{"id":567021,"date":"2026-07-30T14:46:20","date_gmt":"2026-07-30T14:46:20","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/567021\/"},"modified":"2026-07-30T14:46:20","modified_gmt":"2026-07-30T14:46:20","slug":"arkansas-lawmaker-visits-israel-to-see-iron-dome-alongside-us-delegation","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/567021\/","title":{"rendered":"Arkansas lawmaker visits Israel to see Iron Dome alongside US delegation"},"content":{"rendered":"

Rep. Aaron Pilkington had an extra day in Israel, and he spent it in an industrial park north of Tel Aviv<\/a>.<\/p>\n

The Arkansas Republican came with a delegation of state legislators organized by the Combat Antisemitism<\/a> Movement. The July itinerary ran through the Knesset, Yad Vashem, Kibbutz Nir Oz, the Supernova music festival site, and a meeting with US Ambassador Mike Huckabee. The stop Pilkington mentioned first is the one that was not on the schedule.<\/p>\n

\u201cI went to go and tour a data center over there in Tel Aviv owned by Serverfarm, which is the same company that\u2019s building one in my district in Clarksville,\u201d he said. \u201cI\u2019ve been to other data centers, but to see one that\u2019s owned by the same company was really great.\u201d<\/p>\n

Serverfarm operates ISR1 [Israel Data Center], a 100,000-square-foot facility just north of Tel Aviv. It is also developing a multi-building campus in Clarksville, Arkansas, inside Pilkington\u2019s District 45, which local reporting has described as a $6.6 billion project. The company says it plans to finish the first two buildings by January 2028.<\/p>\n

Pilkington, a healthcare<\/a> administrator now in his fifth term in the Arkansas House, was the lead House sponsor of House Bill 1444, which became Act 548 in April 2025 and amended the state\u2019s sales-and-use-tax exemption for data centers. He does not claim to have brought Serverfarm to Clarksville, and the public record does not show that he did.<\/p>\n

\"ArkansasArkansas lawmaker Rep. Aaron Pilkington visits the Western Wall in Jerusalem, Israel. (credit: COMBAT ANTISEMITISM MOVEMENT)Why the US lawmaker defends the aid<\/p>\n

It was his first trip, and he said he had wanted to make it for years.<\/p>\n

\u201cAs a Christian, it\u2019s always fascinating to visit the Holy Land,\u201d he said. \u201cBut then of course, in Arkansas we have a deep connection to Israel.\u201d<\/p>\n

That connection is concrete. In November 2025, a joint venture between Israel\u2019s Rafael\u00a0<\/a>Advanced Defense Systems and the US defense firm Raytheon [of RTX Corporation] opened a manufacturing facility in East Camden, Arkansas, producing Tamir interceptors used by the Iron Dome and a related American variant. The Arkansas Economic<\/p>\n

Development Commission puts the investment at roughly $63 million and projects as many as 60 jobs. East Camden lies outside Pilkington\u2019s district, but it sits at the center of his argument.<\/p>\n

Asked what he tells younger Republicans who question US aid to Israel, a debate that has grown louder inside his own party, he answered with a payroll.<\/p>\n

\u201cA lot of that aid gets spent in American factories,\u201d he said. \u201cIt comes back to us in a different way. For us, I say it\u2019s helping the economy of Arkansas.\u201d<\/p>\n

The picture is more complicated than that. The current US-Israel security assistance memorandum covers fiscal years 2019 through 2028 and pledges $38 billion, subject to congressional appropriations. Most Foreign Military Financing (FMF) is tied to US defense procurement, and Israel\u2019s longstanding permission to spend a portion of the funds on Israeli-made goods is being phased out entirely by 2028. Pilkington\u2019s underlying point, that a meaningful share of the money circulates through American factories, holds.<\/p>\n

\"ArkansasArkansas lawmaker Rep. Aaron Pilkington visits Israel’s Knesset in Jerusalem. (credit: COMBAT ANTISEMITISM MOVEMENT)<\/p>\n

His second argument is the phrase he used in a statement released by the delegation organizers.<\/p>\n

\u201cIsrael is the vanguard of Western civilization over there,\u201d he said. \u201cIf Israel is gone, the next person on the list is the United States of America. When you see what they say, I believe them when they tell us \u2018Death to Israel, death to America.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n

