Barbara Sharief

With 11 Democratic candidates now vying to fill the open seat in Florida’s 20th Congressional District, with a Nov. 2 special election primary scheduled, the question of who, if anyone, will advance former Rep. Alcee Hastings’s (D-FL) legacy on Jewish issues remains unanswered, even as a number of contenders have claimed commonalities with the late congressman. At least one candidate appears eager to boost her credentials among Jewish community leaders and pro-Israel advocates who have struggled to parse the crowded race, where no single frontrunner has yet to emerge. Barbara Sharief, a Black Muslim commissioner in Broward County, casts herself as a staunch supporter of the Jewish state, a position she described simply as “common sense” in an interview with Jewish Insider’s Matthew Kassel.

Money flow: Sharief — the only candidate in the crowded race whose campaign site thus far includes an issues section exclusively touting her “support for Israel” — argues strongly in favor of maintaining annual U.S. military assistance to the Jewish state. She also supports recent legislation that would provide Israel with $1 billion in supplemental aid to replenish its Iron Dome missile-defense system after the May conflict with Hamas. Without such aid, “the Middle East will become destabilized very quickly,” Sharief said. “That represents a threat for America, and I don’t think people get that.”

Two-state solution: For her part, Sharief added her belief that calls to further condition military aid to Israel are ultimately unhelpful in engendering the conditions that could lead to a two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. “We already know that the bombs are flying, and we know that they’ve been going on for hundreds of years,” she said. “What we have to do as Americans is provide the aid, keep the Middle East stable and then try to get these people to the table to create a peace treaty and a two-state solution.”

Different view: Sharief vehemently objected to fellow candidate Omari Hardy’s recent comments in support of BDS, charging that his views betray a lack of experience “when it comes to understanding the geopolitics and the dynamics” in the region. She suggested that Hardy had only changed his stance in an effort to court support from the progressive left, though he insists his evolution is authentic. “For me, I am a Muslim-born woman, and I have a completely different opinion,” Sharief said. “BDS, you see, is never going to be successful, number one, because Hitler tried that on the Jews in 1933 and it didn’t work very well. So why is that concept, when we know how horrible it is, still being proffered today? I think it’s wrong.”

Read the full interview with Sharief here.

(L R) Israeli Foreign Minister Yair Lapid, US Secretary of State Antony Blinken and United Arab Emirates Foreign Minister Sheikh Abdullah bin Zayed al-Nahyan take part in a joint news conference at the State Department in Washington.

Secretary of State Tony Blinken warned in unusually blunt terms on Wednesday morning that time is running out for Iran to rejoin the 2015 nuclear deal and that the Islamic Republic has not been engaging in “good faith” with efforts to revive the deal. Should efforts to restore the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) fail, Blinken said the U.S. is “prepared to turn to other options,” Jewish Insider’s Marc Rod reports.

Coming together: Blinken’s comments came during a press conference with Israeli Foreign Minister Yair Lapid and United Arab Emirates Foreign Minister Sheikh Abdullah bin Zayed, following a trilateral meeting among the three officials. Lapid met privately with Blinken later on Wednesday.

Quotable: “Despite the fact that we’ve made abundantly clear we are prepared to return to full compliance with the JCPOA if Iran does the same, what we are seeing — or maybe more accurately not seeing from Tehran now — suggests that they’re not,” Blinken said. “Time is running short because, as we’ve also had an opportunity to discuss together, we are getting closer to a point at which returning to compliance with the JCPOA will not in and of itself recapture the benefits of the JCPOA. With every passing day and Iran’s refusal to engage in good faith, the runway gets shorter.”

Administration trend: Blinken’s comments appear to reflect a growing skepticism in the Biden administration about the JCPOA’s fate. His remarks at the press conference followed comments on Wednesday morning from U.S. Special Envoy for Iran Rob Malley at a Carnegie Endowment for International Peace event in which Malley said the U.S. must “prepare for a world… where Iran doesn’t have constraints on its nuclear program” and “consider options to dealing with that.” In a meeting on Tuesday, Lapid and National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan discussed alternatives to the Iran deal. The issue also came up during the trilateral and bilateral meetings at the State Department on Wednesday.

