Abdul el Sayed, A Fierce Critic Of Israel Running For Power In USA

 Nadene Goldfoot                                                

His importance is that he is a young progressive Democrat, El-Sayed defeated U.S. representative Haley Stevens in the 2026 Michigan Democratic Senate primary.  Dr. Abdulrahman Mohamed "Abdul" El-Sayed  born October 31, 1984) is an American epidemiologist, public health administrator, academic and politician who is the Democratic nominee in the 2026 United States Senate election in Michigan.  He faces Republican nominee Mike Rogers in the general election. If elected, El-Sayed would be the first Muslim member of the U.S. Senate. Born and raised in southeast Michigan, El-Sayed graduated from the University of Michigan and was a Rhodes Scholar at the University of Oxford, where he earned a doctorate in public health. He then earned his medical degree from Columbia University and became an assistant professor of epidemiology at the Columbia University Mailman School of Public Health. He was the executive director of the Detroit Health Department from 2015 to 2017, and from 2023 to 2025 he served as director of the Wayne County Department of Health, Human & Veterans Services.

In 2026, El-Sayed said the US should not fund foreign militaries at all, and in particular he identified Israel, Egypt, Jordan, and Saudi Arabia.

 Does he have a good chance?  

 The more mature Michael Joseph Rogers (born June 2, 1963) is an American politician and former FBI agent who served from 2001 to 2015 as the U.S. representative for Michigan's 8th congressional district. A member of the Republican Party, he chaired the United States House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence from 2011 to 2015.  Rogers is a longtime supporter of Israel and was aligned with AIPAC during his congressional tenure. In August 2025, he defended Israel's right to defend itself and criticized opposition to its conduct in the Gaza war. Rogers has longstanding ties to pro-Israel lobbying groups, including AIPAC, and attended four AIPAC-hosted fundraisers in Los Angeles in August 2026 while his allies explored ways for the organization and its donors to support his campaign without publicly highlighting AIPAC's involvement.

Israel

In 2026, El-Sayed was widely described as "a fierce critic of Israel". He has criticized US military funding to Israel, AIPAC, and Israeli influence in US politics. El-Sayed has said that his criticism of Israel should not be conflated with hostility toward Judaism or the Jewish people, whom he "love[s] and revere[s]" based on his experience with Jews in Michigan.

On a January 2024 podcast, El-Sayed called the war in the Gaza Strip a genocide and called for a ceasefire. In a May 2026 TIME interview, he asked: "If you can't call it what it is, which is a genocide, then how are you going to stand up to Donald Trump? How are you going to stand up to pharma CEOs?" In April 2026, El-Sayed said in a CNN interview: "Killing tens of thousands of people makes you pretty damn evil. It's not how evil is this one versus that one. Hamas: evil. Israeli government: evil. We can say both."

El-Sayed has said he recognizes Israel's right to exist, but not its right to be an explicitly Jewish state. He has called Israel an ethnostate, saying, "I don't believe in ethnostates, and I certainly don't believe that our country is responsible to sustain ethnostates."El-Sayed supports "self-determination for Palestinians and Jewish Israelis alike".

^{Jews have gone through art least 3,000 years of distrust of those around us who were not Monotheist, but Poly-}

^{They would not accept us as full citizens, putting us in the 2nd class or worse.} 

                                                                          Iran war

El-Sayed has attributed the 2026 Iran war to AIPAC's influence in US politics. AIPAAC stands for American-Israel-Public Affairs -Committee. Jews here and in Israel are like those long ago living in Babylon and Palestine at the same time;  we have this Jewish connection;  like our navel.  Call one a name and it hurts all of us.  He called Israel a "rogue state" and said the U.S. should "stop funding the Israeli military unilateral blank checks".

In October 2026, El-Sayed discussed the war in interviews with Fox News and NBC News. He called the war illegal and said it did not increase American security and had prevented the U.S. from transporting oil and gas through the Strait of Hormuz. El-Sayed also said that Israel had dragged the U.S. into a war aimed at expanding Israel's borders. He said the U.S. had paid $2.8 billion to buy 2,000-pound bombs for a foreign government in September and that he would prefer to spend the money on American schools and infrastructure.

El-Sayed was born and raised in southeast Michigan, and lives in Ann Arbor with his wife, Sarah Jukaku, whom he married in 2006, and their two daughters. He is Muslim. His father-in-law, Tayeb Jukaku, is a nephrologist, and is tied for the top individual donor to the main PAC supporting El-Sayed's Senate campaign, having given $300,000; according to the Washington Report on Middle East Affairs, Tayeb Jukaku served as president of Michigan's chapter of the Council on American–Islamic Relations (CAIR) and he remains on its board of directors as of 2026,

My Seven Levels of Love

 Nadene Goldfoot                                         

Love Story(1970) is a classic American romantic drama movie directed by Arthur Hiller and starring Ali MacGraw and Ryan O'Neal:  Oliver Barrett IV, a wealthy Harvard law student from an aristocratic family, falls in love with Jenny Cavilleri, a sharp-witted music student from a working-class background. Despite his father cutting him off, the couple marries and builds a life together. Their devotion is tested when Jenny faces a terminal illness,     

Richard Schwartz and Jacqueline Olds know a lot about love. These Harvard Medical School (HMS) professors and couples therapists study how love evolves and, too often, how it collapses.

