The Curious Case of AOC

How the lawmaker has fallen short of what this moment demands

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The story of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is in a lot of ways an inspiring one. A young, middle class bartender from the Bronx, through grit and determination (and burning through the soles of her ballet flats) unseats the heir-apparent of Nancy Pelosi and upends the status quo in Washington D.C., bringing a new kind of politics to Congress and inspiring millions. But in other ways her rise, and subsequent integration into the D.C. machine, has been nothing short of a tragedy. A person who became the unofficial figurehead of a movement to replace all of the corrupt geriatric Democrats in Congress with young, unbought progressives with a real vision for the working class, has now ended up - in the eyes of many - a cautionary tale about how you can’t change the party before the party changes you. While AOC still has a chorus of fierce defenders online, there are now just as many detractors who see her as the avatar of what happens when you trying to change the death machine from the inside.

Ocasio-Cortez kicked off yet another a firestorm last week, when she was a “no” vote on Marjorie Taylor-Greene’s amendment to cut $500 million in funding to Israel, while her colleagues Summer Lee, Ilhan Omar, Rashida Tlaib, and Al Green all voted yes. Even some of those who still hold high hopes for the Congresswoman were critical of this vote. Responding to the criticism, AOC tweeted:

“Marjorie Taylor Greene’s amendment does nothing to cut off offensive aid to Israel nor end the flow of US munitions being used in Gaza. Of course I voted against it. What it does do is cut off defensive Iron Dome capacities while allowing the actual bombs killing Palestinians to continue. I have long stated that I do not believe that adding to the death count of innocent victims to this war is constructive to its end. That is a simple and clear difference of opinion that has long been established. I remain focused on cutting the flow of US munitions that are being used to perpetuate the genocide in Gaza.”

This attempt, 21 months into a genocide, to try to differentiate between “offensive” and “defensive” weapons, is an absurdity beyond even what some of her biggest fans could defend. The backlash was swift. Across the ideological spectrum nearly everyone who has been opposed to this genocided responded. The idea that you can support “defensive” weapons for a state conducting mass crimes against humanity while still opposing those crimes is a far beyond a simple difference of opinion. It is a morally bankrupt attempt to try to split the baby that will make no one happy, Zionist and anti-Zionist alike. Further, the idea that AOC would ever vote for “defensive” weapons to countries like Russia or Iran is absurd on its face. As Dylan Saba wrote in Jewish Currents “By almost entirely negating the ability of militant groups in Gaza to respond to Israel’s incursions, the purportedly defensive Iron Dome allows Israel to strike without fear of repercussion. And because the cost is so low when measured in Israeli casualties, Israel can wage perpetual war without suffering domestic political consequences, and is under negligible pressure to pursue diplomacy with the Palestinians.” It is quite frankly unacceptable for a three term congresswoman to be ignorant of this obvious truth. The reality is that to her it is likely still too big of a risk to be all in for Palestine.

This ideological incoherence, to rightfully call what Israel is doing a genocide but then defend the idea of sending them funding for any kind of weapons at all, has come to be a hallmark of the AOC brand: to champion progressive values on one side, and then hedge and muddy on the other. Her response to the backlash to the backlash was even worse, with her ostensibly implying her colleagues stand with neo-nazis for voting yes. She deferred to her “record on Palestine” being one of the best in Congress, which is true, but is also an impossibly low bar in a body that has gleefully funded a campaign of mass Palestinian slaughter for nearly two years.

Her record may be good for the unfathomably steep curve you need to grade on in D.C., but it in so many ways has fallen short of what this moment calls for, and what is needed for anyone who thinks Palestinian lives have the same value as Jewish ones. While public opinion has swung sharply against Israel, especially for those who vote Democrat, our political bodies could not be less representative of what the public thinks, wants, and feels. Support for Israel is so rote, so obligatory, that even the slightest deviation from the status quo is treated like a crime. While many of AOC’s most fervent fans may accuse her critics of “purity testing”, I would submit that there is no such thing as a purity test for genocide. The genocide in Gaza is the moral issue of our time. It is the primary contradiction from which all others flow. If you cannot find it within yourself to unwaveringly stand with Palestine, there is no use expecting you to stand up for anything else. What could possibly be more imperative, more profoundly necessary, than opposing a holocaust while it is happening? AOC states that her record “speaks for itself”, and I agree with her. Let’s take a look.

@tarenceray on twitter

In 2019 after AOC won her primary against Joe Crowley, she sat down for an interview with PBS, the first of which ever pressed her on her stance on Israel. When the anchor asked her about her tweet calling the slaughter of at least 37 peaceful Palestinian protestors during the Great March of Return a “massacre”, AOC immediately responded that Israel had a “right to exist”, the braindead mantra so oft-repeated that it becomes true by default, and signaled support for the DOA two-state solution. When pressed on using the word “occupation” she folded and said she doesn’t really know a lot yet. One could be forgiven for assuming that this was just a matter of lack of education on the subject and that as she matured into an experienced politician she would come to see the horror of Israel for what it is and forthrightly oppose it. “Ocasio-Cortez is just 28 and it shows, give her a couple years and I am sure she will show more firmness and strength on these answers” said Mondoweiss writer Phillip Weiss at the time.

