Just say no to AIPAC

When a group becomes a "Group"

Nine months ago, we launched the Searchlight Institute to break the culture of rigidity that has suffocated the left-of-center ideas world for too long. Doing so requires saying “no” to interest groups that enforce ideological conformity and push Democrats to adopt policy positions that are wrong on the merits and politically disastrous. Most of these groups exist on the left—but not always.

One group in particular has come to deploy the same counterproductive tactics used by left-wing groups: the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, otherwise known as AIPAC. By pushing elected officials to take ever more uncompromising positions, it has vacated the moderate middle, leaving a void filled by extremist candidates, including those who outright deny Israel’s right to exist. I noted this evolution when we launched, but given the outsized role AIPAC has played in a number of high-profile primaries recently—and the way its influence is consistently wrongfooting candidates—it is worth fleshing out the argument.

An important distinction to make up front is that not all groups are “Groups” in the pejorative sense. Having lived and worked in the DC area for most of my life, I know and am friends with lots of people who work for many nonprofit groups; I have worked for and started some of them myself, including Searchlight. The criteria for whether a group is a “Group” is pretty simple: does it demand that elected officials take positions that are wrong on the merits or politically disastrous, or both? Does it use misleading polling and policy analysis to make its case? Does it deploy resources such as donations, endorsements, volunteers, and TV ads as pressure tactics against candidates who refuse to kowtow to its rigid litmus tests? If so, then yes, it is a “Group.”

Over the past decade or so, AIPAC has evolved from a group to a “Group,” a trajectory that tracked the rise of Prime Minister Bibi Netanyahu. In my lifetime, under leaders ranging from Labor’s Yitzhak Rabin in the 1990s to Likud’s Ariel Sharon in the 2000s, Israel succeeded in surviving as a liberal democracy under hostile and often punishing conditions, seeking a formal peace process and a two-state solution despite a steady stream of terror attacks and two Intifadas. The hawkish Sharon even pushed through a forced evacuation of Israeli settlers and military forces from the Gaza Strip in August 2005, breaking with Likud to form the centrist party Kadima.

Netanyahu changed all that. As prime minister, he has pushed Israel to abandon the goal of a two-state solution and imposed his militaristic, doomsday worldview on the nation, approaching every conflict as existential and steering the nation towards repeated and sustained use of overwhelming military force and community violence against Palestinians.

I first experienced AIPAC’s influence in 2015, when President Barack Obama successfully negotiated the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), a diplomatic agreement restricting Iran’s nuclear abilities. Netanyahu vehemently opposed the deal and applied major political pressure on Congressional Democrats to vote against it. In a shocking breach of protocol, Republican Speaker John Boehner circumvented the Obama administration and invited Netanyahu to give a joint address to Congress, which Bibi used to blast the deal. Backing Bibi, AIPAC launched a massive lobbying campaign, spending nearly $30 million in an attempt to kill the JCPOA.

At the time, I was working for Senator Harry Reid, who resisted AIPAC’s lobbying and supported the JCPOA. With Democrats in the minority in both houses of Congress, Reid dedicated himself to the tricky task of protecting the JCPOA against the efforts by AIPAC and Republicans to overturn it. AIPAC’s ferocious lobbying succeeded in getting Chuck Schumer, then the third-ranking Democratic leader and presumed successor to Reid, to oppose the deal, “shaking [the] Democratic firewall,” as the New York Times reported at the time. Yet Reid prevailed, and the deal stood.

Whatever you think of the JCPOA or American support for Israel on the merits, AIPAC could, back then, credibly contend that it was pushing Democrats to take politically popular positions. Support for Israel among the American public had been strong and durable for many years. While I personally believe the JCPOA was a good deal and a historic achievement—a view underscored by watching Trump struggle to secure what is virtually guaranteed to be a significantly worse deal—the fact remains that it was politically unpopular. A Pew poll taken at the time found just 21% of Americans approving of the deal, compared to 49% who opposed it.

Since then, however, Netanyahu’s stances have grown more extreme, as have the actions of the Israeli government under his leadership. This development has shifted public opinion on Israel in the U.S.—including among American Jews, among whom Netanyahu now has a -16 approval rating—and played a role in increasing antisemitism worldwide. Whereas AIPAC once had public opinion on its side, the reverse is true today. In 2022, Americans had a favorable opinion of Israel by a thirteen-point margin, yet today they have an unfavorable view by a twenty-three point margin. By a fifteen-point margin, voters think Israel is committing genocide. Sixty-one percent of American Jews, who overwhelmingly (76%) believe that Israel’s existence is vital for the future of the Jewish people, say that Israel is guilty of war crimes in Gaza. Only 31% of American Jews support AIPAC’s demand that the U.S. provide unconditional military and financial assistance to Israel, while 44% believe the aid should be conditional, and 26% believe the U.S. should simply stop providing the assistance.

