The commentator was let go from CNN following comments made at a United Nations event in 2018
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Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) and Rep. Rashida Tlaib (D-MI) listen to testimony from acting Homeland Security Secretary Kevin McAleenan while he testifies before the House Oversight and Reform Committee on July 18, 2019, in Washington, D.C.
Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) defended former CNN commentator Marc Lamont Hill, who was fired from the network in 2018 over comments he made about Israel, in a new interview with The New Yorker’s David Remnick published on Monday.
“You talk about cancel culture,” the New York congresswoman told Remnick. “But notice that those discussions only go one way. We don’t talk about all the people who were fired. You just kind of talk about, like, right-leaning podcast bros and more conservative figures. But, for example, Marc Lamont Hill was fired [from CNN] for discussing an issue with respect to Palestinians, pretty summarily. There was no discussion about it, no engagement, no thoughtful discourse over it, just pure accusation.”
Remnick noted that Ocasio-Cortez had “criticized that term, ‘cancel culture,’ even dismissed it” in the past.
Lamont Hill, a professor at Temple University, was fired in November 2018 following his comments made at a United Nations event in which he advocated for a “free Palestine from the river to the sea” — widely interpreted to be a call for the destruction of the State of Israel — and said, “we cannot endorse a narrow politics of respectability that shames Palestinians for resisting, for refusing to do nothing in the face of state violence and ethnic cleansing.”
Months later, Lamont Hill again came under fire for comments he made about Zionism at an activist summit, which critics, including Anti-Defamation League CEO Jonathan Greenblatt, condemned at the time.
“You have to make choices about where you want to work,” Lamont Hill said at the Netroots Nation summit in Philadelphia in July 2019. “And if you work for a Zionist organization, you’re going to get Zionist content. And no matter how vigorous you are in the newsroom, there are going to be two, three, four, 17, or maybe one powerful person — not going to suggest a conspiracy — all news outlets have a point of a view. And if your point of view competes with the point of view of the institution, you’re going to have challenges.”
Last February, Lamont Hill signed with the Black News Channel, ahead of its relaunch.
The Association of Gulf Jewish Community’s Rabbi Abadie says many countries now realize they made a ‘historical mistake’ and want to ‘welcome the Jews back'
Members of the Jewish Council of the Emirates celebrate Chanukah, 2021. (Credit: AGJC)
When Rafael Schwartz moved to Kuwait three years ago for work, he was hoping he’d be able to make quick trips to the fledgling Jewish community in the nearby United Arab Emirates every few weeks if he needed Jewish company or kosher food. But when COVID-19 struck two years ago, he found himself unable to travel.
“My intention was to leave once a month and go to Dubai, where there was a small Jewish community, but the pandemic changed all that and I never left Kuwait,” Schwartz, who is originally from the U.K., recently told The Circuit over Zoom.
Once the virus hit, traveling in and out of Kuwait, which sits at the tip of the Persian Gulf, bordering Iraq and Saudi Arabia, became difficult — and sometimes impossible, when the country closed its borders — and Schwartz soon found himself trying to keep up with his Jewish traditions in a country that does not officially recognize Israel and is known for its institutionalized, often pervasive, antisemitism. An engineer by trade, Schwartz told JI that while he has lived and worked in multiple countries with small or nonexistent Jewish residents, he still found himself yearning for Jewish community.
Then, in February 2021, something like a miracle happened. Spurred by the fall 2020 signing of the Abraham Accords, a set of normalization agreements between Israel and four Muslim-majority countries, the Association of Gulf Jewish Communities (AGJC) was born, connecting Jews in six Persian Gulf countries and providing a Jewish lifeline for people like Schwartz.
In that short time, the AGJC has become the backbone of Jewish life in the Gulf, primarily in the UAE and Bahrain — two of the signatories to the Abraham Accords — and has connected the sprinkling of Jews living and working in Kuwait, Oman, Qatar and Saudi Arabia.
