As the holiday season gets underway, Jewish Washington is abuzz with a bipartisan tradition: gossiping about who got invited to the White House Hanukkah party — and how those who did not make the list can still score an invitation. 

This year, there’s another conversation as well, in group chats of people who were invited to a Hanukkah party at the Naval Observatory, hosted by Vice President JD Vance: What’s with the Christmas branding on the invitation? 

The top of the green-and-gold virtual invitation reads, “The Golden Noel: Celebrating 50 years of Christmas at the Vice President’s residence.” The invitation to President Donald Trump’s White House Hanukkah party, in contrast, looks, well, like a Hanukkah invitation — royal blue background, with white text. 

“Would I have preferred something to be a little more Hanukkah-like? Perhaps, but I don’t see it as a very big deal,” said Rabbi Levi Shemtov, executive vice president of American Friends of Lubavitch (Chabad). Shemtov oversees kashrut at the White House Hanukkah celebration, whether it is hosted by a Democrat or a Republican. 

Several people who received the invitation told Jewish Insider they found the decoration puzzling. Ultimately, though, they aren’t concerned. Many Jewish Republicans are pleased that Vance is hosting a Hanukkah celebration at all. 

“Noticed that as well, but haven’t heard any complaints,” said one Republican who was invited to the party. “I’m happy he’s having one.” 

The vice president has faced scrutiny over his recent remarks pushing back on critics of a Young Republican group chat where members praised Adolf Hitler, and for his close ties to Tucker Carlson, even as the popular podcaster has hosted antisemitic guests. Politico reported this week that Vance has been doing outreach to Jewish donors. 

The incident calls to mind a prior White House Christmas invitation faux pas. In 2008, First Lady Laura Bush’s press secretary issued an apology after the Hanukkah invitations that year featured an image of a Christmas tree. “Mrs. Bush is apologetic. It is just something that fell through the cracks,” said Sally McDonough, the press secretary, at the time. 

A spokesperson for Vance told JI on Thursday that the same branding for the invitations was used for all of the vice president’s holiday parties. “The Vance family is celebrating 50 historic years of Christmas at the Vice President’s Residence. They look forward to welcoming all of their guests,” the spokesperson said.

President Donald Trump announced on Sunday that he plans to designate the Muslim Brotherhood as a Foreign Terrorist Organization following months of bipartisan calls for his administration to target the group. 

Trump announced the move in an interview with journalist John Solomon of the conservative outlet Just the News on Sunday morning, saying that an executive order is being prepared for his signature. 

“It will be done in the strongest and most powerful terms,” Trump said. “Final documents are being drawn.”

The White House did not respond to Jewish Insider’s request for comment on the announcement or details of the order being drafted for the president. 

Trump considered designating the Brotherhood as a Foreign Terrorist Organization (FTO) during his first administration, though that effort never materialized. Sebastian Gorka, who serves as Trump’s deputy assistant for national security affairs and senior director for counterterrorism at the National Security Council, has been publicly and privately urging the president to do so since returning to office, as have a chorus of GOP lawmakers, along with a handful of Democrats in Congress. 

Gorka posted on X on Sunday that the “time has come” to designate the group, which he called “the progenitor of all modern Jihadist terror groups, from al Qaeda to HAMAS.”

A Senate bill that would designate the Muslim Brotherhood as a terrorist group, led by Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX), has 11 co-sponsors, including Sen. Tom Cotton (R-AR), Sen. Rick Scott (R-FL), Sen. Dave McCormick (R-PA) and Sen. John Fetterman (D-PA). The House version of the bill has 19 co-sponsors, including four House Democrats.

Trump’s announcement comes less than a week after Texas Gov. Greg Abbott, a Republican, issued a declaration designating the Muslim Brotherhood and Council on American-Islamic Relations as foreign terrorist groups and transnational criminal organizations, a move prohibiting both groups from buying land in Texas and allowing the AG’s office to sue to shut them down.

Secretary of State Marco Rubio said in August that the FTO designation was “in the works” for the Brotherhood. 

“Obviously, there are different branches of the Muslim Brotherhood, so you’d have to designate each one of them,” Rubio told right-wing talk show host Sid Rosenberg on his radio program at the time, adding that the State Department needed to go through a lengthy “process which I didn’t fully appreciate until I came into this job.”

News of Trump’s comments was met with praise in the U.S. and in Israel, even as the details are still fuzzy over what he will be signing. 

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said on Sunday that he wanted to “commend President Trump on his decision to outlaw and designate the Muslim Brotherhood organization as a terrorist organization.”

“This is an organization that endangers stability throughout the Middle East and also beyond the Middle East. Therefore, the State of Israel has already outlawed part of the organization, and we are working to complete this action soon,” Netanyahu said. 

The Institute for the Study of Global Antisemitism and Policy (ISGAP) released a statement commending “the fact that the threat posed by the Muslim Brotherhood’s ideology is now being taken seriously at the highest levels of the U.S. government.”

“We welcome President Trump’s statements and the growing recognition that the Muslim Brotherhood, its ideology and network pose a serious challenge to the United States and democratic societies,” Charles Asher Small, ISGAP’s executive director, said to Jewish Insider.^. 

“A formal U.S. designation would represent an important first step to confront the Muslim Brotherhood in the United States,” Small added. “This will require sustained, evidence-based policy, serious scrutiny of its affiliated structures and funding streams, and long-term investment in democratic resilience.”

Dan Schlessinger, the lead attorney for the Boim family in their lawsuit against American Muslims for Palestine regarding the murder of American teenager David Boim in 1996, told JI in a statement: “This is welcome news for many including the Boim family. The next question is what does this mean for U.S.-based, Hamas adjacent groups like American Muslims for Palestine and Students for Justice in Palestine. Our hope is they will be included in this designation as well.”

Schlessinger and his team have accused AMP in court of acting as an “alter ego” of a now-defunct group that shut down after it was found to have provided support to Hamas.

Congressional lawmakers met Wednesday with Saudi Crown Prince Mohamed bin Salman, a day after a summit between the Saudi leader and President Donald Trump at the White House, where the administration announced a slew of new military and civilian deals with Riyadh.

Sens. Jim Risch (R-ID) and Jeanne Shaheen (D-NH), the top lawmakers on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, met separately with the crown prince midday Wednesday. Risch described the meeting to Jewish Insider as “very good.”

“We talked about the president’s 20-point plan for Gaza, obviously the normalization process with Israel and the things that are related to that — it was a very good meeting,” Risch said.

Bin Salman said publicly on Tuesday that he’s interested in joining the Abraham Accords but only after a clear pathway to a Palestinian state has been implemented.

Sen. Joni Ernst (R-IA) organized a separate meeting with Sens. Tim Sheehy (R-MT), Dick Durbin (D-IL), Lindsey Graham (R-SC), Jim Banks (R-IN), James Lankford (R-OK), Katie Britt (R-AL), Tom Cotton (R-AR) and Jacky Rosen (D-NV) and Rep. French Hill (R-AR). Ernst, Lankford and Rosen co-chair the Abraham Accords Caucus.

“It was a great meeting, great discussion,” Banks said. “Our relationship has never been stronger. … His visit to the U.S. has been incredibly successful, not just in Washington but throughout the rest of the country. America is very pro-MBS and pro-Saudi Arabia, and the relationship is only going to grow further from here.”

He noted that his state’s national guard is a partner of the Saudi Arabian military, so the state has a special relationship with Riyadh.

“We discussed everything. MBS is focused on the future, artificial intelligence, data centers, the relationship with the United States, we talked about all of it,” Banks continued. “It was a candid discussion. I have a sense — I’m a young senator, he’s a young world leader — that he’s going to be around for a long time and our relationship’s only going to improve and grow from here.”

Sheehy said the meeting was “great.”

“They are our strongest ally — obviously besides Israel — in the region so we’ve got to stay close to them and make sure we’re aligned,” Sheehy said.

Lankford declined to delve into the specifics of what was discussed. Still, he described it as “positive” and “a good meeting.”

Rosen said, “Saudi Arabia plays a critical role with the US and other Middle Eastern partners to combat Iranian aggression in the region, and I believe Saudi-Israel normalization is key to long term peace in the region. I attended the meeting today to learn about the Saudi vision for a future Middle East and conditions for joining the Abraham Accords.”Sen. Dick Durbin (D-IL) said he asked bin Salman about a two-state solution.

“My question was direct—I believe in the two-state solution. I believe the only way to bring real peace to the Middle East is to give both the Palestinian and Israeli people a safe homeland. We need to work towards that goal,” Durbin said in a statement.

An individual familiar with the discussion described it as “a very cordial and productive discussion that included all different topics, including Israel and Hamas, how to work together to box out Iran, and economic development between our nations.”

But Rosen said she emerged with lingering questions about some of the deals announced this week.

“However, I still have questions about several of the White House announcements this week, including the sale of F-35s to the Kingdom and how we will maintain Israel’s QME and protect our own technology,” she said. “I urge the Administration to provide Congress with more specifics on all of these agreements as soon as possible.”

On the House side, Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA), Majority Leader Steve Scalise (R-LA) and Reps. Rick Crawford (R-AR), Jim Himes (D-CT), Mike Rogers (R-AL), Adam Smith (D-WA), Tom Cole (R-OK), Rosa DeLauro (D-CT) and Brad Schneider (D-IL) reportedly participated in a separate meeting with bin Salman.

Rogers, the chair of the House Armed Services Committee, described bin Salman as “very impressive.” 

“He did a great job, he’s been a great ally in that region … he was very impressive today,” Rogers said.

He said that the issue of Saudi normalization with Israel was not discussed, and that the conversation focused more on “stabilizing the region from threats.”

Johnson, in a podcast interview with Katie Miller after the meeting, said that bin Salman was “very engaging” and praised his “sense of humor.”

“It was encouraging, we need that partnership between the two nations,” Johnson said

“He just wowed [the attendees],” Johnson said. “My Democrat colleagues were leaving and Greg Meeks … said, ‘He’s really good.’ And I said, ‘Yeah, he is’’

President Donald Trump is hosting Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman on Tuesday at the White House, marking the first time MBS has visited Washington since 2018. 

Trump plans to roll out the red carpet for the visit, which includes a welcome ceremony, bilateral meeting in the Oval Office and a black-tie dinner in the evening. Tiger Woods and Elon Musk are expected to be in attendance at the dinner, among other high-profile attendees. “We’re more than meeting,” Trump said late Friday. “We’re honoring Saudi Arabia, the crown prince.” 

The visit is not an official state visit, as MBS is not Saudi Arabia’s head of state; however, the crown prince holds almost all responsibility in ruling the kingdom. 

The bilateral meeting will feature high-stakes discussions on several key issues, including the sale of F-35 fighter jets, Saudi-Israel normalization and a possible U.S.–Saudi defense pact. Experts told Jewish Insider such an agreement is likely to be modeled after the assurances Trump gave Qatar in September, in the wake of an Israeli strike on Hamas in the Gulf state, when he issued an executive order stating that the U.S. will regard “any armed attack” on Qatar “as a threat to the peace and security of the United States.” 

Trump announced on Monday he would approve the sale of the F-35s to Riyadh, helping the Saudis secure a long-coveted deal and making them the first country in the Middle East other than Israel to obtain the advanced fighter jets. “They want to buy. They are a great ally. We will be doing that. We will be selling them F-35s,” Trump told reporters in the Oval Office. 

Concerns remain within the foreign policy community over the impact that the sale of F-35s will have on the military balance in the region and Israel’s qualitative military edge, which the U.S. is bound by law to uphold. Experts also cautioned the risks of transferring sensitive technology to Riyadh after Saudi naval forces conducted a joint military exercise with China last month. Israel has requested that such a sale be conditioned on the kingdom joining the Abraham Accords, however Trump made no mention of such a provision. 

Trump, however, is planning to discuss Saudi normalization with Israel. “The Abraham Accords will be a part we’re going to be discussing,” Trump said Friday. “I hope that Saudi Arabia will be going into the Abraham Accords fairly shortly.” 

Despite the president’s optimism, the hope of adding Riyadh to the Abraham Accords is likely a lot more wishcasting than a reflection of diplomatic progress in the region. Experts told JI that the Trump administration should use the aforementioned agreements as leverage tied to normalization, as has been the case under past administrations, but Trump is poised to take a different approach. 

The gap between Saudi Arabia and Israel remains wide. Saudi officials have said they require an Israeli commitment to a two-state solution as a prerequisite to normalizing ties, something that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu — and much of the Israeli public — is firmly against. Experts told JI that after two years of war in Gaza, the security deals are likely not enticing enough on their own and Saudi Arabia may be holding out for more concessions before joining the Abraham Accords.

Paul Ingrassia, the Department of Homeland Security’s White House liaison who withdrew his nomination to lead the Office of Special Counsel late last month after antisemitic and racist text messages of his were unearthed, has been appointed to serve as deputy general counsel at the General Services Administration.

Ingrassia, 30, has served in multiple roles in the second Trump administration. Prior to his most recent role at DHS, Ingrassia briefly served as the liaison to the Department of Justice but was reassigned after clashing with the DOJ’s chief of staff. 

The conservative activist revealed his new position in an email to fellow DHS staff on Thursday announcing his departure. Ingrassia wrote in the email, obtained by Politico, that Trump had called him into the Oval Office on Wednesday evening to offer him the job. 

Reached by Jewish Insider, a White House official confirmed that Ingrassia had taken on the deputy general counsel role at GSA, but did not provide additional comment. The official told Politico that Ingrassia was a “very helpful addition to GSA and will successfully execute President Trump’s America First policies.”

The new position comes less than a month after Ingrassia pulled himself from consideration to lead the Office of Special Counsel, which is tasked with investigating and prosecuting whistleblower claims and accusations of corruption within the federal government.

The nomination was initially poorly received by some Republicans on the committee due to his past incendiary comments, including antisemitic conspiracy theories posted to social media. Two GOP committee members had privately expressed concerns to the White House about Ingrassia’s candidacy in recent months, those senators told JI on condition of anonymity at the time. 

Ingrassia’s standing plummeted further after it emerged that he had sent incendiary and racist text messages in a group chat of Republican operatives, including statements that Martin Luther King Jr. Day should be “tossed into the seventh circle of hell” and described himself as having a “Nazi streak … from time to time.”

The revelation prompted immediate outcry on Capitol Hill, with Democrats reiterating their prior calls to pull Ingrassia’s nomination and Republicans publicly and privately urging the White House to do the same. 

At the White House on Monday, as President Donald Trump met with Syrian President Ahmad al-Sharaa, two other high-level figures were in attendance — Saudi Defense Minister Prince Khalid bin Salman and Turkish Foreign Minister Hakan Fidan, underscoring how Syria has become a new battleground for regional influence. 

Following the fall of longtime dictator Bashar al-Assad’s regime last December, the war-ravaged nation has become a political vacuum, transformed into a critical security frontier for many regional players — most notably Turkey and Saudi Arabia. 

“Saudi Arabia and Turkey are among the most powerful Middle Eastern countries. The power vacuum caused by the Syrian civil war turned Syria into a stage for these competing powers,” said David May, a research analyst at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies. “Both countries supported elements working to topple former Syrian strongman Bashar al-Assad.”

Despite both countries supporting the overthrow of the Assad regime, the nations share different visions for the future government in Damascus. Saudi Arabia and other moderate Arab countries are seeking to guide Syria towards pragmatic governance and away from the influence of radical Islam — a stark contrast to the propping up of the Muslim Brotherhood by Turkey, according to May. 

“Saudi Arabia and Turkey have radically different foreign policy objectives and trajectories, especially as it relates to political Islam and the Muslim Brotherhood,” said May. “Historically, Turkey and Saudi Arabia each have a claim to the leadership of Islam and the Middle East …. [Saudi Crown Prince] Mohammed bin Salman has tried to modernize the kingdom and has downplayed the fundamentalism that used to be central to the state. Turkey, meanwhile, used to be a modernizing force in the region, but President [Recep Tayyip] Erdogan has elevated the role political Islam and Muslim Brotherhood ideology play in the orientation of the state.”

Saudi Arabia emerged quickly as a key backer of al-Sharaa’s regime due to the Syrian leader’s apparent moderation from his fundamentalist background. 

“When al-Sharaa took Damascus, Saudi Arabia rushed to lobby Washington to press the reset button on al-Sharaa and legitimize his rule in Syria,” Hussain Abdul-Hussain, a research fellow at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, told Jewish Insider. 

Abdul-Hussain has argued that Turkey is not looking to help rebuild a sovereign Syrian state but rather is seeking a “puppet-state” in Damascus, also noting that Ankara supports factions influenced by the Muslim Brotherhood and an alternative Sunni leadership model, which is opposed by Saudi Arabia. 

