UPDATED
Bowman Was Defeated by a Toxic Blend of Zionism and Militarism
THERE ARE 2 DEMOCRATIC PARTY'S
THE PROGRESSIVES
AND WALL ST. (NO NEED FOR THE GOP)
June 26, 2024
Source: Originally published by Z. Feel free to share widely.
New York Congressman Jamaal Bowman lost a primary election Tuesday because of unprecedented spending against him by powerful forces that insist Israel does no wrong. By last week, AIPAC had already devoted more than $14 million to defeating Bowman, in retaliation for his outspoken support of human rights for all — including Palestinian — people.
Since last fall, most Democratic voters — especially young people — have recoiled at the ongoing slaughter of Palestinians in Gaza. But despite the magnitude of the horrors inflicted on civilians, the vast bulk of the U.S. media and political establishment has remained on automatic pro-Israel pilot, while often tarring strong opponents of the mass murder as antisemitic.
Although usually eager to defend Democratic incumbents facing strong primary challenges, this time the party’s leadership offered winks and nods to Bowman’s AIPAC-funded opponent, George Latimer. House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries went through only perfunctory motions of supporting Bowman. Another fellow Democrat, New York Gov. Kathy Hochul, was in the groove when she declared on Sunday: “I am not weighing in on primaries intentionally. But what I’m very focused on is number one, I stand strongly with Israel.”
The meaning of such declarations is rote complicity with nonstop U.S. military aid to Israel as it maintains a siege of Gaza that has already lasted more than 260 days. During that time, the U.N. high commissioner for human rights said last week, “more than 120,000 people in Gaza, overwhelmingly women and children, have been killed or injured” — “as a result of the intensive Israeli offensives.”
When this week began, Save the Children reported that “up to 21,000 children are estimated to be missing in the chaos of the war in Gaza, many trapped beneath rubble, detained, buried in unmarked graves, or lost from their families.” While voters were casting ballots on Tuesday, the Washington Post summarized a new assessment from experts reporting to the United Nations: “The threat of famine in the Gaza Strip has been revived after Israel’s military operation in the southern city of Rafah disrupted aid deliveries, leaving more than 500,000 Palestinians on the brink of starvation.”
Israel’s warfare — fully enabled by the U.S. government — is continuing to cause those systematic atrocities.
“All available evidence indicates that U.S. officials hold Israel to a lower standard than just about any other country,” Responsible Statecraft reporter Connor Echols pointed out last month. The evidence is ample.
The rock-bottom standards applied to the Israeli government are in sync with what the U.S. media and political establishment routinely apply to the United States government. The same basic mass-messaging patterns that confer absolution on whatever the U.S. military does (as described in my book War Made Invisible) are operative in making excuses for what the Israeli military does.
The militaries of the two nations are enmeshed. Not only does the U.S. send huge amounts of weapons and ammunition to Israel. The countries are also constantly exchanging intelligence as well as data on evaluating the efficacy of weaponry and warfare tactics. They share, and create, the same enemies in the Middle East. And the two nations execute highly deceptive maneuvers from the same propaganda playbooks.
In short, while their command structures are separate and they can sometimes be at odds over tactics and proprieties, the Israeli military largely operates as an extension of the U.S. armed forces.
Meanwhile, in the United States, dominant mentalities — constantly reinforced by mass media and mainstream politics — run along parallel ruts of Zionism and militarism that are mutually reinforcing and increasingly intersecting. Along the way, toxins draw strength from the poisons that Martin Luther King Jr. denounced as “the giant triplets of racism, extreme materialism, and militarism.”
All the denials notwithstanding, a bedrock of unwavering support for Israel as it continues the mass killing of Palestinian civilians is the base assumption — conscious or not — that Palestinian lives are far less valuable than Jewish Israeli lives. Or American lives.
The merger of American and Israeli militarism is now more comprehensive than ever. Both are driven by extreme nationalism, war profiteering, and ethnocentric bigotry. Nonviolent unyielding resistance is not futile. It is essential.
New York Congressman Jamaal Bowman lost a primary election Tuesday because of unprecedented spending against him by powerful forces that insist Israel does no wrong. By last week, AIPAC had already devoted more than $14 million to defeating Bowman, in retaliation for his outspoken support of human rights for all — including Palestinian — people.
Since last fall, most Democratic voters — especially young people — have recoiled at the ongoing slaughter of Palestinians in Gaza. But despite the magnitude of the horrors inflicted on civilians, the vast bulk of the U.S. media and political establishment has remained on automatic pro-Israel pilot, while often tarring strong opponents of the mass murder as antisemitic.
Although usually eager to defend Democratic incumbents facing strong primary challenges, this time the party’s leadership offered winks and nods to Bowman’s AIPAC-funded opponent, George Latimer. House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries went through only perfunctory motions of supporting Bowman. Another fellow Democrat, New York Gov. Kathy Hochul, was in the groove when she declared on Sunday: “I am not weighing in on primaries intentionally. But what I’m very focused on is number one, I stand strongly with Israel.”
The meaning of such declarations is rote complicity with nonstop U.S. military aid to Israel as it maintains a siege of Gaza that has already lasted more than 260 days. During that time, the U.N. high commissioner for human rights said last week, “more than 120,000 people in Gaza, overwhelmingly women and children, have been killed or injured” — “as a result of the intensive Israeli offensives.”
When this week began, Save the Children reported that “up to 21,000 children are estimated to be missing in the chaos of the war in Gaza, many trapped beneath rubble, detained, buried in unmarked graves, or lost from their families.” While voters were casting ballots on Tuesday, the Washington Post summarized a new assessment from experts reporting to the United Nations: “The threat of famine in the Gaza Strip has been revived after Israel’s military operation in the southern city of Rafah disrupted aid deliveries, leaving more than 500,000 Palestinians on the brink of starvation.”
Israel’s warfare — fully enabled by the U.S. government — is continuing to cause those systematic atrocities.
