Ocasio-Cortez says US military aid to Israel ‘enabled a genocide in Gaza’ | US news
The Democratic party’s next presidential candidate should re-evaluate the country’s military aid to Israel, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez said Friday during a Munich security conference panel on the future of foreign policy.
Hagar Shezaf from the Israeli newspaper Haaretz asked the US congressman whether he thought “the Democratic presidential candidate in the 2028 elections should re-evaluate military aid to Israel.”
“To me, this is not just about the presidential election.” Ocasio-Cortez replied“Personally, I think the United States has an obligation to protect its own laws, especially the Leahy laws.
“Personally, I think the idea of completely unconditional aid, no matter what is done, does not make sense,” he added. “I think this enabled a genocide in Gaza and I think thousands of women and children died… this was something that was completely preventable.
“Therefore, I believe it is appropriate to enforce our own laws through the Leahy laws, which require conditioning relief in all cases of gross human rights violations,” Ocasio-Cortez said.
Leahy’s laws They are two legal provisions named after former senator Patrick Leahy, who introduced them in the 1990s, that prohibit the U.S. defense department and state department from funding “foreign security forces units where there is credible information that such units have committed gross human rights violations.”
However, According to Charles BlahaLeahy, the former director of the secretary of state’s office who led the review of foreign security agencies, said state department officials to insist Israeli units are subject to the same review standards as units of other countries. Maybe in theory. But in practice this is simply not true.”
U.S. Ambassador to NATO Matt Whitaker declined to answer the question directly, saying Israel is “one of our closest allies.”
Earlier in the day, Ocasio-Cortez had accused Donald Trump of trying to usher in an “age of authoritarianism” and condemned his foreign policy in front of his allies’ top policymakers.
In her speech, Ocasio-Cortez said that Trump and Secretary of State Marco Rubio are “trying to pull the United States away from the rest of the world so that we can turn into an age of authoritarianism,” trying to “create a world where Donald Trump can rule the Western Hemisphere and Latin America as his personal sandbox, where Putin can swing his sword around Europe and bully our own allies there.”
He outlined what he called an “alternative vision” for a leftist U.S. foreign policy, saying he and his fellow Democrats call for a return to a “rules-based order” without the “hypocrisies” of U.S. foreign policy that have dominated past and current administrations.
It remains unclear how big a role Democrats’ positions on the Israel-Gaza conflict will play in the 2028 presidential race. Some Democrats seen as possible candidates have already faced questions on the issue. some He takes a more critical stance in the 2024 race than Kamala Harris or Joe Biden do.
Andrew Roth contributed reporting
