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Floor Speech

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Mr. GRAHAM. Mr. President, at a later date, I will respond to my colleague from Maryland about UNRWA.

But just to let people know who are following this today, I am the ranking Republican on the State, Foreign Ops Appropriations Subcommittee, and I work very well with Senator Coons. Senator Van Hollen is on the committee. There will not be one dime for UNRWA in any bill I support, period. And that is not just me; that is Senator Collins. She is the ranking member who worked very well with Senator Patty Murray to get the supplemental moving. Why is that? Because we believe UNRWA is compromised.

I will come and show you the textbooks that UNRWA uses in the Palestinian community to teach the destruction of the Jewish people. I will show you texts from people in charge of UNRWA on the ground celebrating October 7.

The case has been made over here that UNRWA is no longer a credible organization worth American taxpayer dollars to fund--not one penny for UNRWA.

Helping the Palestinian people begins with changing the way they are taught in school. After we defeated the Germans and the Japanese, it took us a long time to deradicalize a population that was taught from birth to be radical. So what I hope will happen over the course of time is that new people in charge of the Palestinian community in the West Bank and Gaza will stop teaching the death of the Jews, trying to give the Palestinian children a more hopeful life. I hope that happens one day soon.

The reason I came to the floor is I have been asked--probably like the Presiding Officer has--

Mr. VAN HOLLEN.

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Mr. GRAHAM. Let me finish. We will come and debate. I have a plane to catch.

Mr. VAN HOLLEN. We really should debate because I don't know any evidence at all for your--

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Mr. GRAHAM. We will come down, and we will have a discussion about everything I said. Let me finish my thought.

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Mr. GRAHAM. Yes. We will have a very vigorous discussion about how wrong you are to empower this group that has been perpetrating all of the wrong things, not the right things.

Now, having said all that--

Mr. VAN HOLLEN. Will the gentleman yield on that?

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Mr. GRAHAM. Let me finish my thought.

Senator Schumer, whom I have worked with on immigration, on a bunch of things--I have tried to be bipartisan when it comes to foreign policy. My colleague, the President of the Senate, has been one of my best friends in trying to find a way forward to get Saudi and Israel to recognize each other. That would be a big blow to Iran.

I have been asked, like everybody in the body: What do you think about Senator Schumer's speech?

I am dumbfounded. I have always respected him. I disagree with him politically. What he said today was earth-shatteringly bad. The majority leader of the U.S. Senate is calling on the people of Israel to overthrow their government.

Whether you like Bibi or not is not the question. The question is, Is it appropriate for anybody in this body telling another country to take their government down? We are going to have an election here. I hope we take the Biden government down through the election process, but that is for us to decide.

This has been very hurtful. I have been on the phone almost all day trying to explain to people what happened, and I don't have a good explanation.

We are trying to get Saudi Arabia to recognize the one and only Jewish State. That is no easy thing for the Crown Prince to do given this environment.

We are trying to get Israel to take a leap of faith here that it doesn't have to be this way all the time, to do some things that would allow the Palestinian community to reorganize.

Seventy-five percent of the Israeli people do not support a two-state solution now. They have been terribly wounded. There is no support by any politician in Israel--Gantz, Lapid, anybody--to unilaterally declare a Palestinian State.

Five Presidents of the United States have said that if there is ever a Palestinian State, it will come through direct negotiations, without conditions, between the parties.

In the Trump administration, Jared Kushner had a plan to establish a Palestinian State that Prime Minister Netanyahu actually agreed with.

The point here is, what should America be doing now? America should be helping Israel without qualification. We should be trying to find a way to ease the suffering of the Palestinian people, and the best way to do that is to destroy Hamas. The reason so many Palestinians have been killed is because Hamas uses them as human shields.

We live in a world that is literally upside down. We are having prominent Democratic Members--people I respect--calling on the Israeli people to take their government down. I can't believe it. I thought it was a joke. I thought somebody was pranking me this morning. This is a departure in a very serious way about how the United States interacts with its allies. I think it has done enormous damage to very delicate negotiations. I hope that Senator Schumer will revisit this.

