AIPAC cannot keep up with its own motto, “Supporting Israel is good policy and good politics.”
For years, the pro-Israel lobby group has maintained — in the face of growing resistance to AIPAC’s hardline — that supporting Israel was just common sense if you’re a politician because it’s politically popular.
But the very insistence was itself a betrayal of AIPAC’s losing grip. AIPAC never needed to sell itself so hard. Not too long ago, one of its officials bragged to a journalist: “You see this napkin? In 24 hours, we could have the signatures of 70 Senators on this napkin.”
Of course, no one should take at face value the claims to influence from any lobby, but the said official was hardly exaggerating. AIPAC was consistently ranked as the first or second most influential lobby in DC by Congressional staffers. Its annual conference attracted at least half of the Senate, dozens of Congresspersons, and many other politicians too numerous to count. AIPAC basked in its influence.
Today, however, AIPAC hides its agenda. In its political campaigns, AIPAC throws enormous amounts of cash to defeat candidates critical of Israel and prop up subservient politicians — BUT ITS TV ADS NEVER MENTION ISRAEL.
AIPAC’s super PAC itself bears the generic name United Democracy Project, and its targeted campaign ads rarely focus on Israel.
If AIPAC wants to defeat a candidate — such as their successful $4 million campaign against then-incumbent (and Jewish) Rep. Andy Levin of Michigan in 2022 — because of that politician’s views on Israel, their ads could do what other special interest groups do: Say so and so is bad for Israel, and this is why voters should reject them.
Instead, AIPAC will find other issues to highlight, never making it clear that its goal has anything to do with Israel. For instance, in a Democratic primary, it might attack a candidate from the left. Then, it will take the exact opposite attack line elsewhere, attacking a candidate from the right.
Consider AIPAC’s most recent election, a misfire in a New Jersey special election.
AIPAC went after fmr. Rep. Tom Malinowski, because the otherwise pro-Israel candidate refused to endorse unconditional support for Israel. AIPAC launched ads attacking Malinowski that never mentioned Israel.
(AIPAC was hoping one of Malinowski’s two centrist rivals would prevail after weakening him, but in the four-way race, the victor ended up being the unabashedly pro-Palestinian Analilia Mejia.)
If supporting Israel were such good politics, then why doesn’t AIPAC rally the voting public around the issue?
Then there’s the ongoing election campaign in Illinois, where AIPAC has using a front group to influence the race. Once again, if supporting Israel were good politics, why does AIPAC try to hide its campaign contributions?
The front group is just another attempt to exercise political influence while concealing its agenda. AIPAC’s unofficial sister organization is the Democratic Majority for Israel, founded by a former AIPAC employee. DFMI was supposed to be the new group that Democrats, whose base is overwhelmingly pro-Palestine, would be fine taking money from, but even DFMI has become a liability, hence AIPAC’s new front group in Illinois.
AIPAC’s decision to launch a political action committee in late 2021 says a lot, too. A lobby’s sudden decision to launch a $100 million super PAC, after decades of going without, signaled that the pro-Israel cause was no longer self-evidently good politics, but now needs tons of campaign cash to pressure politicians.
All this brings us to the news that a Democratic Party autopsy report on the 2024 presidential election revealed that the Gaza genocide contributed to Harris’s election loss.
Of course, there was no need for a fancy, expensive, consultant-staffed report. The evidence was staring Democrats in the face even before the election: Biden and, subsequently, Harris would lose if they enabled a genocide.
This was apparent in polling that showed the vast majority of Democrats opposed the Biden Administration’s feverish support for Israel’s war crimes and mass murder, the fact that half of Democrats believed that Israel was committing genocide (and, by perforce, so was their government), and the endless cries of protests on streets, campuses, social media, and, yes, even at Biden’s and then Harris’s campaign events. Many of these protesters explicitly stated that their vote was conditional on an end to military aid to Israel or, at least, a US-enforced ceasefire.
As early as November 2023, nearly half of Democrats would voice disapproval of Biden’s policies to deaf ears, opposition that only grew by Election Day, November 2024.
Most prominently, there was the Uncommitted Movement, a grassroots effort with little money and even less preparation time, to persuade Biden to change his policies by encouraging voters to come out and vote Uncommitted in the Democratic primary as an act of protest.
Launched just two weeks before their first campaign in the state of Michigan, Uncommitted got more than 100,000 votes. In Wisconsin, they got more than double the number of votes than Biden’s 2020 margin of victory over Trump, or roughly 50,000 Uncommitted versus 23,000 votes.
In total, Uncommitted got half a million votes nationwide in a grassroots campaign that demonstrated the enormous frustration of so many Democratic voters. And what did the Democrats do with all that apparent rage? Show contempt.
Democratic consultants went on air to say, “Oh, there are always uncommitted voters,” or assure themselves that when confronted with Trump, these voters would fall inline.
The worst display of smug contempt and entitlement was by Harris’s team at the Democratic convention when the party refused Uncommitted’s request for a two-minute speaking slot on stage with a pre-approved speech to be delivered by a Democratic Georgia state representative and Palestinian-Americans.
Despite garnering half a million votes, the DNC decided that Uncommitted did not even deserve two minutes. It was a shocking own goal that demoralized so many people: Harris and the Democrats will not even listen to you for two measly minutes!
So the new report is all well and good, but this was already clear since before the election, and subsequent post-election polling predating the new report revealed that Gaza was the primary reason for traditionally Democratic voters not voting for Harris.
And it’s worth pointing out that the leading contender for the 2028 Democratic presidential nomination, California Gov. Gavin Newsom, who has just stated that he will not take AIPAC money, said very soon after Harris’s loss that Israel was one of the five reasons the Democratic candidate was defeated. So this report is not exactly bringing news, but it has gotten Zionists so angry.
There’s something about its official in-house ink that irritates them because here is one of our two major parties confirming, for its own purposes, that Israel was/is a political liability. And Zionists do not want this reality — which is obvious everywhere — to become political common sense. So they are attacking the report and demanding to see its data. And AIPAC is attacking Rep. Ro Khanna for demanding the report’s release.
