Israel took a beating in the US midterms |
“You took a chance on the unlikeliest of candidates,” Abdul El-Sayed told a Detroit crowd on Wednesday, declaring victory in Michigan’s hard-fought, often ugly, Senate race. In what was predicted to be a squeaker, the Democrat beat his Republican opponent, Mike Rogers, by a healthy seven points.
In some ways, El-Sayed was an unlikely candidate. At 34, in his first run for elected office, he set his sights almost cockily on a US Senate seat. He ran on what has become an uncontroversial affordability platform but also championed the socialist-adjacent Medicare for All.
But what was generally believed to qualify him as an unlikely candidate – and an even unlikelier winner – was his uncompromising criticism of Israel’s policies toward Palestine and Palestinians.
The assumption that El-Sayed’s Israel politics would doom his chances shaped the campaigns of his pro-Zionist Democratic primary rival, Haley Stevens, and the pro-Israel Rogers. It was certainly the wager that the rightwing American Israel Public Affairs Committee, or Aipac, placed when it wasted nearly $30m – its biggest investment ever in a single race – trying to defeat El-Sayed.
We don’t know yet, but his strong criticism of Israel may have put El-Sayed, and other Democrats, over the top. And like the Republicans, Israel and its prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, took a beating in the US midterms.
Six candidates endorsed by the Democratic Socialists of America, a prominent antagonist to rightwing Zionism, won Congressional races in part by foregrounding their primary opponents’ links to Aipac and their own refusal to take its funds. They all were running in bright-blue districts where the winner of the Democratic........