MOULTRIE — Rep. Jack Kingston, R-Savannah, was part of a recent congressional delegation touring embattled Israel.

This was no pleasure trip. Kingston, whose district now encompasses part of Colquitt County and some of Moultrie, is on the Senate Foreign Operations Committee, which determines aid to other countries, and he and other congressmen journeyed to Israel just after Congress passed a resolution of solidarity with the Middle Eastern democracy.

He had gruesome things to report back to his constituents earlier this week.

Kingston told of a young Israeli woman who worked in a shoe store. Another woman came in with a bottle of water and asked to see a pair of shoes, he said, but when the clerk “bent down to help the customer try the shoes on, she was doused by the bottle of ‘water’ which turned out to be acid that destroyed much of her body and her once beautiful face.”

Kingston saw firsthand how everyday life in Israel is not everyday life. Malls and shopping centers are fenced. People must submit to metal detectors and regular searches by bomb squads and soldiers simply just to shop or socialize.

No one “from the prime minister on down” turns off their cellular phone, he said. Everybody always answers it, no matter where they are. This is because, he was informed by one woman, the citizens of Israel feel compelled to check on their loved ones.

“Many of the parents we talked about actually had to go through that and search for their kids and did not know that their kids were at the pizza place that blew up,” he said.

“One of the rescue workers told us that when you go in right after a bombing with all these bodies on the floor and wounded people, the one sound you always hear is the cell phones ringing.”

The congressmen met with Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, terrorist experts and a number of the Israeli Cabinet Ministers and saw illegal weapons confiscated from “normal” Palestinian citizens, he said, including grenade launchers, homemade bombs, sniper rifles, rocket launchers, rocket-propelled grenades, C4 explosives and suicide bomber belts.

The group came back Monday only to find there had been another attack in Tel Aviv, where they had been.

“The one thing that it has shown me is that their war is our war, because, as Bush said, you’re either on the side of terrorism or you’re against it. Just as innocent as someone in the World Trade Center was walking into work 9-11, so are the people who wait at bus stations and get blown up and go into pizza parlors or discotheques,” he said.

Kingston got some bad press in Canada when a broadcast made a point of saying that he and the group visited only Israelis and had no plans or intention to visit Palestinians, according to a recent press release.

“This isn’t true,” he said. “Before we left and once we arrived, we offered to meet with anyone, any Palestinians or members of the Palestinian Authority, except Arafat, and we were turned down.

“I think there are a lot of Palestinians who absolutely want peace, but there aren’t Israelis who are walking into Palestinian territory with suicide bombs. And the only time Israel goes to a place like Jenin is when they have information where some terrorists are hiding out.”

Israeli soldiers have been very sensitive in protecting innocent Palestinians, he said, while the Palestinians have been “deliberately blowing up innocent Israeli citizens.”

Kingston said the repercussions of siding with Israel could hit Americans in the gas tank if Arab nations rally behind Yasser Arafat and the Palestinian effort and give trade preference to China, Russia and European nations, which would “truly hurt” the U.S. economy.

“We do risk those relationships, but as we learned on 9-11, we can’t passively allow a nation to harbor terrorists, because we may be next,” he said.

The U.S. pulled its embassy out of Afghanistan in 1989, he said, and had the U.S. stayed, it might have recognized the terrorist effort earlier and cut it short. Kingston likened the Middle East to Afghanistan in this way.

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l is the only democracy in the Middle East, he said, and it routinely sides with the U.S. in the United Nations

“They’re fighting the same enemies we are,” he said. “The greater enemy is terrorism itself, and Israel has never perpetrated violence as a proaction to the Palestinians. It’s always reactive.”