Daily Kickoff
👋 Good Monday morning!
With Congress in recess this week, a number of House members and senators are visiting Israel. Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC) met today with Israeli Prime Minister Naftali Bennett in Jerusalem, and the two discussed the Iranian threat, security challenges in the Middle East and ways to strengthen Israeli-U.S. cooperation, according to the Prime Minister’s Office.
“You have always been a true friend of Israel, both in good times and in more challenging moments,” Bennett told Graham.
Graham also met with Israeli President Isaac Herzog on Sunday. Herzog said they had a “productive discussion about strategic issues in our region and the importance of facing them united.”
Graham was initially scheduled to visit Israel between Christmas and New Year’s, but his trip was delayed due to the Omicron variant of the coronavirus.
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) is set to arrive in Israel later this week. She’s scheduled to visit the Knesset on Wednesday, where she will be welcomed by lawmakers in an official ceremony and will observe the plenary session. She is also set to hold a working meeting with Herzog.
In a new interview published this morning, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) bemoaned the firing of commentator Marc Lamont Hill, who was let go from CNN in 2018 after calling for a “free Palestine from the river to the sea.”
“You talk about cancel culture,” the New York congresswoman told The New Yorker’s David Remnick. “But notice that those discussions only go one way. We don’t talk about all the people who were fired. You just kind of talk about, like, right-leaning podcast bros and more conservative figures. But, for example, Marc Lamont Hill was fired [from CNN] for discussing an issue with respect to Palestinians, pretty summarily. There was no discussion about it, no engagement, no thoughtful discourse over it, just pure accusation.” Read more here.
Vienna view
Brian Hook: Nuclear negotiations should bar Iran from any enrichment

Brian Hook, former U.S. special representative for Iran and senior advisor to the U.S. secretary of state, speaks onstage during the 2021 Concordia Annual Summit at Sheraton New York on September 21, 2021, in New York City.
Brian Hook, who served as the Trump administration’s Iran envoy, suggested that any deal with Iran must bar the regime from nuclear enrichment of any kind, Jewish Insider’s Marc Rod reports.
‘Original sin’: “The original sin of the [2015] Iran nuclear deal is that it allowed Iran to enrich,” Hook said at an event on Thursday organized by the National Union for Democracy in Iran, an Iranian-American diaspora organization. “Iran claims it wants peaceful nuclear power. This is the world’s leading state sponsor of terrorism. So when such a country is talking about peaceful nuclear power… they can put to bed any concerns people have by [stopping] enrichment.”
Setbacks: Hook said he had not seen anything to indicate that a no-enrichment standard is part of the current talks with Iran. “We should not be defeatist or fatalist about the need to do this,” Hook said. “We shouldn’t negotiate with ourselves and talk ourselves out of it. We should not be resigned to Iran as a nuclear threshold state. It will change the balance of power in the Middle East profoundly.” He added, “The regime needs to understand that this is a non-negotiable issue.”
Knock-on effects: Hook argued that reentering the Iran deal would have “a lot of consequences” for U.S. partners in the region, emboldening Iran to further expand its non-nuclear provocations, such as the Houthi proxy attacks on U.S. allies in the Gulf. The former Trump official said that the Iran deal, from which former President Donald Trump withdrew in 2018, also complicated efforts to convince other Arab nations to agree not to enrich nuclear material themselves.