Elizabeth Warren: I Will End Israeli ‘Occupation’

Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) told anti-Israel activists on Monday that she would end Israel’s “occupation.”

Warren, who is rapidly moving up through the ranks of Democratic Party presidential contenders, has taken increasingly anti-Israel stances in the past several years.

She boycotted Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s address to Congress in 2015, and accused Netanyahu of corruption and “embracing right-wing extremism” earlier this year.

An activist from the radical left-wing group IfNotNow named Becca Lubow approached Warren in New Hampshire on Monday after a town hall and asked Warren if she would commit to pushing “the Israeli government to end Occupation.”

Warren answered, “Yes. Yes. So I’m there.”

In a statement, IfNotNow described, and applauded, what it described as Warren’s increasingly “progressive” stance on Israel:

The word “occupation” was not defined. Some anti-Israel activists consider the very existence of Israel to be an “occupation.”

IfNotNow is a fringe group that began in the midst of Israel’s war against the Palestinian terror group Hamas in 2014 — a war for which Hamas was almost universally blamed, and in which Hamas fired rockets at civilian population centers.

As Breitbart News noted earlier this year (original links):

IfNotNow seeks to disrupt the connections that many American Jewish organizations have with Israel. It blames American Jewish support for Israel for the persistence of the Israeli occupation of Judea and Samaria (the West Bank), though most Palestinians in that territory live under the administration of the Palestinian Authority.

In addition to staging sit-ins and protests, members of IfNotNow attempt to infiltrate Jewish summer camps and tours of Israel, where they launch demonstrations or expose the mainstream Jewish community to anti-Israel propaganda.

In one episode in 2018, members of IfNotNow were arrested while reciting the Kaddish — the traditional Jewish prayer for the dead — near the offices of the Jewish Federation of Greater Los Angeles, memorializing Palestinians killed in “protests” at the Gaza border. (The vast majority of Palestinians killed were members of Hamas, and they were trying to infiltrate Israel to carry out attacks, not stage a non-violent protest against Israeli policies.)

Recently, IfNotNow supported Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-MN) after she repeatedly used antisemitic rhetoric.

Joel B. Pollak is Senior Editor-at-Large at Breitbart News. He earned an A.B. in Social Studies and Environmental Science and Public Policy from Harvard. He is a winner of the 2018 Robert Novak Journalism Alumni Fellowship. He is also the co-author of How Trump Won: The Inside Story of a Revolution, which is available from Regnery. Follow him on Twitter at @joelpollak.

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