Benjamin Netanyahu, Yair Lapid

With a deadlocked Israeli electorate heading to the polls today for the fifth time in less than four years, the Jewish state appears to have made a national sport out of general elections. And what’s a sport without the art of speculating about who might come out on top? In an attempt to make sense of what could be the closest vote of the recent elections – with little change to the two main political blocs – pollsters, pundits and the public are hedging their bets on who, if anyone, might actually win this time, Jewish Insider’s Ruth Marks Eglash reports.

Hung parliament: Pollsters, who carried out 15 surveys in the final week before the election, published their final round of results on Friday night, in accordance with Israeli law, which dictates that no polls can be published within three days of an election. According to the numbers, there is unlikely to be any dramatic change to the country’s political makeup, and no party or bloc ­– pro-Netanyahu vs. anti-Netanyahu – appears strong enough to clinch the election outright.

Frontrunner: According to the poll published by Israel’s Channel 12 News, Opposition Leader and former Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s Likud party and his right-wing configuration of parties (Religious Zionism, Shas, United Torah Judaism) have the best chance of forming a coalition government, although the bloc is predicted to garner only 60 seats.

Problematic polls: “I look at the polls and I am not sure that they can be accurate because there are two groups of people that it’s very hard to poll,” professor Gideon Rahat, a senior fellow at the Israel Democracy Institute and a member of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem faculty, told JI. “First, it’s the ultra-Orthodox, and I suspect what the pollsters have done is look at the previous election and give the ultra-Orthodox parties the same support because their voters are stable,” he continued, raising the question of where support for Religious Zionism, led by far-right politicians Bezalel Smotrich and Itamar Ben-Gvir, has come from.

Read the full story here.

State Rep. Summer Lee talks to the press outside her polling station at the Paulson Recreation Center after voting with Pittsburgh Mayor Ed Gainey on May 17, 2022 in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.

United Democracy Project, a super PAC affiliated with AIPAC, has reemerged in a Pittsburgh-area House race, recently spending about $80,000 on mailers targeting the Democratic nominee, state Rep. Summer Lee, after a bitterly contested primary during which the group invested millions in an effort to oppose her candidacy, Jewish Insider’s Matthew Kassel reports. 

‘Too extreme’: The new mailer, which was shared with JI, accuses Lee of holding views that are “too extreme” for Pennsylvania’s redrawn 12th Congressional District, displaying some of her past social media statements to suggest the progressive Democrat is in favor of defunding the police and abolishing prison, among other things. “Summer Lee is so extreme she wants to ‘totally dismantle’ the Democratic Party,” the mailer reads.

Unexpected confusion: The rhetoric is reminiscent of ads UDP ran during the May primary, when the group spent nearly $3 million while backing Lee’s opponent, Steve Irwin, a Jewish Democrat in Pittsburgh. Even as UDP had sought to cast Lee as hostile to Biden administration policies, the group now hopes to clear a path for the Republican nominee, Mike Doyle, who shares a name with the retiring Democratic incumbent, sowing unexpected voter confusion as the race appears to have tightened before next Tuesday’s election.

Party switch: While the party switch drew fiercecriticism from Lee as well as her supporters, Patrick Dorton, a spokesperson for UDP, explained the about-face as an effort “to build the broadest bipartisan pro-Israel coalition in Congress possible.” Dorton claimed that Lee’s Middle East policy views — she has expressed support for conditioning U.S. aid to Israel, among other things — “are out of the mainstream for Democrats in the district.” He added: “This is a race with a clear contrast between a pro-Israel candidate and an anti-Israel candidate in Summer Lee, who clearly will be a critic of the U.S.-Israel relationship in Congress.”

Promising poll? Until this week, UDP had only invested in one other general election matchup. But the group recently determined it was worth revisiting the Pittsburgh contest after commissioning a poll that showed “a very competitive race,” according to Dorton, who declined to share the poll with JI or characterize its results on the record. He claimed that UDP had “closely monitored a number of contests in the general election” and would not have entered the race if it did not believe it could make an impact. “We don’t get involved in races where we don’t think we can make a difference.”

Read the full story here.

Robert Malley, Biden administration special envoy for Iran, testifies about the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action during a hearing of the Senate Foreign Relations on Capitol Hill on May 25, 2022, in Washington, D.C.

Nuclear negotiations with Iran have been inactive for months, and it is not currently a U.S. priority to push them forward, Rob Malley, the U.S. special representative for Iran and lead U.S. negotiator for the nuclear talks, said on Monday, Jewish Insider’s Marc Rod reports.

