Ted Deutch: “I thank the gentleman from New York, my friend, the ranking member, for yielding. I rise in support of H.R. 1164, the…”

“I thank the gentleman from New York, my friend, the ranking member, for yielding. I rise in support of H.R. 1164, the Taylor Force Act. Mr. Speaker, the pursuit of a negotiated two-state solution to end the Israeli-Palestinian conflict requires a commitment to peace, but it is impossible for the Palestinian Authority to demonstrate that commitment to peace while paying terrorists for attacks on innocent civilians. But that is the reality today, and that is what this bill seeks to end. Under current Palestinian law, the PA pays salaries to terrorists and their families more money for worse crimes, typically well exceeding the mean salary for Palestinian workers. If a terrorist is sentenced to life in prison for a horrific attack that kills Israeli citizens, he will get a four-times higher monthly salary than if he had been sentenced to only a couple of years in prison for a lesser attack. This is blatant incentive to terrorism; the same type of terrorism that we have seen tear through buses, shopping malls, nightclubs, and places of worship around the world. In March of last year, during a surge of deadly stabbings, shootings, and car rammings in Israel, we saw the consequences of this incitement and incentive to terror. Taylor Force, a 28-year-old American tourist, a West Point graduate and then-Vanderbilt graduate student, who had fought in the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, was stabbed to death on a promenade in Jaffa by a young Palestinian terrorist.…”