On Tuesday, voters in New York’s 16th Congressional District will cast ballots in the most expensive House primary race in American history, and if the polls are right, Representative Jamaal Bowman, a left-wing Democrat, is going to lose. In the primary four years ago, Bowman rode the insurgent energy of the Black Lives Matter movement to an upset victory against a longtime incumbent, Eliot Engel, one of Congress’s most reliable supporters of Israel. But the urgent utopian hopes of that moment have long since faded. Now Israel’s champions, many of whom have never been comfortable with Bowman, are striking back, capitalizing on a political environment transformed by Oct. 7.
Bowman’s challenger is the Westchester County executive, George Latimer, who refuses to criticize Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel, putting Latimer not just to Bowman’s right but also to the right of President Biden and Senator Chuck Schumer, the majority leader. A June Emerson poll showed Latimer leading by 17 points. If Bowman is defeated, he will be the first member of the Squad — a group of young, very progressive Black and brown members of Congress — toppled by a moderate. Given that the American Israel Public Affairs Committee’s super PAC has poured more than $14.5 million into the race, a Bowman loss will probably serve as a warning to other politicians about the cost of breaking with Washington’s pro-Israel political consensus.
“This is, in my view, one of the most important elections in the modern history of this country,” Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont said at a rally for Bowman on Friday, speaking about the obscene sums being marshaled on Latimer’s behalf. I think Sanders was exaggerating, but the contest is probably the most important congressional primary this year. It’s setting a precedent for big money interference in local politics and tearing at the longtime progressive alliance between Black people and Jews. It could intimidate into silence Democrats who have qualms about Israel’s treatment of the Palestinians, or if Bowman manages an upset, it could embolden them. These high stakes make his carelessness in giving his enemies ammunition especially frustrating.
It was always going to be hard, after Oct. 7, for Bowman to bridge the gulf between his convictions and the expectations of many of his Jewish constituents. His district, which includes a small slice of the Bronx as well as the suburbs of southern Westchester, is among the country’s most Jewish, and many of his voters, traumatized by Hamas’s attack on Israel and by increasingly visible antisemitism in America, wanted someone who would stand resolutely with the Jewish state. Bowman was never going to do that; he was horrified by his encounter with Israel’s occupation during a congressional trip in 2021, and he’s been anguished by the mass death and suffering of Palestinians in Gaza, where he believes Israel is committing a genocide. There is something deeply admirable about his refusal to subordinate his values to political expediency.
But Bowman has also been reckless in stomping on ideological land mines. Among his greatest unforced errors was claiming that reports of Israeli women being raped on Oct. 7 were a “lie” used for “propaganda.” (He later apologized.) Though he says he continues to support a two-state solution, he’s fallen into the left-wing habit of using “Zionist” as an insult, such as when he referred to the “Zionist regime we call AIPAC.” Speaking to Politico, he complained about the “decision” some Jews have made to segregate themselves, which many saw as an insult to the Orthodox communities in his district. I suspect Bowman didn’t know that the idea of Jews as clannish is an antisemitic trope, but when you have lots of Jewish constituents, understanding their sensitivities is part of the job.
To be clear, Bowman isn’t the only one showing a lack of sensitivity. The campaign against him has been ugly and sometimes frankly racist. Latimer has accused Bowman of caring only about his “Black and brown” constituents and of having an “ethnic” advantage. After the candidates’ first debate, the vice chair of the Westchester County Democratic Committee called Bowman an “angry, lying Black man” on Latimer’s Facebook page, adding that she’d be glad to see him have a stroke. Before Friday’s rally with Sanders, which took place in the picturesque village of Hastings-on-Hudson, some residents sent a letter to local leaders fretting about the threat of “paid agitators” endangering the community.
They had nothing to fear; the rally, on a sweltering afternoon, was fairly small, with, at most, 200 attendees. The modest turnout was a reminder that much of Bowman’s fan base lives outside the district. “At the end of the day, political viability for whatever you’re saying has to flow from having a base that will keep you in office,” said the writer and organizer Micah Sifry, who helped found the group Jews for Jamaal, though he’s no longer involved with it. Bowman’s weakness, said Sifry, is “a combination of neglecting the hard work of relationship building with people who are critical of you, which is the bulk of the Jewish community here, as well as the hard work of base building with other local communities.”
Bowman is right to be outspoken about the suffering being inflicted on Gaza. But recently, as he’s leaned into anti-Zionist rhetoric — calling Israel, for example, a “settler-colonial project” — I’ve sometimes wondered if he’s given up trying to win, setting himself up instead as a political martyr. After Oct. 7, he condemned the Democratic Socialists of America for promoting a rally in which some speakers glorified the attacks, and he made it known that he had let his membership in the group lapse. But as The New York Times reported, last month he sought the group’s endorsement and promised, in a private video meeting, to come out for the boycott, divestment and sanctions movement against Israel. This decision baffled me. The Democratic Socialists of America is not going to help him win many votes in the 16th District, where Sanders fared worse in 2020 than he did in New York as a whole. And by aligning himself with the anti-Zionist boycott movement, even as he says publicly that he still believes Israel has a right to exist, Bowman confirms the fears of many of his local critics.
After the rally on Friday, I asked Bowman about choices he’s made that seemed to me like political malpractice. He rejected the idea that he should cater to those who’ve already decided that he’s antisemitic, emphasizing all the other communities in the district that he’s accountable to: “The community living in poverty, the community that can’t afford housing, the community that can’t afford child care” and those who want to see the war in Gaza end. But he can’t represent those communities, I said, if he loses. “If we lose, we lose,” he said. “It’s not about that. It’s bigger than that.”
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