Rep. Haley Stevens has reportedly prevailed over fellow House member Andy Levin in the Democratic primary for Michigan’s 11th district. The American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) spent more than $4 million in support of Stevens through its United Democracy Project (UDP) Super PAC.
Levin was elected to represent Michigan’s 9th district in 2018 but ended up squaring off against Stevens, the 11th district incumbent, as a result of recent redistricting in the state. Stevens is expected to win the general election easily in the heavily Democratic area.
“A major victory!” tweeted AIPAC after the race was called by Cook Political Report’s Dave Wasserman. “We were proud to join with Hillary Clinton, EMILY’s List, and local labor unions to support Haley Stevens—the one pro-Israel Democrat running in #MI11. Being pro-Israel is both good policy and good politics.”
The UDP PAC has spent heavily across a number of Democratic primaries, but the Michigan race was seen by many as a symbol of growing divisions within the party over Israel. In Levin, AIPAC found themselves working against a Jewish progressive, former synagogue president, and a supporter of Israel. He opposes the BDS movement, voted for an extra $1 billion in Iron Dome funding, has refused to back Rep. Betty McCollum’s historic bill promoting the human rights of Palestinian children, and has resisted efforts to condition U.S. military aid to the Israel. None of this was good enough for AIPAC. In 2021 Levin angered the lobbying group by introducing the Two-State Solution Act, a piece of legislation that pushes back against settlement expansion and calls for an end to Israel’s illegal occupation. Levin has also consistently defended two of AIPAC’s least-favorite politicians, Reps. Ilhan Omar (D-MN) and Rashida Tlaib (D-MI), against antisemitism allegations.
In a fundraising email earlier this year, former AIPAC president David Victor wrote that Levin was “arguably the most corrosive member” of Congress because he fundraises for Israel’s “worst detractors” and “authors and supports highly problematic legislation.”
After Stevens’s apparent win AIPAC sent an email to supporters. “This political battle was bigger than just the candidates on the ballot,” it read. “It was an opportunity to defeat a detractor of the U.S.-Israel relationship and to strengthen support for Israel – both within the Democratic Party and in Congress overall.”
Levin was backed by the liberal Zionist group J Street (which spent around $700,000 on ads) and the progressive Jewish organization IfNotNow.
Levin’s evident defeat comes just two weeks after AIPAC helped take down former House member Donna Edwards in Maryland’s 4th district. Edwards was beaten by pro-Israel former prosecutor Glenn Ivey, who had unsuccessfully run for the seat two previous times. The UDP PAC spent almost $6 million on the race. In a Pittsburgh primary in May, a progressive state legislator and former community organizer Summer Lee barely squeaked out a win against former Republican staffer Steve Irwin. Two months before the primary a poll showed Lee up by 25 points, but AIPAC spent nearly $3 million to help cut down her lead.
Many progressives have scrutinized AIPAC over its big spending in this cycle’s Democratic primaries, but some frame AIPAC’s support for Israel as a something of a political red herring. During a rally in support of Levin last Friday Senator Bernie Sanders (I-VT) said AIPAC’s support for Stevens “has nothing to do — in my view — with Israel. It is simply trying to defeat candidates and members of Congress who stand for working families and are prepared to demand that the wealthy and large corporations pay their fair share of taxes.” Sanders’s comments echo a recent piece by liberal commentator, and former Secretary of Labor, Robert Reich. Reich writes that, “The real criterion for AIPAC’s support or enmity in Democratic primaries seems to have more to do with which candidate is friendlier toward America’s moneyed interests and the Republican agenda” than it does with Israel.
AIPAC has also faced increasing Democratic criticism for endorsing 109 Republicans who refused to certify the 2020 presidential election, but again, the issue of Israel is often glossed over in these critiques. In April the Progressive Caucus of the North Carolina Democratic Party took back its endorsement of AIPAC-backed House candidate Valerie Foushee over the issue. “No American candidate should be accepting funds from an organization that provides financial support for those seeking to destroy our democracy,” said the group. However, the statement also made it clear that the caucus had no problem with Israel’s policies towards Palestinians or AIPAC’s vociferous support for such policies.
AIPAC (which was originally created in the 1950s to spin positive PR in the wake of Israeli atrocities) has always been explicit about the fact it is a single-issue organization committed to expanding pro-Israel sentiment across party lines. However, up until last year (when it launched UDP and its AIPAC PAC) the lobbying group did not technically contribute to campaigns. AIPAC said “hyper-partisanship, high congressional turnover, and the exponential growth in the cost of campaigns” are what inspired the move, but the group likely has deeper anxieties about the popularity of its message going forward.
Recent polling clearly shows that support for Israel is dropping among Democratic voters and young people. Despite its claim that being pro-Israel is good politics, it’s telling that AIPAC never actually mentions the country in its ads and dropped any reference to it when naming its Super PAC. A recent Critical Issues poll from the University of Maryland found that 33% of Democratic voters believe their Congress member leans more toward Israel than they do, with just 3% saying their Representative leans more towards Palestine than them. 56% said they were unaware of their Congress member’s position on the issue. The same pollsters found that the BDS movement has support among most Democratic voters who have heard of it.
