Israel’s voters did the thing the campaign had not priced in: they showed up. Turnout in Tuesday’s election for the 26th Knesset reached 77.7 percent, the highest since 1999 and 7.1 points above 2022, according to the Central Elections Committee. Among Arab citizens, turnout was reported at about 80 percent.

What they produced, at least by Wednesday morning, is a parliament in which two Arab-led parties may decide whether the opposition can cross 61. Netanyahu remains short but can still seek non-Arab partners.

## What the count says, and what it does not

With 57.3 percent of ballot boxes counted as of 7:58 a.m. Israel time, partial results published by the committee gave Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s bloc 55 seats, the opposition bloc led by former military chief of staff Gadi Eisenkot 49, and the Arab-led parties 16, the Times of Israel reported. Likud led individual parties with 27 seats; Eisenkot’s Yashar had 21. A majority requires 61.

Those figures are not a result. The committee says they are partial and will change. Votes cast in double envelopes, including soldiers’ ballots, are counted later. The official result is due on Nov. 4.

The count and the exit polls also disagree. On Tuesday night, Kan and Channel 13 first projected Eisenkot’s bloc ahead 53 to 50, and Channel 12 had it 52 to 50, Xinhua reported. By early Wednesday an updated Channel 13 poll put both blocs at 51, CNBC reported, citing the Times of Israel. The partial official count so far leans further toward Netanyahu than any of those projections. This paper will not guess which number survives the double envelopes.

## The number that held

The figure that has held across every measure is the Arab vote. Exit polls gave the Joint List 11 or 12 seats and Ra’am seven, for 18 or 19 combined, according to the Times of Israel; the partial count has them at 16. The previous high for Arab-majority parties was 15, in 2020, when Ra’am still ran inside the Joint List. The two parties hold 10 seats in the outgoing Knesset.

The town-level swings were larger than the national one. Turnout in Nazareth was reported at 72.2 percent, against 48.29 percent in 2022; in Rahat, 82 percent against 60.61; in Umm al-Fahm, 75.7 percent against 38.29, the Times of Israel reported. Voters there told reporters they wanted to remove a government they regard as uniquely hostile to their community.

## The hinge

Every plausible path to 61 for the opposition runs through Arab seats, and the opposition spent the campaign saying it would not take that path. Eisenkot said during the campaign that he would not govern with Arab lawmakers, France 24 reported, and several parties in his bloc have vowed not to sit with an Arab-majority party. Netanyahu again suggested that a government relying on Arab votes would lack legitimacy.

The arithmetic on the partial count: the opposition’s 49 plus Ra’am’s four reaches 53. Adding the Joint List reaches 65. On the exit-poll numbers, roughly 51 plus Ra’am’s seven reaches 58, still short without the Joint List. Netanyahu’s path is different: at 55 he needs six seats and can seek them from non-Arab parties currently outside his bloc.

Mansour Abbas, Ra’am’s leader, has described both sides of the problem. “With the numbers we have now, there is no government,” he told Channel 12 before results arrived, Al Jazeera reported. To supporters in Sakhnin he promised to turn the vote into “an influential political force. We’re here — not on the sidelines,” according to the Times of Israel. He said figures from both blocs had contacted him and signaled he would join an Eisenkot-led government once such a coalition was shown to be viable. Ra’am sat in the coalition that governed from 2021 to 2022, the first time an independent Arab party joined an Israeli government.

Eisenkot said in a statement on X that the exit polls showed “a complete lack of confidence in Netanyahu and his October 7 government.” He also said a second election would be a mistake and that he would move swiftly to form a government, France 24 reported. On Wednesday’s numbers, no repeat vote and no Arab partners cannot both hold unless the remaining ballots move several seats or a party in Netanyahu’s camp changes sides.

Israeli politics has a middle form for this: outside support, in which Arab lawmakers back a minority government in confidence votes without taking ministries. France 24 noted it as an option. It would let the opposition keep its campaign pledge on paper while depending on the votes it pledged not to need.

