Nina Turner says pro-Israel businessman called on her to ‘disavow the Squad’ — leading to Ohio loss

Nina Turner has filed paperwork to run for Congress in the Ohio district in which she lost the primary race on August 3. But she has not decided whether she is actually going to run, reports a Cleveland journalist.

“I got all options on the table,” she said in an interview September 24.

In that interview, Turner, a progressive Democrat who co-chaired the Sanders campaign in 2020, said that in the middle of her campaign last spring, a pro-Israel Jewish businessman called on her to “disavow the Squad” or the pro-Israel community would come out hard against her.

“I wouldn’t sell my soul,” she said. “Because I do believe in justice and security for both peoples–both peoples–they let me know they were coming, and they did.”

Pro-Israel superpacs spent over $2 million in the last weeks of the campaign, flooding Cleveland-area TV with negative ads about Turner. Turner’s lack of obeisance to the Democratic party leadership was used against her in ads that never mentioned the Israel issue.

Establishment candidate Shontel Brown won by 51 to 44 percent, and is expected to easily win the race for the empty House seat next month.

Turner spoke to Ryan Grim on Sept. 24 for this Intercept podcast.

She and Grim said that the May conflict between Israel and Gaza hurt her chances by polarizing the Israel Palestine question in the Democratic Party. During that conflict, members of the Squad spoke out against Israel’s attacks on Palestinians in an unprecedented show of opposition to America’s support for human rights abuses.

After those speeches, the pressure came on Turner to disavow the Squad, even though she is friends of several of those lawmakers.

I have emails of local primarily business leaders in the Jewish community where they were encouraging Republicans to vote… were saying things like we must support Shontel Brown. In no way can we let Nina Turner win this race….

I was told by a prominent Jewish businessman, we’re coming at you with everything you got, you need to disavow the Squad. People are hearing this first with you and me talking, Ryan, because I haven’t told this level of truth. I was told I needed to disavow the Squad. If I didn’t do it they were coming for me. Also, the Palestinian community didn’t have rights that were more important than the state of Israel…

“What hurt me to my core,” Turner said, is that as a state senator for six years she had provided service to the Jewish community and worked closely with some of those business leaders.

For them to all of a sudden turn on me– The only thing I said during the campaign was for justice, equality and freedom for Israel and the same kind of justice for Palestinians. That was it.

Turner also criticized the BDS campaign aimed at Israel, but to no avail.

“No I don’t agree with BDS,” she said. “The reason I don’t support BDS, I want to bring people together.” But Turner said that BDS-supporters have “a right to peaceably protest and make their views known.”

That wasn’t good enough. The pro-Israel community wants legal punishments against those who support BDS.

Turner noted that the Jewish community is not “homogeneous” and that some Jews support BDS. But the pro-Israel Jewish community was apparently decisive in her election. She lost by 4,000 votes in a small turnout election — 35,000 to 31,000 — and the margin of victory was supplied by affluent suburbs, including the largely Jewish community of Beachwood, alongside Shaker Heights.The 11th district is a traditionally-black one in which black voters have determined the winner. Not this time. “I won the working class whites, blacks, and Hispanics on the east side and the west side. But they did not turn out nearly as much as the more affluent districts,” Turner said.

Turner ran on an anti-corporatist agenda. Medicare for all, the Green New Deal. She says Shontel Brown had one issue. “Their issue was, Anyone but Nina. The fact that I did not show the requisite worship to the Democratic Party and also to the current administration.”

Turner says the powerful South Carolina Rep. James Clyburn endorsed Brown and told people, “I was not the right kind of Democrat… The moral lesson of the story is that Nina Turner is not the right kind of Democrat.”

Turner said if she runs in 2022, the race would play out very differently. There will be many races happening at the same time. The Democratic leadership “can’t concentrate all that firepower” on one safe, Democratic seat at a time when it needs money for many swing districts. And more college students “who rock with me and the progressive movement.” will vote in a primary that is not in the summertime, Turner said.