As
the left-leaning journalist Ryan Grim points out in his forthcoming
book, “The Squad: AOC and the Hope of a Political Revolution,” the
politics of Israel and Palestine have bedeviled the group ever since its
first members burst onto the political scene in 2018.
The
most famous figure in the Squad, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, rarely spoke
about the Middle East in 2018, during her first congressional campaign,
which was centered on the same economic issues that powered the Bernie
Sanders movement. But that May, she’d tweeted about the Israeli
military’s shooting of protesters in Gaza, calling it a “massacre.”
After her primary victory, she was questioned about that tweet, and her
stance on Israel, on the TV show “Firing Line.” She grew visibly
flustered, and afterward decided to stop doing national interviews for a
while.
“At the time, she betrayed a
visceral sense of just how treacherous the issue could be for her, but
she could never have guessed how significantly she had underestimated
it,” wrote Grim.
It was even more
treacherous for Tlaib and Ilhan Omar, the first two Muslim women in
Congress, who’ve both voiced support for the boycott, divestment and
sanctions movement against Israel. Both spoke for many left-wing voters,
especially young ones, who see in the Palestinian struggle a reflection
of their own battles against various forms of oppression. Both also,
occasionally, invoked what many Jews see as antisemitic tropes about
Jewish power and dual loyalty. Less than a week into her first term, for
example, Tlaib tweeted
that Senate supporters of an anti-B.D.S. bill “forgot what country they
represent.” Not long after, Omar tweeted that fealty to Israel by U.S.
political leaders was “all about the Benjamins.” Some of the early weeks
of the new congressional session were consumed by an attempt,
eventually watered down, to officially rebuke her.
Soon
after the original members of the Squad were sworn in in 2019, Mark
Mellman, a Democratic pollster who once did work for the American Israel
Public Affairs Committee, or AIPAC, started a group called the
Democratic Majority for Israel aimed in part at stopping their influence
from growing. “Most Democrats are strongly pro-Israel and we want to
keep it that way,” Mellman told
The Times. “There are a few discordant voices, but we want to make sure
that what’s a very small problem doesn’t metastasize into a bigger
problem.”
To that end, the Democratic
Majority for Israel tried hard to thwart Bowman when he ran against
Eliot Engel in 2020. The group spent almost $2 million
in the race, much of it on ads slamming Bowman for unpaid taxes. As
Grim noted, hitting “a working-class Black man for financial troubles
before he’d risen to become a successful principal in the area would
have been considered tone-deaf in a New York Democratic primary in any
recent cycle,” but especially amid the summer’s protests over the
killing of George Floyd. The attack failed; Bowman ended up winning a
blowout 15-point victory.
The
district, whose contours have changed with redistricting and could
change again before the primary, is about 50 percent Black and Latino,
and voters of color were Bowman’s base. But they were joined by some
Jews, who are thought to make up about 10 percent of the district’s
population. “It was the time,” said Giddins, the Bronxville retiree, who
backed Bowman in the past. “We have to coalesce and give Black people
power. They’re entitled to it.”
But despite Bowman’s popularity, growing disaffection among Jews — who, according
to The New York Times, probably make up 20 percent to 30 percent of the
Democratic primary electorate in his district — could make him
vulnerable. He’s one of several Squad members facing potentially
formidable primary challenges over their stances on the
Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
Omar is
going to have a rematch against a former Minneapolis City Council
member, Don Samuels, who lost to her by about two points in the 2022
primary. Cori Bush, a Missouri Democrat who emerged from the Black Lives
Matter movement, is facing a primary challenge from a former political
ally, the St. Louis County prosecutor Wesley Bell. Summer Lee, a
Pittsburgh Democrat whose district includes the Tree of Life synagogue,
the site of an antisemitic mass murder in 2018, is being challenged by
Bhavini Patel.
Bowman doesn’t have a strong opponent yet, but last month 26 rabbis in his district wrote a letter to Westchester’s popular county executive, George Latimer, imploring him to get into the race. Last week, a local TV station reported
that Latimer had indeed decided to jump in, though he told me he still
hadn’t made a formal decision and wouldn’t until he returned from a
solidarity trip to Israel.
