Addressing a Knesset committee on Sunday, U.S. Rep. Elise Stefanik (R-N.Y.) pledged her support for Israel and the fight against antisemitism amid President Joe Biden’s threats to halt weapons shipments to the Jewish state.
“I will defend George Washington’s vision of religious pluralism and freedom,” she told the Knesset Caucus for Jewish and Pro-Israel Students on Campuses Around the World. “Today, this means crushing antisemitism and home and supplying the State of Israel with what it needs, when it needs it, without conditions, to achieve total victory in the face of evil.”
Total victory, she said, “only starts with wiping those responsible for Oct. 7 off the face of the earth.”
Addressing Biden’s threat to withhold a shipment of offensive weapons to Israel in connection with Jerusalem’s military operation in Rafah, Stefanik said, “I have been clear at home and I will be clear here: There is no excuse for an American president to block aid to Israel, aid that was duly passed by the Congress.”
Stefanik, a Republican and the highest-ranking member of the House of Representatives to visit Israel since Oct. 7, played a prominent role in December’s congressional hearings on antisemitism on U.S. campuses. She asked the presidents of Harvard, the University of Pennsylvania and MIT if “calling for the genocide of Jews” violated the universities’ code of conduct, amid mass protests that began at the onset of the war.
Each of the presidents refused to directly answer the question, leading to the ouster of the presidents of Penn and Harvard.
During her trip to Israel, the congresswoman is scheduled to meet with Israeli officials and visit some of the towns hardest-hit by Hamas’s Oct. 7 massacre.