Impact of President on Peace Process

Floor Speech

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Mr. GREEN of Texas. Mr. Speaker, and still I rise.

I rise today, Mr. Speaker, to first announce two pieces of legislation. Thereafter, I will go into my message, which will be the impact of President Trump's engagement in the peace process between Israel and the Palestinians.

First, let's look at the two resolutions. The first resolution is our Black History Month resolution.

I am proud to say that this resolution will be filed tomorrow, and this is the original Black History Month resolution for 2025. We have many persons who have signed up to cosponsor, but it is still not too late for additional persons to sign up.

The theme is African Americans and labor. It deals with African Americans and labor in America. It will trace the history of labor from enslavement through current times.

The second resolution is one that I am very proud to present. This is a resolution for slavery remembrance month. As you know, August 1619 was the month and year that enslaved persons from Africa were introduced into the Colonies. Since that time, we have had an adverse impact on African Americans in the United States of America.

We need to retrace some of the history of what actually happened, but not just on one day. We have a slavery remembrance day that we proposed. Now, we are proposing a slavery remembrance month. There is still time to sign on to this resolution, as well.

We will file it tomorrow, so if Members desire to be original cosponsors of either of these two, they have until the close of business tomorrow or until we have our last opportunity to file tomorrow any type of legislation. I suggest by noon tomorrow for Members who want to file.

Now, let me get to my message: the impact of the President on the peace process. I say again: the impact of the President on the peace process.

The President, as it relates to this process, is not an honest broker. He is not an honest broker because an honest broker has to be impartial. The President has made it perspicuously clear that he is not impartial.

He has already sided with Israel, and the President has every right to do that, to side with one side as opposed to another, but let's be clear about the role that he is playing. He is not playing the role of an honest broker.

The President is not playing the role of a negotiator because the President does not seek to get input from the Palestinians. The President will get input from one side, that would be the Israelis, and he will make his decisions with the Israelis.

It appears that there will be an all-or-nothing offer made. The President has gone so far as to say that certain things must be done, or certain conditions will manifest themselves.

The President doesn't want peace. It appears to me that the President wants to stop the killing, and there is a difference between stopping the killing and peace.

Peace requires more than the absence of tension, the absence of violence, the absence of killing. Peace requires justice. It requires justice. Stopping killing is not going to end the process because you won't have justice for all parties involved, and there must be justice for all parties involved if we are to have genuine peace between Palestinians and Israelis.

The President appears to currently be engaging in a process of ethnic cleansing. This is where his thoughts are. He seems to believe that we can take Gaza from the Palestinians. He seems to believe that the Gazans can be relocated. Just place them someplace else. Give them nice homes in some other place. Let us, meaning the United States or Israel, have Gaza.

Mr. Speaker, that won't happen because the Palestinians have made it very clear that they don't intend to leave their homeland, but there is more to it than simply replacing them, putting them someplace else. We have to think about what the President is saying.

The President is making it clear that we are an existential threat to the creation of a Palestinian state because if you remove the Palestinians from the land that was once Palestine, they won't have a Palestinian state there, then we, indeed, are an existential threat to Palestine. In fact, if the language that the President is using as it relates to the Palestinians, if it were used as it relates to the Israelis, the President would have some serious problems.

You cannot say with any degree of credibility that we ought to remove the Israelis from Israel, which is now in land that was once labeled ``Palestine.'' You can't say that. If you say ``from the river to the sea,'' you are saying that you are proclaiming an existential threat to exist as it relates to the State of Israel, the mere statement, whereas Israel's Knesset has already, by way of resolution, indicated that there will not be a Palestinian state in the land of what we now call Gaza, in the land of what we now call the West Bank, that there won't be a Palestinian state. If there is not going to be a Palestinian state, then Israel is declaring that it is an existential threat to the creation of a Palestinian state.

The President doesn't want a Palestinian state. He is with the Israelis. The President wants Gaza. He wants the West Bank to be controlled and possibly become a part of Israel. This is not the way to achieve justice.

Remember, you cannot have peace without having justice. You have heard the phrase, ``No justice, no peace.'' Well, there has to be justice for us to have peace, and the President is willing to sacrifice the Palestinians. He seems to be willing to sacrifice them because he has indicated as much, that if a certain thing doesn't happen, if hostages aren't returned by a certain time that he has chosen, that all hell will break loose.

Well, that seems to indicate that he is willing to see an infiltration unlike we have not seen so far, something more than we have seen so far because, quite frankly, Gaza has been decimated. The roads have been destroyed. The bridges have been destroyed. The schools have been destroyed. The hospitals have been destroyed. The homes have been destroyed. People have been killed. Until we decide that we want peace, we are not going to have the kind of place that people should have as a homeland for Palestinians.

There has to be peace. To have peace, there must be justice. To have justice, we have to at least decide that there are certain things that we are willing to do. Justice is going to require equal respect for the lives of all babies--equal respect for the lives of all babies.

I will tell you that I, just as early as this morning, had tears well in my eyes when there was a story about the Israeli babies who were returned after they had been held hostage by Hamas.

Hamas did a dastardly thing in taking babies as hostage. Israel has done nothing that would warrant Hamas to take babies as hostages. Then, for those babies to be returned in caskets, it is heartbreaking.

Those parents had to suffer immeasurable heartache as a result of what happened to their children. Those babies were young babies, infants.

Hamas is not--is not--an organization that seeks peace. If you are going to do these kinds of things, you are not seeking peace because what you did was not just. It was an injustice to take those babies.

