July 5, 2022 by Richard Silverstein
America’s most powerful lobby, Aipac, had a problem. While it prided itself on being a bipartisan group, whose ardent support for Israel transcended Party, it really wasn’t that at all. Its major donors and most of its members were Republican. In fact, those donors overwhelmingly supported Republican Senate and House candidates. Forty of the GOP lawmakers endorsed by Aipac voted against certifying Joe Biden as president. As a result, a reasonable argument can be made that Aipac, at least tacitly, supported the Insurrection. It certainly ignored the troubling fact that these candidates voted to destroy the Republic.
Another factor that drove Aipac into the arms of the Republican Party, was Israel’s rightward trend toward apartheid and its abandonment of democracy. Israeli policy increasingly alienated Democratic voters and attracted Republicans.
It became difficult to persuade Democrats either to donate funds or support Aipac’s political initiatives. That is one of the reasons that the Squad became such a wake-up call for the Israel Lobby. These were (then) eight progressive Democrats, almost all African-American women, who owed nothing to Aipac; and who charted an independent course regarding Israel-Palestine. That set off alarms in every Aipac office throughout the country. Not only were Squad members like Ilhan Omar, Rashida Tlaib and Alexandria Ocasio Cortez a threat to Aipac’s political hegemony, they threatened to get even more like themselves elected to Congress. Aipac saw this as a slippery slope it needed to avert at all costs.
Thus, it commenced a guerilla war, tarring them with the anti-Semitism brush and highlighting their alleged hatred of Israel. It also mounted primary challenges against Tlaib and Ocasio-Cortez which it heavily funded.
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