“All available evidence indicates that U.S. officials hold Israel to a lower standard than just about any other country,” Responsible Statecraft reporter Connor Echols pointed out last month. The evidence is ample.
The rock-bottom standards applied to the Israeli government are in sync with what the U.S. media and political establishment routinely apply to the United States government. The same basic mass-messaging patterns that confer absolution on whatever the U.S. military does (as described in my book War Made Invisible) are operative in making excuses for what the Israeli military does.
The militaries of the two nations are enmeshed. Not only does the U.S. send huge amounts of weapons and ammunition to Israel. The countries are also constantly exchanging intelligence as well as data on evaluating the efficacy of weaponry and warfare tactics. They share, and create, the same enemies in the Middle East. And the two nations execute highly deceptive maneuvers from the same propaganda playbooks.
In short, while their command structures are separate and they can sometimes be at odds over tactics and proprieties, the Israeli military largely operates as an extension of the U.S. armed forces.
Meanwhile, in the United States, dominant mentalities — constantly reinforced by mass media and mainstream politics — run along parallel ruts of Zionism and militarism that are mutually reinforcing and increasingly intersecting. Along the way, toxins draw strength from the poisons that Martin Luther King Jr. denounced as “the giant triplets of racism, extreme materialism, and militarism.”
All the denials notwithstanding, a bedrock of unwavering support for Israel as it continues the mass killing of Palestinian civilians is the base assumption — conscious or not — that Palestinian lives are far less valuable than Jewish Israeli lives. Or American lives.
The merger of American and Israeli militarism is now more comprehensive than ever. Both are driven by extreme nationalism, war profiteering, and ethnocentric bigotry. Nonviolent unyielding resistance is not futile. It is essential.
Norman Solomon is the national director of RootsAction.org and executive director of the Institute for Public Accuracy. He is the author of many books including War Made Easy. His latest book, War Made Invisible: How America Hides the Human Toll of Its Military Machine, was published in 2023 by The New Press.
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Norman Solomon is an American journalist, author, media critic and activist. Solomon is a longtime associate of the media watch group Fairness & Accuracy In Reporting (FAIR). In 1997 he founded the Institute for Public Accuracy, which works to provide alternative sources for journalists, and serves as its executive director. Solomon's weekly column "Media Beat" was in national syndication from 1992 to 2009. He was a Bernie Sanders delegate to the 2016 and 2020 Democratic National Conventions. Since 2011, he has been the national director of RootsAction.org. He is the author of thirteen books including "War Made Invisible: How America Hides the Human Toll of Its Military Machine” (The New Press, 2023).
Scarsdale Is What We Thought It Was
BY MATT KARP
Westchester county executive George Latimer speaks to supporters after winning his race against Democratic incumbent representative Jamaal Bowman in New York’s 16th congressional district, June 25, 2024. (Spencer Platt / Getty Images)
The most expensive House primary in US history has ended in defeat for democratic socialist Jamaal Bowman, soundly beaten by Westchester county executive George Latimer.
According to the New York Times and much of the national media, the winners and losers here are fairly straightforward. Bowman’s defeat was a victory for the pro-Israel lobby, which spent $14 million to oust a major critic of the war in Gaza, and for leading centrist Democrats, from Hillary Clinton to Josh Gottheimer, who had endorsed Latimer. “The outcome in this race,” said an American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) spokesman quoted by the Times, “once again shows that the pro-Israel position is both good policy and good politics.”
Meanwhile, the paper called the election “an excruciating blow for the left,” including Bernie Sanders, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, and “the Squad” in Congress. They had rallied behind Bowman but could not save the gaffe-prone representative from his own voters, who ultimately rejected him as “too extreme to help solve the nation’s problems.”
Every single element of this fable is perfectly accurate — if only the entire district, the national Democratic coalition, and the whole of the American body politic resided in the village of Scarsdale, New York.
This elite Westchester suburb, with its manicured lawns, seven-figure mansions, and an average income of over $500,000 a year, had given Bowman nearly 40 percent of its vote in his upset victory four years ago. But this year Scarsdale decided it could not abide the congressman’s “far-left views,” on Israel or anything else: in the early vote there, Latimer led Bowman by the astonishing margin of 92 to 8 percent.
This was the pattern across wealthy Westchester suburbs, like Rye, Harrison, and Mamaroneck, where the early vote showed Latimer winning over 80 percent support. Residents there may have indeed rejected what the Times suggested were Bowman’s “extreme viewpoints,” including support for a cease-fire in Gaza, where Israel’s war has killed nearly fifteen thousand children.
Yet in most working-class portions of the district, Bowman’s far-left views seem to have held up just fine. He took 84 percent of the vote in the Bronx. Analysts looking to find a popular repudiation of pro-Palestine politics will have to look somewhere beyond working-class Yonkers and Mount Vernon, where the congressman led the early vote by margins similar to his victory in 2020.
Unfortunately for Bowman, too much of his district did, in fact, reside in Scarsdale or somewhere similar. Though Times reporters did not see fit to mention it, last year NY-16 was redrawn so that the Westchester share of its primary vote jumped from about 60 percent to over 90 percent. This was of course the story of the entire election. The new and wealthy suburban areas in the district — including parts of Tarrytown and at least five additional country clubs north of Rye — all voted heavily against Bowman.
The good news for Bowman’s national supporters is that losing Westchester to an AIPAC-funded centrist is not a meaningful defeat for the American left. Any real challenge to corporate Democrats or the pro-Israel lobby will have to come from somewhere else. Scarsdale is what we thought it was — a tiny, eccentric sliver of an enormous, diverse, and largely working-class country.
The bad news is that the American left has not managed to make many inroads into that giant country, either. Perhaps the brand of politics that gave us the Squad in the first place — nine members in a Congress of four hundred and thirty-five — has run its course. If Bowman’s defeat is a wake-up call, it is not because he lost the neighborhoods around the Horseshoe Harbor Yacht Club and Blind Brook Country Club, but because the Left found itself fighting a battle there in the first place.
