Does America Stand with Israel or Not?

            Senator Ted Cruz (R-Texas) and several other Senators traveled to Israel recently because they wanted to see for themselves what was occurring between Israel and Hamas, the Palestinian militant group. Cruz later joined “The Daily Signal Podcast” to discuss what he saw. One thing that he learned is that Hamas located its headquarters in the basement of a hospital and used innocent people as human shields.

It’s their own terrorists killing their own people, because they wanted to kill Israeli civilians, but they just weren’t very good at it, and shot their own people instead….

The press utterly ignores that…. The other civilians that are injured are predominantly the result of a decision that Hamas made to use Palestinians as human shields. So, they deliberately fire their weapons, fire their rockets from heavily populated civilian areas into heavily populated civilian areas.

It’s actually a double war crime. Shooting in a civilian area is a war crime, but shooting from civilian areas is also a war crime….

The Hamas headquarters was in the basement of a hospital in Gaza….

            Why would Hamas locate their headquarters in a Palestinian hospital? They took a calculated risk because it is a win-win situation for them. “Either the [Israeli Defense Forces] will refrain from attacking their headquarters, in which case, that’s great. That’s what they want. Or in the alternative, if the IDF does attack the headquarters, it will kill a significant number of Palestinians, and they’re literally using Palestinian women and newborn babies.”

            Cruz explained in the interview with Rachel del Guidice that he took three days to travel to Israel over the Memorial Day weekend. This was his fifth trip to Israel since he was elected to the Senate. He “went on this trip in particular because of the military conflict they just had, the rocket attacks from Hamas.”

We saw over 4,000 rockets fired from Hamas terrorists into Israel. And I wanted to go to really express America’s strong and unyielding support for the state of Israel. I also wanted to go in particular because the current Democratic administration, the Biden administration, I think, is in very real ways responsible for this Hamas rocket attack.

Pause for a second and just step back. Nine months ago, we were in a very different world. We had peace flowering in the Middle East. We had the Abraham Accords, historic peace agreements signed between Israel and multiple Arab nations. First peace agreement in the Middle East in decades. I was there at the White House the day the Abraham Accords were signed. Fast-forward nine months later, and we’ve got war in the Middle East.

And what changed? And what changed was several things. All of which the Biden administration did. Historically, Democrats and too many Republicans believe the right approach to the Middle East was deliberate and strategic ambiguity, was blurring the lines of, sometimes we support Israel; sometimes we support the Palestinians. We like both. We don’t know. I think that is an absolutely failed approach.

I think it has been demonstrated over and over again. It doesn’t produce peace. It produces endless conflict and warfare. And what I had been urging for the nine years I’ve been in the Senate is clarity, unmistakable clarity to say, “We stand with Israel, period, full stop, the end.” And that clarity produces peace. In the Trump administration, there were two decisions that set the foundation for the Abraham Accords.

No. 1, moving our embassy in Israel to Jerusalem. No. 2, pulling out of the Iran nuclear deal. Both decisions were hotly contested within the administration. In both instances, the State Department and Defense Department opposed making those decisions. And in both instances, I made the case directly and repeatedly to President [Donald] Trump in the Oval Office, and he agreed with me in both times and overruled his own State Department, his own Defense Department.

Those two decisions produced, I believe, the Abraham Accords. On the day of the signing of the Abraham Accords, I spoke with foreign ministers and ambassadors from UAE and Bahrain, both of whom said almost the exact same thing.

They both said a variant of, “We now understand that the United States stands unequivocally with Israel. We want to be friends with America. Therefore, we will be friends with Israel.” So what did Biden do? He came in, and he immediately returned to that deliberate ambiguity. He immediately began undermining Israel.

Within the first few weeks of his administration, he sent over $100 million to the Palestinian Authority, in violation of the Taylor Force Act that prohibits funding organizations that fund terrorists. The Palestinian Authority is in bed with Hamas, and paying terrorists, the families of terrorists for murdering Americans and Israelis.

The Biden administration set out their top foreign policy objective is reentering the Iran nuclear deal, and sending billions of dollars to the Ayatollah Khamenei. That combination emboldened Hamas, because they knew when they fired rockets that the Biden administration and the press would side with them, and blame Israel for defending itself. And so, I wanted to go and express to [Israeli] Prime Minister [Benjamin] Netanyahu, to the leadership of the government, to the Israeli people, that even if the current administration in Washington is not supporting you the way they should, that the American people stand with you.

                Cruz continued the interview by talking about the personal stories behind the violence in Israel. A Hamas rocket hit the home of an elderly woman. She managed to get out of the home, but her caretaker did not and was killed. The Iron Dome stopped 90% of the rockets, but this home was hit by one of the 10% of the rockets that were not stopped. The rocket exploded the roof and demolished most of the home.

            Cruz spoke about the resolution being sponsored by Sen. Bernie Sanders and Reps. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Rashida Tlaib. They are trying to stop U.S. arms sales to Israel. Cruz considers “the rise of the angry anti-Israel left” as “one of the most dangers things we’ve seen in today’s Democratic Party.” People like Sanders and the so-called “Squad” in the House of Representatives were once “relegated to the fringes.” However, today they are “leading Democratic members of Congress who are virulently antisemitic” and have “gone mainstream.”

            It is not difficult to see that such members of Congress are a danger to our nation as well as a danger to Israel. The United States is walking an extremely thin line by not being firm in its support of Israel. History has proven that every nation that opposes Israel ends up losing big. Will America stand with Israel or not? That is the big question!