Signs reading 'Dump AIPAC' on a sidewalk after a protest. Photo credit: Edna Leshowitz/ZUMA Press Wire/Reuters. For decades, a principal goal of Israeli foreign policy was to make supporting Israel a bipartisan consensus in the United States. Israel may be a small country in an unstable part of the world, but it has the lockstep backing – militarily and diplomatically – of the global hegemon. Thanks to America’s unconditional support, Israeli security would be nearly guaranteed, and its freedom of action would be as wide as possible.
Within the United States, the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) has been a key actor in this strategy. It’s used strategic political donations, heavily funding its supporters as well as any challengers to anti-Zionist candidates, to ensure a large pro-Israel caucus.
But now, the strategy is coming apart. The pro-Israel lobby’s latest target was a baffling one: former Rep. Tom Malinowski, who was running in a special election primary for New Jersey’s 11th district. Malinowski has been a fairly strong supporter of Israel, but made some token outreach to Israel critics in his campaign. AIPAC’s super PAC in turn dumped $2.3 million in negative ads on him – and as a result, helped throw the election to Analilia Mejia, a harsh critic of Israel who is now almost certain to win the general election. Whoops!
It’s an indication of just how poisonous support for Israel has become in Democratic politics, in large part due to the actions of AIPAC itself, along with the Israeli government. The party increasingly has no place for fanatical Zionists like Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.), who openly declared: “I have many jobs as leader … and one is to fight for aid to Israel, all the aid that Israel needs.”
This has been a long time coming. For many years, the Israeli government has behaved in an increasingly partisan manner, straining its support on the Democratic side. In particular, Benjamin Netanyahu, who has been Israel’s prime minister for most of the last 30 years, has acted as a shameless Republican hack, and routinely treated the Democratic Party with unvarnished contempt. He was a loud advocate of the Iraq invasion, telling Congress that there was “no question whatsoever that Saddam is … advancing towards the development of nuclear weapons.” Netanyahu was repeatedly rude to President Barack Obama in office (gosh, I wonder why), and openly campaigned against him during the 2012 election. In 2015, Netanyahu gave a speech to Congress – welcomed by Schumer, by the way – attempting to block Obama’s nuclear deal with Iran.
But for quite a while, Israel paid no price for this arrogance. In 2017, Schumer became the leader of Senate Democrats, despite the fact that he had worked hard to blow up his own president’s top foreign policy priority on behalf of another country, and in 2020, the US elected Joe Biden, long one of the most zealously pro-Israel voices in Washington, as president.
The genocide in Gaza has changed all that, likely permanently. After the horrific Oct. 7 attacks, Biden unsurprisingly backed Israel’s even more horrific reprisals without question, sending gobs of money and weapons that the Israeli military turned on defenseless civilians, massacring them by the tens of thousands.
Years of unimaginable butchery funded by American tax dollars cratered Israel’s reputation among Democratic voters. Whereas they slightly favored Israelis in Gallup’s poll in 2022, at 40% sympathy versus 38% for Palestinians, by 2025 this had collapsed to just 21% against 59% for Palestinians.
That brings me back to New Jersey. As Israeli actions have become politically radioactive in Democratic politics, moderate Israel supporters have been put on the back foot. Malinowski made a few small concessions during the campaign, in particular saying that he would consider putting some conditions on aid to Israel over its behavior in Gaza.
In response, AIPAC decided to make an example out of him, spending some $2.3 million on anti-Malinowski ads. But again, because Israel is hideously unpopular among Democratic voters, they had to disguise the effort – attacking Malinowski from the left, blasting him for previously voting to fund ICE, casting him as a Donald Trump supporter, and so on.
These ads were not only 100% pretextual, they were also dishonest about AIPAC’s actual politics. Like most pro-Israel factions, and indeed almost every major party in Israel itself, AIPAC is a far-right group. Its funding comes largely from right-wing billionaires. In other contexts, it donates to Republicans who supported the Jan. 6 putsch. AIPAC pretending to care about ICE when the Israeli military does worse on a practically daily basis is rich indeed.
Amusingly, pro-Israel forces now have another group to contend with: the pro-Palestinian Peace, Accountability, and Leadership PAC. It likely will not be as well-funded, but the group will have the advantage of being on the right side of Democratic opinion.
At any rate, Malinowski was plainly infuriated by this betrayal. In a statement, he warmly endorsed Mejia, promised to campaign against any other AIPAC candidates, and lambasted the group. “Our Democratic Party should have nothing to do with a pro-Trump-billionaire-funded organization that demands absolute fealty to positions that are outside the mainstream of the American pro-Israel community, and then smears those who don’t fall into line,” he said.
The cynicism, dishonesty, and arrogance shown by AIPAC, and the Israeli government in general, are putting Democratic supporters of Israel in an impossible position. If they step even slightly out of line, then they will get buried by millions of dollars in outrageously dishonest ads. If they toe the line, then they will get primaried, and rightly so.
While people like Biden and Schumer claim the alliance with Israel is so important, it’s hard to see how. It’s an apartheid state, committing brutal atrocities like clockwork, and its partisans are constantly meddling in American elections. And for what?
If any conditions on American aid are so intolerable, maybe Israel should start paying for its own weapons.
Ryan Cooper is a senior editor at the American Prospect, and the author of ‘How Are You Going to Pay for That?: Smart Answers to the Dumbest Question in Politics.’
The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect those of Zeteo.