Noticias

Rep. Nellie Pou (D-North Haledon)’s America Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC)-affiliated trip to Israel last month was always going to cause some controversy – and it did.

The trip, which fellow New Jersey Rep. Herb Conaway (D-Delran) also joined, came under fire from Pou’s foes on both the left and the right, who claimed the congresswoman was standing with Israel instead of her own constituents. And it laid bare the extent to which the war in Gaza continues to divide residents of Pou’s 9th congressional district, which unexpectedly voted for Donald Trump last year and which is home to one of the country’s largest Palestinian American communities.

Speaking with the New Jersey Globe late last week, Pou said she remains committed to a ceasefire and a peaceful two-state solution between Palestine and Israel, and she believed August’s trip to be a part of that mission, regardless of what her critics have to say. “We as leaders have to make informed decisions,” she said. “We have to learn, we have to educate ourselves, we have to see all sides of a particular issue.”

The trip included stops in Jerusalem, the Palestinian capital of Ramallah, and areas near Gaza, including the music festival site where Hamas attacked on October 7, 2023. Pou said she met with Palestinian leaders – contrary to claims that she only heard the Israeli side of the debate – as well as with humanitarian aid organizations and with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, whom she and her fellow Democrats confronted directly.

“We looked him right in his face and said what he is doing is absolutely wrong with respect to humanitarian aid, the war on Gaza – making sure that he understands the importance of approving and agreeing to a two-state solution, which is exactly what we’ve been talking about all along,” the congresswoman said. “We said that to him directly.”

But while Pou said Israel has committed “questionable actions” when it comes to the war in Gaza and the humanitarian crisis that has emerged as a result, she did not label those actions as war crimes or genocide, two terms that some Democrats have become increasingly comfortable associating with Israel. (Rep. Bonnie Watson Coleman, perhaps the most progressive member of New Jersey’s delegation, called the crisis in Gaza “genocide” and “ethnic cleansing” in March.)

And asked whether she would join some of her fellow House Democrats in rejecting campaign contributions from AIPAC in the future, Pou declined: “I look forward to people providing me with whatever support they feel that they’re able to do, and I will consider that each and every time, whether it’s on one side or the other.”

(Notably, while AIPAC has already endorsed five Democrats and three Republicans for re-election next year, Pou is not among them; neither is Conaway, the other New Jersey representative who went on last month’s trip. Pou received AIPAC’s endorsement during her first congressional campaign last year.)

Debates over Israel and Palestine have divided Democrats for years, and polls show that rank-and-file Democrats have become increasingly pro-Palestine since the current war began. But they’re especially resonant in the 9th district, home to Paterson and Clifton, which together comprise a neighborhood known as “Little Palestine” for its large Palestinian diaspora community. For Pou to take an AIPAC-funded trip to Israel, many of New Jersey’s Arab American leaders say, undermines those communities.

“There are so many constituents within her district that have family and friends in Gaza, and they’re continuing to face a genocide and starvation driven by the Israeli aid blockade,” said Maheen Mumtaz, a government affairs associate at the Council on American Islamic Relations-New Jersey (CAIR-NJ), a top Arab American advocacy group that has clashed with Pou in the past. “Her taking this trip was really a betrayal for many of her constituents.”

Mumtaz also took issue with Pou’s decision not to use the term “genocide”: “It’s very clear that what is happening there is a genocide, and the fact that Congresswoman Pou isn’t able to directly say it is disappointing,” she said.

Pou’s 9th district constituents, however, are far from a monolith. According to the Arab American Institute, around 18,000 Arab Americans live in the district (out of nearly 800,000 residents total); the diverse district is also home to large Hispanic, Black, Jewish, Polish American, and Italian American communities, among others.

Assemblyman Gary Schaer (D-Passaic), a member of Passaic City’s Orthodox Jewish community and the driving force behind a high-profile antisemitism definition bill in the state legislature, said that Pou’s trip to Israel should be seen as a sign of her interest in learning more about the conflict and how the United States should respond.