Pro-Israel lawmakers in Congress also expressed wariness towards Turkey’s expanding role in the region. “President Erdogan has a long record of hostility toward Israel, Greece, and Cyprus and his government maintains ties to Hamas terrorists, making Turkey an unreliable partner in ensuring peace. That’s why I remain deeply skeptical of Turkey’s intentions and potential role in Syria’s stabilization,” Rep. Josh Gottheimer (D-NJ) told Jewish Insider. 

Other analysts argued that Turkey is seeking a more productive role. Soner Cagaptay, a senior fellow at The Washington Institute for Near East Policy, said that Turkey is actually “the most important stakeholder” in Syria, adding that the Trump administration views Ankara as a critical part of ensuring Syria’s stabilization. 

“Trump wants to see Syria not fall into another cycle of civil war, and he believes that Turkey is a key actor to Syria’s stabilization,” said Cagaptay. “I think Turkey has the institutions to bring to the table to help with capacity building and Syria’s restoration of serious institutions.”

Cagaptay says a stabilized Syria is in Turkey’s best interest, and that al-Sharaa will rely on help from Ankara. 

“100 years after the collapse of the Ottoman Empire, Syria has been Turkey’s most problematic neighbor. Turkey now wants to flip that into an ally,” said Cagaptay. “[Hay’at Tahrir al-Sham] and al-Sharaa need Turkey, and they will play along. They will lead Turkey to legitimacy and recognition.”

After meeting with Trump, al-Sharaa held a meeting with Fidan, along with Syria’s foreign minister and U.N. envoy. Fidan also met at the White House with Vice President JD Vance, Secretary of State Marco Rubio and Special Envoy Steve Witkoff. 

“This visit here by al-Sharaa, in which he was accompanied by Turkish Foreign Minister Fidan, kind of underlines Turkey’s significantly elevated role in Syria and a very important shift,” said Cagaptay. “Syria was Turkey’s most problematic neighbor and now has become a strong ally and a country that Turkey is deeply invested in and cares for.” 

However, Israel views an elevated Turkish role in Syria with “some anxiety,” according to Cagaptay, unlike with Riyadh. 

“Israel and Saudi Arabia are not competing in Syria. Turkey is competing with the two. This suggests that Israel and Saudi Arabia can be allies in Syria, and both — together or independently — will be Turkey’s rival,” said Abdul-Hussain. “Al-Sharaa will have to navigate this dynamic to survive, beat domestic rivals, and emerge as Syria’s sole and strong ruler.”

Senators offered a positive readout from a dinner meeting with Syrian President Ahmad al-Sharaa on Sunday evening prior to al-Sharaa’s Monday summit at the White House with President Donald Trump.

Sen. Markwayne Mullin (R-OK) told Jewish Insider that al-Sharaa was “very charismatic” and “had a very open conversation” about his “checkered past” with senators. “I found it to be straightforward. I thought his answers were what we needed to hear, but I think he honestly believed it too,” Mullin said of the dinner. 

“I was with him in Damascus in August. I led the first delegation there with [Rep.] Jason Smith (R-MO), [Rep.] Jimmy Panetta (D-CA) and [Sen.] Joni Ernst (R-IA). This was kind of more of the same, just building on that,” Mullin told JI. “When we talked in August, there were some issues that he brought up with sanctions towards the Assad regime that we need to work on. I’ve already been working on that, so we wanted to give him an update on it.”

The Oklahoma Republican said progress was being made on lifting the sanctions, something he attributed to the fact that the U.S. wants the al-Sharaa regime to “be successful.”

“He may not fit the mold of what you’d want as a leader in Syria. Actually, if you look at it, he’s probably what needs to be in Syria right now, because they’ve been at war for so long,” Mullin said. “As I told him, it’s trust — but verify. And so far, he’s making all the right moves. He’s trying to actually formalize relationships with Israel, that’s huge for that region. So, as he continues to move down this path, we want to continue to help him be successful.”

Sen. Elissa Slotkin (D-MI) told JI that, as a longtime Middle East and counterterrorism official, “it was quite a change to be sitting across the table from someone a decade ago I may have looked at in a very different light. But he was very impressive.”

She said that Michigan has a large Syrian-American community that supports efforts to lift sanctions and reopen Syria to the world, “so it was actually in some parts, even quite moving.” Slotkin said she also supports lifting sanctions to “do what I can to give them a shot,” and added that she wants to visit Syria.

“There were a number of people at the dinner, Democrats and Republicans, who have former service in the global war on terror,” Slotkin continued. “There was something really almost emotional about sitting across the table from someone who years ago would have been an adversary who now seems like he’s trying to really make Syria work. It was quite moving.”

Sen. Chris Coons (D-DE) echoed his colleagues’ comments about wanting to see al-Sharaa be successful in ushering Syria into a peaceful era.

“We need Syria to succeed. We want Syria to succeed. Peace between Syria and Israel is absolutely essential. Respect and support for the Syrian Democratic Forces is essential,” Coons told JI, referring to the Kurdish-led group that has been a key U.S. ally inside Syria.

The Delaware senator said that the Sunday evening discussion “was broadly a constructive conversation. For some of the members who were present, it was their first time meeting him. For most of us, it was our second or third conversation with him.”

“Having a pathway towards repealing the state sponsor of terrorism designation and repealing or downgrading the Caesar sanctions were key asks of his, and I believe the NDAA has a Risch-Shaheen provision that repeals the Caesar sanctions,” Coons added. 

Sen. Richard Blumenthal (D-CT) called the meeting “encouraging and positive.”

“I think that the relationship with Israel is still challenging,” Blumenthal told JI. “I asked him very specifically about it, but on the whole, I think it’s a new chapter for the region that could be extremely promising.”

Ernst, who also attended the dinner, described it in a statement as “frank and constructive,” praising Trump for engaging with al-Sharaa.

“Today’s visit is an important step toward building trust, fostering dialogue, and uniting Syria’s diverse ethnic and religious communities,” Ernst said. “Under President Trump’s leadership, there is a real opportunity to advance peace in the Middle East and make the vision of a more stable and prosperous world a reality.”

Other lawmakers who attended the dinner were Reps. Brian Mast (R-FL), Marlin Stutzman (R-TN), Joe Wilson (R-SC) and Abe Hamadeh (R-AZ). Mast, according to Politico, was not planning to attend the meeting but happened to be at the same hotel where the meeting was occurring and was asked to join.

He offered a more tepid readout than many of the other attendees.

The fall of Bashar al-Assad’s brutal regime in Syria last December happened slowly, and then all at once — leaving a region reeling from whiplash and a country digging itself out from the rubble, now under the leadership of a former militia head who cut his teeth as an Al-Qaida terrorist. 

This week, that leader, Syrian President Ahmad al-Sharaa, is coming to Washington, the first time a Syrian president has ever been invited to the White House. 

Alongside al-Sharaa’s rise in Damascus has been a flurry of activity in Washington, as lawmakers tried to make sense of a country that one day was considered a rogue nation locked in protracted civil war and the next was viewed as a free state on the path to stability. 

Two people in particular have become fixtures on Capitol Hill, pushing the message that Washington should lift sanctions on Damascus and build stronger ties with Syria: Jasmine Naamou and Tarek Naemo, a married couple who live in Daytona Beach, Fla., with a knack for social media self-promotion and a willingness to strike up a conversation with anyone. 

On the eve of al-Sharaa’s meeting with President Donald Trump, the couple arranged a meeting with the Syrian leader and Rep. Brian Mast (R-FL), chair of the House Foreign Affairs Committee.

Naamou and Naemo first came to Capitol Hill this year as activists with the Syrian American Alliance for Peace and Prosperity, a nonprofit that emerged early this year to advocate for closer ties between the U.S. and Syria, though Naamou said she doesn’t work directly with them anymore. The organization arranged meetings for Syria’s foreign minister in New York this year, and in April it brought two members of Congress — Reps. Cory Mills (R-FL) and Marlin Stutzman (R-IN) — to Syria for the first visit by U.S. officials in years. Naamou and Naemo were on the trip with them. 

Mills and Stutzman’s visit preceded a more senior delegation, with Sen. Jeanne Shaheen (D-NH), the top Democrat on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, and Rep. Joe Wilson (R-SC), who has held several senior foreign policy roles, visiting the country together. 

All of those lawmakers have met with either Naamou or Naemo this year, documented with slick photos shared on the couple’s Instagram accounts. Naamou has 319,000 followers, and a pinned photo with House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA); Naemo has 2.2 million followers and flaunts photos with the Saudi investment minister and Turkey’s ambassador to Syria — plus an image of him holding a rifle and sitting on a golf cart with Wilson. He refers to Wilson as “my dearest friend.” 

Naamou spoke to Jewish Insider on Friday ahead of al-Sharaa’s visit to preview what she hopes the Syrian leader will discuss with Trump, with normalization with Israel high on the list.

“We want regional stability. Israel’s a neighbor. They’re a friend of America. We want them to be friends of Syria. We want to normalize relations,” said Naamou, who was driving to the airport, bound for Washington to be there for al-Sharaa’s visit. She also expressed hope for a U.S. security presence in Syria: “I believe they’re moving in the right direction of getting that security agreement in place. From what I’ve heard, they are in discussions of having a U.S. air base in Damascus to help with those security discussions between Syria and Israel. So I really do see the steps moving in the right direction.” 

Ahead of his visit, the United Nations lifted sanctions on al-Sharaa, a move that followed a similar executive order by Trump in June. “President Trump is committed to supporting a Syria that is stable, unified and at peace with itself and its neighbors,” the White House said at the time.  

Naamou and her husband both work in real estate in central Florida, though they also have ties to a Saudi sovereign wealth fund, according to Intelligence Online, a publication focused on diplomacy. Naamou said investment is a focus of their advocacy to American officials. 

“They’re also going to have discussions on reintegrating investments in Syria because President Trump, when he went over to Saudi Arabia on his Middle East trip, he had announced the whole cessation of sanctions,” said Naamou. 

Florida oceanside city become such fixtures on Capitol Hill? Naamou, who is 30, dates her own advocacy to her college days at the University of Florida, where she studied international relations and political science because of what was happening in Syria. She said the political relationships started back home in Florida, too.

“I live in Volusia County, and it’s a relatively small county, and everyone kind of knows each other,” she said. “You just go to events, and you meet people, and things happen, and you discuss things, and then you find things in common.”

They’ve also met with Reps. Byron Donalds (R-FL), who is running for governor of Florida; Anna Paulina Luna (R-FL); Maxine Waters (D-CA) and Abe Hamadeh (R-AZ), who is the child of Syrian immigrants. 

“I see huge bipartisan support now,” Naamou said. “We like to term Syria as a swing state. Syria is multi-layered. Syria is one of the only countries in the Middle East that is so complex. You have all three Abrahamic religions present in Syria. You have all different types of ethnicities present. And so Syria is very key in the region, because it can be swung either way.”

“Either way,” in this case, means West or East — bringing Syria into the U.S.-led Western world, or into the Russia-Iran-China orbit. 

“They want the U.S., and they want to acclimate here with our values,” said Naamou, who was born in Michigan to a Syrian father. She described the rapid changes in Syria as a “snowball effect.” 

“I’ve never seen, when a regime has fallen, such a fast paced amount of change happen in such a short period of time,” said Naamou. She wants to see it continue: all sanctions lifted, American investment, closer ties. 

“I’m hoping that we see a larger acceptance of Syria in general,” she said. “I’m hoping that we’re able to somehow, in any way, reshape the narrative into a positive light.”

When Syrian President Ahmad al-Sharaa visits the White House on Monday, he will be the first Syrian head of state to do so, a long-anticipated meeting that could advance U.S. efforts to broker a potential security agreement between Syria and Israel. 

The U.S. has worked on mediating a security deal between the two nations this year following the fall of the Iran-aligned Assad regime and Israel’s decisive military action against Hezbollah in Lebanon, something that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said made the talks “possible.” 

After the fall of Assad, the IDF entered a U.N. buffer zone inside Syria in order to protect its own borders as the country’s military and government were in flux. Reports indicate that Damascus is seeking an end to the Israeli presence there, while Israel is calling for the demilitarization of southwest Syria and for al-Sharaa’s government to take more responsibility for the security of the Druze minority in the region.

“Israel’s main concerns center on the deployment of Syrian forces in the south and the protection of the Druze minority, while Syria remains wary of leaving large parts of southern territory outside its control,” said Ahmad Sharawi, a research analyst at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies. 

Trump administration officials have said in recent months that the security deal is “99% done,” though it has yet to be finalized. 

Experts told Jewish Insider the visit could allow the parties to work out the details of the agreement and push the long-awaited security deal to completion — a development that would further cement Damascus’ strategic realignment with Washington and Israel and foster reduced dependence on Iran. 

“Regrettably, a much-discussed Syria-Israel security agreement is evidently not ready to be announced, but it is hoped that the visit will help push the agreement over the finish line,” said Robert Satloff, executive director of The Washington Institute for Near East Policy, who called the visit a “landmark event.”

“Al-Sharaa’s visit to the White House is significant because it marks the first time Washington has treated Damascus not as an adversary, but as a potential partner,” said Sharawi. “There is a real possibility that this meeting could move both sides closer to signing such an agreement.”

To bolster a potential agreement, the U.S. is also preparing to deploy forces to an airbase near Damascus, according to Reuters. The move would mark the first direct American military presence in the Syrian capital, even as President Donald Trump has advocated for reduced or nonexistent military involvement in the region.  

Shawari says a potential U.S. military presence at an airbase near Damascus would represent a “turning point” in the talks.

“For Israel, a limited U.S. presence would provide Israel with a guarantor to keep the Syrians in check; for Damascus, it would signal goodwill toward Washington and a willingness to align with U.S. strategic interests in promoting regional stability,” said Shawari. 

Trump has worked on normalizing U.S. relations with the new Syrian government during his second term. During his Middle East visit in May, Trump became the first American president in 25 years to meet with a Syrian leader and announced an end to U.S. sanctions on Syria for the first time in more than a decade. 

The U.S. requested that the United Nations lift sanctions on al-Sharaa ahead of the visit — a move the Security Council approved on Thursday. The decision allows the U.S. to legally remove al-Sharaa from the Specially Designated Global Terrorist list and follows the State Department’s July 2025 decision to delist his faction, Hay’at Tahrir al-Sham (HTS), as a Foreign Terrorist Organization. The Trump administration has also expressed support for repealing the congressionally mandated Caesar Act sanctions on Syria, a move the Senate is considering. 

“I’m glad that the @UN Security Council lifted its sanctions on Syria,” wrote Sen. Jim Risch (R-ID), the Senate Foreign Relations Committee Chairman, on X on Friday. “This will benefit the Syrian economy and its people. Along with @potus, my colleagues and I are working to repeal Caesar sanctions so Syria can become a safe and prosperous partner for the U.S. in the Middle East.”

The Oval Office meeting also comes on the heels of an announcement Thursday that Kazakhstan will be joining the Abraham Accords, a move that Trump  administration officials said they hoped would help build momentum for the Accords ahead of the meeting and a later visit by the Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman on Nov. 18. 

“President Trump has advocated for Syria’s inclusion in the Abraham Accords since lifting sanctions in May,” said Sharawi. “But, al-Sharaa himself has described that step as unrealistic for now, while signaling that he’s open to a security agreement modeled on the 1974 disengagement accord.”

The 1974 Separation of Forces Agreement — a resolution that was passed by the U.N — established a zone of separation between Israel and Syria and called for the disengagement of forces following the 1973 Yom Kippur War. 

In a webinar hosted by The Washington Institute for Near East Policy on Friday, former Israeli Ambassador to the U.S. Michael Herzog — who said an “active U.S. role” is essential for the deal — questioned the effectiveness of using the previous agreement as a template.

“There is still the framework of the 1974 disengagement agreement between Israel and Syria following the 1973 war, but that is outdated,” said Herzog. “We need a new framework and new structure.”

Sharawi noted a new framework for cooperation between Syria and Israel could be based on “shared security threats” such as Iran and Hezbollah — a point Herzog also emphasized.

“Both Israel and al-Sharaa would take action [under a security agreement] to prevent Hezbollah from reasserting itself in Syria or Iranians smuggling weapons and munitions to Hezbollah in Lebanon through Syria,” said Herzog. “So this is a very big deal, but there are also risks.”

“The biggest opportunity is the fact that both al-Sharaa and Israel regard Iran and the Iranian axis as an enemy,” Herzog added. “Syria was a vital link in the Iranian axis and this is no longer the case — an indirect outcome of Israel turning the tables on Hezbollah and later on Iran.”