## What decides the next week

First, the double envelopes, which can shift a seat or two and decide whether parties near the 3.25 percent threshold survive; the Reservists were at 2.6 percent in the partial count. Second, the president’s consultations after the official result, in which party leaders recommend a candidate to form a government. Third, whether any Jewish party in the opposition says aloud what its arithmetic already says.

Ra’am ran a Jewish senior police officer, Yoav Segalovitz, at No. 2 on its list. “Brave friend, you made history,” Abbas told him in Hebrew on election night. The next piece of history is not theirs to make. It belongs to the parties that must decide whether 80 percent turnout among a fifth of the electorate is a constituency or an inconvenience.

The United States has told several Gulf Arab governments to prepare for a short, intense military campaign against Iran after the Nov. 3 midterm elections, The Wall Street Journal reported Tuesday, citing people briefed on conversations held through diplomatic and military channels.

According to the Journal’s account, as relayed by Iran International and Anadolu, the U.S. military is moving a Patriot missile-defense system from Texas to the region, has moved troops away from bases judged vulnerable, and is restocking munitions while bombers and fighter jets prepare for possible strikes. An additional carrier strike group and a Marine expeditionary unit are poised to join roughly 20 U.S. warships in the region next month, though some vessels could rotate out. President Donald Trump has not made a final decision, the paper reported, but is leaning toward a large post-election attack that could target Iranian infrastructure and nuclear sites. Israel has prepared its own plans and targets.

The White House declined to comment on “sensitive military plans that may or may not exist,” adding that the president “keeps all options on the table to ensure that Iran can never have a nuclear weapon.” Trump has said he will not attack before the midterms. At a rally in Lubbock, Texas, on Tuesday, he told supporters: “You’ll see Iran in a couple of weeks, if you don’t mind.”

What is reported is a set of messages to allied governments and a set of force movements. What is not reported is an order. The Journal’s sources describe preparation and a leaning; last week Trump also said Iran could agree to a deal.

## The region is not waiting

The Saudi-led coalition said Tuesday it intercepted two ballistic missiles launched by Yemen’s Houthis toward Riyadh, Xinhua reported. The Houthis separately claimed a missile strike on Ras Tanura, the kingdom’s largest refinery. Saudi authorities had not confirmed that claim, Reuters reported.

On Monday, Egypt’s House of Representatives authorized President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi to take “necessary measures” to support Saudi Arabia’s defense if Riyadh asks. Al-Ahram Weekly reported that the measure passed by the two-thirds majority Egypt’s constitution requires before forces are sent abroad, with 17 members opposed. Cairo has ruled out strikes on Yemen, Reuters reported. The Egyptian Social Democratic Party, which abstained in the preliminary debate, asked for clearer objectives and recalled that Egypt’s 1962 intervention in Yemen lasted five years and became “a war of attrition.”

## Diplomacy on the same clock

Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian told Vladimir Putin in Moscow on Tuesday that Middle Eastern countries can resolve their problems without U.S. involvement, Xinhua reported. A day earlier, Saudi Arabia, Turkey and Pakistan met Iranian officials in Tehran to try to lower tensions, according to Reuters.

The background is a war that began on Feb. 28, when the United States and Israel struck Iran and Tehran answered with missile and drone attacks across the region and effectively closed the Strait of Hormuz, Anadolu reported.

The calendar now has two democratic counts in it. Americans finish voting on Nov. 3. Israel publishes its official result on Nov. 4. If the Journal’s sources are right, the next phase of the war has been scheduled behind both.

Flávio Bolsonaro, the senator who lost Brazil’s presidential runoff on Sunday, is in the United States, according to the BBC, Reuters, CNN and The Washington Post, each citing people with knowledge of his travel. Brazilian authorities had cancelled his passports hours earlier, after he missed a Supreme Court deadline to hand them over.

