Daily Kickoff
👋 Good Tuesday morning!
National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan met on Monday with Yousef Al Otaiba and Reema bint Bandar Al Saud, respectively the Emirati and Saudi ambassadors to the U.S., and “reiterated the United States’ commitment to the security of both the UAE and Saudi Arabia” following last week’s Houthi drone strike that killed three civilians in Abu Dhabi.
Nine Senate Republicans introduced a bill to impose new terrorism sanctions on the Houthis and redesignate the Iranian-backed militia group as a terrorist organization.
Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) introduced the bill, joined by Sens. Tom Cotton (R-AR), Ben Sasse (R-NE), Roger Marshall (R-KS), Thom Tillis (R-NC), Bill Hagerty (R-TN), Jim Inhofe (R-OK), John Barrasso (R-WY) and Marco Rubio (R-FL).
In a statement, Cruz blamed the Biden administration’s decision to lift terrorism sanctions on the Houthis for “caus[ing] Iran to escalate its aggression across the region.”
PAC see, PAC do. A month after AIPAC announced the formation of its first PAC and Super PAC, J Street revealed yesterday it is launching J Street Action Fund and J Street Grassroots Action to focus on independent expenditures. “[W]ith groups to our right increasingly spending millions to push candidates towards more hawkish and conservative positions, the Action Fund will be a critical new tool of our work,” J Street’s president, Jeremy Ben-Ami, said in a statement.
making history
In a first, an official Holocaust Remembrance Day event in Egypt

Tad Stahnke, international outreach director of the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum
Egyptian officials, American scholars and foreign diplomats gathered on Monday at a luxury hotel on the banks of the Nile to commemorate International Holocaust Remembrance Day, the first time such an event has ever been held in Egypt, The Circuit’s Gabby Deutch reports. The gathering was hosted by the U.S. Embassy in Egypt and the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum (USHMM) in Washington, D.C. A similar event will take place later this week in Abu Dhabi, where Noura al Kaabi, the United Arab Emirates’ culture minister, is slated to speak.
Regional trendsetter: “It was symbolically, I think, very important that we were able to do this in Egypt,” Robert Satloff, executive director of The Washington Institute for Near East Policy and a speaker at the event, told The Circuit from Cairo. “I was just delighted with what happened today and the fact that this occurred in the largest, most populous, trendsetting Arab state.”
Warming peace: The event is the latest symbol of changing attitudes in the Middle East in the wake of the Abraham Accords signed in September 2020. While Egypt was the first Arab nation to sign a peace treaty with Israel, in 1978, the Camp David Accords did not lead to a significant shift in Egyptian attitudes toward Israelis and Jews. “There is a peace treaty between Egypt and Israel, but that peace has always been a cold peace,” said Mina Abdelmalak, who conducts Arabic outreach for the USHMM and was born and raised in Egypt. “It was never translated into the mainstream, people-to-people level. It was mostly government-to-government. So to be able to push this a little bit, that is significant.”
First-generation peacemaker: The Abraham Accords “raised the bar for everyone,” Satloff said, including the “first-generation peacemakers” — Egypt and Jordan. But there were other factors at play too: Egypt, like Israel, sees Iran as a foe. Last week, Egypt’s permanent representative to the United Nations gave a speech in Arabic on behalf of the Arab Group, condemning Holocaust denial as the United Nations General Assembly debated and then passed a resolution on the subject. The only country to vote against the resolution was Iran.
No longer laughable: “If you would have told me a few years ago that such an event would take place in Cairo, I would laugh,” Abdelmalak told The Circuit on Monday. “Until this morning, it wouldn’t have completely surprised me if the government of Egypt would say, ‘Due to security reasons, this is not going to happen.’”