Congressman Ro Khanna represents Alameda County and Santa Clara County. On his webpage, Khanna describes his 17th Congressional District as “Silicon Valley”, but his district includes Fremont and Newark in Alameda County (which are not part of Silicon Valley).
On July 8, 2026, Congressman Ro Khanna confronted apartheid in Israel. An extremist Israeli settler group and Israeli security forces detained Khanna and his staff as they visited the demolished village of Zanuta in Israel’s West Bank. According to Khanna, a group of Israeli settlers with American-made M4 assault rifles menaced and harassed his party by brandishing their rifles, taunting them, and making threatening gestures. When Israeli soldiers arrived supposedly in response to calls for help from Khanna’s staff, the soldiers joined in laughing and smoking with the settlers.
Khanna described the incident as “the most arrogant and humiliating treatment of American citizens I have endured.”
One of Congressman Khanna’s staffers with him on the trip was Cameron Kasky, a survivor of the 2018 Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School mass shooting, who happens to be Jewish. Kasky recounted how he said to himself, “I’m a Jewish school shooting survivor, and I’m sitting here looking at Jewish kids who have the eyes of a school shooter.”
The settlers’ campaign to destroy the village of Zanuta has been ongoing and well-documented. The village has been targeted by Israeli settlers for decades. In 2012, the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) destroyed water cisterns in the village as part of a coordinated effort to drive Palestinian residents out of the area. The crisis escalated in 2021 when Israeli settlers established the Havata Meitarim Farm, a settlement close to Zanuta. Israeli settlers demolished the village again in 2023, driving dozens of Palestinian residents from their homes.
In 2024, the international community, including the United States imposed sanctions against Yinon Levi, a founder of the Havata Meitarim Farm and a notorious leader of violent extremist Israeli settlers illegally destroying villages like Zanuta. According to reports at the time, the sanctions only emboldened the settlers who received support from Israeli Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich, a far-right settler leader.
The armed settlers who harassed Congressman Khanna’s party were identified as part of the Hilltop Youth, a violent extremist settler group. In 2024, the United States, the EU, the UK and Australia each sanctioned the group for its provocations and violent raids targeting Palestinians.
Israel seized the West Bank, Jerusalem and the Gaza Strip in the 1967 Mideast war. At least 750,000 Israelis have settled in the West Bank and their government created apartheid conditions for Palestinians still living there. Despite overwhelming and persistent condemnation by the international community as an illegal occupation, Israeli governments have maintained control of the areas and settlers have engaged in unrestrained campaigns of terror against Palestinians.
The destruction of Zanuta is only one of many stories of apartheid terrorism against Palestinians in the Middle East. For more than a decade, East Bay activists have been sounding the alarm about the efforts to destroy the occupied Palestinian Village of Wadi Foquin, located in the Bethlehem District of the West Bank. As Khanna observed, life for Palestinians in the West Bank is constricted by blatant discrimination, random violence, Israeli military checkpoints and Israeli-only bypass roads which limit access to markets, jobs, schools, and healthcare facilities.
In 2009, the Buena Vista United Methodist Church in Alameda, California, started the Friends of Wadi Foquin, to support its Palestinian residents. Since then, San Francisco Bay Area churches, including Trinity United Methodist Church and Berkeley Methodist United Church and many community members have worked tirelessly to advocate against Israeli aggression and the settlements that now surround Wadi Foquin.
The destruction of Gaza in 2025 and the accompanying havoc, including unprecedented killings of journalists covering Israel’s genocidal campaign, has captured the world’s attention. Congressman Khanna’s most recent trip to the West Bank may have brought him face-to-face with the privileges of apartheid terror, but it was not his first encounter with America’s role in supporting that terror.
Khanna is a co-sponsor of the Block the Bombs bill to prohibit the President from selling, transferring, or exporting some of the most destructive weapon systems we make to Israel, which are currently being used in the destruction of Gaza. Originally introduced in June 2025, the bill has slowly been gaining support from Democratic members of Congress.