CONTRIBUTOR
Matt Karp is an associate professor of history at Princeton University and a Jacobin contributing editor.
BY MATT KARP
JACOBIN
06.26.2024
Jamaal Bowman’s defeat is another reminder that left-wing politics cannot live or die in the rich suburbs.
Jamaal Bowman’s defeat is another reminder that left-wing politics cannot live or die in the rich suburbs.
Westchester county executive George Latimer speaks to supporters after winning his race against Democratic incumbent representative Jamaal Bowman in New York’s 16th congressional district, June 25, 2024. (Spencer Platt / Getty Images)
The most expensive House primary in US history has ended in defeat for democratic socialist Jamaal Bowman, soundly beaten by Westchester county executive George Latimer.
According to the New York Times and much of the national media, the winners and losers here are fairly straightforward. Bowman’s defeat was a victory for the pro-Israel lobby, which spent $14 million to oust a major critic of the war in Gaza, and for leading centrist Democrats, from Hillary Clinton to Josh Gottheimer, who had endorsed Latimer. “The outcome in this race,” said an American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) spokesman quoted by the Times, “once again shows that the pro-Israel position is both good policy and good politics.”
Meanwhile, the paper called the election “an excruciating blow for the left,” including Bernie Sanders, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, and “the Squad” in Congress. They had rallied behind Bowman but could not save the gaffe-prone representative from his own voters, who ultimately rejected him as “too extreme to help solve the nation’s problems.”
Every single element of this fable is perfectly accurate — if only the entire district, the national Democratic coalition, and the whole of the American body politic resided in the village of Scarsdale, New York.
This elite Westchester suburb, with its manicured lawns, seven-figure mansions, and an average income of over $500,000 a year, had given Bowman nearly 40 percent of its vote in his upset victory four years ago. But this year Scarsdale decided it could not abide the congressman’s “far-left views,” on Israel or anything else: in the early vote there, Latimer led Bowman by the astonishing margin of 92 to 8 percent.
This was the pattern across wealthy Westchester suburbs, like Rye, Harrison, and Mamaroneck, where the early vote showed Latimer winning over 80 percent support. Residents there may have indeed rejected what the Times suggested were Bowman’s “extreme viewpoints,” including support for a cease-fire in Gaza, where Israel’s war has killed nearly fifteen thousand children.
Yet in most working-class portions of the district, Bowman’s far-left views seem to have held up just fine. He took 84 percent of the vote in the Bronx. Analysts looking to find a popular repudiation of pro-Palestine politics will have to look somewhere beyond working-class Yonkers and Mount Vernon, where the congressman led the early vote by margins similar to his victory in 2020.
Unfortunately for Bowman, too much of his district did, in fact, reside in Scarsdale or somewhere similar. Though Times reporters did not see fit to mention it, last year NY-16 was redrawn so that the Westchester share of its primary vote jumped from about 60 percent to over 90 percent. This was of course the story of the entire election. The new and wealthy suburban areas in the district — including parts of Tarrytown and at least five additional country clubs north of Rye — all voted heavily against Bowman.
The good news for Bowman’s national supporters is that losing Westchester to an AIPAC-funded centrist is not a meaningful defeat for the American left. Any real challenge to corporate Democrats or the pro-Israel lobby will have to come from somewhere else. Scarsdale is what we thought it was — a tiny, eccentric sliver of an enormous, diverse, and largely working-class country.
The bad news is that the American left has not managed to make many inroads into that giant country, either. Perhaps the brand of politics that gave us the Squad in the first place — nine members in a Congress of four hundred and thirty-five — has run its course. If Bowman’s defeat is a wake-up call, it is not because he lost the neighborhoods around the Horseshoe Harbor Yacht Club and Blind Brook Country Club, but because the Left found itself fighting a battle there in the first place.
CONTRIBUTOR
Matt Karp is an associate professor of history at Princeton University and a Jacobin contributing editor.
Jamaal Bowman’s Courage
June 26, 2024
Source: The Beinart Notebook
Watch video here: https://open.substack.com/pub/peterbeinart/p/jamaal-bowmans-courage?utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web
I made a second video this week because I wanted to say something about Jamaal Bowman, who lost his primary race for Congress last night. He lost because he had the courage to visit the West Bank and speak about what he saw. He lost because he’s an unusual politician. He has moral courage.
Sources Cited in This Video:
A Politico article about Bowman’s trip to the West Bank.
A Jewish Currents article I wrote about how Pro-Israel groups keep US foreign policy white.
Our guests this Friday at 11 AM will be Raja Khouri and Jeffrey Wilkinson, co-authors of the book, The Wall Between: What Jews and Palestinians Don’t Want to Know About Each Other. Since October 7, dialogue between Palestinians and Jews has become even more difficult, and there are those in both communities—and on the left and right—who question its value. I’m excited to ask Raja and Jeffrey to respond to those criticisms, and to explain how they believe that greater dialogue between Palestinians and Jews can contribute to the struggle for equality, freedom, and safety for everyone.
Paid subscribers will get the link this Tuesday and the video the following week. They’ll also gain access to our library of past Zoom interviews with guests like Rashid Khalidi, Thomas Friedman, Ilhan Omar, Benny Morris, Noam Chomsky, and Bret Stephens.
See you on Friday,
Peter
VIDEO TRANSCRIPT:
So, last night, Jamaal Bowman lost his race for re-election to Congress. And I wanted to say something about him and that race. Now, it’s important not to be willing to overlook the flaws of people just because you profoundly agree with them on really important policy issues. So, I don’t want to suggest that Jamaal Bowman didn’t make any mistakes in this race. I think it was unfortunate when he said that Jews in Westchester segregate themselves. If you look at the context, I think you can understand what he was trying to say, which was essentially that people would understand him better if people live together more, and that would actually break down antisemitism. But still, I think it was probably a territory that he shouldn’t have ventured into. But that said, again, even though we need to be willing to be critical of people we disagree with, it’s also important that we not be naive.
