Newly elected House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) took a trip to the Palestinian Territories with Judiciary Chair Jim Jordan (R-OH), where he met up with extremist groups and proclaimed that there's no oppression in the area, reported Mother Jones on Friday.
The trip took place in 2020, when the two lawmakers were in the minority and Johnson was an obscure backbencher.
"In February of that year, Johnson traveled to Israel with Rep. Jim Jordan (R-Ohio)," reported David Corn. "The sponsor for this trip was the New York-based 12Tribe Films Foundation, a small outfit that that describes itself as 'online warriors for truth about Israel and the Jewish people.' The organization spent $34,520 — about one-quarter of its revenue that year — to fly the two lawmakers and their wives to Israel and host them for the week-long trip."
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The trip to Israel, according to the report, "included visits to the Golan Heights, Jerusalem, and Hebron, a city in the Israeli-occupied West Bank, as well as meetings with Israeli military officials, business owners, and political leaders — including Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and other members of the right-wing Likud Party. The two congressmen also received a briefing from the Kohelet Policy Forum, a far-right Israeli think tank that would later help cook up the Netanyahu administration’s controversial plan to weaken the country’s judiciary. At the Golan Heights, the pair posed and smiled in front of a sign for Trump Heights, a new Israeli settlement in occupied territory claimed by Israel but that is widely considered to violate international law."
“You hear in the US about how the Palestinians or the Arab people are oppressed in these areas, and have these terrible lives. None of that is true. We didn’t see any of it,” said Johnson. Notably, the trip did not take the two members to the Gaza Strip, which has been under the control of the militant group Hamas for nearly two decades, and where Israel has frequently engaged in airstrikes that kill civilians and restricted the importation of energy and supplies over the border.
Israel maintains that Hamas, which was behind the brutal October 7 terrorist attack that killed hundreds of people and left hundreds more hostages, deliberately puts its military installations in civilian areas to maximize death from Israeli operations.
Johnson has for years been active within the Christian nationalist movement, which holds America should be an explicitly Christian nation and the United States Constitution should be put under strict Christian law. Many evangelicals within the Christian Right are supportive of Israel primarily because they believe Jewish control of the Holy Land is necessary to fulfill Biblical prophecy and begin the end of the world.