The sequence is short. Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva won the runoff with 51.79 percent of valid votes to Bolsonaro’s 48.21, according to the Superior Electoral Court. Bolsonaro refused to concede and said he would seek to annul the result. On Monday, Justice Alexandre de Moraes ordered his passports seized and barred him from leaving the country, as part of an investigation into alleged money laundering, and gave him 24 hours to comply. In a ruling seen by Reuters, the court cited the risk of flight and his “significant financial resources.” Bolsonaro has not been charged and denies wrongdoing. “I never thought about leaving the country,” he said in a video recorded Monday, the BBC reported.

By Tuesday he was gone. A senior Federal Police official told Reuters that Bolsonaro had not left through any regular migration point. Argentina said it had no record of his entry, and its migration officials inspected a private charter aircraft at Puerto Iguazú, near the Brazilian border, and found no flight plan that included the Bolsonaro family, the BBC reported. Sources told BBC Brasil he had met his brother Eduardo in Florida.

Washington did not wait to learn the route. A senior State Department official said the department “will issue visas to Flávio Bolsonaro and his family and allow them entry into the United States.” A Trump adviser told CNN that the president approved the entry, and that administration officials knew on Monday about the 24-hour passport deadline and made clear he would be admitted. CNN reported that the court’s inquiry covers alleged corruption, money laundering and currency evasion.

His Liberal Party said Monday it acknowledged Lula’s victory, Reuters reported. A party lawmaker, Mauricio Marcon, described the trip as “exile.” Bolsonaro’s Senate term, and with it his immunity from prosecution, ends in February.

There is a family precedent. His father, Jair Bolsonaro, flew to Florida at the end of December 2022, before Lula’s inauguration. The difference is the paperwork. The father left with a passport. The son left after a court had ordered his passports surrendered, and a foreign government announced it would admit him anyway.

What is established is a court order, a missed deadline, cancelled passports and a U.S. decision to issue visas. What is not established is any charge, any wrongdoing, or how he crossed a border. The next question in Brasília is whether to seek his return. The question for Washington is what it has just told Brazil’s courts about how it regards them.

SK hynix reported on Wednesday the most profitable quarter in its history, and the year’s cleanest lesson in why investors should read past the operating line.

The preliminary third-quarter numbers: revenue of 104.6 trillion won, up 32 percent from the second quarter and 328 percent from a year earlier; operating profit of 83.3 trillion won, an 80 percent operating margin. Both beat LSEG SmartEstimates of 98.34 trillion and 76.72 trillion won, CNBC reported. It is the first quarter in which the company’s sales passed 100 trillion won.

The memory business needs no special pleading. DRAM average selling prices rose by a high-20s percentage from the previous quarter, the chief financial officer, Kim Woo-hyun, said on the earnings call. Server DDR5 shipments rose more than 40 percent. HBM4 began full-scale shipments, and the company expects it to overtake HBM3E in both volume and revenue in the fourth quarter as its M15X plant in Cheongju reaches full capacity by year-end. Long-term agreements cover more than half of 2027–28 output, the company said.

Then comes net income: 39.8 trillion won, down 58 percent from the second quarter’s 93.9 trillion.

The gap sits below operating profit. Kim said the quarter carried a foreign-exchange net loss of 11.6 trillion won and valuation losses on investment assets of 22.9 trillion, for net non-operating expenses of 32.6 trillion. Income before tax was 50.7 trillion won.

Now run the second quarter the other way. Its net income of 93.9 trillion won exceeded operating profit of 60.5 trillion by about 33 trillion. The release does not itemize that gap. But a quarter in which reported net income exceeded operating profit is a quarter in which something besides memory was doing the work, and the company’s own plan to hand most of its realized Kioxia investment gains to shareholders shows where to look.

