Future of US Israel Policy is Being Decided in Jamaal Bowman's Primary Fight Next Week

The Anti-Israel Movement has Largely Failed to Counter the Targeting of Pro-Palestinian Elected Leaders by AIPAC

The future of American policy on Israel and Gaza will largely be decided next Tuesday in the primary battle between incumbent Jamaal Bowman (NY-14) and his pro-Israel challenger, George Latimer, who is backed by a giant war chest courtesy of the American Israeli Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC). 

That’s admittedly a heavy weight to assign to a single Congressional race, but if AIPAC can knock out one of the few outspoken incumbent opponents of Israel’s Occupation and mass murder in Gaza, we can expect the rest of the House to fall in line with AIPAC’s dictates.

And Bowman is not just any incumbent.  He himself was the challenger in 2020 against one of the most stridently pro-Israel Democrats in Congress, Elliott Engel. Engel had been in the House for thirty years and was Chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, from where he assiduously defended Israel’s interests.

Joined with a new crop of “Squad” House members like AOC and Cori Bush, Bowman became one of the core advocates for changing US policy on Israel. When he traveled to Israel in 2021 with J Street, he met with the Israeli Foreign Minister and with Palestinian leaders, his name was in headlines in media across Israel, as elites there recognized a serious new challenge to unquestioning US acceptance of Israel’s Occupation had emerged.

Bowman’s defeat of Engel was seen as one of the largest political defeats AIPAC had ever suffered. So in 2024, AIPAC and other pro-Israel forces aren’t taking any chances as they seek to remove Bowman.  They recruited a top-tier challenger in George Latimer, who is currently County Executive of Westchester, a county of 990,000 that overlaps heavily with Bowman’s District. And Latimer is backed by more money than possibly any Democratic primary campaign has ever seen. As of June 18^th, AIPAC’s “United Democracy Project” PAC has poured almost $15 million into the primary to defeat Bowman, a rate equal to half a million dollars spent EVERY DAY to take Bowman out. 

The goal is obviously to show that when a House member like Bowman gets out of step with AIPAC’s agenda, they will face obliteration in the next primary race.

How the Pro-Israel Lobby Gets Its Way in US Policy

While the amount being spent in the specific Bowman campaign is eye-popping, it’s nothing new that AIPAC and allied donors have been outsized political donors to political races across the country, AIPAC has vowed to spend $100 million this campaign cycle to take out progressive, anti-Occupation Democrats in primaries this Spring and in general elections this fall

On the Republican side of the aisle in particular, this is backed up by the insane religious delusions of the evangelical Right, which see Israeli as a centerpiece of its “end times”/rapture theology, where groups like Christians United for Israel and its 10 million members have turned the GOP into a solid bloc defending any murderous act of Israel as part of God’s plan.

The impact is that direct votes on aid to Israel receive overwhelming votes in Congress. Back in 2021, funding for Israel’s Iron Dome defense system received 420 votes - where even Bowman was not in the handful of dissenters.

And with the mass murder in the recent assault on Gaza, only 58 House members dissented in April when the House voted on sending more military funds to Israel.

Even on more symbolic measures, the pro-Israel lobby intimidates all but a handful of House members. In April, only 70 Democrats voted against a bill defining antisemitism as speech critical of Israel – language so expansive that Jerry Nadler, representing one of the most Jewish districts in the nation, condemned the legislation as sweeping “too broadly” in its definition. When Joe Biden came out publicly against a bill calling for sanctions on the International Criminal Court for bringing charges against senior Israel officials over their war crimes in Gaza, 42 Democrats still joined almost all Republicans in the House in approving a bill calling for those sanctions.

The Failure of the Anti-Israel Movement to Counter AIPAC

What is striking is how much those leading street and university protests against Israel have completely failed to respond effectively to AIPAC. While I am critical of the sectarians and real anti-semites on the fringes of those protests, the deeper problem is that even those with a good faith commitment to justice in Gaza have no real power analysis.

The overwhelming rhetoric of that movement has been focused on demanding that Biden cut off military aid, ignoring the fact that Biden could never unilaterally end aid given AIPAC’s control of veto-proof majorities in Congress that would override any Biden attempt to cut off Israel completely. There has been little or no focus on shifting power in the House where AIPAC has its iron grip on policy.

Despite Columbia University being a relatively short train ride away from Bowman’s district, there was little effort to send volunteers to walk his district and campaign against the AIPAC candidate In fact, if you look at the websites of the ANSWER coalition, Students for Justice in Palestine, Jewish Voices for Peace, or the national Democratic Socialists of America - four groups leading these campus and street protests - none of them even mention Bowman’s race or any of the other pro-Palestinian House members being targeted for defeat by AIPAC-backed candidates.

Very belatedly, in fact less than a month ago, the local New York City chapter of DSA endorsed Bowman’s campaign, but they are an exception in a national organization where many factions have fought against any national endorsement of Bowman. In fact, many DSA chapters passed resolutions calling to expel Bowman, who had been a member of DSA, from the organization because of his vote for the Iron Dome back in 2021. (See Purge at DSA: Why are Activists Trying to Expel Representative Bowman? at The Nation). This is the sad reality- in the lead up to the mass murder in Gaza, the largest socialist group in the country spent a year debating whether to expel one of the most pro-Palestinian House members in the country, even as AIPAC was marshalling its funds to purge Bowman and other anti-Occupation political leaders.

That said, an anti-AIPAC coalition has emerged of less sectarian progressive organizations, led by groups like the Working Families Party, the Sunrise Movement, If No Now, the Center for Popular Democracy and others that has called for candidates to reject AIPAC funding and focused on the problem of AIPAC’s stranglehold on Congress’s poicy agenda.

The problem is that this coalition only came together in March while AIPAC has been organizing in House and Senate races for decades.

What is striking is the complete disconnect of so many pro-Palestinian activists from the basic need for building alliances to stop the slaughter in Gaza. Depite AOC being one of the handful of House members to vote against the Iron Dome and every other dollar sent to the Israeli military, you still have groups like the Columbia Students for Justice in Palestine lying that she did- and refusing to work with her in any common cause. See this tweet from just a week ago:

The tragedy of the Palestinians is that so many of those who speak in their name in the US are so incompetent at basic political skills, even as their AIPAC enemies are some of the most skilled political operatives in our national political system.

While polls are not encouraging, there is still hope that Jamaal Bowman pulls off another upset and survives the onslaught of AIPAC money in next week’s primary. But if he is defeated along with others being targeted by AIPAC, there is little chance of any shift in US policy on Israel for the immediate future.