Daily Kickoff
👋 Good Tuesday morning!
In today’s Daily Kickoff, we interview Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand about her recent trip to the Middle East as part of the Abraham Accords Caucus, and profile Special Envoy for Holocaust Issues Ellen Germain. Also in today’s Daily Kickoff: Jeff Zients, Izabella Tabarovsky, Ron Dermer and Uri Levine.
Secretary of State Tony Blinken will travel to Israel on Monday for meetings with Israeli and Palestinian officials, two weeks after National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan and Brett McGurk, the National Security Council’s coordinator for the Middle East and North Africa, were in the region.
The Senate delegation that traveled to the Middle East last week under the auspices of the Abraham Accords Caucus will hold a press conference on Capitol Hill this morning to recap the trip. We spoke to Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand (D-NY) about what the group encountered in their meetings in Israel, Bahrain, Morocco and the United Arab Emirates.
Gillibrand told us that she has “never been more optimistic” about the future of the region, and suggested that conditions are ripe for President Joe Biden to “create the greatest Middle East peace plan of generations.” Read our full interview with the New York senator below.
On the other side of Capitol Hill, we’re keeping an eye on Democratic committee assignments. We noted yesterday that Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-MN) has requested to keep her seat on the House Foreign Affairs Committee, and that House Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) has pledged to hold a vote to remove her. But Omar may have at least one unlikely Republican ally — Rep. Nancy Mace (R-SC), who said yesterday that she is likely to oppose removing Omar from the committee. The sophomore Republican from South Carolina had opposed stripping Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA) of her committee assignments last Congress, and said last month she would not support McCarthy’s plan to remove Democrats from committees this year.
With a slim majority in the House, the Republican caucus can only afford for four of its members to defect on the vote to remove Omar. Rep. David Valadao (R-CA) said in December it “seems inappropriate” to remove members from their committees. But there has also been a cadre of Democratic lawmakers, some of them Jewish, who have been deeply critical of Omar’s past comments and could join the bulk of Republicans in voting to remove Omar from her committee seats.
McCarthy, meanwhile, announced several additions to the powerful Rules Committee, which controls business on the House floor, including Rep. Thomas Massie (R-KY), a libertarian who has voted in the past against aid to Israel and measures condemning antisemitism, maintained a rocky relationship with members of Kentucky’s Jewish community and repeatedly made comments that have been denounced as antisemitic. Rep. Ralph Norman (R-SC), who recently floated cutting defense spending, was also picked for the committee, as was Rep. Chip Roy (R-TX). Both Norman and Roy had opposed McCarthy’s early bids for speaker earlier this month.
rave review
‘I’ve never been more optimistic’ about the Middle East, Gillibrand says after Abraham Accords trip

Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand (D-NY) told Jewish Insider’s Marc Rod yesterday that she’s “never been more optimistic than today” about the future of peace and cooperation in the Middle East after returning from a congressional delegation last week to Israel, the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain and Morocco.
Window of opportunity: “There is a Middle East peace plan in these opportunities and [President Joe Biden] could create the greatest Middle East peace plan of generations,” Gillibrand, who was part of the seven-member delegation, said. She noted that each country’s leaders expressed a desire for expanded economic and security cooperation with Israel and the U.S., highlighting in particular the threat of Iran and its proxies. Gillibrand said the delegation’s focus was on deepening existing relationships rather than adding new countries to the Accords, but she said that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu was “extremely optimistic” about the prospect of adding Saudi Arabia to the agreements — “he [said], ‘This is weeks and months away, not years.’”
Iran convergence: “[Iran] is a unifying issue,” she said. “And when we met with Prime Minister Netanyahu, we really reiterated the statements from these [Arab] governments and how their talking points aligned almost exactly with the prime minister’s.” Israel and Sunni Arab states have generally taken a more hawkish position on Iran than the Biden administration, particularly in opposing nuclear negotiations with Iran. Gillibrand argued that a regional security agreement “could address” the urgent questions related to Iran’s nuclear ambitions and said she’d like to meet with the administration and Biden to discuss the subject.
Palestinian push: Gillibrand described the possibility of expanded Arab support for the Palestinians through the Accords as a potential “game changer.” Gillibrand told JI that Netanyahu “made assurances that his government follows his lead” on Palestinian issues, adding, “I think he was trying to very directly say to us that, despite perspectives of some members of his coalition government, it is his judgment that is relevant.”
On the agenda: The junior New York senator downplayed a report from early in the trip that Rosen had requested that the delegation not meet with two controversial far-right members of Netanyahu’s coalition government, Ministers Itamar Ben-Gvir and Bezalel Smotrich. The group met with opposition leader and former Prime Minister Yair Lapid, President Isaac Herzog and Defense Minister Yoav Gallant in addition to Netanyahu. Gillibrand said that the group “never planned to meet with other parties within the government,” that “wasn’t part of what our goals were” and such meetings “would not have been on our agenda regardless.”