Satloff said there are steps al-Sharaa could take — whether as part of the emerging agreement or through independent gestures — to further strengthen regional security and demonstrate Damascus’ commitment to peace.

“One area where President al-Sharaa could make a singular contribution to broader Middle East peace is to publicly clarify an issue that has provided Lebanon’s Hezbollah with fodder for its ‘resistance’ against Israel — that is, for Syria to state that the disputed Shebaa Farms and divided town of Ghajar were Syrian territory when taken by Israel, not Lebanese,” said Satloff, referring to a disputed area along the Lebanon-Syria-Israel border that has been under Israeli control since 1967 but is claimed by Lebanon with Syrian backing. “This would pull the rug from under Hezbollah and undermine much of its rationale for continuing the fight against Israel.”

Hamas returned the remains of Lt. Hadar Goldin on Sunday, over 11 years after he was killed in battle in Gaza.

Israel confirmed the body was Goldin’s through DNA testing, four hours after it was returned. 

Goldin was 23 when he fought in Operation Protective Edge in Gaza and took part in a mission to destroy a Hamas tunnel in Rafah on Aug. 1, 2014, during a 72-hour ceasefire. Hamas terrorists killed two Israeli soldiers, taking Goldin’s body with them.

Goldin’s parents, Leah and Simcha, publicly advocated for his return, but did not support the release of living terrorists in exchange for their son’s remains. They repeatedly suggested that humanitarian aid to Gaza be reduced or stopped as long as the remains of their son and Oron Shaul, another soldier whose body was taken in 2014, were held in Gaza. 

After Goldin’s remains were returned, Leah said her family “took for granted that the State of Israel would not leave soldiers behind. It took us 11 years to bring him home through the IDF and security forces. … We faced many disappointments. We cannot give up on who we are, and we will prevail through our values. …Thank you for walking with us all the way.”

Simcha Goldin credited IDF “soldiers [who] fought to bring warriors back from the battlefield. The IDF brought Hadar back to his homeland — no one else. … What this war has proven is that when we fight for our soldiers, we succeed. Victory means bringing home the hostages and bringing home our soldiers to Israel.”

Goldin’s body is the 24th that Hamas has returned since the ceasefire began on Oct. 13 this year, after which all of the remaining hostages, both living and deceased, were meant to be returned within three days. However, the terrorist group has drawn out the return of the remains, and four more hostages have yet to be handed over to Israel: Meny Godard, Master Sgt. Ran Gvili, Dror Or and Sudthisak Rinthalak, a Thai national.

IDF Chief of Staff Eyal Zamir visited the Goldin family on Saturday night. Hamas and the Red Cross were permitted to search for his body in the areas of Gaza controlled by Israel, Hebrew media reported.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu announced earlier Sunday that Hamas was expected to return Goldin’s body. 

“Lt. Hadar Goldin fell in a heroic battle in Operation Protective Edge 11 years ago,” Netanyahu said. “His body was taken hostage by Hamas, who refused to return him throughout this entire period. This entire time, Israeli governments made a great effort to return him. Naturally, this has been amid the great agony of his family, which will now be able to give him a Jewish burial.” 

Netanyahu added that Israel has “a tradition from the establishment of the state … to bring back our soldiers who fell in battle, and we are doing it. Sometimes it takes a long time … It is a holy value. It expresses our mutual responsibility with the citizens of Israel and first and foremost the soldiers and fighters of Israel.” 

Goldin’s return was reportedly tied to the fate of 200 Hamas fighters currently hiding in a tunnel in the Israel-controlled half of Gaza. 

According to Israel’s Channel 12, the White House reportedly suggested a plan by which, after Goldin’s remains are returned, the terrorists would lay down their arms and surrender, and Israel would allow them to go into exile or to the Hamas-controlled half of Gaza. The IDF would then destroy the tunnel in which they were hiding.

An Israeli official said last week that Netanyahu “would not allow safe passage for 200 Hamas terrorists.” 

Kazakhstan, which has maintained diplomatic relations with Israel since 1992, will join the Abraham Accords, President Donald Trump announced on Thursday.

The announcement, made during Kazakh President Kassym-Jomart Tokayev’s visit to the White House, came shortly before a planned visit to Washington by Syrian President Ahmad a-Sharaa on Monday, and Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman on Nov. 18. 

In a post on Truth Social, Trump said he had held a call between Tokayev and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and that he will “soon announce a Signing Ceremony to make it official, and there are many more Countries trying to join this club of STRENGTH.” The Kazakh Embassy in Washington characterized the meeting as a discussion of “strengthening the Enhanced Strategic Partnership” between the countries. As of Friday morning Israel had not issued any official statement on the announcement.

The Trump administration has sought to bring Riyadh into the Abraham Accords and normalize relations with Israel since the Accords were announced in 2020, and has been negotiating an agreement between Damascus and Jerusalem, which reportedly may fall short of full diplomatic relations.

A Trump administration official told Axios that bringing Kazakhstan into the Abraham Accords is meant “as a first step in repairing Israel’s standing in the Arab and Muslim world” and that the White House wants to build momentum ahead of MBS’ visit. 

Israel and Kazakhstan, a Muslim-majority country, have had diplomatic relations for 33 years, in contrast to the countries that previously joined the Abraham Accords — the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain and Morocco — which had not had open diplomatic relations with Israel. The accords marked a positive shift in Israel’s stature in the Middle East, and the relations have endured through the two-year war in Gaza.

Since Trump’s return to office, his administration has sought to expand the Abraham Accords with an eye on normalization between Israel and Saudi Arabia or Indonesia, the world’s most populous Muslim-majority country. 

But they have also pushed Muslim-majority countries like Kazakhstan and Azerbaijan, which already have ties with Israel, to join the accords. Earlier this year, Farid Shafiyev, chairman of the Azerbaijan government-backed think tank the Center for Analysis of International Relations, told Jewish Insider that his country was “way ahead” of the Abraham Accords with its decades-long close relations with Israel, and dismissed American requests for Baku to join as “a bit of media buzz, but that’s it.”

As for Kazakhstan’s motivation, the central Asian nation has long lobbied Washington to cancel a Cold War-era law that has hindered its access to American markets, and could benefit from currying favor with the Trump administration.

For over a decade, Kazakhstan has lobbied to repeal the Jackson-Vanik Amendment to the U.S. Trade Act of 1974, which required the U.S. to downgrade trade with non-market economies — at the time, the Soviet bloc — that restricted emigration and other human rights. The amendment was intended to penalize the Soviet Union for not allowing Soviet Jews to leave.

In 2012, then-President Barack Obama signed the Magnitsky Act, which normalized trade relations between the U.S. and Russia and Moldova. However, the Jackson-Vanik Amendment continued to apply to Kazakhstan and other former Soviet republics, which have to receive an annual waiver in order to have normal trade ties with the U.S.

As far back as 2013, Kazakhstan’s Jewish community has worked with the country’s government and American Jewish organizations to lobby Congress to repeal Jackson-Vanik. Leading Jewish organizations working on the issue came out in strong support of Kazakhstan’s move to join the Abraham Accords.

Mark Levin, CEO of the National Coalition Supporting Eurasian Jewry (NCSEJ), formerly the National Council for Soviet Jewry, said the group has been “supportive for decades” of Kazakhstan’s “graduation from Jackson-Vanik” and that the country has “more than met the requirements to be graduated.”

“We hope that the Trump administration will come out in full support of the U.S.-Kazakhstan Trade Modernization Act and encourage Congress to pass it,” Levin said, referring to the bipartisan legislation introduced by Reps. Jimmy Panetta (D-CA), Robert Aderholt (R-AL), Dina Titus (D-NV), Darin LaHood (R-IL), Ami Bera (D-CA) and Tom Suozzi (D-NY) in February.

William Daroff, CEO of the Conference of Presidents of Major Jewish Organizations, which was instrumental in getting Jackson-Vanik passed, said that the group “has long advocated for Kazakhstan’s graduation from the Jackson-Vanik Amendment, recognizing its sustained commitment to Jewish life, religious tolerance, and strong bilateral ties with both Israel and the United States. Repealing Jackson-Vanik would be both symbolically and strategically significant: affirming Kazakhstan’s modern record while strengthening the framework of partnership that the Abraham Accords embody.”

Daroff also said that “the reported decision by Kazakhstan to join the Abraham Accords represents a meaningful step toward deepening cooperation between Israel and the broader Muslim world.”

Daniel Mariaschin, CEO of B’nai B’rith International, said the repeal of Jackson-Vanik would be “a long overdue course correction for both the country itself, and for our community. Working for years in tandem with others in our Jewish community, we have long called for the removal of trade restrictions on a country that has demonstrated respect for its Jewish community, established ties over 30 years ago with the State of Israel, and seeks a strong  relationship with the United States. Kazakhstan will be an important player in what we hope will be an ever-expanding group of Abraham Accords countries in the months to come.”

This story was updated at 2 a.m. ET.

The White House has told Republicans that President Donald Trump will not pull the nomination of Amer Ghalib, the mayor of Hamtramck, Mich., to be U.S. ambassador to Kuwait and wants the Senate Foreign Relations Committee to hold a vote on his candidacy, despite the growing bipartisan opposition to his nomination, Jewish Insider has learned. 

White House officials have communicated to committee Republicans in recent days that Trump would not withdraw Ghalib’s nomination because the president credits the Democratic Hamtramck mayor with helping him turn out Michigan’s Arab-American vote and win the state in last November’s presidential election, two sources familiar with the ongoing discussions told JI.

“We were told Trump believes he [Ghalib] helped him deliver Michigan. He doesn’t want to abandon him,” one GOP senator on the committee said of the White House’s characterization of the president’s thinking.

Pressed about the four committee Republicans who already committed to joining all Democrats in opposing Ghalib’s confirmation, the White House has told senators and senior committee staffers that Trump wants Ghalib’s nomination to receive a vote regardless of the outcome. 

“If Trump wants his friend to go down that way, that’s OK. He can go down that way,” another Republican on the committee said, expressing confidence that Ghalib had no path to advance out of committee. 

No Democratic senators on the committee will support advancing Ghalib’s nomination to the full Senate if and when it comes up for a vote, a source familiar with the Democratic whip count told JI. With all Democrats opposed, Ghalib could only afford to lose one Republican to be reported favorably out of committee. 

Four committee Republicans have already come out publicly against his nomination — Sens. Ted Cruz (R-TX), John Curtis (R-UT), Dave McCormick (R-PA) and John Cornyn (R-TX). At least two others confirmed to JI that they have voiced their reservations about Ghalib to the White House in the wake of his confirmation hearing last week, when Ghalib faced a bipartisan grilling over his long record of promoting antisemitic ideas and his embrace of anti-Israel positions as an elected official. Those senators have not yet made those concerns public. 

The White House did not respond to JI’s request for comment on Tuesday.

Sen. Jim Risch (R-ID), the committee’s chairman, acknowledged to JI on Tuesday evening that he had not yet scheduled Ghalib’s nomination for a vote, but demurred when asked if he planned to do so. 

A committee spokesperson for Risch declined to comment.

“A lot of what Trump is doing is kind of testing whether these guys have a gag reflex,” one Democratic committee member said of the situation, surmising that the president’s actions were partially aimed at assessing how much Republicans were willing to push back on nominees and legislative proposals that they object to.

The White House has pulled Joel Rayburn’s nomination to be assistant secretary of state for near Eastern affairs, two sources familiar with the matter confirmed to Jewish Insider on Monday.

A source familiar with the Trump administration’s thinking said Rayburn was withdrawn because “he did not have the votes.” 

“The administration will proceed in a different direction,” the source said of moving forward with a new nominee. 

Despite claims that Rayburn lacked the votes, the former Syria envoy’s nomination had been advanced to the full Senate by the Senate Foreign Relations Committee last week.

Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY) was the only committee Republican to come out against Rayburn’s nomination on the GOP side. 

That vote was made possible by Sen. Jacky Rosen (D-NV), who crossed party lines to move Rayburn forward after his nomination had languished due to opposition from Paul and all committee Democrats.

Rayburn has been viewed critically by some isolationist figures, both within the administration and on Capitol Hill. Paul, a longtime critic of American engagement abroad, had said he was skeptical of Rayburn’s denials, including under oath at his confirmation hearing in May, that he had knowledge of efforts to mislead President Donald Trump about U.S. troop presence in Syria while serving as Syria envoy in the first Trump administration.

Votes to advance Rayburn’s nomination out of committee were repeatedly canceled over the summer as other committee Republicans and the White House lobbied Rosen and Paul to switch their respective positions. His nomination was first submitted to Congress in early February.

Every Senate Democrat with the exception of Sen. John Fetterman (D-PA) wrote to President Donald Trump on Tuesday urging him to “reinforce” the White House’s pledge to oppose Israeli annexation of the West Bank.

In a letter led by Sen. Adam Schiff (D-CA), the senators offered their “support for your comments opposing any efforts by the Government of Israel to annex territory in the West Bank and to urge your Administration to promote steps to preserve the viability of a two-state solution and the success of the Abraham Accords.”

The missive was sent weeks after Trump vowed publicly to not allow Israel to annex the West Bank, telling reporters in the Oval Office in late September that, “I will not allow Israel to annex the West Bank, nope, I will not allow it. It’s not gonna happen.”

“Since your plan for Gaza does not address the West Bank, it is imperative that your Administration reinforce your comments and emphasize its opposition to annexation. As longstanding supporters of Israel’s security and Palestinian aspirations for statehood, we are unified in our opposition to unilateral measures by either party that undermine the prospect of lasting peace through negotiations to achieve a two-state solution,” the letter stated.

The senators argued that “any steps by Israel to annex territory or expand settlements that prevent the establishment of a Palestinian state” would be harmful to the peace process. 

“Such steps have elicited deep concern and opposition from Arab partners and place at risk your past achievements under the Abraham Accords and the possibility of expanding them further,” they wrote. “At the same time, terrorism, including the horrific terrorist attack of Oct. 7, 2023, must be uniformly condemned and will not bring the region closer to peace.”

“It is essential that the United States reject measures that undermine the viability of a negotiated resolution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict,” the letter continued. 

Paul Ingrassia announced on Tuesday he was withdrawing his embattled nomination to lead the Office of Special Counsel amid growing GOP opposition to his recently unearthed antisemitic and racist text messages. 

Ingrassia, 30, currently serves as the White House liaison for the Department of Homeland Security. Prior to that role, he briefly served as the liaison to the Department of Justice at the beginning of President Donald Trump’s second term, but was reassigned after clashing with the DOJ’s chief of staff.

“I will be withdrawing myself from Thursday’s HSGAC [Senate Homeland Security & Governmental Affairs Committee] hearing to lead the Office of Special Counsel because unfortunately I do not have enough Republican votes at this time,” Ingrassia wrote in a post on Truth Social. “I appreciate the overwhelming support that I have received throughout this process and will continue to serve President Trump and this administration to Make America Great Again!”

Trump nominated Ingrassia in late May to lead the Office of Special Counsel, which is tasked with investigating and prosecuting whistleblower claims and accusations of corruption within the federal government. He was scheduled to receive a confirmation hearing in committee on Thursday.

The nomination was initially poorly received by some Republicans on the committee due to his past incendiary comments, including antisemitic conspiracy theories posted to social media. Two GOP committee members had privately expressed concerns to the White House about Ingrassia’s candidacy in recent months, those senators told Jewish Insider on condition of anonymity. 

Ingrassia’s standing plummeted further after Politico reported on Monday that he had sent text messages in a group chat of Republican operatives stating that Martin Luther King Jr. Day should be “tossed into the seventh circle of hell” and described himself as having a “Nazi streak … from time to time.”

Ingrassia wrote in the text chain that he would “never trust a chinaman or Indian,” a comment made in reference to former Republican presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy. Another message stated that “We need competent white men in positions of leadership … The founding fathers were wrong that all men are created equal.” 

The revelation prompted immediate outcry on Capitol Hill, with Democrats reiterating their prior calls to pull Ingrassia’s nomination and Republicans publicly and privately urging the White House to do the same. Three Republicans on the Homeland Security Committee — Sens. Ron Johnson (R-WI), Rick Scott (R-FL) and James Lankford (R-OK) — told reporters that they would vote against Ingrassia’s nomination at his confirmation hearing. 

Johnson said that Ingrassia’s nomination “never should’ve gotten this far” and that the White House “ought to withdraw” his name from consideration. 

“I don’t plan on voting for him. I can’t imagine how anybody can be antisemitic in this country,” Scott said, later adding that he had informed the White House of his decision after the most recent text messages were published.

Asked by reporters at the Capitol on Tuesday if the White House should pull Ingrassia’s nomination, Senate Majority Leader John Thune (R-SD) replied, “I hope so. He’s not going to pass.” He responded, “Yeah,” when asked if it’d be a mistake for Ingrassia to appear before the Homeland Security Committee on Thursday. 

