Next Tuesday, AIPAC will face a massive referendum on its power and influence.
The pro-Israel lobbying group has spent $30 million on the Michigan Democratic Senate primary, its largest single-race investment ever.
The contest pits AIPAC’s candidate, Rep. Haley Stevens, against progressive former health official Dr. Abdul El-Sayed, who has highlighted Palestinian rights on the campaign trail and called for an end to U.S. military support for Israel.
At this week’s debate, AIPAC emerged as the dominant theme, as Stevens was challenged on the issue by El-Sayed and debate moderator Roop Raj, an anchor with the local FOX affiliate.
Stevens attempted to dodge the subject. “I have been very clear, consistent, and transparent, and I have continued to be,” she insisted when asked about a lobbying group that uses shell PACs to funnel money into Democratic races because Israel has become so unpopular.
Asked whether she regretted how much AIPAC had spent on her, she said she was proud of her record.
Stevens was also pressed on whether or not she would be doing AIPAC’s “bidding” if elected. “Absolutely not,” was her reply, but it’s difficult to take this claim seriously. If AIPAC didn’t think Stevens represented a solid, pro-Israel vote, then why would they be spending $30 million on the race?
“They’ve set a record in this race to help elect my opponent because they know that she’ll be a reliable vote,” said El-Sayed during the debate, and he’s obviously right. Just look at the recent House vote on U.S. military aid to Israel.
Earlier this month, Rep. Thomas Massie (R-KY) introduced an amendment to eliminate the $3.3 billion in military assistance sent to the country each year. 103 Democrats backed the measure, including many longtime Israel supporters.
Massie’s effort was defeated 314 -104, but the fallout has been ongoing.
AIPAC immediately cut off contributions on its online portal for Democrats who had supported the amendment. “AIPAC members are deeply appreciative of their representatives who stand on principle and are disappointed by those who don’t,” a spokesperson told the New York Times.
It’s clear that many Democratic lawmakers can read writing on the wall, i.e., look at any number of recent polls that show voters no longer like Israel. After backing the Massie amendment, Rep. Pat Ryan (D-NY) announced he would stop accepting AIPAC contributions and return the contributions he has already received.
“I expect groups like AIPAC will not support me in my future elections and frankly, I don’t want their support,” he tweeted. “Hardline stances that refuse to stand up to a corrupt and increasingly dangerous Netanyahu regime have no place in our politics.”
However, some politicians aren’t moving with their base, and that includes Stevens, who once declared that Israel appears in her dreams.
A Stevens loss, despite their record-breaking spending, would be a massive blow to the Israel Lobby.
“I’ve never seen one single issue external to candidates’ platform and campaign become so central,” Omid Memarian, an analyst from Michigan and the director of communications at Democracy for the Arab World Now, recently told Haaretz.
“Even voters unfamiliar with El-Sayed came to see rejecting AIPAC as proof he was ‘clean,'” he continued. “What has been feeding Abdul’s campaign is Trump’s broken promise to Muslims that we are not going to start a war, that he’s going to solve the Gaza problem.”
Bush vs. Bell: Round Two
Two years ago, Cori Bush was ousted from Missouri’s 1st district seat by Wesley Bell, who beat her in the Democratic primary with $9 million in support from AIPAC. Now she’s running to take it back.
As these things often go, Bell had no discernible attachment to the Zionist cause before the lobbying group propped him up to take out one of the House’s biggest Israel critics. In fact, he had been running to unseat Sen. Josh Hawley (R-MO) before being recruited by the organization.
At the press conference announcing his candidacy, Bell attacked Bush for voting against Israel’s Iron Dome system.
“They want propaganda to try and create confusion and disinformation,” he said. “I think it matters a lot. And then obviously how one votes. There’s certain things that we cannot politicize and that’s one of them, in my opinion. And as we see — Republicans and Democrats alike, one of the few issues that we all come together on.”
“All they did was radicalize me, so now they need to be afraid,” declared Bush in her concession speech. “They’re about to see this other Cori, this other side. AIPAC, I’m coming to tear your kingdom down.”
Just like 2024, Israel and Palestine are factoring into the race heavily.
On a recent joint appearance at a local radio show, Bell refused to refer to Israel’s actions in Gaza as a genocide.
“I am no fan of Donald Trump, but I love my country,” he declared. “I am no fan of Bibi Netanyahu, but we’re still going to stand with our allies. And when we disagree, there’s going to be disagreements. And I’ve been able to say to his face that I disagree with him. But it’s important that we stand with our allies in Ukraine, Israel, Taiwan, Western Europe.”
AIPAC’s Super PAC, the United Democracy Project, is funding anti-Bush ads in the district again. Predictably, they’re the highest-spending independent group in the contest, but is money enough this time around?
The political climate has changed quite a bit since Bell and Bush last squared off, as Democratic voters have grown wearier of Israel amid the ongoing genocide and war on Iran. The Israel Lobby has had to spend more and more money as the wheels fall off.
