Former U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo boasted of the Trump administration’s achievements in the Middle East, including brokering monumental peace accords between Israel and Arab states while bringing Iran “to its knees,” as he condemned antisemitism and claimed standing with Israel is a “means to defend American heritage.” He warned that the Biden administration is seeking to “reverse the historic progress we brought to the Middle East.”
Appearing at the Zionist Organization of America’s (ZOA) annual gala on Sunday evening, former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, who was being honored at the event, detailed his “proud” achievements in his previous role while expressing his desire to continue serving as secretary of state, seeing that there is “much work” remaining.
Expressing his strong belief in supporting the Jewish state, he cautioned over a decline in supportive policies by the current administration.
“I believe strongly in our support for Israel because of our Judeo-Christian heritage, and I’m proud of the tough choices we made to support Israel,” he said. “But I see them today being eroded relatively quickly.”
We were told, ‘you can’t move the U.S. embassy in Israel to Jerusalem, there’ll be war,’” he recalled. “Well, we did and there wasn’t.”
“We were told in the administration, ‘You can’t end the terrible Iran deal because it will make it more likely that there would be war; that Iran would obtain a nuclear weapon,’” he said.
“But we ended our participation in that terrible deal. We applied maximum economic pressure to Iran and to its leadership,” he added. “We brought Iran to its knees.”
He also noted that “ridding the world of [slain Iranian Gen.] Qassim Soleimani meant much to the security of Israel.”
Middle East Peace
Pompeo also highlighted the significant changes that resulted from the Trump administration’s foreign policy, claiming, “We defended Israel and we changed the Middle East forever.”
“We were told, too, that you can’t secure peace between Arab nations and Israel without buying off Palestinian kleptocrats and starting World War III,” he said. “But we did forge real peace and there was no war.”
“The Abraham Accords rewrote decades of failed shuttle negotiations because we were willing to go against the elites of the foreign policy establishment to secure American freedom and to champion American values,” he added.
Israeli Territory
Pompeo also noted the achievement of recognizing Israel’s “rightful territories.”
“We were told you can’t allow Israel to have its rights in Judea and Samaria and the Golan Heights,” he said. “If you do that, there will be war.”
“Well, we did and there wasn’t,” he added.
He called attention to the reality of Israel’s place in the Middle East, claiming Judea and Samaria is “the same territory that some have in recent decades renamed, ‘The West Bank’ as part of their demand for the creation of a 23rd Arab Islamic State.”
“This all takes place in the context of a Middle East where their Arab brothers already control more than 500 times the amount of territory as Israel,” he said, noting that the country of Jordan is “three times the size of Israel — 80% of whose population [who self-identify as] part of the Arab block that officially took the name ‘Palestinians’ only in 1964.”
Claiming “Israel is not an occupier and the hundreds of thousands of Jews and Christians who call Judea, Samaria, and eastern Jerusalem ‘home,’ have a perfectly legitimate right to live there in safety under Israeli sovereignty,” Pompeo lamented “international leader[s]” who, when talking about Jerusalem and the West Bank, “accuse our ally Israel of occupation and of illegal settlement.”
“[Former] President Obama [and former Secretary of State Hillary] Clinton, did this repeatedly, and so has the new Biden administration,” he said.
“Even though these legal terms are just a casual way of calling the Jewish state of Israel a ‘thief’ in essence, they use it,” he added.
He accused “United Nations institutions” as well as the media and “political circles” of using such misinformation “to launch all manner of hostile misrepresentations and condemnations.”
“They do this to encourage antisemitic boycotts against the Jewish state, to suppress religious freedom for Jews and Christians and ancestral heritage site, and they do it to justify acts of terrorism and mass murder,” he said.
Is there really any legal truth to the accusation that Israel is occupying Palestinian land? You all know the answer is absolutely not,” he said.
Biden Administration
“We know what happens when the world turns its back on Israel and her people,” he said. “I worry this is happening more and more today.”
“We can’t allow that to happen,” he said. “We can’t allow the current administration to reverse the historic progress we brought to the Middle East.”
Anti-Zionism and Antisemitism
Warning that antisemitism “is on the rise and it’s up to us to speak out against it,” Pompeo declared the U.S. must stand up against it.
“It’s because I’m a champion of religious freedom that I’m here today to tell you that the United States must stand with the Jewish people and Israel in the fight against the world’s oldest bigotry: antisemitism,” he said.
“We must oppose it unequivocally [and] we must fight it relentlessly,” he added.
