While Aipac and their allies can eliminate nearly any adversary if they throw $20m at a primary election, this is not a sustainable strategy
The Democratic primary in the congressional race in New York’s 16th congressional district between the incumbent congressman Jamaal Bowman and the Westchester county executive, George Latimer, was a victory for Latimer, and one of the first successful primaries by the right wing of the Democratic party against the left. The contest was by far the most expensive congressional primary in history, and came to be viewed as a battle for the soul of the Democratic party, and specifically a fight around the Israel-Palestine issue, with Latimer and his advocates in the American Israel Public Affairs Committee spending over $20m to elect him, and to rebuke Bowman’s criticism of Israel and support for a ceasefire.
Bowman’s defeat represents a victory for Aipac and a defeat for the progressive and pro-Palestine movements. But it is a pyrrhic victory. The first election overtly fought on the Israel-Palestine conflict has resulted in a victory for pro-Israel forces, and the movement for Palestinian rights has been dealt a severe blow at the ballot box. Elected officials will be far less willing to take a stand in the near term. But the result of this election masks a considerable shift in the balance of power within American politics away from unconditional support for Israel as an unquestioned political consensus.
Sometimes, a major electoral victory is a sign of a movement in retreat and a crumbling consensus. Take California’s gay marriage ban in 2008, at the time seen as a major defeat for gay rights advocates. But the victory of Prop 8 hid the underlying shift: the very fact that gay rights, unthinkable even a few years prior, was a polarized electoral issue showed that anti-gay rights forces were losing in the long term. The same is true here and now, about Israel and Palestine.
The fundamentals of this race were poor for the left. New York’s suburban 16th congressional district would never be a progressive target in a vacuum, containing some of the nation’s wealthiest communities.
