Weekly Briefing: Bowman echoes Democratic base on ‘genocide’ — and is ‘secretly’ targeted by the Israel lobby

As the world forms the consensus that Israel is carrying out genocide in Gaza, and everything must be done to save civilians, the same understanding is reflected in the Democratic Party. By 56 to 22 percent Democrats believe Israel is committing genocide.

But the tragedy – and open scandal — is that if a Democratic pol utters the word genocide, they will be ostracized by the leadership and pushed out by the donors. Just like the prohibition on stating another truth — Israel practices apartheid.

“What’s happening is not genocide. We reject that,” Joe Biden declared this week in a speech to the Jewish community.

Rep. Rashida Tlaib called the president out at the People’s Conference for Palestine in Detroit. “Biden says what’s happening in Gaza isn’t a genocide. Where is your red line, President Biden?” she said yesterday (Michael Arria reports).

Susheela Jayapal, a candidate for Congress in Portland, Oregon, didn’t even say genocide. But because Jayapal, a county commissioner, is not blindly supportive of Israel – and she is the sister of Pramila Jayapal, a Washington congressperson who is a member of the Squad – the Israel lobby poured money into her opponent’s campaign in the Democratic primary for an open seat; and the result was that in the primary this week, State Rep. Maxine Dexter beat Jayapal by a whopping 47 to 30.

Local media says that AIPAC, the big Israel lobby group, appears to be behind a “torrent” of outside spending in the millions on Dexter’s campaign.

Just as last week in Maryland, pro-Israel lobby superpacs spent upward of $4 million to boost their candidate Sarah Elfreth to win the primary in an open district in Annapolis/Columbia.

This is a pattern. Ever since the arrival in 2019 of the Squad, the Israel-critical voices in the Congress, AIPAC and its Democratic wing, Democratic Majority for Israel, have repeatedly defeated progressive candidates. AIPAC’s superpac has “the capacity to knock 20 to 30 percentage points off the lead of a progressive Democratic candidate,” the Intercept reports.

And you wonder why Joe Biden is hewing the line on Israel and alienating his base.

Now this wave is hitting New York. Former middle school principal Jamaal Bowman famously beat Israel warhorse Eliot Engel in 2020 to join the Squad from a district that straddles the Bronx and Westchester suburbs. Bowman then successfully defended the seat against a pro-Israel challenger in 2022.

But this year, the Israel lobby is pushing Westchester County Executive George Latimer and pouring millions of dollars into the district in the form of ads targeting Bowman for supposedly giving aid and comfort to MAGA forces by not supporting Joe Biden on reproductive rights and gun violence. AIPAC’s wing, the United Democracy Project, spent nearly $2 million in ads this week, more than a month ahead of the primary.

But guess what, The ads don’t talk about Israel. That’s because AIPAC knows that Israel is a giant loser for the Democratic base.

According to polls, Latimer is running ahead of Bowman. On MSNBC, Ayman Mohyeldin described AIPAC’s funds as “dark money” and said AIPAC is “secretly” funneling money into the district.

Bowman is doing his best to call out the Israel lobby group. “Their number one issue is Israel but they pay to run ads on other issues because they’re an organization that lies to the American people,” Bowman told Mohyeldin. “I was outside all day today. [People are] frustrated by the ads, they’re pissed by the ads.”

Two-thirds of his district supports permanent ceasefire, Bowman says. “We have people, they have money.”

Israel was not an unspoken issue when Latimer and Bowman squared off in a debate on May 13. Latimer appealed to the many Jewish voters in the district to support him, called Bowman anti-Israel, and piped the Israeli talking point that Israel has “No partner for peace” in Palestine.

Bowman cited his own pro-Israel talking points: “I believe in a two-state solution and Israel’s right to exist.”

But he said Americans need to take a stand against the killings in Gaza. “With 100,000 dead or injured, the majority women and children, we have to speak out about that.”

The congressman attacked Latimer for being in the pocket of the Israel lobby. “My opponent is standing with Benjamin Netanyahu in continuing the onslaught on innocent civilians in Gaza. My opponent is bought and paid for and in the pocket of AIPAC. [He is] the largest recipient of AIPAC money in the country. AIPAC is funded by the same Republicans who supported the January 6 insurrection, who opposed voting rights and reproductive rights.”

Bowman also stood up for the campus protesters. He said free speech is vital to America’s progressive tradition. “Without free speech, we’d still have Jim Crow and enslavement,” he said. And no LGBTQ freedoms either.

The leadership hates such idealism. Party leaders have smeared Bowman as an “angry black man,” while liberal Zionists have walked away from him. They’re almost as conservative as AIPAC on Israel.

One liberal Zionist ally, Micah Sifry, regularly met with Bowman but says he cooled on the Congress member after he called out Israeli genocide last December. Sifry still endorses Bowman and offers a very good report on the combustible identity politics of the race at Substack.

[The] coalition broke last winter, after Bowman had denounced Israel’s war as a “genocide” and then did an event in a local Islamic center with Norman Finkelstein… That led J Street, the liberal pro-Israel, pro-peace lobby that had backed Bowman since 2020, to take the unprecedented step of rescinding its endorsement. Now only more left-wing Jewish groups, like JFREJ, If Not Now and anti-Zionist Jewish Voice for Peace, are backing Bowman. While the first two groups say they are agnostic about Zionism, they’re certainly friendlier to anti-Zionism than any Jewish institution based in the district.

With significant help from AIPAC, which has a huge donor network including many people in Westchester’s large Jewish community, which is perhaps 10-12% of the district’s population, Latimer outraised Bowman in the last quarter of 2023, $1.4 million to about $725,000. More than 40% of that came via AIPAC’s donor portal. More has arrived since…

Another group, the Teach Coalition, the political arm of the Orthodox Union (the most rightwing of the major Jewish denominations in America), started early with a shrewd field strategy, putting somewhere close to $2 million into a “non-partisan” voter registration group with the unintentionally ironic name Westchester Unites. (It’s not clear where Teach Coalition got all that money, but one can assume it was a donor or donors in AIPAC’s network.)

So there you have it. Once again the organized Jewish community enters the fray as the most reactionary force in Democratic Party politics, in support of a mass slaughter and famine – and you can’t be critical of these groups because it’s antisemitic to do so. Evangelical Christians never got this kind of immunity inside the Republican Party!

“As best I can tell as an outsider,” Donald Johnson writes, “a part of the organized Jewish community in the U.S. has made support for this racist country part of their identity and anything that makes them uncomfortable, like honest criticism of their stupid ideology, they treat as antisemitism. And many of our worthless politicians go along with it.”

Thankfully, many Jews are denouncing AIPAC. “We’re fighting back against the pro-genocide lobby,” Jewish Voice for Peace Action says.

Let’s hope the media get on this corruption scandal unfolding in New York. As the pro-genocide lobby seeks to demolish another progressive voice that represents the idealistic base.