Pro-Palestine organizers from a variety of different US-based organizations have launched a new campaign to target the influence of the largest pro-Israel lobbying group in the United States, the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC). The campaign has begun with a petition, urging signers to “reject Israel and AIPAC’s influence on US politics, media, and spending.”

In the past two years of Israel’s war on Gaza, a mass movement has grown in solidarity with Palestine, throughout the world, and in the United States, Israel’s most powerful ally. The US’s unwavering support for Israel has come under heavy scrutiny as public opinion has shifted vastly against Israel’s actions.

AIPAC has come under particularly high scrutiny, highlighting its outsized influence on US democracy. Since October 2023, Democratic voters have shown the strongest opposition to Israel’s actions of any group and Gallup now reports their lowest levels of support yet, with just 8% backing the military campaign.

In response, AIPAC has fought aggressively to preserve its influence within the Democratic Party. The group boasts that “all 129 AIPAC-backed Democrats who have had their primary races in 2024 have won.” AIPAC poured millions into campaigns against Representatives Jamaal Bowman in New York and Cori Bush in Missouri, two of Congress’s most outspoken pro-Palestine voices who both lost in 2024 to their AIPAC-backed opponents.

“This is an opportunity to show that Palestine and the struggle for liberation is not a far away cause,” said Nidaa Lafi, an organizer with the Palestinian Youth Movement based in Dallas. “It’s in our own backyards. It’s something that impacts us as Americans.”

Read the full interview here:

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Peoples Dispatch: The AIPAC out of Politics website claims that AIPAC takes part in “silencing dissent from politicians and voters alike”. Could you give some examples of this?

Nidaa Lafi: I think the obvious one here is AIPAC’s role in funding and interfering in elections. Last year, former representative Cori Bush lost her seat after AIPAC spent millions of dollars against her in the race – so that they could secure a politician that is in line with their pro-Israel agenda and that will continue to vote for funding weapons and aid to Israel.

But even more than that, AIPAC plays a role in shaping the media narrative around around Palestine and around the genocide. I’ll give you an example. AIPAC was one of the first organizations to put out a statement shedding doubt on UNRWA’s role in Gaza.

This is important because this is where the narrative starts to build. It gets picked up by mainstream media. And then we start to see the repercussions of that in Congress. In the past year and a half, we saw multiple politicians come up with resolutions as well as bills that specifically target UNRWA.

And what that has created is consent for what now has become known as the Gaza Humanitarian Fund, which is responsible for the killing of people in aid lines. There’s a very material way in which these narratives manifest in real life, and have consequences for the people of Palestine and even people in the US.

Through watching a live-streamed genocide, there’s a level of awareness globally of what Israel is doing, what it carries out in Gaza. It’s very difficult to continue to manufacture consent for crimes that people are seeing with their own eyes and to create excuses behind why these crimes are nuanced or justified.

Just earlier this year, Israel’s foreign ministry increased the budget for what they call hasbara, which is the public diplomacy of Israel.

We’ve seen that reflected by pro-Israel interest groups. I want to just make it clear that AIPAC is not just AIPAC. AIPAC is an influential group of donors. It’s a network of people that is also connected with other organizations and other groups that have an influence on these things. ADL is very closely tied to AIPAC.

There’s been a concerted effort to attack this level of consciousness that we now see around Palestine. We know that the ADL has been pushing the narrative that student activism for Palestine is anti-semitic, pushing for regulations and laws that impede on their First Amendment right to freedom of speech. AIPAC is involved in that as well.

AIPAC also has a nonprofit directly associated with it, called the American Israeli Education Fund. This is the organization that funds propaganda trips for politicians, for university presidents, for so many other figures in this country. They take them to Israel, essentially give them like a propaganda vacation and bring them back to the US, where they then push pro-Israel policies. On one of the recent trips they took 36 congressional representatives to Israel. This took place in August.

PD: What is the campaign’s plan to actually get AIPAC out of politics?

NL: We want this to be a mass campaign, a campaign and an effort that is taken up by different groups, different people, in different locales, to confront AIPAC in the way that it manifests for them locally. This is where we see just how far reaching AIPAC is.

There’s an element of popularization: pushing out information about AIPAC, exposing its influence not only on foreign policy, but the way that AIPAC’s influence actually impacts Americans domestically as well.

I want to draw a comparison with the arms embargo demand that has become very far reaching in the movement in the past two years. We can see that it’s been taken up in many different ways across the board. And that’s what made it such an impactful demand. There’s the Mask off Maersk campaign that has ignited a movement in Italy, in Spain, in Morocco. We have an arms embargo campaign currently in Oakland that’s targeting the airport’s role in transferring components of the F-35 jets.

It could be that in your city or in your district, AIPAC is funding a candidate that is pushing against progressive values, and is looking to defund public education, or take away people’s rights, but also wants to maintain a strong line on Israel. Or it could be that AIPAC is hosting a conference in your city or AIPAC has strong connections with local media. So it’s about identifying where their influence reaches and then taking up efforts that make sense.

PD: How could such a mass campaign fit into the larger movement for Palestine?

NL: We have polls and data that show us that more people support Palestine than ever before. Particularly with young people, the tide is not just shifting, it’s already shifted.

But what’s critical to sustain this energy and put it into something productive is to also give people a target, to give them something to organize around. We’re putting names and faces to the unconditional support for Israel.

PD: How does the AIPAC Out of Politics campaign plan to build with other movements to get money out of politics?

NL: The American people are becoming more and more skeptical of the politicians that are accepting money from Super PAC funding. We’re seeing more platforms and candidates come into the scene and say, I’m not going to take AIPAC funding as part of their platform.

That’s what they’re running on. That’s what they’re selling to the people. That’s very important because the American people can see the connection. They can see the connection between who their politicians are accepting money from and how that translates to where they vote, where their priorities are, and what policies they push across the board.

It goes beyond just foreign policy. What we’re seeing right now is a prioritization of Israel’s needs for military aid for weapons, for support that comes at the expense of the American people. For example, Cori Bush was pushed out and instead, somebody more along the lines of an establishment Democrat was voted in. Cori Bush was one of the most vocal voices pushing for health care reform in the country, pushing for housing reform and pushing for the working class people of this country to have what they need and what they deserve to live a life of dignity. It’s becoming clear: the politicians that are accepting this, whether it’s money from AIPAC or another PAC money, are the ones that are not prioritizing the needs of the American people.

This is an opportunity to show that Palestine and the struggle for liberation is not a far away cause. It’s in our own backyards. It’s something that impacts us as Americans.

The post Fighting AIPAC’s influence shows that Palestine “is not a far away cause”, says organizer appeared first on Peoples Dispatch.

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