U.S. Senator Mark R. Warner met with members of Tidewater’s Jewish community last month to discuss a range of issues, including Israel, the state of college campuses, and antisemitism.
The former governor and senior senator from Virginia began the conversation by reflecting on his first campaign, which he lost to Senator John Warner. “I learned so much from John Warner. The two became dear friends, he said, and worked across party lines. “He did not view the other side as the enemy – this is something we need more of in politics today.”
Covering a variety of issues, Sen. Warner said he feels the biggest long-term challenge on the global scene is the technology competition with China. This is an area, he noted, where the United States has a great working relationship with Israel.
“No county of Israel’s size (both physical and by population) “so punches above its weight in technology,” as well as across the board in a series of domains, Warner said.
“My ties to Israel go back to the early 1990s,” Sen. Warner said, referencing his first trip to Israel with AIPAC, and then returning many times as a businessman, as governor, as senator, and with his family. During his trip in January 2024, which was just post Oct. 7, Warner said “you could still feel the shock in the streets.”
Addressing current divisions within Congress over Israel, Warner is firm that “even if one has legitimate concerns about what Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is doing, this is not a time to allow any light to come between America and Israel because of the enormous rise of antisemitism that we saw” on college campuses post Oct. 7.
Any differences between the United States and Israel that might exist, Warner stressed, should be discussed in private at this point. One reason, he said, is that so much of the alignment of the rest of the world is anti-Israel. “We can’t allow any gap between us to take place.”
