Former Rep. Tom Malinowski (D-NJ), who established himself as a prominent voice on Capitol Hill on foreign policy and national security issues in Congress between 2019 and 2023, told Jewish Insider last week, as he mounts a congressional comeback bid, that he’s “as pro-Israel as I have ever been.”

But he also expressed more openness to policies conditioning or restricting aid, and called for the U.S. to serve as a “counterweight” to the Israeli far right. And he said that U.S. aid shouldn’t be used in furtherance of Israeli actions that the U.S. itself doesn’t support. At the same time, he expressed support for the Trump administration’s Gaza peace plan and strikes on Iran’s nuclear program.

Malinowski is one of the many Democrats who have declared their candidacies in the special election in New Jersey’s 11th Congressional District, recently vacated by Gov.-elect Mikie Sherrill. The 11th District, an affluent suburb with a sizable Jewish population, borders and incorporates portions of the district Malinowski represented for two terms.

Malinowski said that he’s “as pro-Israel as I have ever been, in the sense that I believe that Israel should be safe and secure as a Jewish and democratic state, and that the United States has a moral and strategic interest in defending Israel as that kind of state at the same.” 

Malinowski said that “to be pro-Israel for me also requires listening to what the hostage families have been saying for the last couple of years, to what hundreds of Israeli security officials have been saying to their government and directly to the United States about the need to bring the war in Gaza to an end and to have some plan that addresses the legitimate desire of Palestinians to have their rights respected and to have a future that they can strive towards.”

“I would not seek to enable [any] ally to do something that I thought should not be done. It’s just a basic foreign policy principle that I think most people would agree is straightforward,” Malinowski told JI, when asked about the possibility of conditioning or suspending aid to Israel. “I would make case-by-case judgments given what’s happening on the ground.”

He said he would not support U.S. policies that would hurt Israel’s ability to protect itself, but added that the U.S. should “serve as a counterweight” to the pressure that an Israel government may feel from Israel’s far right and “use our influence and leverage and our honest voice to steer our ally away from policies that are self-destructive.”

He expressed a similar view in public interviews last year when he offered support for President Joe Biden’s moves to suspend some U.S. arms sales to Israel to pressure Israel against mounting a military incursion into the southern Gaza city of Rafah.

“I would not seek to enable [any] ally to do something that I thought should not be done. It’s just a basic foreign policy principle that I think most people would agree is straightforward,” Malinowski told JI, when asked about the possibility of conditioning or suspending aid to Israel. “I would make case-by-case judgments given what’s happening on the ground.”

He said he was not committing to supporting conditions on aid but also did not rule them out depending on the situation. “There’s no U.S. ally in the world that I would guarantee a rubber stamp on every request for military assistance, that’s not the way U.S. foreign policy functions,” Malinowski said.

He said on X in April of last year that the U.S. has, in practice, failed to apply the globally applicable U.S. laws conditioning all arms sales on human rights compliance to Israel. He said that a decision to enforce that law last year to suspend arms sales to certain Israeli units was a “step towards treating Israel as we would any other partner.”

He added that the purpose of the law is to seek remediation of the issues to prevent the need to cut off arms, as was the case for most of the Israeli units to which it was applied.

At the same time, Malinowski indicated to JI a level of skepticism of efforts to halt all offensive aid to Israel, which have been pushed by some former colleagues, arguing that the “distinction between defensive and offensive is hard to make and a bit artificial.”

He expressed support for the Trump administration’s 20-point ceasefire plan for Gaza, saying it “offers the best possible hope for a way forward” and said the U.S. should focus on pushing all parties involved to implement it to its fullest extent, to deploy the international security force to neutralize Hamas and to surge humanitarian aid.

He said any decision on Israel in Congress, including with regard to aid, would be geared toward pursuing that goal.

“I think we’re very far from being able to address the issues of sovereignty and what the ultimate answer to those questions should be,” Malinowski said. “Even many of my Palestinian and Arab American friends, I think, would say that they’re not interested in lip service to a two-state solution right now.”

He said that “serious oversight” is needed from Congress on the deal because he is concerned that Trump will be “tempted to just declare victory and claim his Nobel Peace Prize without doing the hard work of securing implementation of the rest of the plan,” when it will require “steady pressure” — on Hamas and its interlocutors as well as on Israel — to ensure that the situation does not return to the pre-Oct. 7, 2023, status quo.

Malinowski was not supportive of an effort led by some progressive lawmakers to recognize Palestinian statehood, arguing that the U.S. focus should be — and that his focus would be — on more immediate humanitarian and security issues, including ensuring the Trump plan proceeds.

