2019 called, it wants Israel’s election back
Plus, another Jewish Dem endorses Lawler
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In today’s Daily Kickoff, we look at whether the upcoming elections in Israel are likely produce a new government or, like in 2019, end in a governing stalemate, and report on Sen. Chris Murphy’s trip to Qatar. We spotlight Kansas Senate nominee Adam Hamilton’s position on Israel as the Midwestern Democrat gains traction in his effort to unseat Sen. Roger Marshall, and report on antisemitic messages posted online by the son of Maryland GOP gubernatorial nominee Dan Cox, who also worked on his father’s campaign. Also in today’s Daily Kickoff: Rahm Emanuel, Feridun Sinirlioglu and Sen. Ron Wyden.
Today’s Daily Kickoff was curated by JI Executive Editor Melissa Weiss, with assists from Tamara Zieve and Danielle Cohen-Kanik.
Today’s Agenda
The Israeli Embassy in Washington is holding its official memorial ceremony this evening for the victims of the Oct. 7, 2023, Hamas-led terror attacks. The event in Washington coincides with the official ceremonies in Israel that are being held today across the country.
Sen. Chris Murphy (D-CT) is in the Middle East this week, having arrived on Saturday in Qatar. Murphy, who has praised Qatar as the U.S.’ “best partner” in the Gulf but more recently opposed Doha’s gifting of a luxury jet to President Donald Trump and attempted to block arms sales to the Gulf state, makes the trip days after Qatari-brokered talks between the U.S. and Iran hit a stalemate. Read more from JI’s Melissa Weiss here.
The investigation into FZ1073 is continuing this week amid deepening concerns over serious security lapses that led an Omani pilot with extremist beliefs to be assigned a flight to Israel.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu ordered the country’s National Security Council to appoint an investigator to review “all security aspects regarding foreign civil aviation to Israel,” amid reports that Emirati authorities had sent the names of all passengers and crew to Israeli counterparts prior to the flight. Israeli media reported that the Omani pilot had planned to disable his co-pilot and prepare the flight for normal landing procedures before crashing the jet into Ben Gurion Airport upon its descent.
First in JI: Stacy Caridi, the deputy mayor of Montebello, N.Y., became the second local Jewish Democratic official to endorse Rep. Mike Lawler’s (R-NY) reelection bid, Jewish Insider’s Marc Rod has learned. Caridi, who has known Lawler since his days as a state lawmaker, said the endorsement was in part due to the New York Republican’s record on antisemitism and Israel policy.
Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) is expected to attend a fundraiser tonight in New York for Michigan Democratic Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed.
Brazilian President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva and Sen. Flávio Bolsonaro, the son of the country’s former president and an ally of Trump, are headed to a runoff slated for later this month after neither man garnered enough votes to win Sunday’s election outright. Netanyahu issued congratulations to Bolsonaro, saying, “I look forward to restoring the extraordinary friendship between Israel and Brazil.”
Meanwhile in Spain, Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez this morning called snap elections, slated for late November. The move comes amid widespread protests in the country and the progressive leader’s clashes with right-wing parties over the minority government’s emergency housing measures.
One Thing To Know
BACK TO THE FUTURE
By Lahav Harkov
Welcome to 2019, electorally speaking, that is.
With the High Holy Days season now in the rear-view mirror, Israelis across the country have received postcards in the mail in recent days listing their polling place address, one of the tangible signs that election season is in the homestretch. Yet the Oct. 27, 2026, vote is taking on an unmistakable back-to-the-future feel.
Then, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu was bloodied but unbowed, set to be indicted on bribery and public corruption charges, with a coalition that fell apart over a court order to resolve the issue of Haredi draft exemptions. Now, Netanyahu remains bloodied but unbowed, with a large swath of the public calling for him to take responsibility for security failings surrounding Oct. 7, 2023, and the Haredi draft issue still looms large.
The Big Reads
PASTOR’S POSITION
Adam Hamilton, the Democratic nominee in Kansas’ Senate race running against Sen. Roger Marshall (R-KS), said in a Politico video interview that he wants to end offensive aid to Israel, but disagreed with characterizations of the war in Gaza as a genocide, Jewish Insider’s Marc Rod reports. The comments are a signal of how unpopular Democrats believe U.S. support for Israel has become even in ordinarily deep-red states. “I don’t want my tax money being used for weapons that are going to be dropped on hospitals, destroying entire communities,” Hamilton, a Methodist pastor, said. Pressed on whether he would vote to stop weapons transfers, he said “not all weapons transfers,” carving out an exemption for defensive weapons.
