Daily Kickoff
👋 Good Thursday morning!
In today’s Daily Kickoff, we look at concerns surrounding an upcoming Palestinian literary conference at the University of Pennsylvania featuring Roger Waters, and report from yesterday’s N7 forum in Washington. Also in today’s Daily Kickoff: Sen. Tommy Tuberville, Deborah Lipstadt and Eyal Hulata.
On Wednesday, Secretary of State Tony Blinken delivered a major foreign policy address at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies touting “international cooperation” as Washington’s top diplomatic goal.
“Fellow democracies have always been our first port of call for cooperation. They always will be,” Blinken said at SAIS. “But on certain priorities, if we go it alone, or only with our democratic friends, we will come up short.”
That statement is a subtle acknowledgment of the limits of the Biden administration’s democracy-first approach to foreign relations, particularly at a time when President Joe Biden is trying to strengthen Washington’s relationship with Riyadh and normalize ties between Israel and Saudi Arabia.
“We’ve galvanized regional integration. In the Middle East, we’ve deepened both recent and decades-old relations between Israel and Arab states. And we’re working to foster new ones, including with Saudi Arabia,” said Blinken.
The limits of U.S. influence extend to UNIFIL, the U.N.’s peacekeeping force in southern Lebanon. In an August United Nations Security Council resolution meant to extend UNIFIL’s mandate, one word stood out: The resolution referred to the Shab’a Farms, an area in the Golan Heights, as “occupied.”
If Washington agreed with the resolution’s characterization of the region as “occupied,” it would signal a major policy shift. Israel captured the Golan Heights from Syria in the Six-Day War in 1967 and annexed the region in 1981. The United States, during the Trump administration, was the first country to recognize Israeli control of the Golan, a policy that the Biden administration continued.
“The Biden administration had effectively reversed the official American position recognizing Israel’s sovereignty over the Golan Heights, without having to make an official policy announcement,” Tony Badran, a research fellow at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, argued in a Tablet Magazine article published last week.
But a State Department spokesperson told Jewish Insider’s Gabby Deutch that no such policy change has occurred. In fact, the spokesperson said, Washington disagreed with the use of that language.
“The United States repeatedly relayed our concerns over that characterization of Shab’a Farms during the UNIFIL mandate negotiations,” the spokesperson said. “As with many U.N. Resolutions, the final text represents difficult negotiations and compromises required to ensure passage. U.S. policy on the Golan Heights has not changed.”
The UNIFIL resolution earned praisefrom Israel’s Foreign Ministry and support from the United States. The resolution rejected demands from the Lebanese terror group Hezbollah to limit the movement of UNIFIL. Read the full story here.
Elsewhere in Washington, the House Foreign Affairs Committee’s Subcommittee on the Middle East, North Africa, and Central Asia will hold a hearing today on policy responses to Iran’s malign activities. Former National Intelligence Manager for Iran Norman Roule, FDD Senior Fellow Behnam Ben Taleblu, activist Masih Alinejad and Brookings Institution Vice President and Director of Foreign Policy Suzanne Maloney are scheduled to testify.
Taleblu told JI he plans to tell the committee that “Washington cannot afford to keep disconnecting the dots on Iran policy. It means nothing to claim to stand with the Iranian people and have a policy of enriching their oppressors… Washington has an opportunity to stand with the Iranian people in practice and not just in principle. If it takes, it remains to be seen.”
poison pens
UPenn to host festival featuring speakers calling for the destruction of Israel

The University of Pennsylvania is facing backlash from a growing number of Jewish leaders, trustees and alumni for hosting a Palestinian cultural festival next week featuring several controversial figures who have espoused antisemitic rhetoric and called for the destruction of Israel, Jewish Insider’s Matthew Kassel reports.
Mounting scrutiny: The Palestine Writes Literature Festival, which will take place Sept. 22-24 on UPenn’s campus in Philadelphia, calls itself “the only North American literature festival dedicated to celebrating and promoting cultural productions of Palestinian writers and artists.” But it has recently drawn mounting scrutiny as university officials resisted multiple private letters from local Jewish groups exhorting UPenn to publicly distance itself from the festival and take steps to ensure that Jewish students can seek support during the three-day conference, which overlaps with Yom Kippur.
Waters and Hill: Among the most prominent speakers is Roger Waters, the Pink Floyd co-founder and outspoken anti-Israel activist who has compared the Jewish state to the Third Reich and recently wore a Nazi-style uniform while performing onstage in Berlin. The festival will also include Marc Lamont Hill, a former CNN commentator who was dismissed from the network in 2018 after he advocated for a “free Palestine from the river to the sea,” a formulation that is widely interpreted as a call for Israel’s elimination as a Jewish state.
‘Mind-boggling’: “In a moment when antisemitism has reached an indisputably historic level, it is mind-boggling to think that University of Pennsylvania is hosting this event,” Jonathan Greenblatt, the CEO of the Anti-Defamation League, said in a sharply worded statement to JI on Tuesday. “If this were a conference to explore and celebrate Palestinian literature, none of us would object. However, it is not. It is a gathering of anti-Israel and anti-Zionist activists, some of whom have a long history of antisemitic statements and comments.”