\"ArkansasArkansas lawmaker Rep. Aaron Pilkington visits Israel alongside a delegation organized by the Combat Antisemitism Movement. (credit: COMBAT ANTISEMITISM MOVEMENT)<\/p>\n

\u201cI would much rather send aid money to Israel and fight these extremists over there than have Israel be wiped off the map and then now be fighting them on our shores,\u201d he added.<\/p>\n

What surprised him? Not the security situation but the construction.<\/p>\n

\u201cI was shocked at the amount of cranes,\u201d he said. He asked whether Israel had the American problem of neighborhood opposition to development. \u201cThe people I talked to were like, \u2018That\u2019s not really a thing here. We\u2019re constantly trying to grow.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n

Then the farmland. \u201cThe amount of irrigation you have going on and the amount of agriculture that you\u2019ve got going on in Israel was fascinating,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n

Agriculture is Arkansas\u2019s largest industry, contributing more than $24.3b. a year, and Huckabee, the former Arkansas governor now serving as ambassador, pressed the delegation on exactly that overlap. \u201cOne thing Ambassador Huckabee talked to us about was just the technologies that are being made in Israel when it comes to farming could be useful back in the United States.\u201d<\/p>\n

He was also surprised by the size and visibility of Israel\u2019s Muslim population, a reaction he traced to time spent in Jaffa [part of the Tel Aviv-Yafo Municipality].<\/p>\n

Asked where else Arkansas and Israel might do business, he named technology transfer and given his day job, medicine. \u201cSome of the breakthroughs that are happening in the research and development that\u2019s happening in Israel can have massive effects and help us to address some of the health crises that are happening in Arkansas.\u201d<\/p>\n

Pilkington was the lead House sponsor of the Healthy Moms, Healthy Babies Act, which became law in February 2025 as a $45.3 million maternal and infant health package. Its provisions include presumptive Medicaid eligibility for pregnant women, remote ultrasounds, and remote blood-pressure and glucose monitoring for rural patients.<\/p>\n

\u201cIf we\u2019re going to be pro-life, then we should take care of these mothers and take care of these babies,\u201d he said. \u201cThey\u2019re the most vulnerable in society.\u201d<\/p>\n

Campuses and faith<\/p>\n

In April 2024, Pilkington was the lead sponsor of HR1042, a resolution condemning displays of antisemitism on US university campuses, adopted by the Arkansas House that month. He was candid about its limits.<\/p>\n

\u201cResolutions are not statute, so they\u2019re not as strong as an actual piece of legislation,\u201d he said. \u201cBut it sent a signal to all our universities that we were not going to tolerate those kinds of attitudes.\u201d<\/p>\n

He pointed to the later dismissal of a University of Arkansas professor over social media material that university attorneys characterized as violent and antisemitic. The University of Arkansas System Board of Trustees upheld the termination of Shirin Saeidi, former director of the King Fahd Center for Middle East Studies, in May 2026.<\/p>\n

Saeidi and her attorney disputed the university\u2019s interpretation and argued that the action threatened academic freedom, and a faculty committee had unanimously recommended her reinstatement. There is no documented connection between the case and Pilkington\u2019s resolution.<\/p>\n

A convert to Catholicism and a father of four, Pilkington said the religious sites mattered to him personally. He attended a Mass in Jerusalem and visited the Church of the Holy Sepulchre. \u201cIt was really an amazing, once-in-a-lifetime opportunity,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n

The delegation also visited Shiloh and the Psagot winery in Samaria. Pilkington did not hedge.<\/p>\n

\u201cTo me this is Israel; they have every right to be here,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n

The Clarksville project, whose Israeli counterpart he toured, has drawn questions at home. A community forum in July drew more than 100 residents asking about transparency, electricity infrastructure, environmental impact, public financing, and how many permanent jobs the campus would produce. Pilkington was out of the country at the time, in Israel. He has since disputed the suggestion that residents were deliberately kept in the dark.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Rep. Aaron Pilkington had an extra day in Israel, and he spent it in an industrial park north…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":567022,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[35421,85,39558,46,14406,43,116,1032],"class_list":["post-567021","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-israel","tag-combat-antisemitism-movement","tag-il","tag-iron-dome","tag-israel","tag-knesset","tag-news","tag-tel-aviv","tag-united-states"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/567021","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=567021"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/567021\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/567022"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=567021"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=567021"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=567021"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}