Progressive "Squad" member Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D., N.Y.) said Wednesday that support in Congress for Israel in its war against Hamas does not come from "actual agreement" but from "fear" of the pro-Israel lobbying group AIPAC.
"An unspoken secret in Congress is that much of the reflexive, blind, unconditional vote support for nearly any Israeli gov action isn’t from actual agreement. It’s from fear," Ocasio-Cortez said on X. "Reps are terrified of this. Of AIPAC. So they don’t vote their conscience. They vote their fear."
Ocasio-Cortez's comments came in a response to a post referencing the money spent by a group affiliated with the American Israel Public Affairs Committee to oppose far-left congressman Jamaal Bowman (D., N.Y.), a fellow Squad member. Bowman’s primary challenger, an AIPAC-supported candidate, is Westchester County executive George Latimer.
Bowman has been an outspoken critic of Israel since Hamas's Oct. 7 attack on the Jewish state. He has called reports of rapes perpetrated by Hamas on Oct. 7 "propaganda" and voted against a resolution condemning Hamas’s attack on Israel because he believes the attack was not "unprovoked" as the resolution described it. Bowman once asked a Jewish community leader for a photo of the two of them together, "So I can show the world I’m friends with Jewish People," according to a report this week.
During a virtual town hall meeting in April alongside Reps. Ilhan Omar (D., Minn.) and Pramila Jayapal (D., Wash.) and with Our Revolution, a progressive organizing group launched by Sen. Bernie Sanders (I., Vt.), Bowman said that AIPAC calls him anti-Semitic only because "they want to call me the N-word, but they know they can't get away with that, so they say everything else."
The primary between Bowman and Latimer will take place on June 25. According to a recent Emerson College poll, Latimer is up 17 percentage points over Bowman in the primary.