Ocasio-Cortez: Criticizing Netanyahu Isn’t Anti-Israel

Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez speaks to the media after a public housing town hall on August 29, 2019 in the Bronx. Image by Spencer Platt/Getty Images
WASHINGTON (JTA) — Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, the freshman Democrat congresswoman from New York, said her criticisms of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu should not be seen as shots at the Jewish state.
“The Netanyahu administration has been pursuing a lot of extraordinarily concerning policies,” Ocasio Cortez told Israel’s Channel 12 News in a recent press opportunity in New York.
She likened Netanyahu to President Donald Trump, who has repeatedly attacked her.
“To conflate an individual leader or ego with being against the entire country I think is hallmark behavior of folks like our president,” she said. “Just like we have the ability to criticize our president without being anti-American I think we can criticize the policies” of Netanyahu without being anti-Israel.
Trump has accused Ocasio-Cortez and three other progressive freshmen congresswomen of being anti-Semitic, apparently based on the fact that two of them, Rashida Tlaib of Michigan and Ilhan Omar, of Minnesota, back Israel boycotts. (Ocasio-Cortez and Ayanna Pressley of Massachusetts do not.)
Ocasio-Cortez said in the interview that Trump was instrumentalizing anti-Semitism to distract from his policies.
“It’s done completely in bad faith and they can no longer use this allegation of anti-Semitism to defend their unjust and inhumane policies,” she said. “You can’t use this cudgel of anti-Semitism to scare people away from pointing that out.”
The Forward is free to read, but it isn’t free to produce

I hope you appreciated this article. Before you go, I’d like to ask you to please support the Forward.
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. We’ve started our Passover Fundraising Drive, and we need 1,800 readers like you to step up to support the Forward by April 21. Members of the Forward board are even matching the first 1,000 gifts, up to $70,000.
This is a great time to support independent Jewish journalism, because every dollar goes twice as far.
— Rachel Fishman Feddersen, Publisher and CEO
2X match on all Passover gifts!
Most Popular
- 1
News A Jewish Republican and Muslim Democrat are suddenly in a tight race for a special seat in Congress
- 2
Film & TV What Gal Gadot has said about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict
- 3
Fast Forward The NCAA men’s Final Four has 3 Jewish coaches
- 4
Culture How two Jewish names — Kohen and Mira — are dividing red and blue states
In Case You Missed It
-
Fast Forward ‘Another Jewish warrior’: Fine wins special election for U.S. House seat
-
Fast Forward A Chicagoan wanted to protest Elon Musk — and put a swastika sticker on a Jewish man’s Tesla
-
Fast Forward NY attorney general orders car wash to stop ripping off Jews with antisemitic ‘Passover special’
-
Fast Forward Cory Booker proclaims, ‘Hineni’ — I am here — 19 hours into anti-Trump Senate speech
-
Shop the Forward Store
100% of profits support our journalism
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 comply with the following:
- Credit the Forward
- Retain our pixel
- Preserve our canonical link in Google search
- Add a noindex tag 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.