Michigan Election Winner on Antisemitism and US Aid to Israel

going to have. Yeah. What is your message now that you've won this election to Jewish voters in the state of Michigan, and frankly, national voters who've been watching you very closely and wanna know what you will do to protect them in this era of antisemitism?

Yeah. Mm. You know, I grew up, I was really privileged to grow up in a community where about 40% of my high school class was Jewish.

I grew up going, uh, to synagogue, going to Seder, uh, going to, to, uh, bar and bat mitzvahs growing up.

I have so much respect for the Jewish faith and Jewish contributions to American life.

I also know what it's like to be discriminated against for how I pray, and I want an America where nobody is discriminated against under our Constitution.

You can pray as you choose to pray or not pray at all.

The idea that anybody should feel unsafe in their synagogue or their day school to me is anathema.

I know what it's like to drop off my kids to a mosque and wonder if they're going to be safe, and I'm gonna be able to pick them up safely afterwards.

I think we are all united in the work of making sure that no matter who you are, you are safe in this country, and I'm committed to the safety of Jewish children, like I'm committed to the safety of my own children.

I think a lot of the issue was more about the government of Israel and our posture towards that government.

But I wanna ask us this. We spend billions of dollars subsidizing a foreign government unconditionally, buying bombs and tanks that have been used to do genocide and apartheid and make war we have no business fighting.

And we're told that if you wanna stand up against the murder of innocent Palestinian children, that that's somehow about hate for anybody.

It's not about hate for anybody. It's about equal love for those Palestinian children as you would have for a Jewish child growing up in the Holy Land.

And my approach to foreign policy is simple.

We should be the first among equals to uphold international law.

But we have ran roughshod over the notion of what was done to Gaza as if that's not the central question.

But, like, we're not that far. I mean, it's still ongoing.

You're still talking about apartheid policy in the West Bank.

You're still talking about the ongoing, uh, disruption of access to basic resources in Gaza.

You're still talking about a genocide, but nobody wants to say that.

So if I stand up and say, "Hey, maybe we shouldn't be sending our money to do the worst things to other people," people are like, "Well, it must be because you hate the people who are doing the worst things." I'm like, "That's insane."

What do you think about- That's actually insane ...

Donald Trump, uh, talking about cutting off aid?

By January. I agree with him on that. I don't think that we should be continuing to subsidize a foreign military that has done the worst things with our money. I agree.

I'd love to work with him on doing that.

In fact, I don't know that we should be continuing to sell weapons to a country that is, again, using our weapons to do awful things.

And I, I wanna just step back on this. We have to separate between Judaism and the Jewish people and Israel and its actions. We have to.

And I've tried to do that consistently across my campaign, but people keep saying, "Well, because of your positions on Israel, you must also feel a certain way about Jewish people."

I say, "Well, no, actually. We have to d- differentiate between our foreign policy."

And by the way, I apply the same approach to the government of Egypt where my family came from.

And I would hate that somebody would assume that I would be okay with the human rights abuses of the government of Egypt simply because I say, share the ethnicity- Sure ... of the majority of people who are in Egypt. Mm-hmm.

So we just have to be governing on principle, and we have broken our own principles when it comes to Israel time and again, and I wanna have a conversation, I'll stop here- Yeah ... where a Palestinian child and a Jewish Israeli child growing up in the Holy Land can look forward at their life and say,

"My life is not gonna be curtailed by somebody's violence."

Okay. How do we get there? Hey, it's V-