Despite an expensive campaign to distort his vocal criticism of Israeli crimes in Palestine as “antisemitic,” progressive Michigan Democrat Abdul El-Sayed won his US Senate race with the support of a majority of the state’s early Jewish voters, while a survey published Thursday revealed that 8 in 10 Jewish Americans believe Israel’s actions and lobbying increase antisemitism.
An analysis of Michigan voting data published by the Jewish newspaper The Forward found that El-Sayed, who will be the first Muslim senator in US history, received approximately 60% of the vote among Jewish early voters.
The survey’s results imply a rebuke of the efforts by groups like the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), which spent nearly $30 million on opposing El-Sayed and supporting his primary opponent, Rep. Haley Stevens (D-Mich.).
“The media spent October obsessing over Abdul El-Sayed’s ‘problem’ with Jewish voters,” writer and labor organizer Joe Wrote said on social media, noting that corporate outlets including The Washington Post, New York Times, Associated Press, and NPR “ran constant articles.”
“In the end, El-Sayed got 60% of the Michigan Jewish vote, 1.3% less than Elissa Slotkin did in 2024,” he added, referring to Michigan’s Democratic junior US senator, who is Jewish. “The mainstream media is a joke.”
While AIPAC’s enormous spending helped make the contest one of the most expensive Senate primaries in US history, El-Sayed’s focus on issues affecting working families—the affordability crisis, fixing the nation’s broken healthcare system via Medicare for All—in addition to broader topics like getting money out of politics and ending US militarism and aid to Israel, led to his Tuesday victory.
AIPAC—whose super political action committee, United Democracy Project (UDP), only started financially supporting congressional candidates in 2021—has flexed its electoral muscles in recent years. In 2024, it helped defeat progressive Reps. Jamaal Bowman (D-NY) and Cori Bush (D-Mo.). However, Rep. Summer Lee (D-Pa.) survived a UDP spending blitz during the previous midterms in 2022, and El-Sayed’s victories in both the Michigan primary and general election demonstrate the limits of its largesse.
El-Sayed’s victory coincided with the release of a new GBAO survey commissioned by the liberal Jewish lobby group J Street showing that overwhelming majorities of Jewish Americans believe the actions of Israel and AIPAC contribute to antisemitism in the United States.
According to the survey, 80% of respondents believe that Israel’s actions in Gaza and the West Bank increase hatred of Jews, while 66% said that AIPAC funding advertisements against candidates who criticize Israel worsens antisemitism, and 60% agree that “Jewish organizations that condemn harsh criticism of Israel as antisemitic are exploiting concerns about antisemitism to defend unpopular Israeli government policies.”
Tellingly, more respondents believe that Israel is committing genocide in Gaza (31%) than that Israel deserves unconditional support (30%).
A United Nations Commission of Inquiry, as well as many experts, including Israeli and other Jewish scholars, say that Israel is committing genocide in Gaza. A genocide case against Israel filed by South Africa and formally backed by nearly 20 nations is proceeding through the International Court of Justice.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and former Defense Minister Yoav Gallant are wanted by the International Criminal Court for alleged crimes against humanity in Gaza, including murder and forced starvation, committed during a war that has left more than 250,000 Palestinians dead or wounded and nearly 2 million people forcibly displaced.
In the illegally occupied West Bank, Israel has been accelerating its decadeslong campaign of apartheid, settler colonization, land theft, and ethnic cleansing, expanding illegal settlements and outposts while systematically dispossessing Palestinians of their homes, farms, and ancestral lands.
The far-right Netanyahu government has openly embraced annexation, with ministers pushing to formally absorb Palestinian territory into Israel and explicitly declaring their intention to prevent the establishment of an independent Palestinian state.
Armed Israeli settler-colonists, frequently operating with the protection, participation, or complicity of Israeli occupation forces, have unleashed increasingly brazen pogroms against Palestinian communities, burning homes, mosques, and vehicles, destroying olive groves, stealing livestock, beating residents, and killing Palestinians.
Appearing Thursday on MS NOW’s “Morning Joe,” El-Sayed was asked by host Willie Geist what message he had for Jewish voters who had been concerned about his positions and how he would protect them against antisemitism.
“I was really privileged to grow up in a community where about 40% of my high school class was Jewish,” he said. “I grew up going to synagogue, going to Seder, going to bar and bat mitzvahs growing up. I have so much respect for the Jewish faith and Jewish contributions to American life.”
“I also know what it’s like to be discriminated against for how I pray,” the senator-elect continued. “And I want an America where nobody is discriminated against under our Constitution.”
“I know what it’s like to drop off my kids to a mosque and wonder if they’re going to be safe, and am I going to be able to pick them up safely afterwards,” El-Sayed continued. “I’m committed to the safety of Jewish children like I’m committed to the safety of my own children.”
“But I want to ask us this,” he said. “We spend billions of dollars subsidizing a foreign government unconditionally buying bombs and tanks that have been used to do genocide and apartheid and make war we have no business fighting.”
“And we’re told that if you want to stand up against the murder of innocent Palestinian children, that that’s somehow about hate for anybody. It’s not about hate for anybody,” El-Sayed stressed. “It’s about equal love for those Palestinian children, as you would have for a Jewish child growing up in the Holy Land.”
“So if I stand up and say, hey, maybe we shouldn’t be sending our money to do the worst things to other people, people are like, well, it must be because you hate the people who are doing the worst things,” he said. “I’m like, that’s insane.”
“We have to separate between Judaism and the Jewish people and Israel and its actions,” the senator-elect asserted. “And by the way, I apply the same approach to the government of Egypt where my family came from. And I would hate that somebody would assume that I would be OK with the human rights abuses of the government of Egypt simply because I share the ethnicity of the majority of people who are in Egypt.”
El-Sayed concluded by saying he wants to see a world in which “a Palestinian child and a Jewish Israeli child growing up in the Holy Land can look forward at their life and say, my life is not going to be curtailed by somebody’s violence.”
From Common Dreams via This RSS Feed.
It is mind boggling how the media portrays American Jewish and American Muslim relations. Often when given an opportunity, American Christians stipulate that, I, an American Jew have animosity against Muslims and it’s wholly fabricated. Similar to the senator-elects comments, there are many Muslims in the area where I grew up. I didn’t go to a mosque with them, but I attended holiday dinners, we were friends in and out of school, just like anyone else. We bonded over being ostracized for having a different faith, how our holidays were never respected by schools or workplaces or how people commented on how our dietary restrictions are “weird” or “hard to follow”.
The oligarchs and Israel benefit from painting us as rivals when we have more in common than different.
