Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez voted in favor of House Resolution 888, which reaffirms Israel's right to exist. It also (1) recognizes that denying Israel's right to exist is a form of antisemitism; (2) rejects calls for Israel's destruction; and (3) condemns the Hamas-led attack.
Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is an American politican representing New York's 14th Congressional District as a member of the Democratic Party.
POLITICS
House Resolution 894 notably equates opposition to Zionism as antisemitism. House Resolution 888 affirms Israels's right to exitThis is especially problematic for pro-Palestinian Jewish groups, such as Jewish Voice for Peace. This vote for H. Res. 888 is especially disappointing coming from AOC, who is a member of "the Squad."
In 2021, she changed her vote from "no" to "present" for a bill to increase funding to the Iron Dome.
She has also discussed being open to Iron Dome funding on October 17th 2023, specifiying that the funding only go to this and defense as she has concerns as to where that funding would actually go. "But on the sole principal of Iron Dome and defense, I absolutely think there's an openness, for sure."
She did vote no on House Resolution 894 titled "Strongly condemning and denouncing the drastic rise of antisemitism in the United States and around the world". This resolution states that “anti-Zionism is antisemitism” and criticizes several protest chants for Palestinian freedom that are protected by the First Amendment, including “From the River to the Sea,” “Palestine Will Be Free,” and “Gaza Will Win.” This addition is to clarify what she did vote yes and no for.
She does support a ceasefire, refuses the funds of AIPAC, has demonstrated support but signing Res. 888 aims for a two state answer and does not mention the right of Palestinians to exist, leading to criticism from Congresswoman Rashida Talib. Also, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez has taken $189.00 in Pro-Israel donations across the 2020, 2024 election cycles (from OpenSecrets.org via ContributionBot).
She falsely claimed that Kamala Harris is working tirelessly for a ceasefire, despite the fact that Harris is against an arms embargo.
In July 2025, she voted against cutting US fundint to Israel's Iron Dome claiming they are "defensive" weapons. She doubled down on Twitter and Bluesky after facing heavy backlash, defending her vote, saying that the Iron Dome weapons are defensive and cutting funding to it would be "adding to the death count of innocent victims"
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🔒House 888 Resolution:
House Resolution 888 presents an incredibly biased, whitewashed and revisionist history of the state of Israel and its brutal occupation, 75+ year ethnic cleansing of Palestinians and current assault while also undermining the fight against antisemitism by declaring a range of legitimate, pro-justice political positions antisemitic.
The conflation of anti-Israeli sentiments with anti-Semitism in official American law represents a dangerous conflation of political critique with racial and religious prejudice. Such legislation is heinous and deplorable for both Palestinians and Jews alike for several reasons.
By equating anti-Israeli sentiments with anti-Semitism, such laws effectively erase the Palestinian narrative and deny their legitimate grievances. Palestinians have endured decades of displacement, discrimination, and violence at the hands of the Israeli state. By criminalizing criticism of Israel, these laws contribute to the dehumanization of Palestinians and perpetuate their marginalization on the global stage.
In fact, these laws serve to whitewash the history of Israel’s creation and ongoing occupation of Palestinian lands. The state of Israel was established through the expulsion and dispossession of indigenous Palestinians, a fact that is well-documented and verified by historical evidence. By censoring discussion of this history, such laws prevent a nuanced understanding of the Israeli-Palestinian assault and hinder efforts towards reconciliation and justice.
Not to mention, such a resolution undermines legitimate criticism of Israeli policies and actions by equating it with hatred towards Jewish people as a whole. This not only stifles freedom of speech and expression but also perpetuates the false notion that criticism of the Israeli government is inherently anti-Semitic. In reality, many Jews themselves oppose the actions of the Israeli state and support Palestinian rights.
Moreover, the perpetuation of the very harmful and dangerous narrative that being critical of the Israeli government is tantamount to denying the Holocaust or supporting genocidal ideologies is a false equivalence that not only distorts the truth but also diminishes the severity of actual anti-Semitic acts and beliefs, which should be unequivocally condemned.
By affirming Israel’s right to exist, despite the state having been founded on the ethnic cleansing and erasure of Palestinian identity, heritage, culture and statehood, this bill perpetuates the Zionist ideology that the destruction of Palestine is both acceptable and justified.
Conflating Zionism with Judaism:
While the Jewish faith and cultural identity not only long predate and but have no inherent connection to the racist political ideology of Zionism, the modern Israeli regime has deliberately pursued an ethnic supremacist agenda rooted in Jewish ethno-religious identity — yet built upon the demolition of Palestinian homes, the theft of Palestinian lands and the generational uprooting, displacement and dehumanization of the Palestinian people at large.
The harrowing cost of human suffering, loss of life and deprivation of the most basic liberties and security has been unconscionable and now, Zionism represents an utterly deplorable ethnic supremacist ideology that has enabled unconscionable acts of violence, displacement and subjugation against the Palestinian people for almost a century.
Its real-world impacts have been nothing short of a calculated campaign of ethnic cleansing, cultural erasure and apartheid racism - a horrific legacy that cannot be decoupled from Zionism's founding vision of creating an exclusionary Jewish ethno-state through the denial of Palestinian self-determination and indigeneity.
The forced expulsion of over 700,000 Palestinians from their ancestral homes and villages during the Nakba, rendering millions stateless and exiled as refugees, was an act of premeditated ethnic purging. With the willful destruction of Palestinian property, demolition of homes, uprooting of ancient olive groves, and obliteration of cultural resources further demonstrating a systematic effort to erase Palestinian identity, history and any enduring claims to the land.
Subsequent decades have seen this brutal ethnic persecution, land confiscation and denial of human rights institutionalized through severely discriminatory policies, illegal settlements, violence by occupying forces, arbitrary detentions, torture, and most notably, systemic oppression under Israel's racist apartheid regime.
