Sen. Dave McCormick (R-PA) is planning to visit Israel as part of a congressional delegation sometime in late May, he revealed to Jewish Insider.

The freshman senator announced his plans when he sat down with JI in his Senate office late last week for a wide-ranging discussion about his first few months in office. McCormick offered thoughts during the conversation on his relationships with Sen. John Fetterman (D-PA) and Gov. Josh Shapiro (D-PA), first-term legislative priorities and his advocacy on issues important to the Jewish community. 

“We’re planning a CODEL, a limited CODEL in May to go to Israel and to go to the region. We haven’t quite figured out the schedule, but obviously, Israel will be central to that. Dina [Powell McCormick] and I went to Israel in January, after the horror of Oct. 7, and this will be a good chance to go back,” McCormick told JI, referencing his trip in the months following Hamas’ October 2023 attack.

McCormick, 59, has leaned in on his campaign promise to focus on combating antisemitism and backing Israel since his come-from-behind defeat of former Sen. Bob Casey (D-PA) in November. Since entering the Senate, he co-sponsored the Antisemitism Awareness Act (which was also backed by Casey) and took over for Sen. Todd Young (R-IN) as chair of the Senate Foreign Relations Subcommittee on Near East, South Asia, Central Asia, and Counterterrorism, a key panel on Middle East affairs and U.S. policy toward international organizations, including the United Nations. 

He said targeting Iran and encouraging the expansion of the Abraham Accords will be “at the top of the list” of his Middle East agenda, and also plans to be a vocal proponent of sanctions against Iran as a new member of the Senate Banking, Housing and Urban Affairs Committee. 

“In Pennsylvania we have a huge Jewish population, and it’s predominantly Democrat,” McCormick said. “I won a lot of those voters, even though they were registered Democrats, I think because I was a forceful advocate. And I wasn’t a forceful advocate for political reasons, it was just an obvious position to me.”

Noting that the two residences he’s called home in the tight-knit Pittsburgh neighborhood of Squirrel Hill have been within walking distance of the Tree of Life Synagogue, the site of the deadliest massacre of American Jews in U.S. history in 2018, McCormick explained that he came from “a community where you’re very aware of antisemitism and hatred taken to its extreme.”

“I think you can draw a line that’s not too hard to follow from what was happening in Gaza and the people funding, to the agitation, the agitators on campus. That thinking allowed me to take a very hard line on it,” McCormick said.

Reflecting on his 2024 trip to Israel, he said, “We went, as you recall, to [Kibbutz] Kfar Aza. We watched the 47-minute film [of Oct. 7 footage]. We saw this up close and personal. We met with hostage families. We’ve been meeting with hostage families. To internalize that and then come back and see those freaking kids and the agitators on Penn’s campus and at Pitt — one of the kids on my campaign at Pitt got physically accosted — it just brought it home to me, feeling like I needed to speak out as a strong voice because I deeply believed in it. These were my constituents.” 

McCormick visited the University of Pennsylvania last year to meet with Jewish students and said it was suggested to him that “at least half” of the protesters on campus “were not students.” 

“I think you can draw a line that’s not too hard to follow from what was happening in Gaza and the people funding, to the agitation, the agitators on campus. That thinking allowed me to take a very hard line on it,” McCormick said.

“The maddening thing about it was that it was all in violation of the law and campus policy. This was not like a college president wringing their hands saying, what’s the right thing to do? The actual regulation on campus, the law in the city of Philadelphia was very clear that this was in violation, but yet they didn’t enforce it.”

While he views himself as ideologically conservative, the Pennsylvania Republican told JI  he recognizes he represents a swing state alongside Fetterman and Shapiro, two high-profile Democrats with bipartisan reputations.

“I’m a conservative, but I’m a guy who wants to get stuff done. I made a bunch of promises. The best thing you can say about me is like, I will grade myself and I think the voters will grade me by how I do on my promises. Whatever it takes to deliver on my promises, I’ll work with President Trump, I’ll work across the aisle, I’ll work with Gov. Shapiro to deliver on those promises for Pennsylvania. I think that’s what people want,” McCormick said. 

Asked about how he, Fetterman and Shapiro have worked together in the months since he ended Casey’s Senate tenure, McCormick noted that Fetterman “was very close to Casey, and when I won, we went and sat down and we had a very forthright conversation. One of our rules is we keep our conversation to ourselves, but the bottom line is we agree on a bunch of things. Certainly on antisemitism and Israel we’re very much aligned.”

As for his relationship with Shapiro, McCormick acknowledged that the two don’t know each other well but have “talked a couple times.” 

“He and I are both focused on bringing economic development, jobs to Pennsylvania, and so whenever there’s an opportunity to do that, I’m a business guy for 30 years, I know a lot of these people that are talking about investing in Pennsylvania, wherever I can work with him to help do that, I’m gonna do that. I’m sure we have lots of differences too, but on the things we can agree on, if it’s good for Pennsylvania, they’re gonna find a very forthright, straightforward guy in me,” he said of the state’s star Democratic governor. 

McCormick says another focus of his work involves “thinking about big opportunities to change the trajectory of Pennsylvania,” pointing to “the intersection of artificial intelligence and energy” and potential areas of growth for the state in the defense industry.

“I think you should have a high degree of skepticism anytime anybody’s explicit public position or ideology is the destruction of your state. I think it’s hard to gain confidence that you can be on peaceful ground. I think that’s true for Iran. I also think it’s true for Hamas,” McCormick said. 

“We’ve got a huge opportunity in defense. The defense budget is going to increase. Pennsylvania has an enormous opportunity to be key to shipbuilding with our shipyard, robotics with Pittsburgh AI, and manufacturing of weapons and ammunition,” he said.

On the foreign policy front, McCormick has emerged as one of the GOP’s most outspoken pro-Israel voices among the newest class of senators. McCormick has aligned himself with President Donald Trump’s “maximum pressure” sanctions program against Tehran and repeatedly told JI he believes the regime should be viewed with extreme skepticism. 

“I think you should have a high degree of skepticism anytime anybody’s explicit public position or ideology is the destruction of your state. I think it’s hard to gain confidence that you can be on peaceful ground. I think that’s true for Iran. I also think it’s true for Hamas,” McCormick said. 

“Any discussion with Hamas, or negotiation that we or others would conduct with Iran, we’d have to come into it with a high degree of skepticism, a belief that it’s very hard to ensure that agreements would be enforced. I don’t know if I want to take that to the extreme — therefore you can only have military action or something like that — but I think we should take them at their word.”

The Pennsylvania senator declined to go into specifics, but said that “any scenario that has Iran within days or weeks, or even single-digit months of a nuclear capacity to reign terror on neighboring countries, Israel, U.S. proxies, the United States, would be unacceptable” in his view. 

“There’s certainly a path where you know there might be some arrangement where that capability is many, many years out, but I think the more you think that is something that is within the line of sight, the more unacceptable it is,” he said.