A Few Minutes With Senator James Risch

I was on the Hill to meet Senator James Risch of Idaho, a former chairman and current ranking member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. Risch, 78, is also the 31st governor of Idaho, entering politics after a successful legal career. During his 12 years on Capitol Hill, the political conservative has been a staunch friend of Israel. Just this year, he wrote to President Biden urging him not to delay arms sales to Israel; sponsored a bill opposing the reopening of the US consulate for Palestinians in Jerusalem; and sponsored resolutions on BDS and requiring transparency from UNRWA.

In the long wake of last year’s Abraham Accords that drew Israel’s covert links with Gulf Arab states into the open, he discusses his co-sponsorship of the Israel Normalization Act, which requires the State Department to adopt a strategy to widen the process of normalization between Israel and Arab countries and reiterates America’s firm support for Israel even as tensions with Iran ratchet up again.

Ranking Member Risch, thank you for hosting us. Let’s start with a general question: There are worries that the US-Israel relationship is becoming a partisan issue, a political football between left and right. Is that happening?

I’m not sure I agree with you about it being a political football. There certainly are a handful of people that would view it that way. But I spend a lot of time talking not only to my colleagues on my side of the aisle, but to colleagues on the other side of the aisle. And there isn’t a lot of difference in any of our views of our relationship with Israel. On some minor things, we may have disagreements, but we even have disagreements within our own party. My prognosis is that the relationship between the United States and Israel will clearly remain at least as strong as it is, and probably, be enhanced as we go along. And that will be on a bipartisan basis, not on a partisan basis.

You sponsored legislation against the BDS movement, which was in the news recently over Ben & Jerry’s decision to boycott the West Bank — are you worried that it will mark a new trend?

No, I’m not. People who are anti-Israel had been attempting to do this for a long time through the back door — by boycotting investment funds that have links to Israel — and now they’ve tried to go through the front door. But the BDS movement hasn’t been successful, other than ‘de minimis’ things like the Ben & Jerry’s issue. It was a big story over there (in Israel), but not a very big story in the United States. I’ve never had a Ben & Jerry’s ice cream. We have lots of ice cream makers.