Leadership Quote by Howard Berman

“Unequivocal” is doing the heavy lifting here. Berman isn’t just staking out a position; he’s trying to pre-empt debate by framing support for Israel as a moral baseline rather than a policy choice. The sentence is built like a guardrail: “has been” invokes continuity and bipartisan tradition, “must continue to be” turns that tradition into obligation, and “right to exist” places the issue in the realm of existential legitimacy, where criticism can be made to sound like denial. It’s language designed to narrow the lane of acceptable disagreement.

The pairing of “right to exist” with “to be free from terror” also matters. It collapses a complex geopolitical reality into a clean binary: security versus terror. That framing is politically useful in Washington, especially in the post-9/11 era when “terror” became a master category that could justify hardline positions, expand security cooperation, and rally public sentiment. It’s also a strategic choice: once “terror” is the organizing concept, questions about occupation, settlement policy, civilian harm, or Palestinian political rights can be reframed as distractions from the core imperative of counterterrorism.

As a politician, Berman is signaling to multiple audiences at once: constituents, donors, party leadership, and foreign policy gatekeepers. The subtext is reassurance - that whatever tactical disagreements exist, the United States will not condition its relationship on Israel’s behavior in ways that could be read as weakening its security. The result is a sentence that reads like principle, but functions like insulation: a rhetorical shield for policy continuity under moral branding.