And that comment had nothing to do with the onslaught that Jamaal Bowman faced from AIPAC and other pro-Israel groups. That onslaught was fundamentally about one thing. It was about the fact that Jamaal Bowman was a passionate supporter of Palestinian freedom. When members of Congress are staunch supporters of Israel, they can say things that are far, far more problematic vis-à-vis Jews than anything that Jamaal Bowman ever said, and get a complete pass. The reason that Jamaal Bowman had a target on his back was really simple. It’s because he went to see what life was like for Palestinians in the West Bank. Now, that might not seem like a big deal, but it actually is because the vast majority of members of Congress avert their eyes. They make a conscious choice to go to Israel on AIPAC junkets that don’t show them the reality of what it’s like for Palestinians to live their entire lives without the most basic of human rights. I suspect perhaps they just don’t want to know because they know that if they did see, it would only cause problems for them. But Jamaal Bowman went to see. He even went to Hebron, which is perhaps the most brutal of all the places in the West Bank, a place where Palestinians can’t even walk on certain streets in their own city. And he had the courage to see. And he had the courage to talk about it. And that’s unusual for a member of Congress.
And the thing you always need to remember about these people, you know, who spent untold amounts of money, unprecedented amounts of money, on trying to defeat him—the people who gave all this money to AIPAC and other pro-Israel groups to defeat him—is that, overwhelmingly, they have not seen the things that Jamaal Bowman has seen. I have lived in proximity to those people my entire life. I’m telling you they may have been to Israel 40 times. But those kind of AIPAC donors, they don’t go to see what life is like for Palestinians who have lived their entire lives in the West Bank without the right to vote for the government that has life and death power over their lives under a different legal system, a military legal system, while they’re Jewish neighbors enjoy free movement, and due process, and the right to vote, and citizenship. If they had gone to see those things, I think many of them would not be AIPAC donors because it would shake them to their core. But one of the reasons I think they find the kind of things that Jamaal Bowman says so frightening is because they haven’t had the courage to go and actually face these realities for themselves. But Jamaal Bowman did go to face these realities and then he took it upon himself to talk about what he had seen. And he paid a political price.
The second thing I want to say about Jamaal Bowman and this race is that you can’t disentangle the attack that he came under because of his views about Israel from the opposition to him simply because he was a courageous and passionate progressive on a whole range of issues. The thing that’s important to remember about people who give a lot of money to AIPAC is it’s not just that they’re pro-Israel, or that they’re generally Jewish. They’re also extremely wealthy. And it’s often difficult to disentangle their pro-Israel politics from their class perspectives. But things fuse together, right? They don’t want supporters of Palestinian rights in Congress. But they also don’t want people who are going to raise their taxes or try to fundamentally change the American economic system.
And so, when you defeat Jamaal Bowman, it’s kind of a twofer because you get rid of a critic of Israel, but you also get rid of someone who potentially could threaten your own bottom line. And one of the dirty little secrets, I think, about kind of American Jewish organizational life is that people find it often easier to say that they oppose progressives because those progressives are anti-Israel or supposedly ‘antisemitic’ than to admit that partly they’re doing it for economic self-interest because they’re just really rich people who don’t want progressives like Jamaal Bowman because those people might threaten their bottom line. So, that’s another reason I think that progressives like Jamaal Bowman come under such fierce assault. It’s much nicer if you’re one of the very, very wealthy people who gave all this money to AIPAC to have a kind of milquetoast moderate like George Latimer who won’t rock the boat on Israel. And he won’t really rock the boat by challenging corporate interests on anything.
The third point I want to make about Jamaal Bowman has to do with race. Now, it’s not true that AIPAC opposes Black members of Congress simply because they’re Black. Which is to say if there’s a really, really pro-Israel Black member of congress, like Ritchie Torres, they’re thrilled about that, right. But it’s also not coincidental that so many of the people that AIPAC tries to destroy politically are Black or other people of color. And that’s because people who have a family history of oppression in the United States are more likely—not always, by any means—but, on average, are more likely to identify with the Palestinians because of their own experience. They’re more likely to feel, as Jamaal Bowman did, a kind of moral obligation to themselves and their own ancestors to go and see what’s actually going on to Palestinians who lack basic rights in the West Bank.
And so, when you go to politically destroy people who care about Palestinians, you’re going to end up destroying a disproportionate number of those people who will be Black or other people of color. And there’s a whole history to this. It didn’t start with Jamaal Bowman. You can think about Andrew Young, Jimmy Carter’s Ambassador to the United Nations, who, coming out of the Civil Rights movement, felt he had an obligation to have a concern for Palestinians, and met a PLO representative in the late 1970s, and there was a big pro-Israel outcry, and he was forced out of his job. Or Jesse Jackson, who came under assault in the 1980s when he ran for president, or a congressman like Walter Fauntroy or Barack Obama or Raphael Warnock. You may remember that Raphael Warnock went on a trip of Black pastors to see Palestinian life for himself, wrote a very passionate, eloquent letter talking about the parallels between the oppression of Palestinians and the oppression of Black Americans. And Raphael Warnock came under fierce assault and had to walk that back. And if he hadn’t walked that back, he probably wouldn’t be a senator right now.
Jamaal Bowman is a different kind of person. He’s a very unusual politician in that he is a man of genuine moral conviction, of genuine moral courage, and he was willing to put his political life at risk. And he did so perhaps partly because we are in this extraordinarily horrifying moment—a moment when people are being tested, when people are doing things that I think we will remember for a very long time. I saw yesterday that Save the Children was reporting that, by their estimates, as many as 20,000 children in Gaza are either detained, missing, lying in mass graves, or dead under the rubble. Twenty thousand. I think perhaps Jamaal Bowman knew that this was a moment on which he was willing to be judged and he was willing to risk his political career for that. And I really, really hope that I live long enough to live in an America in which Palestinian lives are considered equal to Jewish lives. And in that America, I believe, that people will look back with shame at what was done to Jamaal Bowman, and maybe even some of those AIPAC donors or their children or grandchildren will feel shame, and we will look back at Jamaal Bowman in this race as a hero.
