Daily Kickoff
👋 Good Thursday morning!
In today’s Daily Kickoff, we talk to political observers in Israel about what’s on the line in the upcoming elections, and look at a new effort to engage young Jewish Londoners. Also in today’s Daily Kickoff: State Rep. Emilia Sykes, Madison Gesiotto Gilbert and Peter Thiel.
The European Union will likely be the next to sanction Iran over the Islamic Republic’s recent arms sales to Moscow, which have reportedly included 2,400 “suicide drones,” some of which were deployed — with deadly outcomes — by the Russian military against Ukrainian civilians this week.
Iran is facing increased pressure abroad and at home, where bloody protests against the regime of Ayatollah Ali Khamenei have rocked the country for five weeks. Dissidents, such as Iranian-American writer Masih Alinejad, are hopeful that the latest protests will destabilize the regime to the point of collapse.
Alinejad, who in recent months has spoken with Secretary of State Tony Blinken and National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan, is calling on President Joe Biden to “applaud the democratic ambitions of the Iranian people and move beyond the White House’s narrow focus on the nuclear issue to demand that the human rights of protesters be respected. The administration has made the contest between autocracy and democracy a central theme of its foreign policy. Iran should be part of that policy.”
The protests and new sanctions leveled against Tehran for its support of Russia throw into question the outcome of talks over Iran’s nuclear program, which had picked up steam in August after a monthslong stalemate, but are now on ice. The E.U.’s foreign policy chief, Josep Borrell, told reporters this week that the deal is unlikely to be revived. “I don’t expect any move, that’s a pity because we were very, very close,” he said.
Another senior E.U. official told Brussels Playbook this week that they don’t anticipate any further progress on the talks. “Sincerely, the JCPOA does not count anymore,” the official said. “We have gotten used to the idea that this will not move forward.”
Behnam Ben Taleblu, a senior fellow at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, told Jewish Insider that the latest moves by Tehran provide an opportunity for the U.S. to create a more all-encompassing strategy. “Iran’s escalating nuclear moves, brutality at home and boldness abroad offers the West an inflection point to push past the JCPOA and indeed nuclear-centric framing of the Iran threat and develop a more comprehensive Iran strategy,” he told us. “Step one must be [to] do no harm: no harm to long-term U.S. national interests, regional partners and to the Iranian people. Pursuing the JCPOA would be akin to harming all three.”
Joel Rubin, a former deputy assistant secretary of state in the Obama administration, told us that “the reality is that if we want to avoid Iran turning into North Korea, we need to ensure that it never gets the bomb. Because if it did, that would be the ultimate protector of the regime.” Rubin added, “The only time that Iran’s nuclear program has been verifiably rolled back in the past several decades has been under the JCPOA. But the ball is in Iran’s court right now on diplomacy and the administration has made it clear that restoration of the JCPOA is both still possible and in our national security interest.”
The American Enterprise Institute’s Danielle Pletka summed up her assessment in one sentence: “It’s going to be almost impossible for the administration to pursue these talks given Russia and Iran, but then again, it should’ve been impossible for the last two years.”
election watch
What’s at stake in Israel’s looming election

Benjamin Netanyahu, Yair Lapid
With less than 14 days until Israelis return to the polls for a fifth general election in as many years, signs that the country is in the midst of another political race are hard to find. Some blame public apathy toward the Nov. 1 election on the lazy days of summer vacation, followed by nearly a month of Jewish holidays. Others say Israelis are fed up with an unstable political system that has been in crisis for four years. Whatever the reason, this election appears unlikely to bring about any dramatic changes. Yet political analysts who are closely watching the race say that it might be the most decisive election the country has faced so far, with matters such as the rule of law and political identity at stake, Jewish Insider’s Ruth Marks Eglash reports.
Political observations: JI discussed the upcoming vote with three political observers — Yohanan Plesner, president of the Israel Democracy Institute; Aviv Bushinsky, a political commentator and a former chief of staff to former Prime Minister and current Opposition Leader Benjamin Netanyahu; and Jonathan Rynhold, head of the political studies department at Israel’s Bar-Ilan University — to ask why the country is embroiled in this never-ending cycle of elections, what this election is about and what it will take for Netanyahu to return to power?
Latest polls: Polls published this week gave Netanyahu’s Likud around 30 seats out of the 120 in Israel’s Knesset. The right-wing bloc that backs him, however, appears to fall short of the requisite 61 seats needed to form a government. Yesh Atid, the party of Prime Minister Yair Lapid, who took over as caretaker leader in July, polled at 25 seats. That gives the current government bloc – the anti-Netanyahu bloc – 57 seats, with the outsider Arab party, Hadash/Ta’al, hovering at the electoral threshold with the minimum of four seats.
Slow to start: A report published this week by Israeli daily Haaretz noted that campaigns for the election, which was called in June, have been slow to kick off. With two weeks until Israelis cast their ballots, the competing political parties have spent only about 30 percent of their campaign budgets, with most focusing their efforts on a push during the final week. Netanyahu is reportedly placing emphasis on mobilizing older members of his party, with Likud supporters engaging in door-to-door canvassing. Lapid, meanwhile, is treading a fine line between poaching voters from potential coalition partners to the left of the political spectrum and ensuring high voter turnout across the board, with a particular focus on Arab voters.
Read more here.