This post first appeared in the Politics Report.
Earlier this month, an insurgent effort in the House of Representatives tried to stop $3.3 billion from flowing to Israel’s war operations. It failed, but more than half of Democrats supported it.
That’s not how the vote split among San Diego representatives. Only Rep. Sara Jacobs, the youngest Jewish member of Congress, voted to pull the funding. The other three Democrats — Reps. Scott Peters, Juan Vargas and Mike Levin — voted no, as did Republican Rep. Darryl Issa.
That’s a shift for Jacobs — as it was for many Democrats.
When I profiled her in 2024, I wrote about her thought process regarding a previous vote to give Israel billions. In that case, she chose differently.
That bill included humanitarian aid for Gaza, as well as money for Israel’s military, which is its own kind of dark paradox.
“People talk in the abstract about being for this or for that. But that’s usually not the question. The question is, are you more for this than that,” she said of difficult votes.
Jacobs is interesting — not only because she is one of the few representatives to ever visit Gaza and has family living in Israel — but because she straddles the traditional and progressive camps like few others.
She’s not a completely reliable vote for The Squad and her critique on the current state of the American system feels much more watered down than that of the proper left. But she has been apt to vote outside of the Democratic Party mainstream ever since entering congress — as when she was one of just 37 Democrats to vote against the defense budget, a previously unthinkable move for a San Diego representative.
Her staff said she wasn’t available for an interview, but in a joint statement here’s what she and 26 other congresspeople wrote:
We do not support providing an additional $3.3 billion of American taxpayer dollars to be used for Israeli military operations in Gaza and Lebanon—operations which have killed tens of thousands of civilians, led to the indiscriminate destruction of civilian infrastructure, and caused severe and ongoing humanitarian catastrophes. These are just the latest in a long string of human rights violations inflicted on Palestinian civilians. For nearly six decades, Israeli security forces and military authorities have enforced the occupation of the Palestinian territories, including through restrictions on freedom of movement, arbitrary detention, torture, and extrajudicial killings.
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