On a trip to Israel, Saudi Arabia and Jordan last week, Reps. Ro Khanna (D-CA) and Jimmy Panetta (D-CA) met with regional leaders on a range of issues, including Israel’s anticipated retaliatory strike against Iran, the ongoing impacts of the yearlong war and the prospects for peace moving forward.

Khanna and Panetta traveled with fellow members of the House Armed Services Committee — Chairman Mike Rogers (R-AL) and Rep. Seth Moulton (D-MA) — to Israel and Jordan last week, with Khanna and Panetta continuing on to Saudi Arabia.

They met with officials including Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, Foreign Minister Israel Katz and other senior national security officials; Jordan’s King Abdullah II, top defense officials and civic leaders; and Saudi Arabia’s foreign minister and a top advisor to its crown prince.

Both Khanna and Panetta urged Israel to undertake a limited response to Iran’s recent ballistic missile attack in a way that prevents further escalation of the conflict and a continued back-and-forth.

“My hope is that Israel answers in a way that convinces Iran that any future escalation is totally foolhardy and should never happen, so that it is a sufficient deterrence, but that it also gives Iran a way of not having to escalate further into a war, into targeting oil fields or into mobilizing a million-person army,” Khanna told Jewish Insider on Monday.

He said that Jordanian King Abdullah II expressed significant concern about escalation into a broader regional war.

Panetta told JI he believes U.S. influence has convinced Israel to pursue “a limited retaliation that will sort of simmer the situation and gives Iran some breathing room to figure out how they want to go forward, considering their proxies have taken a hit and now, obviously, they’re going to take a hit with this limited retaliation.”

Panetta said the U.S. has pushed Israel not to go after Iran’s leadership or nuclear facilities.

Pressed on the broader, ongoing threat from Iran, including its nuclear program, Khanna framed a war with Iran as a nonstarter, arguing that it would be difficult to locate and eliminate Iran’s nuclear program, that its ballistic missile arsenal would be able to overwhelm Israel’s defense systems and that Iran has a sizable army it could mobilize.

“I don’t think even people in Israel want a war with Iran, and they understand the consequences of it,” he said. “That would be a brutal war.”

He said that given Iran’s advanced nuclear enrichment, the U.S. and its allies should focus on preventing and deterring further progress on weaponization through multilateral sanctions, and ultimately some version of a new nuclear agreement.

“That requires international leadership, because just the United States putting sanctions isn’t enough, if China is going to continue to buy the oil, and Russia is going to continue to buy the oil,”  Khanna said. “What we need is a president to coordinate the international community to put the kind of sanctions on Iran that are going to be internationally upheld.”

Panetta said that it remains to be seen how Iran will respond to Israel’s successes in degrading some of its deterrent capabilities — Hamas, Hezbollah and the Houthis. He offered several possibilities, including that Iran will try to rebuild its proxies, focus on acquiring nuclear weapons, turn to Russia and other allies as a deterrent and/or attempt additional direct attacks on Israel.

“These are all things that I think need to be taken into account to… provide long-term stability for the region, but I think right now, in the short term, I believe that the powers at play understand that there can’t be a regional conflict,” Panetta said. “There’s going to be retaliation, but they cannot let it get to a regional conflict.”

Despite disagreements with Israel over its strategy and operations in Gaza over the past year — including skipping Netanyahu’s speech to Congress — Khanna said that he felt it was important for him to sit down with Israeli leaders.

“I have always believed that Israel is an important ally of the United States, and I have always believed in engagement and dialogue, even where I’ve had disagreements,” Khanna said. “I come from a tradition with admiration for the approach of Yitzhak Rabin, Shimon Peres, Ehud Barak, and want and believe that a two-state solution is about the security of Israel and the self-determination of the Palestinian people.”

He said he had faced “pressure and protest” by some on the Hill and from outside groups not to go to Israel, but said that dialogue and direct meetings with Israeli leadership and others in the region are “the only way we’re going to have peace.”

“There’s a way to honor the relationship of the United States and Israel, recognize that strong alliance, and also put forward ideas that are ultimately, I think, going to be both in the interest of Israel’s security and the Palestinian people finding self-determination, and build a coalition in the United States for support of that relationship that includes a lot of progressives and young people,” Khanna continued.

Khanna added that he’d communicated to Netanyahu the ways that young Americans had “been shattered and deeply disturbed by the massive loss of life” in the war. 

Khanna said his focus for the trip was on the future of Gaza, with self-determination and civil governance for the Palestinian people and security for Israel, including ensuring that Hamas cannot return to power.

Arguing that bilateral Israeli-Palestinian or trilateral Israeli-Palestinian-U.S. negotiations have not proven successful, Khanna called for broader multilateral talks toward Israeli-Palestinian peace, centering the Israeli and Palestinian people but including Saudi Arabia, Egypt, the United Arab Emirates, Jordan and other regional powers, in addition to European allies.

And he said that the Palestinian representation at those talks must include not just the Palestinian Authority — whose President Mahmoud Abbas praised Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar as a “great national leader” — but also Palestinian civil society representatives and young Palestinians.

“We have to talk about what is the way to recovery? What is the way to healing? What is the way to some kind of reconciliation? There’s no other alternative but to try,” Khanna said, adding that he hopes the recent Israeli killings of Hamas and Hezbollah leaders will create opportunities for new leadership that can provide self-determination for the Palestinians and peace in Lebanon.

