Sherrie Mathieson

The Trump administration began mailing $500 rebate checks Wednesday to nearly one million Americans who officials say were overcharged through “user fees” for insurance purchased through the federal Obamacare exchange, healthcare.gov, during the Biden administration. “For years, the Biden administration overcharged you to fund the operation of HealthCare.gov,” President Donald Trump wrote in a letter accompanying the checks, The Hill reported. “That money belongs to hard-working Americans, not the Government, and now I’m returning it to you!” The checks will go out to more than 950,000 Americans who enrolled in Obamacare across 30 states.

Arab Israelis just ruined a favorite lie about Israel. Somewhere, an “anti-Israel” activist is trying to explain why Arab voters deciding Israel’s political future is still apartheid. JOSHUA HOFFMAN OCT 28 Somewhere in London, New York, Paris, or Melbourne, a wannabe “activist” is explaining to a room full of people that Israel is an “apartheid state.” Meanwhile, in Israel, Arab voters may have just become the most important people in the country’s political future. You really couldn’t make this stuff up. As the results emerge from Israel’s national election on Tuesday, the country’s political future looked remarkably uncertain. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s bloc was projected to win 53 seats in the 120-member Knesset (Israeli parliament), while the Jewish-led opposition bloc was projected to win 48. Neither side is close to the 61 seats necessary to form a majority government. And then there were the Arab parties. Israel’s two Arab-led electoral lists — the United Arab List (commonly known by its Hebrew abbreviation Ra’am) and the Joint List — are projected to win a combined 19 seats. If that is confirmed, it would be the largest number of Knesset seats ever won collectively by Arab-led parties in the State of Israel’s history. Think about that for a moment: In a country routinely accused of “apartheid” and “oppression” and “colonialism,” Arab voters could end up determining which Jewish politician becomes prime minister of the Jewish state. Somebody should probably alert the so-called “apartheid” activists. Of course, anyone familiar with Israel beyond the slogans shouted at anti-Israel demonstrations knows that Arab citizens have been voting in Israeli elections since the country’s founding. They elect representatives to the Knesset, organize political parties, challenge government policies, participate in public institutions, and argue about politics with the same intensity as their Jewish neighbors. In fact, some Arab citizens vote for Jewish-led parties, while some Jewish citizens vote for Arab-led parties. I know because, living in Israel since 2013, I’ve personally met Israelis on both sides of that equation. But this election offers something even more interesting than another opportunity to remind people that Arab Israelis can vote. It offers a vivid illustration of how consequential those votes can become. Consider what happened in Arab communities across Israel on Tuesday. As Israelis went to the polls in extraordinary numbers, turnout surged in Arab towns and cities. In Sakhnin, Kafr Qasim, Rahat, and other communities, voters turned out in numbers that could dramatically reshape the country’s political balance. These were not people reluctantly participating in some meaningless democratic performance. They were citizens exercising political power, supporting parties that promised to represent their interests, challenge government policies, and potentially influence the formation of the next government. In other words, they were doing precisely what voters do in a democracy. And judging by the election-night celebrations, they understood the significance of what they had accomplished. At Ra’am headquarters in the Arab city of Sakhnin, supporters erupted in cheers when exit polls projected seven seats for their party. Its leader, Mansour Abbas, promised to turn that electoral strength into political influence. Yet perhaps the most fascinating moment of the evening came from someone who, until recently, might have seemed an unlikely person to address an Arab party’s election-night celebration: Yoav Segalovitz. Segalovitz is Jewish. He is a Zionist. He is a former member of the Knesset and a former senior officer in the Israel Police, once the head of Lahav 433, known as the “Israeli FBI.” He also served in the reputable Paratroopers Brigade during his IDF service. And in this election, he ran as the number-two candidate on Ra’am’s electoral list, headed by Abbas, an Arab Muslim. Yes, you read that correctly. A Jewish Zionist former police commander ran for the Israeli parliament on the list of an Arab-led party with roots in the Islamic Movement. Try fitting that into an “apartheid” slogan. Speaking in Hebrew to the overwhelmingly Arab audience at Ra’am headquarters, Segalovitz declared: “Arabs, Jews, Christians, Druze, Circassians — Israelis. We won’t stay on the side, and I’m with you one hundred percent.” That sentence captures something about Israel that much of the outside