“I think we’re very far from being able to address the issues of sovereignty and what the ultimate answer to those questions should be,” Malinowski explained. “Even many of my Palestinian and Arab American friends, I think, would say that they’re not interested in lip service to a two-state solution right now.”

Malinowski said he did not oppose the U.S. strikes on Iran’s nuclear facilities earlier this year, adding that U.S. intervention likely helped bring the war to a quicker close than it would otherwise have, by bringing the U.S.’ superior capabilities to bear on Iran’s nuclear facilities. He also said he’s “very happy” the Assad regime fell, Hezbollah was “significantly weakened” and the “paper tiger of Iran’s defenses has been exposed.”

At the same time, he argued that any “lasting solution” to Iran’s nuclear program will require a diplomatic agreement with “highly intrusive inspections,” and said President Donald Trump had “exaggerate[d] the impact” of the U.S. strikes.

“My hope is that we will continue to pursue that, rather than imagining that this problem can be addressed just by going to war every few years,” Malinowski said.

At home, Malinowski has spoken publicly at various occasions since the Oct. 7 attacks about anti-Israel and pro-Hamas activism in the U.S. and on college campuses. He argued in May 2024 that students who care about protecting innocent Palestinians were being overshadowed by more extreme voices advocating for the end of Israel, which he called counterproductive.

“The loudest voices are using Gaza’s plight to push a sweeping & more radical agenda of defeating Zionism and “colonialism.” This is not about ending the war but about ending Israel,” Malinowski said on X. “But the actual political effect of these protests has been to shift attention away from Gaza at the very moment (after the World Central Kitchen strike) when opinion was shifting against the war. All our attention should be on getting aid to Gazans, freeing hostages, avoiding more deaths, and what happens post-war. Instead, we have to talk about dumb 19 year olds glorifying Hamas & ‘intifada,’ drowning out the voices of others who sincerely care about saving lives.”

He said those voices also gave right-wing “bad faith partisans” fodder to “cast all legitimate criticism of self-defeating Israeli government policies” as support for Hamas and demand police crackdowns.

“Even though there is a significant problem on the far left that involves anti-Israel protests morphing into calls for an end to Israel as a Jewish state, we don’t quite have a Nazi problem in the Democratic Party in a way that leading Republicans are now acknowledging they do on their side,” Malinowski said.

Malinowski told JI that leaders need to speak up and police antisemitism on their own sides, adding that he “probably underestimated the extent of the problem on the far left” during his time on office but argued that the “problem on the right has gotten much worse and is too often dismissed by critics of the Democratic Party.”

He argued that the problem in the GOP is much more severe than in the Democratic Party. “You have leaders of the party rightly worried, as some on the Republican side are, that a significant share of the young people going into administration positions … have something akin to a Nazi ideology,” he said.

“Even though there is a significant problem on the far left that involves anti-Israel protests morphing into calls for an end to Israel as a Jewish state, we don’t quite have a Nazi problem in the Democratic Party in a way that leading Republicans are now acknowledging they do on their side,” he continued.

He also said that holding social media platforms accountable — a longtime priority for Malinowski — for their amplification of content designed to fuel hatred, will be critical. He said that social media platforms “bear the largest share of responsibility” for increased extremism on both the far left and far right.

Asked about New York City Mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani’s record on Israel and antisemitism issues, Malinowski told JI the Jewish community is “rightly feeling a tremendous amount of anxiety” about rising antisemitic rhetoric and violence.

He said Mamdani has “made a lot of decent promises about the need to reject antisemitism and hatred of all stripes, and about his interest, his determination to listen to people and to bring communities together. And he needs to be held to those promises.”

Malinowski said that if Mamdani follows through, he could prove to be a “potentially very powerful ally against antisemitism” and help to rebuild Jewish-Muslim dialogue that has broken down since Oct. 7.

“But I also understand that he has said things in the past and failed to say some things in the present that cause people understandable anxiety, and therefore everyone has to be vigilant and hold him accountable to the better angels of his nature,” the former congressman continued.

Malinowski said he decided to run for Congress again because “it would be nice to have a Congress again, one that can fulfill its basic constitutional function of checking presidential policies that go too far. … I’d like to contribute to making Congress a coequal branch again.” 

And he argued that his experience in foreign policy generally is one of the key factors that makes him stand out from the rest of the field, explaining that there is a “big shortage” in the House of “people who can conduct oversight of the administration’s foreign policy.”

Asked about emerging attacks on him as a carpetbagger — he previously represented a neighboring district that included only part of the district in which he is now running — Malinowski argued he’s the only lawmaker who has represented any part of the district before and he works in the district as a professor at Seton Hall University.

And he argued that voters are looking for a candidate who can effectively pick up Sherrill’s work where she left off from his first day in office, given his previous service. His previous service, he said “is one of the key distinctions” between him and the rest of the field.

