Daily Kickoff
👋 Good Wednesday morning!
In today’s Daily Kickoff, we report from the AJC Global Forum in Tel Aviv and interview our own Ruth Marks Eglash ahead of the release of her debut novel, Parallel Lines. Also in today’s Daily Kickoff: Barbara Leaf, Barbara Lee and Harvey Averne.
Thirteen House members — 11 Democrats and two Republicans — voted yesterday against legislation that seeks to create an ambassador-level position dedicated to advancing the Abraham Accords. The bill passed overwhelmingly, with 413 votes in favor.
The no votes: Reps. Rich McCormick (R-GA), Thomas Massie (R-KY), Jamaal Bowman (D-NY), Betty McCollum (D-MN), Rashida Tlaib (D-MI), Cori Bush (D-MO), Ilhan Omar (D-MN), Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY), Barbara Lee (D-CA), Summer Lee (D-PA), Delia Ramirez (D-IL), Ayanna Pressley (D-MA) and Chuy Garcia (D-IL).
A spokesperson for Barbara Lee, who is running for Senate in California, told JI’s Marc Rod that she voted against the measure by mistake, and intended to vote yes. She also entered a statement into the Congressional Record to that effect. Lee has recently sought to court pro-Israel voters in the race.
Mistaken votes are uncommon but not unheard of in the House. Multiple lawmakers who initially logged no votes corrected them to yes during the voting process for the Abraham Accords bill on Tuesday.
In Tel Aviv, Diaspora-Israel relations were front and center as the American Jewish Committee wrapped up its Global Forum moments ago. Over the course of the last four days, American Jewish thought leaders and Israeli officials — both in Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s coalition and in the opposition — trickled in and out of the David InterContinental Hotel, advocating their views for the future of the Jewish state, Jewish Insider’s Melissa Weiss reports.
AJC CEO Ted Deutch parried questions about potential protests and disruptions when we spoke to him ahead of the conference. About a dozen demonstrators blew horns and chanted outside the hotel, well out of earshot of the roughly 1,500 attendees in the hotel’s Grand Ballroom, in contrast to more prominent demonstrations at the recent Jewish Federations of North America General Assembly and meetings between Israeli officials and Jewish groups in the U.S. last week.
Earlier this morning, Diaspora Affairs Minister Amichai Chikli — who had faced criticism last week for gesturing at protestors as he marched in the Celebrate Israel Parade in New York — took the stage to applause, giving an eight-minute address that briefly touched on the government’s makeup before focusing on his ministry’s efforts to deepen Jewish education in the U.S.
Chikli touted the Diaspora Ministry’s budget increase, and his recently announced effort to support Jewish day school education in the U.S. “The cure for antisemitism,” Chikli said, “is education.”
But some of the conference’s last words were given by writer Yossi Klein Halevi, who focused his remarks on the relationship between Israel and the diaspora. “The starting point for a necessary realignment between Israel and American Jewry is recognizing the very different and necessary strategies that each community has devised in relation to our surroundings,” he said. “What worries me about this moment is, as I see as really the great danger that we’re facing in the relationship, is that what held the relationship together is symbolized by the two flags on the bimas of most American synagogues. And what those two flags represent, to me, is the commitment to the Jewish state and to democratic values.”
“What’s beginning to happen in both communities,” Klein Halevi noted, “is a growing challenge to the necessary entwinement of those two values.”
Klein Halevi responded to Chikli’s claim, made minutes earlier, that the government had been elected by a large majority, noting that a few thousand votes had determined the outcome of the election and the makeup of the current government. His comment elicited a ripple of applause that coursed through the audience.
“This applause is one of the reasons I love AJC,” Klein Halevi joked.
A robust discussion about the Israel-diaspora relationship was on display — literally — at a plenary session last night titled “The Great Debate: Should Diaspora Jews Have a Say in Israeli Affairs?” Onstage, Israel Hayom’s Ariel Kahana and Shalom Hartman Institute of North America President Yehuda Kurtzer debated the relationship between American Jews and Israelis. The debate followed an address by former Defense Minister Benny Gantz and recorded remarks from Uruguayan President Luis Lacalle Pou that paid tribute to AJC’s global relationship-building efforts.
But some of the loudest applause of the evening was reserved for Enver Hoxhaj, deputy speaker of the parliament of Kosovo, who told the audience that Theodor Herzl’s Altneuland — which he had discovered through Jewish classmates while studying in Vienna 30 years ago — had been a favorite book of his.
Invoking the book’s title, Hoxhaj concluded his speech by telling the crowd that Israel has “an old and new friend in Europe.”
status update
U.S. is working to ‘get Iran to deescalate on a variety of fronts,’ Leaf says

Assistant Secretary of State for Near Eastern Affairs Barbara Leaf told lawmakers on Capitol Hill yesterday that the U.S. is working on efforts to “get Iran to deescalate on a variety of fronts,” Jewish Insider’s Marc Rod reports.
Status update: “There is a lot of misinformation and a lot of disinformation churning around in the media ecosystem right now. We have been very clear that we’ll use diplomacy, indirect or direct, to get after the various threats that Iran poses internationally,” Leaf said. “The best way to constrain the [nuclear] program is to get it back into a diplomatic box with rigorous oversight and inspection regime and so on. JCPOA, for a variety of reasons, is really not actively on the table as it were. But we are trying to get to a place where we can get Iran to deescalate on a variety of fronts.”
Normalization prospects: Leaf called potential normalization between Saudi Arabia and Israel, “absolutely a priority for us” that would bring about broader normalization and “shift things very dynamically in the region.” “There is absolutely the will and determination… on the part of the administration to midwife this,” she continued. However, Leaf said there is “no defined road map at this point” and that “a lot of the discussions are nascent.” The Saudis, she said, have not yet developed “a defined picture of what they might put into the mix” regarding expectations for progress toward Israeli-Palestinian peace as a condition of normalization, although she noted that “they have stipulated that there is a part in any normalization for the Palestinians.”
Bonus: Bahrain and Iran are expected to resume diplomatic ties “sometime soon,” Leaf told lawmakers.