world either does not understand or refuses to acknowledge. Israel is a Jewish state, but it is not a country inhabited exclusively by Jews. Its citizens include Muslims, Christians, Druze, Circassians, and people from an extraordinary variety of ethnic, religious, cultural, and national backgrounds. Among Jewish Israelis themselves are families with roots in Europe, North Africa, the Middle East, Ethiopia, Central Asia, and elsewhere. An Arab Muslim politician can lead a party whose second-ranked candidate is a Jewish Zionist. That party can compete against other Arab parties, Jewish religious parties, secular parties, Right-wing parties, Left-wing parties, and every ideological combination imaginable. It is difficult to imagine a more striking rejection of the simplistic picture so often painted of Israel abroad. There is another irony here: The Arab parties are not merely competing for a symbolic presence in the Knesset. They are competing for actual influence over Israeli government policy. Ra’am, in particular, has pursued a pragmatic strategy of parliamentary cooperation, arguing that participation in government can produce tangible improvements for Arab citizens. This is hardly theoretical. In 2021, Ra’am became the first independent Arab party to formally join an Israeli governing coalition, helping bring to power a government led by the Right-wing Jewish politician Naftali Bennett and later by centrist Yair Lapid. An Arab Muslim party helped govern the Jewish state under a Jewish nationalist prime minister. And now, five years later, Arab parties may once again occupy a pivotal position in Israeli politics. Whether that actually produces a governing coalition is another question. Several Jewish-led opposition parties remain deeply reluctant to form a government with Arab-party participation, particularly after the trauma of October 7th and the wars that followed. The ideological differences are substantial, and neither side can simply assume the other will cooperate. The Arab parties could potentially support a minority government from outside the coalition, negotiate political concessions, or find themselves excluded from the eventual governing arrangement. But none of those possibilities changes the central point: Their votes, their elected representatives, and their political decisions could have enormous consequences for the country’s future. The increasingly popular habit of treating every Arab person between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea as though they occupy the same legal and political position is not serious analysis. It erases the experiences and political agency of millions of Arab citizens of Israel. And it produces some rather embarrassing contradictions. One suspects the nuances here are a little too complicated for a protest placard. So much international commentary about Israel, including in mainstream media and academic circles, treats Israeli society as a cartoon. Jews on one side, Arabs on the other. Powerful “oppressors” versus powerless “victims.” An entire country reduced to two supposedly homogeneous populations locked in permanent confrontation. Actual Israel is considerably more complicated, considerably more diverse, and considerably more interesting. Arab Israelis are not a single political constituency. Some are religious conservatives, others secular pragmatists. Some identify primarily as Palestinians, others emphasize their Israeli identity, and many hold multiple identities simultaneously. Some want Arab parties to participate in Zionist-led coalitions, while others oppose such cooperation. They disagree about religion, economics, security, national identity, and the best way to advance their communities. They are not political props in somebody else’s morality play. They are citizens with their own priorities, disagreements, ambitions, and strategies. That is what makes this election so revealing. Israel’s Arab citizens did not have to convince foreign activists to speak for them. They went to the ballot box and spoke for themselves, potentially giving their political representatives the opportunity to demand concessions, influence legislation, support or prevent the formation of a government, and help shape the next chapter of Israeli political life. Meanwhile, the world’s self-appointed experts on Israel will undoubtedly continue explaining why none of this counts. There is something comical about the contrast. In universities and on social media, people will keep slandering Israel with the labels of “apartheid” and “oppression” and “colonialism.” In Israel itself, Jewish politicians may soon be spending their days negotiating with Arab politicians because they cannot form a government without their buy-in. The country being described abroad and the country actually conducting an election scarcely seem to be the same place. Israel does not need to be portrayed as a utopia to be recognized as a democracy. Its disagreements, inequalities, political maneuvering, ethnic tensions, and dysfunctional coalition negotiations are part of the messy reality of a country in which millions of people with competing interests participate in public life. Its democracy is not demonstrated by the absence of conflict, but by the ability of its citizens to contest power through elections, representation, and political negotiation. And on Tuesday, Arab Israelis sent an uncomfortable message to the rest of the world: In Gaza and the West Bank, Arabs no longer have the opportunity to vote, but in Israel, they might just decide who will be next to run the Jewish state