It says in Pirkei Avot in the Mishnah—and forgive the gendered language, it was written a long time ago—it says, ‘in the place where there is no man, be a man.’ Or we might retranslate it as, ‘in the place where there is no humanity, bring humanity.’ Jamaal Bowman was in a place in Congress in Washington where there are very, very few people who are willing to risk anything politically for the cause of Palestinian lives, for the cause of Palestinian freedom. And he did. In a place where there was no man, he was a man. And for that reason, I believe we will one day look back on him as a hero.
Watch video here: https://open.substack.com/pub/peterbeinart/p/jamaal-bowmans-courage?utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web
I made a second video this week because I wanted to say something about Jamaal Bowman, who lost his primary race for Congress last night. He lost because he had the courage to visit the West Bank and speak about what he saw. He lost because he’s an unusual politician. He has moral courage.
Sources Cited in This Video:
A Politico article about Bowman’s trip to the West Bank.
A Jewish Currents article I wrote about how Pro-Israel groups keep US foreign policy white.
Our guests this Friday at 11 AM will be Raja Khouri and Jeffrey Wilkinson, co-authors of the book, The Wall Between: What Jews and Palestinians Don’t Want to Know About Each Other. Since October 7, dialogue between Palestinians and Jews has become even more difficult, and there are those in both communities—and on the left and right—who question its value. I’m excited to ask Raja and Jeffrey to respond to those criticisms, and to explain how they believe that greater dialogue between Palestinians and Jews can contribute to the struggle for equality, freedom, and safety for everyone.
Paid subscribers will get the link this Tuesday and the video the following week. They’ll also gain access to our library of past Zoom interviews with guests like Rashid Khalidi, Thomas Friedman, Ilhan Omar, Benny Morris, Noam Chomsky, and Bret Stephens.
See you on Friday,
Peter
VIDEO TRANSCRIPT:
So, last night, Jamaal Bowman lost his race for re-election to Congress. And I wanted to say something about him and that race. Now, it’s important not to be willing to overlook the flaws of people just because you profoundly agree with them on really important policy issues. So, I don’t want to suggest that Jamaal Bowman didn’t make any mistakes in this race. I think it was unfortunate when he said that Jews in Westchester segregate themselves. If you look at the context, I think you can understand what he was trying to say, which was essentially that people would understand him better if people live together more, and that would actually break down antisemitism. But still, I think it was probably a territory that he shouldn’t have ventured into. But that said, again, even though we need to be willing to be critical of people we disagree with, it’s also important that we not be naive.
And that comment had nothing to do with the onslaught that Jamaal Bowman faced from AIPAC and other pro-Israel groups. That onslaught was fundamentally about one thing. It was about the fact that Jamaal Bowman was a passionate supporter of Palestinian freedom. When members of Congress are staunch supporters of Israel, they can say things that are far, far more problematic vis-à-vis Jews than anything that Jamaal Bowman ever said, and get a complete pass. The reason that Jamaal Bowman had a target on his back was really simple. It’s because he went to see what life was like for Palestinians in the West Bank. Now, that might not seem like a big deal, but it actually is because the vast majority of members of Congress avert their eyes. They make a conscious choice to go to Israel on AIPAC junkets that don’t show them the reality of what it’s like for Palestinians to live their entire lives without the most basic of human rights. I suspect perhaps they just don’t want to know because they know that if they did see, it would only cause problems for them. But Jamaal Bowman went to see. He even went to Hebron, which is perhaps the most brutal of all the places in the West Bank, a place where Palestinians can’t even walk on certain streets in their own city. And he had the courage to see. And he had the courage to talk about it. And that’s unusual for a member of Congress.
And the thing you always need to remember about these people, you know, who spent untold amounts of money, unprecedented amounts of money, on trying to defeat him—the people who gave all this money to AIPAC and other pro-Israel groups to defeat him—is that, overwhelmingly, they have not seen the things that Jamaal Bowman has seen. I have lived in proximity to those people my entire life. I’m telling you they may have been to Israel 40 times. But those kind of AIPAC donors, they don’t go to see what life is like for Palestinians who have lived their entire lives in the West Bank without the right to vote for the government that has life and death power over their lives under a different legal system, a military legal system, while they’re Jewish neighbors enjoy free movement, and due process, and the right to vote, and citizenship. If they had gone to see those things, I think many of them would not be AIPAC donors because it would shake them to their core. But one of the reasons I think they find the kind of things that Jamaal Bowman says so frightening is because they haven’t had the courage to go and actually face these realities for themselves. But Jamaal Bowman did go to face these realities and then he took it upon himself to talk about what he had seen. And he paid a political price.
The second thing I want to say about Jamaal Bowman and this race is that you can’t disentangle the attack that he came under because of his views about Israel from the opposition to him simply because he was a courageous and passionate progressive on a whole range of issues. The thing that’s important to remember about people who give a lot of money to AIPAC is it’s not just that they’re pro-Israel, or that they’re generally Jewish. They’re also extremely wealthy. And it’s often difficult to disentangle their pro-Israel politics from their class perspectives. But things fuse together, right? They don’t want supporters of Palestinian rights in Congress. But they also don’t want people who are going to raise their taxes or try to fundamentally change the American economic system.
And so, when you defeat Jamaal Bowman, it’s kind of a twofer because you get rid of a critic of Israel, but you also get rid of someone who potentially could threaten your own bottom line. And one of the dirty little secrets, I think, about kind of American Jewish organizational life is that people find it often easier to say that they oppose progressives because those progressives are anti-Israel or supposedly ‘antisemitic’ than to admit that partly they’re doing it for economic self-interest because they’re just really rich people who don’t want progressives like Jamaal Bowman because those people might threaten their bottom line. So, that’s another reason I think that progressives like Jamaal Bowman come under such fierce assault. It’s much nicer if you’re one of the very, very wealthy people who gave all this money to AIPAC to have a kind of milquetoast moderate like George Latimer who won’t rock the boat on Israel. And he won’t really rock the boat by challenging corporate interests on anything.