Across the table: In his own comments, Lapid struck an aggressive tone toward Iran, comparing its nuclear ambitions to the Holocaust. Both Lapid’s father and Blinken’s stepfather were Holocaust survivors. “Secretary of State Blinken and I are sons of Holocaust survivors. We know there are moments when nations must use force to protect the world from evil,” Lapid said. “If the terror regime is going to acquire a nuclear weapon, we must act. We must make clear that the civilized world won’t allow it… Israel reserves the right to attack at any given moment in any way. That is not only our right, it is also our responsibility.”

Read more here.

The Israeli Pavilion at the Expo 2020

A group of yarmulke-clad men in suits and women in elegant dresses waited excitedly just outside the Israeli Pavilion at Expo 2020 in Dubai. As noisy crowds entered the adjacent pavilions of India and Italy, the sounds of an Israeli band warming up to play for the pavilion’s opening rose above the din, writes Rebecca Anne Proctor, who was on the scene for Jewish Insider.

A different look: Visitors entered the main area of the pavilion by walking up a winding walkway built to emulate the form of sand dunes and shaded streets found throughout the Middle East. From a distance, the “dunes” look like they’ve been made from real sand, but a closer look revealed a concrete steel structure topped with sand-colored recycled leather. Like most of Expo 2020, the Israeli Pavilion, which opened last week, is about telling a country’s story, particularly how it sees its past and its future. Atop the zig-zagging mount was an open-steel structure where seven 15-meter-high LED screen gates showed videos of Israel’s cultural richness — from ancient ruins to contemporary dancers, small port towns and enchanting natural landscapes.

Making history: Dozens of blue and white balloons — a nod to the Israeli flag — filled the pavilion’s inner structure. Israel’s Minister of Tourism Yoel Razvozov delivered a few opening remarks, putting the event into perspective. “Many things are happening here for the first time. For the first time in history, the Expo fair is being held in an Arab country. It is also the first time there is an Israeli pavilion in a major fair on Arab soil. It is one of the most sound and robust steps toward cooperation between the United Arab Emirates and Israel in history.”

‘Toward Tomorrow’: The evening concluded on a contemporary note, with guests dancing to the catchy sounds of Hamalgezot, an Israeli band playing traditional Israeli music, followed by Israeli DJ Abass. As attendees celebrated the pavilion’s opening, the large, illuminated sign at the back of the pavilion’s main area glistened amidst the dazzling lights and moving images from the surrounding LED screens. In Aravit script, a font invented by typographer Liron Lavi Turkenich that merges Hebrew and Arabic characters, the sign spelled the phrase: “Towards Tomorrow.”

Read the full story here.

Sheera Frenkel

For Sheera Frenkel, a New York Times reporter and the co-author of a recent best-selling book on the inner workings of Facebook, covering the social media giant was a result of “happenstance.” Now she is a must-follow reporter on the Facebook beat. Last week, Frances Haugen, a former Facebook employee-turned-whistleblower, testified to Congress about how Facebook executives, including CEO Mark Zuckerberg, suppressed internal research demonstrating the harms of the company’s products. Frenkel felt vindicated. “It was, I would say, incredibly satisfying to see the receipts, in a way, for everything we had been told for years,” she said. In conversation with Jewish Insider’s Gabby Deutch, Frenkel talked about what covering authoritarian governments taught her about the social media giant, how to use Facebook responsibly and why she separates her Jewish identity from her reporting.

Still surprising: “It’s still sometimes surprising to see [Facebook executives] justify the fact that they don’t want to hurt their engagement, that they have clear options on the table that could really decrease the amount of misinformation and hate speech, but they don’t opt for them because they’re bad for business. When you put it in black and white like that, it is still surprising, despite my knowing it for years.”

Using Facebook responsibly: “Misinformation intentionally gets people angry or upset. I just think getting people to calm down a minute and realize that Facebook’s algorithms are designed to put emotive content at the top of your newsfeed, so whatever is likely to make you angry or sad or happy is going to be the first thing you see on Facebook. Knowing that, and not letting yourself get riled up, is really important.”

Mideast emotions: “Being a Jewish person online, being a woman online: these are not identities that are easy. On the internet, there is a lot of incredibly vitriolic speech directed at any minority group. It’s sad that for some reason, women are still very much treated as a minority online. Early in my career, because I was covering the Middle East — and people are very deeply emotive about their feelings about the Middle East — I had to develop a tough skin online, because the attacks were so vicious.”

Read the full interview here.