Panetta said a key focus for him on the trip was on examining how Israel’s recent tactical successes against Hamas and Hezbollah can “translate into political successes, into diplomatic successes.”

He laid out two potential views of the path forward — a pessimistic one, that Israel’s operations have damaged its and the United States’ reputation in the region, something he said the group heard in Jordan.

“But there’s also the optimistic view of what Israel has done and where it can go,” Panetta continued. “These are solid steps forward, in which they’ve sort of, I would say, almost calmed the situation to a certain extent.”

Panetta described Sinwar, who was killed by Israeli troops last week, as having been a major obstacle to peace. He said he hopes that ”now the Gazan people actually rise up against Hamas” and that Hamas leadership — now concentrated outside the country — will engage in “serious negotiations” about returning to the three-phase cease-fire plan the U.S. had laid out. Panetta said that, based on his meetings in the Middle East, he believes that there is an opportunity to proceed down that path.

Panetta pushed back against those who have called on the U.S. to withdraw support for Israel or to “stand up and yell a one-word slogan.” Such an approach, he said, would give the U.S. less capacity to influence Israel and is not an effective substitute for intensive and ongoing American diplomatic engagement.

Looking toward the longer-term prospects for peace, Panetta emphasized that the Palestinian Authority’s leadership needs to be overhauled so that it has both external and internal credibility. But, in the shorter term, issues with the PA “[don’t] mean that you can’t at least start to get to a point in which you stabilize the conflict,” through hostage and cease-fire talks “in order to get to a point where you can have credible discussions with credible partners.”

Panetta said he’s also hopeful that talks with Hezbollah can proceed that will see the group move back from Israel’s northern border, but added that strengthening the Lebanese government and military — with support from other regional powers — to contain Hezbollah will be critical.

Panetta, who was in Saudi Arabia on Oct. 6, 2023, to discuss normalization with Israel, said that “things have changed” in the year since the Hamas terror attacks.

Panetta said that Saudi Arabia continues to be willing to normalize relations with Israel, “but now the Palestinian issue is at the forefront, and that’s something that they have to take into account as one of the cornerstones of any negotiation for their normalization, one of many now. So I think it’s more of a factor when it comes to their willingness to have normalization with Israel.”

He said that these changes — as well as increased Israeli resistance to a two-state solution — “shouldn’t stop the leadership from continuing to work toward normalization,” even if the “hurdles are a bit taller now after Oct. 7.”

“It doesn’t mean we can’t get over [the hurdles] if we have the political will,” Panetta said.

Khanna said Arab states are also willing to support efforts toward new governance in Gaza, but not to take over administrative duties in Gaza themselves.

From his meetings in Saudi Arabia and Jordan, Khanna said that the two are “willing to be part of the talks” but “want to see real commitment to a pathway towards Palestinian self-determination and a Palestinian state, and that it can’t just be rhetorical. It can’t just be ‘OK, you put in money, and we want you to do security, but there’s no real pathway to Palestinian statehood.’ I think they need to see that it’s a real plan towards that.”

Khanna said that the path forward will require both security for the Israelis as well as true self-determination from the Palestinians — “that it’s not just some imposed government on them, that they have some say in it.”

Khanna and Panetta also defended U.S. pressure against Israel’s military incursion into Rafah, even though that was where a routine Israeli patrol ultimately engaged and killed Sinwar.

Khanna, who had urged Israel against a Rafah operation, said that he was “glad that they found Sinwar and that justice was brought to Sinwar” but said that he had been concerned that the civilian death toll and suffering in Gaza “was too high, and that going into Rafah would have furthered that death toll of innocent Palestinians.”

“I wish that there was a way to have gotten people like Sinwar and others responsible without the dropping of these missiles on so many sites where civilians have died,” he said. “It’s easy to say that sitting in the United States. I don’t know if there was another way to conduct the operations that would have gotten Sinwar and terrorists without having the awful death toll, but that’s what motivated my concern.”

Panetta said that the administration “has continued to put the pressure that they felt is necessary on Israel. Now it doesn’t mean Israel listened all the time, and I think that’s clear, be it with the successes, but also, unfortunately, the failures of their operation, especially when it comes to the amount of civilian death toll.”

Panetta said he believes U.S. pressure has been successful particularly in ensuring increased humanitarian aid into Gaza and that he expects the U.S. to continue to offer “the appropriate recommendations that we feel are necessary to ensure that we get through this and that Israel acts within accordance of international law, as well as within proportionality.”

Pressed on the Rafah operation’s success in eliminating Sinwar, Panetta said that “there can always be second-guessing and Monday-morning quarterbacking, especially in conflicts,” which will continue, and that “you’ve got to give Israel credit” for their success in undermining Hamas, decapitating Hezbollah and reestablishing military deterrence, while again emphasizing the need to leverage those military victories into political ones.

The visit was Khanna’s first time in Israel since Oct. 7, and he described it as a “different country, unfortunately a shaken country.” He said that, before visiting, he “did not understand” the “raw” ongoing trauma that Israeli people are feeling a year on from the Oct. 7 attack and amid ongoing internal displacements inside Israel — trauma that he said is also being felt in Gaza and Lebanon.