Israel

Floor Speech

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Mr. THOMPSON of Pennsylvania. I thank my good friend from Illinois for yielding and thank him for coordinating this time tonight when we truly do talk about our most important ally, a friend that we have and a good democratic friend in a very dangerous part of the world in the Jewish State of Israel.

It was a privilege to be able to visit the country of Israel and to go with other colleagues, to go there with an open mind and to be able to sit down and to visit and talk face to face with the President of Israel, with the Prime Minister of Israel, to meet with the military, to go into the West Bank and sit down with the Prime Minister of the Palestinian Authority and to look at the defense issues that Israel lives with each day and has since the beginning of that democratic nation; to visit all the borders on all sides of Israel and to look out into, whether it was Jordan or Syria or Lebanon, places where, at one time or different times during their short history where missiles rained from and mortars came down on men, women and children in that State of Israel. It's a country that is very familiar and lives every day where defense is on their mind, and a strong defense.

In particular, it was striking to me when we were in the southern part of Israel, and we were overlooking the Gaza Strip. All the borders are being relatively peaceful right now, but at the Gaza Strip and just outside of this small farming community of Sderot where we looked and the leaders of Israel chose, in a goodwill, good-faith offer of peace, gave up what I thought looked like a pretty good piece of real estate that sat along the Mediterranean Sea, and that was the Gaza Strip.

They moved the citizens of Israel out of there, and relocated them into other parts of Israel in the hopes of obtaining a lasting peace and long peace with the Palestinians; and in exchange, what they received is about 3,000 missiles and mortars that came raining down on them.

I think the most striking conversation I had--and I know my good friend was there--was with a young mom of a 9-year-old, and she had grown up in that farming community. Her grandparents lived there. Her parents lived there. She lived her entire life there, and she lived through that time when those missiles rained. She talked about how--and we saw as we were driving in to Sderot bus stations that looked a little unusual but that was because they were designed also as bomb shelters. We saw the playground, which had a great piece of equipment sitting in it. My kids are grown now, but my boys would have loved it. It looked like a giant caterpillar and kind of weaved around. But to look closer, it actually was a bomb shelter for children that they would run to whenever a missile was launched and would soon be landing.

Now from the time the siren sounds in Israel, they have about 20 seconds until that missile lands and explodes. That young mom I think put it so striking for me. Her words I hear over and over again in my mind, Imagine yourself, you are a parent, and you are driving down the road. That siren sounds, and you've got 20 seconds to get to safety. You've got two children. They're both strapped in car seats in the back seat. Which one do you pick?

I think we take for granted our safety and security in this country. We certainly have had our attacks here. We've been relatively safe since 2001 because of the measures that were taken by President Bush and by the Congress at that point, and we have not experienced another attack on our soil in those 8 years. But we certainly have issues that I look forward to talking about further tonight in terms of future threats to not just our country but to the country of Israel. And I thank my good friend for yielding.

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Mr. THOMPSON of Pennsylvania. Will the gentleman yield for a question? Actually, both of my colleagues.

When we were there, we had an opportunity to visit a number of the settlements, and I have been distressed that our President, President Obama, has been almost dictating that Israel give up part of its sovereign nation, these settlements. We were there. We walked them. We saw the strategic location of them.

I wanted to get your impressions of what your thoughts were. Should Israel give in to that direction and give up its sovereign land, those settlements that it has today?

Mr. FLEMING. If the gentleman will yield back, I will just simply say that my first impression beyond the fact that Israel is such a lovely country--I mean, just gorgeous, right in the middle of the desert next to the Mediterranean Sea. And of course we were able to see the Dead Sea and many sites that are holy to us as Christians. But just how small that country is, like a postage stamp, as narrow as 5 miles at its waist. And we saw a patchwork of villages, one being Palestinian and one being Jewish, all throughout the country.

And even though, often cases there were checkpoints and there were fences between them, you couldn't really see that. All you could see looking over is you would see evidence of a Palestinian village and you would see evidence of a Jewish village all sitting there peacefully. It's almost difficult to believe how much war and how much violence has existed there for so long.

