AIPAC’s and Israel’s influence is falling in Congress, two opposing letters show just how much

There is an infamous story about AIPAC that has been illustrative for decades. In late 1992, during the lame duck period as George H.W. Bush was readying to cede the Oval Office to President-elect Bill Clinton, AIPAC’s President David Steiner resigned after being caught on tape boasting about having pressured Bush into giving more aid to Israel and that AIPAC had many people “inside” the incoming Clinton administration.

In those days, AIPAC was much more committed to operating in the shadows of Washington, so the well-known pro-Israel columnist Jeffrey Goldberg asked AIPAC’s policy director Steven Rosen if this might harm AIPAC’s influence in DC.

Rosen smiled and replied, “You see this napkin? In twenty-four hours, we could have the signatures of seventy senators on this napkin.”

It was a smug response, but Rosen’s confidence was merited. It was not false bravado, but the surety that comes from many years of experiencing the truth of that feeling. 

In fact, for a long time, it seemed that AIPAC’s influence was written in stone on the steps of the Capitol building. But, at long last, times are changing.

We saw a small example of that change last week, when Rep. Ro Khanna (D-CA) publicized a letter he had been circulating calling on President Donald Trump and Secretary of State Marco Rubio to join the overwhelming majority of the world, and of U.S. allies, in the symbolic recognition of the State of Palestine. 

The issue itself pales in significance in the face of the ongoing genocide in Gaza and escalating Israeli aggression on the West Bank. In fact, between the UN General Assembly and Donald Trump’s theatrics this week around another doomed call for Palestinian surrender masquerading as a peace plan, Khanna’s letter went mostly unnoticed. 

However, the letter received 47 signatures, which is not a bad total considering it called for a fundamental shift in not only American but also long-standing Democratic policy toward Palestine. 

The real story, though, is the failure of AIPAC’s long-prized “back of the napkin” power.

In response to Khanna’s letter, Rep. Jake Auchinloss (D-MA) circulated his own, and both the letter and the support it received were telling.

Auchinloss’ letter regurgitated the well-worn AIPAC talking points of Israel’s purported “right to self-defense,” which is not a right afforded to states against those they hold under belligerent occupation; holding Israel blameless for the “hunger crisis and suffering of civilians in Gaza”; and unquestioned support for “protect[ing] Israel–our strongest ally–and align[ing] American values with regional momentum…”

Particularly given that the Auchinloss letter was partially supporting an Arab League statement that was clearly meant to marginalize Hamas and press it into surrender, this was a letter that should have gotten overwhelming Democratic support, dwarfing the Khanna letter and demonstrating again that, regardless of public opinion, support for Palestinian rights was marginal in the halls of Democratic Party power.

But the letter only gathered 30 signatures of some of the most extreme pro-Israel voices in the Democratic House Caucus.

That’s despite it being backed strongly by AIPAC and numerous other pro-Israel groups and having circulated for a week after Khanna’s letter started making the rounds. It’s a remarkable development that the pro-Palestinian rights letter gathered more than 50% more signatures than the AIPAC-backed one. 

In fact, Democrats were mostly quiet about the question of Palestinian statehood. In the Senate, Jeff Merkley introduced a bill titled “A resolution calling on the President to recognize a demilitarized State of Palestine, as consistent with international law and the principles of a two-state solution, alongside a secure State of Israel,” which got eight Democratic co-sponsors, plus Bernie Sanders.

The rest of the party was remarkably silent in both chambers of Congress, with only the most extreme supporters of Israel among Democrats—Josh Gottheimer (D-NJ), Brad Schneider (D-IL), and John Fetterman (D-PA)—speaking prominently against the idea of a Palestinian state. For the most part, the Democrats let the Republicans run with that point.

The reason for this can be found in a Reuters/Ipsos poll in August. That poll found that 59% of all American adults supported the recognition of Palestine by all UN member states. Among Democrats, that total was 78%. Interestingly, that number is just slightly higher than the number who said that Israel should be recognized by all United Nations member states (77%). 

Independents also favored recognition of Palestine by a margin of 58%-28%. The electoral calculus could not be clearer, and congressional Democrats noticed. 

That same poll also found that 82% of Democrats consider Israel’s actions in Gaza “excessive,” an appalling framework for such a brutal genocide. 

Yet given the way the Gaza genocide has so often been downplayed or outright denied by mainstream Western media, 82% is an overwhelming number. For all adults, incidentally, this figure is also 59%.

The decline of the Israel Lobby

There was a good reason that AIPAC wanted David Steiner out in 1992 once his boasts about AIPAC’s power were broadcast to the world. Like most lobbying groups, AIPAC’s strength is diminished in the light of day.

