During an interview with ABC News on Thursday, Sen.-elect Abdul El-Sayed (D-MI) stated that “People want to start with the current state of Israel as it exists and then say, well, we can carve out a Palestinian state with what’s left. That’d be like me and you saying, Linsey, we’re going to split a meal, and then, instead of cutting our hamburger in half, you eat, and then I have to eat what’s left. That’s not equal rights to peace, dignity, and self-determination.”
Host Linsey Davis asked, “I’ve seen a lot of questions on social media, people saying, does he believe that Israel has a right to exist? How do you answer that?”
El-Sayed answered, “I believe in peace, dignity, and self-determination for the Jewish Israeli people, equal to peace, dignity, and self-determination for the Palestinian people. People want to start with the current state of Israel as it exists and then say, well, we can carve out a Palestinian state with what’s left. That’d be like me and you saying, Linsey, we’re going to split a meal, and then, instead of cutting our hamburger in half, you eat, and then I have to eat what’s left. That’s not equal rights to peace, dignity, and self-determination. So, I’m committed to a solution that the Palestinian people and the Jewish Israeli people come to together. But we are not in that path. And I think we’ve got to get serious about the fact that, right now, in large part, that’s because our politics are really moved by an organization, AIPAC, that has spent huge amounts of money to make sure that our public policy focuses on the currently existing version of a Jewish state, right? In Israel that has created and done some terrible things with our tax dollars. So I want us to step back and ask, how do you get to equal rights to peace, dignity, and self-determination for these peoples? How do you make sure our tax dollars aren’t spent doing genocide and apartheid or making war we have no business fighting? How do we take those equal rights seriously? And how do we make sure that we’re holding ourselves accountable to international law? And it’s not just about Israel. I take the same approach to Egypt, where my family immigrated from. I take the same approach to Pakistan and to Jordan. I think we need to be the first among equals to make sure that we are enforcing international law. And when we are giving money to a country that is using our money to violate international law, that seems, to me, a good place to start.”
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