PROGRAMMING NOTE: Apologies but no voiceover tonight. Those who need assistance can use the text-to-voice function in the Substack app.
TODAY IN HISTORY
November 4, 1979: The Iran Hostage Crisis begins when a group of Iranian students storms the American embassy in Tehran and takes 66 US citizens hostage. They would hold 52 of those hostages for the next 444 days, shaping both the 1980 US presidential election and the course of the Iranian Revolution in the process. Revolutionary leader Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini used the embassy seizure and hostage crisis to outmaneuver potential opponents within the broader revolutionary movement and ensure that his conception of the “Islamic Republic” would emerge.
November 4, 1995: Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin is assassinated by a right-wing Israeli radical named Yigal Amir. Rabin’s murder is often seen as the reason for the failure of the Oslo peace process, which he’d begun a couple of years earlier with Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat. Oslo’s internal flaws probably doomed it to failure anyway, but Rabin’s killing did hasten the shift of Israeli politics to the right and led indirectly to Benjamin Netanyahu’s first stint as prime minister.
MIDDLE EAST
LEBANON
According to the Lebanese Health Ministry an Israeli military (IDF) drone strike killed one person and wounded another in Nabatieh province on Wednesday. Israeli officials claimed that they “struck two suspects who were observing IDF soldiers.”