Ingrassia also lost the backing of the Zionist Organization of America, the sole Jewish group that was supporting Ingrassia’s nomination, over the texts. The group announced on Tuesday that they were pulling their endorsement as a result of the messages.

“In this age of Jew hatred, even a hint of antisemitism can’t be tolerated,” Mort Klein, the group’s president, told the Washington Post of the decision. 

At a luncheon hosted by the White House on Tuesday for GOP senators, several Republicans took part in a discussion about Ingrassia’s nomination being “dead,” according to one senator who participated in the conversation.

“He’s going to be pulled,” the senator said of Ingrassia, citing several conversations this week with the White House. 

Sen. Richard Blumenthal (D-CT), who also serves on the panel, similarly predicted the White House would withdraw his nomination, saying there was no reason to force the confirmation hearing to proceed on Thursday when he had no chance of being confirmed.

“I expect it because there’s no way he’ll be confirmed. I don’t know why anyone would put him through the gauntlet of questions that I would be asking him, along with others,” Blumenthal told JI. “They should mercifully spare him the ignominy of being overwhelmingly disapproved.”

Ingrassia’s nomination was already considered controversial prior to the leak of his text messages, the result of his ties to avowed white nationalists and antisemites like Kanye West and Nick Fuentes, his record of public statements embracing conspiracy theories and his already rocky tenure in the second Trump administration, which had seen him depart from two roles due to friction with colleagues in less than a year. 

Ingrassia was also the subject of an internal investigation at the Department of Homeland Security this month after a sexual harassment complaint was filed against him, though the complaint was later withdrawn and no wrongdoing was found. 

Ingrassia has also been consistently critical of the U.S.-Israel relationship and has repeatedly asserted since Hamas’ Oct. 7, 2023, attacks on Israel that the United States should not provide any aid to the Jewish state. 

As the Hamas attacks were still underway, Ingrassia posted on X calling illegal immigration to the U.S. “comparable to the attack on Israel.” Days later, Ingrassia wrote in a since-deleted post on the platform that the Israel-Palestine conflict was a “psyop.” 

White House Special Envoy Steve Witkoff predicted on Thursday that the Abraham Accords will “seriously expand” in response to the end of fighting in Gaza. Witkoff was addressing attendees at an event commemorating the second anniversary of the Oct. 7, 2023, Hamas terror attacks.

“No leader has done more for the Jewish people or the State of Israel than President Trump,” Witkoff, speaking at an event at the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, said. “He moved our embassy to Jerusalem, he recognized Israel’s sovereignty over Judea and Samaria [the West Bank] and the Golan Heights. He forged the Abraham peace Accords, which will seriously expand now,” Witkoff said. 

The White House envoy, who returned from the region earlier this week after the implementation of the first phase of the ceasefire, posited that Trump winning a second term last November was “the major breakthrough of this conflict.” 

“The moment that result was declared, the world changed, and so did the negotiations. Hamas and every party in the region understood that President Trump, his return to office, meant strength, accountability and action,” Witkoff explained. “Even before taking office, President Trump made it clear he wanted progress by the day he stepped into the Oval Office, and shortly thereof, we struck a ceasefire and hostage release deal that began to turn the tide.”

“The success of that first hostage release was made possible by President Trump’s 20-point plan, a strategy that united the Arab world behind this effort. Nations like Egypt, Turkey, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Jordan and many others came aboard because peace and civility are in everybody’s interests,” he added.

Witkoff went on to commend the Arab state negotiators and Jared Kushner, Trump’s son-in-law and former senior advisor, arguing that they collectively pressured Hamas to release the remaining hostages. All 20 living hostages were freed on Monday, while the terror group has slow-walked the repatriation of the bodies of deceased hostages 

“In the final phase, at President Trump’s directive, Jared Kushner, a great American, and I flew to Sharm el-Sheikh, Egypt, for the last round of negotiations, led by Qatari, Egyptian and Turkey’s mediators. They were incredible and without them we would not be where we are today,” Witkoff said. “Jared was tremendous. Together, we convinced Hamas that keeping the remaining 20 hostages was no longer an asset, it was a liability, and they began to believe it.”

Witkoff acknowledged that Israel has yet to receive the remains of the deceased hostages still being held by Hamas in Gaza, but said the administration was working toward their release.

“We didn’t get everybody back. We’ve gotten [nine deceased hostages] back and we will pursue the return of the … deceased until they all go home, and I’m confident that they will,” Witkoff said. 

Witkoff also referenced his several recent visits to Gaza during his remarks, pointing out that Gazans he’s engaged with “want peace too. They want stability, opportunity, a better life for their children. A future for Gazans must include jobs, education, hope, aspirations, not just guns and violence. Israel should never have to live under the threat of rockets flying at its people or the fear of terrorist attacks, but Gaza’s people must be able to live a decent life as well.”

“We have to be clear, Hamas must unequivocally disarm. They have no future in Gaza,” he continued. “Only when extremism ends does prosperity begin.”

Rabbi Yehuda Kaploun, Trump’s nominee to serve as antisemitism envoy; Ben Ladany, a former IDF sergeant in the elite Oketz K-9 Unit who was shot seven times in November 2023 while fighting Hamas in Gaza; and Almog Meir Jan, an Israeli hostage held by a Palestinian journalist after being taken from the Nova music festival, also spoke at the event. 

Nat Shaffir, a Holocaust survivor and USHMM volunteer, and 18 other Holocaust survivors, were among those in attendance, in addition to Rep. Randy Fine (R-FL); Andrew Giuliani, the son of former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani and the executive director of the White House task force overseeing the 2026 FIFA World Cup whom Trump appointed in his first term to sit on the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Council; Alex Witkoff, the son of Steve Witkoff and CEO of the Witkoff Group who also sits on the council; Rabbi Levi Shemtov, executive vice president of American Friends of Lubavitch (Chabad); and Alina Habba, the acting U.S. attorney for New Jersey and the president’s former personal attorney.

As the Trump administration ratchets up its efforts to influence higher education, the latest White House proposal for colleges and universities is being met with skepticism from academics — even as its authors say its implementation should be a no-brainer.

That’s in reference to a White House document called the “Compact for Academic Excellence in Higher Education,” a 10-point plan that the federal government is asking universities to sign in order to get preferential treatment for the federal funds upon which many research universities rely. 

If the schools don’t agree to the terms in the compact — which include commitments to end race-based hiring and admissions, limits on foreign enrollment and a pledge to foster greater ideological diversity — they risk losing billions of dollars.

The compact reflects an evolution of a familiar Trump administration argument: that America’s preeminent educational institutions have strayed from their mission, letting politics interfere with their raison d’etre as centers of academic excellence. Combating antisemitism on college campuses — a cause the White House has prioritized this year — provided President Donald Trump a foray into greater oversight of higher education. But there appears to be no direct line from that fight against antisemitism to the broader ideological framework in this compact, which makes only a passing reference to antisemitism.

A White House official who worked on the compact called it a “basic, basic easy low hurdle,” telling Jewish Insider that the document is “a nonpartisan, neutral concept.” 

Many academics, including several who have spoken out against antisemitism and against universities’ handling of it in recent years, don’t agree. 

“Fundamentally, the premise of the document is inconsistent with our core belief that scientific funding should be based on scientific merit alone,” Massachusetts Institute of Technology President Sally Kornbluth said last week, making MIT the first university to formally reject the compact. 

The White House wrote to MIT and eight other campuses this month, giving them early access. Brown University joined MIT in rejecting the compact on Wednesday, but the other seven universities haven’t yet responded ahead of the Oct. 20 deadline. 

With the compact, Trump is making the case that universities have a fiduciary responsibility to American citizens that they have not met, as academia has “lost its way,” according to the administration official. 

“It’s for the taxpayers,” said the official, who requested anonymity to speak openly about a negotiating process that is mostly taking place behind closed doors. “This administration is here to support research … but at the same time we also can’t abdicate our responsibility to you and myself. There are a lot of people who are cutting checks to the IRS because that’s what they have to do, and they don’t even go to college.” 

But where the Trump administration sees “good hygiene,” according to the official, many academics worry the compact’s far-reaching goals could amount to an overreach that impinges on free speech and academic freedom.

“It’s something that everybody’s talking about, and people are taking it very seriously,” said David Myers, a professor and the chair of Jewish history at the University of California, Los Angeles. “It really seems to touch upon one of the cardinal principles of university governance, which is autonomy and independence.” 

Menachem Rosensaft, an adjunct law professor who teaches about antisemitism and the Holocaust at Cornell University, called the compact “overkill, with a number of positive items in it, but overall problematic for any independent university of college.” 

Rosensaft questioned how the compact addresses antisemitism, if at all: Antisemitism is only mentioned in a section about foreign students, which accuses those who are “not properly vetted” with “saturating the campus with noxious values such as antisemitism and other anti-American values.”

Academics concerned about antisemitism told JI that the Trump administration is right to point out that severe problems exist in higher education. But many are unsure how this compact will address the issues Jewish students face. 

“I often wonder if a compact like this had come out of the Biden administration or a Harris administration, whether, from the faculty, there’d be that same kind of knee-jerk reaction [that] we have to oppose everything that comes out of the administration — when actually, when you read this line by line, there’s a lot of things we can agree with,” said Miriam Elman, a former political science professor at Syracuse University. 

“If you look at certain things individually, they’re OK. I don’t have any problem with freezing tuition, for example, or with arresting grade inflation. I don’t have any problem with teaching [Western civilization]. The problem is that, as a whole package, it’s kind of the antithesis of what universities are meant to do,” said Norman Goda, a historian and professor of Holocaust studies at the University of Florida. “And if the addressing of antisemitism is one of the aims of this, then I don’t know how that is done.”

Miriam Elman, a former political science professor at Syracuse University, said that some of the immediate skepticism of the compact is likely due to politics. But that doesn’t alleviate all of her concerns.

“I often wonder if a compact like this had come out of the Biden administration or a Harris administration, whether, from the faculty, there’d be that same kind of knee-jerk reaction [that] we have to oppose everything that comes out of the administration — when actually, when you read this line by line, there’s a lot of things we can agree with,” said Elman, who is the executive director of the Academic Engagement Network, which fights academic boycotts of Israel. 

“But we also are not naive. The Trump administration does have an agenda. It does have priorities, and it is wrapping those priorities into the fight against campus antisemitism. So there is a lot of concern.” 

The compact appears to be primarily directed at undergraduate programs. Dr. Philip Greenland, a professor of medicine at Northwestern University, said his colleagues at the medical school are generally not worried about the compact in the way many humanities professors are. “It could affect the medical school in a secondary way: If Northwestern is drawn into this and doesn’t comply, we may never get our federal funding back,” said Greenland. The Trump administration froze $790 million in federal funding for Northwestern in April. 

“Although the compact doesn’t seem to be talking about antisemitism, in the end, people will remember: How did the administration go after the universities?” said Pamela Nadell, the chair in women’s and gender history at American University and the author of a new book about antisemitism in America. “They said that they were promoting antisemitism.”

“I think it’s in some sense a good thing that it doesn’t call out, specifically, that this is about antisemitism,” Greenland continued. “What the compact seems to be more about is a claim, which is justifiable, that universities have become very, very ideological in one direction … People are claiming that the compact will deprive them of their free speech. But what that doesn’t recognize is that the current situation deprives other people of their free speech and their free expression.” 

The Trump administration official told JI that the compact is “all-encompassing,” and argued that its broad mandate includes antisemitism — but not only that.

“It overlaps, but the compact isn’t a compact to stop antisemitism. It’s a compact to return to lawful academic excellence and a marketplace of ideas, [and] that includes eradicating antisemitism,” said the official. 

Pamela Nadell, the chair in women’s and gender history at American University and the author of a new book about antisemitism in America, argued that the Trump administration’s earlier actions targeting antisemitism will come to be viewed as the pretext for what is now a much larger and more strategic rewriting of federal policy toward institutions of higher education. 

“Although the compact doesn’t seem to be talking about antisemitism, in the end, people will remember: How did the administration go after the universities?” said Nadell. “They said that they were promoting antisemitism.”

Days before the remaining living hostages are expected to be released from more than two years of captivity in Gaza, White House Special Envoy Steve Witkoff, Jared Kushner and Ivanka Trump addressed a receptive crowd of hundreds of thousands on Saturday night in Tel Aviv’s Hostages Square.

Witkoff and Kushner had been in Sharm el-Sheikh, Egypt, earlier in the week for high-level talks that secured an agreement, which went into effect on Friday, to end the two-year war between Israel and Hamas. They arrived in Israel on Thursday ahead of President Donald Trump’s planned visit to the country on Monday, the day that most living hostages are expected to be released.

“To the hostages themselves,” Witkoff said, “our brothers and sisters, you are coming home.” The White House special envoy praised Trump, who, Witkoff said, “once again proved that bold leadership and moral clarity can reshape history and change the world.” 

“We all owe a debt of deep gratitude to President Trump,” the White House special envoy continued, to cheers and chants thanking Trump, Witkoff and Kushner. Numerous mentions of Trump’s name throughout the evening drew cheers and applause from the crowd.

Witkoff paused his speech and appeared flustered after his mentions of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu drew widespread jeers from the crowd. “I was in the trenches with the prime minister,” Witkoff said as he tried to mollify the crowd. “Believe me, he was a very important part here.” Netanyahu and Israeli Strategic Affairs Minister Ron Dermer, Witkoff added, “have both sacrificed so much for this country and devoted their lives to the service of Israel.” 

Witkoff noted the “tireless dedication of leaders who would not rest until the world saw what could be achieved,” naming the president, Kushner and Arab leaders including Qatari Prime Minister Sheikh Mohammed bin Abdulrahman Al Thani, Qatari Emir Tamim bin Hamad Al Thani, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan and Egyptian President Abdel Fattah el-Sissi.

Calling Oct. 7, 2023, a “shattering day,” Kushner said the attacks “shocked me to my core in a way I’ll never be the same. Since then, my heart has not been complete.”

Kushner, who has in recent months been increasingly involved in the White House’s efforts to reach a comprehensive deal to end the Israel-Hamas war, described the “tremendous burden that I felt to see these hostages come home, to see their families get the closure they deserve and to end this nightmare — and also to see the suffering end for the people in Gaza, who, for most of them, were experiencing this through no fault of their own, other than being born into a situation that was horrific.” 

In brief remarks, Ivanka Trump said that “the return of each hostage is not only a moment of homecoming and relief, it’s a triumph of faith, of courage and of our shared humanity.”

Addressing the hostage families, Trump said, “The president wanted me to share, as he has with so many of you personally, that he sees you, he hears you, he stands with you — always. Always.”

A video that played as Kushner, Witkoff and Trump exited the stage praised the U.S. president as “Israel’s great friend.”

Ruby Chen, the father of slain Israeli American hostage Itay Chen, who spoke following Trump, said that Israel Police estimated that 400,000 people were in attendance at Saturday’s rally, a weekly solidarity event since the Oct. 7 attacks. 

With Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu accepting President Donald Trump’s 20-point plan to end the war in Gaza at the White House on Monday, the ball is now in Hamas’ court.

Whether Hamas would agree to release the hostages first, before Israel makes any concessions other than stopping the fighting, remains to be seen. There is also newfound pressure on Qatar, a chief patron of Hamas, to convince the terror group to accept the deal.

The late Israeli elder statesman Abba Eban famously said, “The Arabs never miss an opportunity to miss an opportunity.” In readily accepting Trump’s plan, Netanyahu is counting on Hamas to do just that.

That’s not to say that Netanyahu opposes the plan. His calculus may be that he will be able to execute the parts he supports, while the aspects he finds less favorable are unlikely to materialize anyway — largely, he believes, due to the Palestinians’ own intransigence.

As Netanyahu noted in the press conference, the plan meets all of Israel’s war aims: Bringing back the hostages, dismantling Hamas — most of which Israel already did in the war — and making sure it no longer poses a threat to Israel, through demilitarization and deradicalization. Other elements of the plan that Israel has long said would be part of the “day after” for Gaza are a technocratic government with help from international partners, and the IDF retaining a buffer zone inside Gaza’s perimeter. Netanyahu also reportedly secured 11th-hour edits to the plan regarding the IDF’s withdrawal and Hamas’ disarmament prior to the press conference.

But the details are tricky. 

For example, point 17 of the plan: “In the event Hamas delays or rejects this proposal, the above, including the scaled-up aid operation, will proceed in the terror-free areas handed over from the IDF to the [International Stabilization Force].”