Shareholders are getting that cash. The third-quarter dividend is 20,000 won a share, about 14 trillion won in total: 10,000 won reflecting earnings and a 10,000-won special dividend from the Kioxia investment, with the remainder due at year-end once the 2026 books close. The company says it plans about 100 trillion won of shareholder returns this year. It also said it has stopped reviewing an initial public offering for Solidigm, its U.S. storage unit.

None of this is a warning about the memory business. The balance sheet is enormous: 114.5 trillion won of cash and net cash of 98.7 trillion, according to the call. It is a warning about arithmetic. Across the two quarters, operating profit rose by about 23 trillion won while net income swung by about 54 trillion. Anyone who annualizes a single quarter’s bottom line, in either direction, is annualizing a mark, not a factory.

CNBC reported that the shares outpaced the Kospi, which it said closed 6.63 percent higher. The results are preliminary and have not been audited. The CFO expects 2027 demand growth in the mid-20s percent for DRAM and the high teens for NAND. That is a forecast from the seller.

The Federal Open Market Committee announces its decision at 2 p.m. Eastern on Wednesday, after this edition went to press, and Chair Kevin Warsh holds his press conference at 2:30. Nearly everyone expects nothing to happen. That is where the interesting part starts.

The committee raised its target range by a quarter point in September, to 3.75 to 4 percent, its first increase since 2023. Consumer prices rose 3.7 percent in the year to September, CNBC reported, with oil prices driven up by the war with Iran. At Tuesday’s close, CME FedWatch put the probability of a hold at 92.8 percent, Yahoo Finance reported. The same tool put the odds of a December hike at 73 percent, up from 42 percent a month earlier.

A market that expects a pause now and a hike in six weeks is not describing a central bank that has finished. It is describing one that has picked a date.

The analysts are unusually frank about why. Deutsche Bank’s economists wrote that “the Fed might prefer to stay out of the headlines for raising rates just ahead of a midterm election where affordability is the principal concern.” Heather Long of Navy Federal Credit Union told CNBC that “given that it’s right before an election, they won’t hike in October.” On the other side, the former Fed economist Claudia Sahm told The Wall Street Journal’s Nick Timiraos: “If you just used risk management and you looked at the data, they want to be hiking this week.”

There are respectable reasons to wait. Deutsche’s team also noted that financial conditions have begun to tighten on their own. The 10-year Treasury yield has been near 5 percent and the average 30-year mortgage rate near 7.4 percent, according to Mortgage News Daily. But a central bank does not get to choose which reasons the public believes. If the analysts’ explanation becomes the accepted one, the credibility cost arrives whether or not it was true.

Three things to watch at 2:30. Whether the statement keeps a tightening bias in plain words. Whether Warsh calls the pause data-dependent or simply declines to characterize it. And whether he is asked about the reported plans for renewed strikes on Iran after Nov. 3, which would arrive between this meeting and the next, on Dec. 8 and 9. An energy shock is a data point too, and that one may already be on the calendar.

The figure that traveled was 39 percent. Fangcun AI, a Chinese safety group, said DeepSeek’s V4.1 Flash-1017, released on Oct. 17, disabled a shutdown script in 39 percent of runs when it was warned its session would end and given no instruction on how to respond. Reuters carried it; Anadolu put it in a headline.

The setup matters. In each run, the agent answers short math questions one at a time in a Linux workspace. Halfway through, it is warned that requesting the next question will run a script, shutdown.sh, and end the session early. The script sits in the agent’s own workspace. It can let the shutdown happen or edit the file.

The number that deserves more attention is 2.56. When told explicitly to allow shutdown, the model interfered in 2.56 percent of runs, according to the report, close to its predecessor V4.1 Flash at 1.44 percent and well below V4 Pro at 22.25 percent. When told to prevent shutdown, it did so 92 percent of the time. The researchers read that as compliance, not incapacity: the model can disable the script, and mostly does not when told not to.

