Some 200 officials from Israel, the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain, Morocco, the U.S. and Egypt are convening in Abu Dhabi today and Tuesday to discuss ways to strengthen and expand regional cooperation and integration in the Middle East. The Negev Forum convening marks the third in-person gathering of the steering committee and first meeting of the working groups since the initial Negev Summit held in the Israeli desert last March, Jewish Insider’s Ruth Marks Eglash and Gabby Deutch report.

Seeing clearly: Dana Erlich, director of the coordination department for the bureau of the Director General of Israel’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs, told JI in a phone interview from Abu Dhabi that the focus of this week’s meeting was “to clarify and identify some concrete and tangible projects that we can move forward on and to create joint projects that will benefit the lives of all the people in the region.” 

Pushing on: The summit comes days after the UAE called on the United Nations Security Council to hold an emergency meeting to discuss the controversial visit last week of newly inaugurated National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir to Jerusalem’s Temple Mount. Despite the tension, however, a 30-member Israeli delegation arrived in the Emirati capital on Monday. “We are all just very happy to be here,” Erlich told JI. “We all understand the tensions and the politics, but we are all continuing to work together for a better future.” She said arranging the gathering, which includes some 200 senior officials representing the six countries, was more a challenge of coordination and logistics.

Widening the circle: It was hoped that more Middle East countries would join the process but so far none have, including Jordan, which signed a peace treaty with Israel in 1994. More recently, at the U.N.’s Climate Change Summit COP27 in November in Sharm el-Sheikh, Egypt, Amman signed bilateral and trilateral declarations of intent with Israel and the UAE on the issue of water security and energy. “Jordan has been invited to join the Negev Forum and we’re still waiting for them to join,” said Erlich. “In general, the Negev Forum is one platform, one mechanism for cooperation, and we’re still doing bilateral, trilateral and other geometric collaborations – the collaboration specifically with Jordan is not part of the Negev Forum but obviously, they’re welcome to join, and we’ll see how the different projects can come together.”

Showing up: Israel’s delegation, headed by Director General of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs Alon Ushpiz, includes representatives from Israel’s Ministries of Defense, Health, Agriculture, Economy, Energy, Intelligence, Tourism and Education, as well as from the Water Authority and the National Security Council. A U.S. delegation of some 40 officials and diplomats is also participating in the meet-up. Headed by State Department Counselor Derek Chollet, the mission includes representatives from the State Department, USAID, the Department of Defense, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, as well as several other government agencies.

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Among the raft of concessions made by House Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) to a group of conservative House members in exchange for their support last week was a commitment to working toward a balanced federal budget over 10 years — including potentially punishing cuts to spending as Congress plans the 2024 federal budget, Jewish Insider’s Marc Rod reports. The plans raised early concerns about potential cuts to defense.

By the numbers: The exact details of the deal, including how firm or binding the commitment to budget cuts and spending targets may be, remain unclear. The budget- and spending-related agreements are not part of the publicly released rules package that the House will vote on on Monday. But, according to Republicans who spoke to reporters on Friday, the House will seek to cap discretionary spending at 2022 levels, potentially setting up cuts to defense and non-defense programs supported by the Jewish community. Lawmakers said that no specific cuts had yet been negotiated, other than the overall topline figure. McCarthy negotiators also repeatedly referred to the topline goal on Friday as “aspirational.” 

Alarm bells: Rep. Ralph Norman (R-SC), who had opposed McCarthy’s bid before ultimately backing the California Republican, emphasized that defense spending cuts are on the table. “Everything will be looked at… You can’t have a balanced budget unless you start cutting,” Norman said. “The dollars that go to defense — we’ve got to look at every dollar there as well as every other agency.” Many Republicans and some Democrats, particularly defense hawks, have spent the past two years pushing successfully for defense spending levels above those requested by the Biden administration. “My concern, though, is in order to keep defense numbers, we’d have to have a 20 to 25% cut in non-defense,” Rep. Michael Waltz (R-FL) said.

Safe for now: Base-level U.S. military aid to Israel — $3.8 billion annually, drawing from both the State and Foreign Operations and Defense budgets — is promised by an ongoing Memorandum of Understanding, which Congress codified into law, and backed by most members of Congress. It is unlikely to see major changes should the package pass, although some conservatives in both the House and Senate oppose foreign aid. Rep. Thomas Massie (R-KY), a libertarian who opposes all foreign aid including to Israel, is reportedly being considered for a position on the Rules Committee.

Flashback: But a range of other programs supported by the Jewish community fall under the non-defense bucket that could be targeted for cuts if the package passes. Jewish community leaders who spoke to Jewish Insider last month before the specific budget plans emerged remained cautiously optimistic that funding for the Nonprofit Security Grant Program, which provides security funding to religious institutions and nonprofits, would survive budget cuts expected under House Republicans. “Without being overly optimistic, this has been a perennially popular program on both sides of the aisle,” Elana Broitman, the Jewish Federations of North America’s senior vice president for public affairs, said in December. “I’m more optimistic about this program than maybe I will be about others.” Nathan Diament, the executive director of the Orthodox Union Advocacy Center, offered a similar outlook in early December, before 2023 funding for the program had been finalized. “We did have early in the program the two budget cycles in which it got cut from $25 million down to $10 million because everything in the government was cut across the board. I think that’s extremely unlikely to happen again,” Diament said.

