Skip To Content
JEWISH. INDEPENDENT. NONPROFIT.
Life

Eric Cantor to the Forward: Administration Is ‘Bullying Israel’

The lone Jewish Republican in Congress is taking the Obama administration to task over its latest spat with the Israeli government.

House Minority Whip Eric Cantor phoned White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel on March 15 — asking him to convey to his bosses the message that it is time to ease pressure on Israel.

“The administration needs to reduce the level of its rhetoric,” Cantor said in an interview with the Forward, “I don’t think that the notion of us telling Israel what is best for its security is a good one.”

Cantor and several other Republican lawmakers have criticized the administration’s tough stance on Israel in light of the dispute over the Jewish state’s approval of another 1,600 homes in contested East Jerusalem. Connecticut Senator Joseph Lieberman, an independent, and Senator John McCain, Republican of Arizona, have also said that the Obama administration was wrong in pressuring Israel.

Cantor said in the interview that he believed that behind the administration’s approach stood an attempt to “curry some favor in the Arab world by bullying our ally.” He added that the administration should ask itself how this policy advances America’s national security interests.

The House Minority Whip said that Israel’s announcement of its new building plans in the Ramat Shlomo neighborhood, which took place during the visit of Vice President Joe Biden, was “wrong and ill-timed. ” But Cantor stressed that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu apologized for the incident personally and publicly. “From the moment he did that, it is puzzling for me why the administration is continuing to pressure Israel,” Cantor said.

He also added that the U.S. should distinguish between Jewish building in East Jerusalem and settlement expansion in the West Bank, because the understandings reached by former Prime Minister Ariel Sharon and President George W. Bush made clear that Jewish neighborhoods surrounding Jerusalem would not be part of a future Palestinian state.

“It is very troubling for me that this administration wants to treat Jerusalem the same way it treats areas in dispute,” Cantor said.

A message from our CEO & publisher Rachel Fishman Feddersen

I hope you appreciated this article. Before you move on, I wanted to ask you to support the Forward’s award-winning journalism during our High Holiday Monthly Donor Drive.

If you’ve turned to the Forward in the past 12 months to better understand the world around you, we hope you will support us with a gift now. Your support has a direct impact, giving us the resources we need to report from Israel and around the U.S., across college campuses, and wherever there is news of importance to American Jews.

Make a monthly or one-time gift and support Jewish journalism throughout 5785. The first six months of your monthly gift will be matched for twice the investment in independent Jewish journalism. 

—  Rachel Fishman Feddersen, Publisher and CEO

Join our mission to tell the Jewish story fully and fairly.

Republish This Story

Please read before republishing

We’re happy to make this story available to republish for free, unless it originated with JTA, Haaretz or another publication (as indicated on the article) and as long as you follow our guidelines. You must credit the Forward, retain our pixel and preserve our canonical link in Google search.  See our full guidelines for more information, and this guide for detail about canonical URLs.

To republish, copy the HTML by clicking on the yellow button to the right; it includes our tracking pixel, all paragraph styles and hyperlinks, the author byline and credit to the Forward. It does not include images; to avoid copyright violations, you must add them manually, following our guidelines. Please email us at [email protected], subject line “republish,” with any questions or to let us know what stories you’re picking up.

We don't support Internet Explorer

Please use Chrome, Safari, Firefox, or Edge to view this site.