When Mariam bint Mohammed AlMheiri landed in Tel Aviv last year, she didn’t know what to expect. A serial startup founder and environmentalist, AlMheiri is used to experimenting and exploring. But as the first United Arab Emirates minister to visit Israel after the Abraham Accords normalized ties between the countries in 2020, she was taking a new — and particularly noticeable — leap of faith.

“I remember at the hotel I was staying at, they put a label on the water bottle and the chocolate, saying, ‘Thank you to the first minister of the UAE,’ with my name on it,” recalled AlMheiri, the UAE’s minister of climate change and the environment. “When I was at restaurants or cafes, they wanted me to sign a book, because they said it’s the first time we have someone from the UAE and a minister.” People asked for selfies everywhere she went.

“For us, the Abraham Accords is a historic moment for both countries,” AlMheiri told Jewish Insider’s Gabby Deutchin an interview with The Circuit earlier this month in Los Angeles, where she was speaking about energy and food technology at the Milken Institute Global Conference.

Move fast: AlMheiri is responsible for helping the UAE reach ambitious clean energy and sustainability goals. For a major oil-producing nation in a region that is especially susceptible to the ravages of climate change, this is a task both improbable and of paramount importance. “Things have to move faster. Our government wants to be very agile, very focused on game-changing initiatives,” AlMheiri said.

Regional relationships: During AlMheiri’s visit to Israel last July, she and Israel’s environmental protection minister, Tamar Zandberg, signed a memorandum of understanding to cooperate on preservation efforts and environmental protection. “Israel and the United Arab Emirates have common environmental challenges, and the right way to deal with them is regional cooperation in finding and implementing solutions,” Zandberg told JI.

Scuba savvy: AlMheiri easily alternates between savvy business language, scientific jargon and casual conversation. She was educated as a mechanical engineer, but it was a passion for scuba diving that led her, almost by accident, to work for the Emirati government. She took up deep-sea diving as a hobby while trying to find work in aeronautical engineering when she returned to the UAE, and it was while diving that she began to think about human-caused environmental problems.

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Rep. Rashida Tlaib (D-MI) questions Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen as she testifies before the House Financial Services Committee in the Rayburn House Office Building on Capitol Hill on May 12, 2022, in Washington, D.C.

Rep. Rashida Tlaib (D-MI) and a handful of progressive Democrats introduced a resolution on Monday referring to Palestinian Arabs as the “indigenous inhabitants” of Israel and endorsing Palestinian right of return, one of the most sensitive issues in Israeli-Palestinian relations, Jewish Insider’s Marc Rod reports.

In the text: The resolution seeks to set as U.S. policy recognition of the “Nakba” — the term, translating to “catastrophe,” that Palestinians use to refer to the mass Palestinian exodus that accompanied the foundation of Israel — and accept as a settled issue Palestinian refugees’ right of return to inside Israel’s borders. It also refers to Palestinians as the “indigenous population” of the region, but does not acknowledge Jewish history in the region.

Signing on: Tlaib’s resolution has been cosponsored by Reps. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY), Ilhan Omar (D-MN), Betty McCollum (D-MN), Marie Newman (D-IL), Cori Bush (D-MO) and Jamaal Bowman (D-NY).

Pushback: Rep. Brad Sherman (D-CA) blasted Tlaib’s resolution as “predicated on a demonstrably false historical narrative… predictably failing to mention the hundreds of attacks on Jewish communities in the British mandate of Palestine by Palestinian militias.” He added, “Thankfully, the vast majority of my colleagues in Congress and in the House Foreign Affairs Committee understand that the historical narrative in Congresswoman Tlaib’s resolution is an outrageous falsehood and thus this bill isn’t likely to be passed or even considered.”

Landmines: Aaron David Miller, a senior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace who advised multiple secretaries of state on Arab-Israeli negotiations, said that the legislation asks Congress to “wade into the intricacies and volatility of some of the most combustible issues in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and essentially recognize a narrative.” He continued, “This legislation is packed with landmines and traps… The whole issue of right of return is an issue that for years in negotiations we realized was the most combustible, most complicated, and the one which we had the least chance of resolving.”

