Daily Kickoff
Good Friday morning.
In today’s Daily Kickoff, we look at the White House’s efforts to couple fighting antisemitism and Islamophobia, and interview Kibbutz Nir Oz residents who survived the Oct. 7 Hamas terror attacks. Also in today’s Daily Kickoff: Rep. Max Miller, Laura Blumenfeld and Sacha Baron Cohen.
For less-distracted reading over the weekend, browse this week’s edition of The Weekly Print, a curated print-friendly PDF featuring a selection of recent Jewish Insider, eJewishPhilanthropy and The Circuit stories, including: Record crowd on National Mall demands release of hostages, condemns antisemitism; Jews, Bedouins unite in face of Hamas terror attacks on Israel; Labour pains for Keir Starmer over Gaza war.Print the latest edition here.
When the 19th annual Manama Dialogue kicks off this evening in Bahrain, the situation some 1,200 miles away in Israel and Gaza won’t be far from mind. The summit’s first plenary will focus on “War, Diplomacy and De-escalation.” One thing that will be different this year: No Israelis will be in attendance. Top U.S. officials for the Middle East, however, are expected to attend. The weekend-long confab, which includes a second plenary, “New Arab Initiatives for Regional Peace,” comes amid deteriorating relations between Israel and Jordan.
The Hashemite Kingdom backed out of its water and energy deal with Israel on Thursday, further depriving itself in a time of severe scarcity, as Amman continues to be one of the most strident critics of Israel since the war began, Jewish Insider’s Lahav Harkov reports. Jordanian Foreign Minister Ayman Safadi told Al Jazeera that Amman will not give final approval to the project that his country was set to ratify last month, because of “retaliatory barbarism carried out by Israel.”
The deal,mediated by the United Arab Emirates in 2021 in the aftermath of the Abraham Accords, would have had Israel build a solar field in Jordan to test solar-energy storage solutions and export the clean energy to Israel, while the Jewish state would construct a designated desalination site from which all water would be sold to Jordan.
Israel has plenty of energy from its gas in the Mediterranean, but Jordan is “one of the most water-stressed countries in the world and…the situation is likely to deteriorate further,” according to a U.N. report.
Members of a Jordanian team at a field hospital in Gaza were wounded on Thursday, with Jordan pointing a finger at Israel. Israel evacuated its embassy in Jordan at the outset of the war over safety concerns, and Jordan recalled its ambassador, saying Israel’s would not be welcome back.
Queen Rania has since given CNN interviews in which she denied the atrocities Hamas committed against Israelis, drew an equivalence between Hamas and Israel, and accused Jews of making false claims of antisemitism. King Abdullah II published an op-ed in the Washington Post this week accusing Israel of taking “unilateral actions [that] have undermined the peace process” and saying its leadership is “unwilling to take the path of peace,” without mentioning the many actions by the Palestinian leadership that ran counter to that path.
Jordanian newspaper Al-Ghad‘s front page on Wednesday featured an editorial in Hebrew with the headline “What will be after Israel?” and celebrating a “new world order” to come after a Hamas victory. Earlier this week, Al-Ghad featured a cartoon of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu drinking Gazans’ blood.
While Israel and Jordan have had a peace treaty for 29 years, it has been a decidedly cold peace, with Amman even recently terminating the lease on land Israel continued to use after making peace. Jordan is ruled by the Hashemite monarchy but most of its population views itself as Palestinian.
war of words
Concerns rise over WH linkage of antisemitism, Islamophobia

When Seann Pietila was arrested in June for threatening to commit a mass shooting targeting Jewish people, a U.S. attorney described the indictment in the context of a “rise in antisemitism across the nation and here in Michigan.” This week, the 19-year-old Michigan man pleaded guilty to a federal charge for the violent threats he made online. But even though his violent threats specifically targeted only Jews, the U.S. attorney’s new comments were different: “At this moment of increased threats across the nation, we renew our commitment to prevent, disrupt, and prosecute illegal acts of hate fueled by antisemitism, Islamophobia or anti-Arab bias,” he said. Nothing in the indictment against Pietila referred to anything he had said or done that targeted Muslims, Jewish Insider’s Gabby Deutch reports.
Wider shift: The change in language from the Department of Justice may seem like a matter of semantics. But it reflects a larger shift across the federal government, which in recent weeks has increasingly grouped antisemitism and Islamophobia together in its public language following the Oct. 7 Hamas attack in Israel and the resulting Israel-Hamas war — even as federal data indicates a much larger rise in antisemitism than in anti-Muslim hate crimes.
The fine print: On Tuesday, the White House released a fact sheet about actions taken to address the “alarming rise of reported antisemitic and Islamophobic events at schools and on college campuses.” An Oct. 27 statement from President Joe Biden on the five-year anniversary of the 2018 antisemitic shooting at Pittsburgh’s Tree of Life synagogue also called on Americans to speak “out against bigotry and hate in all its forms, whether it is racism, antisemitism or Islamophobia.” Similar statements from Biden in 2021 and 2022 about the Tree of Life shooting did not mention Islamophobia.
Raising questions: The imprecise language has worried some Jewish community advocates who question whether the lack of specificity in diagnosing the problem of rising antisemitism dilutes the White House’s efforts to address it.
Not clear: “I think that tying antisemitism and Islamophobia together is a way of avoiding actually addressing the way that either form of hate is manifesting, because they’re not the same,” Amanda Berman, executive director of Zioness, a progressive pro-Israel organization, told JI on Thursday.