The U.S. Israel Education Association (USIEA) took several members of the Republican House of Representatives to Israel last week to meet with Israeli and Palestinian business leaders about the financial threats to the Jewish state and how cooperation could benefit all parties.

The visit came after the debacle caused by two Muslim freshman Congresswomen — Reps. Ilhan Omar (D-MN) and Rashida Tlaib (D-MI) — who were blocked from entering Israel because of their outspoken support for the Boycott Divestments and Sanctions (BDS) movement that aims to damage Israel’s economic stability for its alleged mistreatment of Palestinians.

Reps. Cathy McMorris Rodgers (R-WA), Ann Wagner (R-MO), Phil Roe (R-TN) and Bradley Byrne (R-AL) took that trip, according to the Jewish News Syndicate. 

“USIEA Executive Director Heather Johnston reported that she had witnessed a ‘paradigm shift’ in the senior members of Congress over the course of the mission,” JNS reported.

“Speaking to Israeli and Palestinian members of the Judea and Samaria Chamber of Commerce, they got a totally different narrative from the one in the news or the one told by political leaders who have taken sides,” Johnston told JNS. The report went on to say:

Spending two days in Judea and Samaria, the group investigated economic development and partnerships between Israelis and Palestinians, witnessing the ‘[positive] direction that the grassroots business development is going in and learning about the unstoppable people’s business movement that is well underway and is not going away.

Both Israelis and Palestinians expressed concerns about the BDS movement, JNS reported:

During visits to Hebron, Ariel’s Industrial Park and the Judea and Samaria Chamber of Commerce, the group met with Palestinian business leaders and employees who voiced their concerns about BDS.

Johnston said that the visiting representatives learned that 90 percent of the Palestinian population wants to work with Israel, but are unable to speak about this desire freely due to the Palestinian Authority’s anti-normalization policy.

BDS “hurts Palestinians and their opportunities perhaps even more than the Israelis because through this cooperation Palestinians are having opportunities they’ve never had before—jobs that are paying three to four times what they could get anywhere else,” the GOP delegation leader McMorris Rogers told JNS.

McMorris Rogers said this kind of cooperation is vital to any kind of peace solution between Israel and the Palestinians.

“To ensure this support, McMorris Rogers, who is the acting Republican representative to the United Nations General Assembly, said, ‘I will be talking to my colleagues and urging them to see first-hand what is happening in Judea and Samaria [in terms of] economic cooperation.’”

“Each member of Congress expressed hope in the future of the U.S.-Israel relationship, as well as Israeli-Palestinian economic partnerships in Judea and Samaria,” JNS reported. “Johnston posed that despite the small number of ‘strong yet antagonist voices in Congress,’ the U.S.-Israel relationship has never been stronger.”

“Israel has been our long-time greatest ally within the Middle East, cooperating on defense, technology, innovation, and agriculture, and Israel must remain our greatest ally—our support must be bipartisan, staunch and unequivocal,” McMorris Rogers said.

Follow Penny Starr on Twitter