The third point I want to make about Jamaal Bowman has to do with race. Now, it’s not true that AIPAC opposes Black members of Congress simply because they’re Black. Which is to say if there’s a really, really pro-Israel Black member of congress, like Ritchie Torres, they’re thrilled about that, right. But it’s also not coincidental that so many of the people that AIPAC tries to destroy politically are Black or other people of color. And that’s because people who have a family history of oppression in the United States are more likely—not always, by any means—but, on average, are more likely to identify with the Palestinians because of their own experience. They’re more likely to feel, as Jamaal Bowman did, a kind of moral obligation to themselves and their own ancestors to go and see what’s actually going on to Palestinians who lack basic rights in the West Bank.
And so, when you go to politically destroy people who care about Palestinians, you’re going to end up destroying a disproportionate number of those people who will be Black or other people of color. And there’s a whole history to this. It didn’t start with Jamaal Bowman. You can think about Andrew Young, Jimmy Carter’s Ambassador to the United Nations, who, coming out of the Civil Rights movement, felt he had an obligation to have a concern for Palestinians, and met a PLO representative in the late 1970s, and there was a big pro-Israel outcry, and he was forced out of his job. Or Jesse Jackson, who came under assault in the 1980s when he ran for president, or a congressman like Walter Fauntroy or Barack Obama or Raphael Warnock. You may remember that Raphael Warnock went on a trip of Black pastors to see Palestinian life for himself, wrote a very passionate, eloquent letter talking about the parallels between the oppression of Palestinians and the oppression of Black Americans. And Raphael Warnock came under fierce assault and had to walk that back. And if he hadn’t walked that back, he probably wouldn’t be a senator right now.
Jamaal Bowman is a different kind of person. He’s a very unusual politician in that he is a man of genuine moral conviction, of genuine moral courage, and he was willing to put his political life at risk. And he did so perhaps partly because we are in this extraordinarily horrifying moment—a moment when people are being tested, when people are doing things that I think we will remember for a very long time. I saw yesterday that Save the Children was reporting that, by their estimates, as many as 20,000 children in Gaza are either detained, missing, lying in mass graves, or dead under the rubble. Twenty thousand. I think perhaps Jamaal Bowman knew that this was a moment on which he was willing to be judged and he was willing to risk his political career for that. And I really, really hope that I live long enough to live in an America in which Palestinian lives are considered equal to Jewish lives. And in that America, I believe, that people will look back with shame at what was done to Jamaal Bowman, and maybe even some of those AIPAC donors or their children or grandchildren will feel shame, and we will look back at Jamaal Bowman in this race as a hero.
It says in Pirkei Avot in the Mishnah—and forgive the gendered language, it was written a long time ago—it says, ‘in the place where there is no man, be a man.’ Or we might retranslate it as, ‘in the place where there is no humanity, bring humanity.’ Jamaal Bowman was in a place in Congress in Washington where there are very, very few people who are willing to risk anything politically for the cause of Palestinian lives, for the cause of Palestinian freedom. And he did. In a place where there was no man, he was a man. And for that reason, I believe we will one day look back on him as a hero.
BYBRANKO MARCETIC
JACOBIN
06.26.2024
Lost in the triumphalism over Jamaal Bowman’s loss is that AIPAC has had to drastically narrow its ambitions, targeting the most already vulnerable of Israel critics in order to inflate its strength.
Jamaal Bowman watches during a campaign event at Hartley Park on June 24, 2024 in Mount Vernon, New York. (Michael M. Santiago / Getty Images)
Left-wing insurgent campaigns have hoped that while getting into Congress might be extraordinarily hard, once in, they could rely on the benefit of being incumbents to hang onto their seats and stay in Congress. Last night’s Democratic primary race for New York’s 16th congressional district, which saw Squad member and two-term representative Jamaal Bowman fall to Westchester county executive George Latimer by nearly twenty points, shows this is no longer a safe bet.
Last night’s result will be a boon for the Israel lobby group the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), which, through its super PAC United Democracy Project (UDP), poured nearly $15 million into the race to unseat Bowman. It is arguably the crowning achievement of a strategy that pro-Israel groups first pioneered three years ago to deny Bernie Sanders’s campaign surrogate Nina Turner a safe congressional seat in Ohio she was set to easily win.
Bowman’s loss will soon be used — in fact, already is and was before the polls even closed — by AIPAC and other pro-war forces to scare less courageous candidates and members of Congress into line. Pro-Israel groups have framed the race as a referendum on Bowman’s and the rest of the Squad’s stance on the Gaza war US-Israel policy and argued that these positions are out of step with a more centrist Democratic electorate. They have been assisted by much of the press, which you will soon see helpfully spreading AIPAC’s preferred narrative in coverage of Latimer’s victory.
US politicians were already terrified of AIPAC when it ramped up the scale of its political interference in 2022 by entering Democratic primaries directly and funneling massive amounts of cash against progressive candidates critical of Israel, however mild or tangential to their candidacy those criticisms were. As several people involved in progressive campaigns told me earlier this year, candidates and politicians often privately say they have to hide or walk back their disgust toward Israel’s actions in case they get primaried over it. The goal with the Bowman result is to wield it as a cautionary tale of what can happen to your political career if you defy the pro-Israel lobby, whether by voting against US military aid to Israel or even simply backing a cease-fire, both of which Bowman did.
This gambit of using Bowman’s loss to convince others that criticizing Israel will end their careers may well work. But it really shouldn’t. In reality, AIPAC’s threat is more of a bluff than it seems.
