President Barack Obama’s nominee for United States ambassador to the United Nations gave a highly anti-Israel interview in April 2002 in which she said that "external intervention" may be necessary to prevent "genocide" and "major human rights abuses" in the "Palestine/Israeli situation".

Responding to a hypothetical question, Samantha Power, who was named to replace ambassador Susan Rice, said if given the opportunity she would advise the president to sacrifice billions of dollars of aid to the Jewish state, allocating the funds instead  to “the new state of Palestine.”

“In the Palestine-Israeli situation, there’s an abundance of information and what we don’t need is some kind of early warning mechanism there,” she said, in response to a question regarding how the United States should monitor a situation in the Middle east which may be “moving toward genocide.”

“What we need is a willingness to actually put something on the line in service of helping the situation, and putting something on the line might mean alienating a domestic constituency of tremendous political and financial import. It may more crucially mean sacrificing or investing literally billions of dollars not in servicing Israel’s military but actually investing in the new state of Palestine, investing billions of dollars it would probably take also to support what I think will have to be a mammoth protection force,” she said.

“You have to go in as if you are serious. You have to put something on the line and unfortunately the imposition of a solution on unwilling parties is dreadful,” she continued.

Power, a longtime adviser for President Obama, left the administration in February, but was considered the favorite to replace Rice at the U.N.

She worked on his 2008 presidential campaign and was senior director for multilateral affairs and human rights during the president’s first term in office.