“Her constituency now includes significant members of the Jewish community,” Schaer said. “I think that the congresswoman is making some tremendous attempts to understand the Middle East situation better… I give her tremendous credit for wanting to see up front and personally what she could.”

Back in 2012, when the modern incarnation of the 9th congressional district was first drawn, Israel became an important campaign issue between Reps. Bill Pascrell (D-Paterson) and Steve Rothman (D-Englewood), two long-serving congressmen thrown into the same district. Rothman was seen by Paterson’s Arab American community as unacceptably pro-Israel, and the community instead rallied behind Pascrell, who won resoundingly.

But after Hamas’s October 7th attack in 2023, the relationship between Pascrell and Little Palestine curdled. Local Palestinian American leaders hounded Pascrell to call for a ceasefire, and Prospect Park Mayor Mohamed Khairullah ran against him in the 2024 Democratic primary on a Gaza-focused platform. Pascrell won handily, but lost in the 9th district’s heavily Arab areas.

Even once Pascrell died last August, the issue did not fade away. Paterson Mayor André Sayegh, New Jersey’s most prominent Arab American politician, briefly ran for the seat in the hurried process to replace Pascrell, but was not selected; some Arab American leaders then unexpectedly turned to Billy Prempeh, the district’s Republican nominee, whose Israel-skeptic stances earned him the support of CAIR-NJ.

Democratic leaders in the district were also heavily concerned about retaining support from the district’s Jewish residents, including in the Orthodox Jewish enclaves of Passaic and Clifton, and from pro-Israel outside groups. Their worries were enough to essentially nix Sayegh and another pro-Palestine candidate, Assemblywoman Shavonda Sumter (D-North Haledon), from consideration when the convention to replace Pascrell was held.

There’s evidence that, despite all that, Pou did substantially better than the top of the ticket at winning Arab American votes. In three of the South Paterson election districts with the largest Palestinian populations, Pou won by a 52%-33% margin while Kamala Harris won just 42%-41%; a significant chunk of the vote went to Green Party candidates in both races.

Gaza, however, continues to loom over Pou’s 2026 re-election campaign. Sayegh is mulling a potential primary challenge against Pou and Prempeh is running once again as a Republican, and both have already begun using Israel as a wedge issue against the congresswoman. (Pou’s other declared Republican challenger, Clifton Councilwoman Rosie Pino, does not seem to have mentioned Israel or Palestine once during her campaign.)

Pou’s trip to Israel also happened to coincide with another crisis facing the 9th district: a water main break in Paterson that left hundreds of thousands with water troubles for weeks. The fact that Pou was in another country at the time prompted both Sayegh and Prempeh to claim that she was more interested in Israel’s problems than her own district’s.

Pou, for her part, called any attempts to criticize her handling of the water crisis “nonsense.” She said that she and her office had been in constant contact with federal, state, and local partners to bring water back to her constituents, and she’s now shepherding a bill through Congress to commission a Government Accountability Office study on how to prevent future water infrastructure failures.

The water main break has since been largely fixed, and like many things in politics, it’s possible the memory of it will fade in short order. But the war in Gaza remains as devastating and as complex as ever, with no obvious respite on the horizon.

Schaer said that he still has confidence in the Democratic Party to be the big-tent party that it’s long been. “Democrats have always embraced the big umbrella theory,” he said. “There’s enough room under this umbrella to represent us all, to allow all of us to come together to discuss, to debate, to differ.”

But CAIR-NJ and Pou’s other critics, many of whom have political motivations of their own, are unlikely to be satisfied with that. Until Pou severs her ties with AIPAC, Mumtaz said, “she loses our voting bloc.”

Pou, caught in the middle of such a fraught debate and fighting to win a tough re-election race, said that she’ll try to continue doing what all politicians hopefully aim to do: represent everyone in their constituency fairly.

“My constituents consist of both Palestinians as well as the Jewish community,” she said. “I understand that, and I will be representing them… My record will show that I’m not always voting in favor of one side and against the other. So that’s what I will be guided by.”

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