RJC Stands with Israel, Condemns Biden Response

Washington, DC – Today, the Republican Jewish Coalition released the following statement from National Chairman Senator Norm Coleman and CEO Matt Brooks in response to the terrorist attacks in Israel:

On the 50-year anniversary of the Yom Kippur War, during Shabbat and the holiday of Simchat Torah, Iran-backed Hamas terrorists launched a coordinated, sophisticated, and barbaric attack on Israeli civilians and soldiers - launching thousands of rockets, kidnapping families, and murdering innocents in their homes and on the streets.

Today’s attacks have shocked the conscience of Israel and the world. Israel stood shoulder-to-shoulder with the United States on 9/11 - we must stand resolutely with Israel today.

Shamefully, the Biden administration’s first instinct in responding to this unfolding atrocity was to call for Israeli restraint, as innocent Israelis were being kidnapped, murdered, and paraded through the streets. It was a statement so disastrously wrongheaded that the office that issued it was forced to delete it.

But the damage may not be so easily undone. A statement suggesting that Israel’s self-defense efforts would have anything less than unequivocal support from their greatest ally, the United States, gives Israelis cause to wonder if America has their backs in a perilous moment like this. And it further emboldens the enemies Israel faces arrayed on its borders.

We must never draw any kind of equivalence between rampaging Hamas terrorists targeting Israeli civilians and our greatest ally in the region defending itself from these heinous attacks, and it is deeply troubling that the Biden administration’s first instinct was to do exactly that.

Please join us in praying for the people of Israel - we pray for the wounded, and for those whose lives we’ve lost: May their memories be a blessing forever.