And of course with that we visited Sderot, which is, I guess, a flash point where there have been rockets hurled and that sort of thing.

So I think that was really what I found to be very impressive.

Mr. THOMPSON of Pennsylvania. If the gentleman will yield.

Mr. FLEMING. Yes, sir.

Mr. THOMPSON of Pennsylvania. It struck me that many of those settlements are in strategic locations. They're high ground from which terrorists, the Palestinians, lobbed missiles and rockets onto the men, women, and children of Israel. And those were taken as a part of the war in 1948, and frankly, they're extremely important areas to hold on to.

I kind of think of the--as I think about our President, President Obama, dictating onto the Israeli nation that they should give up the space, it's a little bit like somebody coming to us and saying, okay, now you need to give back New Mexico, California, and Nevada to the sovereign nation of Mexico. We wouldn't stand for that. I would certainly hope that the sovereign nation of Israel would not stand for that as well.

Mr. SCHOCK. Will the gentleman yield?

Mr. THOMPSON of Pennsylvania. Yes.

Mr. SCHOCK. Okay. To your point, I think what you're suggesting is, number one, should any of these properties be, quote, given back or surrendered, but, number two, should that really be the focus of our effort towards peace.

It seems to me a little disingenuous on the part of our administration to suggest that somehow what stands between the current situation and a path road to peace is the issue of settlements is really a misnomer.

The reality is the State of Israel has shown throughout their history that they are the ones who have bargained in good faith and time and time again shown a willingness to give up lands as they have and only to their own peril; as you mentioned, what you saw in Sderot with the bomb shelters and the people who have suffered as a result of them giving up the Gaza Strip.

But the issue of Israel willing to give up this settlement or that settlement or redraw the boundaries, you and I both heard from Netanyahu's own words that they're not wedded to any set boundary. But what we also heard was out of the lips of the Prime Minister of the Palestinian Authority, which was his unwillingness to accept Israel as a Jewish state.

Therein lies the real problem with the pathway to peace and a two-state solution: the Palestinians' unwillingness at this point to recognize Israel as a Jewish state. I would only also add that while we are talking about settlements, Iran continues to march towards acquiring a nuclear weapon. While I certainly respect this administration's plans to begin talks and to negotiate and to try and solve this diplomatically, I would remind the American people, and my colleagues here, that this is the same administration that we want to talk to that has lied to the international community and hidden from them a nuclear facility which

the world was just made aware of last week.

So I would only question the sincerity and the ability for us to truly negotiate with trust with this regime who up until last weekend we were not even aware of an additional nuclear facility. So it's very alarming. I will tell you, I don't know what my distinguished colleagues here feel, but we have two bills that are still in this Chamber, H.R. 2194, which is the Iran Refined Petroleum Sanctions Act, and then the Iran Sanctions Enabling Act, which was H.R. 1327. Both of those bills have a majority of Members of Congress supporting it. And it just seems to me a shame that this body has not acted on that legislation to put another tool in the chest of President Obama as he goes forward to negotiate with Iran, the fact that these sanctions are there if and when they become necessary to use.

And I would just yield back.

Mr. THOMPSON of Pennsylvania. I thank the gentleman. I certainly thank you for naming those pieces of legislation. They are extremely important. They do have the large support of this entire Chamber.

I would ask the Speaker support that bill and to bring that bill to the floor so that we can do the right thing by this most important ally that we have in the Middle East and would serve the needs. I think what you have talked about tonight really most recently addresses the most immediate threat in Israel and I think the most immediate threat to the United States, and that is the situation in Iran.

Mr. Speaker, Iran has recently revealed the development of a secret nuclear facility. And Iran's admission of the operations of a secret nuclear facility is a serious problem and a serious threat. While this new revelation is alarming, it's not unexpected. Iran has deceived the world time and time again. And any attempts to assure the world that their nuclear program is peaceful should be seen for what it is, and that is just another lie.

Now, Mr. Speaker, it's time to impose meaningful sanctions on the Iranian Government. We have legislation that has been drafted and introduced and has the support of the majority Members of this Chamber. We must not continue a foreign policy that extends a hand of cooperation to our enemies while they continue dangerous acts of deception. If the nuclear facility was designed for civilian purposes, we have to ask, why did Iran conceal its existence?

