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,” Lander said, claiming his view is part of the “mainstream position” of the majority of American Jews and particularly young American Jews.
Staunch backers of Israel accused Lander of being a foe of the Jewish state.
“Brad Lander has a long history of using his Jewish identity as a weapon to empower antisemitic causes, candidates and organizations that harm our community for his own political gains,” state Assemblyman Sam Berger (D-Queens) told The Post.
State Sen. Simcha Felder, who just won a special election to the City Council and represents the heavily orthodox Jewish, pro-Israel community of Borough Park, said, “There’s no way in the world I can vote for him.
“Lander is anti-Israel. I don’t think there’s anything Israel can do to satisfy him — under any government. It’s a terrible thing,” Felder said.
“I think he would be happier if Israel were under British rule.”
Lander, who oversees the city’s pension funds, has been accused of divesting from Israeli bonds.
On Sunday, Lander, through his campaign, said his position is that the US should keep funding Israel’s Iron Dome defense system and related defensive weapons systems to intercept the missiles launched at it by Iran or Hamas or Hezbollah.
Lander has opposed the US funding of 2,000-pound bombs and other offensive weapons that Israel has been dropping on Gaza.
In his opinion piece from two years ago, Lander complained that the “far-right” government headed by Netanyahu was undermining Israel’s judiciary and “eroding religious pluralism” in the country while “simultaneously entrenching control over Palestinians, demolishing their homes and expanding illegal settlements.”
“Through their actions both inside and out of Israel’s 1948 borders, they are sabotaging the vision of Israel as a Jewish and democratic state – a vision that has inspired Jews for over a century,” he wrote.
He complained that Israel’s government was intent on extending a policy that has “long denied Palestinians living under occupation for over 50 years the benefits of democracy, self-determination, or basic human rights. Any meaningful commitment to a democratic future for Israel requires an end to the occupation – not its entrenchment.”
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