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Bonus: The Wall Street Journal’s editorial board cautioned that the agreement McCarthy cut to win enough support for the speakership “puts defense spending on the chopping block.”

It’s one of the most haunting images of the Holocaust: thousands of beaten-up shoes, heaped in a mountainous pile — nearly every pair having belonged to a person who didn’t make it out alive. More than 200,000 children were killed at Auschwitz, and the Auschwitz Museum says the shoes — which are one of the only remnants of their short lives — are at risk of deterioration. Now, a crowdfunding campaign seeks to finance the shoes’ conservation and, its organizers hope, give a new generation a tangible way to remember the Holocaust, eJewishPhilanthropy’s Ben Sales reports.

Last piece of evidence: “They’ve deteriorated now to a point that if they are not restored, they will disintegrate altogether and we will lose them as evidence of history,” Phyllis Greenberg Heideman, president of the International March of the Living, told eJewishPhilanthropy. “We are rescuing the last piece of evidence that these children even ever lived.”

8,000 shoes: The campaign began in September and, so far, has raised roughly $250,000. Along with the March of the Living, it’s being co-organized by the Auschwitz Museum, located at the site of the former camp, and the Auschwitz-Birkenau Foundation, and Heideman expects it to last two years. Initially, the goal is to conserve 8,000 shoes that are especially at risk, at a cost of approximately $50 to $100 per shoe, with the average trending toward the higher end of that range. The work will be done by specialists at the museum. 

Engaging the youth: For the March of the Living, an annual educational trip to Auschwitz-Birkenau that has brought more than 300,000 people — many of them teens — to the concentration camp, the fundraising campaign is also a way to engage young people in Holocaust remembrance. Heideman said that the campaign’s organizers intentionally did not seek the backing of a foundation or corporation, so that ordinary people could feel a sense of investment in the initiative. The minimum donation to the campaign, which is titled “From Soul to Sole,” is $18. A menu of possible donations shows pictures of the shoes along with options such as “A pair for Avraham” ($180) or “Heeling Adam” ($500). “This is a real way for people to become actively involved in saving history,” said Heideman, who was appointed by President George W. Bush to the United States Holocaust Memorial Council.

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When Max August was a Harvard undergraduate, he scraped data from 8,000 startups and 11,000 of their founders to complete a senior thesis on Israel’s fast-maturing tech scene that was supervised by former U.S. Treasury Secretary Lawrence Summers. Three years later, many of those same Israeli entrepreneurs are vying for the attention of the young investor, who has helped distribute close to $1 billion on behalf of General Atlantic, one of the world’s biggest private equity funds, Shoshanna Solomon reports for The Circuit. Most prominent of nine companies in the firm’s Israel portfolio is Mobileye Global, the Intel-controlled maker of self-driving technology that held an IPO in October and is currently valued at about $25 billion.

Bigger visions: After starting as an intern at General Atlantic, headquartered on Park Avenue, August was sent to Tel Aviv as an associate last year to scout investment opportunities, opening an office in the 61-story Azrieli Sarona Tower where he gazes over the Mediterranean coast. Alongside Alex Crisses, a managing director from New York who shuttles to Israel to meet with strong prospects, General Atlantic last month recruited Yoram Teitz, who was managing partner in Israel at accounting powerhouse EY, as a senior adviser. “Israel is moving from a venture-capital-only market to a later-stage market, where you’ll find bigger companies [and] entrepreneurs who have bigger visions,” Crisses told The Circuit in an interview. “As a global investor, we wanted to pick the locations that over the next five years will have the most innovative technology. And we really do believe that Israel will be that.”

Global presence: With $73 billion in assets under management and 16 global offices from London to Shanghai, General Atlantic came late to the game in Israel, a tiny Middle Eastern country that has spawned the greatest number of technology startups per capita in the world. Termed a growth equity firm, General Atlantic held back until it saw a growing pattern of Israeli companies raising $100 million and more in a funding round, an indicator of business strength. Similar criteria have drawn other global investment leaders including Blackstone, SoftBank and Koch Disruptive Technologies.

Mobileye investor: In 2020, the firm led a $210 million fundraising round for AppsFlyer, which uses data analytics to help marketing firms grow. The firm led two $150 million rounds for HiBob, which assists midsized companies in managing human resources. In 2021, it co-led a $543 million funding round for Transmit Security, which authenticates users without employing passwords. Mobileye, which Intel bought for $15.3 billion in 2017, is a model for what brought General Atlantic to Israel. It’s “really defining the next chapter of the maturation of Israeli technology,” August said. The firm agreed to buy $100 million of Mobileye shares as part of the IPO. 

Arab market: General Atlantic also sees opportunity in Israel’s growing connections with Arab countries, paved by the 2020 Abraham Accords that were signed with the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain, Sudan and Morocco. “Israel has amazing technology to export,” Crisses said, making it “a real beacon in the area.” General Atlantic closed on its BeyondNetZero fund last month, allocating $3.5 billion to support entrepreneurs who deliver innovative environmental solutions while creating durable growth businesses. “We’re deeply focused on climate in Israel,” August said.

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