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Good Thursday morning. 

In today’s Daily Kickoff, we report on how Israel is responding to wildfires that disrupted the country’s Yom Ha’atzmaut events, and do a deep dive into Middle East envoy Steve Witkoff’s handling of negotiations with Russia, Iran and Hamas and the real estate experience he brings to the negotiating table. We cover a bipartisan call from lawmakers for Wikipedia to address antisemitism and anti-Israel sentiment in its entries, and report on yesterday’s Senate Aging Committee hearing on antisemitism targeting older Americans. Also in today’s Daily Kickoff: Amos Hochstein, Ruby Chen and Israeli President Isaac Herzog.

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As Yom HaZikaron, Israel’s Memorial Day, turned into Yom Ha’atzmaut, the country’s Independence Day, much of the fanfare and revelry was absent after wildfires shut down the country’s main highways and prompted the evacuation of some areas around Jerusalem, stranding many for hours, Jewish Insider Executive Editor Melissa Weiss reports.

The government scrapped plans for its annual Yom Ha’atzmaut ceremony at Mt. Herzl, opting to air a dress rehearsal that was recorded earlier in the week. Across the country, municipalities canceled events. A flyover to express solidarity with the hostages in Gaza, scheduled for Thursday morning, was also canceled.

At least one person was arrested on suspicion of attempting to ignite a fire in a field in the Jerusalem District. The man, from east Jerusalem, was apprehended with a lighter and flammable materials after police received a tip from a witness who had seen him attempting to ignite vegetation. Amid claims of arson terrorism, including from far-right National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir, officials said that the origins of the blazes remained unclear and under investigation.

Hostage families and returned hostages had, prior to the rapidly deteriorating weather conditions, called for the country’s Yom Ha’atzmaut celebrations to be canceled, arguing that celebrations are moot while hostages remain in Gaza for a second Independence Day.

“On Israel’s 76th Independence Day, I was in a tunnel and didn’t think that Israel was celebrating Independence Day while at war and with hostages in captivity,” Yarden Bibas, whose wife and children were killed in captivity, said on social media. “This year, I cannot celebrate my independence because I have brothers and sisters who are still being held hostage and my heart is still there with them.”

The widespread cancellation of festivities — already contentious due to the country’s ongoing war in Gaza — against the backdrop of the destructive wildfires, underscores a fundamental challenge that Israel faces: the failure to address a threat before it spirals out of control. 

During the Los Angeles wildfires that devastated portions of Southern California, Israeli officials cautioned that they would be ill-equipped to handle a similar challenge, citing budgeting issues, a lack of manpower and the drain on resources resulting from the fires that Israeli firefighters battled the previous summer, when Hezbollah rockets ignited portions of the country’s north.

A lack of preparedness was a key factor in the IDF’s failure to protect Israel’s border communities and army outposts on Oct. 7, 2023 — despite warnings that had been ignored. A year and a half later, the failure to prepare for wildfire season raises similar questions about accountability, readiness, and apparently unheeded warnings.

As Israel rings in 77 years, it continues to face challenges key to its survival. How it chooses to approach those challenges — face on, or by kicking the can down the road — will determine its future.

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When the billionaire developer Steve Witkoff was tapped as the Trump administration’s Middle East envoy last November, several of his former associates in real estate applauded the unorthodox appointment to a high-profile role overseeing some of the most sensitive foreign policy issues facing the United States. Even as he had no diplomatic experience, Witkoff, a close friend of President Donald Trump, won praise as a shrewd negotiator and creative dealmaker who could draw on decades of experience navigating New York City’s cutthroat real estate market, Jewish Insider’s Matthew Kassel reports. 

Negotiation risks: But more than three months into his role, Witkoff, whose portfolio has expanded beyond the Middle East, critics are now casting doubt on his qualifications as he assumes a leading role in nuclear negotiations with Iran as well as discussions with Russia to end its war with Ukraine. Among some of Witkoff’s fellow developers who are souring on his early tenure as Trump’s top envoy, there is skepticism his insistent focus on striking a deal above all else, an asset in his former job, may be a liability as he engages in high-stakes talks with bad-faith actors seeking potentially dangerous concessions from the United States.

Read the full story here.

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Senators on the Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee postponed a final vote on advancing the Antisemitism Awareness Act after approving four amendments that could jeopardize GOP support for the bill and leave its future passage once again in question, Jewish Insider’s Marc Rod and Emily Jacobs report.

What happened: Sen. Bill Cassidy (R-LA), the committee’s chair and a major proponent of the legislation, told JI after the meeting that he needed to postpone the vote because Republicans could not return to the committee room quickly enough to vote for it, with just minutes remaining before a two-hour cut-off to the meeting. Democrats refused requests to waive the two-hour limit. “I couldn’t get my people back. And Democrats have limited debate until noon as an obvious tactic to defeat the bill,” Cassidy said. “They don’t care if Jewish students are harassed on college campuses. And so that is a procedural way in which, if you limit the two hours and we can’t get our votes back, then we can’t have the vote.”

