Abdul El-Sayed is midway through his stump speech, telling a crowd of about 100 in a brick-lined event hall that he won’t take corporate donations and will raise taxes on billionaires. The Democratic candidate then turns to where those tax dollars should – and should not – be spent.
Taxpayer money should not go to “a country committing apartheid, at minimum genocide, over the past two years and counting,” he says. “Money that should have been spent on our kids and their schools and their healthcare [was] used to buy bombs and tanks,” he continues. “I think unconditional foreign military aid should be illegal.” The crowd applauds enthusiastically.
He doesn’t name the country. But he doesn’t have to.
Why We Wrote This
An overwhelming majority of Democrats now view Israel negatively – a dramatic shift that is playing out in primary campaigns across the country. It could portend big changes in policy, should the party capture control of Congress.
Dr. El-Sayed, a former county health director running in a competitive primary for Michigan’s open U.S. Senate seat, is a fierce critic of Israel. Most polls show him in a close contest with Rep. Haley Stevens, a Detroit-area lawmaker who is backed by the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, or AIPAC, which Dr. El-Sayed notes is spending heavily to try to influence the race. “That kind of electioneering is anti-democratic and should be illegal,” he says. A third Democratic candidate, state Sen. Mallory McMorrow, is also in contention in the Aug. 4 primary.
Not long ago, Ms. Stevens was squarely in the Democratic mainstream, pledging support for Israel’s defense while paying lip service to the moribund Palestinian peace process. Standing firm with what’s considered by some the only true democracy in the Middle East was for decades a bipartisan cause championed in Congress by both hawkish Republicans and left-leaning Democrats, many of them Jewish.
That era is over. What began as a drop in support for Israel among younger Democrats has become a vertiginous, across-the-board collapse. Today, an overwhelming majority of Democrats view Israel negatively, and AIPAC is itself a target for progressives seeking to purge the party’s pro-Israel ranks.
A New York Times-Siena poll this week found that just 24% of Democrats support providing additional economic and military aid to Israel, while 68% oppose it (as do 68% of independents). That’s a big shift from a decade ago, when, according to a 2015 Pew Research Center poll, only 26% of Democrats thought the United States was “too supportive” of Israel. This week’s Times-Siena poll also found 57% of Democrats sympathize more with the Palestinians than with Israel; only 19% sympathize more with Israel. And in a March survey conducted by Pew, 80% of Democrats and Democratic-leaning independents expressed an unfavorable view of Israel.
Editor’s note: The Republican Party, led by President Donald Trump, is still a bulwark of political support for Israel. But young conservatives and some prominent right-wing media figures have grown far more antagonistic of late, signaling future turmoil on the right. See Part 2 of this series on Friday.
Dr. El-Sayed, a Michigan-born medical professional whose father immigrated from Egypt, is representative of the generational and ideological wave breaking over the party. Even if he loses the primary here in Michigan, the ground has already shifted for Democrats who once proudly touted AIPAC’s endorsement.
“Support for Israel has been a defining feature of American political life for decades. It was real and quite robust, and we’re seeing it rapidly changing,” says Theodore Sasson, who directs the program in Jewish Studies at Middlebury College in Vermont.
This change was already underway before Israel’s war in Gaza, which came in the wake of Hamas’s terrorist attack and hostage-taking on Oct. 7, 2023. But the Gaza war, which sparked widespread protests on college campuses across the U.S. – including some that targeted Jewish students – deepened the distrust of Israel and its right-wing leader, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
To many Democratic voters, pursuing a social justice agenda at home is undercut by complicity with Israel’s wars and its occupation of Palestinian territory. “We have to start with basic humanity and human rights [in Gaza]. And if we can’t start there, I don’t really know what else we’re fighting for,” says Ben Briggance, an El-Sayed supporter at the event in Detroit.
During the Joe Biden presidency, as those views proliferated among the grassroots, official policy in Washington didn’t follow suit. But political elites eventually move toward their base, says Professor Sasson, who is also a senior research fellow at the Institute for National Security Studies at Tel Aviv University. “A very large gap opened up on the Democratic side between public opinion and the positions of elected officials that only now is narrowing again.”
Changes in Congress
This dynamic is playing out in midterm primary campaigns from New York to California and in Midwestern swing districts. The result could be a future Congress in which Democratic lawmakers, should they regain a majority, spearhead a dramatically different approach to U.S.-Israel policy.
There are signs a shift is already happening: In April, 40 U.S. senators backed a resolution sponsored by independent Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont to block the sale of bulldozers to Israel, while a second resolution blocking the sale of 1,000-pound bombs to Israel’s military received 36 votes. A year earlier, a Sanders-backed resolution to limit arms sales to Israel only got 15 votes in the Senate. (No Republican senator voted for these measures.)
