Hakeem Jeffries Comes Out Against Measure to Cut Off Aid to Israel

House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries has announced that he will vote against Representative Thomas Massie’s measure to cut off all aid to Israel—even though it’s a policy that the vast majority of Democratic voters agree with.

“I will be voting no on Republican Amendment #8.… It is overly broad in that it prohibits or would limit the use of funds for longstanding initiatives related to humanitarian aid, refugee resettlement, peace-building and U.S. Embassy operations,” Jeffries wrote in a letter to his Democratic colleagues Tuesday. “In addition, the so-called Massie amendment would restrict our country’s ability to confront Hamas, Hezbollah and other terrorist organizations in the region who are sworn enemies of both the United States and Israel. In my view, there are more decisive ways to achieve the urgent change necessary when it comes to the far-right Netanyahu government.”

In his letter, Jeffries noted that the liberal organization J Street also opposed the measure. In response, the Jewish group hedged its opposition, saying it supports Jeffries’s position while also respecting that he won’t whip against the measure. The group suggested that Democrats could vote “no, present or yes” to reflect their concerns about “the way American military assistance and American-supplied weapons have been used by the Israeli government in Gaza, the West Bank, Lebanon and elsewhere.”

Jeffries opposed the amendment while mentioning that the U.S. and Israel need a “new security arrangement” that would “undergird the maintenance of Israel’s qualitative military edge against Iran and other malign actors in the region.”

Dozens of Democrats are expected to vote for the amendment, which would be attached to the spending bill.

Jeffries’s letter reveals the ideological gap between party leadership and the party’s base. The second-most-powerful Democrat in the country thinks that cutting off aid to Israel—which has been committing a genocide against Palestinians for nearly three years—is too extreme, and that the problem lies solely with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and not the decades of apartheid that preceded his nonconsecutive 20 years in leadership.

This isn’t just coming from congressional Democrats. California Governor and 2028 presidential hopeful Gavin Newsom refused to call Israel an apartheid state and doubled down on his support for Israel in an interview with Axios on Monday. And even Democratic Representative Ro Khanna—who was just held at gunpoint by Israeli settlers on his trip to the West Bank—stopped short of calling for a full embargo against the Israeli government.

“Inexcusable moral failure by the ‘opposition’ party leadership,” Middle East analyst Omar Baddar wrote on X. “If a genocide (sniper bullets in the heads of toddlers, systematically murdered medics & journalists, rape of prisoners … etc.) isn’t a red line, then what the hell is?!” ...