Read the full story here.

What they’re saying: Multiple Republicans on the committee said that they will not support moving the Antisemitism Awareness Act forward in its amended form, Jewish Insider’s Marc Rod reports.

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A bipartisan group of 23 members of Congress sent a letter on Thursday to the foundation that oversees Wikipedia, expressing concern about antisemitism and anti-Israel bias on the platform and seeking answers about how the influential online encyclopedia will work to combat prejudice and abuse by editors. The letter, authored by Reps. Debbie Wasserman Schultz (D-FL) and Don Bacon (R-NE), comes after the Anti-Defamation League published a report in March detailing allegations of Wikipedia editors conspiring to impose an anti-Israel bias across the site, Jewish Insider’s Gabby Deutch reports.

What they’re asking for: “It is clear that more needs to be done to ensure Wikipedia remains free of bias, antisemitism and pro-terrorist content,” the signatories wrote to Maryana Isakander, CEO of the Wikimedia Foundation, the San Francisco-based nonprofit that oversees Wikipedia’s operations. The letter asks Wikimedia to explain its oversight processes “to prevent biased or coordinated manipulation of content,” and to identify whether it takes specific measures to prevent antisemitic bias among its editors. The legislators also ask Wikimedia to take steps to prevent foreign interference “on behalf of adversaries of the United States,” such as Hamas and Iran, and to take steps to increase transparency. The edit history of all pages on Wikipedia is technically public, but the labyrinthine process is nearly impossible to understand for those without deep editing experience.

Read the full story here.

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The Senate Aging Committee convened a hearing on Wednesday on the recent surge in domestic antisemitism and its impact on older Americans, Jewish Insider’s Emily Jacobs and Marc Rod report. Sen. Rick Scott (R-FL), the committee’s chairman, said in his opening statement that he organized the hearing to highlight the fear permeating elderly Jewish communities in Florida and nationwide. “Older Jewish Americans overwhelmingly recognize the increasing threat of antisemitism. In fact, according to the American Jewish Committee’s 2024 State of Antisemitism in America report, 96% of Jewish Americans over the age of 65 recognize that antisemitism is a problem in the U.S. today,” Scott said.

Testimonies: Witnesses at the hearing included David Schaecter, president of the Holocaust Survivors Foundation USA (HSF); Rabbi Mark Rosenberg, a Florida law enforcement chaplain and director of Chesed Shel Emes Florida; American Jewish Committee CEO Ted Deutch; and Rebecca Federman, senior director of the security desk for the Community Security Initiative. “Survivors suffer from extreme physical and mental-health challenges due to the long-term effects of starvation, beatings, disease, malnutrition and the murders of our loved ones. I am here to remind everyone that there are still thousands of survivors alive today who are in desperate need, and who cannot be forgotten,” Schaecter said in his introductory remarks, going on to tout his support for the HEAR Act "and other legislation that will enable families to recover their property from those who still want to profit from the Holocaust.”

Read the full story here.

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Harvard University’s long-awaited twin reports on campus antisemitism and Islamophobia, which depicted an academic year marked by strife for Jewish and Muslim students in the wake of the Oct. 7 Hamas attacks and the ensuing war in Gaza, was largely praised by Jewish leaders — both on and off campus — as an “overdue and important step.” But when comparing the two reports side-by-side, some raised concern that there are “major holes” and “asymmetry,” Jewish Insider’s Haley Cohen reports. 

Asymmetry observation: “My general take is that they did a good job in detailing what happened and in making recommendations about how to fix the immediate problems,” Rabbi David Wolpe, a former visiting scholar at Harvard’s Divinity School, told JI of the more than 300-page antisemitism report released on Tuesday, authored by the 15-member task force which was formed in January 2024. Wolpe was a former member of a separate antisemitism advisory group that the elite university formed last year as a response to record-high levels of antisemitism that roiled the campus. But after reading the nearly as lengthy 200-page Islamophobia report, Wolpe noticed a “a real difference in tone” between how the two were written, calling the report on Muslim students “more disparaging and negative about Harvard than the antisemitism report.”

Read the full story here.

Seeing Crimson: The Harvard Crimson’s Jacob Miller argues that the university's task force on antisemitism fails to address deeper moral issues surrounding anti-Israel activism on campus, focusing instead on whether such actions constitute antisemitism.

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Speaking on Wednesday at an event organized by the Vandenberg Coalition, Sen. Jim Banks (R-IN) attempted to lay out a middle path forward for conservative foreign policy balancing elements of the internationalism that has long dominated the party and the more restrictionist sentiments that have been ascendant in the Trump era, Jewish Insider’s Marc Rod reports.