In other words, if Hamas rejects the plan, humanitarian aid “without interference” — likely including dual use items that could be exploited by terrorist organizations — would still be immediately and significantly scaled up and managed by the United Nations and Red Crescent, among others. Once an international force is put together, the IDF would still be expected to retreat from areas in which it has defeated Hamas. And a transitional, technocratic government overseen by Trump and former British Prime Minister Tony Blair’s “Board of Peace” would be put into place. 

All of that is meant to happen even if the hostages are not freed and Hamas refuses to lay down its arms.

Yet, Trump said that if Hamas rejects the plan: “You know, Bibi, you have the full backing to do what you have to do.” And Netanyahu made clear what that means to him — continuing the war: “Israel will finish the job by itself. This can be done the easy way or it can be done the hard way, but it will be done. We didn’t fight this horrible fight, sacrifice the finest of our young men, to have Hamas stay in Gaza.” 

Arab countries that would potentially take part in the “Board of Peace” and the International Stabilization Fund have said repeatedly that they would not participate in administering Gaza until the war ended, which makes it unclear if, as the plan says, all of that will really happen if Hamas rejects the deal and the war continues.

Then there’s the part of the plan that is most controversial in Netanyahu’s political base: the potential involvement of the Palestinian Authority in governing Gaza, and the creation of a pathway to Palestinian statehood.

“Gaza will have a peaceful administration that is run neither by Hamas nor the Palestinian Authority,” Netanyahu said in the press conference.

Yet the text of the plan says that the Gaza transitional government will only stay in place “until such time as the Palestinian Authority has completed its reform program, as outlined in various proposals, including President Trump’s peace plan in 2020 and the Saudi-French proposal, and can securely and effectively take back control of Gaza.”

The 2020 proposal includes things such as “a constitution … that provides for freedom of press, free and fair elections, respect for human rights for its citizens” and more, as well as “transparent, independent, and credit-worthy financial institutions” and ending incitement. 

Netanyahu said on Fox News’ “Sunday Briefing” that “if all of that is turned on its head, there’s a tremendous transformation … Good luck. Some people believe it happens. I don’t think it’s going to happen.”

The plan also says that the “credible pathway to Palestinian self-determination and statehood” would only happen “when the PA reform program is faithfully carried out.” Netanyahu appears to be calculating that Ramallah is unlikely to meet those conditions.

That being said, Netanyahu did sign a document that says unequivocally “we recognize [statehood] as the aspiration of the Palestinian people,” which is disturbing to some on the Israeli right, who argue that even acquiescence in principle is a problem.

While there is significant opposition to the plan from the right flank of Netanyahu’s governing coalition, it has been neutralized for now, in that most of the plan will not go to any kind of vote in the Cabinet. Any attempts to bring the government down over it would have to wait three weeks for the Knesset to come back from its recess, and even then they are likely to fail, with some of the opposition offering Netanyahu a “safety net.”

But as Netanyahu heads back to Israel having said “yes,” plenty of doubts remain as to whether this plan will actually be enacted. First, whether Hamas agrees, and then, new questions and challenges every step of the way.

President Donald Trump and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu announced on Monday that Israel had agreed to sign onto the White House’s 20-point peace plan to end the war in Gaza, with Trump calling the development “one of the great days ever in civilization.” 

Both leaders described the deal, which would release all of the remaining Israeli hostages in exchange for an immediate end of the war, as the starting point for greater regional integration, a goal that Trump described as “eternal peace in the Middle East.” 

Senior Trump administration officials first introduced the plan last week in a meeting with Arab and Muslim leaders in New York, and Trump said he had buy-in from the Qataris, who have been a go-between in negotiations with Israel and Hamas, and that he had discussed the matter with the leaders of the United Arab Emirates and Saudi Arabia. 

But the deal is not yet final: Hamas has not yet agreed to it, though Trump expressed hope that the terror group will do so. Trump said he would allow Netanyahu to continue the war with his “full backing” if Hamas does not agree to it. 

“This can be done the easy way, or it can be done the hard way. But it has to be done,” Netanyahu said at the press conference. “All these goals must be achieved because we didn’t fight this horrible fight, sacrifice the finest of our young men, for Hamas to stay in Gaza.”

The plan would require the release of all the hostages still held by Hamas back to Israel within 72 hours, and an immediate end to the war, according to a copy of the plan published by the White House. In exchange, Israel would release 250 Palestinians serving life sentences in Israeli jails, along with nearly 2,000 Gazans detained since the Oct. 7 attacks in 2023.

The first principle of the plan is that Gaza would be deradicalized, with Hamas out of power and transitional mechanisms in place to take over governance of the beleaguered territory. Amnesty would be offered to Hamas members “who commit to peaceful co-existence and to decommission their weapons” once the hostages are returned. Hamas members who wish to leave would have safe passage to do so, although the plan does not explicitly state that they will be required to leave. The plan would also surge aid to Gaza through the United Nations and other international mechanisms as soon as the hostages are released.

An international transitional body, with Trump as chair and former U.K. Prime Minister Tony Blair heavily involved, would oversee the redevelopment of Gaza until the Palestinian Authority has been reformed and is able to take over leadership of the Gaza Strip. The U.S. and other Arab and international partners would develop a temporary stabilization force to deploy in Gaza, and Trump would oversee the creation of an economic development plan to facilitate investments in the seaside territory. 

“I believe that today we are taking a critical step towards both ending the war in Gaza and setting the stage for dramatically advancing peace in the Middle East, and I think beyond the Middle East, with very important Muslim countries,” Netanyahu said. “We’re giving everybody a chance to have this done peacefully, something that will achieve all our war objectives without any further bloodshed.” 

Several Muslim leaders announced their support for the deal, including the prime minister of Pakistan and the Emirati foreign minister. 

As Trump and Netanyahu stood side by side, each heaping praise upon the other, they were not entirely on the same page about all aspects of the deal — in particular the role of the Palestinian Authority in the future governance of Gaza, which Netanyahu has all but written off, despite that goal listed as an objective in the White House’s plan. 

“Gaza will have a peaceful civilian administration that is run neither by Hamas nor by the Palestinian Authority,” Netanyahu said, a contrast to the plan’s language that the PA — once it is reformed, an objective that could take years — will control Gaza. 

The White House deal also recognizes “Palestinian self-determination and statehood” as “the aspiration of the Palestinian people.” Netanyahu, however, has said repeatedly that a Palestinian state is out of the question. 

Trump did not refer to the plan’s language about Palestinian statehood in his remarks, instead offering leeway to Netanyahu. “Prime Minister Netanyahu is very clear about his opposition to a Palestinian state,” Trump said. “Several countries have foolishly recognized the Palestinian state.” 

The leaders’ comments followed a three-hour meeting between Trump and Netanyahu. During the meeting, Trump orchestrated a phone call between Netanyahu and the Qatari emir, which Trump said afterward was a “a heart-to-heart conversation” in which Netanyahu apologized for Israel’s attack on Doha last month that targeted Hamas leaders and killed a Qatari security guard. The three nations agreed to launch a “formal trilateral mechanism” to “enhance mutual security, correct misperceptions and avoid future misgivings.” 

The full text of the plan says that even if Hamas rejects the plan, the scaled-up humanitarian aid operation will continue, and terror-free areas will be handed over from the Israel Defense Forces to the international stabilization force. But Trump said that Israel will have the “full backing” of the U.S. to resume fighting in Gaza if Hamas does not accept the plan. 

“If Hamas rejects the deal — which is always possible, they’re the only one left. Everyone else has accepted it. But I have a feeling that we’re going to have a positive answer. But if not, as you know, Bibi, you’d have our full backing,” said Trump.  

During a meeting between Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and President Donald Trump at the White House on Monday, Netanyahu apologized to Qatar’s prime minister, Sheikh Mohammed bin Abdulrahman al-Thani, for killing a Qatari serviceman in an attempted strike on Hamas leadership in Doha and promised not to violate Qatari sovereignty again.

The strike, which reportedly failed to eliminate any members of Hamas’ top political leadership, caused a public rift between the U.S. and Israel. The Trump administration attempted to warn Qatar about the strike before it happened and Trump said he promised Qatar that such attacks would not be repeated in the future.

According to a readout from the White House, “Prime Minister Netanyahu expressed his deep regret that Israel’s missile strike against Hamas targets in Qatar unintentionally killed a Qatari serviceman” and that “in targeting Hamas leadership during hostage negotiations, Israel violated Qatari sovereignty and affirmed that Israel will not conduct such an attack again in the future.”

According to remarks released by the Israeli government, Netanyahu told Al Thani, “I want you to know that Israel regrets that one of your citizens was killed in our strike. I want to assure you that Israel was targeting Hamas, not Qataris. I also want to assure you that Israel has no plan to violate your sovereignty again in the future, and I have made that commitment to the president.”

Netanyahu also acknowledged Qatar’s “grievances against Israel” as well as Israel’s own issues with Qatar “from support for the Muslim Brotherhood to how Israel is portrayed on Al Jazeera to support for anti-Israel sentiment on college campuses.”

Trump, during the call, “expressed his desire to put Israeli-Qatar relations on a positive track after years of mutual grievances and miscommunications,” and the three leaders agreed to establish a trilateral mechanism “to enhance coordination, improve communication, resolve mutual grievances, and strengthen collective efforts to prevent threats,” per the White House release.

According to his remarks, Netanyahu said that the mechanism is intended to “address both our countries outstanding grievances.”

Netanyahu and Al Thani “underscored their shared commitment to working together constructively and clearing away misperceptions, while building on the longstanding ties both have with the United States,” according to the White House readout.

The three leaders discussed efforts to end the war in Gaza as well as “the need for greater understanding between their countries.”

Al Thani “emphasiz[ed] Qatar’s readiness to continue contributing meaningfully to regional security and stability.”

Israel and Qatar do not have formal relations and public high-level diplomatic engagements between their leaders are rare.

From the Israeli side, news of the apology has been met with frustration and scorn from Netanyahu’s political allies and opponents.

Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich compared the apology to U.K. Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain’s appeasement of Adolf Hitler during WWII. Netanyahu’s “groveling apology to a state that supports and funds terror is a disgrace,” Smotrich said on X.

National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir expressed continued support for the Qatar strike, calling it “important, just, and supremely moral.”

Orit Strock, a member of the Israeli Cabinet, asked, “Did the Emir of Qatar apologize to PM Netanyahu for Oct. 7?”

Yair Golan, chairman of opposition party The Democrats, called the apology “a humiliation” and said that, “In order to beat Hamas, we need to replace Bibi and Qatar.”

Israeli political analyst and author Amit Segal said, “The Qatari scum have not condemned the October 7 massacre to this day. Even if there is a diplomatic need for this, it is repulsive and disgusting.”

Haaretz reporter Amir Tibon and others expressed anger that Netanyahu had apologized to the Qataris before he apologized to Israeli victims of Oct. 7.

Nadav Pollack, a lecturer at Israel’s Reichman University, said that the apology and promise show that Qatar holds stronger influence in the White House than Israel.

Foundation for Defense of Democracies CEO Mark Dubowitz downplayed the significance of the apology.

“Apology or not, Qatar is on notice that Israel will eliminate Hamas terrorists where and when it chooses,” Dubowitz told Jewish Insider. “The overarching message is more important: Get your Muslim Brotherhood cousins to agree to a deal, and release the hostages, or next time we won’t miss.”

Rich Goldberg, a senior advisor at FDD and a former Trump administration official, responded similarly.

“If that’s the worst thing Israel has to do to save face while Qatar acquiesces to U.S. pressure to secure the release of all hostages, let it be the last insult endured,” Goldberg told JI. “There is a cold dark place in hell awaiting all Hamas sponsors, and I expect the Mossad will help them find that place at the right time in the future.”

Both Dubowitz and Goldberg have publicly maintained that the U.S. was likely aware of and approved of the Israeli strikes in Qatar, in spite of Trump’s own public condemnations and denials.

Former U.S. Ambassador to Israel Dan Shapiro, a senior fellow at the Atlantic Council and former top Pentagon official in the Biden administration, told JI that the apology “was a useful diplomatic maneuver, likely pre-scripted, to ensure Qatar would do its part to deliver a yes from Hamas on release of all hostages and disarmament. Trump pressuring Netanyahu was necessary, but no less needed was his pressure on Qatar. The apology gave him that leverage.”

Michael Makovsky, the CEO of the Jewish Institute for National Security of America said that “Based on what we know, it’s understandable that Netanyahu felt compelled to apologize to the Qatari PM.  Pres Trump asked him to do it, and Trump has collaborated with Israel in the 12-Day War, and backed Israel on Gaza.”

“But it’s unfortunate, because Israel doesn’t owe Qatar an apology—Qatar owes Israel an apology for supporting Hamas for so many years, by hosting its leaders, funding its operations, offering verbal support, etc.,” Makovsky continued. “Qatar should also apologize for spreading anti-Israel (and anti-American) hate on its al-Jazeera news organization. The bigger question is why Pres. Trump is so favorable to Qatar.”

Dana Stroul, the research director for the Washington Institute for Near East Policy and Shapiro’s predecessor at the Defense Department in the Biden administration, said that the statement echoes past engagements.

“It’s almost reverting to traditional US diplomacy of facilitating rapprochement between long-standing US partners,” Stroul said. “Recall then-President Obama brokering a phone call and an Israeli apology to Turkey in 2013 for its role in a 2010 Gaza flotilla incident. It also is a critical step in coalescing Arab support for providing meaningful support and resources to post war Gaza.”

She added that the administration “definitely believes it needs Qatar on its side.”
“When you read all of the various statements from the Trump administration about the peace and de-escalation agreements they are  brokering, Qatar is very frequently thanked in these statements for its mediation role,” she explained.

Nearly a day after an Israeli airstrike targeted a meeting of high-level Hamas officials in Doha, Qatar, there are more questions than answers, both in Jerusalem and Washington. Israel has not confirmed which officials were killed in the strike, while Hamas has said that five officials from the group, including the son of Hamas’ chief negotiator, Khalil al-Hayya, were killed in addition to a member of the Qatari security forces. 

Israeli reports earlier today indicate that the strike did not kill the most senior echelon of the terror group, which for years has been based in Qatar, a U.S. ally.

Amid ongoing uncertainty over the success of the strike, the operation was met with rare condemnation from the White House, first from Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt and then from President Donald Trump himself, who said he “was very unhappy about it, very unhappy about every aspect” — perhaps, in part, because the operation is not believed to have taken out the most senior Hamas officials.

But it was Trump himself who said over the weekend on his Truth Social site that he had “warned Hamas about the consequences of not accepting” the ceasefire and hostage-release deal that had been put forward by the U.S.

At the same time that Trump officials, including the president, were criticizing the operation, U.S. Ambassador to Israel Mike Huckabee was embracing Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu at the U.S. Embassy’s belated Independence Day celebration in Jerusalem, where the prime minister addressed a smaller group of VIPs attending the party.

“Israel acted wholly independently and we take full responsibility for this action,” Netanyahu said of the Doha strikes. “This action can open to an end of the war in Gaza.”

Israeli officials and defense sources said on Wednesday that they are waiting for better intelligence before commenting on who was killed, but they viewed the operation as a success.

Israeli Defense Minister Israel Katz warned that there could be additional strikes of this kind: “The long hand of Israel will act against its enemies anywhere in the world. There is no place where they can hide. Whoever was a partner in the Oct. 7 massacre will be fully brought to justice.” 

Everyone from Israeli Opposition Leader Yair Lapid to Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich put out statements praising the IDF and Shin Bet and saying the terrorists got what they deserved.

At the same time, the Hostages and Missing Families Forum said the affiliated families felt “deep concern and heavy anxiety” that their loved ones would pay the price. “We know from survivors who have returned that the revenge directed at the hostages is brutal. The chance of bringing them back now faces greater uncertainty than ever before.” 

However, Shimon Or, uncle of hostage Avinatan Or, said on Kan radio that “this action brings us closer to bringing Avinatan and the rest of the hostages. …We will not bring back the hostages anymore with military operations and ‘the gates of hell,’ but with control over Gaza.”

Meanwhile, Israeli officials have pushed back on criticism that the strikes would affect ceasefire talks, briefing press in Hebrew and English that the operation will help talks, because there are other channels for negotiations. 

The Israeli strike targeting Hamas leaders in Qatar is dividing the White House, which strongly criticized Israel for attacking Qatari territory, and Senate Republicans, who have been overwhelmingly supportive of the Israeli action.

President Donald Trump told reporters on Tuesday evening he was “not thrilled about the way that went down” and “very unhappy with every aspect,” his first direct public comments on the Israeli strike, after White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt made comments to the same effect earlier in the day.

Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC), asked about the White House statement on the attack, told Jewish Insider, “I understand we have troops there, but my focus is Israel. Hamas has had every chance. … Lay down your weapons, release the hostages — you live. If you don’t — it keeps going.”