Hidden Weakness
AIPAC’s high-profile involvement in Bowman’s primary (and its plan to do the same to fellow Squad member Representative Cori Bush this August) was, in reality, a carefully calibrated public relations move meant to inflate its own fearsome reputation on Capitol Hill while disguising a less-than-stellar track record this year. It’s easy to forget, but the media narrative for much of the past eight months was that the Squad was facing an extinction-level event: an “electoral bloodbath,” with at least four members (Bowman, Bush, and representatives Summer Lee and Ilhan Omar) facing “brutal” and “competitive primaries,” not to mention the entire bloc “grappling with one career-threatening problem or another,” such as Representative Rashida Tlaib’s November censure by the House.AIPAC’s high-profile involvement in Bowman’s primary was, in reality, a carefully calibrated public relations move meant to inflate its own fearsome reputation on Capitol Hill while disguising a less-than-stellar track record this year.
“There is a 100% chance that members of the Squad are going to be tagged with these far-left positions that are out of sync with the mainstream of the party and the general public,” one Democratic strategist said in October.
That hasn’t really worked out. Despite her censure and generally becoming a lightning rod for pro-Israel attacks, Tlaib is safe in her seat, with no serious challenger and out-fundraising everyone in Michigan, with AIPAC having failed to recruit a challenger to run against her despite dangling $20 million in front of them. Omar has won the state Democratic Party endorsement — and has a fundraising advantage — over her primary challenger in a race the pro-Israel lobby has been pointedly absent from so far.
The lobby has also fallen flat on its face in non-Squad-involved races, blowing $4.6 million on beating centrist representative Dave Min in March over his mild criticisms of Israeli policy; the $400,000 it set on fire running ads against Representative Thomas Massie, a prominent GOP critic of Israel, didn’t move the needle an inch in that race, which Massie won with nearly 76 percent of the vote. Meanwhile, much of the public, particularly Democratic voters, has shifted closer to the Squad’s positions on the Gaza war and US-Israel policy since October, contrary to what AIPAC and its allies were rubbing their hands imagining eight months ago — and contrary to neoliberal Democratic representative Josh Gottheimer’s hopeful claim this morning that “the Squad politics are on the way out, not the way in.”
But AIPAC’s biggest failure this cycle was in fellow Squad member Summer Lee’s reelection for the 12th District in Pennsylvania just two months ago. Lee’s race, which she won by more than twenty points, had many of the same factors that AIPAC and its boosters are arguing doomed Bowman: her district had a significant Jewish population; she didn’t mince words when it came to Israel and its war; she was criticized by some local Jewish leaders who even accused her of being an antisemite; she voted against military aid to Israel; and, in theory, she had a precarious grip on her seat, having only served one term after just barely scraping through to win the Democratic primary two years earlier, when a tidal wave of AIPAC spending obliterated her early lead.
And yet, this year, AIPAC preemptively bowed out of Lee’s race despite big plans to spend $10 to 20 million to beat her, because at least four people the lobby feverishly tried to recruit in Pittsburgh said no, deciding she wasn’t beatable. As Lee told me, “AIPAC lost because they couldn’t win.”
This is part of a pattern: in both Pennsylvania and across the country, AIPAC endorsed candidates who tended to be in noncompetitive districts or even running unopposed. That way, when its endorsees won, regardless of whether or not their AIPAC endorsement actually figured in the race, the lobby could then swoop in and loudly take credit, publicize its reverse-engineered 100 percent (or close to it) success rate in a cycle, and proclaim that “Being pro-Israel is good policy and good politics.”Across the country, AIPAC endorsed candidates who tended to be in noncompetitive districts or even running unopposed.
That’s exactly why UDP scrambled to publicize the defeat of Kina Collins this past March in Illinois’ 7th District at the hands of a fourteen-term incumbent, calling her a “Justice Democrats candidate” whose loss “was a significant defeat for the Squad and the anti-Israel fringe.” In reality, Collins was neither a Justice Democrats endorsee this year nor received a cent of outside spending backing her campaign, unlike two years ago. But UDP spent nearly half a million dollars on a race in which Collins came a distant third anyway, so it could claim victory over pro-Palestinian activists.
None of this paints an image of an indomitable force assured of its own power or the popularity of its ideas. And AIPAC’s involvement in Bowman’s race fit squarely in this public relations–minded strategy. The two-term congressman became such a major target of AIPAC’s spending barrage not because he was a critic of Israel, but because he was one of the few critics of Israel the organization could actually beat.
Bowman’s Vulnerabilities
What made Bowman such a vulnerable candidate?
It’s hard to argue it was because his challenger’s position on the Gaza war — which Latimer made a habit of not giving a straight answer on — was more popular than Bowman’s support for a cease-fire and cutting off US military aid. An Emerson College poll of voters in the district from early this month found that more voters favored a candidate who backed a Gaza cease-fire than vice versa, and that far more (50 percent) believed the United States was spending too much on aid to Israel in its war than too little (17 percent) or the right amount (33 percent). Yet despite this, voters also said they were more aligned with Latimer on the war by a nearly sixteen-point margin.
In fact, Bowman wasn’t even disliked in the district, with voters holding a favorable opinion of him by a fifty-three to forty-one margin. It’s just that Latimer was better liked: 65 percent viewed him favorably, compared to 23 percent who gave an unfavorable view.
Bowman’s disadvantage went well beyond the issue of Israel. Having come out of nowhere to win the seat in 2020, he was never secure in the district. As the Huffington Post’s Daniel Marans reported, Bowman won reelection handily in 2022 largely because the establishment vote was split between two candidates.
Latimer, meanwhile, was a local boy who had spent decades in Westchester and New York politics serving in various political posts: Rye city councilman, Westchester county legislator and board chairman, county Democratic Party chair, New York state assemblyman and senator, and Westchester county executive. This helps explain Latimer’s advantage in name recognition and favorability in the district, as well as the unusual amount of local official and party endorsements he drew against an incumbent.Latimer was a local boy who had spent decades in Westchester and New York politics serving in various political posts, explaining his advantage in name recognition and favorability in the district.
It’s not a coincidence that Squad members like Tlaib and Lee — who came to their seats by first rising through state politics and, in Lee’s case, riding a progressive wave that put several progressive allies in key posts — managed to ward off similar local challengers. The victorious Lee was even endorsed by her two AIPAC-backed senators, Bob Casey and John Fetterman, both of whom oppose a cease-fire. A former Bowman advisor told the Atlantic that “he did not make the kind of connections and build out the coalition like he needed to in the district” — a district that had been redrawn since his 2020 win to include wealthier, whiter parts of the county.
