Congressman Ro Khanna has been making a lot of noise lately—pushing for the release of the Epstein files, challenging the administration over war powers in the escalating conflict with Iran, and positioning himself on the front lines of the Democratic Party’s internal debate over Israel and Palestine. Plenty of people suspect he’s trying to carve out a lane for a presidential run. On Israel-Palestine, that lane is clearly to the left of most national Democrats: sharply critical of Israel, willing to call Gaza a genocide, and increasingly explicit about the occupation.
In January, his team reached out to me for input as they worked on a House resolution on the West Bank, and I agreed to share what I considered the most urgent issues. I was clear with them that the core problem was not just a few bad ministers or a temporary policy deviation, but a Zionist project with ever-expanding territorial aims and virtually no meaningful internal resistance within the Israeli political system—and that any real change would require a much more radical rethinking of the U.S.-Israel relationship than most Democrats have been willing to entertain.
That same week, with the distinction between rhetoric and action—and between band-aids and cures—very much in mind, I noticed Khanna had voted for a spending bill that included billions more for Israeli security and cut UNRWA funding. I called him out publicly, and he responded quickly, saying the Israel provisions had been folded into a broader appropriations bill and had been “snuck in” by Republicans; when I asked directly whether he had known those provisions were in the bill when he voted for it, his answer was blunt: “I genuinely did not.” When the bill later came back amended, he reached out privately to tell me he’d be voting no. It was clear that he wanted to prove his mettle on the issue, and he agreed to an interview once the House resolution came out.
Khanna introduced House Resolution 1092 this week, condemning Israeli settlement expansion, settler violence, and human rights abuses in the West Bank while calling for accountability and specific U.S. policy responses. In our conversation, he was quick to admit that it will not produce immediate material change; rather, it is meant to establish a clear Democratic policy framework and build pressure for future administrations to act.
With that in mind, I wanted to use my conversation with Khanna to press him on the harder questions—the ones Democratic presidential hopefuls will increasingly have to answer if they want to occupy the left flank of this issue. In other words, the places where the rubber actually meets the road.
Questions like:
Would he continue supporting Iron Dome funding even as Israel wages relentless aggression across the region with the knowledge that it is largely insulated from retaliation?
What does a “two-state solution” actually mean at this point, beyond ritual incantation, given the geography of the West Bank and the sheer scale of the settlement project?
How does one reconcile support for a “Jewish democratic state” with the reality that maintaining a Jewish-majority state in all likelihood requires the permanent subordination of non-Jews under its control?
Given that decades of American pressure and diplomacy have failed to restrain Israel’s expansion, occupation, and aggression, what new, harsher measures would he actually be willing to try?
At what point do we stop treating Israel as an ally in the normal sense of the term?
Khanna’s answers were revealing. At one point, he said plainly that the United States should view Israel first and foremost as “an occupying nation violating human rights,” and that this lens should guide policy. That is stronger language than you hear from almost any major Democratic figure with national ambitions. He said he no longer supports renewing the existing Memorandum of Understanding on military aid when it comes up in 2028, and took a shot at fellow ambitious California Democrat Gavin Newsom, whose recent comments on Israeli apartheid generated headlines but, in Khanna’s view, remain too vague to mean much.
He also made clear that, in his view, Congress is not where this will ultimately be decided: real change would have to come from a president, State Department, and national security apparatus willing to treat Israel as a state carrying out occupation and systematic rights abuses.
Still, Khanna stopped short of the more fundamental break that many people, myself included, now believe the situation requires. From my vantage point, it seems that he is trying to define a Democratic position that is much harsher on Israel than the party establishment has been, but still recognizably inside the boundaries of mainstream electoral politics.
In any case, I think the conversation was quite revealing about where the debate is headed, and I’d love to hear what you think in the comments.
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