We must impose meaningful sanctions on the threat that endangers the safety of American citizens and America's allies. Now, the confirmation of this secret nuclear facility is troubling, especially to me at a time just days after the Obama administration announced plans to abandon the placement of a missile defense system in the Czech Republic and Poland and all because Russia was not happy with the idea. Only 1 year since Russia invaded Georgia and 70 years to the day since the Soviet Union invaded Poland, the administration has announced the dismantling of one our most important missile defense systems at the expense of our allies.

Mr. Speaker, the abandonment of the European missile defense site, which could have protected the homeland of the United States against Iranian long-range missiles, is unacceptable. As I was talking with one of the Chairs of our missile defense caucus in this body, he described to me that there are plans for a better system to be put in place.

However, that new missile defense program will not be operational until 2018 or 2020. And while we do have other missile defense shields in place that will remain, he described it like this: it's like trying to bring down an airplane with a baseball. He supposed it could be possible, but it's a one-in-a-million chance. When you think of intercontinental ballistic missiles that travel the speed of 10,000 miles per hour, to me it's unacceptable at this point in time in our history when we have threats that sometimes come from other countries, such as Iran, sometimes from terrorists that hold no national identity, and it's alarming to me that we are taking down this missile defense program.

Mr. FLEMING. Would the gentleman yield on that point?

Mr. THOMPSON of Pennsylvania. Please.

Mr. FLEMING. I appreciate the gentleman pointing out the fact that what we are doing in fact is removing a missile shield that is just before deployment, that would go into the Czech Republic, that would go into Poland. It would be, of course, subsurface. It would be something that would help defend much of that region of the country, including 80 American military bases; and, instead, we are going to exchange it for a whole different, a ship-based system which requires, first of all, a lot of development that is not yet in place.

As you point out, it is going to be another decade before it will even be capable. It would require ships being in exactly the right place at the right time. And it also begs the point: If Iran is developing nuclear material just for civilian purposes, why do they need all of this rocketry ability? They just ran a test, a three-rocket test, one of which had a range of 1,500 miles. Now why do you need that? I'm pretty sure Iran is not planning to go to the Moon. So for what purpose is that?

And what is also, I think, ironic is the fact that our President is talking about renewing the STAR treaty and taking our already reduced nuclear weapons down to an even lower level. If we do this with Russia at the same time as there are more countries than ever that have more nuclear weapons and more capability to deliver those weapons than ever, so again it goes back to the appeasement question: Does it make sense to unilaterally disarm yourself while your potential enemies, and I would say in this case with Iran, our enemy, because they are killing our men and women through their proxies and through their surrogates and their weapons. Why in the world would we be doing that when in fact we have a growing threat from them?

And going back to Israel, it seems that wherever you see the U.S. military around the world, peace breaks out. You look at World War II, troops were in Japan, troops were in the Philippines, they were in France, they were in England and Germany. All those countries now are very peaceful democracies. And of course we went into Iraq, and Iraq is evolving into an oasis, if you will, of democracy, as is Israel.

So it seems to me that we need to stay on the same post-World War II course of certainly using Theodore Roosevelt's old philosophy, ``speak softly but carry a big stick,'' rather than using a lot of rhetoric about all the things that we want to do and all the sanctions we want to take and yet disarm ourselves and our friends at the same time.

Certainly, one only has to ask around the world who is happy with this right now and who isn't. Well, it turns out our friends are unhappy with us and our enemies are happy with us all the way from Venezuela to Iran to Russia. They are all happy with everything we've been doing lately and the decisions our President has been making. We found out while we were in Israel that the President has a 4 percent, yes, 4 percent favorability rating. They are very unhappy with his position on Iran right now and also on the Palestinian question.

So I think that it's certainly nice to be liked overseas; but when you're liked by your enemies and also of course Poland and the Czech Republic are unhappy with us right now because we left them in the dust after agreeing to put a missile shield there and then pulling out after they've gone out on a limb for us, I think we are going, Mr. Speaker, in the wrong direction in the way we deal with our friends and our enemies in and around this question of Iran and the nuclear weapons that they have.