Should a
few members of the Squad lose their primaries, the blow to Democratic
unity could be severe. “Many of the young people or people of color,
Muslim and Arab Democrats who support the Squad will feel like the party
is not a place for them,” said Waleed Shahid, former communications
director of the Justice Democrats, the group that recruited
Ocasio-Cortez to run for office, and a senior adviser on Bowman’s 2020
campaign. “And they’ll either stay at home or they’ll go to a third
party.”
Already, there are signs that the party is fracturing over Israel. According to a recent Reuters/Ipsos poll,
about three-quarters of Democrats want a cease-fire, but few in the
Democratic establishment share their views. Last week, in a rare gesture
of defiance, more than 100 congressional staffers walked out to demand
that their bosses back a cease-fire. More than 500 alumni of Biden’s
2020 presidential campaign and Democratic Party staff members have
signed a letter imploring Biden to call for a cease-fire, saying, “If you fail to act swiftly, your legacy will be complicity in the face of genocide.”
If
the conflict in Israel cools down in a few months, it might recede from
the center of American politics. But the wounds it’s torn open will be
hard to mend, because so many people are feeling betrayed. Many liberal
Jews, mourning the mass murder in Israel and shaken by the upsurge of
antisemitism at home, believe they’ve been abandoned by their allies.
Advocates for the freedom and safety of Palestinians, horror-struck by
more than 10,000 civilian deaths in Gaza, believe that the Democratic
Party is giving its approval to atrocities. Bowman’s attempt to
transcend this split in his own district, knowing how much ire would be
directed at him, struck me as decent and brave. But when people discover
that they see the world so radically differently, better communication
alone might not be enough to bring them back together.
From the time he was elected,
Bowman has had to traverse a minefield on the Middle East, facing
pressure from both his pro-Israel Jewish constituents and from some of
the left-wing groups that backed him. He’s mostly refused to tiptoe.
Coming into office, Bowman was a member of the Democratic Socialists of
America, but he angered the organization when he voted to fund Israel’s
Iron Dome defense system. After he traveled to Israel and the West Bank
with the left-leaning pro-Israel group J Street in 2021, some in the
Democratic Socialists, which has a policy of boycotting Israel, moved to
expel him. He ended up dropping his membership.
For
all the blowback from the left, however, the trip solidified his
abhorrence of the occupation of Palestine. “I got to see the giant wall
built around the West Bank,” Bowman told me. He described being turned
away from a checkpoint in the West Bank city of Hebron, where
Palestinian movement is curtailed to accommodate a few hundred fanatical
settlers, because he wasn’t Jewish. “And I thought that was ironic,
because I’m literally a sitting member of Congress voting to support
funding for the state of Israel,” he said.
He
saw firsthand the way settlement expansion is making a contiguous
Palestinian state nearly impossible. “I left feeling pretty overwhelmed
and pretty dejected,” Bowman said, adding, “The rhetoric at home didn’t
match the reality on the ground there, and specifically, the rhetoric
around a two-state solution.” Bowman still believes in two states, but
said, “The policies of the Israeli government haven’t gotten us there,
and the U.S. hasn’t held Israel accountable towards helping us to get
there.”
“At Jamaal’s core, he’s
someone who believes in racial and social justice,” said Shahid, his
former adviser. “And I think that a lot of the ways he thinks about the
world were confirmed” by his trip to Israel. Shahid compared Bowman’s
experience to that of the writer Ta-Nehisi Coates, who, speaking on the
left-wing broadcast “Democracy Now,”
described his own shocking encounter with the brutal segregation in
Hebron. “I was in a territory where your mobility is inhibited,” said
Coates. “Where your voting rights are inhibited. Where your right to the
water is inhibited. Where your right to housing is inhibited, and it’s
all inhibited based on ethnicity. And that sounded extremely, extremely
familiar to me.”
It was familiar to
Bowman, too. Given the congressman’s “experience as a racially conscious
Black person,” said Shahid, “it’s hard not to see the parallels.”
