JTA — When Jordan Wood vied last fall for the Democratic nomination for Maine’s US Senate seat, he avoided accusing Israel of genocide,  citing a link between rising antisemitism and “the language” that people use.

Graham Platner, who went on to overwhelmingly win the nomination, did not stint on using the term. Platner is out after accusations of sexual assault, and Wood is once again running in the abbreviated primary to replace him.

And now the former congressional staffer is changing his tune.

“I believe we can’t continue to fund Israel’s genocide in Gaza,” Wood wrote on social media last week. “It’s a moral atrocity. We should be using our taxpayer dollars to fund schools, healthcare, and childcare here at home, not on bombing innocent civilians.”

Last November, Wood said he was concerned the word was so loaded as to be dangerous. He told Democratic commentator Kaivan Shroff that he believed Israel has committed war crimes in Gaza, but stopped short of using the term genocide.

“I’ve hesitated on it because I’m also seeing a real rise in antisemitism in the United States,” Wood said then. “My husband is Jewish, and the acts of violence toward Jewish Americans is very much connected to the language that we use.”

It would be “a huge deal for the United States Congress to designate what’s going on in Gaza as a genocide officially,” Wood said. “There could be consequences to that of US citizens that have served in the IDF,” he added. “Do they get........

© The Times of Israel