NY Mag’s Intelligencer showcases Lee’s sole call for an unconditional ceasefire among the Democratic candidates for U.S. Senate, while Porter was “wishy-washy”

WASHINGTON, D.C. — In a new Intelligencer profile of the leading Democratic candidates for California’s U.S. Senate seat, Congresswoman Barbara Lee is singled out as the true progressive candidate in a race, reiterated by Lee’s early and continued call for an immediate ceasefire without conditions in Gaza. The profile highlights the stark contrasts between Lee and Rep. Katie Porter on the key issue of Israel/Palestine.

Key Highlights

Lee: “When you have a path that leads to more anger and violence, how in the world will there ever be peace and security and justice for the Palestinian people and for the Israeli people?”

• Even while trailing her peers, Lee has made a huge impact on the campaign, perhaps especially when it comes to the issue of Israel’s relentless ground offensive in Gaza. In the hours after Hamas’s violent attack on Israel on October 7, both Schiff and Lee immediately hit their marks — Schiff in his unreserved support for Israel and Lee in her instantaneous call for a cease-fire. “When I called for a cease-fire,” she said, “I condemned Hamas as a terrorist organization. I believe in Israel’s right to exist and in Israel’s security. What is taking place is counterproductive to Israel’s security. I still believe in a two-state solution. When you have a path that leads to more anger and violence, how in the world will there ever be peace and security and justice for the Palestinian people and for the Israeli people?”
• Her message has resonated with younger Democrats: A January poll showed that California voters under 30 supported a cease-fire by 55 to 18 percent. (Among voters over 65, the numbers were nearly reversed, and overall a slim plurality of voters, 41 percent, supported a cease-fire.) At the Democratic Club in December, Lee and I were interrupted by 28-year-old Justin Jones, one of the “Tennessee Three” ejected from his state legislature and then reinstated last year after a battle over gun control. Jones, an Oakland native, had been an intern in Lee’s California office before taking office in Tennessee and is one of the many young Democratic politicians who have endorsed her. He was in Washington to attend White House meetings about gun violence.
• “Young people have a lot of moral clarity,” Jones told me. “That’s why you see a lot of support for Congresswoman Lee from young people: because they want someone who has been consistent. I was just telling people about that lone dissenting vote in 2001” — a vote taken days after Jones turned 6 — “and I spoke to a group of Jewish Democrats and I told them the congresswoman has said, ‘Let us not become the evil that we deplore.’ ”

“A week after our conversation, Porter altered her stance”

• “The poles occupied by Lee and Schiff on Israel have left Porter in a no-man’s-land. She first offered a wishy-washy call for “a pause that will allow for the conditions to be set for there to be a cease-fire.” Foreign policy, she said, “is an area where I have done a great deal to educate myself and to learn to engage.” She told me of how she had traveled to Israel, read a lot, talked to rabbis, attended a town hall at her local mosque, and taken a meeting with the Islamic civil-rights group CAIR Los Angeles, in which she explained to them why she would not sign Cori Bush’s cease-fire resolution (because it did not call for the release of Israeli hostages). “It was not an easy meeting,” she said, “but it was very, very helpful.”
• A week after our conversation, Porter altered her stance in a 400-word statement calling for the U.S. to pressure Israel and Hamas to create conditions that would enable a “bilateral cease-fire.” Critics, including the conservative Orange County Register, said her position was confusing, while Politico wrote, “The change of heart also calls attention to how undefined Porter is when it comes to foreign policy, especially compared to Lee, an antiwar icon,” and “Schiff, who has a well-established profile as a centrist on national security.” Lee’s campaign dinged Porter, posting, “A conditional cease-fire is not a cease-fire at all” and “We need leaders who set the pace for change — not half-heartedly follow along when it’s politically expedient.”