These trends, coupled with the increasing number of House members prepared to criticize Israeli apartheid, provide some insight into AIPAC’s decision to spend millions on Democratic primaries. If progressives hope to deter the group’s influence it seems likely that they will have to challenge the group on the subject of Israel directly.
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“Albert Einstein turned down an offer to become Israel’s president & distanced himself from Zionism & the Israeli state. Zionist treatment of the Arabs had alienated him. In 1938, he observed, “I would much rather see reasonable agreement with the Arabs on the basis of living together in peace than the creation of a Jewish state. I am afraid of the inner damage Judaism will sustain–especially from the development of a narrow nationalism within our ranks.”
“In August 2002, as a consequence of aggressive Israeli behavior in the occupied West Bank, England’s chief rabbi, Jonathan Sacks, warned that Zionist state policies, as they manifest themselves in the colonization process & the associated persecution of the Palestinians, are perverting “the deepest ideals” of Judaism.
“Today, the American organization Jewish Voice for Peace (JVP); the British organization, Jews for Justice for Palestinians (JFJFP); & Jews for a Just Peace (JJP), a federation of groups in ten European countries, all keep up this tradition of admonition & critical analysis while promoting the “human, civil, & political rights” of the Palestinians.
“Toward the end of his life, Albert Einstein warned that “the attitude we adopt toward the Arab minority will provide the real test of our moral standards as a people.” The conclusions drawn by every human rights organization that has examined Israeli behavior toward the Palestinians over the last 70 years, including Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, Israel’s own B’Tselem, & the Palestinian Human Rights Organization (PHRO), leave no doubt that the Zionists have failed Einstein’s test. Yet that conclusion is just what the Zionists have never been able to face. Thus, any reminder of the movement’s failure in the form of contemporary critiques & documentation are not only denied, but condemned as anti-Semitic. Jews who express such concerns are systematically denigrated as “self-hating.”
“The U.S. media, still bound by the mythology of Israel as a democratic, modern, secular state that shares America’s pioneering tradition, have traditionally ignored or downplayed critics of Zionism. This leaves most in the West ignorant of Israel’s actual policies & practices. “Today, Judaism is on the cusp of ethical collapse due to the purposeful transformation of the religion into an arm of Zionist-Israeli state ideology.”
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It must be obvious to any well informed person that the greatest threat to Judaism was & is Zionism.
https://tothepointanalyses.com/author/firstname-lastname/ By Professor Lawrence Davidson
EXCERPTS: “Ahad Ha-am (pen name of the famous Jewish moralist Asher Ginzberg) noted as early as 1891 that Zionist settlers in Palestine have “an inclination to despotism. They treat the Arabs with hostility & cruelty, deprive them of their rights, offend them without cause, & even boast of these deeds.” He warned that such behavior stemmed from the political orientation of the Zionist movement which could only end up “morally corrupting” the Jewish people.
“As the issuance of the Balfour Declaration drew nearer, other Jews voiced their worries. In the United States, a letter representative of the Jewish opposition to Zionism was sent by Henry Moskowitz to the New York Times on 10 June, 1917. Moskowitz was a Jewish activist & cofounder of the NAACP. He wrote the following: “What are the serious moral dangers in this nationalistic point of view from the standpoint of the Jewish soul? First, it is apt to breed racial egotism.”
“In a 1945 essay, Hannah Arendt, one of the most insightful Jewish political philosophers of the 20th century, described the Zionist movement as a “German-inspired nationalism” (thus my use of “über alles” above). That is, as an ideology that holds “the nation to be an eternal organic body, the product of inevitable natural growth of inherent qualities; & it explains peoples, not in terms of political organizations, but in terms of biological superhuman personalities.”
“In 1948, Arendt and 27 other prominent Jews living in the United States—including Albert Einstein—wrote a letter to the New York Times condemning the growth of rightwing political influences in the newly founded Israeli state. Citing the appearance of the “Freedom Party” (Tnuat Haherut) led by Menachem Begin, they warned that it was a “political party closely akin in its organization, methods, political philosophy, & social appeal to the Nazi & Fascist parties.” Begin would go on to become one of Israel’s prime ministers. The contemporary Israeli party Likud is a successor of the “Freedom Party.” (cont’d)
“If progressives hope to deter the group’s influence it seems likely that they will have to challenge the group on the subject of Israel directly.”
Lol. What percentage of the population actually cares about Israel as an important issue? Not like vague opinions on it, but like have it be a driving factor in determining their voting intentions? This is the reason why AIPAC doesn’t mention it in its’ ads. The same applies to “challenging the group on the subject of Israel directly”. It’s a waste of money for both sides because the voters don’t vote based on this issue. This is also why Sanders and Reich and others are trying to paint AIPAC as a conservative force trying to undermine progressives as opposed to a one-issue lobby that cares not a bit about any progressive causes. It would be entirely happy to endorse the most left-wing progressive candidate possible as long as they are pro-Israel.
Levin’s mistake is that he turned himself into the Jewish defender of Tlaib, Bush and Omar. That’s why AIPAC supported Stevens. It doesn’t even have anything to do with his personal positions on Israel. Well, his other mistake was being a weak candidate overall running against another incumbent with strong local support.