Josep Borell, the High Representative of the European Union for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy speaks during a joint press conference at Iran’s foreign ministry headquarters in Tehran on June 25, 2022. (Photo by ATTA KENARE/AFP via Getty Images)

Efforts to reach a new nuclear agreement with Iran hit a new impasse over the weekend, after Tehran voiced discontent with the most recent draft submitted by E.U. negotiators. Josep Borrell, the E.U.’s top diplomat, said on Monday that the odds of reaching a new agreement were diminishing and suggested that observers should not expect an imminent agreement between the parties, while a U.S. official toldPolitico that Iran’s response to the proposal was “not at all encouraging.” Meanwhile, a newly released 80-page Swedish intelligence report warned that Tehran had attempted to purchase nuclear technology from the Scandinavian nation as recently as last year. ​​

Transatlantic talk: A bipartisan group of legislators visiting Israel this week — Sens. Bob Menendez (D-NJ), Lindsey Graham (R-SC), Cindy Hyde-Smith (R-MS), Marcia Blackburn (R-TN), Cynthia Lummis (R-WY) and Rep. Ronny Jackson (R-TX) — addressed the current state of negotiations as well as conversations between Israeli and U.S. officials at a press briefing in Jerusalem on Monday afternoon. Menendez, who chairs the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, told reporters that the administration has committed to submitting any agreement it reaches with Iran for congressional review, but added that he was “unsure” if there would be sufficient votes in the Senate to block the agreement — 60 are needed for the initial vote, and two-thirds would be needed to override a presidential veto. 

Free rein: U.S. Ambassador to Israel Tom Nides, who met with the delegation as well as Mossad chief David Barnea on Monday, said afterward that President Joe Biden told Israeli Prime Minister Yair Lapid last week that the U.S. “will not tie Israel’s hands” if it chooses to act against Iran.

D.C.-bound: Barnea is now headed to Washington for meetings with U.S. officials including CIA Director Bill Burns. Barnea is also expected to meet with members of the Senate Intelligence Committee; the committee is scheduled to meet on Wednesday “to receive a closed briefing to examine certain intelligence matters.”

On air: Amid heightened tensions in the region, the U.S. military sent a pair of B-52 bombers with nuclear capabilities on a Middle East flyover, a move that a top Air Force official said demonstrated the U.S. “ability to combine forces to deter and, if necessary, defeat our adversaries.”

Save the date: Special Envoy for Iran Rob Malley will brief members of the House Foreign Affairs Committee on Sept. 14.

Arnold Roth (L) of the foundation Israeli Families for Peace speaks to the press in front of a wall of pictures displaying Israeli victims in February 22, 2004, in The Hague, The Netherlands.

On Aug. 9, 2001, in the afternoon of what had been a typical day in Jerusalem, families gathered for lunch, as they often did, at Sbarro on the corner of Jaffa Road and King George Street. Located in a bustling area, the kosher pizzeria was a particularly popular spot among neighborhood children and members of the area’s religious communities. That Thursday, the restaurant was packed. Fifteen-year-old Malki Roth, a citizen of Israel, Australia and the U.S., was there with her best friend. At the same time, Malki’s father, Arnold Roth, the head of a drug development company, was taking his lunch break amid an afternoon of nonstop meetings. He had just finished when, around 2 p.m., he answered a call from his wife screaming into the phone. There had been an attack. Malki, her best friend and 13 others — mostly young mothers and children — were killed when a Hamas terrorist entered the restaurant and detonated a bomb, killing himself in the process. An additional 130 people were injured. Arnold joined the hosts of Jewish Insider’s “Limited Liability Podcast,” Rich Goldberg and Jarrod Bernstein, to talk about his daughter’s life and death, and his family’s efforts to hold her murderers accountable.

On the day of the attack: “At around 2 o’clock I got back from lunch, my wife was on the phone, and she was shrieking into the phone, something I’m not at all used to, and she said that there had been a “פיגוע” — a terror attack — in the center of Jerusalem. She knew that because she was on the floor with our youngest child watching CNN, and her message was, “I can’t reach the children,” and then she hung up. Naturally, like everybody else in Jerusalem, I reached for my phone and called all of my children one after the other… And I found very quickly that the cell network had gone down…An hour later, I still hadn’t reached Malki and I had spoken to the other children. And from there it was just a movie plot that just got darker and blacker and more awful…Around 5 o’clock, 5:30 that afternoon, this is the ninth of August 2001, and the downstairs neighbor, [a] lovely lady who’s no longer alive, came up the stairs with an awful look that I’ll never forget on her face, and she said, “Michal is dead.” Michal was our daughter’s best friend and we knew that they were together, and we hadn’t had any status update. Well, the television had provided the first status update, so we knew we were in something that was more worrying, more catastrophic than anything that I think we were prepared for. And so it went until 2 in the morning. Two in the morning, our two oldest sons had been accompanied by a social worker, they went down to the government forensic center in Yaffo near Tel Aviv, and at roughly 2 o’clock they phoned home from there and they said they had found Malki. And that was, as you can imagine, just one of those moments you never forget.”

On Malki’s compassion: “Malki was the youngest of the four children that we brought with us from Australia when we moved to Israel in the summer of 1988, she was just 2 and a half years old. [In] 2001 she had just finished 10th grade, had acquired the leadership of a group of girls through a youth group and had proven herself to be terrifically good at this, and was an advocate for change in her own circle in the school, in the social setting, for children with disabilities. I mentioned that, because the youngest of our children, who lives with us today and who was born 10 years after Malki, is catastrophically disabled. And Malki was somebody who just looked right past that and saw a sibling, a sister whom she adored. That was actually a large part of her personality. She was always smiling and very engaged with other people, just a wonderful human being to be around.”