Mideast matters: The first-term Indiana senator argued that the U.S. has critical interests in the Middle East, in countering the threat from Iran and supporting Israel, even as he leaned into elements of President Donald Trump’s foreign policy that are controversial among Republican traditionalists. He framed that policy as a return to a Reaganite peace through strength approach. Banks said that the U.S. “cannot accept another bad deal with Iran,” adding that he does not believe Trump would be interested in returning to a deal similar to the Obama-era Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action.

Read the full story here.

Talking Trump: The New York Times’ David Brooks considers the driving factors behind President Donald Trump’s policy moves since taking office. “I have come to think of the Trump team less as a presidential administration or even as representative of a political party and more as a revolutionary vanguard. History is filled with examples of passionate minorities seizing power over disorganized and passive majorities: the Jacobins during the French Revolution, the Bolsheviks during the Russian Revolution, Mao’s Communist Party in China, Castro’s 26th of July Movement in Cuba. These movements did not always possess superior resources; they possessed superior boldness, decisiveness and clarity of purpose.” [NYTimes]

Witkoff’s Way: In The New York Post, Douglas Murray looks at Middle East envoy Steve Witkoff’s handling of numerous high-profile diplomatic issues. “If Trump wants to stop a lineup of broken foreign-policy promises, he should sideline Witkoff as soon as possible. Or blame him for the failures and move on. There’s no job in government that is good to learn from scratch. But learning foreign affairs against regimes with long memories is the worst role of all. I once asked a great expert on the Middle East what one thing he wished people outside the region understood. It was this. Countries like America think in two-year electoral cycles — four years at the absolute most. But all the time, we have to try to understand and negotiate with groups and governments that think of a decade as the smallest fraction of time. … Trump himself has made great promises and great statements. But his negotiator has been hooked into negotiations. And the Kremlin, Iran, Qatar, Hamas and the rest of them have reckoned that they can string America along very nicely. A few more weeks will become a few more months and then a few more years. And then — no Trump — and behold a weaker American leader who will lead America and the world into a far worse place.” [NYPost]

Jewish Unity: In the Jewish News Syndicate, William Daroff, the CEO of the Conference of Presidents of American Jewish Organizations, reflects on the meaning of Yom Ha’atzmaut during a time of challenge for both Israeli and Diaspora Jewry. “At a time when antisemitism is surging — from elite university campuses to the halls of international institutions — Israel stands as a powerful reminder of Jewish dignity, perseverance and the eternal capacity for renewal. It is not merely a geopolitical entity. It is a civilizational statement: The Jewish people are not relics of the past but builders of the future. Despite immense challenges, the people of Israel rise each morning with resolve — to defend their communities, to mourn their losses and to rebuild with hope. Across the Jewish world, Israel continues to inspire and anchor Jewish life. This Yom Ha’atzmaut, we rededicate ourselves to the enduring bond between American Jewry and the State of Israel — and to the vital partnership between our two nations. Ours is not a transactional relationship. It is familial, forged by shared values of democracy, freedom, innovation and a belief in the sacred worth of every human life.” [JNS]

A Father’s Plea: In Haaretz, Ruby Chen, whose son Itay was killed on Oct. 7 and his body taken to Gaza, makes a plea for unity in an effort to bring the remaining 59 hostages home in the coming weeks. “I would like to ask us all to remember one word this week: unity. The Jewish people have prospered and survived for over 5,000 years on the principle of taking care of one another and not leaving anyone behind. This unity has been missing in Israel for the last few years. We must take a stand and demand the Israeli government prioritize this unity, the backbone of the Jewish faith. Prioritize the release of all the hostages and set a clear goal: That the very last hostage is home before the end of May. Work backwards knowing there is a difficult price to pay for the release of the last hostage, but that this is what is required to allow Israel to begin to heal and rebuild. We need a deal immediately, to release all of the 59 remaining hostages.” [Haaretz]

Conference Concern: In the Baltimore Sun, Rabbi Chai Posner raises concerns about an upcoming Jewish Voice for Peace conference in Baltimore, slated for this weekend. “JVP’s radical agenda is not just confined to inflammatory rhetoric — it is translated into real-world harassment, interruptions and public disturbances, such as violent and illegal demonstrations and snarling rush hour traffic, for which it is currently facing legal action. This extremism is consistent with JVP’s unwavering opposition to the existence of a Jewish state within any part of historic Israel. By distorting Judaism to minimize, or even erase, the Jewish connection to Israel, JVP seeks to undermine one of the most sacred tenets of our faith and identity. Their position rejects the possibility of compromise and coexistence, choosing radical zealotry instead. Despite JVP’s efforts to present itself as a significant voice within the Jewish community, its ideology is far from mainstream.” [BaltimoreSun]

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ELAD MALKA

Israeli President Isaac Herzog held a ceremony at the president’s residence honoring 120 soldiers across the Israeli Defense Forces who were identified for their exemplary service.

“Even on our national holiday – and especially on our national holiday – we cannot celebrate independence with a whole heart when our brothers and sisters are not with us. Israel as a nation longs for them, for their freedom,” Herzog said.

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