The association estimates there are roughly 1,200 Jews residing in the Gulf, not including a further 1,000 serving there as part of the U.S. military. Among its activities, the organization has played a hand in the growing number of Jewish life-cycle events, helping to organize the region’s first bar mitzvah in 16 years and its first Jewish wedding in 52 years. It has also launched a Jewish dating website, a Beth Din of Arabia (Jewish religious court), and is currently in the process of creating an Arabian Kosher Certification Agency, which will set standards for kashrut throughout all six Gulf countries. The AGJC also offers weekly in-person and virtual programming, including a Friday pre-Shabbat Zoom and events around the holidays.
“There was a big Pesach turnout,” said Schwartz, who logged into the Zoom event from Kuwait. “One of the people who also joined was a Jewish lady from Kuwait City who has lived here for 40 years. She was curious about where to find matzah and the rabbi connected us so that we could meet.”
For indigenous Gulf Jews, such as Ebrahim Daoud Nonoo, AGJC’s president and the chairman of the board of trustees of the House of Ten Commandments, the Jewish community in Bahrain, the growing Jewish life is a welcome change.
“It is lovely,” Nonoo, whose family has lived in Manama, Bahrain’s capital, for more than 100 years, told JI. “The community is a very ancient one but until now we had to send our kids abroad to study, and the problem with that is that they don’t come back. So now we have a community that is growing older and older and there are no children.”
“We are a tiny community and the good thing we are seeing now is that we have a workable way to make Jewish life flourish in the country,” he continued. “The AGJC is a fantastic support for all the communities in the Gulf, allowing us to enjoy Jewish life not just from the point of view of kosher food or religious books, but we also have the input of a rabbi and we have used him for bar mitzvahs and weddings.”
Nonoo, who served as a member of Bahrain’s Shura Council (Upper House of Parliament) from 2001 to 2006, added, “We are in a much better place than before because we no longer need to go to Europe or the United States to find Jewish support, we can now get it from Dubai or we have it here in Bahrain.”
The more the Jewish community grows, said Nonoo, the more it will attract Jews from all over the world to live and work comfortably in the Gulf. And, he added, the presence of a Jewish community in countries where they were absent or invisible for so many decades is essential for outreach to local Muslim populations.
“It is really sad to see a Jewish community die, and we are bringing them back to life,” he said, adding that the synagogue often invites local Muslims to participate in services and events to learn about Judaism.
“When I arrived here a year ago, Jewish life in the Gulf was almost unknown,” Rabbi Dr. Elie Abadie, the AGJC’s rabbi, said in an interview with JI. “It was barren land, but I could see that we could create an orchard and connect Jewish communities and individuals in all of the countries.”
Abadie, who was born in Lebanon and speaks fluent Arabic, said that the UAE and Bahrain are now “fully open” and embracing their Jewish communities, and he is hopeful that “Saudi Arabia will follow suit sooner rather than later, then Oman, Qatar, Kuwait — which will probably be the last the one to open, although there are some rumblings that people want to open up to Jews and Israel.”
Abadie said that the AGJC had connected with individual American Jewish soldiers stationed in Kuwait who have lived there for decades and are married to locals, as well as a few descendants of Jews who now live as Muslims.
“It feels really good watching this and, in a way, it makes you feel vindicated that finally Arab countries have come to realize that either persecuting or expelling their Jews was a historical mistake and now they want to correct that and welcome the Jews back,” he said. “I hope and pray that we will see even more events for the Jewish community in these countries and that more Jews will either go to settle there or come out of the closet, so to speak.”
Former Rep. Max Rose (D-NY), who is running to reclaim his redrawn Staten Island congressional seat, criticized both the Biden administration and Congress on Friday for failing to take the actions he sees as necessary to counteract white supremacist domestic terrorism.
Rose, speaking at a virtual event organized by the American Jewish Congress, said that the administration should be more aggressive in pursuing white supremacist groups in the same fashion that the U.S. pursued jihadist terrorist organizations. Specifically, he said, domestic groups with international connections and membership should be labeled as Foreign Terrorist Organizations.