Stuck: The talks have not advanced since late August or early September, Malley said, when Iran demanded a concession “extraneous to the [nuclear deal] and which none of the other participants… would have said was a legitimate demand” to the European Union’s proposed framework, which many had thought could lead to a finalized agreement. “It’s really not our focus right now, it’s not on the agenda because nothing has changed,” Malley said in a virtual interview with Aaron David Miller, a senior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. “So we’re not going to focus on something that is inert when other things are happening.”

Shifting focus: The U.S. envoy described the mass protests inside Iran and Tehran’s decision to provide drones to Russia for its invasion of Ukraine as more significant recent developments, and as the U.S.’ primary focus with regard to Washington’s Iran policy. “If nothing’s going to happen, we’re going to spend our time where we can be useful,” Malley explained. “We’re going to continue to use our sanctions and other pressure tools to make sure that Iran can’t acquire nuclear weapons. And we’re going to focus on areas where we can be effective at this time.”

Reframing: Malley suggested that the nuclear talks are one of multiple options and tools being pursued by the Biden administration, claiming that the administration and the media have failed to “fully” present the administration’s Iran strategy. “President Biden said during the campaign, and since he’s been in office, that we believe that he is committed to preventing Iran from acquiring a nuclear weapon and that diplomacy is the best way to do that, and so we will pursue it without apology,” Malley said. “At the same time, as I said, we will use other tools and, in last resort, a military option if necessary, to stop Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons. So what we had done since the early days of the administration was see whether a diplomatic path was available… Several times we came very close. And each time we came close, Iran came up with a new extraneous demand that derailed the talks.”

Mea culpa: Malley again apologized for a tweet earlier this month in which he said that Iranians were demanding that the regime “respect their human rights and dignity.” Malley faced criticism from Iranian activists in the diaspora for what they said was a mischaracterization of the protesters’ demands. “It was a mistake… it’s not something that I should do, particularly because it was viewed as diminishing the demands of the protesters,” Malley said. “And so what I said and what I’ll say again today: it’s not up to us. It’s not up to me to characterize what the people on the streets of Iran — particularly the women — are demonstrating what they want… The Iranian people will determine their future.”

Read more here.

Vereinigte Staaten von Amerika, USA, Kalifornien, Los Angeles, L.A., Grand Park und Los Angeles City Hall

The Los Angeles City Council is expected to vote today on a resolution adopting the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance working definition of antisemitism. “A crucial first step in fighting antisemitism is defining it in a way that reflects the lived experiences of Jewish people,” reads a letter, authored by the Jewish Federation of Greater Los Angeles and signed by more than four dozen rabbis and area Jewish groups, expressing support for the measure. A source familiar with the matter told Jewish Insider they expect the resolution — which was introduced weeks after a leaked tape showed several council members speaking disparagingly about minority groups, including Latinos and Jews — to pass by a large margin. 

On the East Coast: Meanwhile, Maryland’s Montgomery County Council will also debate a resolution condemning antisemitism today following months of behind-the-scenes negotiations over the resolution’s language on Israel and anti-Zionism, JI’s Gabby Deutch reports. The council was initially slated to vote on the resolution, which would have adopted the IHRA working definition of antisemitism, in July. But the body delayed its consideration in light of pressure from progressive activists who objected to the IHRA definition’s assertion that anti-Zionism can be antisemitic. 

Simple changes: “We made simple changes,” said Ron Halber, executive director of the Jewish Community Relations Council of Greater Washington, which originally advocated for the resolution along with the Anti-Defamation League and American Jewish Committee. The new text of the resolution says the council “affirms,” rather than “adopts,” the IHRA definition, and it is only to be used as a non-legally binding framework. It also states that criticism of Israeli policies is not antisemitic, although anti-Zionism can be. 

Making sacrifices: Hadar Susskind, president and CEO of Americans for Peace Now and a Montgomery County resident, is a critic of the IHRA definition who worked with Jewish community members to reach a compromise on the resolution. APN urged its members to lobby against the resolution in its original form over the summer, but now it has dropped its official objections. “Compromises were made,” said Susskind.

Pressure campaign: On Monday, a group of 38 local and national left-wing organizations came out against the resolution and urged supporters to lobby against it. Signatories included local chapters of the Council on American Islamic Relations, IfNotNow, Jewish Voice for Peace and Democratic Socialists of America. CAIR, which has been pressuring the council to reject the resolution since the summer, has said it will not support any resolution that mentions the IHRA definition.