President Joe Biden meets with Israeli Prime Minister Naftali Bennett in the Oval Office of the White House in Washington, D.C, on August 27, 2021.

The political ground beneath the leaders of both Israel and the U.S. looks shaky. In Israel, the year-old coalition government led by Prime Minister Naftali Bennett appears to be losing its grip on power. In Washington, President Joe Biden and the Democrats face a potential walloping in the midterms amid sky-high inflation. But despite political turbulence at home in the U.S. and the Middle East, the state of the U.S.-Israel relationship is strong, experts tell Jewish Insider’s Gabby Deutch. And they credit Bennett and Biden with working to calm the once-rocky waters of a relationship that had in the past been driven by strong personalities in both countries.

Complete makeover: “The first year has brought about a complete makeover of U.S.-Israel bilateral ties,” said Scott Lasensky, who served as a senior adviser to former U.S. Ambassador to Israel Daniel Shapiro. Biden and Bennett do not have a close personal relationship, although Biden has traveled to Israel many times throughout his career, with another visit to Israel reportedly planned for next month. Instead, both leaders have deputized their respective cabinet members to form close working relationships that have rarely drawn headlines.

No fanfare: “All the parties, both American and Israeli, deserve credit for managing the relationship without letting personality interfere with policy,” said Mark Dubowitz, CEO of the Foundation for Defense of Democracies. “You’re able to work through the disagreements, and some of the disagreements are profound, but you can do it quietly without a lot of fanfare.” That’s a departure from both the strained relationship between former Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and former President Barack Obama, and then the close personal friendship between Netanyahu and former President Donald Trump.

Showing support: Like Obama, Biden has policy disagreements with Israel, most notably on settlement construction and how to address Iran’s nuclear program. But Biden’s team appears to want Bennett’s government to remain in place.

Quotable: “I really respect this government. It’s working,” U.S. Ambassador to Israel Tom Nides said at an Atlantic Council event in May. “I was anxious and thrilled working with them in a difficult situation. I am a big fan of this government, and we hope to continue working with them.”

Read more here.

Israeli Prime Minister Naftali Bennett attends a cabinet meeting at the Prime minister’s office in Jerusalem, on March 27, 2022.

To mark the current Israeli government’s first anniversary, Prime Minister Naftali Bennett last week published a 27-page Hebrew-language pamphlet highlighting its achievements over the past year and appealing to what he called the “silent Zionist majority” to help him keep his fractious coalition in power. From less rocket fire from Gaza to some significant accomplishments for Israel’s economy, including the passage of a national budget after more than three years of political stagnation, the government led by Bennett and Foreign Minister Yair Lapid has some cause for celebration.But observers told Jewish Insider’s Ruth Marks Eglash that it is the very makeup of the government and maybe even its effectiveness in running the country — that might end up being its downfall, as long-standing issues that remain at the core of Israeli identity continue to overshadow its existence.

No peace: “This government is excellent and has shown stability,” Shalom Yerushalmi, a veteran political commentator, told JI. “It passed a budget and is doing some important things with Israel’s infrastructure and development, but it probably won’t be able to hold on to power for much longer.” The reason, he theorized, is because it is impossible to have an Israeli government containing an Arab party that identifies with the Palestinian people without working towards peace between Israelis and Palestinians.

Crisis mode: Yohanan Plesner, president of the Israel Democracy Institute, told JI that the government had been successful in “extracting Israel from crisis mode” caused by four successive elections and putting it back into a state where it could properly function. However, he pointed out, two events have now undermined that sense of normality – the wave of terror attacks in March and April that left more than a dozen Israelis dead and the resignation of coalition whip Idit Silman, a member of the Knesset from Bennett’s own Yamina party.

Falling apart: Ben Dror Yemini, a political columnist for the Israeli daily Yediot Aharonot, said the Bennett-Lapid government had been functioning well, reducing crime, improving the economy and bringing achievements in foreign relations, particularly with the Abraham Accords partners. “In the big picture, the government is really functioning harmoniously but on the other hand, the coalition is falling apart,” he said, also pointing to the Palestinian issue as an ever-looming shadow and a weak spot that has allowed claims by former Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and some opposition leaders – that a government with Arab members allows terrorism to flourish unabated – to gain traction.

Read more here.

David Brog, Carolina Serrano, Mark Robertson

Las Vegas Republicans will decide on Tuesday which of three candidates — with three distinct profiles — will go on to the general election in Nevada’s newly competitive, redrawn Las Vegas-area 1st Congressional District, Jewish Insider’s Marc Rod reports.

At the races: Leading the Republican field are Carolina Serrano, a former organizer for Latinos for Trump who has promoted conspiracy theories about the 2020 election and the Jan. 6 Capitol riot; Mark Robertson, a 30-year military veteran; and David Brog, the CEO of the Maccabee Task Force and former head of Christians United for Israel, who associates himself with the populist National Conservatism movement.

