Rabbi Shmuley: Cory Booker Fled the Terror Rockets He Helped Pay For in Iran Deal

JERUSALEM, Israel — I spent Thursday in the South of Israel accompanying Israel’s Minister of Heritage Amichai Eliyahu to the sites of the October 7^th massacre. We saw things that will scar me forever.

Homes burned to a crisp with whole families inside. Children’s bedrooms painted completely in blood. Thousands of bullet holes that shattered every car window and murdered the occupants inside. And everywhere – worst of all – the ever-present and very pungent scent of death. I will be sickened and traumatized by these gruesome sites for the rest of my life.

I arrived a day after President Joe Biden showed tremendous moral and physical courage by being the first president to ever travel to show solidarity with Israel in wartime. He had been proceeded by other courageous American lawmakers and leaders, including Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY).

But not all American elected officials showed that solidarity and courage.

When the rocket barrage started and the terrorists infiltrated early on Saturday, October, 7, a day that will live infamy, beginning an attack that would end in the brutal slaughter of 1,400 soldiers and civilians, the disemboweling of pregnant women, and the decapitation and incineration of babies, arguably, the highest ranking American official in all of Israel was our own junior Senator from New Jersey, Cory Booker.

The day was Simchat Torah, a festival that had been special to Cory ever since we met each other on that exact day 32 years ago in Oxford, and danced on a table together with hundreds of other students. In the years that followed, Cory and I had always tried to spend Simchat Torah together — that is, until 2015, when Cory voted to give Iran access to $150 billion and to legitimize their nuclear program. He thought that our very close friendship would insulate him against my public criticism.

He thought wrong.

I called a press conference with our governor at the time, Chris Christie, at Chabad of Rutgers University and slammed his vote as aiding and abetting genocide and supporting global terror. Cory, wounded that his closest friend – a rabbi who had delivered hundreds of public speeches with him in synagogues across the world, would attack him – skipped that year’s Simchat Torah celebrations at my community.

But even I could not have predicted the confluence of circumstances that would surround Cory’s vote to fund Iran.

I could not have predicted that eight years later, on the exact day of Simchat Torah, Iranian money would put Cory’s own life in danger while Cory was actually in Israel, in its capital of Jerusalem, jogging on its streets, as 30 miles away Jewish women were being raped and burned alive by the Iranian proxy, Hamas.

Even I could not have predicted that Cory would be in Israel – on a fluke, or should we say providence, as he had to give a speech the following Tuesday in Israel – at the very moment that the worst possible fruition of his vote to fund Iran would be realized.

Even I could not have predicted that Cory would be there to actually hear the sirens as they blasted in Jerusalem, making him feel immediately imperiled.

And even I could not have predicted the precipitous fall of my once-closest friend in terms of his own personal courage, honor, and bravery. That he would immediately flee the country – somehow managing to leave within 24 hours of the attack, as tends of thousands of regular Americans sought an exit from the country.

Just two days Later, Senator Joni Ernst, Republican of Iowa, led a bipartisan delegation of Republicans and Democrats to the same city of Jerusalem in a show or solidarity with the Israeli people.

Just six days later, the most powerful Senator of all, Chuck Schumer, led another bipartisan delegation of Senators that included the only female Jewish Senator in the chamber, Jackie Rosen, Democrat of Nevada.

So why was Booker so eager to leave?

Five of our nine children are currently in Israel, including two soldiers sons in the Israel Defense Forces (IDF): Mendy, who is a reservist and was called up on his phone while he had just been literally called up to bless the Torah in synagogue; and Yosef, 22 years old, trained as a combat solider in one of the IDF’s elite units, and who is getting married in the last week of October. We also have our youngest son, Dovid Chaim, just 17 years old, in yeshiva (seminary) there.

We do not think of ourselves as a particularly brave family, and our children, of course, do not have anything like the kind of special protection in Israel that would be accorded a United States Senator. Yet none of our kids even dreamed of asking us to come back home to the United States.

