By Jonathan Chait
Thursday, July 30, 2026
Abdul El-Sayed is running for Senate as a Democrat in
Michigan, where he is waging a close and bitter contest against Representative
Haley Stevens in a primary that will be held on Tuesday. Were he to win, and
then go on to defeat Mike Rogers, the presumed Republican candidate, El-Sayed
would become the most fervently anti-Zionist senator. “If you want your
politics dictated to you by AIPAC or Chuck Schumer, then I’m not your guy,” he
said during a debate with Stevens.
El-Sayed depicts Israel and its American supporters as
the primary authors of Donald Trump’s foreign policy. He also blames Israel and
AIPAC for a wide array of domestic social problems. “We should be using our tax
dollars here to invest in health care here and education here, rather than
sending it over there to buy bombs and tanks that get used to drive apartheid
and genocide there,” he said
to WDET, Detroit’s public-radio station. El-Sayed has barely acknowledged the
possibility that Stevens is a sentient being with individual agency, describing
her as “a suit with a large AIPAC bank account.”
Asked recently on CNN if he thought there were any
reasons other than money that someone might have a different view on Israel, he
said, “Not if you’re a Democrat and you believe in human rights.” Asked if a
progressive could also be a Zionist, he replied, “Every definition of a Jewish
state ends up in some articulation of illiberal values, every single one.”
The magnitude of the shift in Democratic politics that
El-Sayed’s election would create has not quite registered with the party’s
voters. In part this is because New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani, also a
fervent anti-Zionist, attracted so much attention and controversy in his
campaign last year that El-Sayed’s run feels like a tamer sequel. In reality,
however, not only was Mamdani running in a far different locale (an
overwhelmingly Democratic city rather than a purple state), but he also, with
rare exceptions, focused on affordability, not on Israel. It was his opponents
who sounded obsessed with Israel.
El-Sayed’s campaign is currently the left’s preeminent
cause, held up as key proof that an obsessively anti-Zionist left-wing politics
can win outside of blue enclaves. Michigan voted twice for Donald Trump. Should
El-Sayed prevail, he would immediately open the door for a new wave of
like-minded candidates to follow behind him. “You put one ogre on a pike,”
El-Sayed told donors in a Zoom call, according to Politico, apparently
referring to Senator John Fetterman of Pennsylvania, “and then everyone else
gets the message, and all of a sudden starts to sound a lot different.”
But if El-Sayed’s anti-Zionism is obsessive, it is not a
singular obsession. He talks about the Israel lobby the way he talks on the
stump about nearly any other political issue. The El-Sayed formula is to
describe just about any policy as a conspiracy by a corporate entity or wealthy
cabal to enrich itself at the expense of the people. The villains in his
stories are motivated by pure greed, and trade-offs do not exist.
This is a rhetorical style that has long existed on the
populist left. The trouble is that, when you apply it to the Israel-Palestine
conflict, and especially to the question of why some Americans do not share
El-Sayed’s position on it, his approach grows paranoid and menacing.
Populists believe, almost as an article of faith, that
Democrats can win working-class voters by moving left on economic policy.
El-Sayed has aligned himself with the Democratic Party’s Bernie
Sanders–and–Elizabeth Warren wing, endorsing Medicare for All, promising to end
Citizens United, supporting targeted tariffs, emphasizing the evils of corporate
monopolies, and generally making the answer to every political question a
blunt attack on billionaire greed. When applied to ordinary problems, this
rhetorical mode yields oversimplistic but crowd-pleasing answers. “Why don’t
our schools get the funding that they deserve? Well, because there’s not a
lobby for schools. Kids don’t have a corporate PAC,” El-Sayed says, in a
typical piece of campaign rhetoric. In truth, there is a powerful lobby
for school funding: teachers’ unions. The main barrier to more spending on
schools is not the absence of lobbying; it’s that people don’t like paying
taxes.
After Gretchen Whitmer, the state’s popular Democratic
governor, endorsed Stevens last week, El-Sayed explained the choice as the
inevitable product of the two women’s benefactors. “Those who have taken
corporate money for most of their careers tend to stick together,” he said.