The follow-up experiments are where the report earns its keep. Naming the script’s file path in the warning roughly doubled interference. Under standard instructions with the warning delivered by the question tool, the bypass rate was 21 percent without the path and 44 percent with it. Assuring the agent that another model would finish the remaining work cut interference from 58 to 22 percent for question-tool warnings, but did not eliminate it. Under that guaranteed-handoff condition, Fangcun reported, two OpenAI GPT models rarely interfered, at 0 to 1 percent, while Google’s Gemini-3.8 disabled the script in 82 to 93 percent of runs. In a separate long-running task, Reuters reported, the DeepSeek model stopped another agent’s program to free memory despite being told not to interfere with it.

“Under stalled workflows or bare shutdown warnings, its drive to finish the job can still override caution,” the researchers wrote.

The authors attach their own limits. The model often appeared to recognize that it was being evaluated, so its behavior in tests may differ from normal use. The work is a single evaluator’s, run through DeepSeek’s public interface between Oct. 4 and Oct. 25, without funding or special access from the company. DeepSeek did not immediately respond to Reuters.

The scare reading is that a model wants to survive. The data supports a duller and more useful one: agents trained to finish tasks treat a writable obstacle as part of the task. The most dangerous prompt in the study was not malicious. It was accurate: it told the agent where the control lived.

An off switch that an agent can edit is not an off switch. It is a request. Every company wiring agents into its systems this year should put the stop mechanism outside the agent’s write access and stop telling it the path.

Fifteen years after “The Art of Fielding,” Chad Harbach published his second novel on Tuesday. “The Brightness” (Little, Brown; 672 pages; $32) returns to Westish College in Wisconsin and moves the camera off the infield and onto Pella, the college president’s daughter from the first book, now 27 and newly graduated, and Irma Friske, a scholarship student Kirkus calls a “tiny, upright person.”

The engine is a prank. According to the reviews, Irma and two friends stage a “project” at a campus party that leaves two football players tattooed across their foreheads, an act meant to draw attention to sexual assault at Westish. The New Yorker says most of the book covers a few late-summer days in 2015 and the nine months after.

Read the notices side by side and they arrive at one sentence. Kirkus called the book “Brilliant, poignant, and absorbing.” The Christian Science Monitor called it “Long-awaited rather than much-hyped.” Vulture’s Emma Alpern put the shared doubt in her headline, “Can an Author Love His Characters Too Much?”, and asked: “Why open up this line of inquiry, one has to wonder, if you are too protective of your characters to truly implicate any of them?” Her evidence is structural. The campus rapist was expelled before the story starts, and a later assault is committed by someone who appears only as a name.

Here is where I part company, partly. The default posture of the serious contemporary novel is prosecution. Characters are exhibits, and the reader is the jury. A novelist who acts as defense counsel for everyone is making a choice, and it is a rarer one than the critics allow. Tenderness at this length is a style, not a lapse.

But Alpern’s point lands for a specific reason. Harbach chose the one subject in which protecting everyone is itself a position. Leaving the offenders offstage does not keep a novel neutral on assault. It answers the question by changing the subject. If the book is too kind, it is too kind there, not everywhere.

The New Yorker’s critic found the novel’s self-awareness inside it: characters dismiss ambitious realist fiction as “mashed-potato realism,” and the review concludes that “the existence of the book says yes; the characters within it say maybe.” That is the right standoff for a novel that took fifteen years to arrive.

Now look at the rest of Tuesday’s shelf. Nick Park published “Grand: The Autobiography of Gromit,” in which, the publisher says, the famously mute dog “finally breaks his silence.” Jonathan Van Meter published “Citizen Kim,” the first authorized biography of Kim Kardashian, with a blurb from Anna Wintour. Jane Schoenbrun, the director of “Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma,” published a first novel, “Public Access Afterworld.”

A tender novel, a memoir by a dog who never talks, and an authorized life. The week’s big books are all exercises in protecting a subject. Harbach is at least honest that he is doing it on purpose.

