Gregory Meeks, who said West Bank annexation spending was off-limits with US defense aid, likely to chair House Foreign Affairs panel
Graphic by Angelie Zaslavsky
By Ron Kampeas December 3, 2020
WASHINGTON (JTA) — Rep. Brad Sherman, a solidly pro-Israel Democrat from California, has withdrawn from the race to chair the House Foreign Affairs Committee — a move that likely will lead to Rep. Gregory Meeks of New York becoming the first Black chairman of the influential panel.
Sherman withdrew after finishing last in a preliminary vote by the House Democratic Steering and Policy Committee. In the vote Tuesday, first reported by Jewish Insider, the centrist Meeks had 29 votes to 13 for Joaquin Castro, a Texas progressive, and 10 for Sherman, also a centrist.
All three lawmakers auditioned for the job in meetings with the centrist Democratic Majority for Israel and the liberal J Street Middle East policy group. They all said that U.S. money should not be used to annex West Bank territory, a move that Israel’s government considered earlier this year.
Meeks and Sherman later clarified that they meant that money allocated for defense assistance was, according to U.S. law, off-limits for spending in the West Bank. Castro did not stand down from his claim that using the money for annexation would invite reconsideration of some assistance to Israel.
Meeks, who has been endorsed by the Congressional Black Caucus, looks poised to win when the full Democratic caucus votes later this week. He would succeed Rep. Eliot Engel, the longtime New York congressman who was ousted in a primary by a progressive challenger. Engel, like Sherman, had a long pro-Israel record.
In a statement, Sherman said the Democratic Steering and Policy Committee “recognized Gregory Meeks’s capacity, eloquence, and experience, and the fact that he would make history as the first African American Chair of the Foreign Affairs Committee.”
It’s our birthday and we’re still celebrating!
We hope you appreciated this article. Before you go, we’d like to ask you to please support the Forward’s independent Jewish news.
This week we celebrate 129 years of the Forward. We’re proud of our origins as a Yiddish print publication serving Jewish immigrants. And we’re just as proud of what we’ve become today: A trusted source of Jewish news and opinion, available digitally to anyone in the world without paywalls or subscriptions.
We’ve helped five generations of American Jews make sense of the news and the world around them — and we aren’t slowing down any time soon.
As a nonprofit newsroom, reader donations make it possible for us to do this work. Support independent, agenda-free Jewish journalism and our board will match your gift in honor of our birthday!
Support our mission to tell the Jewish story fully and fairly.
