Newly elected Senator Abdul El-Sayed appeared on MS Now’s Morning Joe. He was asked what message he had for Jewish voters. Below the separator was his response. It was part of a wide ranging discussion.

It seems to me that any decent person would agree that Jewish-Israeli and Palestinian children should be able to live in peaceful harmony. However the massive arms industry and militaries that want action, not inaction, ensure that conflict never ends.

The words of Senator-elect El-Sayed about follow as he responds to the question:

I was really privileged to grow up in a community where about 40 % of my high school class was Jewish. I grew up going to synagogue, going to seder, going to 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 going to 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 toward that government. But I want to 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 want to stand up against the murder of innocent Palestinian children, 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.

My approach to foreign policy is simple. We should be the first among equals to uphold international law. But we have ran rough shot 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 destruction of access to basic resources in Gaza.

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

If I stand up and say, hey, maybe we shouldn’t be sending our money to do the worst things to other people, others are like, well, it must be because you hate the people who are doing the worst things.

I’m like, that’s insane.

…I don’t think that we should be continuing to subsidize a foreign military that has done the worst things with our money. I’d love to work with [Trump] 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 want to just step back on this. We have to separate between Judaism and the Jewish people and Israel and its actions. We have to.

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 differentiate between our foreign policy, and by the way, I apply the same approach to the government of Egypt where my family came from. 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 share the ethnicity of the majority of people who are in Egypt.

We just have to be governing on principle. We have broken our own principles when it comes to Israel time and again.

I want to have a conversation 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 going to be curtailed by somebody’s violence.

How do we get there?