JERUSALEM (JNS) – “We have your back and we feel your pain,” Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) said during a Sunday press conference from Tel Aviv on Sunday. “We say to Israel, you do not stand alone.”
“I wanted to be here, but I also had an obligation to be here,” added Schumer, who is the first Jewish Senate majority leader and the highest-ranking elected U.S. Jewish official.
Schumer was joined by a bipartisan delegation: Sens. Bill Cassidy (R-La.), Jacky Rosen (D-Nev.), Mitt Romney (R-Utah) and Mark Kelly (D-Ariz.). He noted that despite divisions in the U.S. Congress, he and his colleagues are united on Israel. (Rosen is the only Jewish woman in the Senate.)
The senator said that he will think of Oct. 7, when Hamas attacked Israel and killed about 1,300 Israelis, every day for the rest of his life, as he has thought of Sept. 11 since the terrorist attacks of 9/11.
The delegation met with families of victims, including those who don’t know if their relatives are alive and some who knew they were being held captive in the Gaza Strip. “When we met them, there was not a dry eye in the house,” Schumer said. “We cried openly.”
Schumer also said that the senators experienced what Israelis do every day. The group had to hasten to a shelter when sirens went off during lunch at the hotel, and the start of the press conference was delayed by some 15 minutes because a siren went off.
‘We cannot let this evil continue’
“Israelis are affected all the time by Hamas’s war-like attitudes,” Schumer said. “What if this happened to my 4-year-old grandson?”
He noted that his family members—ranging from three months to 88 years old—were rounded up by the Nazis. “They machine-gunned all of them,” he said.
“The world cannot move on and say, ‘Oh, that was yesterday.’ If we don’t prevent the threat from Hamas from occurring, it will happen again and again,” Schumer said. “We cannot let this evil continue to prowl the world.”
“We’re not waiting for the House,” he added. “That would be foolish.”
He noted that he thinks that a strong bipartisan response from the Senate may increase the chances of the House to act, despite its current disfunction.
Schumer said that the delegation had “good and productive meetings” with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, Defense Minister Yoav Gallant, Strategic Affairs Minister Ron Dermer and National Unity Party leader Benny Gantz and his party member Gadi Eisenkot, and with Israeli President Isaac Herzog and Opposition Leader Yair Lapid.
“Israel lives in the hearts of all Jewish people,” Rosen said. “America will never again abandon the Jewish state.”
Romney said that when pictures come out of Palestinian civilian casualties, it’s important to know that they are Hamas’s responsibility. He also dismissed isolationists stateside who prefer that the United States disengage from foreign policy.
“There’s a war being raged against free countries, against democracies, against freedom,” Romney said. Backing away will only make the war spread further, he said, noting that the United States is involved in the war because it is in the interests of America, Israel and the world.