hate mail
The son — and one-time campaign worker — of Dan Cox, the Republican nominee challenging Democratic Maryland Gov. Wes Moore, sent Facebook messages predicting “Israel will fall” and calling Jews “scum who killed my savior Jesus” and the “Synagogue of Satan,” according to a post from a GOP consultant, Jewish Insider’s Will Bredderman reports. Republican operative Alexandra Levine shared screenshots of messages allegedly from Josiah Cox, the GOP gubernatorial nominee’s son, that were posted to a Facebook group in June. The profile in the images uses the same name and photo as one the gubernatorial hopeful tagged in a 2024 post, which also called his son his “bodyguard” and shared photos of him, including one with then-Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA). “Jewish customs disgust me,” one of the screen-grabbed missives reads. “You’re pedophiles and Satan worshipping scum and you slaughter innocents all around the world.”
campaign offensive
Mike Rogers, the Republican nominee for Senate in Michigan, released a new ad featuring the University of Michigan student who confronted his Democratic opponent, Abdul El-Sayed, over his positions on Iran and its repressive Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps in a viral exchange last week, Jewish Insider’s Matthew Kassel reports. In the 30-second campaign ad posted on Friday, Iman Dashti, who identifies as Persian American, says that his family “escaped oppression in Iran to find freedom in America,” before calling El-Sayed “a real threat to our national security and our values.”
Early adopter: El-Sayed accused Israel of committing genocide in Gaza as early as two weeks after Hamas’ Oct. 7, 2023, attacks on Israel, before Israel’s ground invasion began nearly a week later and well before any other mainstream political leaders used the term, JI’s Marc Rod reports.
The Rundown
photo op
daylight between them
On Our Radar
● The Live Briefing. Word on the street, clips, podcasts and quick updates — the items we’re tracking all day in our Live Briefing on the app (on Apple and Android) and website.
The U.S. withdrew a dozen B-1 bombers from the U.K.’s RAF Fairford air base a week after British officials arrested several dual British-Iranian citizens near the base who were suspected of planning an attack on the facility, which the U.S. used to conduct attacks against Iran during the height of the war…
A U.S. official said that two members of Iran’s delegation to the U.N. General Assembly had been “kicked out” of the U.S. over the weekend after ignoring an order from Secretary of State Marco Rubio to leave the country last week amid stalled talks between the U.S. and Tehran…
Iran’s oil minister, Mohsen Paknejad, resigned on Sunday, citing personal reasons; his resignation was accepted by President Masoud Pezeshkian, who had previously denied Paknejad’s efforts to step down…
The New York Times spotlights the continued operations of Mahan Air amid U.S. sanctions designed to shut down Iranian airlines, noting that Mahan recently began flights to Vietnam and Thailand, months after Iran permitted tankers bound for the region to transit through the Strait of Hormuz…
The Iranian rial hit a new record low of 2.688 million rials to the U.S. dollar on Saturday; the Islamic Republic’s central bank said it would begin selling up to $2 billion to support the rial…
“CBS Sunday Morning” talks to some of the Israeli passengers who neutralized the co-pilot of FZ1073 during last week’s attack on a flight traveling from Dubai to Israel…
The New York Times interviews more than a dozen passengers on the flight to piece together a detailed account of the events that transpired on the plane and in Saudi Arabia, where the aircraft made an emergency landing…
Speaking to NBC’s “Meet the Press,” former U.S. Ambassador to Japan Rahm Emanuel, who is mulling a 2028 presidential bid, addressed questions over the viability of a Jewish candidate, saying, “If my faith is a problem for you, don’t vote for me”…
A federal district court temporarily blocked the release of a long-delayed Department of Education report on individual foreign donors who have contributed to universities amid a lawsuit by a coalition of colleges and universities…
Sen. Ron Wyden (D-OR) condemned antisemitic posters that appeared on the University of Oregon campus that attacked the school’s Hillel director as an “enemy of the people”…
Singer Zach Bryan performed at Robert Kraft’s Gillette Stadium over the weekend wearing a “Free Palestine” shirt, weeks after an uproar over a planned performance at the venue by rapper Macklemore, who had recently chanted “Free Palestine” and displayed imagery from Gaza during two shows in which he opened for singer Ed Sheeran…
The head of the Jewish Greens, the subgroup within the U.K.’s Green Party, said it was “quite possible” that she would leave the party following its weekend vote to equate Zionism with racism and for Israel to be replaced with a Palestinian state “with equal rights for all”…
Meanwhile, a new study from the Institute for Jewish Policy Research found a significant increase since 2022, prior to the Oct. 7, 2023, Hamas terror attacks, in the number of Jewish Brits who identified as Zionist and who said they were “very emotionally attached to Israel”…
The internationally recognized government of Yemen, backed by Riyadh, announced scaled-up operations targeting the Iran-backed Houthis in the country.