This week, Israel’s ambassador to the U.S., Yechiel Leiter, criticized Senator Sanders, who is Jewish, over his resolutions. Speaking at an event in Washington hosted by the National Taskforce to Combat Antisemitism, Mr. Leiter said the senator who sponsored those resolutions – whom he did not name – was “not a Jew” but a “communist who may have a Jewish pedigree. That doesn’t make him a Jew.”
Senator Sanders has endorsed Dr. El-Sayed and other anti-Israel progressives running in this year’s midterms, including Graham Platner, a military veteran and political novice who is seeking to unseat Republican Sen. Susan Collins in Maine.
Even Democrats not aligned with Mr. Sanders’ progressive wing have become wary of being tagged as too pro-Israel. Asked by Politico in March about donations from AIPAC, several Democrats eyeing 2028 presidential runs pledged not to take the group’s money, including some who had previously done so. Another emerging litmus test for Democratic candidates is whether they believe Israel committed genocide in Gaza.
In a fundraising email, AIPAC called both Dr. El-Sayed and Mr. Platner “a direct threat to the U.S.-Israel relationship” and urged donors to “not let extremists rewrite the future of this relationship.” (Mr. Platner posted the email on X and said he was “proud” to be attacked by AIPAC. He has faced criticism over a tattoo on his chest of an image recognized as a Nazi symbol, which he covered up after it became controversial. Mr. Platner said he had been unaware of the symbolism of the tattoo, which he got in his 20s while in the Marine Corps.)
The rhetoric on Israel by these candidates and others has been troubling to Brian Romick, a veteran congressional staffer and president of the Democratic Majority For Israel (DMFI), which works to elect pro-Israel candidates. His group has endorsed Ms. Stevens in the Michigan Senate primary. “Haley is a proven vote-getter. She won a swing seat,” he says. “El-Sayed is pretty extreme.”
Mr. Romick pushes back on the notion that pro-Israel Democrats are out of step with the party’s base. Three-quarters of Democratic voters say they support Israel as a Jewish homeland and a majority want the U.S. to maintain its alliance, according to a November poll commissioned by the DMFI. “I think they understand the unique difficulties that Israel faces,” says Mr. Romick, a former chief of staff to Rep. Steny Hoyer of Maryland.
The role of AIPAC
During an interview, Dr. El-Sayed says lawmakers have been cowed into voting for aid for Israel by “a $100 million-plus super PAC that spends money on both sides of the aisle to [defeat] politicians who say what I just said.”
He says he supports the right to peace and self-determination for Palestinians and Jewish Israelis alike. “I just want us to treat Israel the way we would treat any other country that does what Israel does,” he tells the Monitor.
AIPAC’s super PAC, the United Democracy Project, spent $38 million in the 2024 election, mostly in Democratic primaries, and is expected to spend more this year. It has had a mixed record in early primaries in New Jersey and Illinois, where it sought to undercut candidates critical of Israel, though its ads rarely highlight this issue.
In Michigan, a new previously unknown super PAC is reportedly spending more than $5 million to support Ms. Stevens. Deryn Sousa, a spokesperson for AIPAC, says it wasn’t funded by his group. “Millions of Americans want to help tough, principled Democrats defeat extremist candidates,” he says in an email.
Ms. Stevens has recorded videos for AIPAC in support of Israel. At a 2023 lighting of a Hanukkah menorah, she said that “Israel comes to me in my dreams. I see Israel’s future.” (Her campaign didn’t respond to a request for comment.)
She was elected to the U.S. House in 2022 after winning a contentious primary in a redrawn district against Rep. Andy Levin, the scion of a prominent Jewish Democratic political family. His father, Sander Levin, and his uncle, Carl Levin, were both veteran lawmakers in Washington; Mr. Levin succeeded his father in a Detroit-area district. In that primary, AIPAC spent heavily to defeat Mr. Levin after he criticized Israel and defended Palestinian rights.
Elections rarely turn on foreign policy alone, and Dr. El-Sayed’s campaign is grounded as much in his support for single-payer healthcare and other social policies as his opposition to Israeli and American wars in the Middle East. But many Democrats in Michigan believe that the Biden administration’s support for Israel’s war in Gaza helped deliver the state to Mr. Trump in 2024.
In Dearborn, a Detroit-area city where Arab Americans form a majority and which Mr. Biden won easily in 2020, Mr. Trump defeated Kamala Harris by nearly 3,000 votes. He also flipped a neighboring city with a large Arab American population and went on to win Michigan’s 15 electoral seats by about 80,000 votes.
Anger over Gaza wasn’t the only factor, says Adrian Hemond, a Democratic consultant in Michigan. “Republicans have been competitive in Dearborn for many years,” he says. On social issues, he notes, conservative Muslim voters “don’t fit easily into the Democratic tent.”
Still, the frustration felt by Arab American voters over Mr. Biden’s backing of Israel was shared by Democrats in Washington, and some have since voiced regrets. Wendy Sherman, a deputy secretary of state during the Biden administration, said in a recent podcast interview that Mr. Netanyahu “has led us down a road” that has “created a genocide in Gaza and destabilized the Middle East.”
