Daily Kickoff
👋 Good Tuesday morning!
President Joe Biden signed the $1 trillion infrastructure bill into law on Monday afternoon in a ceremony on the White House lawn.
Attendees included Second Gentleman Doug Emhoff, Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen, Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas, Attorney General Merrick Garland, Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY), Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti, Colorado Gov. Jared Polis, Sens. Richard Blumenthal (D-CT), Jon Ossoff (D-GA), Jacky Rosen (D-NV), Ben Cardin (D-MD), Reps. Debbie Wasserman Schultz (D-FL), Josh Gottheimer (D-NJ), Sara Jacobs (D-CA), Andy Levin (D-MI), Jamie Raskin (D-MD), Brad Schneider (D-IL), California Assemblyman Jesse Gabriel, White House Jewish Liaison Chanan Weissman, Rabbi Jonah Pesner, Joel Rubin, Sheila Katz, Nathan Diament, Elana Broitman and Susie Stern.
Sen. Patrick Leahy (D-VT), the longest-serving current U.S. senator, announced that he will not run for reelection in 2022. Sen. Patty Murray (D-WA) is expected to take over the top Democratic spot on the Senate Appropriations Committee.
Leahy’s retirement also sets up Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-CA) to become president pro tempore of the Senate — the third position in the presidential line of succession — if Democrats keep their Senate majority.
Mike Herzog, Israel’s new ambassador to the U.S., officially assumed office yesterday, replacing Ambassador Gilad Erdan, who will continue serving as Israel’s ambassador to the U.N. Herzog arrived in Washington on Friday and hosted the annual conference of Israeli consuls general in the U.S. He dedicated his first day on the job to meetings with embassy staff, according to an embassy spokesman.
In Jerusalem, U.S. Ambassador to the U.N. Linda Thomas-Greenfield met with Israeli Prime Minister Naftali Bennett, President Isaac Herzog, Foreign Minister Yair Lapid and Transportation Minister Merav Michaeli on Monday.
In her meeting with Bennett, the two discussed U.S.-Israel ties, their commitment to battling anti-Israel bias at the U.N. and Iranian aggression in the region, according to a readout from the U.S. Mission at the U.N. Bennett lauded Thomas-Greenfield for “sounding a fair and supportive voice in a place that is extremely biased against Israel.”
In her discussions with Lapid, Thomas-Greenfield reaffirmed the Biden-Harris administration’s commitment to strengthening and supporting the Abraham Accords and normalization agreements with Arab nations and reiterated the U.S. position on preserving a two-state solution. With President Herzog, the ambassador discussed efforts to combat antisemitism and promote Holocaust education globally, and with Michaeli she spoke about transportation and infrastructure, advancing gender equality and combating violence against women, and shared strategic challenges facing Israel and the U.S.
In Washington, Israeli Deputy Foreign Minister Idan Roll met yesterday with Deputy Secretary of State Wendy Sherman as part of his debut visit to the U.S. “It was a pleasure to meet with Israeli Deputy Foreign Minister Idan Roll today to discuss the strong partnership between the United States and Israel, our commitment to Israel’s security, and the need to take steps to improve both Israeli and Palestinian lives,” Sherman tweeted. Roll’s office said the two discussed regional security in the Middle East, Iran, Israel’s normalization agreements with Arab countries and the possibility of expanding them.
Roll also met with leaders from AIPAC and attended an NBA game between the Washington Wizards, with Israeli forward Deni Avdija, and the New Orleans Pelicans.
rocket power
Surprising observers, U.S. Army tests Iron Dome in Guam

(Photo by JACK GUEZ/AFP via Getty Images)
The U.S. Army announced last month that it would temporarily send one of its two Iron Dome missile-defense batteries to Guam for testing, a move that has baffled some observers, who say it would be better suited for deployment in a combat zone like Iraq or Syria, Jewish Insider’s Marc Rod reports.
Questions: “The Iron Dome system is one of the most capable systems in the world for what it was designed to, but given the threats to Guam, it’s not the first place I would have sent it,” Bradley Bowman, the senior director of the Center on Military and Political Power at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies (FDD) told Jewish Insider. “A deployment for Iron Dome where you’re not integrating it and you’re not conducting a live fire reduces the utility of the deployment.”
Inside the decision: Iron Dome has been deployed — to great success — in Israel for the past decade to intercept short-range threats from Israel’s neighbors to populated areas. But the situation in Guam, which faces longer-range threats from China, is very different from Israel. The Army purchased two Iron Dome batteries at Congress’s direction in 2019. The current Guam deployment appears to largely be an attempt to fulfill congressional requirements enacted in National Defense Authorization Acts in 2019 and 2021, to deploy an “interim” cruise-missile defense system and to deploy the Iron Dome batteries by the end of this year.
From the Pentagon: “The 2019 National Defense Authorization Act required the deployment of [an] interim cruise-missile defense system to an operational theater no later than the end of 2021,” Army spokesperson Jason Waggoner told JI, adding that the system is being deployed “to fulfill those NDAA requirements, test the capabilities of the system and further train and refine the deployment capabilities of air defenders.”
Other options: “I just don’t think it’s the right system for Guam. I don’t think there’s a real rocket and mortar threat to Guam right now,” retired Rear Adm. Mark Montgomery, the senior director of FDD’s Center on Cyber and Technology Innovation, told JI. “There is probably a future in Iron Dome where they could be useful [in Guam], but right now… it’s not the appropriate system.” Montgomery added that there are other theaters where Iron Dome could be more useful, naming Iraq, Syria and the United Arab Emirates, where U.S. forces are regularly under threat from drones and missiles launched by Iranian proxy forces.