Rep. Bowman: It ‘Felt’ Like I Was in the Jim Crow Era When I Visited West Bank

EXCERPT:

BOWMAN: "Even before I went to the West Bank on my own — not on my own, but with J Street, I spoke to Israeli and Palestinian scholars over the phone just to learn more about it, and one of the, I forget his name, told me we're in this civil rights era moment here in the West Bank. This is like Jim Crow. And when I heard Ta-Nehisi Coates say that, I felt what he was saying because although I didn't live during Jim Crow, the Jim Crow South, I read about it. And when I went there, it felt that way. It felt suffocating, it felt stifling. It felt immobile. And again, for me, as a sitting member of Congress who has voted in support of the Iron Dome, right, so I felt what he was talking about there."