Sen. Markwayne Mullin (R-OK) told JI, “Israel has made this very clear, and the same as we’ve made it very clear, we’re going to go after terrorist organizations, no matter where you’re at. We have a good relationship with the Qataris. They didn’t target the Qataris. They were targeting Hamas, and they had the right to do that.”

Asked about the administration’s comments, he said, “I understand where they’re at. My opinion is the Qataris knew good and well that they were there and they were doing nothing about it.”

He said that he does not know the full context of the strike at this point, but that if Israel had asked Qatar to take action against the Hamas leaders sheltering inside the country and Qatar had refused, “then I don’t blame Israel for doing that. Now if they didn’t have a conversation beforehand, maybe it is a different story.”

When asked about the White House’s statement, which described the Israeli strike as “unfortunate,” Sen. Rick Scott (R-FL) responded, “I think it’s unfortunate that Qatar kept the Hamas leaders in their country, that was the unfortunate part.”

He said that he was surprised that the strike didn’t come sooner.

“Why did it take them so long? As soon as Oct. 7 happened, I met with the Qatari ambassador and I said, ‘Why are you hosting these people?’ He said, ‘Well, Obama asked.’ I said, ‘He gave you a bad job. Stop doing it,’” Scott continued. “I’m glad [Israel] did it. I’m impressed with what [Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin] Netanyahu’s done, the political leaders, the military leaders, the IDF, whether destroying Hamas, or Hezbollah or Iran — you have to really admire what they’re doing.”

Sen. Roger Marshall (R-KS), the most outspoken supporter of Qatar among Senate Republicans, stood alone in offering a full-throated criticism of the Israeli strike and fully backing Trump’s position.

“I fully agree with President [Trump]. At the request of the U.S. and Israel, Qatar is mediating a peace agreement. The Israeli attack on allied soil, where approximately 10,000 American troops are stationed, is highly ill-advised,” Marshall said on X. “Grateful that [Secretary of State Marco Rubio] is finalizing a Defense Coordination Agreement with Qatar to prevent Israel from repeating this action.”

In a prepared statement on behalf of President Donald Trump, White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt on Tuesday criticized the Israeli strike on Hamas leaders in Qatar and expressed regret that it had taken place in Doha, adding that the U.S. had warned Qatar about the strike when the U.S. itself became aware.

She said Trump had also vowed to Qatari leaders that such an attack would not be repeated in Qatari territory.

“This morning, the Trump administration was notified by the United States military … as Israel was attacking Hamas, which very unfortunately was located in a section of Doha, the capital of Qatar,” Leavitt said. “Unilaterally bombing inside Qatar, a sovereign nation and close ally of the United States that is working very hard and bravely taking risks with us to broker peace, does not advance Israel or America’s goals.”

Pressed repeatedly on whether Israel had notified the U.S. about the attack, as some reports indicated, or whether the U.S. military had detected it independently, Leavitt did not specify, repeating only that the U.S. military had notified the White House.

She said that Trump “immediately directed” Middle East envoy Steve Witkoff to notify Qatar about the upcoming attack when the administration learned about it.

“The president views Qatar as a strong ally and friend of the United States and feels very badly about the location of this attack,” Leavitt continued.

She did add, however, that the administration views eliminating Hamas as “a worthy goal.”

Asked whether Trump would impose “consequences” on Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu for the strike or provide a “directive … to Netanyahu in terms of what’s allowed in the future,” Leavitt said that “that’s a decision only the president can make.”

Leavitt said that Trump had spoken to Qatari Emir Tamim bin Hamad Al Thani, Prime Minister Mohammed bin Abdulrahman Al Thani and Netanyahu after the attack.

She said the president “assured [the Qatari leaders] that such a thing will not happen again on their soil” and thanked Qatar for “their support and friendship to our country.”

She said that both Trump and Netanyahu agreed that they want to make peace quickly and said Trump “believes this unfortunate incident could serve as an opportunity for peace,” and that Trump had conveyed his displeasure about the location of the strike to Netanyahu.

“He expects all of our friends and allies in the region — that includes both Qatar and Israel — to seek peace as well, and he wants to see that happen, and he’s working with all of our allies in the region to get that done,” Leavitt said.

Leavitt denied that Trump’s post on social media over the weekend offering a “last warning” to Hamas to accept a ceasefire deal was a reference to the impending Israeli attack.

The White House’s expressed concern about the location of the attack puts the administration at odds with many senior members of Trump’s own party in the Senate, who were quick to express support for the Israeli attack, and aligns more closely with top Senate Democrats who have been more critical of the attack and where it took place.

Asked about the White House’s opposition to the strike, multiple Senate Republicans who had earlier in the day expressed support for the Israeli attack declined to comment.

Meanwhile, Sen. Chris Coons (D-DE) said, “I will actually agree with President Trump that it doesn’t advance our interests in terms of advancing negotiations for the release of hostages or the ceasefire that is urgently needed in Gaza.”

“I have not gotten any briefing on the details of how it was approved, whether or not the Trump administration was aware and supported it, but in the middle of a hostage negotiation that is urgently needed to free the hostages, to end the fighting, to deliver humanitarian relief and to address Hamas — to take a strike in Doha against Hamas leaders, I think puts at risk any peace process,” Coons said. He added that he wants to be briefed on further details.

Sergio Gor’s expected departure from a key role in the White House, where he has vetted thousands of candidates for political jobs as the influential leader of the Presidential Personnel Office, is raising some questions about how his litmus tests and isolationist views will compare to his newly announced replacement, particularly with regard to national security hires.

Gor, 38, was nominated by President Donald Trump last week to be U.S. ambassador to India. If confirmed by the Senate, Gor, who was also tapped as special envoy for South and Central Asian affairs, will leave behind a powerful post at which he built a reputation as an ideological gatekeeper. 

Throughout his time in the White House, Gor has drawn attention for his unyielding focus on loyalty to Trump and — more singularly — a fierce commitment to elevating national security and foreign policy hires who share his skepticism of American engagement abroad.

His successor, Dan Scavino, as the White House confirmed this week, is likewise a longtime Trump confidant who now serves as White House deputy chief of staff. But unlike Gor — whose background suggests an interest in imposing ideological litmus tests on job applicants  — Scavino, 49, “has no ideology other than Trump,” according to a former top administration official.

Even as Gor has won plaudits from a range of high-ranking officials in the administration, the former official, who spoke anonymously to address a sensitive subject, suggested his approach to the White House role has been driven by his foreign policy worldview as well as his allegiance to the president, a tension that is unlikely to be replicated by Scavino.

“Sergio brought his own world with him to the job, not just Trump’s,” the former official told Jewish Insider on Wednesday. “Loyal to Trump, yes — loyal to a Paul-Tucker-Koch world ideology, I think yes as well,” he added, referring to Gor’s former boss Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY), podcast host Tucker Carlson and the activist network linked with Charles Koch, a leading conservative donor who has opposed Trump.

By contrast, Scavino, a former Trump golf club manager who has previously run the president’s prolific and unfiltered social media, seems to have few, if any, competing interests at stake. “There’s a reason Dan has a seat in the Situation Room when the toughest decisions are made,” the former Trump official elaborated. “Sergio never did. This should be a positive development for vetting and placement.”

It remains to be seen which positions Scavino will still need to help staff when he fully assumes Gor’s duties — especially with “over 95%” of departments and agencies now “filled,” according to a statement from Trump last week, which could not be verified.

“There is much still to be done, and Dan’s leadership will ensure the highest quality, most dedicated workforce ever,” Karoline Leavitt, the White House press secretary, said in a statement, calling Scavino “one of Trump’s most trusted and longest serving advisors.”

In his tenure, Gor, a former top aide to Paul, the libertarian Republican from Kentucky, has helped weaken the National Security Council and worked to install Pentagon officials who have pressed for a reduced U.S. military presence in the Middle East — fueling concerns among pro-Israel leaders who have questioned if such views were aligned with Trump’s approach.

The personnel chief, whose efforts highlighted an intra-party battle between warring traditional and MAGA Republican factions that has recently grown less fractious as the administration has taken shape, also promoted officials affiliated with the libertarian Koch network, in spite of a directive from Trump upon his reelection to avoid “people who worked with, or are endorsed by” the Charles Koch or his political advocacy group.

More recently, Gor has prominently clashed with some top Trump allies, including Elon Musk and Michael Anton, the State Department’s director of policy planning who served as a technical lead amid failed nuclear negotiations with Iran. Anton, who is now expected to leave the administration soon, has reportedly grown frustrated with Gor’s rejections of his proposed hires, among other sources of tension first detailed by Politico on Wednesday. 

“He has the power to can people and for them not to get through,” one Trump official who has interacted with Gor and was not authorized to comment on the record said of his current role.

Meanwhile, Gor has advanced some officials widely criticized for espousing racist and antisemitic views, including Darren Beattie, who was fired in Trump’s first term for speaking at a white nationalist event and is now a top official in the State Department.

Beattie’s promotion, along with others who have drawn scrutiny for extreme views, underscores how Gor has been “clearing people who are unclearable,” said a former senior Republican Hill aide, who was granted anonymity in order to speak freely. “Sergio is obviously fine with that,” he said of Beattie’s past comments.

Trump, who in a social media post announcing his nomination last week called Gor’s time in the White House “essential” to upholding the administration’s agenda, said the personnel director would remain in his current role until his confirmation in the Senate, which has not yet scheduled a hearing.

A White House spokesperson confirmed to JI on Wednesday that Gor will stay in his post pending Senate approval for the ambassadorial role, which comes amid growing tensions between the United States and India, a major ally, over Trump’s tariff threats.

As Gor now prepares to leave the White House for a more public role, Danielle Pletka, a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, suggested his approach to hiring ultimately demonstrated how he struggled to evolve with the administration on key issues.

“I think that the Trump administration has settled into a routine, and I think that people who are very ideologically rigid are finding less and less space for themselves,” Pletka told JI. “The president is not an isolationist, and those who are are discovering quickly that he does not appreciate being told how his staff have a stronger America first agenda than he does.”

Seb Gorka, the White House senior director for counterterrorism and a deputy assistant to the president, aired his grievances with the anti-Israel faction within the Republican Party on Tuesday, alleging that the wing of the GOP aligned with podcast host Tucker Carlson is  “basically Pat Buchanan in a new guise.”

Gorka made the comments in a conversation on counterterrorism and U.S. strategy at the Hudson Institute after being pressed on the foreign policy disputes within the MAGA movement and Carlson’s grievances with President Donald Trump’s decision to strike Iran’s nuclear facilities in June. 

Asked by moderator Michael Doran, a Hudson senior fellow and director of the Center for Peace and Security in the Middle East, if he was comfortable addressing the growth of anti-Israel, antisemitic sentiment on right-wing podcasts and social media, Gorka replied, “Yeah, I am, because it bothers me immensely, but I’ve come to a certain realization with regards to that, that this wing of isolationism is nothing new. We had this 100 years ago.”

“This is just a poor, substandard repackaging of neo-Buchananite isolationism,” Gorka said, referencing Buchanan, the former Nixon communications director who became an outspoken critic of Israel. “It’s actually a more shallow version. Pat is far smarter than this version of isolationism.”

Gorka said that he is “actually in a better place with” the onslaught of anti-Israel rhetoric from Carlson’s wing of the party than he was previously, explaining that he realized that most of the rhetoric was coming from “probably half a dozen very loud people on Twitter and Rumble,” the right-wing video platform. 

“You get out of the miasma, the cesspit that is social media, and you talk to representative MAGA voters, of the 80 million that put the president back in the White House, they don’t think that we should pull down the shutters on the Pacific and the Atlantic coast,” Gorka explained. “They don’t think that Israel is the reason for Oct. 7. They actually have a very special place in their heart for Israel, and they don’t think that hospitals being bombed in Ukraine is a good thing because somebody offered NATO membership to Ukraine, allegedly, a decade ago.”

“As an immigrant to this country, a legal immigrant to the United States, one of the most trenchant indicative characteristics for me of the American people is common sense. They understand who is responsible for Oct. 7. They understand who [Russian President] Vladimir Putin is. And as such, I was worried by this neo-Buchanan isolationism, but I look at President Trump’s actions, they have no hold on him,” he continued.  

Gorka then pointed to the early days of the first Trump administration, alleging that at the time, then-Defense Secretary James Mattis and Secretary of State Rex Tillerson expressed hesitation about moving the U.S. Embassy in Israel to Jerusalem out of fear that doing so would cause a third world war. 

Gorka said that Trump told concerned members of his Cabinet at the time that they were going through with the move because, “A) We promised the people of Israel 23 years ago, and we’ve broken that promise every six months of 23 years. B) I promised the American electorate in the campaign. We’re doing it. And C) It’s the right thing to do.” He argued that the “moral clarity” shown by Trump on issues impacting Israel highlighted the contrast between the president and his detractors on foreign policy matters. 

Earlier in the program, Gorka told Doran that the president’s approach to the Middle East was heavily focused on combating Iran.

“You need to understand one thing: When the president looks at the region, he doesn’t slice it down into cylinders of excellence. He doesn’t care if you’re the Syrian desk officer or the natural resources expert. He has one overlay for the whole AOR [Area of Responsibility], and that one metric, that one prism, is Iran, and he’s absolutely right,” Gorka said. “Iran is front and center in everything we do in the region, because they remain the greatest state sponsor terrorism, and the world would be a much safer place if that were not the case.”

Gorka noted that when Trump is asked by reporters about anything related to national security, “more than 50% of the time … the president will bring up Iran,” adding that this was “especially” the case “before [Operation] Midnight Hammer, because it really is on his mind that this is the threat. A nuclear Iran, an ideologically Islamo-fascist regime that wishes to acquire the most dangerous weapons in the world, is a threat to all decent peoples.”

Turning his attention to Israel, Gorka argued that the Jewish state’s “post-Oct. 7 operations have rewritten the map of the Middle East for the next 50 to 100 years.” He praised Israel’s military moves in Syria and Lebanon, crediting the IDF with taking down the Assad regime in Damascus and significantly weakening Hezbollah. 

As for whether the U.S. will undertake additional operations in the region to target Iranian proxies, Gorka said the “jury is still out on that,” but praised Trump’s strikes against the Houthis. 

“We had great success with our operation against the Houthis. Again, it wasn’t well understood by the so-called experts. For the president, the action against the Houthis was about one thing and one thing alone. When we told him there had been 150 attacks against U.S. vessels going through the Straits and that they’d actually fired on naval vessels as well, he said, ‘Well, that will not be allowed to stand.’ It’s not just about U.S. interests [but] about global freedom of maritime transport. So all of these things are connected,” Gorka said of Trump’s motivation to strike the Iran-backed Yemeni terror group. 

Gorka also disputed the notion that the president was tied down by ideological labels, but rather that he’s focused on achieving results and fixing problems: “Here’s the trouble for the Beltway with understanding the current commander in chief: there is no ideological taxonomy into which he will fall.”

Rich Goldberg, a senior advisor at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, this week concluded a monthslong stint in the Trump administration as the senior counselor for the White House’s new National Energy Dominance Council (NEDC) and a senior advisor to Secretary of the Interior Doug Burgum.

Goldberg helped launch the NEDC, which he compared in an interview with Jewish Insider this week to a “[National Security Council], only for energy,” coordinating with the White House, Burgum and Secretary of Energy Christopher Wright to build domestic production of energy and exploitation of oil, gas, coal and nuclear resources, as well as critical minerals. That effort includes moves to speed up approvals for energy projects.

He said that the council is particularly focused on the energy demands of the growing AI space, which are “so enormous that we truly have a national emergency on our hands.” He said the U.S. will “lose the [AI] arms race to China” if it can’t increase its capacity to generate power, in partnership with U.S. allies.

He added that the NEDC is also focused on exporting American energy to allies, with the goal of de-linking them from U.S. adversaries and using U.S. energy to promote stability amid potential global energy crises.

As part of the NEDC’s efforts, the U.S. and Israel signed a memorandum of understanding on U.S.-Israel energy and artificial intelligence cooperation during Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s July visit to the U.S.

“This has huge potential for the future, when you think about combining the Israeli tech and innovation ecosystem and having the smartest people in Israel and startups focused on power generation, focused on advanced energy solutions, focused on AI applications for energy, and combining that with U.S. infrastructure, U.S. know-how, U.S. leadership,” Goldberg said. 

He said that the program could be expanded to include the United Arab Emirates, which is stepping up its investments in the U.S. and in AI.

