McMorrow clarifies stance on Gaza, joins Michigan Dems calling situation a genocide

BY BEN SOLIS, MICHIGAN ADVANCE

MICHIGAN—Yet another Michigan Democratic candidate seeking statewide office has called the situation in Gaza and the Israeli military offensive against the Palestinian people there a genocide—this time from US Senate hopeful Mallory McMorrow.

McMorrow was pressed with a question on Gaza and accepting money from the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, the largest pro-Israel lobby in the United States.

The state senator from Royal Oak said plainly that she would not be accepting money from AIPAC, not now or in the future, nor was she seeking its endorsement.

She also called the war and the strife there a moral abomination. When asked if she would call it a genocide, McMorrow, after a deep breath and long pause, said it was by definition a genocide.

“We have Benjamin Netanyahu trying to tell us what we’ve been seeing with our own eyes is not true,” McMorrow said of the Israeli prime minister, whose government has been at the forefront of the military action against Palestinians in Gaza. “It is true. And two things can be true at once.”

McMorrow noted that there has been a disturbing loss of life on both sides of the conflict, including the inciting Oct. 7, 2023 inflection point when Hamas terrorists attacked multiple settlements in southern Israel, including a music festival, murdering more than 1,000 civilians and taking hundreds of hostages.

She also said her husband is Jewish and that her daughter, Noa, has an Israeli name. Both of those aspects of her public and private life garnered death threats against her after the Oct. 7 attack, which she said was the most horrendous affront to Jews since the Holocaust.

But the response from the Israeli military and the Netanyahu government was just just as horrendous, McMorrow said.

“[The war and genocide] has to end immediately,” McMorrow said. “The position of the United States should not be that we support Netanyahu with no check and balances … as an ally gone rogue, by a leader who, in their own country, is deeply unpopular. If there was an election to be held today in Israel, he would no longer be the prime minister. We have to end the war now.”

McMorrow said she supported a resolution put forward by US Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vermont) calling for the nation to cut off offensive arms sales, which in her estimation was the most effective leverage the United States had to end the war.

The candidate also called for flooding the Gaza region with humanitarian aid so as to make those shipments valueless—outside of their intended purpose—to Hamas, which could potentially steal those supplies.

“We cannot be bombing Gaza to the point where it is unlivable, uninhabitable,” she said. “We have to negotiate a permanent ceasefire, and the release of all hostages. Hamas apparently agreed to that yesterday.”

McMorrow added that it was her belief that the US needed to get to a place where it was brokering a real two-state solution with Israel and Palestinian leaders to secure a lasting peace between the two parties.

“My view on this is that we have completely lost the humanity in the issue,” McMorrow said. “It is talked about as like a third-rail litmus test, without acknowledging that these are human beings. They’re people, and our position should be that there is no individual life that is worth more than another individual life.”

As to the debate on whether the situation should be called a genocide, McMorrow said she doesn’t care what you call it.

“There are members in the Jewish community [to whom] it means something very different to them. That if you’ve lost family in the Holocaust, it means the specific medical testing, gas chambers, being put on a train,” McMorrow said. “I don’t want us to get lost in, ‘do you agree with this definition or not?’ I want to get to the solution.”

Although the commentary was likely encouraging for pro-Palestinan Michigan voters, Dropsite News—a Substack blog produced by journalist Ryan Grimm—reported last month that McMorrow had privately produced an AIPAC position paper that at least one pro-Israel donor said was “outstanding.” Those details came from a donor call obtained by Drop Site news, which was also published online.

The paper was never made public and the McMorrow campaign denied that that the candidate filled out any AIPAC questionnaire. The campaign also noted that the the donor did not speak for the campaign.

McMorrow’s campaign did not respond to a question on the position paper when asked by a Michigan Advance reporter.

Still, of the three top candidates in the race, McMorrow now positions herself with Abdul El-Sayed, who has plainly called the situation in Gaza a genocide and has been adament that he would not take money from AIPAC.

US Rep. Haley Stevens (D-Birmingham), has called for an end to the conflict but also has a strong pro-Israel record. AIPACTracker, which tallies money spent on candidates through the PAC, lists Stevens as having received a sum total of $5.17 million from the organization.

A request for comment from the Stevens campaign, and for clarification on the amount of money the representative has received from AIPAC, was not returned at the time of publication.

Stevens told Punchbowl News in August that she opposed the Sanders resolution. Stevens clarified that she didn’t believe an arms blockade would end the war, nor would it build a lasting piece or get Hamas to surrender.

Aside from McMorrow and El-Sayed in the U.S. Senate race, at least one gubernatorial candidate has made his stance on the Gaza genocide clear—Lt. Gov. Garlin Gilchrist II.

The candidate, speaking to the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee’s national convention in Dearborn, also known as ArabCon, issued his support for Palestinians facing hunger and strife in the Israel-Hamas war, saying that the government of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu was committing a genocide

“This is not a matter of opinion. It is a matter of fact,” Gilchrist said.

READ MORE: Gilchrist calls Gaza crisis a genocide at Arab convention

This coverage was republished from Michigan Advance pursuant to a Creative Commons license.