Aipac: the pro-Israel group planning to spend millions in US elections

Joe Biden with Benjamin Netanyahu in October last year. Aipac’s influence has been diminished by its unwavering backing of the Israeli PM. Photograph: Avi Ohayon/Israel Gpo/ZUMA Press Wire/Shutterstock

A handful of pro-Israel groups fund political campaigns in support of individual candidates in US elections, led by the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (Aipac), a powerful force in American politics. Before the 2024 election, Aipac plans to spend tens of millions of dollars against congressional candidates, primarily Democrats, whom it deems insufficiently supportive of Israel.

Aipac and other pro-Israel lobby groups have recruited and supported challengers to a number of lawmakers and candidates – most notably members of the Squad, the group of progressive representatives who are particularly vocal in their criticism of Israel’s offensive in Gaza.

The 2024 election will be bellwether of the enduring impact of these groups on US politics amid shifting US public opinion on Israel.

What is Aipac?

Aipac has its roots in the American Zionist Committee for Public Affairs, which was founded by a lobbyist for the Israeli government in an attempt to manage the political fallout the Israeli army’s 1953 massacre of dozens of Palestinians, most of them children and women, in the West Bank village of Qibya.

The organisation was renamed Aipac in 1959. It was not until financial support surged after the 1973 Yom Kippur war that it began to grow into the powerful Washington lobbyist group it is today.

For many years, Aipac’s influence went largely unchallenged on Capitol Hill. The pressure group claimed to voice bipartisan support for Israel in Congress and worked to marginalise the relatively small number of critics there.

Aipac’s annual conference typically involved a long rollcall of members of Congress who support the group. It has regularly galvanised almost every member of the US Senate to sign letters in support of Israeli policies, including several wars in Gaza.

But the group’s once unchallenged influence in Washington has been diminished by its unwavering backing for the Israeli prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, over the past 15 years. It sided with him against President Barack Obama’s opposition to settlement construction in the occupied Palestinian territories and his nuclear deal with Iran.

The liberal Tel Aviv newspaper Haaretz has described Aipac as “the pro-Netanyahu, anti-Israel lobby”.

“Effectively, the organization has become an operational wing of Netanyahu’s far-right government, one that peddles a false image of a liberal Israel in the United States and sells illusions to members of Congress,” it said.

What has changed?

Aipac traditionally endorsed candidates sympathetic to Israel as a signal for others to fund their campaigns. But in December 2021, the group for the first time in its 70-year history moved into direct financial support for individual political campaigns by launching a super political action committee, the United Democracy Project (UDP). A Super Pac is permitted to spend without restriction for or against candidates but cannot make direct donations to their campaigns.

The move was prompted by alarm at the erosion of longstanding bipartisan support for Israel in the US. Opinion polls show younger Democrats have grown more critical of the deepening oppression of the Palestinians, including Jewish Americans, a trend that has only strengthened with the present war in Gaza.

Aipac has grown increasingly concerned that the election of candidates critical of Israel could open the door to the conditioning of the US’s considerable military aid, erosion of Washington’s diplomatic protection on the international stage, and political pressure to establish a Palestinian state.

So the UDP is working to block Democratic candidates critical of Israel at the first hurdle – the primaries – in an effort to shore up the claim that there is unswerving support for the Jewish state across Congress. It is also targeting progressive Democratic members of Congress who have pressed for a ceasefire in Gaza.

What about other lobby groups?

A number of smaller groups are working to the same end, principally the Democratic Majority For Israel (DMFI). It was founded five years ago by Mark Mellman, a Democratic political consultant. The DMFI’s board of directors includes Archie Gottesman, who also cofounded JewBelong, a group that has posted pink billboards in US cities in support of Israel including one that declared: ‘Trust Me. If Israel Wanted to Commit Genocide in Gaza, It Could’.

Notably, the UDP has so far not waded into the campaign against Summer Lee in this year’s primary, despite spending more than $3m to defeat her in 2022. Instead the Republican megadonor Jeffrey Yass has stepped up as the only known funder of a Pac called Moderate to support Lee’s primary opponent, Bhavini Patel. It is running ads saying that Lee’s criticisms of Biden amount to support for Donald Trump even though Yass himself is a Trump supporter.

A more moderate pro-Israel group, J Street, was founded in 2007 to counter Aipac’s unflinching support for rightwing governments. J Street established a Pac to support candidates who back a two state solution for Israel and Palestine. But it has raised only about $4m so far this election cycle.

Who are they targeting and how?

Aipac plans to spend $100m this year against congressional candidates, primarily Democrats, and members of Congress critical of Israel. So far the UDP has raised more than $49m, according to its most recent Federal Election Commission filings.

The bulk of that money has yet to be spent but the UDP has already thrown millions of dollars into political advertising targeted against candidates critical of Israel, but which focusses on other issues and fails to make clear that it is funded by a pro-Israel group. Critics have accused Aipac of attempting to intimidate candidates into avoiding criticism of Israel by implicitly threatening to fund campaigns against them.

Among those expected to be targeted by pro-Israel groups are members of the the Squad, including Jamaal Bowman and Cori Bush, who are thought to be vulnerable to political attacks over issues unrelated to their criticisms of the war in Gaza.

Who is funding these campaigns?

The leading donors to the UDP are Republicans seeking to influence Democratic primaries.

The single largest donor is the conservative Ukrainian American billionaire co-founder of WhatsApp, Jan Koum, who gave $5m. Koum also donated to Republican presidential candidate Nikki Haley’s Super Pac.

Other donors include the financier, Jonathan Jacobson, who gave $2.5m to the UDP toward the end of last year although for many years his political donations were directed to the Republican National Committee and the party’s US Senate campaigns. The Israeli-born entrepreneur David Zalik gave the UDP $2m. He has also donated to Republican campaigns in Georgia.

The Home Depot founder Bernie Marcus, who was one of the largest donors to Donald Trump’s 2016 campaign and who continues to back him financially, gave $1m to the UDP, as did the hedge fund manager Paul Singer, who has given millions of dollars to Republican political causes over the years.

Donations to the UDP are separate from tens of millions of dollars in pledges made directly to Aipac in the wake of the 7 October attacks by Hamas as the public relations battle intensified over Israel’s subsequent assault on Gaza and a surging number of Palestinian civilian deaths.

Top donors to the DMFI include Deborah Simon, the daughter of the billionaire businessman and movie producer Mel Simon, who gave $1m. She regularly donates to Democratic causes and Jewish organisations such as the Anti-Defamation League.

Sam Bankman-Fried, the former cryptocurrency billionaire who is serving 25 years for fraud, gave $250,000 to DMFI during the 2022 mid term elections. The group has been forced to return the money.

Other major DMFI donors are closely tied to Aipac such as Stacy Schusterman, who has given more than $1m, and the venture capitalist Gary Lauder.

How has the present war in Gaza changed the equation?

The conflict has strengthened the hand of Israel’s critics within the Democratic party as polls show rising sympathy for the Palestinians. That in turn has made Aipac’s financial backing a potential liability for some Israel-supporting Democratic candidates.

Aipac was already on the defensive after endorsing the 2022 campaigns of dozens of Republican members of Congress who tried to block President Biden’s presidential victory.

Aipac defended the move by claiming that backing for the Jewish state overrides other issues and that it was “no moment for the pro-Israel movement to become selective about its friends”.

“When we launched our political action committee last year, we decided that we would base decisions about political contributions on only one thing: whether a political candidate supports the US-Israel relationship,” it said.