Israel Matzav

Video: Interview with Congressman Randy Forbes (R-Va) about his visit to Judea and Samaria

In an earlier post, I reported that five Republican Congressmen had visited Judea and Samaria this week. Here's an interview with one of them, Representative Randy Forbes of Virginia.

Let's go to the videotape.



JPost adds:

A delegation of Republican congressmen who strongly support Israel and stand behind many of its policies is hardly an unusual sight.

Like many who have come before, they shook hands with Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu and visited the Western Wall.

But in an unusual move, they veered from the well-worn diplomatic path, to see some of the spots at the heart of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

Noam Arnon, spokesman for the Jewish Community of Hebron, said this was the first time he knew of that a delegation like this had ever come to see the Jewish sites in his city and to speak with residents there.

“They will now be strong and knowledgeable ambassadors for Israel, even more than our own,” said Naftali Bennett, the director-general of the Council of Jewish Communities of Judea, Samaria and the Gaza Strip, who spent time with the delegation.

Their fact-finding mission last week was kept under wraps until they left the country at the start of this week.

It was important to go beyond the media images of the country, Forbes said as he sat in a suit, with a view of the Temple Mount behind him.

Very few Americans even knew what the West Bank was, he said.

“When you talk about it, they think you mean the Western side of some river that is moving through the Middle East,” he said.

It was always important, he said, to see the geography of a place. But that was particularly true in Israel, given its small size. If there were a military attack, “you have seconds to respond, we have hours,” he said.

“It is a big difference, and it changes the way you think of security,” he said.

He said he didn’t want to dictate to Israel the terms of a two-state solution or what its borders should be. But any final-status agreement must guarantee Israel’s security.

“If Israel would ask,” he said, “I would say, not at the 1967 line.

“That would be a mistake,” Forbes said and added that he did not believe Israel could defend itself, if the pre-1967 lines became the border.

Israel should not compromise its security needs in an effort to jumpstart the peace talks with the Palestinians, he said.

“It may create long-term instability,” he warned.

Nor does he believe that the US should insist on a freeze of settlement activity.

While in Ariel, he said, he heard how the city had been harmed by the lack of construction.

Forbes was ]struck by the fact that Palestinians in the West Bank could build, while Jews struggled for permits.

He also had strong statements to make about Jerusalem. The US should move its embassy from Tel Aviv to the capital, Forbes said.

“We should not tell the people of Israel where to put their capital.

Once they have decided that Jerusalem should be their capital, I think it is important that our embassy should be in their capital and I would support that move,” he said.

His support for the Jewish state, which he visited for the first time in 2001, stretched back to his childhood, he explained.

As a college student, Forbes was so intrigued by Israel that he wrote his senior thesis on the Israeli-Arab conflict.

Already then, he said, he understood Israel’s significance to the Western world, as both a democratic nation in the Middle East and a strong American ally.

“My conclusion has only been solidified over the years,” he said.

Read the whole thing.

We need more trips like this. The problem is that the US embassy and consulate continue to warn people not to visit Judea and Samaria.

Labels: Judea and Samaria, Randy Forbes, Republicans

posted by Carl in Jerusalem @ 11:58 AM