Anti-Bds Labeling Act

Floor Speech

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Mr. DOGGETT. Mr. Speaker, this bill wrongfully seeks to codify Trump's one-state solution.

Strangely, Benjamin Netanyahu and Hamas completely agree on one subject, they want from the river to the sea. The only question is: Who gets to control and subjugates the other one?

I believe that subjugation is not security. Rather, it is a time bomb that is just getting ready to explode causing more grief and misery to all, as we are seeing now with the repeated rocket firing into Israel, the ongoing destruction of Gaza, and the escalating settler violence in the West Bank.

I strongly believe in Israel as a democratic Jewish state. The Hamas attackers were not martyrs, they were murderers and rapists. They can never be a partner for peace, but neither can Netanyahu's cohorts, Ben- Gvir and Smotrich. They cannot be partners for peace. They have refused to be partners for peace, nor do they prioritize the release of the hostages. They continue to endanger Israeli security.

Smotrich, a self-described Fascist, wrongly insists that a hostage deal would be surrender. He is responsible for the largest seizure of land in the West Bank since the 1993 Oslo Accords. His myopic vision for Israel is to annex everything and create a greater Israel that incorporates all the so-called Palestinians.

In a June speech, he said: ``[We] created a separate civilian system'' . . . ``It will be easier to swallow in the international and legal context.''

Ben-Gvir told Israeli settlers: ``We are behind you. Run for the hilltops, settle them.''

He promotes an exclusive Israeli control of the land from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea. The same message that those people protesting Israel are advocating, he is also advocating. He has distributed thousands of assault weapons to Israeli settlements to drive Palestinians from the West Bank.

When dozens of armed Israeli settlers stormed one West Bank village, firing bullets and setting homes on fire, they said that they were ``Ben-Gvir's gang here to kill the Arabs.''

Smotrich and Ben-Gvir should be sanctioned for their incitement of violence. It has led to 1,000 incidents of settlers driving over 1,300 Palestinians from their homes since October 7, with 600 Palestinians killed.

Unfortunately, at the same time that Gaza is being rendered uninhabitable, Netanyahu's refusal to stop settler violence in the West Bank and the expansion of these West Bank settlements are all designed to prevent a Palestinian state from ever coming into being in a viable way.

Like this very bill, their goal is to block creation of any Palestinian state and to refer to it as Judea and Samaria, rather than many of us, who consider ourselves to be strongly for Israel, calling it the occupied territories because it has been occupied since the 1967 war.

The only hope for lasting peace and security is for a Jewish state and a Palestinian state to be side by side and find security guarantees for each. That will be a long, difficult, and challenging process. We have been unable to accomplish it for decades, but it is the only process that we can undertake that will truly lead to the survival and the viability of Israel, so it is not a matter of a temporary peace and another threat to innocent people on either side of the line.

Efforts to conflate the occupied territories with Israel defeat any real hope of a lasting solution. We should reject the approach that Trump, Ben-Gvir, Smotrich, Netanyahu, and Hamas all share, of a river to the sea, a one-state approach, because that is only a recipe for an endless war and untold suffering.

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