This decline in support has serious consequences for Jewish safety. As J Street CEO Jeremy Ben-Ami and UCLA political scientist Dov Waxman argued in a report for the Nexus Project, “giving Netanyahu and his far-right allies carte blanche to do what they like in the Gaza Strip and the West Bank does not protect Jews, it makes them less safe.” When Israel engages in military operations that cause major casualties among innocent Palestinians, antisemitic incidents and hate crimes spike, as Jews are unfairly blamed for the extreme actions of Netanyahu’s government—which AIPAC insists American politicians continue to support.

As Netanyahu’s actions have become increasingly indefensible and politically toxic, Democrats must face the reality that AIPAC is mirroring the worst behavior for which I have criticized left-wing “Groups”.

Every element of the case against them now applies to AIPAC. Acting as a pressure group focused on its own narrow interests, AIPAC forces Democrats to take positions that are out of step with the American people and morally wrong. It does so by bestowing or withholding valuable resources such as endorsements, cash, volunteers, and other campaign resources—many of which are in-kind contributions in all but the strictly legal sense. And it plies them with skewed polling and policy analysis to support its case. In the same way that left-wing “Groups” enforce extreme litmus tests, AIPAC demands that Democrats not just support the best interests of Israel, broadly defined, but unquestioningly support Netanyahu, spending millions against supporters of Israel who dare criticize him, even as he executes what some of the world’s leading experts have classified as a genocide.

I saw this firsthand when I served as chief of staff to Senator John Fetterman. Fetterman had always been a strong supporter of Israel and was not shy about saying so during his 2022 Senate campaign. At the same time, he also opposed forever wars and expressed a thoroughgoing commitment to human rights. Yet as AIPAC allies leaned on Fetterman, those compassionate, countervailing commitments fell by the wayside, replaced by an unquestioning obedience to the AIPAC line. Fetterman is an extreme example, but the trend is the same for other Democratic politicians.

As Democrats reconsider their relationship with AIPAC, they should factor in that the magnitude of the policies for which AIPAC has whipped support exceeds that of left-wing “Groups.” AIPAC lobbies for Democrats to turn a blind eye to war crimes and to continue supplying weapons to Israel without any restrictions—a unique privilege among American allies. It endorsed more than 100 members of Congress who voted to overturn the results of the 2020 election. And it has demanded that politicians fall in line as Netanyahu drew America into a disastrous war with Iran that left the Iranian regime strengthened, while dramatically undermining America’s geopolitical interests and driving up costs at home.

My criticism of the “Groups” is rooted in a larger concern that their actions undermine our ability to beat Trump and his fascist cohort; their pressure pushes Democrats to adopt the sort of extreme policy positions that make it harder to win in red and purple states where they used to be competitive. This prevents Democrats from building the broad-based supermajority coalition necessary to defeat the rise of fascism.

Once again, this criticism applies to AIPAC. In recent elections, AIPAC has spent a remarkable amount of money primarying Democrats and instigating needless factional infighting. So far in 2026, AIPAC’s United Democracy Project has spent over $38 million through direct spending, shell PACs, and donations to aligned organizations.

Since their money is contingent on candidates agreeing to extreme positions that are unpopular with Democratic primary voters (as well as general election voters), these interventions sometimes backfire, which sends more extreme people to Congress. In New Jersey’s 11th Congressional District, AIPAC spent $2 million attacking Tom Malinowski, a pro-Israel moderate, because he refused to support unconditional aid to Israel. This paved the way for Analilia Mejia, a left-wing candidate, to defeat Malinowski in the primary by a margin of 889 votes. In Illinois’ 9th Congressional District, AIPAC spent millions against former Evanston mayor Daniel Biss, a supporter of Israel and the grandson of Holocaust survivors, because he refused to back unrestricted military aid to the Netanyahu government. In 2024, AIPAC spent over $4.6 million against California Congressman Dave Min, another moderate supporter of Israel, whose offense appeared to be privately criticizing Netanyahu for Israel’s expansion of West Bank settlements. Min prevailed, but AIPAC made his effort to hold a swing district more difficult.

Now, AIPAC’s involvement is wrongfooting otherwise strong Democratic candidates, both progressives and moderates. As opposition to AIPAC becomes a major motivator for many of the party’s most engaged voters, candidates with extreme views have surged in recent primary elections, and several of them are now on their way to Congress.

The risk for Democrats is enormous. In the 1960s and 70s, infighting over Vietnam toppled Lyndon Johnson and opened the door to Nixon, Reagan, and thirty years of wandering in the political wilderness, as Republicans dominated the White House for all but four years between 1968 and 1992. Today, the positions AIPAC is pushing Democrats to take threaten to consign the party to a similar spiral of internal conflict, when we should be uniting under a big tent to fight right-wing authoritarianism.

For those of us who love and admire the state of Israel and are heartbroken at what Netanyahu has done to it, rejecting AIPAC is a step towards rebuilding the support he has squandered. Just as left-wing groups push Democrats to reject mainstream positions on issues such as climate change or immigration, AIPAC’s absolutism leaves no room for moderation. To Democrats of all factions, including those who fret about the rise of the party’s insurgent left wing, I would give the same advice as I do on other topics: just say no to interest groups who push you to take extreme positions that are morally indefensible and repel American voters.

Just say no to AIPAC.