Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) said Sunday Iran wants to make Israel “an impossible place to live” amid its aerial attacks on the U.S. ally over the weekend.
Well, Iran’s goal has always been the same and that is to make Israel in unlivable place. Iran does not believe that it can —Iran knows it cannot beat Israel militarily. But what it does aspire to do is make Israel an impossible place to live in and a place no one wants to visit,” Rubio told Jake Tapper on CNN’s “State of the Union.”
The U.S. helped Israel repel Iranian aerial attacks overnight, and Israeli officials are now meeting to discuss how they might want to respond to Iran. Iran said the attempted attacks were in response to a strike on an Iranian consulate in Syria that killed members of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps.
Rubio cautioned that Israel’s economy, especially the country’s tourism industry, could be at risk in the aftermath of the Iranian attacks.
“I hear a lot of talk right now about how this was a performative attack and how that none of them got through and this is all great. It’s good that those strikes did not get through and harm anybody,” he said.
“But what do you think tourism numbers are today in Israel and in the next couple of weeks, where we think business numbers are going to look like… All of this is harmful to the Jewish state, because that is the goal of Iran ultimately, and that’s why they want us out of Iraq. That’s why they want us out of Syria,” he continued.