I don't know who he is trying to please by saying that, but they are not worth pleasing. I don't know who you are trying to please by saying that the Israeli Government needs to cease to exist as it is today and the Israeli people need to find somebody better, in the eyes of Senator Schumer.

I am not asking the Israeli people to elect somebody I like; I am asking them: Whenever you have an election, elect somebody you like. I am not asking the people of Israel to bow to my view of how to settle this matter after the largest loss of Jewish life since the Holocaust. I want to give unconditional, unqualified support to the people of Israel to destroy Hamas.

After World War II, if anybody had suggested to America that we need to take our foot off the gas when it came to destroying the Nazis and the Japanese, you would have been run out of town. What won the Oscar? A film called ``Oppenheimer'' talking about how the atomic bomb was created and used by our country to destroy two cities in Japan to end the war.

You have to understand--and the Presiding Officer does; you have done your homework--you have to understand that October 7, to the Israeli people, is Pearl Harbor and 9/11 on steroids. It is not just a tit-for- tat with Hamas; it was an attempt by Hamas to break the back of the Jewish people, to brutally rape and murder in a fashion they want the world to see.

So the Israeli perspective on what to do is similar to what we thought we should do after World War II: total, complete victory; everybody mobilize and do what you have to do to end the war, to take the Nazis down; and the Imperial Japanese Army--destroy it unequivocally.

Millions of people were killed in World War II. War is literally hell. But when you have been attacked the way we were on Pearl Harbor and 9/11, you have to respond forcefully. You have to make sure it never happens again. And the only way Israel can do this is to destroy the military capability of Hamas.

So why did this happen? I believe that the great Satan, which is Iran, wanted this to happen to prevent a reconciliation between Saudi Arabia and the State of Israel, ending the Arab-Israeli conflict. A nightmare for the Ayatollah is that the Arabs and the Jews make peace and economically integrate, leaving them behind.

Israel has signed agreements with six of their Arab neighbors under Bibi's leadership.

When I go, I meet with Lapid, I meet with Gantz, and I meet with Bibi. I meet with everybody because it is not about Bibi; it is not about Gantz; it is about our relationship. If it is Gantz or Lapid next time, I will meet with them. I know them all. Mr. Lapid and I are very good friends. I have known Bibi for 25 years. It is about, what should we do to help our friends in Israel?

Nothing would please me more than to find a way to end this war sooner rather than later and get back on track for their normalization process, but we cannot expect Israel to stop now. It is like putting 80 percent of a fire out--the 20 percent is going to start it all over again.

We are down to six brigades, organized military units that Hamas has to wreak havoc on the Palestinian people and the State of Israel. It is nonnegotiable: Hamas will be destroyed militarily.

I am hoping, in the middle of all this chaos, we can still find a way for Saudi Arabia and Israel to normalize. That would be the ultimate death blow, I think, to the Iranian ambitions in the region. Part of that deal, as the Presiding Officer knows, would be the Palestinians would have a better life eventually; that Saudi Arabia and UAE would invest heavily into Gaza and the West Bank; new, younger, less corrupt people running the place, trying to find a pathway forward where the Palestinians and Israel can coexist in a way that is beneficial for all.

That can never happen until Hamas is destroyed. If Hamas is still in place, they will kill everybody who wants to make peace with Israel. They did it before. They have no desire, as Senator Van Hollen said, of recognizing the Jewish State.

But I will close where I began. What Senator Schumer said on the floor of the Senate is taking the country and the Senate down the wrong road. This is not something any of us should be saying--calling on a government to be toppled, basically, by its own people.

At the end of the day, Bibi is not the problem. The problem is radical Islam wanting to kill every Jew they can find. The problem is Iran, which has its mission to destroy the Jewish State and to purify Islam.

I could spend hours talking about the Biden-Obama policy of empowering the Ayatollah, but that is not for today.

So what I would say to what Senator Schumer said today--my response to Senator Schumer: I am disappointed. You have done a lot of damage, my friend, and you need to fix this.

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