These are not mere "realities" for Palestinians who remain, but grave crimes against humanity perpetrated through Zionism's new brand of unrelenting, institutionalized cruelty. This utterly shameful legacy of calculated ethnic cleansing, apartheid governance and flagrant violations of international law is inextricably intertwined with how Zionism's racist, supremacist and anti-democratic ideology has been implemented on the ground by Israel.
Any attempt to decouple or whitewash these egregious atrocities from Zionism itself is a form of explicit denialism and complicity in oppression of the highest order. No ethnic, religious or any other group deserves an ethno-supremacist theocratic state constructed through the forcible subjugation of indigenous populations as second-class citizens stripped of all rights, dignity and humanity.
Such an abhorrent exclusionary system based on racial hierarchy is fundamentally incompatible with even the barest notion of true democracy, self-determination or universal human rights regardless of ethnicity or faith.
Statehood, sovereignty and self-determination can never legitimately emerge from such systematic violence, discrimination, forced displacement and ethnic persecution as political Zionism has perpetrated against the Palestinian population.
If a state were to arise organically through democratic processes that enshrine equality, safety and liberty for all citizens regardless of ethnicity or faith, it would have legitimacy. But any racist system of ethnic domination erected through brute force subjugation and calculated ethnic supremacy, as Zionism has done, is an egregious affront to justice and human rights that requires being dismantled - not enshrined - with a new equitable path forward established.
Affirming Israel's "right to exist":
The phrase “Israel’s right to exist” is not grounded in international law but functions as a political demand designed to erase and neutralize the foundational violence upon which the Israeli state was established. No country has an enshrined “right to exist” under international law; what is codified, instead, is the right of peoples to self-determination. Yet Palestinians — an indigenous population subject to forced displacement, occupation, and apartheid — are uniquely coerced to affirm not just Israel’s existence, but its existence as a Jewish ethnostate. The demand to recognise an illegal state built on the erasure of Palestinians serves a clear colonial function: to reframe a settler-colonial project as a matter of mutual recognition, while masking the dispossession and ongoing subjugation of the native population.
Reaffirming this “right” without condition is not neutral — it is a weaponized narrative that forces the oppressed to validate the conditions of their own oppression. It silences the Nakba, the mass expulsion of over 750,000 Palestinians in 1948; it ignores the demolition of over 500 villages; it legitimizes the denial of the right of return, a right Palestinians hold under UN Resolution 194. In reality, this dog-whistle turns a settler-colonial enterprise into a moral imperative, requiring Palestinians to grant legitimacy to a state that continues to colonize their land, suffocate Gaza, fragment the West Bank, and implement apartheid policies across all territories it controls.
This language operates as a form of colonial gaslighting by shifting the global discourse from justice, land, and liberation to “recognition,” painting Palestinians as irrational or hostile if they refuse to validate a system structured on their displacement. It allows Israel to demand unconditional acceptance while giving nothing in return — not rights, not reparations, not even a meaningful recognition of the Palestinian people as equals. Internationally, it upholds a model where settler-colonialism is not only protected but sanctified, positioning Israel as eternally under threat while Palestinians are cast as aggressors for simply insisting they too have a right to exist with dignity on their ancestral land.
In this way, the assertion that “Israel has a right to exist” functions not as a principle of peace, but as a discursive tool of imperial domination, maintaining asymmetry and preventing justice. To challenge it is not to deny Jewish safety or personhood — it is to refuse the erasure of a people whose lives, land, and future have been systematically stripped under the banner of legitimacy. True peace cannot be built on the demand that the colonized affirm the righteousness of their own dispossession.
Liberal Zionism:
Liberal Zionism masquerades as a "moderate" or "progressive" strain of Zionism, blending Jewish nationalism with cherry-picked liberal values like democracy and human rights as a means to justify the existence of the illegal settler colonial ethnostate known as “Israel” [1].
And Liberal Zionism is one of the greatest threats because of its political camouflage [2]. By co-opting progressive language, Liberal Zionism inoculates Zionism against true anti-colonial solidarity, dividing the left and derailing BDS movements [3]. It ensures the ongoing Nakba – from Gaza's ruins to Hebron's checkpoints – persists under a democratic veneer, making decolonization seem radical rather than just [4] [5].
Emerging from early 20th-century Labor Zionism — the very movement that orchestrated the 1948 Nakba which ethnically cleansed over 750,000 Palestinians through mass expulsions and village destructions — liberal Zionism has always served as the velvet glove over the iron fist of settler-colonialism [6] [7].
Despite claiming it merely seeks a "Jewish and democratic state," this rhetoric is actually code for an ethnostate where Jewish supremacy trumps Palestinian equality, enshrined in laws like the 2018 Nation-State Law that demotes Arabic and prioritizes Jewish settlement [8] [9].
At its core, liberal Zionism rejects the colonial origins of Israel and instead attempts to frame the Zionist project as a "return" or "liberation" rather than a European settler invasion that erased indigenous Palestinian society [10].
As a political movement, liberal Zionism emerged as a response to antisemitism and the Holocaust but quickly pivoted to justifying land theft under the guise of "self-determination," ignoring how Zionism fits classic colonial patterns: displacement of natives, resource extraction, and demographic engineering to maintain a Jewish majority [11].
As of 2025, amid the Gaza genocide and West Bank annexation pushes, it clings to a fading two-state illusion, providing diplomatic and financial cover for Israel's crimes while silencing Palestinian voices as "antisemitic" [12].
“Zionism is a colonialism, not a simple radical nationalism: even in its left-wing version, it is a colonialist nationalism." – Zeev Sternhell, liberal Zionist historian exposing his own ideology's flaws [13].
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