Goldberg argued that the administration’s “energy dominance” approach can help offset the impacts of global instability, pointing to the Israel-Iran war as an example. He said that the U.S.’ lack of dependence on Middle Eastern oil gave it “flexibility” in taking action against Iran, including imposing primary and secondary sanctions on Iranian oil, and carrying out strikes.

He said that expanding U.S. energy production will also allow it to respond quickly and assist allies and partners if their supplies might be interrupted. Goldberg noted that the administration had reached out to Egypt and Jordan when the war began to ensure their energy supplies wouldn’t be impacted.

“I think we have a lot of flexibility right now, if we wanted to, to curtail Iranian energy flows dramatically,” Goldberg said. “But obviously what [President Donald Trump] directed and accomplished at the end of the 12-day war, combined with what the Israelis accomplished, has given him far more tremendous options and flexibility than any sanctions ever could.”

Goldberg argued that the setbacks to Iran’s nuclear program from the U.S. and Israeli strikes have also “dramatically improved the energy shipment picture and our national security picture” in the Middle East, making it more risky for Iran to threaten maritime shipping in the Strait of Hormuz, which he also called a blow to China.

Goldberg also highlighted the fact that the administration recently stopped providing waivers that allowed Iraq to continue purchasing energy from Iran. He said that increased U.S. production allows the U.S. to work with Iraq to de-link its energy supply from Iran.

“The energy sector, the financial sector has been the financial pathway for Iran, along with its terror militias … to maintain effective control and influence over Baghdad,” Goldberg said. “This is not in the U.S. interest, it’s not in Iraq’s interest.”

He said Iraq is “Iran’s Alamo” — one of its last strongholds outside its borders, aside from the Houthis in Yemen — “and we would be committing policy malpractice not to seize the moment.” He added that Iraq also has “tremendous natural resources” that could be developed if the influence and threat of Iranian-backed militias could be eliminated.

As for the Houthis, Goldberg said that there will need to be “creative ways” to address that threat, involving Gulf partners and Israel.

He said that the Middle East also provides great opportunities for growth in the energy sector, ultimately through the India-Middle East-Europe Corridor (IMEC) — a proposed pipeline, rail and shipping corridor that would run from Mumbai through the Gulf states and Israel to Greece. Saudi-Israeli normalization would be critical to advancing the IMEC vision.

The IMEC proposal would also sidestep the Houthi threat in the Red Sea, Goldberg noted. 

“This is where IMEC presents a real game-changing opportunity through energy infrastructure,” he said. “It’s absolutely conceivable and something we should be putting all of our energy behind, politically, to have a Saudi-to-Europe pipeline connection that runs straight through Eilat. The infrastructure is largely mapped out. It would take a relatively modest infrastructure investment upgrade.”

He said that the vision goes beyond simple normalization: “What we’re looking at is complete economic and energy integration and a transformation of global supply chains.” He said that makes him “optimistic” about the future for the region.

Asked about his inside perspective on the Trump administration’s decision-making around the Israel-Iran war and the U.S.’ decision to bomb Iran, Goldberg praised Trump, saying that “you could not have scripted how everything played out better” and lauded Trump for his “willingness to defy, truly, a crowd of idiots out in the Twitter-sphere that were screaming of all kinds of crazy things that might happen if the U.S. did the obvious and removed the Iranian ability to cross the nuclear threshold in any short amount of time.”

Goldberg said that the U.S. strikes were a response to a “core national security interest” and a “clear and present national security threat” that “bogged us down in the world,” “distracted us from longer-term strategic threats” and “increased price premiums” for energy and shipping supply chains.

He also argued that the Israeli military campaign against Iran could not have seen the success that it did unless Trump had been elected president, arguing that the weapons shipments that the Biden administration withheld from Israel were critical to the Israeli operations, as was Trump’s willingness to deploy U.S. military assets to defend Israel. He dismissed the notion that the Trump administration had prematurely forced Israel to cut off its military operation against Iran.

Goldberg said that reimposing United Nations sanctions on Iran through the snapback mechanism would be a critical step toward “enshrining the policy of no reconstitution at the Security Council,” and prevent a future president — he named left-wing Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) or right-wing podcast host Tucker Carlson — from attempting to revive the Obama-era nuclear deal and granting sanctions relief once again.

“The president, from everything that I have seen, is fundamentally committed to ensuring Iran does not reconstitute its nuclear program, dismantles it further if he can achieve that diplomatically, and is not allowed to continue to foment wars, sponsor terrorism,” Goldberg said. “The Iranians now have to fear Donald Trump using force at any given moment,” he added.

Goldberg said that media reports of breaches between Trump and the Israeli government were “false” and “politically motivated in some sort of disinformation campaign.”

“The one truth I know is that the Trump administration — the president, the prime minister — are closely, closely coordinated,” Goldberg said.

Regarding the future of Gaza, Goldberg emphasized that Hamas has not negotiated in good faith to release the hostages, and said that “at some point, we should have a question of what value the Hamas leaders outside of Gaza present to us” if they are not being helpful — or are actively harmful — in achieving hostage-release deals.

He added that Trump’s proposal for the mass relocation of the population of Gaza for rebuilding and anti-Hamas operations is still on the table if other efforts fail. Goldberg suggested that the existing Israeli strategy of clearing areas but then withdrawing, rather than setting up new governance, had not been successful, but that a new Israeli occupation strategy could provide space for such an approach. He said there are other options that could be “in between those two.”

“[The Gaza Humanitarian Foundation] is fundamentally the greatest assault on the Hamas-international aid humanitarian apparatus that could possibly exist, which is why they need it to die,” Goldberg continued. “If they lose the fight against GHF, if GHF evolves further into something that actually goes into communities … and the IDF facilitates that in some way, and it proves to be successful and [non-Hamas] people are willing to step up” to take on leadership and civil service roles, “you have a hope for Gaza.”

He said that abandoning the GHF or an equivalent effort would be a major victory for Hamas.

Sebastian Gorka, the White House senior director for counterterrorism and a deputy assistant to the president, said Wednesday at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies that the U.S. is not seeking regime change in Iran, but will maintain its maximum-pressure campaign on Tehran.

Gorka also said that he supports efforts to designate the Muslim Brotherhood as a terrorist organization, suggested that he’s pursuing efforts to convince Qatar and Turkey to cut ties with Hamas and said the U.S. wants to see Syrian minority groups come to the table and join with the new Syrian government.

He said that the Trump administration views Iran as the paramount threat and focus in the Middle East, and that its strategy toward Iran is “max pressure, no regime change,” with the goal of stopping Iran’s nuclear program and ending its support for terrorist proxies.

“We are not in the business of deploying the 82nd Airborne to do regime changes anywhere. We don’t believe in that,” Gorka said. 

In the long term, he added, “we would like the people of Persia, including the minorities of Persia, to eventually liberate themselves.”

Trump had publicly floated the possibility of regime change in Iran after the U.S. strikes on the country last month, but subsequently said he does not seek regime change. Some administration officials had also floated the idea of sanctions relief for Iran.

Gorka said he backs efforts to designate the Muslim Brotherhood as a terrorist organization, describing the group as the “granddaddy” of all of the terrorist organizations that have attacked the United States and its allies for decades. 

“If we can designate, as we have, Hamas, which in its founding charter from 1984 says, ‘We are a chapter of the Muslim Brotherhood,’ then why haven’t we designated the Brotherhood itself?”

“So what I’ll say right now,” Gorka said, clearing his throat, is, “I like the idea,” he finished in a whisper.

Asked by Jewish Insider about whether the administration is working to end Turkey and Qatar’s sponsorship of Hamas, he said that he is “imminently traveling to that part of the world, so that should tell you something.”

He added that Turkey is an “important nation, it’s a geopolitical nation, it has a role to play with us as a NATO nation, but there are things I will be discussing with Ankara that I find leave me with a sense of unease,” including the Turkish government’s relationship with Hamas as well as reports that ISIS terrorists have been moving through Turkey.

“There has to be a balance between their conceptualization of the PKK threat,” Gorka said, referring to the Kurdish militant group, “and threats that we share, such as ISIS. I think that’s where the rebalance has to come.”

“With regards to Qatar, Qatar has … a very simple choice it has to make. Do you give any kind of succor to those who do not help in the stabilization of the region? That’s all I’m going to say,” he continued.

In Gaza, Gorka said that there “are a lot of good things happening at a tactical and operational level” on the ground, in that the U.S. is working to train anti-Hamas police and security units and that those units are “working quite closely with Israel.”

But, he said, “as far as I’m concerned, none of that goes anywhere until the political leadership changes,” saying that the “cultural issue” of widespread support in Gaza for Hamas and the Oct. 7, 2023, attacks on Israel is a problem that cannot be solved by a police force. “We need some brave men and women to say, ‘I am here to help fix Gaza.’”

Gorka framed President Donald Trump’s proposal for the U.S. to take over Gaza and relocate the Palestinian population as a negotiating tactic to motivate Middle Eastern countries to step up to take responsibility and invest in Gaza — though that investment hasn’t yet come to fruition.

Gorka, who said he regularly watched videos of ISIS and Al-Qaida’s brutal torture and murder of their victims, described footage of the atrocities committed by Hamas on Oct. 7 as far beyond anything he had ever seen before. “Nothing I’d watched in my two decades prepared me for what I saw that day.”

“I praise the government of Israel. I praise the IDF because what they have done in response is a redrawing of the map of the Middle East that will change your politics for at least a century,” Gorka said. “One of the greatest things they have done is to ensure that the strategic threat of Iran is now incapable of resupplying its proxies in the territory of Syria. God bless Israel for doing that. Now we have to finish the job. We have to make sure Iran stops supplying its proxies. We have to stabilize Syria.”

He added that, “despite the ideological way it has been exploited by certain actors here and elsewhere, the response to Oct. 7 has actually benefited us, because people have woken up to the horrors of modern … Jew hatred.”

The White House advisor said that the administration has told Syrian President Ahmad al-Sharaa that the U.S. “want[s] him to make Syria great again,” and that doing so will require bringing all elements of Syria to the table, including Kurds, Christians, Alawites and Druze. Additionally, the U.S. has told those minority groups, including Kurdish allies, that it does not support them making pushes for autonomy.

“Come to the table, because this is your shot,” Gorka said. “Get in on that deal, because it’s the only time it’s going to happen.”

In the short term, he said, the administration wants to make sure those minority communities can protect themselves and to “make sure the state sees an end to the massacre of whichever confessional community.”

Asked by JI about the possibility of Iranian retaliatory attacks in the United States, Gorka said that “because of how we boxed in Iran, they are basically forced to use surrogates. … They can’t deploy their own assets, which is a good thing. Beyond that, we take it very seriously and that’s all I can say right now.”

He highlighted other recent intercepted plots, including one in the United Kingdom, where Iran has attempted to utilize Iranian expatriates to attack the Israeli Embassy, adding that the group has also sought to employ domestic criminal groups to carry out operations on its behalf.

Gorka praised Israel’s operations against Hezbollah in Lebanon, and noted that the country’s new president, Joseph Aoun, studied under him at the National Defense University.

“The relationship is positive but it could be improved in terms of matching verbiage to actual results,” he said.

Gorka previewed U.S. plans for a “series of short efforts, high-intensity efforts to make the leading terror threats to America combat-inneffective, at which point our friends, our allies, our partners in the Middle East and elsewhere pick up the terrorist suppression operations.” The goal, he explained, is to prevent terrorist groups from being able to carry out operations on U.S. soil.

He said that the U.S. does not want to maintain a global presence permanently to counter terrorism, though he added that the U.S. is willing to maintain a “small footprint” in certain locations to address specific threats.

He also emphasized the need for the U.S.’ Muslim partner nations to lead efforts to counter jihadist narratives and recruiting efforts, and poke holes in jihadist ideology.

It’s a scenario that has played out many times over since Oct. 7, 2023: Against the backdrop of ceasefire and hostage-release negotiations, Israeli actions in Gaza draw widespread condemnation. World leaders call for a ceasefire. Amid that growing criticism, Hamas, sensing increased pressure on Israel, responds by escalating its demands or backing away from negotiations entirely.

This week is no different, with Israel’s launch on Monday of a ground operation in central Gaza’s Deir al-Balah, where it had not previously operated, the same day that more than two dozen Western countries released a joint statement calling for “unconditional and permanent ceasefire.” Hamas negotiators in Doha, Qatar, have reportedly spent the last two weeks dragging out ceasefire talks, over issues ranging from the number of Palestinian prisoners to be released to the areas where the IDF is allowed to operate.

In yesterday’s statement, the countries’ demand of Hamas is only for the “immediate and unconditional release” of the remaining 50 hostages, with no mention of disarmament or the terror group’s removal from power — key Israeli demands since Hamas’ brutal attacks on the Jewish state almost two years ago.

Hamas has since October 2023 faced limited pressure to acquiesce to Israeli and American demands. The terror group’s backers in Doha, where senior Hamas officials have long lived in opulence and security, have similarly faced little international pressure — even as Qatar plays a key role in negotiations. Israel has not been a perfect actor, and at times has walked away from the negotiating table. But Jerusalem’s refusals have been outpaced by Hamas’ intransigence, the latter of which has frustrated White House officials in both the current and former administrations.

At his final press briefing as secretary of state in January, Tony Blinken warned that Hamas benefitted from international pressure on Israel, saying, “Hamas held back [from agreeing to deals] at various points because it saw or hoped that public international pressure was mounting on Israel, and it could just wait it out and that pressure would get to a point where Israel would have to accede to all of Hamas’ demands.”

And in a Washington Post op-ed shortly after leaving the White House, Brett McGurk acknowledged that “throughout the ceasefire negotiations, Hamas consistently held back on a commitment to release hostages and aimed to ensure that it remains in power after the war ends.”

What’s more, McGurk wrote in his op-ed, Israel faced demands in the weeks and months after the onset of the war “that the only way to stop the fighting was for Israel to accept all of Hamas’s terms. Calls to restrict weapons shipments to Israel, or to increase pressure on Israel (rather than on those who kept attacking it), or to back U.N. Security Council resolutions demanding ‘unconditional’ ceasefires with Hamas, discounted this regional equation and the intent of Israel’s adversaries.”

There is a popular adage that insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results. For nearly two years, Israel, Hamas and the international community have fallen into an endless cycle of talks, official statements and Hamas backtracking. Far from getting a different result, the world has seen more of the same: the continued captivity of the hostages, deepening global ostracization of Israel, ongoing death and destruction in Gaza and a Hamas that feels emboldened to up its demands.

White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt said on Monday that President Donald Trump was “caught off guard” by recent Israeli actions in Syria and Gaza, noting that he had called Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to air his concerns. 

Leavitt made the comments after being asked if the president had “expressed his frustration” with Netanyahu directly over the fatal attack on the Holy Family Catholic Church, the only Catholic church in Gaza, and the IDF’s move to strike government buildings in Damascus, Syria’s capital, last week during sectarian clashes that drew in Syrian government forces and left more than 1,000 people dead. The strikes on Syria came as the Trump administration has thrown its full support behind the new government and urged Israel to normalize relations with the war-torn country. 

“The president enjoys a good working relationship with Prime Minister Bibi Netanyahu and stays in frequent communication with him. He was caught off guard by the bombing in Syria and also the bombing of the Catholic Church in Gaza,” Leavitt told reporters outside the White House. 

The White House press secretary went on to note that Trump and Secretary of State Marco Rubio stepped in to prevent an escalation in Damascus and to demand answers on the church strike. 

“In both accounts, the president quickly called the prime minister to rectify those situations, and we saw Secretary Rubio intervene when it came to Syria. We saw a deescalation there. And as for the bombing of the Catholic church in Gaza, the prime minister did put out a statement saying this was an accident and they deeply regretted that action on behalf of the State of Israel following his conversation with the president,” Leavitt explained.

The strike on the church killed three and injured 10, including a priest.

Leavitt later added when asked about the church bombing, “The president’s message on this conflict we’ve seen in the Middle East taking place for far too long, that has become quite brutal, especially in recent days, you’ve seen reports of more people dying. I think the president never likes to see that. He wants the killing to end.”

Earlier Monday, U.S. Ambassador to Turkey Tom Barrack, who is also serving as special envoy to Syria, criticized Israel’s actions in the country, telling the Associated Press that Jerusalem’s intervention in Syria “creates another very confusing chapter” in the region and “came at a very bad time.”

“The United States was not asked, nor did they participate in that decision, nor was it the United States’ responsibility in matters that Israel feels is for its own self-defense,” Barrack told the outlet of Israel’s strikes on Syria.

Barrack conceded that “both sides did the best they can” in negotiations leading up to the ceasefire he announced between Israel and Syria over the weekend, praising the two countries for trying to find common ground on issues such as the transfer of Syrian forces and military equipment from Damascus to Sweida, where members of the Druze religious minority have been under frequent attacks from Sunni Muslim Bedouin tribes.