“This administration needs to do more in this space,” Rose, who spent six months as the Defense Department’s COVID advisor last year, said. “Our safety — the safety of Jewish communities — relies on it, and we do not want to act after a horrific incident. We want to act before it.”
Rose painted a picture of a “new strain of global white supremacist terrorism” comparable to the status of jihadist terrorism in the early 1990s, pointing to the international chapters and affiliations of groups founded in the United States like the Proud Boys and Atomwaffen (also known as the National Socialist Order).
“[Administrations] will say — ironically — ‘Well, there are too many members of these organizations in the United States of America… so it’s not going to work,’” he said. “It’s patently absurd. The only reason why they’re not doing this is because they’re afraid… All this requires is the will of this administration.”
Rose argued that the Trump administration did more than the Biden administration had in this regard, having designated the Russian Imperial Movement, a global white supremacist group, as a Foreign Terrorist Organization.
He also believes that Congress should also work to create a separate domestic terrorism statute, such as exists for foreign terrorism, although he acknowledged that there is “not the political will to do that.” And he noted a differentiation between “domestic violence” and “domestic terrorism.”
“In the absence of that, I don’t care how much funding or condemning congressional resolutions you pass in regards to enforcing or protecting us against domestic terrorism, what you’re ultimately doing is — and this is a valiant cause — you’re protecting us against domestic violence,” Rose explained. “But what we are concerned about is terrorism. And that is totally different because the goals of terrorism are completely different.”
He added that Congress should also pass a resolution urging the State Department to label the top global white supremacist organizations as Foreign Terrorist Groups, and said Democrats should pressure the Biden administration to do more on this issue.
The former Army officer, who is running in the newly drawn 11th Congressional District, added that he believes “unspoken racial biases” contribute to the differential treatment of jihadist terrorism and white supremcasist terrorism “despite the fact that both have terrorist ambitions.”
Rose further said that the Jewish community must continue to instill “a sense of proactiveness and a fierce sense of urgency around this issue” in public leaders, including calling out members of both parties.
“I’ve criticized multiple members of my own party,” Rose said. “But we have got to make sure that we are not also letting the Republican Party off the hook when it comes to their deep-seated antisemitism as well. Whether that’s commercials with George Soros, or so many other instances. When it comes to protecting communities from antisemitism, blind party alleigance has no place.”
The ‘original sin’ of the Iran deal was allowing Iran to continue any level of enrichment, the Trump admin's Iran envoy argued last week
Leigh Vogel/Getty Images for Concordia Summit
Brian Hook, former U.S. special representative for Iran and senior advisor to the U.S. secretary of state, speaks onstage during the 2021 Concordia Annual Summit at Sheraton New York on September 21, 2021, in New York City.
Brian Hook, who served as the Trump administration’s Iran envoy, suggested that any deal with Iran must bar the regime from nuclear enrichment of any kind.
“The original sin of the [2015] Iran nuclear deal is that it allowed Iran to enrich,” Hook said at an event on Thursday organized by the National Union for Democracy in Iran, an Iranian-American diaspora organization. “Iran claims it wants peaceful nuclear power. This is the world’s leading state sponsor of terrorism. So when such a country is talking about peaceful nuclear power… they can put to bed any concerns people have by [stopping] enrichment.”
The 2015 agreement required Iran to reduce its uranium stockpile by 98% and keep it at that level until 2031. Tehran was also required to keep the stockpile’s enrichment level at 3.67%. In a breach of the deal, Iran is currently enriching up to 60%.
Hook argued that more than half of the countries with peaceful nuclear power, including the United Arab Emirates, operate nuclear power plants without enriching nuclear material at home.
“It’s a model we really need to insist on in any negotiation,” Hook continued. “Anything less than that is going to set off an arms race.”
But, he added, he has not seen anything to indicate that such a standard is part of the current talks with Iran.
“We should not be defeatist or fatalist about the need to do this,” Hook said. “We shouldn’t negotiate with ourselves and talk ourselves out of it. We should not be resigned to Iran as a nuclear threshold state. It will change the balance of power in the Middle East profoundly.”