Democratic operatives reportedly worked with Alaska Democratic U.S. Senate nominee Mary Peltola to recruit people named Dan Sullivan to “stack the ballot” and confuse voters wanting to vote for incumbent GOP Sen. Dan S. Sullivan, according to a New York Times report. Alaska uses rank-choice voting, which lets the top four vote-getters in the primary advance to the general election. If no candidate receives an outright majority in the general election, voters’ second-choice selections are factored in until someone reaches over 50 percent of the tally. The New York Times reported that in the summer of 2025, a staff member for former U.S. Rep. Peltola received instructions from campaign aides to find as many people named Dan Sullivan on the Alaska voting rolls as possible to recruit to run for Senate. Advertisement - story continues below “The plan worked. This spring, a retired teacher from a tiny fishing village along the Alaska Panhandle, reachable only by air and sea, announced his candidacy for Senate. His name was Dan J. Sullivan,” the Times said. He received about 2.5 percent of the vote in August’s primary and has advanced to the general election. Even a small bleed-off of votes could make the difference in Sen. Sullivan being re-elected in his tight race with Peltola. Advertisement - story continues below The Times noted, “The Peltola campaign has repeatedly denied any involvement in his candidacy. But The Times has found, based on interviews and text messages, along with documents prepared for a potential lawsuit against the campaign, that not only did Ms. Peltola’s team work with people trying to recruit Mr. Sullivan to run for Senate, but the effort was much broader. The group worked to coax other would-be spoilers into the race, to dilute the incumbent’s support and help catapult the Democrat to victory.” Gerald Heikes, who is listed as a Republican on the ballot, was also recruited into the race. Elisa Rios, Peltola’s former campaign manager and longtime aide, who was fired in August amid a staff shakeup, told the Times, “Alaskan voters need to know.” Advertisement - story continues below Rios said that Peltola, who was Alaska’s sole U.S. House member from September 2022 to January 2025, was not directly involved in recruiting people, but she was “definitely aware” of the operation, which was called the “ballot composition project.” “It also involved the Peltola campaign’s lawyers, as well as senior aides at the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee, which directs the party’s campaign strategy in Senate races across the country,” the Times said. The operation had its desired effect, leaving Peltola as the only Democrat on the ballot. Related: Trump DOJ Sues to Block Alaska Senate Certification if GOP Loses Over Ballot Confusion Her campaign said in a statement to the Times, “The Alaskans for Mary campaign has no involvement with either Sullivan campaign and did not recruit any candidates into the race.” The DSCC also denied involvement. However, the news outlet noted, “This article is based on interviews over the past two months with 12 people who participated in or were told of the plan, or were would-be candidates that the team tried to recruit. The Times also obtained dozens of text messages that provided updates on the progress of the effort. The reporting included the extensive interviews with Ms. Rios, during which she shared details of the operation.” Advertisement - story continues below “Last week, as The Times prepared to publish this article, Ms. Rios, who had been planning to file a wrongful termination lawsuit against the Peltola campaign, contacted The Times and said she wanted to take back her previous statements,” the Times said. But they never agreed that the interviews were off the record or on background, and “Ms. Rios’s interviews were consistent with The Times’s other reporting. She has not filed a lawsuit against the campaign.” One possibility is that some agreement had been reached. The Department of Justice filed a lawsuit in federal court in Alaska to block state officials from certifying the results of the U.S. Senate race if Republican Sen. Dan Sullivan loses next month. The complaint argues that the presence on the ballot of another candidate named Daniel J. Sullivan is a purposeful attempt to mislead voters and thwart the will of the electorate. “Given the substantial likelihood that the inclusion of Daniel J. Sullivan will confuse or mislead voters looking to cast a vote for Senator Sullivan, and thus distort the will of Alaskan voters, there is a substantial likelihood that a certification of the election will reflect an electoral process that lacked integrity,” it said.