to actually step up and do much anything about it i think because this has reached a point where it's like okay this is continuing to go on no matter what happens.

It has allowed other countries to say, okay, we have to go in and as well as they're able to keep their distance from the issue with Iran. So they're able to go in and say, look, this is not about the Iran war. This is about free shipping, et cetera, et cetera.

So overall I find it hard to see how this would be anything other than a W for Rialto. Yeah, I agree. I think if nothing else, it at least concentrates greater numbers of air defenses in that area, which really can't hurt Saudi Arabia at this point.

Countries have their air defenses at this point. Nobody's really getting any more, any quick timeline. But the UK and France can send it.

But they have Asia, obviously, as its large ground military that it can help with. So this is, I'm sure I help, you know, but the Hufi's lucky set and not the way that I like to say, you know, frame it as they're much more equipped with enthusiasm than with skill. That's not to say they have no skill, but they have much more enthusiasm, that skill.

That being said, they are able to consistently breakthrough Saudi air defense right now I think any support that Saudi air defense can get right now is to go a long way but I do also want to ask you as a resident Israeli politics expert this is the last episode of going to get a chance to record prior to the elections coming next week so before we get there, any final prognosis, any fix, any early inclinations on where those elections are headed? The biggest part of the Israeli elections, because of how many moving parts there are, because of how many different parties, both in Netanyahu's coalition as well as then the opposition, a lot, there's going to be many different facets that have to go right for both of them in order to reach the critical 61 seat threshold to get a majority for Netanyahu's coalition he has to be firing on all cylinders so he's going to need his own obviously liquid party to turn out in droves which you know morale is perhaps not necessarily at an all-time high with them. But unlike with other countries that have a more straightforward system, he will also need big, big turnout from the smaller parties that really do not agree necessarily on much of anything.

So I'm thinking religious Zionism as well as many of the other ones that really span the gamut from morally clued type policies all the way out to Smotrich and whatnot, so he'll need that going for him. And then also, he is sort of in a bind with the Haredi parties. So United Toward Judaism and Shaz both quit, which are the two Haredi parties, both quit his coalition earlier this year over the lack of progress over the draft with Haradim.

So there hasn't been any significant progress here and it's not really even sure what side they'll come down on. They are notoriously willing to negotiate, which with whatever party is willing to work them, they've said they've, they'd be willing to work within Eisencott government. I don't think Eisencott would be willing to work with him with him.

But again, this sort of gets into the dilemma of what does the opposition do and what does the opposition need to do to reach 61? So ultimately it's going to come down to a whole lot of moving pieces and parts there. But we'll have an episode out by the time this goes up or shortly thereafter on home fronts on the complete early election breakdown.

Speaker 2: Now we are going to wrap up the pot a little bit early today but we do want to as usual circle around the table and see what we're each going to be watching for the next week so kyle i'll put it to you first what should we be aware of what should we keep an eye on in the next few days? Well, at this point, it's all Israel all the time until the 27th. We're in the back nine now at this point.

So we're going to have a lot of Israeli coverage coming out on war fronts, on home fronts. and I'm going to be very singularly focused on that until we get a clear direction on where that's going to go. Yeah, and for me, it's going to be more Yemen. By the time this episode is out, we will be either hours away or we will have already released a war fronts episode going in-depth on the siege of the city of Thais that has continued and continued to get worse as the humanitarian crisis reverses.

We're also going to see pretty soon the deployments from the UK and from Egypt starting to really have more of an effect, hopefully, but we're actually seeing how significant those are going to be. And that will just about do it for today's episode of the Middle East Journal table. If you've listened thus far, you are almost certainly listening from fonts.co as one of our premium subscribers.

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