The Shift: The Democratic Party battle over AIPAC heats up

A Democratic National Committee member says she will introduce a resolution rejecting AIPAC spending at this month’s DNC meeting.

“At a time when Democratic voters might really not have felt represented or seen when it came to Gaza or seeing their party support Palestinian rights or stand against military conflict, this could be one step toward bringing those voters back into the party,” the committee member, Allison Minnerly, told The Intercept’s Matt Sledge.

“Given the recent primaries in Illinois, but also what we’ve seen across the country, I think it’s important that we specify that AIPAC as a growing force in our primaries needs to be specifically addressed when we talk about dark money,” she added.

If Minnerly’s name rings a bell, it might be because she introduced Resolution 18 last year. It called for a ceasefire in Gaza, suspension of U.S. military aid to Israel, and recognition of Palestinian statehood. Her effort was ultimately watered down, then unceremoniously dismissed at the DNC’s summer meeting in Minnesota.

“The fight over Resolution 18 was more than a simple vote over a symbolic resolution. The story shows how the Israel lobby is doing all it can to prevent Democratic Party leadership from honoring the overwhelming will of party members. It also is a harbinger of fights to come, as support for Palestine only continues to grow in the party in reaction to Israel’s genocide in Gaza,” wrote Nadia Ahmad at Mondoweiss at the time.

The same is true this time around.

The new resolution is also symbolic, but it gets Democrats on the record regarding a lobbying group that has already become a hot-button issue among presidential hopefuls.

One such example is Illinois Governor JB Pritzker, who is attempting to distance himself from past AIPAC connections based on the direction of the political winds.

“It became an organization that was supporting Donald Trump and people who follow Donald Trump,” Pritzker declared after the group spent heavily in Illinois’s recent primaries. “AIPAC really is not an organization that I think today I would want any part of.”

A spokesperson for the Governor reiterated that Pritzker “withdrew his support” from the group after it “became a pro-Trump organization.”

Pritzker’s statement makes it seem as if AIPAC is a well-intentioned group that has been led astray amid the current political climate. He’s constructed a fantasy, but there’s an obvious reason behind the fabrication. He’s creating a narrative where his past support can be excused. He didn’t change in this story, they did.

You see lawmakers push similar stories when it’s time to lightly criticize an ongoing genocide. The U.S./Israel relationship remains sacrosanct. The whole business has simply been muddied by Donald Trump and Benjamin Netanyahu.

Just days after the Pritzker’s comments, Holly Otterbein and Alex Thompson published an illuminating report in Axios detailing the extent of his pro-Israel connections and they go far beyond AIPAC.

When he was president and head of the Pritzker Family Foundation it gave $82,000 to Friends of the Israel Defense Forces and $1.7 million to the American Israel Education Foundation, the AIPAC-affiliated group that sponsors trips to Israel for lawmakers.

“Pritzker has tried to walk a fine line — breaking with AIPAC over its affiliation with Trump rather than Israeli actions — and focusing most of his criticism on Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu rather than on the country itself,” notes the Axios piece.

It’s doubtful he can continue to maintain this position without some major pushback from the party’s left flank, of which Minnerly’s resolution is just the latest example.

Hasan Piker and the Democrats

In a truly breathtaking move, a number of Democratic leaders have recently spent their time denouncing Hasan Piker.

The left-wing Twitch streamer is set to hit the campaign trail in support of Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed, which has led to condemnations from two of his opponents state Sen. Mallory McMorrow and Rep. Haley Stevens. He’s also facing backlash from Michigan Senator Elissa Slotkin.

Piker is consistently criticized because, among other things, he said that October 7th was a “direct consequence” of Israel’s actions and that the United States’s foreign policy led to the 9/11 attacks. He’s been smeared as a antisemite and compared to Holocaust deniers for such statements.

However, most voters have grown skeptical of Israel and many probably agree with Piker’s consistent criticisms of Zionism.

Israel’s reputation is in the toilet among people who consider themselves Democrats, and people who consider themselves Independents. The most recent Gallup poll on the issues shows that a majority of Americans sympathize with Palestinians more than Israelis.

“We have to be serious here about who’s going to be the best general election candidate for U.S. Senate in Michigan to beat Mike Rogers, and someone who’s campaigning with someone like that is not going to win in Michigan,” Hayley Stevens tells Jewish Insider.

What is this assertion based on exactly? If campaigning with (the extremely popular) Piker is a liability for El-Sayed, then surely Stevens’s AIPAC’s connections are a potential messaging problem.

As usual, there are a variety of double standards at work here. Slotkin says that Piker “sounds deeply antisemitic” because he’s criticized Zionists, but the same week she appeared on Bill Maher’s show, a guy who has been making actual bigoted comments for decades.

Establishment Dems obviously want to make example of Piker and quash growing pro-Palestine sentiment among Democratic voters. One of the main groups attacking him has been the centrist think tank Third Way. The group says it want to “reduce far-left influence and infrastructure” within the Democratic party, which shouldn’t be especially daunting since there is none.

Andrew Perez has a good piece at Zeteo summing this up.

“Third Way is targeting Piker as part of a broader effort to keep the Democratic Party under the control of big corporations, the ultra-wealthy, and supporters of Israel, no matter what the party’s base wants,” he writes.