“The regime needs to understand that this is a non-negotiable issue,” he added.
Hook argued that reentering the Iran deal would have “a lot of consequences” for U.S. partners in the region, emboldening Iran to further expand its non-nuclear provocations, such as the Houthi proxy attacks on U.S. allies in the Gulf.
The former Trump official said that the Iran deal, from which former President Donald Trump withdrew in 2018, also complicated efforts to convince other Arab nations to agree not to enrich nuclear material themselves.
“Once you accept Iran enriching, it’s near impossible to say to anybody else, ‘You can’t enrich,’” he said. “We need to restore the standard.”
The resolution, which will be voted on by two campus bodies later this month, comes a year after the unanimous passage of a measure adopting the antisemitism definition
In the first challenge to the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance working definition of antisemitism on an American college campus, a student governing body at the University of Texas at Austin is set to vote a resolution condemning the definition and “affirming the rights of advocates for Palestine.”
The goal of the resolution is “to affirm the speech, actions, protests, and campaigns of students advocating for Palestine as a protected right at the University of Texas at Austin,” according to its authors. The UT Senate of College Councils, which took up the resolution at a meeting on Thursday night but did not vote on it, is an academic body with appointed representatives from each college at Texas’ flagship university.
Another UT student governing body, the Graduate Student Assembly, will vote on the resolution later this month following its own heated debate on Wednesday night, when more than a dozen students spoke in opposition to the measure.
Jordan Cope, a UT Austin alum who authored a resolution condemning antisemitism and approving IHRA that was passed unanimously last year, called the new anti-IHRA measure “outrageous in that it seeks to deprive the mainstream Jewish community of its right to define and defend against antisemitism.”
“I’m incredibly proud of the UT Jewish community for the fight it has put up,” Cope told JI. “These moments have tested the community, but its resolve has been most unwavering and admirable.”
The resolution comes on the heels of a wave of anti-Israel sentiment that hit American campuses last spring during an intense round of fighting between Israel and Hamas in Gaza. Universities have considered resolutions in support of the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement for years, and in 2015, UT Austin defeated a student bill that would require the university to divest its endowment from several countries that do business in Israel.
Thursday’s effort is believed to be the first measure at an American university to explicitly condemn and reject the IHRA definition of antisemitism.
In a 2019 executive order, former President Donald Trump adopted the definition when adding antisemitism to a list of types of discrimination prohibited by federal law. Secretary of State Tony Blinken said last year that the Biden administration “enthusiastically embraces” the IHRA definition.
“The International Holocaust Remembrance Association definition of antisemitism is a tool for education and engagement with university administrators, Jewish and non-Jewish students and broader campus communities so that we can all better understand what antisemitism is, how it manifests today, and what steps are needed to firmly address it,” UT’s Hillel director, Maiya Edelson, told Jewish Insider in an email Wednesday.
The proposed UT resolution states that “the IHRA definition of antisemitism has notoriously been harmful to the speech and rights of pro-Palestine advocates on campuses… as it falsely conflates criticisms of the State of Israel as a form of antisemitism.”
The IHRA definition does not call criticism of Israel antisemitism — it states that “criticism of Israel similar to that leveled against any other country cannot be regarded as antisemitic” — but it does state that “denying the Jewish people their right to self-determination, e.g., by claiming that the existence of a State of Israel is a racist endeavor” is an example of antisemitism.
More than 2,000 people have signed a petition authored by “UT Jewish students and allies” urging peers at the university to oppose the measure.
The authors of the resolution, the petition reads, “belittle our lived experiences with antisemitism by claiming these instances were not about Jewish people, but rather that our advocacy to educate our peers on ways to prevent antisemitism was actually a nefarious plot to harm others.”
“Texas Hillel supports UT Jewish students in their efforts to reaffirm the need for a working definition of antisemitism on campus and to educate their peers on how antisemitism impacts them and their experiences on campus and beyond,” said Edelson.
