by Emily Brooks, Washington Examiner
Left-wing Rep. Jamaal Bowman, a New York Democrat, is drawing sharp criticism from Jewish community activists for dropping his support of a bill that aims to promote the normalization of diplomatic relations between Israel and Arab states in the region.
“It’s hard to fathom anything more worthwhile than encouraging peace in a troubled region of the world,” Rabbi Avrohom Gordimer, the chairman of the Coalition for Jewish Values’s Rabbinic Circle, said in a statement.
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“For a leader in Congress to bow to anti-peace groups, which would hold regional harmony hostage to the intransigence of the Palestinian Authority, is to oppose cooperation and harmony and to support racist hatred against the Jewish community,” Gordimer said.
The Israel Relations Normalization Act of 2021 has wide bipartisan support, with 72 co-sponsors in the Senate and 329 co-sponsors in the House. Through directing the State Department to develop strategies and report to Congress, it aims to build on the Abraham Accords agreements between Israel, the United Arab Emirates, and Bahrain that were negotiated by the Trump administration.
Bowman signed on as a co-sponsor of the bill in September 2021. But in a Tuesday letter to a constituent reported by Jewish Insider, Bowman announced his intention to drop his support of the bill due to a change of perspective after a trip to Israel and Palestine.
“While I originally co-sponsored the Israel Relations Normalization Act seeing it as an opportunity to make progress toward justice and healing in the Middle East, as well as a path to a two-state solution, my experience on the ground and further conversation with constituents led me to see that it is not the right step to fulfill these goals,” Bowman said in the letter.
He argued that the bill would make “already vulnerable communities less safe” and promote “deals at odds with human rights and safety for everyday people in the region,” including “recognition of Morocco’s control over Western Sahara, and conversations about arms sales with the United Arab Emirates.”
“This agreement to normalize relations unhelpfully isolates Palestine and Western Sahara when what we need is a process that engages them,” Bowman said.
The freshman congressman’s change of position came after more than two dozen advocacy organizations, including Americans for Justice in Palestine Action, CODEPINK, and the Council on American-Islamic Relations, released a statement last month opposing the bill.
“We expect radicals and terrorist supporters to oppose peace, but groups who purposefully warp Jewish teachings in order to undermine the security of Jews residing in the Jewish homeland deserve special condemnation,” said Rabbi Ze’ev Smason, the Coalition for Jewish Values’s Midwestern regional vice president. “Peace is a paramount Jewish value. Our sages and scripture repeatedly urge us to seek and pursue peace. Instead these groups prefer for terror and hate to continue.”
Bowman unseated longtime Democratic Rep. Eliot Engel in 2020 with the backing of Justice Democrats, the progressive PAC that also supported members of the “Squad,” such as New York Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Missouri Rep. Cori Bush, and Minnesota Rep. Ilhan Omar.
Bowman’s office did not respond to a request for comment.