The Congressional Black Caucus’s Silent Partnership With AIPAC
The influential group of lawmakers has damaged its reputation as “conscience of the Congress” by staying silent on the Gaza genocide.
..... AIPAC—together with its two political action committees, AIPAC PAC and United Democracy Project—has one purpose: defending Israel at all costs. “We support candidates…based on one criteria [sic]—their commitment to strengthening the US-Israel relationship,” AIPAC spokesperson Marshall Wittmann told Politico in 2024.
This single-issue litmus test means that the CBC is now beholden to a group that is far more concerned with the state of Israel than it is with the caucus’s core mission. And the CBC’s resulting silence not only damages its credibility but also jeopardizes its ability to advocate for the interests of Black Americans, many of whom recognize an ethnonationalist campaign to eliminate a people. One glaring example of this clash of interests is AIPAC’s targeting of Black lawmakers such as Cori Bush of Missouri, who lost her seat in 2024, for speaking out against Israel’s crimes against humanity.
This posture predates the start of the war on Gaza in 2023. During the 2022 midterms, AIPAC endorsed candidates with white-supremacist views and Republicans who refused to affirm that Joe Biden had won the 2020 election. The group also targeted Black Democratic lawmakers like Pennsylvania Representative Summer Lee, who spoke out against Israel’s occupation of the West Bank and Gaza. (Lee survived that AIPAC offensive, but now, like other congressional critics of Israel, she has to be prepared for AIPAC-funded primary challenges each time she runs for reelection.)
This has been AIPAC’s standard mode of intimidation in a political system ruled? by money and the need to continually raise funds—a total of nearly $4 billion in the 2024 congressional cycle alone. Over that same period, more than 80 percent of lawmakers in Congress received money from AIPAC. What has rendered the Democratic Party such an impotent voice in combating the Gaza genocide, in other words, is a matter of fundraising math. A single-issue lobby reliant on strong financial backing from GOP donors has successfully managed to keep Democratic critics of Israel out of Congress.
Recruited and abandoned: Jamaal Bowman says AIPAC tried to influence his first congressional campaign, only to later help unseat him. As one example, look at what happened to Jamaal Bowman. In May 2023, while serving as a Democratic....
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