Student governments at more than two dozen universities have adopted the IHRA definition. The University of Texas is among them: UT’s Undergraduate Student Government — the elected undergraduate governing body — unanimously approved a resolution adopting the IHRA definition last March.
Since then, Texas has been the site of several high-profile antisemitic incidents. In August, a member of the Texas State Guard was arrested for purposely setting fire to Austin’s Congregation Beth Israel, causing more than $150,000 in damage. Last month, an armed intruder held a rabbi and three congregants hostage at Colleyville’s Congregation Beth Israel during a Shabbat prayer service.
Recent antisemitic acts at UT include a rock thrown through the window of UT’s Hillel building in October 2020 and an incident in January 2021 in which graffiti was painted on on the house of the Sigma Alpha Mu fraternity that read, “Samys R Jews LOL, Samys’ Js Rape.”
The anti-IHRA resolution did not mention any of these incidents but described antisemitism as “a centuries-old phenomenon which is largely intertwined with white supremacy,” and claimed that acts of antisemitism at UT have also harmed Palestinian students.
“Many anti-Jewish incidents at UT have invoked white supremacist Nazi imagery and language that targets and harms not only Jewish students but also students of other marginalized identities, including Palestinians,” the text said.
Not far from Ben Gurion Airport, in a spacious and airy hangar, sits Israel’s latest collection of highly sophisticated Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs). Large and small, short distance and longer range — even the first Israeli drone, circa 1980, strung from the ceiling — the space has everything one might expect to inspire, create and develop these innovative flying machines. However, among the workstations, spare parts and a plethora of highly trained engineers, there’s one thing conspicuously missing: women.
The space is part of a sprawling campus belonging to Israel Aerospace Industries (IAI), a state-owned company that develops all manner of civilian and military aerial systems it sells to more than 100 countries. It is a leader in the field both in Israel and around the world, however, among its 15,000 engineers only around a third are female.
The shortage of female engineers at IAI mirrors Israel’s broader technology and innovation sector today where women make up roughly a third of employees. And IAI is among the leaders in the industry looking for ways to address this gender imbalance.
“We want to raise the percentage of women in the engineering positions in the high-tech world in the future, not only for the IAI but for all of Israel,” Gili May, IAI’s chief relationship officer, who is responsible for the company’s social responsibility outreach, told Jewish Insider. “I think IAI has an obligation to fight for the right of women to take their place in the field of engineering. Of course, we hope that those graduating from our program will come back to us in the future, but that does not really matter as long as some of the girls from this program end up becoming engineers.”
The company’s Engineers of the Future program, launched six years ago, offers 100 teenage girls each year the chance to take a peek inside the industry, showing them the kind of jobs available and even connecting them with female mentors already working in the field who can guide them through their hectic adolescent years.
“I was always interested in science, and I always wanted to head in that direction but doing this program really helped to develop my dreams, it showed me what was possible and what I might be able to accomplish,” Eliya Harari, who participated in the program in 2017, told JI.
Now 21, Harari is completing a degree in computer science at Bar-Ilan University. She said that while she was interested in computers in high school and was inspired by her mother’s career as an engineer, she did not receive too much encouragement or support from teachers or her peers.
“When you are young, there are so many things that you want to do and it is distracting,” Harari said. “But when I joined the [IAI] program, I met other girls who were like me, and that really made it fun and gave me some support.”
A recent study by Power in Diversity, a joint venture of more than 60 Israeli venture capital firms and more than 170 Israeli startups aimed at promoting diversity and inclusion, found that women account for only 33% of all industry employees. Dror Bin, CEO of Israel’s Innovation Authority, told JI in an interview last month that boosting the number of women in the sector was one of the authority’s main priorities, also in part to address an overall shortage of manpower in the country’s high-tech sphere.
“The manpower shortage in Israel’s high-tech [sector] is chronic,” Maty Zwaig, CEO of Scale-Up Velocity, a branch of Start-Up Nation Central, which seeks to advance Israel’s high-tech industry and provide solutions to its human capital challenges, told JI.