Former Vice President Dick Cheney, who died Monday, was remembered by former officials and pro-Israel leaders as a supporter of the Jewish state and a strong voice on U.S. national security issues throughout his time in public service.

Cheney, seen as a particularly powerful vice president, was a key voice in the George W. Bush administration during the War on Terror and also served as secretary of defense under President George H.W. Bush, chief of staff to President Gerald Ford and a leader in the House Republican Conference as a representative from Wyoming.

“He was always a big supporter of Israel while he was in the Bush administration but also before, as a congressman and as defense secretary in the first Bush years,” Tevi Troy, a presidential historian who served in the George W. Bush White House, told Jewish Insider, also highlighting the prominent pro-Israel voices with whom Cheney surrounded himself as vice president.

“I was always very impressed by how well-prepared he was, how knowledgeable he was and how focused he was,” Troy continued. “In meetings with President Bush, he usually didn’t say much — because he knew that if he said something, it might color how the room reacted. But he would give his views. He would listen attentively in the meetings and he would give his views to Bush afterwards. … He was revered in the administration, and if he did weigh in on an issue, you knew that he was going to have a lot of sway on that issue. But he also knew what the role of vice president was.”

Troy, reflecting on the dynamics between the president and vice president in several recent administrations, said that Cheney stands out in both his skill and knowledge but also in the fact that he had no ambitions to run for president — which Troy said gave his counsel “more weight.”

“It wasn’t about what his long-term ambitions were, but what he thought was best for the administration and the country,” Troy said.

Danielle Pletka, a distinguished senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, said that like other Republicans of his generation, Cheney’s support for Israel deepened in the wake of the 9/11 attacks, as the U.S. and Israel faced a shared threat. She described him as a “great guy” who was “never confused about what was right.”

“I think he recognized that the Middle East that we had nurtured over decades was one that in many ways allowed for the growth of Al-Qaida and he set about helping to change those things,” Pletka said. “People excoriate him for the Iraq War — but I can assure you the people of Iraq don’t excoriate him.”

“At the end of the day, he was always an extremely fierce patriot and did what he thought was best for American interests, and like a lot of conservatives understood very clearly that our friendship and our partnership with Israel was part and parcel of that,” she continued.

Pletka also described Cheney as “very clear-eyed” about the threats the U.S. faced in the Middle East, including from Iran, and that he “believed in seizing opportunities” to disrupt Iran and other adversaries.

“When I think about how Iran was allowed to exploit the situation in Iraq — I know he did his utmost to ensure that we pushed back, often without success in the second half of the Bush administration,” she continued. “When we were losing in Iraq, he was absolutely instrumental in ensuring that the policy got turned around.”

Israeli Ambassador to the U.S. Yechiel Leiter said on X that the “passing of former U.S. Vice President Dick Cheney marks the loss of a great American patriot, a devoted public servant and a dear friend of Israel.”

“His leadership and his belief in the strength of the U.S.-Israel alliance will not be forgotten,” Leiter continued.

The Jewish Federations of North America, in a statement, described Cheney as a “a dedicated public servant who was a friend to the Jewish community and played a significant role in strengthening the strategic partnership between the United States and the State of Israel.”

JFNA said that Cheney “maintained enduring relationships with Jewish communal leaders and institutions, engaging in serious dialogue on matters of global security and the protection of Jewish communities worldwide,” “demonstrated an unwavering commitment to the security of Israel” and helped expand military ties between the U.S. and Israel.

AIPAC said in a statement that Cheney, in his various roles, “worked to strengthen the ties between” the United States and Israel and was “a strong supporter of the U.S.-Israel partnership.”

The Republican Jewish Coalition praised Cheney as “an American patriot and an unwavering friend of Israel and the Jewish community.”

“Vice President Cheney had a substantial role in meeting the greatest challenges our country faced in the last 40 years, including 9/11,” RJC Chairman Norm Coleman and CEO Matt Brooks said. “He understood the threats against the U.S. and the valuable role of U.S. allies, including Israel, in combatting them.”

Sen. Mitch McConnell (R-KY) said that Cheney’s “intellect, experience, and resolve made America safer” throughout his years in government service.

“As grave threats to our security continue to loom, his commitment to American leadership will remain a lesson,” McConnell continued.

In the latter years of his life, Cheney stood staunchly by his daughter, former Rep. Liz Cheney (R-WY), as she emerged as one of the most vocal critics of President Donald Trump in the Republican Party following the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol.

Like his daughter, Cheney endorsed former Vice President Kamala Harris in the 2024 presidential election, describing Trump as a threat to democracy.