The dirty little secret about the Israel First lobby is that it’s not actually as intimidating as it likes to claim. It’s very good at projecting strength, the shadow of a fearsome, roaring beast stretched and magnified by the angle of the sun. But when you turn around, you realize what’s behind you is a yawning kitten many times smaller.
The American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) spent more than $100 million in the 2024 election cycle to project exactly this kind of strength, and to make it seem, as they are fond of saying, that “being pro-Israel is good policy and good politics.” They’ve certainly convinced a lot of people in Washington that that’s true.
“You got AIPAC telling any Democrat who stands up to [Benjamin] Netanyahu, ‘Guess what? We’re gonna primary you. We’re gonna spend millions of dollars to defeat you,’” Bernie Sanders recently said, a point he’s made repeatedly.
“What I have heard from members [of Congress], and what members have told me they have heard from other members is, ‘What’s happening in Palestine is awful, Netanyahu’s awful, I can’t believe this is happening. I would say something, I would call for a cease-fire, but I just can’t risk an AIPAC primary,’” Usamah Andrabi, communications director for Justice Democrats, similarly told me last year.
But a lot of this fear is overblown. Yes, pro-Israel forces’ ability to raise and pour money into races is considerable and points to the growing corruption of the US political system. But what they don’t want you to know is that they have a record of failure that’s just as considerable — and the recent New York City primary elections were one of the most spectacular showcases of that failure we’ve seen yet.
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Auteur: Branko Marcetic