Zwaig said that along the traditional route to careers in Israeli high-tech there were many points where young women could and should be encouraged and engaged much more, which would ultimately increase their participation in the industry.
“The pipeline to the high-tech industry in Israel begins with STEM, then there is the army and then university,” she described, using the acronym for the curriculum focused on science, technology, engineering and math. “We have a clear understanding of points where things go wrong, where we lose girls in the system.”
According to the Council for Higher Education in Israel, while the number of students overall studying STEM has increased over the past decade, still only 29% of students in subjects such as computer sciences, electrical engineering and electronics are female,Haaretz reported last month. The report highlighted that the gender gap begins in junior high school, where boys make up most of the students taking such subjects and continues on through the “pipeline” that Zwaig describes.
The number of girls or young women involved in science and technology dwindles even further when Israelis reach the army, said Zwaig, a former lieutenant colonel in the IDF, where she headed R&D units in the Intelligence Corps, citing her organization’s own research.
Only around 27% of army programmers are women and only 17% of cyber units are female, she said, adding that by the time many young women reach university, degrees focused on technological or science – subjects that almost guarantee a future in engineering or some aspect of high-tech and innovation – feel out of reach.
At IAI, which has been working to advance female engineers in its own ranks, the four-month training program for junior high school girls not only promotes STEM, it also works to develop bonds with those already working in the field.
Dikla Avraham, one of the few female engineers at IAI and a mentor for the program (not Harari’s mentor), said that such outreach was important in introducing “young women to the world of engineering and science,” which they might be reluctant to join because it such a male-dominated industry.
The program, she said, gave young women confidence and the mentoring showed that it is possible to also become wives and mothers, even while working in a highly competitive and very demanding industry.
May, who is also IAI’s spokesman, said that encouraging teenage girls to stick with scientific subjects throughout high school, the army and into university when there were so many life distractions came down to is “branding.”
“Of course, you need the basic capabilities in order to succeed in one of these subjects, but you don’t have to be a rocket scientist in order to matriculate in physics,” he pointed out. “We want to emphasize that studying these subjects is cool and that being an engineer is cool too.”
Scale-Up Velocity’s Zwaig is hopeful too, saying that even beyond the traditional life path laid out for Israelis, “it is never too late for women to go back and learn these topics” and find employment in the high-tech field.
Among the programs run by Scale-Up Velocity, is a retraining course for ultra-Orthodox women who are the main breadwinners in their community and are becoming increasingly present in Israel’s high-tech hub.
“If women want to do something that pays more, then they can find a way in,” Zwaig concluded. “The main problem is that women, at a certain stage, tell themselves this field is not for them, but there are so many positions they can do, it’s just a matter of self-perception.”
The visit will be Pelosi’s first trip to Israel since 2020
Greg Nash-Pool/Getty Images
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) addresses reporters during a press conference to unveil the Joseph H. Rainey Room in the in the U.S. Capitol on February 3, 2022, in Washington, D.C.
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) is expected to travel to Israel later this month, according to official Israeli sources.
A spokesperson for the speaker’s office told Jewish Insider that security protocols barred them from confirming or denying pending international travel. The House has no votes scheduled for the next two weeks — from Feb. 10-27, but is set to hold virtual committee hearings from Feb. 15-17. Members often use recess periods, when they are not expected in Washington, for international travel.
Pelosi last traveled to Israel in January 2020 for a Holocaust remembrance event organized by Yad Vashem, which also included a stop at Auschwitz-Birkenau. During that trip, she met with then-President Reuven Rivlin and now-Defense Minister Benny Gantz.
In recent months, Pelosi has met in Washington with Israeli Foreign Minister Yair Lapid and Rivlin. Discussion topics in those meetings have included Iran nuclear negotiations, the May 2021 Gaza war and funding for Israel’s Iron Dome missile-defense system — which Democrats aim to include in the still-pending 2022 government funding package.
