How AIPAC is Making the US Congress pro-Genocide

AIPAC, or the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, Israel’s lobby in the United States, will deploy $100M this campaign season to help elect pro-genocide candidates to the US Congress. That makes AIPAC the largest single-issue spender in the primaries.

For AIPAC, priority #1 is to unseat the most vocal critics of Israel’s genocidal war on Gaza. Target #1 has been MI-Democratic Representative Rashida Tlaib, Congress’s most outspoken advocate for Palestinian human rights. AIPAC offered a whopping $20 million to both Hill Harper and Nasser Beydoun to run against her in the 2024 Democratic primary, a fifth of AIPAC’s entire war chest.

Both Harper and Beydoun balked at AIPAC’s offer, and both leaked the dollar amount they were offered, apparently to dissuade others from taking the blood money. It was harder than AIPAC realized to compell a Democrat from Arab Detroit to accept $20M to support a plausible genocide of the Palestinians. Who would have guessed?

AIPAC has had more success in their attempt to unseat NY-Democratic Representative Jamaal Bowman, one of the few U.S. lawmakers calling for a ceasefire. AIPAC recruited pro-Israel stalwart George Latimer to run against Bowman in the Democratic primary, giving Latimer more than $600,000 or a some 42% of his entire campaign budget. After AIPAC, Bowman’s next largest contributor was Bradley Tusk, who gave the maximum of $6,600.

That brings us to AIPAC’s attempt to oust MO-Democratic Representative Cori Bush, the lead sponsor of a House resolution pushing President Biden to call for a ceasefire. This has been AIPAC’s most impressive success story to date. Wesley Bell, their hand-picked pro-genocide candidate to take out Bush, was beating her by 22% in a Feb. 7-9 poll of 401 likely 2024 Democratic primary voters. 

AIPAC is also trying to bring an end to the PA-Democratic Representative Summer Lee’s political career. Bhavini Patel seems to have been recruited to this end, although Patel has not acknowledged it publicly. However, in Dec 2022, the Jewish Insider reported that Patel had been “tentatively eyed by some pro-Israel advocates in Pittsburgh as a potential challenger to Lee next cycle,” according to a person “familiar with the matter.” 

For Patel, the AIPAC money is already paying back dividends, as she recently published photos on her Instagram attending pro-Israel rallies. In Feb 2024, Patel told her supporters on a fundraising call that she could help take down the progressive Squad by leveraging support from right-wing Hindu and pro-Israel supporters. A marriage of convenience, apparently.

For decades, AIPAC has been on a mission to engineer a pro-Israel, pro-apartheid and now, awkwardly, a pro-genocide US Congress.

In the 2022 midterms, for example, AIPAC spent $30M on candidates to ensure their support for billions every year in unconditional military aid to Israel, even though that meant supporting 109 U.S. House of Representative members who voted to overturn the 2020 election. 

For AIPAC, the end of American democracy is apparently a price worth paying if it means the continuation of Jewish supremacy in Israel and Palestine.

Recall that, in 2012, AIPAC helped Hakeem Jeffries defeat Charles Barron in a 2012 Democratic seat for Congress with at least $475K in donations. In true fashion, AIPAC and Jeffries accused Barron of antisemitism for having described Gaza as a concentration camp. 

Today, Hakeem Jeffries is the Democratic House minority leader and opposes placing any conditions at all on the billions of dollars sent to the Israeli military every year, something he emphasized in an interview on February 4th, 2024. That makes Jeffries directly complicit with Israel’s genocidal acts in Gaza.

AIPAC’s power and influence over the US Congress has meant that many of our elected representatives enter politics for the sole reason that they are willing to keep quiet about Israeli war crimes. The result has been that a tiny group of people, representing a tiny minority of US citizens have been and continue to engineer US Congressional support for a plausible genocide.