With that, I will yield back to my friends.

Mr. SCHOCK. Well, I agree, and it's why it's so important that we impress on this body the importance that we take up the legislation that we mentioned earlier dealing with sanctions, but also, we raise this issue in this body.

You know, we've been so focused on the issue of health care the last couple of months, and while this is an important issue that the President has made throughout the past year, the reality is we need to look no further than September 11 to know that, if this country

is not safe, if your allies are not safe, and that if terrorism is allowed to breed around the world, that really nothing else matters, and that nothing can be more detrimental to our economy and our way of life than for terrorism to breed, to be successful and, ultimately, be able to attack democracy, as we saw with our markets here after September 11, the great job loss, the great tumble that it took as a result of the attacks of September 11.

We need to remain vigilant in not only keeping our country safe but also supporting the allies around the world, and I think it's why my friends here tonight have spent some time talking about this important issue, which has been raised last week by the discovery of this facility, that the State of Iran has attempted to keep from the international community.

And one has to ask the question: why? If their intentions are what they say they are, if their intentions are pure and simple, if their intentions are non-nuclear or non-weapons grade, if their intentions are simply to provide energy to their people, certainly that is not something that requires the dark of night or secret. That is something that you would think one would be happy for full disclosure.

And our own estimates suggest that the centrifuges in that facility are not designed to produce energy-grade uranium but, rather, weapons-grade uranium. And so I think it adds to the doubt in many of our minds and the concern for our President to move rather quickly for, if not this facility, perhaps some others that we don't know about that are still out there.

So I thank the gentlemen for being here tonight and sharing their perspectives of our trip to Israel and also impressing on the public the importance of us taking up the issue of Iran and dealing very swiftly with sanctions and, if not sanctions, supporting Israel's efforts to stop a nuclear Iran.

Mr. FLEMING. I would just say I would like to thank Congressman Schock for having this Special Order hour this evening so that we could talk about this important issue, and it's one that we're going to be talking about a lot more in the coming days because it's pretty apparent that all of these issues are beginning to line up. They're beginning to stack up very rapidly.

And of course, the issue that we know our friends and Israel are facing is that if we are unable to bring the Iranians to the negotiating table or to have sanctions that work, then they're still the last option left on the table, which they reserve the right as a sovereign Nation to do, and that is, potentially take out the nuclear facilities in Iran.

We pray that it doesn't come to that, but it has already of course in Syria and Iraq back in the Hussein days, and we are looking for peaceful solutions. But we have counterweight around the world in Russia and China that as soon as we try to do one thing they want to reverse it. Russia is a very significant trading partner with Iran. They're providing Iran with a state-of-the-art SAM missile system which is going to close the window for the capability of Israel to potentially attack Iran's nuclear facilities if that needs to be done, which is all the more important why decisions are having to be made at an even faster pace.

So, once again, I thank Mr. Schock for bringing us together for this hour.

Mr. SCHOCK. I thank Dr. Fleming for being here.

Mr. THOMPSON of Pennsylvania. I also want to thank my good friend from Illinois and my good friend from Louisiana for being here tonight on this important topic.

I mean, the Constitution, when we were sworn in which seems like a lifetime ago back in January, we placed our hand on the Bible, raised our hand, and we swore to uphold and defend that Constitution. And within that, one of the first responsibilities is for common defense. That's the first, and I think the most responsibility that we have as Members of Congress is our safety and security, and certainly, this issue is one that is all about safety and security.

Frankly, history shows, and we know, that a strong defense is a strong deterrent. We want peace. We pray for peace. I long for a day when the whole world is at peace, but we know that we need a strong defense in order to serve as a deterrent to achieve peace. And I'm hopeful that we will see the day that--and I believe it was the President of Israel, Shimon Peres, who said he longs for a day when rising out of the desert we see buildings and not missiles and that we know the economic impact and that we have peace that we can also cherish.

So I thank Mr. Schock for coordinating this evening.

Mr. SCHOCK. I thank Mr. Thompson

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