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Elsewhere: Rep. Doug Lamborn (R-CO)is set to announce a companion bill to Senate Republicans’ Taylor Force Martyr Payment Prevention Act today — follow-on legislation to the original Taylor Force Act, which targets foreign banks involved in “martyr payments.”

USAID Administrator Samantha Power gestures during a press conference in Sarajevo, Bosnia, on Friday, Jan. 21, 2022.

U.S. Agency for International Development Administrator Samantha Power said on Tuesday that the U.S. has seen “a lot of enthusiasm” from Israel about the Biden administration’s decision last year to reinstate aid to the Palestinians, which was cut completely in 2018 by the Trump administration, Jewish Insider’s Marc Rod reports.

Quotable: “We see a lot of enthusiasm on the part of the government of Israel to resume this assistance out of concern about the destabilizing effects of cutting off assistance, just the fundamental recognition that economic stability plays a critical role,” Power told the House Foreign Relations Committee during a budget hearing.

Money moves: In March, Congress approved $219 million in Palestinian aid for 2022, a significant increase from 2021 and exceeding the administration’s budget request. The U.S.’s current Palestinian aid is primarily focused on water and sanitation, Power said, and is “just restarting now” following the administration’s decision to reinstate the support.

Top of the list: Power also said that addressing antisemitic and anti-Israel material in U.N.-funded educational materials distributed to Palestinians “is at the top of the list to raise with any Palestinian officials that we encounter,” the former U.N. ambassador said. The educational materials, funded through the U.N. Agency for Relief and Works for Palestinian Refugees in the Near East, fall under the State Department’s jurisdiction, she noted, rather than USAID’s.

In action: The USAID director said the Middle East Partnership for Peace program is now “up and running” and should be announcing new grants in the coming months. Its advisory board held its first meeting in April and is actively soliciting further grantees, and is working on better publicizing their availability, she added. Power is “hopeful that we’ll really be able to scale some of what we’re doing so far” once there is greater familiarity with the MEPPA program and the projects it is funding, she said. Some of the recipients of MEPPA grants have remained anonymous.

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A rally organized by National Council for Jewish Women in Washington, D.C. on Tuesday, May 17, 2022.

Following a weekend of pro-choice rallies that drew hundreds of thousands of people nationwide, several thousand American Jews gathered in front of the U.S. Capitol on Tuesday morning at a rally with a similar message that was organized by the National Council of Jewish Women. “We did want to have a particular Jewish rally for our abortion justice, because we feel that for too long, Jewish voices have been left out of the national conversation on religion and abortion,” NCJW CEO Sheila Katz told Jewish Insider’s Gabby Deutch after the rally.

Additional activism: The Jewish Rally for Abortion Justice, which capped off NCJW’s first in-person conference in three years, had been planned for months — well before Politico published a leaked draft of a Supreme Court opinion overturning Roe v. Wade earlier this month, and before the weekend’s events that saw a groundswell of abortion activism. But that didn’t stop the more than 2,000 people who showed up Tuesday at the Capitol, many of whom also attended rallies on Saturday, to protest in a Jewish context.

Notable: One of the sponsors for the conference was Ben & Jerry’s, a company known for its longtime support of progressive causes. The ice cream maker was criticized by many leaders in the U.S. Jewish community last year after vowing not to sell its products in what it called “Occupied Palestinian Territory.” Katz said Ben & Jerry’s has sponsored NCJW’s conference for the last five years, and that she has not talked to the company about its stance on Israel. “They’ve been ongoing supporters from the corporate side,” said Katz. “We didn’t not do stuff on Israel” because of Ben & Jerry’s, she said. Katz pointed out that “every workshop had sessions about Israel and building a feminist field in Israel, so that’s important work for us. It’s one of our core issues.”

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