The country’s most powerful pro-Israel lobbying group threw its financial might against a moderate Democratic House candidate in New Jersey who is a longtime supporter of the Jewish state but has said that U.S. military aid should not be unconditional.
The move appeared to backfire.
Instead, the group, the influential American Israel Public Affairs Committee, may have helped a pro-Palestinian progressive win the primary.
The group’s allied super PAC spent at least $2.3 million against former Representative Tom Malinowski, who has said that he “would not deny anything Israel needs to defend itself” but left open the possibility of placing limits on aid.
It ran negative ads against him, sending a message that it was willing to punish Democrats seen as insufficiently supportive of Israel. And with the race still uncalled on Friday, Mr. Malinowski was indeed trailing narrowly. But the candidate leading him was not one of the other moderates in the race, but an outspoken critic of Israel: Analilia Mejia, a left-leaning political organizer who has said she believed the country committed genocide in Gaza.
The outcome appeared to be a misfire by the super PAC, the United Democracy Project, which was flush with nearly $96 million at the start of the year, making it one of the best-funded outside groups in the country.
Many Democrats were furious at AIPAC’s intervention in the primary. Matt Bennett, the executive vice president at Third Way, a centrist Democratic think tank, called the group’s advertisements targeting Mr. Malinowski “dumb and irresponsible” and suggested that the group had lost the trust of Democrats.
“I think it is going to be hard for them to recover,” he said.
Ms. Mejia’s surge in the 11-candidate primary race was an indication of how much the Democratic base has shifted away from support for Israel. It also suggested the waning influence of AIPAC, once a firmly bipartisan organization, within the Democratic Party. The group’s intervention in New Jersey, which appeared to be intended as a warning to moderates not to place conditions on support for Israel, may instead embolden critics of the country.
Across the United States, the political battle over Israel’s standing in the Democratic Party is still raging. Democratic House and Senate primary candidates are fighting over whether to accept donations from pro-Israel groups and whether the country’s actions in Gaza constituted a genocide.
In New York, supporters of the Palestinian cause have helped fuel a fierce primary battle between two Jewish House candidates who both call themselves Zionists but have taken opposing positions on the use of the term “genocide.” In Illinois, a crowded House race includes two Jewish candidates with opposing views and a Palestinian American progressive. And in Michigan, support for Israel is already playing a role in one of the Democratic Party’s most important Senate primaries.
The issue has been quieter in Republican primaries, but the party’s leaders are also wrestling over America’s longtime military and financial support for Israel.
AIPAC’s allied super PAC is eyeing more than 30 congressional races this year, said Patrick Dorton, a spokesman for the group. He called the New Jersey surprise “an anticipated possibility” and said “our focus remains on who will serve the next full term in Congress.”
The winner of the primary will face the Republican nominee, Joe Hathaway, the mayor of Randolph, on April 16 in a special election for the seat. The district, which once leaned Republican, was redrawn after the 2020 census and is now far safer for Democrats.
If Mr. Hathaway winds up winning the seat, the group’s warning to candidates it sees as insufficiently supportive of Israel may be seen as effective after all.
During the last two congressional elections, the AIPAC-tied super PAC spent more than $94 million to help defeat candidates it viewed as anti-Israel — a vast majority of them Democrats.
“This is a generational issue,” said Rahm Emanuel, a Democrat who frequently sparred with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel when he served as President Barack Obama’s chief of staff. At a gathering of Jewish leaders and donors late last year, Mr. Emanuel, a potential presidential candidate, warned that fewer future White House aspirants would be willing to visit Israel: “Netanyahu made Israel a political problem and turned it into a toxic entity here.”
Disputes Over a Word
A vast majority of Democrats and Republicans in Congress remain broadly supportive of Israel, approving billions of dollars in annual aid. But the Gaza war has fundamentally shifted how many Americans view their country’s relationship with Israel.
That change was on stark display earlier this year during a forum for House candidates in San Francisco. During a lightning round, the question arrived: “Is Israel committing genocide in Gaza?”
Two of the top Democrats vying to replace Representative Nancy Pelosi quickly held up a green sign: “Yes.” Scott Wiener, a state senator and a co-chair of the legislative Jewish Caucus, kept his sign down, awkwardly spinning it in his hands. The crowd jeered as he declined to answer.
Days later, he posted a video on X clarifying his position.