Khanna is also a co-sponsor of the West Bank Violence Prevention Act which targets extremist Israeli settlers - like the Hilltop Youth and Yinon Levi - with sanctions, and he has introduced a resolution in Congress opposing the expansion of illegal settlements in the West Bank. Khanna has taken a firm position on the need for the United States to stop arming Israel, saying:
“We’re supplying them the M4s that they’re using to detain American citizens. We’re supplying them the weapons that they’re using to kill Palestinian Americans. We’re supplying them the weapons that they’re using to commit terror on the Palestinian population in the West Bank. It is simply inhumane, and the United States needs to not just sanction these extremist settlers — we need to demand that the IDF start to demolish the outposts in the West Bank.”
While Israeli settler violence in the West Bank has reached record levels, and the genocidal destruction of Gaza continues unabated, American sentiments (and sanctions) are clearly not having a significant impact. A 2025 Quinnipiac poll found that 75% of Democratic voters support the call to end military assistance to Israel. Still, we individually and collectively must do more to demand peace in the Middle East.
While Congressman Khanna remains steadfast in his opposition to arming Israel, the United States at this moment is on a different trajectory. On July 22, 2026, the House of Representatives passed the 2027 National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA). It includes Section 219 - originally numbered as Section 224 - entitled “United States-Israel Defense Technology Cooperation Initiative.”
Section 219 lays the groundwork for bilateral research and development, co-production of weapons, joint ventures, licensing agreements, and seemingly every manner of U.S.-Israeli military-industrial complex cooperation.
In addition to providing billions of dollars for military assistance to Israel, Section 219 mandates expanded coordination between the U.S. military and the Israeli military in every area of defense technology, including AI, quantum, autonomous systems, directed energy, cyber, biotech, and many more. In one commentator’s words, the U.S. military’s data could soon be the Israeli military’s data.
In a very disturbing sign of the times, the National Defense Authorization Act also approves changing the name of the Dept.of Defense to Department of War. The new reality is that we are hostage to war, working hand-in-hand with the genocidal machinations of Benjamin Netanyahu in the West Bank, Gaza, Lebanon and Iran.
The few progressive Democrats still standing on the Alameda County Democratic Party Central Committee have introduced a resolution condemning Congressman Khanna’s detention. It will be debated at the Committee meeting on Wednesday, August 5, 2026 at 7:00 pm. You can watch the debate live on the Alameda County Democratic Party’s Facebook page or attend the meeting in person to show your support for the resolution at the City of Refuge Church at 8400 Enterprise Way in Oakland.
You can contact Congressman Khanna’s District office directly at (408) 436-2720 to express your support for him and his staff, and call other members of Congress representing the Bay Area.
You can join the Friends of Wadi Foquin or make a donation to their projects online.
You can make a donation to one of the many organizations supporting the Palestinian people in Gaza, including Project Hope, or the World Food Program USA or Doctors without Borders.
Locally, you can join or support the Oakland People’s Arms Embargo campaign.
Activists are demanding that Federal Express halt all military cargo shipments to Israel from US airports, including the Oakland Airport. Federal Express has weekly military shipments from the Oakland Airport directly to Israel’s main airbase, including F-35 fighter jet parts, bomb release units, and surveillance systems. I’m hoping for a national boycott of Federal Express.
The quest for peace in the Middle East has been sabotaged many times by Israeli extremists, marked by the assassinations of UN envoy Count Folke Bernadotte in 1948, and Israeli President Yitzhak Rabin in 1995.
It has been more than 50 years since the U.N. first declared that Zionism is racism in 1975. The UN Secretary General at the time, Kurt Waldheim called for “urgent progress” in search of “a solution to the Middle East problems.”
For our part, the United States government has spent most of the past almost 80 years in denial, on the wrong side of history, ignoring the rights of the Palestinian people and feeding Israeli apartheid. The need for “urgent progress” is as great now as it ever was. It is also essential to recognize and call out the historic and dangerous role that Israeli extremists like Yinon Levi and Benjamin Netanyahu play in sabotaging peace efforts in the Middle East.
History teaches us that we can stop wars and end apartheid. I was at the Oakland Coliseum when Nelson Mandela addressed us as a free man after nearly twenty-seven years in South African prisons. It was the sustained attention of the world on South Africa apartheid and courageous members of Congress like Ron Dellums, that ended it.
It will require our sustained attention in this moment and in the years to come, and courageous members of Congress like Ro Khanna to stop our government from arming Israeli extremists, and free us, the Palestinian people and the people of Israel.
https://factually.co/fact-checks/military/section-224-219-2027-ndaa-changes-us-israel-defense-cooperation-26684f
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