Israel

Floor Speech

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Mr. LANKFORD. Madam President, earlier this year, I was with a bipartisan delegation. I traveled around the Abraham Accords countries. We were in Morocco, we were in Bahrain, we were in the UAE, and we were in Israel, talking about future advancement for peace. There was great optimism and engagement. There was economic activity, tourist activity. There was a lot of interaction with development on healthcare, on cyber protections, and cooperation together for energy and water.

Literally, there were families meeting each other, some of them for the first time in generations, to be able to have a conversation about a future in the Middle East based around peace. It was based off of an agreement that started on September 15, 2020, with the signing of the Abraham Accords, and it has continued to advance.

In fact, just as recently as a month ago, there was outspoken public support from Saudi Arabia and from Israel about advancing a normalization agreement between Saudi Arabia and Israel--what people thought would be unheard of just a few years ago.

There was an advance of conversation about how we could increase peace. And then, on the 7th of October, 1 day after the 50th anniversary of the start of the Yom Kippur War, a group of terrorists from Gaza penetrated the wall separating Gaza and Israel, and they slaughtered 1,400 Israelis, brutally, many in their bed--children, elderly, disabled--it didn't matter. Whether they were college students at a concert, whether they were people traveling down a highway, or whether it was children, literally, on their playgrounds, they murdered them where they stood. And then they took hostages and retreated back into Gaza, for some reason assuming that Israel and the world would just not notice their barbarism.

Well, the world certainly noticed, and, as Americans, we obviously all lived in the shock and horror of the event with the Israelis and the rest of the world. Thirty-one Americans died in that attack, and 13 are missing, presumed to be hostages inside Gaza. Many of those individuals were killed simply because they were Jewish--period.

The pain of that has struck all of us over the course of the past several weeks now, and we have watched Israel rightly respond to the acts of terrorism, as we have as a nation, as well, when we were attacked on 9/11. We mobilized our forces. We identified al-Qaida, and we identified those who were harboring al-Qaida in Afghanistan and the Taliban and determined that type of attack would not happen again. And we, as a nation, determined we were not only going to stop the capabilities of al-Qaida to be able to attack us, but we were going to preemptively respond if we were attacked again. Our first goal, though, was to be able to prevent that kind of attack from coming at us again.

Israel is entirely right when they have been attacked by a terrorist organization to be able to say: That organization cannot do that to our Nation again and to our people again.

The United States has responded by sending two carrier strike groups to the Mediterranean, to literally park off the coast of Israel, to give a clear signal to Lebanon, to Iran: Do not engage in this.

We understand fully, as most of the world does, that Hamas is funded by Iran. And while many in the Muslim world, in the Arab countries continue to be able to speak out on behalf of Palestinians, they also understand that 70 percent of the funding for Hamas comes from Iran.

The weapons systems that Hamas has right now were fully funded by Iran, and the weapons systems in Lebanon, by Hezbollah, where they have been attacking Israel from the north, were fully funded and created and, many times, shipped directly from Iran.

Iran is the destabilizing force in this entire region, and we, as Americans, have made very, very clear that we understand that Iran is the one who funded this, who supplied the weapons systems, who supplied the training and the munitions. Iran is the one who continues to destabilize that region.

As Americans, we clearly speak out for the protection of all civilians in every nation around the world and in every conflict in the world, but we were also very clear that Israel did not initiate this battle in the last 2 weeks. Hamas did, and they pulled their hostages back into Gaza, as they continue to be able to hide them among the civilian population. It is a painful peace for us to be able to see internationally. For us in Oklahoma, we are like many others that are in this Chamber as well. It personally affects many families in Oklahoma. Israel is a nation so small that there is no one that has not experienced the pain of a friend or relative, someone whom they work with, they know people who have been directly attacked. But in my State of Oklahoma, we are in the same condition. Many people that I interact with talk frequently about family, friends that live in Israel or that travel back and forth.

Quite frankly, last weekend, I worshipped with a Jewish congregation on Shabbat and heard the dialogue from many people about their travels back and forth and family and friends and what they personally experienced as a family based on this terrorist attack. Quite frankly, my State of Oklahoma has a very close bond with Israel, as the United States has a very close bond, close enough that we had many Oklahomans that were currently in Israel during that time of the attacks, and our office actively worked to be able to get many of those out, since many flights have been canceled out of Tel Aviv.

So we have actively worked to be able to get many of those individuals back home to Oklahoma, and they have quite a story to tell, as you would assume.

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