On the Roths’ connection to Israel despite their struggles to get justice for Malki: “This has not… weakened in the smallest way, my devotion or that of my wife and our family to Zionism. We know why we’re living in Israel…we came here to raise our children in Israel, and we love what’s happened, we are happy, and we have children and grandchildren living here…So, it has not changed our connection to Israel in the smallest way. But it has sharpened, I would use the word contempt, the contempt that I personally feel towards politicians in multiple places and multiple levels of seniority.”

Read more and listen to the podcast here.

Linda Kinstler

“Is it possible,” asks Yosef Yerushalmi, a scholar of Jewish history, “that the antonym of ‘forgetting’ is not ‘remembering,’ but ‘justice?’” This is the question that drives Come to This Court and Cry: How the Holocaust Ends, a new book from journalist Linda Kinstler that explores how society remembers and honors the victims of the Holocaust — and warns that the power of survivor testimony is under threat today from the forces of nationalism and authoritarianism. “The whole book is very much rooted in a desire to see through this vision of Jewish justice, this idea that the survivors gave their testimonies and they gave them for all time, and they expected them to last through various transitions, through upheavals,” Kinstler told Jewish Insider’s Gabby Deutch in a recent interview. “Now, it seems like just at the precise moment when they’re dying, [the testimonies] are starting to collapse.”

Latvian Lindbergh: Kinstler explores these themes primarily through the story of Herberts Cukurs, a famed aviator known as the “Latvian Lindbergh” who later served in a Nazi killing brigade responsible for the murders of tens of thousands of Jews. In 1965, he was killed in Uruguay by Mossad agents who, just a few years earlier, had captured Adolf Eichmann in Argentina and brought him to Israel to stand trial. Cukurs came on Kinstler’s radar because of an unusual criminal investigation: Seventy years after the Holocaust, a Latvian prosecutor “reopened” Cukurs’ case to try to prove his innocence and make him something of a martyr for the Latvian nation. 

It’s personal: “I had already been studying all these approaches to historical memory and justice, and then I found myself really in one of them, by virtue of my unfortunate personal connection to the story,” Kinstler recalled. She is referring to her grandfather Boris Kinstler, one of Cukurs’ comrades in a notorious killing unit called the Arajs Kommando. Boris vanished mysteriously in the late 1940s after he was believed to have become a KGB agent, but despite her years of research, Kinstler cannot fully verify his story. Boris never even met his son — Kinstler’s father — but his ghost looms large in the family’s memory. Kinstler’s mother, also from Latvia, is Jewish.

Revisionist renaissance: Like other European nations in the post-Communist era, Latvia began to publicly examine its history and reckon with the country’s strong faction of Nazi collaborators after the fall of the Soviet Union. But a “revisionist renaissance” was soon underway, mimicking trends that have swept across Eastern Europe. 

Justice undone: When asked whether justice has been served for victims of the Holocaust, Kinstler paused. “I don’t know,” she said. “Justice can always be undone, which is part of the thing that I wanted to illustrate. You can’t just say, ‘OK, it was achieved, now we can move on.’” In other words: Kinstler has written an ode to the mantra “Never forget.”

Read the full interview here.

Bonus: “Baltic Truth,” a new Dudu Fisher-narrated documentary about the Holocaust in Latvia and Lithuania, premieres at the Stephen Wise Free Synagogue in New York City on Sept. 14.

The Museum of the Future is lit up during its opening ceremony, in the gulf emirate of Dubai, United Arab Emirates on February 22, 2022. (Photo by Government of Dubai – Media Office / Handout/Anadolu Agency via Getty Images)

Years before the Abraham Accords enabled Emiratis and Israelis to openly run businesses together, Abdulla Baqer operated a back-channel in Dubai that brought Israel’s cybersecurity expertise to the Arab world. Working with intelligence veterans in the Middle East, Asia and elsewhere, the charismatic entrepreneur helped facilitate the growing commercial ties that were poking through the longtime Arab-Israeli divide. After the Accords were signed at the White House two years ago, Baqer and his partners unveiled Black Wall Global, a firm that finds little need these days to obscure its mission of marketing Israeli technology to nations that have been reluctant to deal directly with the Jewish state, reports The Circuit’s Jonathan Ferziger.

Strategy session: Baqer, 45, is also co-president of the UAE-Israel Business Council, through which he coaches Israelis on using the United Arab Emirates as a platform for dealing with Arab markets. “There are a lot of countries that don’t allow Israeli companies to set up shop,” Baqer told The Circuit. “They can always come to the UAE, partner with a UAE company and basically go out and be sold as an Emirati company.”

Let’s make a deal: Black Wall is one of the smaller Israeli-led companies that have prospered in the new atmosphere of normalized relations with the Gulf states. Israel and the UAE signed a free-trade agreement in May that eliminates most tariffs and is projected to bring annual trade between the two countries over the next five years to more than $10 billion. The biggest deal between the Emirates and Israel has been Delek Drilling’s $1 billion sale last year of its stake in an offshore Mediterranean gas field to the UAE’s Mubadala Petroleum. State-owned Israel Aerospace Industries has signed drone-development deals with Edge Group, a government-owned defense company in the UAE. And OurCrowd, a Jerusalem-based venture capital investment platform, set up a subsidiary in the UAE and last November became the first Israeli VC registered by the Abu Dhabi Global Market to operate in the country.

Read the full story here and sign up for the Weekly Circuit newsletter here.