Additionally, the U.S. has deployed more than 200 intelligence and military analysts to Saudi command centers to support operations by Riyadh’s Yemeni allies against the Houthis; the U.S. is also providing aerial refueling for Saudi aircraft conducting defensive patrols…
Israel and Ireland played to a 1-1 draw in a spectator-less Nations League match in Serbia on Sunday, in which the Irish players donned black armbands and refused to shake the hands of the Israeli players; members of the Israeli team also wore black armbands, with the team’s captain, Dor Peretz, writing “7/10” on his armband in commemoration of Oct. 7…
Turkey is reportedly considering nominating Feridun Sinirlioglu, the secretary-general of the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe, to succeed António Guterres as U.N. secretary-general when his term ends at the end of the year; Sinirlioglu would be entering a race that does not have a clear front-runner but has seen two candidates, Costa Rican economist Rebeca Grynspan and Guyanese Ambassador to the U.N. Carolyn Rodrigues-Birkett, emerge as top-tier hopefuls…
Reuters spotlights the “new geopolitical significance” of Eritrea, the largely isolated East African nation whose positioning along the Red Sea has made it part of an alternative route to the Strait of Hormuz…
Benny Stanislawski, the communications director for Bob Brooks’ Pennsylvania congressional campaign who previously served as spokesperson for Rep. Ritchie Torres (D-NY), got engaged to Dahvi Cohen, a policy advisor to Sen. Adam Schiff (D-CA), over the weekend…
Worthy Reads
Find more Worthy Reads in our Live Briefing via our app (on Apple and Android) and website.
Forced Into Heroism: In his Substack “Between Us,” Nadav Eyal considers the ordinary heroes of FZ1073 and the institutional failures that led to the harrowing midair attack. “There is a saying in the Israeli military: ‘where you find medals, you will also find failures.’ The point is that soldiers and officers sometimes have to display exceptional bravery because someone else failed to plan, prepare, or perform their duty. People are then required to compensate for institutional mistakes with extraordinary courage.” [BetweenUs]
Still on High Alert: In The New York Times, Yonatan Touval weighs the security considerations that are likely to factor into the upcoming Israeli election, taking place weeks after the anniversary of the Oct. 7 attacks. “Israel’s security institutions had been watching and still failed to understand what they saw. Israeli intelligence had obtained Hamas’s detailed invasion plan more than a year earlier and later observed parts of it being rehearsed. The deeper error was strategic. … No election can end the vigilance imposed by the dangers Israel faces. But its citizens can decide whether their own government must also be watched hour by hour.” [NYTimes]
Picture of the Day
Israeli President Isaac Herzog opened the National Memorial Day marking the upcoming anniversary of the Oct. 7, 2023, Hamas terror attacks this morning at 6:29 a.m — the time that the 2023 attacks began — by lowering the flag of the State of Israel at the President’s Residence in Jerusalem to half-staff. Spokesperson of the Office of the President
Birthdays
Dalila Bela, actor known for her role as Agent Olive on the TVOKids/PBS series “Odd Squad,” turns 25
Eli Jacobs, investor and board member of many companies, he was the owner of the Baltimore Orioles from 1989 to 1993, turns 89
Morton Meltzer, psychiatrist in Cameron, N.C., affiliated with WakeMed Health and Hospitals
Theodore Steiner, Fairfax, Calif., resident
Robert Winer, Long Beach, Calif., resident
Ben Cardin, former U.S. senator (D-MD), turns 83
Jonathan Dobrer, author, lecturer and journalist, turns 82
Brian Lehrer, talk show host on New York City’s public radio station WNYC, turns 74
Alan Cohen, founder of several pharmaceutical companies, he was the owner of the NHL’s Florida Panthers, turns 72
Madeleine “Mandy” Grunwald, political consultant and media advisor for the Democratic Party, turns 69
Andrew Cushnir, president and CEO of The Associated: Jewish Federation of Baltimore, turns 63
Michael Jacobs, former editor of the Atlanta Jewish Times, now a consultant, turns 57
Jesse Adam Eisenberg, actor, producer and playwright, he played Mark Zuckerberg in “The Social Network,” turns 43
Charlotte Kaye, past president of the Congressional Jewish Staff Association, turns 32
Eden Golan, Israeli singer, she represented Israel in the Eurovision Song Contest in 2024, turns 23
Gladys Bendahan, Canary Islands native, she is a former coordinator at Israel’s Mission to the United Nations
Daniel Rubenstein, Israeli tour guide and educator
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