In recent months, the U.S.-Israeli military operation against Iran has further inflamed Israel’s critics on both the right and left. Media reports revealed that the decision to go to war came after a classified presentation by Mr. Netanyahu at the White House, leading some to conclude Mr. Trump had been manipulated by the Israeli prime minister.
At the Michigan Democratic Party convention in April, delegates booed and heckled Ms. Stevens as she spoke from the stage. Ms. McMorrow, whose husband is Jewish, later told a radio station her husband was called an antisemitic slur and that the convention had been “tense and disrespectful.”
Dr. El-Sayed says his supporters were under “very clear guidance not to be unkind to anyone.” He told the Monitor that he reached out to Ms. Stevens afterward “and told her that I thought that [reception] was unkind and unnecessary.”
Ms. McMorrow has said Israel committed genocide in Gaza and has eschewed funding from AIPAC, though an anti-Israel group has challenged her credibility, citing past statements. But she has criticized Dr. El-Sayed for campaigning alongside Hasan Piker, a popular left-wing streamer who has dismissed Hamas atrocities, condoned the 9/11 terrorist attacks, and made antisemitic remarks.
“If you want to go on his show, I have no problem with that … but appearing with him to campaign for you sends a very different message,” she told radio station WHMI. (Dr. El-Sayed has said that he doesn’t share all of Mr. Piker’s views but rejects “platform policing.”)
Mr. Hemond, who doesn’t work for any of these candidates or campaigns, is skeptical that a progressive candidate can win a statewide primary in Michigan. Young progressives are a major force in Ann Arbor and other liberal communities but Ms. Stevens leads in polls among seniors and Black voters. “The median voter is a Black woman in Detroit whom you can find in a church pew on a Sunday,” he says.
Concerns about antisemitism
Detroit also has a sizable Jewish community, mostly in the suburbs in Ms. Stevens’ congressional district. Voters in these communities lean Democratic, as Jewish voters do nationally. But while many Jews are critical of the Netanyahu government and the Iran war, there is also trepidation over a rise in antisemitism on the political left and right.
In March, a Lebanese American man rammed a truck filled with explosives into Temple Israel, a synagogue in a Detroit suburb. The man died in the attack, which didn’t cause any other major injuries, though children were inside the building at the time. The FBI called it a targeted attack “inspired by Hezbollah’s violent imagery.”
In a Washington Post poll from last fall, just 36% of Jewish Americans said they considered the Democratic Party “friendly toward Jews.” Back in 2020, more than half of respondents categorized the Democratic Party as “friendly.” Over this same period, the proportion who considered the party “unfriendly” rose from 10% to 31%.
Ohio Rep. Greg Landsman, a Jewish Democrat who represents a swing seat, faced a primary challenge last month from an opponent who said he decided to run after seeing Mr. Landsman in an AIPAC-sponsored video and wondering why U.S. tax dollars were going to Israel instead of to Ohio.
Mr. Landsman was one of just four House Democrats who voted in March against a War Powers Resolution that would have curtailed the Trump administration’s military operation against Iran. That vote “angered a lot of people who’ve supported him for a long time,” says Alex Linser, chair of the Hamilton County Democratic Party. But Mr. Landsman “was very honest and thoughtful about engaging with people here on the ground, about why he took the vote he did.” In April, when the resolution came up again, he voted in favor of ending the war, saying it was time to do so.
Mr. Landsman won his May 5 primary but lost nearly one-third of the vote to a political neophyte who raised just $13,000. He says he understands that Democrats are angry at Israel’s government but worries the criticisms have led to dangerous generalizations about Jews, including claims of a genocide in Gaza. Genocide “describes evil intent, and then suggests in this case the Jews are evil, at which point it makes it a whole lot easier for violent people to go kill Jews, so please use another word,” he says.
Back in Detroit, Dr. El-Sayed defends using the word genocide to describe Israel’s actions in Gaza as legally justified. He says he wants to be a partner to the Jewish community in Michigan. “I will always stand with Judaism and Jewish people, those are not the same thing as Israel and AIPAC,” he tells the Monitor.
“There is nobody who understands the pain of being discriminated against for how one prays like somebody who is discriminated [against] for how someone prays,” he says.
Mr. Levin, the former congressman who lost his seat to Ms. Stevens and now runs a clean-energy nonprofit, has endorsed Dr. El-Sayed in the Senate primary. He says it’s wrong for AIPAC to label Dr. El-Sayed as an extreme candidate. “I know what antisemitism is. I grew up with it,” he says. “That’s not who Abdul is.”
He says Democrats in Washington need to recognize that the party’s base has had enough of pro-Israel politicians who don’t stand up for the rights of Palestinians. The next generation of Democrats, including Jewish Americans, he says, “see this as a natural position to take.”