Exclusive | Brad Lander urged Biden to consider yanking $4B in US funding to ally Israel just several months before Oct. 7
Mayoral hopeful Brad Lander urged the former Biden administration to yank up to $4 billion in US funding to Israel if certain conditions weren’t met — peddling the threat seven months before the Oct.7 massacre.Lander said that if the Jewish state failed to honor human rights or kept building settlements in Palestinian territories, the Democratic White House should pull the aid.“Biden and [Secretary of State Antony] Blinken need to recognize that times have changed.
The Democratic Party cannot continue toeing the AIPAC [American Israel Public Affairs Committee] line,” said Lander, the city comptroller, in a column he penned for the Israeli publication Haaretz on March 2, 2023.“We cannot continue to write a blank check to an increasingly authoritarian regime,” Lander said.He wrote the column seven months before Hamas’s infamous Oct.7, 2023, invasion of Israel that slaughtered 1,200 people and abducted scores of hostages, including some who are still being held in Gaza, triggering the ongoing Mideast war.“If our goal is to support Israel as the Middle East’s only Democracy, as a partner in what Biden officials call the ‘rules-based international order,’ then that support must be tied to following the rules, respecting rights and acting democratically,” Landers wrote at the time.
“And there must be consequences for not doing so.“The nearly $4 billion of American military aid to Israel each year cannot fund [Israeli Prime Minister] Bibi [Netanyahu], [National Security Minister Itamar] Ben-Gvir and [Finance Minister Bezalel Yoel] Smotrich’s erosion of democratic institutions, or their illegal settlements, home demolitions or military detention of children.”Lander acknowledged that he didn’t know whether pulling US aid to Israel would change Netanyahu’s actions.“But standing up for democracy, human rights and international law is the only place to start.It’s a big part of what motivated American support for Israel to begin with,�...