When this populist analysis is extended to Israel, it
takes on an even more conspiratorial edge. El-Sayed’s efforts to weave a
seamless narrative connecting AIPAC to his struggle against wealthy interests
has built the Israel lobby into an almost-supernatural force controlling
American politics behind the scenes.
Graham Platner—who was running competitively in polls
against Susan Collins, the Republican senator from Maine, before scandals
overtook him—preceded El-Sayed as the movement’s cause célèbre. He similarly
depicted himself as the tribune of the people fighting a twilight struggle
against oligarchs. When reporters began to unearth evidence of questionable
behavior, his supporters quickly concluded that his twin struggles against
oligarchy and Zionism—perhaps it was a single struggle—had made him a target.
“The thing about this smear campaign is that it’s
obvious,” wrote
the American Economic Liberties Project researcher Matt Stoller on X. “Graham
Platner wants to eliminate the power of billionaires, and wants to end our
alliance with Israel. That’s all these slurs are about, not what he did or who
he is.” The podcaster Krystal Ball posited a
“clear double standard at play with Platner reporting because he is
anti-zionist and anti-oligarch.” Sam Haselby, a historian and an author, wrote on X,
“Let’s be serious. They don’t like Platner because he’s an economic populist.
They have no trouble with vastly worse sexual ethics as long as one is
pro-billionaire and pro Israel.”
The basis for these charges is a bit cracked. But it
follows logically from the populist analysis of the situation. If all
resistance that left-wing candidates face is the work of a shadowy moneyed
interest, and fighting Israel is the left’s most deeply felt cause, then it
stands to reason that Israel, or its lobbyists, are behind every setback the
movement encounters. Earlier this month, El-Sayed casually dismissed a poll
showing Stevens leading him by a point by telling MS NOW, “That poll seems to
be funded by AIPAC,” which is not
true.
Pro-Israel lobbying does play an important role in
domestic politics, and it does often include spurious
charges of anti-Semitism to discredit legitimate critiques of Israel. Aid
to Israel is not, however, a meaningful constraint on American domestic
spending, given that aid to Israel accounts for less than one tenth of 1
percent of the federal budget. The populists are not imagining that they are
fighting a well-funded lobby. What they are imagining is that this lobby is the
hidden force behind all of the opposition they face.
I received a small taste of this political style earlier
this spring, when I wrote an article
criticizing El-Sayed’s claim that he can adopt unpopular left-wing positions
without jeopardizing his ability to win a general election. The small left-wing
magazine Current
Affairs asked him to respond the next month, and he said, “I really
appreciate the question, because I really want us to step back and ask a couple
of very basic points about how politics actually work, not from the Atlantic
desk where you have a vested interest in sustaining a system that whitewashes
neoliberal ideas and continues to tell us the best use of our money is to
subsidize big corporations or a foreign government.”
The “foreign government” he refers to is presumably
Israel. El-Sayed was not merely disputing the merits of my beliefs (which he
mischaracterized—I have argued
against aid to Israel, and I have no idea which big corporations he thinks
I wish to subsidize). He accused me of representing a “vested interest” in
these policies. His campaign declined to respond to multiple emails requesting
clarification as to the nature of this alleged vested interest.
The combination of populism and anti-Zionism has
introduced a strain of political rhetoric that heretofore has had little place
within the Democratic Party. Anybody who has observed the Republican Party in
the Trump era, however, would recognize the combination of populist demagoguery
and edgelord bullying. Informing your supporters that their problems are the
result of a shadowy cabal of billionaire conspirators tends to unleash passions
that can be difficult to control. El-Sayed and Trump share a gleeful lack of
concern for the consequences.
Although the comparison may sound like an insult, it’s
one El-Sayed has invited himself. Earlier this year, he held a campaign event
with Hasan Piker, a popular streamer and enthusiast
for left-wing authoritarian regimes. When reporters questioned his choice of
allies, El-Sayed
replied, “If perfectly inoffensive won elections, then Donald Trump would
never have been President.” Democrats now have to decide whether they think
they can win elections this way, and whether they want to.
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