“I’ve stopped short of calling it genocide, but I can’t anymore,” Mr. Wiener wrote. Looking into the camera, he added, “To me, the Israeli government has tried to destroy Gaza and to push Palestinians out, and that qualifies as genocide.”
Criticism poured in almost immediately. His opponents called his stance politically convenient, and Jewish groups said it was incorrect, arguing that it “lacks moral clarity.”
For years, Mr. Wiener has been a key Jewish leader in Sacramento, where he served as co-chair of the Jewish Caucus for the past half decade. After the war in Gaza began, he said, he was yelled and cursed at several times for his support for Israel. But he has also been a harsh critic of Israel’s actions in Gaza, calling them a “moral stain” and a “shanda,” Yiddish for disgrace.
After he used the term “genocide” in his video, several Jewish groups in Los Angeles called on the Jewish Caucus to demand his resignation and rescind its endorsement of his congressional campaign. While the caucus did not do so, Mr. Wiener later announced that he would step down as co-chair next month.
“For a long time, I used equivalent words because of the extreme sensitivity in the Jewish community,” he said in an interview. “Ultimately, I decided after a lot of introspection and a lot of conversations that I have already said it in other words. So I decided to name this for what it is.”
The question of whether to call Israel’s actions in Gaza a “genocide” — an idea that is intensely debated by scholars, legal experts and human rights advocates, but rejected by the Israeli government and many American Jewish leaders — has come up in other Democratic primaries.
In Michigan’s competitive three-way Democratic primary race for Senate, one candidate, Abdul El-Sayed, has pushed the term, while another, Representative Haley Stevens, has said she disagrees. The state has large numbers of Muslim and Jewish voters and has for years been a hub of Democratic infighting over Israel.
The third top candidate, Mallory McMorrow, told a local radio station that while she previously agreed that Israel had committed genocide, there had been too much emphasis on the word, which she said had become a “political purity test.”
The term is also a point of contention in the New York City House primary contest between Representative Dan Goldman and his challenger, Brad Lander, both of whom are Jewish. Mr. Lander began last year to describe Israel’s actions as a genocide, while Mr. Goldman has rejected the term.
‘A Very Sensitive Issue’
Whether or not to accept support from AIPAC has become a key dividing line among Democrats.
The group has sent fund-raising appeals for a handful of candidates in the last several months, including Laura Fine, an Illinois state senator running for the U.S. House in a suburban Chicago district that includes heavily Jewish areas such as Skokie and West Rogers Park.
Ms. Fine, who is Jewish and opposes any conditions on aid for Israel, said the Gaza war remained a “wedge issue” for many local voters.
“It’s a very sensitive issue for me personally,” she said, recalling how she left the progressive caucus that she helped create in the state legislature after the Hamas-led Oct. 7, 2023, attacks because of the caucus’s criticism of Israel.
One of her opponents, Daniel Biss, the Democratic mayor of Evanston, Ill., spent most of his childhood summers in Israel, where his grandparents settled after fleeing Europe shortly after the Holocaust.
Mr. Biss, who is also Jewish, said that his “commitment to Israel is deeply part of who I am” but that he wanted Congress to stop giving “a blank check to causing human suffering.”
The other top Democratic candidate in the race, Kat Abughazaleh, would become the second Palestinian American member of Congress if elected.
She said she had heard from young voters who tied aid to Israel to their own concerns about the cost of living, asking why “we’re spending on bombs that kill civilians rather than supporting people here.” (Ms. Abughazaleh’s campaign merchandise includes a T-shirt and sticker declaring “Let’s Beat AIPAC,” adding a four-letter word for emphasis.)
Democrats Caught in a Bind
In recent weeks, Mr. Wiener said that he had had dozens of lengthy conversations with Jewish leaders and voters, and that while many strongly disagreed with him, others privately thanked him for his remarks.
But some of his opponents accused him of shifting his stance for votes.
“It seems like a political move based off backlash and polling,” said Saikat Chakrabarti, a former chief of staff for Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York who is running against Mr. Wiener.
Mr. Wiener said he believed many Jewish Democratic elected officials were in an impossible position, singled out by both pro-Israel groups and activists on the left.
“There is absolutely a level of targeting of a Jewish candidate that goes on here,” he said. “I guess that’s human psychology — an apostate is worse than your opponent.”
Jennifer Medina is a Los Angeles-based political reporter for The Times, focused on political attitudes and demographic change.
The post A Pro-Israel Group’s Move Backfires as Gaza Tensions Flare in Midterms appeared first on New York Times.
