New diplomats arriving to the United Kingdom are required to present their credentials to the reigning monarch. Mark Regev, the last Israeli envoy to present his credentials in person to Queen Elizabeth II, who died last Thursday at 96 after a 70-year reign and whose funeral is today, felt pressure to make the most of his short time with her.

“I needed to decide what I wanted to talk to her about,” recalled Regev, who headed Israel’s embassy in London from June 2016 through 2020. When his replacement, Tzipi Hotovely assumed the role, she presented her credentials remotely due to the COVID-19 pandemic. 

The Inter-Parliamentary Task Force to Combat Online Antisemitism — an international coalition of lawmakers formed in 2020 including lawmakers from the U.S., Canada, the European Union, Israel, Australia, South Africa and New Zealand — is set to hold its first in-person hearing Friday morning in Washington, featuring testimony from high-ranking officials from Meta, TikTok, Twitter and YouTube.

“This has been a more than two-year effort since when we launched the task force to assess and analyze the problem and the challenges that are presented in trying to stop the infectious spread of online antisemitism,” Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz (D-FL), one of the group’s co-chairs, told Jewish Insider. “We know that there is a huge problem, we know that it leaps out of the virtual world into the real world.”

Despite the strong relationship between the United States and Israel, not many members of Congress have actually visited the Jewish state. Heather Johnston, this week’s guest on  Jewish Insider’s “Limited Liability Podcast,” is working to change that. Johnston, the founder and executive director of the U.S. Israel Education Association (UIEA), an organization that educates members of Congress and helps them foster stronger ties between the two countries, has been bringing senior government officials on tours to Israel since 2011. Additionally, Johnston is the founder and director of JH Israel, a leadership nonprofit; in her work for that group, she teamed up with former Ariel Mayor Ron Nachman to establish the National Leadership Center in Ariel, which brings together students from across Israel to take part in a series of obstacle courses, and connect the lessons they’ve learned to their everyday lives. Johnston sat down with co-hosts Rich Goldberg and Jarrod Bernstein to discuss her organizations and what it’s like bringing lawmakers to Israel.

The U.S. Israel Education Association in a nutshell: “Well, I founded this organization with the intent of being able to educate senior members of Congress and to serve them toward a strong U.S.-Israel collaboration, and to help them to discover their lanes of action and ways they can lead inside that collaboration.

Democrats on the House Foreign Affairs Committee — including several who have been critical of the ongoing Iran nuclear talks and did not support the original 2015 agreement — voted unanimously on Thursday to block a Republican measure to compel the Biden administration to turn over the current draft of the deal to Congress.

The measure had been introduced under special procedures that would have forced the full House to vote on it later this month if the committee had not taken it up at its business meeting this week — in what one Democratic staffer described as an act of procedural “funny business.”

House members of the Abraham Accords Caucus announced plans for a trip to the Abraham Accords countries early next year during an event for civil society leaders from Abraham Accords member nations on Wednesday in recognition of the agreements’ second anniversary.

Reps. Brad Schneider (D-IL), Cathy McMorris Rodgers (R-WA), David Trone (D-MD), Ann Wagner (R-MO), Lisa McClain (R-MI), Kathy Manning (D-NC), Lois Frankel (D-FL), Debbie Wasserman Schultz (D-FL) and Ritchie Torres (D-NY) hosted representatives of Israel-Is, the Mimouna Association, il’Heure Joyeuse, UAE Youth Council, the King Hamad Global Center for Peaceful Coexistence and the American Jewish Committee, as well as a Fulbright Fellow from Bahrain for a roundtable discussion about the first two years of the Accords at the Capitol on Thursday.

During a private meeting on the sidelines of the G20 summit in Japan three years ago, then-President Donald Trump was apparently so eager to impress Vladimir Putin that he unwittingly set himself up for a stinging retort from the Russian president.

Following a tense exchange in which Putin had bragged of acquiring “hypersonic missiles” before the U.S., Trump countered with a characteristically self-centered boast, according to a forthcoming book on Trump’s presidency set to be released next week.

Two years after former President Donald Trump signed the Abraham Accords with the leaders of the United Arab Emirates and Bahrain, a top Biden administration foreign policy official pledged to continue to promote and build on the normalization agreements. 

“I can attest to the fact that it remains a priority, of working on this every single day,” a senior State Department official told Jewish Insider on Wednesday. The official requested anonymity to speak freely. “We feel very strongly that we need to deliver tangible results. It’s very important that, basically, the peace dividend is demonstrated.” The official pointed to growing trade, tourism and defense ties as examples of those results.

An obscure new book calling for the construction of “a parallel Christian society” to replace “the failed secular state” — co-written by the controversial founder of a social media platform for white nationalists — seems to be performing surprisingly well on Amazon.

In spite of its extremism, the self-published tract — whose title, Christian Nationalism: A Biblical Guide for Taking Dominion and Discipling Nations, reads like an ominous call to action — eked its way onto a list of Amazon’s bestselling print books on Tuesday evening, just over a week after its release and perhaps even earlier.