As AIPAC’s influence grew over the years, it was more difficult to keep quiet about its ability to influence elected representatives and its ability to work its contacts and close relationships with both Republican and Democratic leaders to help get friendly figures appointed to key positions in the executive. Steiner’s boasts shed some light on those dynamics, which were clear to Washington insiders and policy wonks, but less so to the broader public. That was the last thing AIPAC wanted.

Thus, it was important to create two parallel tracks. One was for Washington, where AIPAC’s power was clear enough that even people like New York Times columnist Tom Friedman would talk about Congress being “bought and paid for.” The other was for the public, where even so loyal a pro-Israel a figure as Friedman would be slapped down for saying such a heretical thing. 

In fact, in more recent years, there is a strong case to be made that AIPAC’s increasing visibility is proportional to its declining influence. Palestine solidarity activists have consistently shone a light on AIPAC, and even liberal Zionist groups like J Street, by their very existence, helped make people aware that AIPAC and other pro-Israel lobbying groups were pushing the most extreme policies on Palestine.

Bernie Sanders, the Squad, and a few other politicians have also helped to raise public awareness of AIPAC’s role in policymaking. 

As I have argued repeatedly for decades, it is a mistake to believe that the Israel Lobby is responsible for U.S. policy being as bad as it is in Palestine. The United States routinely opposes liberation movements and supports racist and colonialist powers. That opposition has always been our default position unless our perceived interests dictate otherwise. Central and South America, Southeast Asia, Africa, and most of the world can testify that the U.S. needs no AIPAC to oppose human rights, justice, and liberation. Our own domestic history of racist laws and capitalist demagoguery is further testimony.

But that doesn’t change the fact that AIPAC has played a unique role in making Israel an exceptional case. They have helped pass legislation to press the U.S. to move its embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem, as Donald Trump did in his first term; to ensure massive amounts of annual and supplementary military aid to a country that is quite capable of paying for its own military; committing the United States by law to ensuring that Israel is so militarily powerful that it can defeat any combination of Arab and Muslim armies.

And there is much more, including legislating special projects and business partnerships between American and Israeli corporations, exemptions from U.S. laws regarding visas, and, perhaps most of all, creating a political atmosphere where it is risky to criticize Israel even mildly and where even presidents are loath to do less than protect Israel even when it acts in direct contradiction to American policy.

But now, AIPAC has been forced into the daylight. The declining view of Israel among Democrats reached such heights that AIPAC dove in headfirst to direct political campaign financing. This was something it had always avoided, concentrating on lobbying and allowing its efforts to provide clear signals for the political action committees and major party donors who wanted to know how to deploy their resources most strategically. Unlike AIPAC, many of them could funnel pro-Israel money without it being described as such publicly. 

But direct involvement in campaign financing has a major downside. While money obviously helps any political campaign, it is only as valuable as the votes it can buy. And those votes have gotten increasingly expensive as voters become ever more repulsed by American support for a racist, settler-colonial, apartheid regime. That revulsion has been magnified exponentially by the genocide in Gaza, especially for the growing cohort of Americans who get their news from social media and are therefore seeing Israel’s crimes directly rather than through the filters of the mainstream media.

It’s now well established that AIPAC is funneling Republican money into Democratic primaries in order to oust progressive candidates. Jamaal Bowman and Cori Bush were their latest victims. 

But those two races were extremely costly, shattering records for spending in party congressional primaries. And even so, Bush only lost by less than 7,000 votes (out of over 123,000 cast), and AIPAC needed the help of redrawing Bowman’s district on top of its record-setting spending to oust him. 

Bush is rumored to be readying for a run to regain her seat in 2026, and running against AIPAC will be a powerful strategy for her. 

AIPAC has become politically toxic for Democrats, as has Israel. The muted response to Ro Khanna’s letter calling for a Palestinian state made that clear, and, whether they’ll admit it or not, so did the 2024 presidential election. 

To combat that toxicity, AIPAC will try to repeat some of its success in funding candidates quietly, running ads that talk about domestic issues and never even come close to a mention of Israel. They will do minimal campaign financing with AIPAC-PAC and lean heavily on the more deceptively titled United Democracy Project. 

Democrats have just shown us that they know we’re watching and that not only their base, but the swing voters they so desperately need are tired of Israel’s blank check and repulsed by AIPAC. Democratic candidates who take even one dollar from pro-Israel PACs must be confronted, challenged, and exposed as loudly as possible.

Breaking AIPAC’s hold in Washington is on the horizon, but it is only the first step in changing long-entrenched U.S. policy toward Israel. Still, it’s a big step, and we already have the advocacy tools we need to do the rest of the work. Justice is possible, but the road is long. We’ve come farther than many may think.