Published: 18 May 2021
Last updated: 4 March 2024
DAN COLEMAN: Betty McCollum, an unassuming 67-year-old from Minnesota, is having a moment: for the first time, J Street is backing her legislation
BIGOTRY CAN PLAY TRICKS on the mind. Over the past few years, the Islamophobic, anti-Palestinian far Right, led by then President Donald Trump, focused its fearmongering and vilification on US congresswoman Ilhan Omar. The Sudanese-born Omar, an outspoken Muslim woman, was a ready target for Trump and company’s racist bile.
Meanwhile, the Palestinian cause was unobtrusively taken up by fellow-congresswoman Betty McCollum. Superficially, McCollum is the polar opposite of Omar. Born and raised in the US, she attended a Catholic college.
Her children grown, McCollum, 67, has the grandmotherly appeal of fictional Minnesotan Betty Crocker, the character and symbol of General Mills baking division created in 1921 for advertising campaigns for food and recipes.
Politically speaking, McCollum, while a strong advocate for human rights, is hardly a radical. She stands well within the liberal/progressive tradition once exemplified by vice presidents Hubert Humphrey and Walter Mondale.
Thus, while Trump was excoriating Omar as one who “hates Israel and the Jewish people”, the non-threatening McCollum has quietly and persistently taken up the Palestinian cause.
In 2015, McCollum wrote a letter, co-signed by 17 other members of Congress, to then secretary of state John Kerry expressing her concern over the treatment of Palestinian children in the custody of the Israeli military and calling for their human rights to be elevated to “priority status” in the bilateral relationship with Israel.
She told the US magazine Jewish Currents, “when I read the 2013 UNICEF report that outlined the systemic military detention of Palestinian children by Israeli security forces and the blatant mistreatment and abuse suffered by those children, some of them 12 years old and younger, I could not ignore it”.
while Trump was excoriating Omar, the non-threatening McCollum has quietly and persistently taken up the Palestinian cause.
In 2017, this time with 30 co-sponsors, McCollum introduced into Congress the Promoting Human Rights by Ending Israeli Military Detention of Palestinian Children Act. Congress did not vote on the bill. Follow-up legislation in 2019 sought to prohibit “the use of certain foreign-assistance funds to support the military detention, interrogation, abuse, or ill treatment of children in violation of international humanitarian law”.
In support of this bill, McCollum cited a report from the Israeli human rights organisation B’Tselem which described how Palestinian minors are handcuffed and blindfolded, deprived of food and sleep, and then, exhausted, scared, and alone, finally interrogated.
Surprising to many is the fact that what McCollum is calling for is already a matter of law in the US. The Foreign Assistance Act forbids foreign aid to be used in the commission of human rights violations and the Arms Export Act stipulates that military aid can only be used for self-defence. But a blind eye has been turned toward Israel, one that McCollum’s bill would remove.
As McCollum told news website The Intercept, “I don’t want $1 of US … aid to Israel paying for the military detention and abuse of Palestinian children”.
On April 15, McCollum expanded her focus to all Palestinians, introducing a bill “to promote and protect the human rights of Palestinians living under Israeli military occupation and to ensure that United States taxpayer funds are not used by the Government of Israel to support the military detention of Palestinian children, the unlawful seizure, appropriation, and destruction of Palestinian property and forcible transfer of civilians in the West Bank, or further annexation of Palestinian land in violation of international law.”
McCollum’s bill has been endorsed by more than 100 organisations including J Street, Jewish Voice for Peace Action, and Americans for Peace Now.
Yet McCollum still flies under the radar.
The Forward’s coverage of the bill focused on how New York congressman “Jamaal Bowman defends his support of bill to regulate aid to Israel.” McCollum is mentioned only in passing. Jewish Currents reported on the bill in an article on “J Street Goes on the Offensive, Carefully.” The piece opens with a large photo of Bernie Sanders and a quote from Elizabeth Warren, both high profile senators and 2020 Democratic primary candidates.
It is said persistence pays off, sometimes if only by virtue of sticking around until the time is right. While acknowledging that her bill is not likely to pass Congress this year, McCollum told Jewish Currents, “this bill will eventually transform US policy on Israel/Palestine because it is mobilising civil society across our country to influence the debate.”
McCollum’s bill has been endorsed by more than 100 organisations, yet she still flies under the radar
And the terms of the debate may be shifting.
This year is the first time J Street has supported McCollum’s legislation and J Street is coming into its own as a rival to The American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) in representing the American Jewish community. A change in Jewish advocacy around this issue could affect the views of many in Congress.
The past two election cycles have seen a steady increase in the election of those who McCollum has described as “a growing group of Democrats who are disturbed and disillusioned by the conduct of the Israeli government.”
These include representatives like Bowman, who told The Forward, “I think honest conversations about what’s happening, transparency around how our aid is being used will take us one big step closer to a true two-state solution.”
American opinion may be shifting when we find Pulitzer Prize-winning New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof writing last week, “shouldn’t our vast sums of aid to Israel be conditioned on reducing conflict rather than aggravating it, on building conditions for peace rather than creating obstacles to it?”
And President Biden brings a much more balanced view to the conflict. In principle at least, the Biden Administration does not appear far from McCollum. In a call last Saturday with Netanyahu, White House reports say that Biden “expressed his support for steps to enable the Palestinian people to enjoy the dignity, security, freedom, and economic opportunity that they deserve and affirmed his support for a two-state solution.”
Like Biden and Bowman, McCollum sees her work as a step toward a two-state solution. Although her legislation focuses on the rights of the Palestinians, she told The Intercept, “I am determined to keep trying and I hope more of my colleagues will join me in working for peace, justice, and human rights for Palestinians and Israelis alike.”
Photo: Betty McCollum in Minnesota, 2018 (US Campaign for Palestinian Rights)