“I need to go back. I didn’t finish the work that I was doing,” said Bush in March. “It was interrupted by big money. It was interrupted by AIPAC and their allies who made the decision that they didn’t want this activist, this advocate, who had been speaking out against war and imperialism, that had been speaking out against a genocide in Gaza at the hands of the Israeli government.”
Odds & Ends
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📄 LRB Blog: Don’t extradite him
💻 Drop Site News: Israel Is Paying Millions to Train AI Chatbots How to Talk About Gaza. It’s Working.
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⏸️ Jewish Insider: DMFI pauses endorsements of nine House Democrats who voted against aid to Israel
🔄 AP: Cori Bush and Wesley Bell’s rematch sets up key test for Democrats in Missouri
🚨 The Intercept: House Investigation of BreakThrough News Is an Attack on All Journalism
“The pro-Israel lobbying group has spent $30 million on the Michigan Democratic Senate primary, its largest single-race investment ever.”
Since Oct. 7, Israel has spent over a billion dollars on global “hasbara” — television appearances, social media campaigns, chat-bot training, and other efforts to influence how people think about Israel. And this “public diplomacy” budget more than quadrupled in the last year alone….Take for example, Trump’s former campaign manager Brad Parscale, who is currently the proud holder of three of Israel’s largest contracts. His main gig: running a mass texting campaign on behalf of Israel while posing as mysterious “peace” groups like “Allies for Peace.” Or, to take another example, the public diplomacy group Targeted Communications Global, which has spent nearly $10 million to run ads on places like X, the Daily Caller, and Breitbart. It turns out, Israel is more worried about maintaining their right-leaning supporters….But perhaps the most shocking revelation is just how much time and money Tel Aviv is spending on “training” our chat bots — think Claude, ChatGPT, or Grok. The Israeli government is actually paying for “LLM poisoning” — developing pro-Israel websites that feed information to these chatbots whenever they’re asked about Israel.
How much is your support for Israel worth? Try $1 billion. | Responsible Statecraft
“Wesley Bell seems incredibly comfortable silencing his constituents and lying to them — whether he’s feigning ignorance about his biggest source of funding, AIPAC, and its support of genocide,” The fifth plaintiff, Christine Wilmes
+ Flashback: St. Louis police beat women at Wesley Bell town hall,
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QFzCsE4k3_M
+ Wesley Bell’s security team assaulted protesters at 2025 town hall, lawsuit alleges, 7/9/26
https://www.stlpr.org/law-order/2026-07-09/wesley-bells-security-assaulted-protesters-lawsuit
“These private security guards, including police officers working secondary (jobs), grabbed Representative Bell’s constituents by the throat, threw them against the wall, and knocked them to the ground,” the lawsuit states. “Representative Bell’s employees had no justification for their assault and battery on his constituents and caused them physical and psychological damages.”
The lawsuit comes less than a month before Bell’s high-profile rematch with former U.S. Rep. Cori Bush, D-St. Louis County.
+ MEMO Book Review of Joss Sheldon’s:
“The Zionists Who Hate Jews”: a century of evidence against Zionism’s oldest defence
Across 11 chapters and more than 300 pages, Sheldon draws on historians including Tom Segev, Avi Shlaim and Ella Shohat to make the case that Zionists “have always disparaged and defamed the Jews whom they dislike”, “allied themselves with some of the biggest Jew-haters on the planet” and “denied us our right to self-determination”. His formula for the whole book: Zionism and antisemitism go together, just like cream cheese and bagels.
https://www.middleeastmonitor.com/20260729-the-zionists-who-hate-jews-a-century-of-evidence-against-zionisms-oldest-defence/
US prosecutor who helped ICC’s Karim Khan seek Israeli arrest warrants breaks her silence.
Brenda Hollis, the US prosecutor who supervised the International Criminal Court (ICC) team that built the war crimes cases against Israeli and Hamas leaders, has defended Karim Khan’s handling of the Palestine investigation, rejecting the Israeli claim that the arrest warrant applications were rushed to distract from misconduct allegations.
Following Khan’s removal by the court’s Assembly of States Parties (ASP) last Friday, Hollis said that “regardless how you assess the removal of Karim, it should not be allowed to be conflated with the requests for arrest warrants for Hamas and Israeli leaders”.
“Let it be clear to all that he dealt with the situation in Palestine in accordance with his mandate,” she wrote in a post on LinkedIn.
“The requests for arrest warrants were not hurried, last-minute submissions. They were the result of ongoing investigations. They were based on law and sufficient credible evidence and finalised after thorough internal and external review.”
Hollis said she was in a position to know because she had run the team that prepared them. … She went on to oversee the Palestine investigation alongside British barrister Andrew Cayley, until the applications were filed in May 2024.
Kevin Jon Heller noted on X:
An important statement from Brenda Hollis, who ran the #Palestine team, about the Prosecutor and the #ICC warrants for Netanyahu & Gallant. Having worked closely with the team as Special Adviser on War Crimes, I know firsthand her assessment is spot-on. linkedin.com/posts/brenda-h…