Democratic Rep. Sara Jacobs personifies the conflict within her party over U.S. support for Israel and the nightmare in Gaza — and the increasingly precarious balancing act for any politician trying to navigate it.
The third-term member of Congress from San Diego is Jewish. She has family in Israel. So the country’s security is not an abstract notion. As a millennial, and the youngest member of Democratic leadership in the House, she doesn’t view criticism of Israel as off the table. But she also sits on the Armed Services Committee and represents one of the nation’s most military-centric districts, so she is acutely aware of Israel’s security needs and its role as a key U.S. ally in the Middle East.
All of those roiling elements were on full display last night, in Washington and at a town hall meeting in her district. The Senate voted down a resolution from Sen. Bernie Sanders (D-Vt.) to block the sale of U.S. weapons to Israel. The measure failed, but 27 Democratic senators, more than half the caucus, voted in favor — a sign that the horrific images of starvation coming out of Gaza in recent months are starting to erode the largely unconditional support that Israel has long enjoyed among many Democrats.
Jacobs says she would have voted in favor of the resolution, though she wants the U.S. to continue supporting Israel’s defense, including by helping to pay for the Iron Dome missile defense system.
She tried to lay out her nuanced position at the town hall, where pro-Palestinian protesters gathered noisily outside the high school auditorium in a suburban section of San Diego where the event was held. Inside, one of the first questions was what is she doing to ensure the people of Gaza are receiving humanitarian aid and whether Israel has committed genocide.
Jacobs, who worked for the United Nations and State Department before she was elected to Congress in 2020, tried to thread the needle — saying that Israel “might” have committed genocide.
“But I am not a lawyer, and that is a legal determination,” she told the restive audience. “I think we’ve clearly seen serious atrocities. I think we’ve likely seen war crimes, and we’ve definitely seen forced displacement that could amount to ethnic cleansing.”
Soon, members of the audience were yelling at her — and each other. Her efforts to explain her support for a ban on offensive weapons, but not for defense, were drowned out. “Weapons are weapons,” a woman shouted. A man stood and chanted “free free Palestine” while waving a black-and-white keffiyeh. Members of the crowd shouted back at him.
After about 20 minutes, police escorted the man with the keffiyeh out of the auditorium and the town hall turned to other topics — mostly expressions of anger about various actions by President Donald Trump wrapped into a question.
Jacobs said the next day that she welcomed the protests and is less worried about the politics of the issue within the Democratic Party than she is about addressing the larger issues. “The thing that needs to be worked out is how we get unimpeded humanitarian access to Gaza, and then how we get back on a path to a situation where you have two states where Israelis can live safely and securely and where Palestinians can live with dignity and autonomy and self determination,” she told POLITICO today.
The bitter politics of the conflict aside, Jacobs contends there’s a middle position in which people can condemn both the Oct. 7, 2023, attack by Hamas and the Israeli response that authorities say has led to about 60,000 deaths, mostly civilians in Gaza.
“I truly believe both that Oct. 7 was horrible and we should be calling for the release of the remaining hostages, and that what’s going on in Gaza right now is horrible, and those don’t have to be mutually exclusive,” she said. “Civilians shouldn’t be blamed for their government actions, and that’s true of Israeli civilians, and it’s true of Palestinian civilians, and it’s true of American civilians.”
Despite what happened at her town hall, the protests over the war in Gaza around the U.S. have, for now at least, ebbed since last year and many Democratic voters in general have turned their attention to other issues. But it’s not clear how long politicians like Jacobs, or her party, will be able to walk this precarious middle ground.
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