It was an injustice to keep those babies, and now you are returning them lifeless to their parents, and they have to suffer for the rest of their lives knowing what happened to their babies.

You can't stop there. All babies have to be treated equally. The lives of all babies have to be treated equally. You cannot say that it is shameful and sinful for Hamas to do what they did to those Israeli babies and not condemn what Israel has done to the Palestinian babies.

Babies have been bombed; body parts scattered all over. One parent just had the baby born and was about to register the baby. The parents come back, and the baby is no longer alive. All babies have to be treated equally. Their lives have to be respected in the same way, regardless as to where they are, where they are from, and what their ethnicity is. We cannot continue to believe that some babies have lives that are more valuable than others.

Nothing Israel has done merits what Hamas did to the babies that they took hostage or other babies that may have been killed as well. Nothing that the Palestinians have done merits the killing of--nothing that the Israelis have done merits the killing of Palestinian babies to the extent that they have been killed.

Palestinian babies, Palestinians cannot have done anything that would merit Israelis killing their babies to the same extent that they have. Israelis have to understand that Palestinian babies have lives that have to be respected to the same extent as they want Israeli babies' lives to be respected. By the same token, Palestinians have to respect Israeli babies' lives to the same extent that they want Palestinian lives to be respected. All babies have to be respected equally. All babies.

Today, I want to say to the Israelis and the Palestinians: There will be no peace until you respect the babies equally. But you have got to do more than this and we have to do more because we have to rebuild Palestine.

I say ``we.'' I believe the United States has to make a contribution, just as we contributed to the rebuilding of Japan after we dropped bombs on Japan, just as we have contributed to the rebuilding of other places when we have been involved in the destruction.

We helped to destroy Palestine. Yes, I know that what Hamas did was dastardly. I understand that. It shouldn't have been done, but that did not give Israel the right to kill babies and innocent people to the extent that Israel has killed these babies and innocent people. We have to respect their lives.

Now we have to respect their property. There has to be a home for Palestinians, and that home has to have some help from the United States because we sent our weaponry over there. We have to pay for weapons that were used to bomb the Palestinians. The bombs, many of them, were actually munitions that came from us.

We have a duty to respect their lives and their property, and we have a duty to help to rebuild. This is something that we can't push off on others, and we can't just decide, Mr. President, that the Palestinians should not have a state and that we can just simply take their land. This land belongs to them. It was theirs in 1948.

The majority of the people in Palestine in 1948 were not people who were there to have a State of Israel. People came into the place called Palestine and helped to build and construct the State of Israel. I have said that a two-state solution is a solution, but you can't have a two- state solution without respecting the babies that are Palestinian and the land that was once Palestine.

We have got to give Palestinians a homeland, more specifically a state. Palestinians have the right to live there with sovereignty, not to be told what to do by others, not to have the flow of their electricity controlled by others, not to have others determine whether they can have ingress and egress. They have got to have a state.

That means there has to be some negotiation. It can't just be dictation. The President wants to dictate what the policies will be and expect everybody to live happily thereafter. If we want true peace, then, Mr. President, you have got to cease to be a dictator and become a negotiator. You have to talk to the Palestinians and get their opinions about what they want, and you have got to decide that you cannot side with one side and conclude that that is going to give you the necessary strength to bring peace about.

You may have calm, but you won't have peace, and you won't have the kind of peace that will be lasting if you just decide you are going to stop the killing. Stopping killing does not bring about peace. It just brings about an absence of a certain amount of tension.

Dr. King reminded us that if you want peace, you have to have more than the absence of tension. You have got to have the presence of justice. The presence of justice must be accorded not only to the Israelis, they deserve justice. But to the Palestinians, they also deserve justice. Justice for both sides, peace for both sides. One country, one place; Palestinians on one side of that place, the Israelis on the other side. Two people, two homes, two sovereignties living side by side in peace.

Finally, on this whole question, Dr. King also reminded us that we have to learn to live together as brothers--this is how he put it--or we will perish together as fools. Living together as brothers--and I would add and sisters--is an imperative. We no longer have, as Dr. King put it, a choice between violence or nonviolence. He said: We have a choice between nonviolence or nonexistence, and we are marching toward nonexistence.

As we decide who is going to have certain pieces of land and how land is going to be divided, many countries who are viewing this are concluding that to protect themselves, they are going to have to have the ultimate weapon. Just as North Korea made that decision, others are making that decision. I don't support any of those decisions. I don't support any nuclear weapons. I would like to see the absence of nuclear weapons across the globe, but I also understand that they exist. I understand that others are going to want them to protect themselves from us, from the United States, from Israel. They are going to want them to protect themselves from other countries that have them.

Friends, it is no longer the choice between nonviolence or violence. The choice is going to be between nonviolence or nonexistence, and we have to learn to live together as brothers and sisters or we will perish together as fools. Those were the words of Dr. Martin Luther King.

I stand for peace, peace between Israelis and Palestinians. I stand for loving all babies the same. The lives of all babies should be treated equally. Hamas shouldn't hide behind babies, but that doesn't give you the right to just kill babies indiscriminately. Thousands of babies have been killed. You can't do that. That is antithetical to having a just society where peace presides.

I present to you my belief that if we are to have true peace, there has to be justice; and if there is to be justice, all babies have to be treated equally. All babies have to be respected equally. All babies' lives are equally as important. It doesn't matter where they are or who they are.

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