Israel "a place of freedom and democracy"

Former New York City mayor Rudolph Giuliani, accepting the "Friend of Israel" award at The Fellowship’s Washington Briefing.

I have always been a friend of Israel, but it really took on great meaning for me and in some ways helped to determine a lot of my thinking, political thinking, when I took a trip to Israel in the mid-1980s. It was the first time I had been to Israel, and emotionally it has so much power when you actually go and see all of the biblical sights Masada, and Jerusalem, and the Church of the Holy Sepulcher, and Nazareth, and Bethlehem, and the Jordan River. There’s something that kind of gets into your soul.

But the thing that really struck me when I was there was how small the country is, how difficult it is to defend, and what a magnificent thing the Israelis had built on the desert physically beautiful, agriculturally advanced, but most importantly, a place of freedom and democracy in a part of the world that knows mostly oppression and tyranny. And this is something that you have to see in order to really get into your soul and get to feel.

The friendship between the United States and Israel is like that. It’s deep, deep in our souls. It’s in our history, it’s in our religions, it’s in our political philosophy, and so your promoting of it is enormously important. I was just in Israel last week, and I brought with me a partner of mine and a friend who had never been there before. To watch somebody for the first time see all of these places and get a sense of what this really means is a wonderful thing to behold.

Promoting [the U.S.-Israel friendship] is really, really a terrific thing to do for both our countries, for the United States and for Israel. Explaining to us the very, very strong relationship between Judaism and Christianity, and the fact that we believe in the same God, we have the same set of principles, we have the same set of values, we’re really the same people, is remarkable, and I applaud you, Rabbi [Eckstein], I applaud all of you that run this organization. I’m very, very deeply touched by this award.