They have also been happily married for nearly four decades.

Love may well be one of the most studied, but least understood, behaviors. More than 20 years ago, the biological anthropologist Helen Fisher studied 166 societies and found evidence of romantic love—the kind that leaves one breathless and euphoric—in 147 of them. This ubiquity, said Schwartz, an HMS associate professor of psychiatry at McLean Hospital in Belmont, Mass., indicates that “there’s good reason to suspect that romantic love is kept alive by something basic to our biological nature.”

Love relies heavily on a complex network of brain chemistry and neurobiology, though defining it purely as a simple reaction leaves out human choice and psychology.When people experience romantic attraction and love, specific chemical and neural systems activate in the brain:  

Dopamine: Floods the brain's reward circuits (like the caudate nucleus and ventral tegmental area), driving pleasure, focus, and intense cravings.
Norepinephrine & Adrenaline: Cause physical sensations like a racing heart, sweaty hands, and butterflies.
Serotonin: Levels often drop during early romantic obsession, which correlates with fixated or recurring thoughts about a partner.
Oxytocin & Vasopressin: Released by the hypothalamus to foster deep trust, security, intimacy, and long-term pair bonding.

So, when we say  the words,  "love you," what are we saying ?  A strong, deep emotion of affection, care, and attachment. According to the Merriam-Webster Dictionary, love is a strong affection for another person based on 1. kinship, 2. personal ties, 3. sexual attraction, or 4. deep admiration.  You can feel 2,3,and 4 for the one person.  

So it seems there are different levels of love:  

1.  To Honor your father and mother is to also love them;  Interpersonal Affection: Warm attachment or deep care felt for family members, friends, pets,   Trust is built in a baby the moment it is born between mother and child for warmth and food.  Any event throwing this off may break that feeling of being able to trust people.  Wars do things like this;  to break the trust.  The treatment during childhood-what kinds of love being displayed, also build the same view into the child.  

2. Friends, Personal ties:  Special long time people in childhood, long term friends:  Active Choice and Commitment: Viewed by many philosophers and psychologists—such as through the Greater Good Science Center—not just as a passive feeling, but as a deep, unselfish commitment to another person's well-being.

3. Pets:  Altruism and Compassion: Self-giving concern, kindness, and empathy extended toward neighbors, communities, or all of humanity.

4. Strong physical attraction :  This comes first;  all else forgotten about, this gets things going;  sometimes as the only thing...   



                              Golda , Golda Mabovitch, before 1910 at age 12

5  Romantic partners.  Question:  What can we view as a Romanic Partner?  Here's where the different levels show up.  A romantic partner is a person with whom someone shares a mutually recognized social, emotional, and often physical relationship built on courtship-a  big one, affection, and commitments. In interpersonal relationships, what "counts" during courtship is anything that tests, proves, or builds long-term compatibility with the explicit intention of marriage. Because courtship is distinct from casual dating, the focus shifts from superficial entertainment to deliberate character assessment and future planning.  Here at age 12, girls are into romantic stories.  

Around 1913, Golda  Mabovitych  began dating Morris Meyerson, a sign painter and socialist.




Golda Meir (previously Meyerson; née Mabovitch; 3 May 1898 – 8 December 1978) was the prime minister of Israel from 1969 to 1974. She was Israel's first and, to date, only female head of government. 

On 24 December 1917, Meir and Meyerson married. However, Meir's precondition for marriage was to settle in Palestine. She had intended to make aliyah (immigration to Israel) straight away, but her plans were disrupted when all transatlantic passenger services were canceled due to the entry of the United States into the First World War. She then threw her energies into Poale Zion activities. A short time after their wedding, she embarked on a fund-raising campaign for Poale Zion that took her across the United States.

 I think this is what happened to her marriage:  She worked so hard in her politics of running the government of Israel with her party that she forgot she had a husband and didn't give him the attention and affection he needed.  They had a child together. Perhaps Morris forgot how important the birthing of Israel was to Golda, too, and they did not even try to share this interest of hers.  This is not known.

