Daily Kickoff
Good Tuesday morning.
In today’s Daily Kickoff, In today’s Daily Kickoff, we interview New York City Council candidate Maya Kornberg about her primary challenge to a far-left councilmember and talk to Morton Williams co-owner Avi Kaner about his decision to redirect his Columbia University giving. We also report on how Senate Democrats are approaching legislation to sanction the International Criminal Court and interview freshman Rep. Jeff Crank. Also in today’s Daily Kickoff: Rep. Mikie Sherrill, Andy Jassy and Doug Emhoff.
What We’re Watching
- Middle East envoy Steve Witkoff will travel to Saudi Arabia today, where he is slated to meet with Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman in Riyadh. Witkoff is expected to travel to Israel later in the week.
- The Senate will vote today on a motion to proceed on legislation sanctioning the International Criminal Court. More below.
What You Should Know
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is likely to visit President Donald Trump in Washington in the coming week, two sources with knowledge of the preparations confirmed to Jewish Insider’s Lahav Harkov. Some reports say Netanyahu may depart Israel as soon as Saturday night, following the slated release of three more hostages from Gaza.
Netanyahu has good reasons to fly across the globe and rush into a meeting with Trump only two weeks after the inauguration – even though the prime minister told the Tel Aviv District Court on Monday that he has not yet fully recovered from recent prostate surgery.
There’s Trump’s comment that Palestinians should be moved out of Gaza to allow for reconstruction, a move that Israeli government officials have quietly floated from the beginning of the war as a strategy that could also help uproot Hamas’ control of the area. Jerusalem and Washington are already reportedly in talks about the idea — which the Palestinian Authority has rejected — with Israelis suggesting more distant Muslim-majority countries than Jordan and Egypt, which have refused to take in Gazans. Albania has already publicly declined.
But Netanyahu is likely trying to get some face time with Trump as soon as possible — amid the looming threat from Iran and following a series of appointments and statements about Israeli national security issues that raised eyebrows among Israeli officials and pro-Israel figures in Washington.
The confirmations of Secretary of State Marco Rubio and Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth last week were met with enthusiasm in Israel. But other, more isolationist figures may be giving Jerusalem pause, such as Michael DiMino as deputy assistant secretary of defense for the Middle East, a position with influence on policy decisions relating to Israel.
Netanyahu is enthusiastic about possible normalization with Saudi Arabia, but after Trump’s Middle East envoy, Steve Witkoff, reportedly pressured the prime minister to enter a cease-fire and hostage-release agreement with Hamas that required significant concessions from Israel, Jerusalem may have more questions than before about the cost of a deal with Riyadh.
A source who recently spoke with administration officials expressed concerns to JI that the key players in the 2020 Abraham Accords are not part of the second Trump administration. White House officials, the source said, seem to be missing the underpinnings of the Accords — that an Israel that is strong enough to face Iran is what makes it an attractive partner to other countries in the region. If the Trump administration looks at the deal as a traditional give-and-take agreement – for example, a Palestinian state in return for Saudi normalization – then Israel may come out seeming like the difficult party getting in the way of the deal the president wants.
The Iranian threat is always a priority for Netanyahu, and Trump has signaled that he wants to first try to negotiate a deal with the mullahs’ regime rather than approve an Israeli strike on Iran’s nuclear facilities. “Hopefully, that can be worked out without having to worry about it. It would be really nice if that could be worked out without having to go that further step,” the president recently told reporters asking about a possible strike.
That may be interpreted as an implicit threat in the style of, ‘Nice country you got there; it would be a shame if I let Israel attack it.’ But Trump’s recent revocation of security details to former officials threatened by the Islamic Republic has raised questions about how seriously the president takes the Iranian threat.
As with the Gaza cease-fire, Trump’s dealmaking enthusiasm may take precedence over Israel’s security needs and lead him to a Biden-like playbook on Iran, which Netanyahu would want to try to forestall by persuading him otherwise in person, which has been an effective strategy for the prime minister in the past.
Sources in the prime minister’s inner circle dismissed all of these concerns and brushed off claims that the meeting is an urgent request, noting that Netanyahu and Trump discussed a future meeting soon after the election in November. Trump understands the Iranian threat — after all, the Islamic Republic tried to assassinate him, and there is no daylight with Washington, is the general line from Jerusalem. Trump’s threats and Witkoff’s pressure were on Qatar and Egypt to bring Hamas, not Israel, to the table, Jerusalem maintains. And Trump has made pro-Israel appointments, from Rubio and Hegseth to his nominees for ambassador to Israel, Mike Huckabee, and ambassador to the U.N., Elise Stefanik.
But even the sunniest take on the current situation can’t deny that there are pressing issues on the table right now, spanning Iran, Lebanon and Gaza. Netanyahu wants to discuss all of them face-to-face with Trump at the outset of his administration.
brooklyn beat
Jewish voters in Park Slope say they are ready for a change

For Jewish community members, the vandalism of Miriam, a beloved Middle Eastern eatery, over the weekend was the latest instance of rising antisemitism fueled by the Oct. 7 attacks and Israel’s war with Hamas in Gaza, contributing to a growing sense of unease that many Park Slope constituents feel their local representative has failed to address. Shahana Hanif, a far-left city councilmember has faced backlash from the city’s Jewish leaders over her hostile positions on Israel and handling of antisemitism in the district. Even as Hanif has more recently made overtures to the Jewish community as she faces reelection in the June primary, activists eager for new representation are hopeful that her challenger, Maya Kornberg — a Jewish Democrat who announced her candidacy last month — will be more sensitive to their needs amid an uptick in antisemitic activity in central Brooklyn and beyond, Jewish Insider’s Matthew Kassel reports.
Firsthand experience: In a recent interview at a cafe not far from Miriam, Kornberg, 33, said her experience launching her first campaign for public office had underscored the persistence of antisemitism as she faced a swell of online vitriol attacking her Jewish identity. When she announced she was running on social media in December, she was “shocked to see the blatantly antisemitic comments,” she told JI last week. “There were people saying ‘Jews don’t belong in public office,’ ‘You kill children in Gaza’ and ‘You’re a pro-genocide candidate.’ There was someone posting a swastika,” Kornberg added. “I screenshotted and took all of those down because there was no place for them on my platform. I study violence facing electeds. I know that Jews and other marginalized groups and minorities in this country face violence, but it was different to experience it personally. That galvanized me even more to say this is not the America that I’m raising my kid in. This is not the city that I want to raise the next generation of Jewish Americans in.”
Read the full interview here.