Israel Security Assistance Support Act
Floor Speech
BREAK IN TRANSCRIPT
Mr. SHERMAN. Mr. Speaker, my pro-Israel efforts began long before my 28 years on the Foreign Affairs Committee, and I believe that my pro- Israel record is as long and as strong as any Member of this House.
I rise to oppose this pseudo pro-Israel bill. It purports to deal with this issue of 2,000-pound bombs. As the ranking member has pointed out, suspensions occurred also under Reagan and Ford. More significantly, this is just a communicative act. It has no strategic significance.
Israel already has such a large stockpile of 2,000-pound bombs and similar weapons that the administration is going to be providing many thousands of JDAM kits to turn those dumb bombs into smart bombs.
The chair is working with several of us on a much better response to this suspension, and I look forward to that working its way through the committee. No one should be tempted to vote for this bill. There will be a better bill.
This bill does nothing to help Israel strategically, but it attacks Israel at its two weakest points. The first is bipartisan support. Israel has one friend in the world. It cannot afford to have only one- half of one friend.
We saw that bipartisan support when 85 percent of Democrats and 85 percent of Republicans voted to provide Israel with $14 billion of extraordinary aid, but this resolution has poison pills, including condemning Biden by name, in a clear effort to get as little Democratic support as possible.
Second, this bill attacks Israel's international image. Israel, in fact, meets American international standards for minimizing civilian casualties, but what this bill does is it exempts Israel from the Leahy and similar laws, in effect declaring from this Congress to the world that Israel can't meet the standard.
Israel is doing at least as good a job as any military in the history of urban warfare. The report from the Biden administration wasn't as clear as it should be on that but reached the right conclusion.
Congress should not step forward and exempt Israel from a test that Israel clearly meets. That is poison on the international stage.
BREAK IN TRANSCRIPT
Source