Jumping in: Serrano told JI that she was largely disconnected from politics until former President Donald Trump’s entry into the 2016 presidential race, when she found herself attracted to him because “he championed American citizens in a way that politicians really hadn’t before.” She went on to intern for Rep. John Katko (R-NY) and worked briefly as a field organizer for the Republican National Committee in Nevada. “It’s important to take the [Republican] message out to more people. Specifically, I’m Hispanic… I really realized we’re kind of all voting against our own interests because my values align more with the Republican Party,” she said.

Career change: Robertson, who retired as a colonel after three decades in the military, was deployed to 10 countries, including to Afghanistan, Kuwait, Iraq and Syria. He said he joined the race after Democrats gained a trifecta in Washington in 2021 — taking the White House and both chambers of Congress — as well as control in Nevada’s capital. “I don’t like the direction of our country… [this] headlong dive into socialism that the Democrats are taking us,” he explained.

Transition: Brog, who currently leads the Maccabee Task Force, a nonprofit funded largely by the late Las Vegas billionaire and GOP megadonor Sheldon Adelson that combats campus antisemitism, called his congressional run a continuation of “the last few decades” of fighting the “woke left,” a distillation of the message he expressed to JI in an interview earlier this year. Brog said his longtime advocacy work on key policy priorities — ”fighting wokeism” and protecting American industries and the working class — makes him the best candidate for the district.

Israel on the mind: Robertson characterized himself as a “very supportive” of Israel, noting that he’s also a member of the Republican Jewish Coalition’s leadership council. “Judeo-Christian values are an important part of what makes the United States the great country that it is,” Robertson said. “And I think Israel being the lone democracy in the Middle East, that we have much in common with Israel” and it is in America’s “national interests to [continue] supporting Israel.” Serrano expressed little interest in discussing foreign policy. “I’m more focused on domestic issues. Obviously, Israel’s a great ally of the United States and I respect and support that,” she said. “And I just don’t really have many thoughts beyond that.”

Tea leaves: Humberto Sanchez, a reporter for The Nevada Independent, told JI the race is “pretty wide open right now.” He said late last week that “anything happening now, between now and Tuesday, could move it in any of those three directions… It’s a three-way race at the top right now.” And the incumbent, Rep. Dina Titus (D-NV), could face trouble in November. “In a normal year you would expect a Democrat to win, particularly an incumbent,” Dan Lee, a political science professor at University of Nevala, Las Vegas, told JI. But, Lee noted, this is a highly favorable environment for Republicans and in the redrawn district, “a lot of these voters don’t know [Titus]… she won’t have as much of that incumbency advantage as she would normally have.”

Read more here.

Aviva Aron-Dine speaking at the Brookings Institution’s Municipal Finance Conference.

With the recent departure of the National Economic Council’s deputy director, David Kamin, who is returning to his post at NYU’s Law School, the White House is tapping Aviva Aron-Dine, an economic policy analyst who served as executive associate director of the Office of Management and Budget (OMB), for the role, Jewish Insider’s Jacob Miller reports.

Policy oriented: Bucking the pipeline to academia from MIT’s economic department, one of the nation’s top economics programs, Aron-Dine jumped directly into government. “Generally, people who do extremely well in graduate school don’t want to go straight into government,” said Harvard economist Jason Furman, who worked with Aron-Dine. “She cared about the world and wanted to make the world a better place and thought that was the best way for her to do it.” Policy was the area where Aron-Dine felt she could exert the greatest influence. “I think she thought that adding new details to economic research was less important than taking what we already know and implementing it and using it,” Furman explained.

Credit continuation: In the Obama White House, Aron-Dine successfully argued the merits of continuing several tax credit programs, which mitigate poverty for an estimated 16 million people. “I’m not sure the White House would have made those tax credits permanent and permanently reduced child poverty were it not for her combination of advocacy and analysis,” Furman said. Aron-Dine pushed to ensure the U.S. tax code would continue to create incentives for charitable donations. In a 2012 memo written alongside Jonathan Greenblatt, who served as special assistant to President Barack Obama in the Office of Social Innovation and Civic Participation before becoming CEO of the Anti-Defamation League, Aron-Dine opposed capping the dollar amount on charitable deductions, a policy they claimed would reduce giving by billions of dollars each year. “She was far more focused on getting to the right outcome rather than making the easy call,” Greenblatt told JI.

Popular hire: “Detailed knowledge is almost secondary to [the] ability to function in an organization, to process, bring people together, aggregate what others are doing,” said Furman. “[NEC Director Brian Deese] doesn’t know all the latest economic studies, and she does,” Furman added. “I think he does a great job of getting a lot out of very substantive, analytic people like her, but he’s also going to need someone to help run the policy processes and the deputy processes and the like, so they definitely will work well together.”

Read the full story here.