Skip To Content
JEWISH. INDEPENDENT. NONPROFIT.
Fast Forward

Ocasio-Cortez: Cutting Aid To Israel Is ‘Certainly On The Table’

Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez said in an interview with Yahoo News on Sunday that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is a “Trump-like figure” who is part of “the ascent of authoritarianism across the world.”

Speaking to Yahoo’s Skullduggery podcast, the freshman Democrat from New York said that Netanyahu’s pre-election pledge last week to annex the West Bank should affect American policy towards the Jewish state, and that there are “conversations happening in our caucus.”

When asked if she would support reducing American military aid to Israel, Ocasio-Cortez replied, “I think it’s certainly on the table….I hope to play a facilitating role in this conversation and a supportive role in this conversation. But I also know that there have been people leading on this for a long time, like Congresswoman [Betty] McCollum.”

McCollum, a 10-term Democrat from Minnesota, introduced a bill in 2017 to prevent American aid to Israel from being used to detain Palestinian children that received 30 Democratic co-sponsors. McCollum also said in 2018 that Israel’s Nation-State Law was “apartheid.”

Ocasio-Cortez received some criticism during her upset 2018 primary campaign victory after she described the deaths of Palestinians on the Gaza border as a “massacre.” But she seemed to backtrack when interviewed by PBS after her primary, telling Margaret Hoover that she planned to “learn and evolve on this issue” and that she was not “the expert on geo-politics on this issue.”

President Obama agreed in 2016 to a 10-year, $38 billion military aid deal with Israel, but the deal has not yet been approved by Congress.

Aiden Pink is the deputy news editor for the Forward. You can reach him at [email protected] or on Twitter, @aidenpink

A message from our CEO & publisher Rachel Fishman Feddersen

I hope you appreciated this article. Before you go, I’d like to ask you to please support the Forward’s award-winning, nonprofit journalism during this critical time.

At a time when other newsrooms are closing or cutting back, the Forward has removed its paywall and invested additional resources to report on the ground from Israel and around the U.S. on the impact of the war, rising antisemitism and polarized discourse.

Readers like you make it all possible. Support our work by becoming a Forward Member and connect with our journalism and your community.

—  Rachel Fishman Feddersen, Publisher and CEO

Join our mission to tell the Jewish story fully and fairly.

Republish This Story

Please read before republishing

We’re happy to make this story available to republish for free, unless it originated with JTA, Haaretz or another publication (as indicated on the article) and as long as you follow our guidelines. You must credit the Forward, retain our pixel and preserve our canonical link in Google search.  See our full guidelines for more information, and this guide for detail about canonical URLs.

To republish, copy the HTML by clicking on the yellow button to the right; it includes our tracking pixel, all paragraph styles and hyperlinks, the author byline and credit to the Forward. It does not include images; to avoid copyright violations, you must add them manually, following our guidelines. Please email us at [email protected], subject line “republish,” with any questions or to let us know what stories you’re picking up.

We don't support Internet Explorer

Please use Chrome, Safari, Firefox, or Edge to view this site.