The top House Democrat’s visit comes at what Biden administration officials have described as a critical time for their negotiations to reenter the 2015 Iran nuclear deal, which Israel opposes.
The AIPAC-affiliated American Israel Education Foundation is also set to send first-term members of Congress to Israel this month.
Jewish Insider’s Ruth Marks Eglash contributed reporting from Israel.
Senators who support and oppose the 2015 nuclear deal said that opportunities for an agreement are shrinking
Saul Loeb/Getty Images
Sen. Marco Rubio (R-FL) introduces former US Senator Bill Nelson, nominee to be administrator of NASA, at a Senate Committee on Commerce, Science, and Transportation confirmation hearing on Capitol Hill on April 21, 2021 in Washington, D.C.
Following a classified briefing from the Biden administration on Wednesday morning, members of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee painted a worrisome picture of Iran’s rapidly advancing nuclear program and unclear prospects for how close or achievable a deal might be.
“I think a deal is in sight, but only if you really squint,” Sen. Chris Murphy (D-CT), one of the Senate’s most vocal supporters of the 2015 Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), told Jewish Insider. “There’s significant gaps between the two sides. It’s not [that] they can’t be closed, but every day that goes by and they’re not is not great for the chances of success.”
Sen. Bob Menendez (D-NJ), the chair of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee and one of the upper chamber’s few Democratic JCPOA opponents, said that it is “possible [but] becoming increasingly difficult” to reenter the agreement because “the window is closing and closing rapidly.” He added that “it’s an open question” if the administration believes it is close to a deal with Iran.
Sen. Marco Rubio (R-FL), the Senate Intelligence Committee’s vice chair, who participated in another recent classified session with the Intelligence Committee, said that the briefing “reflects a lot of what you’re hearing the public statements are from the administration, which is that a deal is in sight.”
Rep. Andy Levin (D-MI), who recently participated in a similar briefing for House Foreign Affairs Committee members, told JI that the administration offered “a very precise understanding” of how close they are to a deal, which he said he could not disclose given the classified nature of the briefing.
Senators on both sides of the aisle offered dire warnings about the current status of Iran’s nuclear program.
“The assessment of where the program — where Iran’s nuclear program is right now — is downright scary,” Murphy said, adding that Iran’s current breakout time is around eight weeks and “that time is getting smaller, not bigger, every single day.”
Sen. Ed Markey (D-MA) said that the briefing “laid out how aggressive Iran has been in the reactivation of their uranium enrichment program and how close they are now to actually being able to have enough material for a bomb” and “a sense of the increasing danger that is being caused by the Iran nuclear agreement.”
Murphy declined to share the administration’s timeline for potentially walking away from the talks, which was discussed in the briefing. He added that the administration has been involved in daily discussions with Israeli counterparts.
“And I don’t know how anybody could walk away from that briefing thinking to himself, ‘We’re going to do better by just continuing this escalatory pattern of sanction and sabotage efforts and assassination,’” Murphy said.
Levin said that the administration has a “clear sense of the timeline” for when they should potentially pull out of the talks.
“I think the administration has a very sober understanding of what the situation is, and they’re acting accordingly,” he said. “I think the United States has a fairly clear understanding of where things stand, and we’re very, very concerned about Iran emerging as a country that has nuclear weapons… they’re getting closer.”
Markey said that the briefing gave “a sense of the need to negotiate to roll back the program for months, to be able to give more of a safeguard to a breakout.”
Menendez, who gave an hourlong speech on the Senate floor last week lambasting the JCPOA as insufficient to ward off Iranian nuclear ambitions, said that “if all [the administration is] faced with is a bad deal, they should walk away.”
Rubio argued, “I don’t think a good deal is in sight because the only deal with Iran… appears to be one that would freeze in place the gains they’ve already made, and that would be dangerous for the world.”
Several other Senate Foreign Relations Committee members, including Ranking Member Sen. Jim Risch (R-ID) and Sens. Todd Young (R-IN), Bill Hagerty (R-TN) and Mitt Romney (R-UT), declined to discuss the briefing.