I grieve the Palestinian and Israeli lives lost yesterday, today, and every day. As long as our country provides billions in unconditional funding to… - Rashida Tlaib Al-Harbi

The federal government says to states, “You have to do certain things before we actually give you aid for roads and for different kinds of services. You know, you can’t discriminate. You can’t violate someone’s right.” We do it to states all the time. We need to do the same thing to foreign countries. We can’t sit back and just give it out freely without using it as leverage to promote peace and to promote true, real justice for all.

I was at the airport on my way to D.C., and I said, “I don’t know what to do. I don’t want to, you know, not be there, kind of in his face, like I’m not going anywhere, you’re going somewhere.” And for me, at that moment, I said to her, “But also, I don’t know about wearing white, because, I mean, the suffrage movement didn’t always — it didn’t include the brown, black women.” And so, it was hard for me. So, I remember, Ilhan is like, “Well, wear something else.” I was like, “Ooh, I’m going to wear a Palestinian thobe”...I couldn’t sit through some of it, and we ended up leaving, especially when they just went just full-out applause when they put that medal around Rush. And then — I know. I know. Do you know there was a 97-year-old man who was a guest of another colleague, who has been working really hard to try to get the Medal of Freedom for this man, who survived Nazi Germany? And he invented something to do with solar, profound accomplishments, profound strength, things that we need to be celebrating in our country. And he watched in the gallery to see somebody like that get the Medal of Freedom, when he’s sitting there, asking — you know, when he’s sitting there, just like, “I’ve done all these things in my life. I’ve survived all this.” And he did it from — you know, in this beautiful, gracious way, even after all that he’s been through.

I want you to know my mom, who’s from a small village in the West Bank. They’re literally glued. It’s like 5:00 or 6:00 in the morning. And now it’s more than that. They’re glued to the TV. My grandmother, my aunts, my uncles in Palestine are sitting by and watching their granddaughter [inaudible]. I want to tell them—I want to tell them—I want them to know, you know, as I uplift the families of the 13th Congressional District, I’ll uplift them, every single day, being who I am as a proud Palestinian American and woman and Muslim. I [inaudible] so much, because for so many years they’ve felt dehumanized. And I tell you, as a Palestinian, it means—you know, a lot of my strength comes from being Palestinian. But I can tell you, my mother’s—like the compassion this woman his, that is in me. She smiles every single time that she—this woman doesn’t even understand when people are being racist to her, because she believes that people can be better. And she is an inspiration to me in so many ways.