Derrick Anderson, a retired Green Beret running as a Republican for Congress in Virginia’s 7th Congressional District, has a unique personal insight into the current crisis in the Middle East. During his time in the military, he served in Israel and some of its neighboring countries, and he said he has comrades still under fire in the region by Iranian proxy groups.

The 7th District seat, centered in the Washington exurb of Prince William County, is currently held by Rep. Abigail Spanberger (D-VA), who is leaving Congress to run for governor of Virginia. Anderson was recruited by the GOP’s House campaign arm and former Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) for the swing seat, and is backed by House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA), Majority Leader Steve Scalise (R-LA) and Majority Whip Tom Emmer (R-MN).

He told Jewish Insider in an interview last week that Congress needs to be “moving quickly… right now” to provide additional aid to the Jewish state in its war against Hamas.

“When people are letting politics muddy up the ability to support our most staunch ally in the Middle East, it’s infuriating to me,” he said. “The fact that it’s getting muddied up with a lot of the political gamesmanship, it’s not OK. We need to get the aid over there because they can’t finish this thing until they have the means to be able to do it.”

Anderson wasn’t specific about what sort of package he might support to provide that aid, including whether he would support a compromise package along the lines of the one passed by the Senate.

“We need to be getting funding to Israel ASAP,” he reiterated, when pressed on whether he’d support passing aid to Ukraine and the Palestinians packaged with Israel aid. “We could get an aid package together right now and send it to Israel right now… people are muddying it up with all these other things.”

Anderson suggested he’s skeptical of sending more U.S. funds to the Palestinians, noting that other countries are providing aid.

He told JI in a written response to a follow-up question that “we can’t write a blank check or send endless amounts of cash to Ukraine, but we need to make sure they can beat Putin because a win for Putin puts us and our allies at risk.”

“At the end of the day, this is about accountability and being fiscally responsible, while at the same time supporting our allies overseas,” he continued.

He said in the interview that the U.S. should not be talking about pushing for a two-state solution while Israel’s war in Gaza is ongoing, and should not do so until Hamas no longer poses a threat to Israel.

“They still have not been able to clear Gaza yet,” he said. “A two-state solution can only work if there’s support for Israel and it’s ironclad, [and] Israel knows that we always have their back. So for the time being, we need to be supporting Israel. We need to destroy Hamas.”

Anderson has had deployments across the Middle East, including Iraq, Afghanistan, Jordan, Lebanon, Israel and Bahrain, around the time that ISIS was asserting itself across the region. During that time, he trained with Israeli Defense Forces special operations personnel in Israel, and later in the U.S. He said that IDF personnel had shown him around the area, including Jerusalem, the West Bank, the Gaza border and terrorist tunnel systems, and he heard rocket fire in southern Israel.

“If you don’t go to Israel, if you don’t physically see it, it’s sometimes hard to understand what exactly is going on there, and the problems and the difficulties that they face,” Anderson said. “Unless you’re physically witnessing it, unless you’re physically in that world, it’s hard to understand what the Israelis go through on a daily basis.”

Anderson said his positions on Israel and the Middle East are based on both his own experience as a service member in the Middle East and accounts from friends and colleagues still serving in the region, who he said have been injured in drone attacks by Iranian-backed proxy groups.

To stem the tide of these attacks, Anderson called on the administration to stop providing sanctions waivers to the regime, which he connected directly to Oct. 7 and the subsequent proxy attacks. He said in a follow-up response that this approach would further help prevent Hezbollah from opening a second front to Israel’s north.

He also told JI in the interview that the Biden administration should take a more aggressive approach in responding to attacks on U.S. forces in the Middle East — conducting more retaliatory strikes and on more important targets.

“My guys that I’ve spoken to on the ground said that the targets that they were targeting were not actually real targets, they were soft targets,” Anderson said. “Their responses were lackluster at best. I’m not necessarily saying that we have to go into Iran specifically, but there’s plenty of target-rich environments… that the Biden administration could have taken advantage of.”

Anderson said in response to follow-up questions that the U.S. should be a “clear beacon” in favor of growing ties between Israel and its neighbors, as well as supporting Israel and fighting antisemitism.

“We know what right looks like with the Abraham Accords and the pre-Oct. 7 negotiations between Israel and other Middle Eastern countries, but bad actors in the region wholeheartedly hate that peace was in the air and disrupted those talks with the horrendous Oct. 7 attack,” he said.

He added, “The first step in confronting antisemitism is calling it out quickly and clearly. There’s a growing, festering group of anti-Semitic Democrats in Congress and I’m not going to stand for that type of hate.”

Anderson told JI in the interview that the administration’s chaotic withdrawal from Afghanistan — where he spent six months and lost comrades — was a key factor in prompting him to run for Congress; he also blamed the withdrawal for subsequent foreign policy crises.

“That really, really hit hard for me,” Anderson said. “I was sick and tired of being upset about it so I decided to do something about it… and it’s going to be an honor to represent the people that raised me, I’m really excited about that.”

Anderson’s main Republican opponent is Cameron Hamilton, a former Navy SEAL who also trained with Israeli special forces and has flip-flopped on his support for additional aid to Israel. On the Democratic side, the field includes Eugene Vindman, a well-known Trump-era whistleblower and war crimes prosecutor, and a series of local political officials.

Anderson is second in overall fundraising in the field, with $464,000 raised at the end of 2023, trailing well behind Vindman, who has raised more than $2 million, but outpacing Hamilton and others on the Democratic side.