“What was the purpose?” Ruby Chen asked rhetorically in an interview with the Washington Examiner. “If it’s sacrifice, how do you make sure that sacrifice was not in vain, and that it meant something? But if it only means that my son actually, as a hero, prevented Hamas terrorists from going out and finding Jewish people and killing them, which is something that I could say, but what is the bigger meaning? If it’s just postponing the next vicious cycle by the next five or 10 years, then what was the purpose?”

Chen, who views himself as a normal father thrust into the unfamiliar world of Washington politics and connections from his family’s advocacy for their son and the other hostages, believes it’s time for Israel to seek normalization with its neighbors, including Saudi Arabia, to end the cycles of violence that have plagued the region for decades.

“What I think is that the majority of the Israeli public believes that there is upside in having that normalization, and I personally lost a son due to this conflict,” he added. “Okay, how many more parents need to send a kid to the [Israeli military] with a percentage that [don’t return]? I think that more and more Israelis feel that way, that it’s been 80 years of this type of cycle happening.”

His new mission, dubbed the Middle East Legacy Initiative, is looking to see an expansion of the Abraham Accords, which was President Donald Trump’s landmark foreign policy achievement during his first term. The accords normalized relations between Israel and Sudan, the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain, Morocco, and, during his second term, Kazakhstan.

Chen said his Middle East Legacy Initiative is “about advocating for the expansion of the Abraham Accords, cementing the legacy of the president, but also building a sound foundation for the United States-Israeli relationship that is built on economic prosperity, and not about aid being given to the Israelis, but about finding ways to create a win-win situation and also secures maybe the future security of the state of Israel, but also the future of the relationship between the United States and Israel.”

The Biden administration was pursuing an Israeli-Saudi normalization agreement to build off the Abraham Accords prior to Hamas’s attack, which derailed those efforts, and that is what Hamas and its backers in Iran wanted. Trump, since returning to the White House for his second term, has sought to expand the accords, but with limited success to date.

In May, Trump said he was “mandatorily requesting” multiple Arab nations to join the accords as a means of negotiating the war in Iran that he started with Israel.

“I think that this president has very unique political capital and a very unique window of opportunity to be able to create that legacy that benefits the state of Israel, the countries in the Middle East,” Chen said. “Creating that integration that would hopefully prevent more vicious cycles happening and causing tragedy. My family already needed to go through that, but preventing maybe others from going through something similar.”

Trump signed a multibillion-dollar nuclear cooperation agreement with Saudi Arabia last month, and the deal is under review in Congress. He then said the U.S.-Saudi nuclear cooperation deal hinges on whether Saudi Arabia joins the Abraham Accords.

Chen was in Washington last week to attend the memorial for the late Sen. Lindsey Graham, with whom he had developed a close relationship due to his frequent trips to Washington to advocate the U.S. government to do more to try to secure the release of the hostages.

Chen met Graham about a week after Oct. 7, when Graham and other lawmakers, including then-Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY), traveled to Israel in the aftermath of the attack.

“You immediately saw how compassionate of a human being he was and how much he felt for the topic,” Chen said.

Graham invited Chen to attend then-President Joe Biden’s 2024 State of the Union address as his guest. Chen said Graham told him he was willing to fight for the hostages’ release even if it meant giving Biden a political victory.

Now Chen believes it is time for the president and Congress to push Graham’s vision for the Middle East into reality.

“What is the legacy of Sen. Graham? It was Saudi peace, and it was the economic integration of Israel into the region,” he said. “And I would challenge anyone, including the prime minister of Israel, what are you willing to do to enable that legacy of Lindsey to happen? Like that is this new way to relish Sen. Graham, not by going on a podium and saying nice things about him, but actually, what are you going to do to allow that vision that the senator had, which I believe is in the interest of the United States, countering China, Russia, in the Middle East. It’s about prosperity for U.S. economy.”

Saudi leaders have previously tied a willingness to normalize relations with Israel to the issue of Palestinian statehood, though that is a nonstarter for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. His governing coalition includes more radical members whom he needs to keep in the coalition, but he is facing his first electoral test this fall since the Hamas attacks and the subsequent regional war that has been going on since.

“I think that the administration could be more vivid or open in demanding from the prime minister to say openly in public if he gets reelected again, in the next 100 days of his new administration, the Israeli government, what will they do to support the Saudi normalization?” Chen said.

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He also acknowledged that those extremists in Netanyahu’s coalition and the policies they support present hurdles for normalization.

“I think that the Arab countries that see [their comments] have a very difficult time thinking that with this government it is possible to create normalization,” Chen said. “I think you need to look at it and understand what are the obstacles that are preventing that from happening. And at the moment, that is the only type of coalition that Netanyahu has, as the others have said that they will not join his coalition. So again, if the big picture is how do we move normalization, I find it very difficult to envision how that normalization happens with the same government if it is reelected.”