Israel struck the Syrian Defense Ministry’s headquarters in Damascus on Wednesday in response to violence against the country’s Druze minority, a week after Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu spoke in the White House of the “opportunity for stability, security and eventually peace” with Syria.

The strikes came after clashes between Druze and Bedouin groups that began on Sunday, leaving as many as 250 dead over four days in Sweida, some 25 miles from the border with Israel and in the area of Syria that Israel seeks to have demilitarized. 

Syrian government forces entered the fray on Tuesday, saying they aimed to stop the fighting and bring about a ceasefire, which they said they had reached on Wednesday. Syrian President Ahmed al-Sharaa, formerly the head of the Syrian branch of Al Qaida, seeks to disarm Druze and other militias and have them integrate under the new government.

Israeli Druze called for Israel to intervene from the outset of the violence on Sunday, saying that their Syrian counterparts were being massacred, raped and tortured by forces aligned with al-Sharaa. In Israel, videos and images circulated of Druze religious figures’ mustaches being forcibly shaved off by men in military fatigues.

Secretary of State Marco Rubio said on Wednesday afternoon that Washington has “engaged all the parties involved in the clashes in Syria. We have agreed on specific steps that will bring this troubling and horrifying situation to an end tonight. This will require all parties to deliver on the commitments they have made and this is what we fully expect them to do.”

An Israeli official said that the U.S. had been in talks to stop the violence in Syria since Monday. 

Reda Mansour, a Middle Eastern Studies professor at Reichman University, former Israeli ambassador to Brazil and a member of Israel’s Druze community, told Jewish Insider that “there is not really one Syrian army; it’s different armed groups that do what they think. It will take time until everyone is convinced to hold their fire.” 

Mansour expressed hope that the Israeli strikes convinced al-Sharaa to “stop the rampage.” 

The former ambassador compared the violence against the Druze in Syria to the Oct. 7, 2023 Hamas attack on Israel and said that the Druze in Syria had not faced such violence since the 1925 rebellion against the French Mandate.

“In the rebellion against the French, it was mostly between soldiers,” Mansour said. “This ISIS and Al Qaida-style attack is a massacre, rape, burning of holy sites, torture of the elderly and religious leaders.” 

Mansour also said the community has not had electricity in three days and is running out of food and medical supplies, after attacks on the city’s hospital and its medical staff.

Syrian Druze “are in distress and they are asking [Israel] for help all of the time,” Mansour said, and argued that “al-Sharaa wants to get rid of the Druze.” 

“If he wanted to stop the attack, it wouldn’t have happened,” Mansour said. “His people said they are coming to Sweida to defend the Druze from the Bedouin, and then they conquered Druze villages. The people murdering and torturing the elderly are wearing his military’s uniforms.” 

On Tuesday, dozens of Israeli Druze men began crossing into Syria, breaching a border fence near the town of Majdal Shams in the Golan Heights. 

Netanyahu called on the Israeli Druze to remain in Israel: “You could be murdered, you could be taken hostage, and you are impeding the efforts of the IDF,” he said. 

Yet, on Wednesday, the number of Israeli Druze in Syria rose to at least 1,000. The IDF also used tear gas and other crowd control methods to stop Syrian Druze from crossing into Israel.

IDF Chief of Staff Lt.-Gen. Eyal Zamir said that Israel is “acting with determination to prevent hostile elements from establishing a presence beyond the border, to protect the citizens of the State of Israel, and to prevent the harming of Druze civilians … We will not allow southern Syria to become a terror stronghold.”

Zamir called on Druze Israelis to “uphold the law and preserve your lives. We are committed to you and your security and are doing everything possible to support you. I have ordered a further reinforcement of intelligence and strike capabilities in order to increase the pace of strikes and halt the assaults against the Druze in Syria as needed.”

Israeli Foreign Minister Gideon Sa’ar, who has held a hard line on al-Sharaa since the fall of the Assad regime last year, called on the new Syrian government “to come to its senses and to restore order,” lest it lose control of the country and risk the economic engagement it has sought with the West. 

Sa’ar called on the international community to speak out against the violence against minorities in Syria, asking rhetorically, “What else needs to happen? What are they still waiting for?”

“We are seeing a recurring phenomenon of persecution of minorities to the point of murder and pogroms in Syria,” Sa’ar said in a briefing to reporters on Wednesday. “Sometimes it is the regime’s forces. Sometimes it is Jihadist militias that are the basis of the regime. And usually, it is both.”

Sa’ar pointed to violence against the Syrian Alawite community, the burning and bombing of churches in recent weeks and repeated waves of violence against Druze in Syria. 

The foreign minister said that Israel will act to keep regime forces out of southern Syria and protect its border, and to protect the Druze minority.

Sa’ar also took aim at Western leaders looking to engage with al-Sharaa. “This is not a democratically elected regime,” he said. “Because sometimes, when I am in political meetings [with foreign counterparts], people talk to me about the ‘transition.’ This is not an elected regime at all. This is a regime that … took control by force.”

Sa’ar later spoke to his counterparts in the EU, Germany and Greece, pointing out that the EU set the protection of minority rights as a condition for lifting sanctions on Syria. Sa’ar said there is a “consistent pattern of exploiting these riots [against minorities] for the regime’s interests.” He also called the Syrian government’s claim that there would be an independent investigation of the events a “farce,” noting that al-Sharaa made a similar statement about the massacre of Alawites in March, and no results have materialized.

However, IDF Lt.-Col. (res.) Sarit Zehavi, founder and president of the Alma Research and Education Center focusing on the security of Israel’s northern border, argued to JI that “Israel really had no choice.”

“It had to send a sharp and clear message of defense to the Druze in Syria because it committed to defending them, because the Druze in Israel are real partners,” she said.

In addition, Zehavi said that “whoever doesn’t protect minorities in Syria, especially those on the border [with Israel], will end up being attacked by the same jihadis.”

That being said, Zehavi doubted that the strike on the Syrian Defense Ministry would be effective and said that Israel should focus on targets that are relevant specifically to stopping the attacks on Syrian Druze.

Michael Doran, director of the Center for Peace and Security in the Middle East at the Hudson Institute, questioned whether Israel was certain al-Sharaa was behind the violence in Sweida. Doran wrote that he is not convinced that al-Sharaa “traveled to Baku and met with Israelis there, [and] then chose to provoke a conflict with [Israel] over the Druze,” referring to a meeting between Syrian and Israeli officials over the weekend.

“A policy that holds al-Sharaa responsible for forces he doesn’t control won’t strengthen him—it will weaken him,” Doran wrote on X. “In practice, it becomes a tacit, perhaps unwitting, vote for a disintegrated Syria. But a disintegrated Syria serves Iran more than it serves Israel. And it won’t help with Turkey either.” 

Last week, Netanyahu praised President Donald Trump in the White House for having “opened up a channel” with the Syrian regime for negotiations. Talks were underway, with Israeli representatives reportedly meeting with al-Sharaa in the UAE and Azerbaijan last week, for a non-aggression pact between the countries, though not for normalization.

An Israeli official speaking about the future of Israel-Syria talks on condition of anonymity said on Wednesday that Israeli “policy is not based on illusions, but on reality. We want security first.” 

Recently, Israel was willing to engage more with the regime in Syria because “things stabilized a bit,” the official said, “but we are not deluding ourselves. They are talking nicely … but there is a difference between what they say and what they do. As their neighbors, we cannot ignore what they do. We send messages [to Western countries] that reflect these things.”

Mansour, who is an expert on modern Syrian history, was skeptical that negotiations between Israel and Syria can be fruitful, saying, “There is not much hope for a political culture that will create stability … There is an inability of the Sunnis, the majority, to understand and accept that there are many minorities, over 30% of the population.”

The former ambassador said that regime-affiliated forces have been harassing minorities on a daily basis. “They enter Christian areas and call on loudspeakers to convert to Islam,” he said. “They check couples to see if they’re married and if not they harass them. There is daily pressure on the Druze, Christians, Alawites and Kurds, and it cannot continue. When they are threatened, they will react.”

Al-Sharaa, Mansour said, “does not look like he’s capable or wants to change it. He wears a suit and tie, but he was in Al Qaida from age 16 … He hinted he’s willing to let Israel keep the Golan Heights and that he wants peace, but on the ground the signs are not encouraging. He speaks nicely, but on the ground he wants to get rid of the Druze — and if he succeeds, he’ll attack the Kurds next.” 

“The problem,” Mansour lamented, “is that the Americans believed his show.” 

Zehavi said that Israel is likely to return to talks but will be better informed about where the al-Sharaa regime is headed after recent events.

“The first question is whether [al-Sharaa] controls his forces so they won’t massacre minorities, whether he really controls Syria,” she said. 

This week also clarified Israel’s red lines for al-Sharaa, she said: “It’s clear why it is important for southern Syria to be demilitarized. You cannot mix Druze and jihadi militias.” 

Members of the House Armed Services Committee sparred on Tuesday at their annual meeting on the National Defense Authorization Act, the massive annual defense and national security policy legislation, over reportedly rogue actions by Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth and Under Secretary Elbridge Colby to pause U.S. aid to Ukraine without White House knowledge or support.

In debate on an amendment by Rep. Seth Moulton (D-MA) that sought to block Hegseth from halting Ukraine aid without Trump’s direct authorization, Democrats argued that Hegseth and Colby were subverting the command structure, while Republicans dismissed the concerns and insisted that Trump was in full control of the administration’s policy. The amendment failed along party lines.

“I’ve not been a fan of President [Donald] Trump’s Ukraine policy up until this week … but I do believe in the chain of command and the role of the commander in chief,” Moulton said. “Regardless of my disagreements with the president, we have one commander in chief. It’s not Bridge Colby or Pete Hegseth.”

“When the Department of Defense freelances with lethal aid, it sends mixed signals to our allies and emboldens our adversaries,” Moulton continued.

Rep. George Whitesides (D-CA), also calling out Colby and Hegseth directly, said, “decisions of this magnitude do not belong to a single cabinet official with a political agenda.”

Rep. Mike Rogers (R-AL), the committee chairman, responded that “the president is in full control of America’s Ukraine policy. Yesterday’s announcement to accelerate weapon deliveries with NATO support made that crystal clear. Therefore, this amendment does nothing more than add red tape.”

Rep. Pat Fallon (R-TX) said the amendment is “nothing more than political theater,” “sticking the congressional nose where it does not belong” and “a waste of time.” He said that it’s up to Trump to fire Hegseth if he’s dissatisfied with him, but that the cabinet exists to delegate responsibilities.

The committee also voted down, on party lines, an amendment by Rep. Joe Courtney (D-CT) that aimed to block the conversion of a Qatari jumbo jet into Air Force One as well as its transfer to Trump’s presidential library, as well as several amendments related to Hegseth’s transmission of Houthi attack plans on the unsecured messaging app Signal.

The committee approved several amendments relating to the Middle East in bipartisan amendment packages. The amendments request briefings and reports from the administration on potential risks to the Al Udeid airbase in Qatar, which was attacked by Iran last month, the potential for defense partnership with the new Syrian government, the U.S. weapons stockpile in Israel and its replenishment needs and potential integration of the U.S. defense industrial base with Israel.

Those amendments were led by Reps. Ronny Jackson (R-TX), Abe Hamadeh (R-AZ), Elise Stefanik (R-NY) and Joe Wilson (R-SC), respectively.

It also approved three amendments relating to antisemitism as part of amendment packages.

One, led by Jackson, would ban any funding for colleges and universities that have had antisemitic demonstrations and “failed to take action to mitigate and prevent” future ones, as defined by the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance’s working definition of antisemitism.

A second, led by Rep. Sarah Elfreth (D-MD), would require a report on antisemitism training and efforts to combat antisemitism inside the Pentagon.

The third, by Rep. Eugene Vindman (D-VA) would request a report on “the threat posed by violent antisemitism as a component of transnational extremist movements,” including the spread of their ideologies and propaganda, the threat they pose to U.S. and the history of violence motivated by antisemitic ideologies.

The bill includes provisions establishing a new program pursuing defense applications of technologies like artificial intelligence, cybersecurity, quantum computing and automation with Israel and other partners; authorizing the U.S. to maintain its weapons stockpile in Israel and its counter-tunnelling cooperation program with Israel through 2028; and expanding an existing U.S.-Israel counter-drone and missile cooperative program to include other types of unmanned systems in addition to airborne threats.

It proposes $35 million for the emerging technology cooperation program, $50 million for anti-tunneling cooperation and $70 million for counter-unmanned systems cooperation, a $15 million boost.

The bill also requests a briefing on the findings that Western components have been used in Iranian attack drones, in spite of sanctions and export restrictions, and ways that the problem can be addressed.

The committee rejected an amendment from Rep. Nancy Mace (R-SC) that would have eliminated Ukraine aid in the bill by a voice vote, and voted 47-10 in favor of an amendment by Rep. Adam Smith (D-WA) that would boost Ukraine aid by $100 million, bringing the total to $400 million.

The Senate Armed Services Committee’s version of the NDAA was also released on Wednesday. That bill includes the same extension of counter-tunneling programs through 2028, but proposes increasing funding to $80 million. It proposes increasing funding for the existing counter-drone and missile program to $75 million, and also extends that program through 2028. It provides $15 million for emerging technology development with Israel.

The Senate bill also instructs the Defense Department to work to provide additional “training, equipment, logistics support, supplies, and services” to Jordan and Lebanon to protect their territorial security. 

Amid debate over withdrawing troops from Syria, the Senate bill would require the Defense Department to certify that withdrawing or reducing U.S. troop presence in Syria would not compromise U.S. priorities. It also instructs the Pentagon to “take appropriate measures to support the defenses” of camps in Syria holding ISIS prisoners and report to Congress on the subject.

As previously reported by Jewish Insider, the bill also pushes to advance Middle East air defense integration.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu hosted senior administration officials, leaders from Jewish and pro-Israel Christian groups and hostage families for a reception last night at Blair House during his third visit to the United States this year.

Netanyahu was introduced by Paula White-Cain, the senior advisor to the White House Faith Office. “Israel, you are never, never alone,” she told the audience, pledging that evangelicals “will always stand with Israel.”

The Israeli prime minister spoke about efforts to free the hostages, both living and deceased, held in Gaza, saying, “We’re committed to getting every last one out … we don’t leave this sacred mission for a second.” He said he’d arrived a few minutes late because he had been speaking with the Israeli delegation engaging in hostage talks in Doha, Qatar, adding that he and President Donald Trump had spoken extensively about those efforts. 

“We are going to succeed, we’ll bring them all home,” Netanyahu said, repeatedly acknowledging hostage family members in the room. “Each family has their own history of suffering, of hope, of prayer. … We do not forget, we will not relent, we’ll get them all home. All of them.”

Netanyahu also said that Iran would have had nuclear weapons within a year if Israel and the U.S. had not struck its facilities. He suggested that the U.S.’ show of force should also put to rest any questions about continued American supremacy in the 21st century, which “bodes well for the future.”

He honored Gen. Erik Kurilla, the outgoing head of U.S. Central Command — a rare public appearance in D.C. for the military leader. Netanyahu said Kurilla is a “commander without peer” whose successor would have “gigantic shoes” to fill, adding that Kurilla’s support has been “truly remarkable.” Netanyahu presented Kurilla with a sculpture made from a piece of an intercepted Iranian missile, featuring a map of Israel, a tree and a dove of peace, which Netanyahu said symbolized “peace through strength.”

Others in the crowded room — forced indoors by a torrential downpour and tornado watch in D.C. — included Education Secretary Linda McMahon, Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick, Labor Secretary Lori Chavez-DeRemer, Small Business Administrator Kelly Loeffler, Under Secretary of Defense Elbridge Colby, U.S. Ambassador to Israel Mike Huckabee, Rep. Randy Fine (R-FL), Justice Department Senior Counsel Leo Terrell and Israeli Ambassador to the U.S. Yechiel Leiter. Brett McGurk, from the Biden administration’s National Security Council, was also in the crowd.

Jewish leaders in attendance included William Daroff, Elliot Brandt, Jonathan Greenblatt, Nathan Diament, Rabbi Moshe Hauer, former Sen. Norm Coleman (R-MN), Halie Soifer and Brian Romick. Christian leaders who attended included pastors Robert Jeffress, Mike Evans and Mario Bramnick. 

The reception was the marquee event between the Israeli leader and officials from American Jewish groups during this visit. During recent visits to the U.S., Netanyahu skipped traditional sit-downs with Jewish leaders. Netanyahu has prioritized engagement with pro-Israel evangelical Christians and political conservatives, sometimes at the expense of more liberal-leaning American Jews.