Before
going to Israel and Palestine, Bowman had co-sponsored legislation
encouraging Arab states to normalize their relations with Israel. When
he returned, he withdrew his sponsorship and announced he’d vote against the bill because, among other things, it didn’t take Palestinian interests into account. The move appalled
rabbis in his district. Later, Bowman angered many Jewish constituents
by co-sponsoring Tlaib’s resolution commemorating what Palestinians call
the nakba, or catastrophe, referring to their expulsion from Israel
during the country’s founding. He angered them further by boycotting the
speech by Israel’s president, Isaac Herzog, to Congress in July.
Oct.
7 brought an already simmering discontent to a raging boil. A few days
after the attacks, Bowman wanted to attend an Israeli solidarity rally
held by the Westchester Jewish Council, but organizers advised him to
stay away because he’d be received poorly. He has spoken out repeatedly
against antisemitism, denouncing, for example, an Oct. 8 demonstration
in Manhattan, promoted by the New York Democratic Socialists of America,
where Hamas’s attacks were celebrated. But he hasn’t backed away from
his fundamental view of the conflict, leaving the mainstream Jewish
community feeling as if he’s run roughshod over their interests and
sensitivities. “Actions against Israel affect the safety of the Jewish
people everywhere,” said Weinberger, the woman with two children in
Israel, adding, “We feel so helpless in Congress because of him. He’s
taken our voice away.”
In 2022,
despite mounting unhappiness with Bowman among some local Jewish
leaders, national pro-Israel groups sat out his primary, determining, as
Jewish Insider reported,
that he “was likely unbeatable.” (He ended up winning about 57 percent
of the vote in a four-way race.) But pro-Israel groups — one of which
received funds from the disgraced crypto king Sam Bankman-Fried — poured
an unprecedented amount of money into other primaries that year, a foretaste of the resources we could soon see mobilized against Bowman.
As Politico reported,
the Democratic Majority for Israel spent $2 million to defeat the
Bernie Sanders-backed Democrat Nina Turner in a 2022 Ohio primary. In
Michigan, the United Democracy Project, a super PAC tied to AIPAC, spent
a staggering
$4.3 million to help beat Representative Andy Levin, a Jewish Democrat
who had been outspoken in his criticism of Israel’s occupation. Some
funding for the United Democracy Project came from Republican megadonors,
including the Home Depot co-founder Bernie Marcus, a Trump supporter.
These are not, needless to say, people who are averse to creating
lasting ill will among Democrats.
“I’ve
been in politics for 30 years, local, state and federal,” said Mark
Pocan, a Wisconsin Democrat and former co-chair of the Congressional
Progressive Caucus. “But last cycle was the first time I saw a really
disturbing new phenomenon, which was two groups — cryptocurrency folks
and AIPAC — getting involved in Democratic primaries with huge amounts
of money,” often more than the candidates were spending themselves. We
can expect to see even more outside money from groups supporting Israel
deployed against the Squad in 2024. “The level of concern and engagement
on the part of the pro-Israel community is at an extraordinarily high
level,” Mellman, of Democratic Majority for Israel, told me.
These
big-footed donors, who are overwhelmingly targeting representatives of
color, are going to exacerbate the fissures in the Democratic Party. But
they did not create them. Talking to some of the disenchanted voters at
Bowman’s event, I was struck most not by their anger but by their
heartbreak.
Diana Lovett, a Democratic
Party district leader who held a fund-raiser for Bowman last year, said
polarization over the congressman was tearing apart local Democrats.
Leaving the event, she told me, with great sadness, that she didn’t feel
she could back him anymore. “I love him personally,” she said. She’d
spoken to him in October about their disagreement over Israel. “He was
lovely, and he’s amazing, and he was the same warm and openhearted
person that he was today,” she said.
But
Lovett, who’d recently been hanging posters of kidnapped Israelis
around town only to see them being torn down, had come to believe that
their views on the Middle East are irreconcilable. “I think he sees what
he believes to be an injustice, a grave injustice,” and that his votes
are coming from a deep “moral consciousness,” she said. “And I think the
pain and suffering he is causing to his constituents is some kind of
collateral damage to that higher principle.”
If
Bowman were a more transactional politician, he might have compromised
on an issue so fraught in his community. But he is, for better or worse,
very sincere. Lovett was dreading “an insanely divisive primary,” but
didn’t see any way around it. “He’s not going to convince us, and we’re
not going to convince him,” she said.
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