Back from weeklong trip to Israel, Baumgartner reflects on ‘misery’ of ongoing conflict and what it would take to end it

WASHINGTON – Rep. Michael Baumgartner returned home to Spokane on Monday from a weeklong visit to Israel, his fifth trip to the country and his first as a member of Congress.

The trip included about 30 freshman members of Congress along with party leaders, including House Speaker Mike Johnson, R-La. It was organized by the American Israel Educational Foundation, the charitable arm of the pro-Israel lobbying group AIPAC, Baumgartner said in an interview on Tuesday.

The trip came as the Israeli government faces growing international condemnation for the impact of its war on civilians in Gaza, but the Spokane Republican defended Israel’s actions and said the focus should instead be on Hamas, which launched terror attacks into Israel that prompted nearly two years of war.

“You have to root out Hamas to give the Palestinian people a chance to have something other than a death cult leading them,” Baumgartner said, adding that progress has been made both toward that goal and in diplomatic efforts to normalize relations between Israel and its Arab neighbors, expanding the agreements known as the Abraham Accords brokered by the first Trump administration.

Baumgartner first traveled to the region as a high schooler three decades ago, and he said his previous trip to Israel was with the late WSU football coach Mike Leach in 2019. He went on to work as a State Department official in Baghdad during the Iraq War and now sits on the House Foreign Affairs Committee and Middle East Subcommittee.

“I’m pleased that an increasing number of my congressional colleagues are looking to me as somebody with some expertise or thought leadership on those issues,” he said of U.S. policy toward the Middle East.

The U.S. delegation met with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, President Isaac Herzog and other high-level Israeli officials, Baumgartner said. They listened to a survivor of the Hamas massacre at an open-air music festival in Israel and planted a tree.

Artillery fire echoed in the background during their outings, he said, a reminder that the fighting continues even after Israel’s military has flattened much of Gaza, a territory about the size of Seattle whose roughly 2 million residents have nearly all been displaced. After Hamas and other Palestinian armed groups killed about 1,200 people in Israel and took roughly 250 hostages back to Gaza, Israel’s response has killed more than 60,000 Palestinians, according to the Gaza Health Ministry.

Israel’s government and its allies have questioned that death toll because Hamas controls the Health Ministry and the figure doesn’t distinguish between civilians and combatants, but the United Nations and human rights groups consider the estimate credible. More Palestinians are assumed to be buried under rubble, making a comprehensive count virtually impossible while the war is ongoing.

Baumgartner said the group visited joint Israeli-U.S. missile defense sites and learned about the benefits of real-time testing that could inform the development of “Golden Dome,” a nationwide missile shield President Donald Trump wants to build despite doubts that such a project, which would cost hundreds of billions of dollars, would be effective over such a large territory. Israel’s “Iron Dome” missile defense system is highly effective but designed to defend a country roughly the size of New Jersey from short-range rockets, not hypersonic missiles.

The congressman said defeating Hamas is a necessary precondition for peace, along with expanding the Abraham Accords, which he described as “a permission structure” for Arab countries to acknowledge Israel’s right to exist. He said he wants “to create a just and lasting peace” between Israelis and Palestinians, but he said the “land for peace” approach has failed to achieve that goal and must be replaced by “a new paradigm”: peace first, then land for the Palestinians.

The group visited Ariel, an Israeli settlement in the West Bank, where Johnson reportedly called the territory “the rightful property of the Jewish people.” Such settlements are illegal under international law, which prohibits displacing residents of occupied territory.

“I don’t think it’s super productive,” Baumgartner said of focusing on the settlements that have proliferated in territory that has long been considered essential to a future Palestinian state. “I’m not saying those concerns aren’t legitimate, but insofar as the U.S. and western diplomatic engagement is concerned, the focal point right now shouldn’t be on exactly which settlement is where. It needs to be on the bigger picture – really suppressing and rooting out Hamas, and then working on the other Arab states.”

Baumgartner praised “the relative success and freedom and patriotism and wellbeing” of the Arab Israelis who make up roughly 20% of Israel’s population, saying, “Probably the freest Muslims in the Middle East live in Israel.”

The congressman said Netanyahu’s stated plan to take control of Gaza City, the last remaining part of the territory not yet under Israeli control, seems to be a negotiating tactic. He blamed European countries recently announcing plans to recognize Palestinian statehood for giving Hamas renewed confidence and disrupting a deal that he said would have freed the remaining hostages and sent Hamas into exile.

Baumgartner compared the strategic challenge facing Israel to the U.S. occupation of Iraq, saying Israeli forces need to hold territory, not just clear it. Asked if the Iraq War is something Israel should emulate, he said holding territory is necessary “to give the Palestinian people a viable alternative to Hamas.”

The group also met with the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation, a U.S.-based organization that has distributed limited amounts of food in Gaza after Israel refused to work with the UN’s World Food Program, which is led by Cindy McCain, the widow of the late Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz. Images of starving children and adults in Gaza have drawn global outrage after Israel limited Gaza’s food supply for months.

A retired U.S. special forces officer who left the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation said in July he had witnessed “war crimes” at the group’s food distribution sites, where Israeli forces and U.S. contractors have reportedly shot and killed Palestinians waiting for food. But Baumgartner said he believes the World Food Program is “just totally dominated by Hamas right now,” based on what he was told by the Americans working for the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation.

Asked why Israel wouldn’t allow more food aid into Gaza, so food is no longer a scarce commodity that Hamas or other armed groups have such a strong incentive to seize, Baumgartner said “the people need to be fed” before commenting again on what he sees as biased media coverage.

“I think the Israeli government has done a poor job in losing the press narrative of what’s gone on there,” he said. “The United Nations food program I don’t think is an honest broker or an honest communicator about what’s actually gone on there.”

Baumgartner otherwise didn’t criticize Israel’s government, which he said is subject to “a double standard.”

“In the history of warfare, no one has ever been held to the same standard,” he said, mentioning how Ulysses S. Grant starved Confederate troops during the Siege of Vicksburg, while emphasizing that he wasn’t accusing Israel of either a siege or using starvation as a weapon of war.

“Allied forces, in World War II, firebombed Dresden and used nuclear weapons on the Japanese – appropriately so – to knock the fighting spirit out of those two warring populations,” Baumgartner said. “The point I’m making is that I think Israel is taking great concern, and appropriately so, to safeguard the population of Gaza, and is in the middle of a bloody counterinsurgency with an extremely dedicated terrorist enemy. It’s an extremely difficult situation that I think they’re doing, relatively speaking, a good job on.”

The congressman emphasized that he wants the people of Gaza “to have a good life” and recounted visiting a Palestinian refugee camp as a high schooler in 1994, adding that he counts Palestinians and other Arabs among his friends.

“Israel’s held to a higher standard, I think, than any force in western history on this,” he said. “Focusing on Israeli actions, really in a double standard, really prolongs the war and gives Hamas confidence that they’re winning, and it just perpetuates the misery for everybody.”