Rep. Alexandria Ocasio Cortez (D-N.Y.) Nov. 13. Photo by Mandel Ngan/AFP via Getty Images

By Jacob Kornbluh May 20, 2024

Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is trying to revive a controversial bill in the state legislature that would penalize New York-based nonprofits that support activities in Israeli settlements.

The legislation, titled “Not on our dime!: Ending New York funding of Israeli settler violence act,” was first introduced last year by several Democratic Socialists and faced fierce opposition from the Democratic leadership and majority of state lawmakers. 

Its proponents are hoping that the endorsement of Ocasio-Cortez, the New York member of Congress who enjoys celebrity status among progressives, will lend the bill momentum.

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“This should be part of our broader human rights commitment to ensure that U.S. taxpayer funds do not go to the violations of human rights anywhere in the globe,” Ocasio-Cortez said at a press conference in her Bronx district office Monday morning. She referenced the recent executive order by President Joe Biden to punish Israeli settlers implicated in violence against Palestinians in the occupied West Bank. 

The bill would prohibit nonprofits “from engaging in unauthorized support of Israeli settlement activity.” It would give the state attorney general the authority to revoke a charity’s tax-exempt status if violated. It targets some $60 million raised by several charities registered in New York that donate to extremist settler organizations.

Assemblyman Zohran Mamdani, the bill’s author and a supporter of the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement against Israel, said it has been expanded and now also targets nonprofits “aiding and abetting” the resettling of Jewish communities in the Gaza Strip or providing “unauthorized” support for units of the IDF that allegedly commit human rights violations.

Mamdani said the renewed push for the bill, in the final weeks of this year’s legislative session, “mirrors the fight for Palestinian human rights” on college campuses across the country. “Our job as politicians is to translate that sentiment into substantive policy,” he said. 

When the bill was introduced last May, a majority of Democrats pushed back, saying it targeted, in part, Jewish organizations and nonprofits assisting families of terror victims. Assembly Speaker Carl Heastie said the measure is “a non-starter” and the Senate leadership said it would kill the bill. 

Ocasio-Cortez acknowledged that backing the bill is “politically perilous” for elected officials. However, she said, it is the right thing to fight for.

“This bill will make sure that the ongoing atrocities that we see happening in Gaza and the West Bank, as well as the ongoing enabling of armed militias to terrorize Palestinians in the West Bank, do not benefit from New York state charitable tax exemptions,” she said.

Representatives for the Democratic leadership in the legislature said their positions against advancing the bill haven’t changed.

Nily Rozic, an Israeli-born Democrat from Queens, who organized a letter signed by the majority of Democrats in the Assembly rejecting the bill, said supporting the measure will just “further divide” Democrats over Israel “at a time when all our energies as Democrats need to be united and focused” on the presidential and congressional elections.

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