 "They married on December 24, 1917, and remained married until his death in Jerusalem on 25 May 1951. She never remarried. Despite never divorcing, the couple grew apart over the course of the marriage. When Meir took her children with her to the United States in the 1930s, Morris stayed behind in Jerusalem.^"

Meir had two children. Her son, Menachem, was born in Jerusalem in 1924 and died on 14 December 2014 in Tel Aviv. He was a professional cellist who studied at the Israel Conservatory and Manhattan School of Music. ^Her  daughter Sarah was born on 17 May 1926 and died on 30 January 2010 in Revivim, 

6  Romantic Passion: Strong physical and emotional attraction ; Seems to be the most important in most partnerships, and why we have so many divorces, too. Example with Golda Meir.   
7. Romantic Passion plus:  Strong physical and emotional attraction combined with devotion or tenderness toward a partner.
Opinions are mixed regarding whether love is purely an involuntary chemical reaction, a personal emotion, or a conscious daily choice involving trust and mutual growth.  

Resource:
Harvard Medical School

Golda, autobiography,
Wikipedia
https://hms.harvard.edu/news-events/publications-archive/brain/love-brain

Israel's Party System Shown In Shifting Voting Pattern

 Nadene Goldfoot                          

    You are looking at a small town called Nof Ha Galil in Samaria (more known as West Bank) 

This map shows the distinction between Judea and Samaria with Nazareth North of Jerusalem on the border of Nazareth in the Galilee.  

                           Nazareth, ancient city's Water Dept.:  method, get your own

Nof HaGalil is a city located in northern Israel in the Lower Galilee region, directly bordering the Arab city of Nazareth.  Nof HaGalil (originally founded as Nazareth Illit) began development in late 1956, with the first dwellings completed in September 1956 and the first residents arriving in December 1956. It was formally established and recognized in 1957

                                     From Nof HasGalil looking down on Galilee

Nof HaGalil is a city in the Northern District of Israel with a population of 45,805.

Nof HaGalil was founded in 1957 as Nazareth Illit (Hebrew: נָצְרַת עִלִּית, romanized: Natzrat Ilit; Arabic: الناصرة العليا, romanized: An-Nāṣira al-‘ulyā, lit. 'Upper Nazareth'), it was planned as a Jewish town overlooking the city of Nazareth and the Jezreel Valley. In 1963, it was declared a local council, and in 1974, it formally gained the status of a city. Following the collapse of the Soviet Union, the city saw a large influx of Jewish immigrants from the former Soviet republics, which doubled the city's population and made it one of the centers of Russian Jewish culture in Israel.Nof Hagalil also has a significant Israeli Arab community.

Initially the city was referred to as the "Jewish neighborhood" of Nazareth, then as Kiryat Natzeret. The name Nazareth Illit (Upper Nazareth) was adopted in 1958. In 1961, Nazareth Illit was recognized as a municipal local council. In 2019 the city was renamed Nof HaGalil (Hebrew: נוֹף הַגָּלִיל, lit. View of the Galilee).  That was the 5th name change.  

According to Central Bureau of Statistics data from the end of 2024, approximately 47% of Nof HaGalil's residents are Jewish and 39% are Arab, including approximately 23% Christians and 16% Muslims.

Need to know:  The Joint List (Arabic: القائمة المشتركة, romanized: al-Qaʾimah al-Mushtarakah; Hebrew: הָרְשִׁימָה הַמְּשֻׁתֶּפֶת, romanized: HaReshima HaMeshutefet) is a political alliance of Arab-majority political parties in Israel. The current Joint List reestablished in 2026 by Hadash, Balad and Ta'al adheres to a left-wing and progressive platform. Originally it included the Islamist Ra'am party ahead of the 2015 election, but the original Joint List was dissolved in 2019 and 2021 due to Ta'al and Ra'am withdrawing, respectively,  

The results of the elections to the 26th Knesset reveal a significant shift in voting patterns in Nof HaGalil: The Joint List has become the city's largest party, winning nearly one-third of the valid votes and overtaking Likud, which led in the previous elections.

According to Central Elections Committee data, the Joint List received 8,216 votes in Nof HaGalil, representing 31.65% of the valid ballots. Likud finished a distant second with 5,531 votes, or 21.31%.

In third place was Yisrael Beytenu, led by Avigdor Liberman, which received 3,564 votes, representing 13.73%. Ra'am finished only eighth, with 936 votes, or 3.61%, approximately 20 votes fewer than Otzma Yehudit, led by Itamar Ben Gvir.

Now, will their city plans for Nof HaGalil carry through, I wonder?  They sound terrific.  In 2021, seven housing projects were under construction in Nof HaGalil. Construction has begun on the Haifa–Nazareth Light Rail which will pass through Nof HaGalil, with 7 stations planned throughout the city. The development of a large municipal park is nearing completion. It includes a petting zoo, an ecological lake, a planetarium, an astronomical observatory, a skating rink, an extreme zip-line course, a musical park, a botanical garden, and an amphitheater. A new government complex is also under construction and there are plans for the expansion of three commercial centers and a hi-tech park.

According to [reliable sources], although the city's Arab population has increased in recent years, the municipality has not approved the construction of churches, mosques, or public Arabic-speaking  schools.   ^{Usually in other countries,; such places are paid for by that minority group themselves.}