Israel, AIPAC and Difficult Questions for Democrats

Rachel Abrams brings on Jonathan Mahler, who has covered the U.S.-Israel relationship for decades, to explain why support for Israel has become a defining litmus test in this year's Democratic primaries. The headline facts: roughly 100 House Democrats — nearly half the caucus — recently voted to end U.S. military aid to Israel, and AIPAC has responded with record spending, mostly against fellow Democrats. Mahler calls it the biggest paradigm shift he has seen: publicly distancing yourself from Israel used to be political suicide, and on the Democratic side it no longer is.

Mahler walks through the inflection points that got AIPAC here. Founded shortly after Israel's creation as a genuinely bipartisan lobby, it faced its first real rupture in 2015, when it sided with Netanyahu against Obama's Iran nuclear deal — the first time U.S. and Israeli interests visibly split. The 2018 arrival of the squad pushed AIPAC into the super PAC era: its United Democracy Project, created for the 2022 midterms, spent $26 million that cycle, ran dark-money ads that never mentioned Israel, and endorsed more than 100 candidates who had backed efforts to overturn the 2020 election. After October 7th and the war in Gaza turned public opinion, AIPAC spent $120 million in 2024 and successfully ousted squad members Cori Bush and Jamal Bowman. Abrams and Mahler also directly address the antisemitic tropes that swirl around criticism of AIPAC, noting the group spends comparably to the crypto and AI lobbies but draws the majority of the heat.

The 2026 twist is that AIPAC's new litmus test — oppose unconditional military aid and you're not pro-Israel enough — has it targeting moderates, and it keeps backfiring. In New Jersey, over $2 million helped defeat Tom Malinowski, a Democrat with a perfect pro-Israel voting record, only for a candidate further left on Israel to win the nomination. In Illinois, Daniel Biss, a grandson of Holocaust survivors, campaigned as the anti-AIPAC candidate after polling showed the group underwater with his voters — and won. The next test is Michigan's Senate primary, where AIPAC is spending close to $30 million backing Haley Stevens against Abdul El-Sayed, who could become the first sitting Democratic senator to call for ending U.S. aid to Israel.