Speech #1020150123

I strongly support the guarantee of loans for the State of Israel. The action is a natural followup to what is one of the great successes of American foreign policy and human rights policy of the last several decades. For 20 years or so. the United States has been pressing in every conceivable way to permit the free emigration of Soviet Jews. and now when it has succeeded to accomplish that objective. all that remains Is to make it possible for those emigrants to have a job. to have a house. and to be a part of the Israeli economy. The people who are emigrating into Israel have the capability of transforming that nation. They are some of the best minds and the best educated and most skilled people of the former Soviet Union. who I believe when integrated into the Israeli economy will be able to make that economy so strong and so selfsufficient that it will at long last be free of the obligation to rely on continuing annual assistance from the United States. So I believe not only as has been said by the former speakers this is not an expenditure of U.S. funds. in fact I believe it will make unnecessary the future expenditure of U.S. funds in the form of continuing foreign assistance. I had the opportunity a couple months ago to speak to one of the giants of our generation. Nathan Shcharansky. the famous refusnik who finally was allowed to emigrate from the Soviet Union and is a leader of the Russian Jewish community in the State of Israel. He said that within the last few months his friends back in Russia were much less sanguine. were much less optimistic about their future in a democratic Russia. They had begun to see a change. a very troubling change amongst their neighbors and amongst their governments that indicated to them that it was time for them to leave.