Our daughter, Rochel Leah, who married an Israeli Chabad Rabbi from Ashkelon in middle of COVID here in the United States and then moved to her husband’s synagogue in Lauder Hill, Florida, had never visited her in-laws’ home in Ashkelon since her wedding, and was there for Sukkot with our son-in-law, Rabbi Itamar. At 6:30am she awoke to a hellscape of bombs, mortars, sirens, rockets, and terrorists running right outside the family home. They spent the entire Simchat Torah shivering in a bomb shelter, hearing the desperate cries of victims on the outside.

Even she did not think of leaving Israel, and immediately met me my wife Debbie, our three married daughters and our ten grandchildren when we arrived in Israel today for our son’s much-scaled-back wedding. Rochel Leah and her husband immediately accompanied me to the kibbutzim and agricultural farms where more than 1000 had savagely murdered.

Are we afraid? Somewhat. Are we worried? Yes, but mostly about our sons in the army. Did we think of canceling our trip to Israel?

Hell no.

And when compared with eighty-year-old President Biden making one of the most high-profile visits of his presidency to the Jewish States while the country is actively at war, Cory’s departure appears a real letdown.

It was I who arranged Cory’s first trip to Israel and, irony of all ironies, it ended up happening on the exact day that the Lubavitcher Rebbe, Menachem Mendel Schneerson, leader of the Chabad movement, died in June 1994. I had to send Cory to Israel with one of my Oxford students as I now flew in the exact opposite direction, to the Rebbe’s funeral in New York.

A year later, I took Cory to Israel myself, and he fell in love with the country and its people. But even those feelings of connection could not negate his political ambition to win the White House, and his belief that he could not afford to alienate President Baack Obama, the first African-American president, on his signature foreign policy issue, the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), or what we all now know as the catastrophe of the Iran deal.

I pleaded with Cory not to support it. I told him that a country calling for the genocide of my people was the ultimate red line. I told him that Iran funds Hezbollah and Hamas, murders innocent people around the world, and is ideologically dedicated in words, speech, and deed to the annihilation of every Jew on the planet. Cory never disagreed with me. But the pleas of a friend who is a rabbi versus pressure from the most powerful man on earth was never evenly matched.

I lost Cory’s vote and Cory lost my friendship.

How strange it is, all these things now happening in New Jersey.

Just two weeks before Hamas broke 30 openings in Israel’s security fence and murdered 250 young people at a music festival on Sukkot, Israel’s greatest Democratic champion in the United States Senate, Robert Menendez, was indicted by the FBI for bribery and allegedly serving as a foreign agent for Egypt.

Cory, who in 2017 had testified as a character witness for Menendez in his first corruption trial and said of him that he was “honest and honorable… when he gives you his word, you can take it to the bank,” this time decided to turn on Menendez and called publicly for his resignation.

I guess Menendez has now discovered of Cory what I discovered, what the Jewish community discovered, and what the State of Israel discovered: That Cory’s word is a bounced check.

Menendez, who has the presumption of innocence, didn’t have 48 hours from being charged before Cory abandoned him and demanded he leave the Senate. No doubt when Cory said earlier that you could take Menendez’ word to the bank, he was speaking of Lehman Brothers or Merryll Lynch.

My own opinion is that rather than see Jewry and Israel’s great friend Robert Menendez – who fought the Iran deal at great personal political peril – resign before he even goes before a jury, it’s Cory who ought to follow his own advice and resign from office.

After all, who did more harm to America? Menendez, who is accused of working with a foreign ally, Egypt, which fights the Muslim Brotherhood; or Cory, who voted to fund America’s foremost enemy, who has just facilitated the murder of 30 Americans in Israel by Hamas, while taking another 20 as hostages, among more than 200?.

Yes, I know. One action was illegal and the other was not. But from a strictly moral perspective – and Cory is nothing if not someone who is always preaching to others about morality – giving $150 billion to murderers, who then deployed the fungibility of that money to arm Hamas and murder 1,400 Israelis, is infinitely, infinitely worse.

Rabbi Shmuley Boteach served as Rabbi to Oxford University for 11 years when he founded the Oxford L’Chaim Society, which became Oxford’s second largest student group and where Cory Booker served as student President. Rabbi Shmuley is the author of “The Israel Warrior” and “Kosher Hate”. Follow him on Instagram and Twitter @RabbiShmuley.