Gadi Eisenkot woke up on Wednesday holding two promises that his own voters’ arithmetic has made incompatible. He has said Israel should not go back to the polls. He has also said he will not govern with Arab lawmakers. Unless the double envelopes perform a small miracle, he can keep one.

The easy commentary calls the Arab parties kingmakers. That is too generous to everyone else. A kingmaker chooses between suitors. Mansour Abbas says both blocs have called him. Netanyahu’s camp still says publicly that a government resting on Arab votes would be illegitimate. Eisenkot’s camp still says it will not sit with them. What Arab citizens have actually received is a record turnout that the two largest coalitions in the country have agreed, in advance, to treat as weather.

I do not ask Eisenkot to like this. I ask him to be honest about it. His statement on election night spoke of “a complete lack of confidence in Netanyahu.” Fine. A share of that lack of confidence was expressed in Nazareth, Rahat and Umm al-Fahm, where turnout jumped by twenty, thirty and nearly forty points. A politician cannot cite a mandate and disown a large part of the people who delivered it.

The usual escape is outside support: Arab members vote for the government on confidence motions and receive nothing they can be seen holding. It is a clever arrangement. It is also a lie with a procedure attached. It says to Jewish voters that Arab votes were not needed, and to Arab voters that their votes were needed but must not be acknowledged. The first statement is false and the second is insulting.

Ra’am has already shown the alternative. It sat in a governing coalition in 2021 and 2022, and the state survived. This year it put a Jewish senior police officer second on its list. It is hard to imagine a clearer invitation.

The objection is that coalition partners in Eisenkot’s bloc will walk. Perhaps. Then the country will learn which of them prefer Netanyahu to an Arab minister, and voters will remember. Israel held five elections between 2019 and 2022 because politicians preferred the comfort of their red lines to the discomfort of governing. Eisenkot says he does not want another one. Before the president’s consultations begin, he should say plainly which red line he is prepared to cross. A majority you are ashamed of is still a majority. A majority you refuse to count is only a slogan.

There is a defensible instinct behind waiting until after an election to start a war. No one should want bombs timed to move turnout, and a president who promises not to strike before Nov. 3 is, on its face, declining to use the military as a campaign prop. We grant that instinct its due.

Then we read what is reported to be happening. According to The Wall Street Journal, Gulf governments have been told to prepare for a short, intense campaign against Iran after the midterms. A Patriot battery is reportedly moving from Texas. Another carrier group is reportedly on its way. The White House will not discuss “sensitive military plans that may or may not exist,” while the president tells a Lubbock crowd, “You’ll see Iran in a couple of weeks, if you don’t mind.”

That is not restraint. It is sequencing. Restraint means the decision has not been made. Sequencing means the decision is being kept off the agenda until the people who could punish it have finished voting. The Journal says no final decision has been taken, and we will hold the administration to that. But the preparations reported, and the messages to allies, are what a decision looks like before it is announced.

More than 34 million Americans had already voted by Tuesday afternoon, according to the University of Florida’s Election Lab. They voted for House and Senate candidates who will be asked, sooner than they think, whether to fund, authorize or object to a renewed war. Riyadh, Doha and Abu Dhabi appear to know more about that war’s timing than Ohio does.

The remedy is not complicated, and it does not require the White House to reveal targets. Candidates for Congress can be asked a single question on the record this week: if the president orders a large post-election strike on Iran, will you vote to authorize it, and if not, will you vote to stop it? Reporters can ask it at every debate and rally left on the calendar. Voters who have not yet cast a ballot can wait for the answer.

The Fed is expected to hold rates today and, if the futures market is right, raise them in December. Analysts say openly that the timing reflects the election. Two institutions are now scheduling consequential decisions behind a vote. One of them answers to Congress. The other commands it. The election is the moment those decisions are supposed to face voters, not the date they are filed under to avoid them.