Frankly, many of us believed this too. There were, of course, a few who went right to cynicism but for a lot of people the election of AOC represented a sea change in our politics, and a desperate hope for a future that wasn’t the world slowly getting worse without end. Unfortunately, our hopes were in vain. Over the course of the last 6 years, AOC has failed to meet what I would call the bare minimum standards to be even considered a social democrat, and when it comes to the question of Palestine, she has revealed that she is far more concerned about being accepted into D.C. circles than she is about maintaining principles.

In 2021, on the heels of an 11-day massacre of Palestinians by Israel, AOC tearfully switched her vote on funding the Iron Dome from nay to “present”. In a statement published on her website explaining the vote, she said “I also believe that, for far too long, the U.S. has handed unconditional aid to the Israeli government while doing nothing to address or raise the persistent human rights abuses against the Palestinian people”. Ironically, her current stance on the Iron Dome - the one she garnered so much criticism for - is in fact a backslide from a previous stance that was also unacceptable. As the situation in Gaza has gone from barbaric to genocidal, her squishiness on Palestine seems to have only increased.

Since the genocide of Palestinians began in October 2023, AOC has taken a series of actions that make even her most long standing supporters question her commitment to ending the genocide and occupation. From voting for the IHRA definition of antisemitism which equates criticism of Israel to hate of Jews, to affirming Israel’s “right to self defense” in a letter on her website in April 2024, to hosting a livestream with Zionists poised as “antisemitism experts” who repeatedly conflated antizionism with antisemitism, to calling protests against genocide propaganda in Brooklyn “atrocious antisemitism”, and categorizing the political assassination of two Israeli embassy workers as antisemitic, AOC has continued to lend credence to the idea that there is something nefarious about hating a country committing mass slaughter. She has continued to deliberately blur the line between hating Israel and hating Jews.

AOC has signaled in her votes that she is more than willing to sanction and condemn the only existing resistance to occupation and genocide. Outside of her votes, she has contributed willingly to Zionist propaganda again and again. I would argue that in a body like the U.S. Congress, someone with a massive platform like AOC’s has far more power and reach in the use of their voice than their votes, so looking at her voting record alone cannot tell us the whole story. Her decision to vocally back Joe Biden to the unceremonious end, to be photographed with him, and to stump for him as he butchered Gaza, as he lent his support to the crushing of anti-Israel protests, as he had his state department repeatedly lie to protect the perpetrators of a genocide, was a profound act of cowardice and cynical political maneuvering that is utterly unforgivable. Instead of choosing to be a thorn in the side of this criminal administration, she made a deliberate choice to give left cover to it.

Even worse, she stood on the stage of the Democratic National Convention and proclaimed without an ounce of evidence that Kamala Harris was “working tirelessly for a ceasefire” as protestors outside begged for the slaughter to stop and for Harris to show an ounce of compassion for their cause. While there are millions of people throwing themselves up against the machine that wants to make criticism of Israel illegal, while millions of people with far less power are risking their livelihoods, reputations, and safety to try to do what little they can to end this, this so-called progressive champion has repeatedly given ammunition to the forces that want to criminalize the base of people who made her rise possible.

Ultimately many of us have moved well beyond the idea that the Democratic Party is a reformable body. We understand that revolution is the only way to change our political future. But for the broader populace, AOC still represents the leftmost horizon of the possible in this country. It is clear that she is being groomed and prepared for a higher office, and being set up as the heir of the progressive movement that began under Bernie Sanders. While we build something that is actually strong enough to take on the imperial machine, we must also demand that those who claim to represent our values actually do so. There can be no allowances for “differences of opinion” on genocide. We can sometimes form temporary alliances with social democrats while we build, but we have to have clearly defined red lines. AOC has demonstrated that she has far more ire for her left critics than she does for the people committing a modern day holocaust. That is simply intolerable. We may not have many allies in Congress, but poll after poll shows that on this issue we have the people. Palestinian lives are not an acceptable sacrifice for any type of political power.

While some can point to her voting record on Palestine and say “she’s done enough”, I think that’s a betrayal of the bare minimum standards we need to have, not of Congress, but of human beings in general. AOC is clearly making a series of political calculations, likely thinking to herself “if I just cave a little here, then when I finally get more power I can do good”, but that’s the story of nearly everyone who went to Congress with a dream. Eventually you get the power, but by then you’ve traded so much of your decency away that you are unrecognizable. If we cannot demand better than a fairweather friend when it comes to a genocide, we cannot demand anything at all. It’s time the left let go of the hope for this politician entirely and built its movements not around figureheads but around a shared commitment to universal human values that we refuse to compromise on. There are no saviors here, there’s just us, and we must dedicate ourselves fully to saving each other, bit by bit, until we are all finally free.

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