Bowman was also hamstrung by a preexisting, widely covered, and non-Israel-related scandal: pulling a fire alarm in the middle of a House session, for which he earned a censure from the Republican-led lower chamber and pleaded guilty to a misdemeanor. The embarrassing incident made national and local headlines for many months.
AIPAC’s spending onslaught may have taken advantage of these vulnerabilities, but it also had an impact in itself. The sheer scale of anti-Bowman money poured into the race — a total of $18 million from anti-Bowman outside groups, which made it the most expensive House primary in history, and, as one observer pointed out, amounted to more than three times the total amount raised in the entire British election taking place right now — funded a relentless stream of negative ads that played on this scandal and highlighted Bowman’s other missteps. Those included opposition research that had him espousing fringe views before he was an elected official and, most prominently, his vote against the president’s infrastructure bill.
That vote, in reality, stayed true to the legislative strategy Democratic leadership had themselves devised to get the president’s ambitious agenda across the finish line. But shorn of context, the attacks sent a message that AIPAC had first devised way back in 2021 against Turner, and which pointedly never actually mentioned Israel: progressives and the Squad were incompetent, fringe extremists disloyal to the party and not serious about legislating. It was an effective message in a solidly blue district where 87 percent voted for Biden in 2020. The pro-Bowman side simply could not match that firepower to counteract this wall-to-wall narrative and redefine him in the voters’ eyes, having been outspent by a massive more than seven-to-one ratio.
It’s also impossible to deny that, in a heavily Jewish district, the outcome was affected by Bowman’s positions on Israel. More specifically, as Marans pointed out, the Congressman made several unforced errors, including failing to turn up to post-October 7 vigils and arrange meetings with local Jewish leaders and constituents, and using rhetoric of questionable political wisdom to criticize Israel’s war that made it easier for opponents to smear him as a fringe extremist. These errors alienated persuadable middle-of-the-road pro-Israel voters, including the liberal Zionist group J Street, which had worked with Bowman in previous elections. Some of it came as a last-minute attempt to shore up his left flank and drive up turnout. But some of it predated the election, seemingly in response to pressure to move left on the issue.Bowman ended the race as a candidate whose rhetoric and positions more closely matched those of activists, while campaigning in a district that had become more conservative than the one he had first won with more moderate posturing.
The result was a double-edged sword. Bowman ended the race as a candidate whose rhetoric and positions more closely matched those of activists, while campaigning in a district that had become more conservative than the one he had first won with more moderate posturing. Whether forcing Bowman to shift constitutes a bigger win than keeping in Congress one of the few members willing to vote against military aid to Israel and one of its most prominent pro-cease-fire advocates will be up for internal left-wing debate.
Make Them Realize
No one, not even the staunchest liberal supporters of Israel or its current war, should come away feeling good about the Bowman race. As many have correctly pointed out, much of the unprecedented sum of money UDP blasted into the district to defeat him came from pro-Trump Republican megadonors who hold repugnant views at odds with most of those who voted against Bowman, whether on labor rights and taxing the rich or abortion rights and the legitimacy of the 2020 election result. Through AIPAC, these donors have jerry-rigged a way to interfere in and shape the Democratic Party.
There’s no reason to believe this playbook is going to stay limited to the pro-Israel lobby. As former representative Andy Levin told me, “This may have been pioneered by AIPAC, but Big Pharma isn’t stupid, the tobacco industry isn’t stupid, the fossil fuel industry isn’t stupid. Why won’t they just say: ‘Great idea, AIPAC. Thank you very much. We will pick the nominee of both parties and that’ll be great for us to advance our interests.’”
Meanwhile, to the extent that anyone believed it in the first place, no one should take seriously anymore the Democratic establishment’s claims that it believes in diversity, protecting incumbents, and passing the torch to a new generation. Party bigwigs enabled, and in some cases actively assisted, the replacement of an exciting, young, black educator with a seventy-year-old, white career politician who had a history of obstructing federal desegregation efforts.
Bowman’s challenger’s campaign also happened to be one of the more shockingly racist ones in recent history, with Latimer accusing Bowman of having an “ethnic benefit,” of having the heavily Arab American town of Dearborn, Michigan, as his “constituency,” and of “taking money from Hamas,” to name just a few potshots. Press coverage fixated on Bowman’s scandals while largely sidelining Latimer’s numerous missteps, including missing a budget vote because he was on a trip with a woman who wasn’t his wife, whom he also set up with a six-figure government job — a black mark on the supposed objectivity of the mainstream media.
Bowman was defiant and morally clear-eyed in conceding defeat, as he has been throughout the past eight months. “We will never stand for the bombing and killing of babies in Gaza,” he told supporters. “Our opponents . . . may have won this round at this time in this race. But this will be a battle for our humanity and justice for the rest of our lives.” We will never know if he might have overcome his disadvantages had events gone a little differently here and there, or if he had made a handful of different choices. But overcoming is also a lot harder with the weight of nearly $20 million on your neck.
Bowman’s loss is a projection of AIPAC’s financial strength, but also, paradoxically, a sign of the limits of its ability to defeat Israel critics despite the ungodly sums of money at its disposal. After giddily anticipating the Squad’s obliteration last October and a firm swing in public opinion toward its positions, the lobby has serially failed to defeat its targets and had to drastically narrow its electoral ambitions in the face of its left-wing opponents’ strength, all while watching the US public turn against Israel’s ghastly war and US support for it in ever larger numbers.
The Left’s first job is to recognize this. Its next job, whether through Representative Bush’s upcoming primary election or future contests, is to make the rest of the political establishment realize it too.
CONTRIBUTOR
Branko Marcetic is a Jacobin staff writer and the author of Yesterday’s Man: The Case Against Joe Biden.
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