What Ilhan Omar Said About AIPAC Was Right

I’m ashamed to admit that endorsing AIPAC positions was all about the Benjamins for me and my candidate.

By Ady Barkan

Over the week­end, Republican House minor­i­ty leader Kevin McCarthy said he would seek to for­mal­ly sanc­tion the first two Muslim con­gress­women, Ilhan Omar and Rashida Tlaib, because their crit­i­cism of Israel’s occu­pa­tion of Palestine was even more rep­re­hen­si­ble than Congressman Steve King’s defense of white suprema­cy. What moti­vat­ed McCarthy’s false accu­sa­tions of anti-Semitism? On Twitter, Omar sug­gest­ed, “It’s all about the Benjamins baby,” quot­ing Puff Daddy’s ’90s paean to cash mon­ey. Omar sub­se­quent­ly spec­i­fied that she was talk­ing about spend­ing from the likes of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, bet­ter known as AIPAC, the pow­er­ful pro-Israel lob­by­ing organization.

By Monday morn­ing, AIPAC had mobi­lized its allies to con­demn Omar’s com­ment for play­ing into cen­turies-old anti-Semitic tropes that wealthy Jews con­trol the world. Even the Democratic lead­er­ship put out a state­ment con­demn­ing her. All because she dared to point out that the emper­or has no clothes.

As a Jew, an Israeli cit­i­zen, and a pro­fes­sion­al lob­by­ist (ahem, activist), I speak from per­son­al expe­ri­ence when I say that AIPAC is tremen­dous­ly effec­tive, and the lubri­cant that makes its oper­a­tion hum is dol­lar, dol­lar bills.
In 2006, fresh out of col­lege, I land­ed a job as the first real staffer on a long-shot Democratic con­gres­sion­al race in deep-red Ohio. My boss, Victoria Wulsin, was a charm­ing hip­pie doc­tor with a lefty per­spec­tive on inter­na­tion­al affairs. She was skep­ti­cal of mil­i­tary force and opposed to the Israeli occu­pa­tion of Palestine. 

About a month after win­ning the Democratic pri­ma­ry, we were strug­gling to gain atten­tion or mon­ey. Nobody gave us a chance to win. One polit­i­cal-action orga­ni­za­tion, how­ev­er, did reach out to us. It wasn’t Emily’s List, although Vic was fierce­ly pro-choice. It wasn’t a labor union or even a doc­tors’ asso­ci­a­tion. It was AIPAC. A local Democratic vol­un­teer leader of the Cincinnati AIPAC chap­ter sat down in Vic’s liv­ing room and I recall him say­ing that he would like to raise $5,000 for our cam­paign and would also like to see Vic take a pub­lic stance on two rel­a­tive­ly obscure issues relat­ing to Iranian sanc­tions, arms sales to Israel, or some oth­er such top­ic that very few vot­ers in the dis­trict cared about.

Vic and I both thought of our­selves as pro-peace, not pro-Israel. We both felt icky about doing it; it was too hawk­ish and too quid pro quo. But we were des­per­ate. So I read the AIPAC posi­tion papers that the vol­un­teer left with us, I wrote up a state­ment say­ing that Vic sup­port­ed AIPAC’s stance on its two pet issues of the cycle, she approved it, I post­ed it online, and the checks prompt­ly arrived in the mail there­after. We didn’t win, but the mon­ey helped us get close.

It was, I am ashamed to say, def­i­nite­ly about the Benjamins. We nev­er would have done it oth­er­wise. AIPAC’s pow­er is about more than mon­ey, cer­tain­ly. It’s about great orga­niz­ing (they built a local chap­ter, and sent a local Democratic vol­un­teer emis­sary who then facil­i­tat­ed the con­tri­bu­tions). It’s about dili­gence (they paid atten­tion to Vic’s cam­paign long before any­one else, and were hap­py to donate to both us and the mil­i­taris­tic, pro-Likud Republican incum­bent). Their lob­by­ists on the Hill are the best in the busi­ness, and their leg­is­la­tor jun­kets to the Holy Land are mas­ter­ful­ly orches­trat­ed. But mon­ey is cen­tral to the whole system.

Technically, AIPAC doesn’t make the polit­i­cal con­tri­bu­tions. Instead, as it notes proud­ly on its web­site, indi­vid­ual mem­bers of its “Congressional Club,” like that Cincinnati res­i­dent, do the bundling and donat­ing direct­ly, both as indi­vid­u­als and through Political Action Committees that AIPAC and its mem­bers have set up. Omar is right to point all this out. These dynam­ics are not unique to the Israel-Palestine issue, how­ev­er, and there is no rea­son that Americans should be sur­prised or offend­ed by what she and I are say­ing. The NRA and the broad­er gun lob­by oper­ate in the same way. Same with ExxonMobil and the fos­sil-fuel lob­by. But since Omar and Tlaib are pow­er­ful new spokes­women for the move­ment to end the Israeli occu­pa­tion, dele­git­imiz­ing them is a cen­tral aim of the Israel lobby.

AIPAC and its part­ners, which include Christian Zionists and mil­i­tary con­trac­tors, are a cen­tral pil­lar of the Israeli occu­pa­tion. Without con­gres­sion­al sup­port, the Likud/anti-Palestine/pro-occu­pa­tion project would be rad­i­cal­ly under­mined. The mon­ey that AIPAC and the rest of the lob­by spend is indis­pens­able to that work. That’s why they spend it. Pointing this out is not anti-Semitic.

We do, in fact, have a grow­ing anti-Semitism prob­lem in America. But Omar and Tlaib are not a part of it. They are allies of mine and of Jews across this coun­try who are fight­ing for peace, racial jus­tice, immi­grants’ rights, and the defeat of fas­cism. The anti-Semites are the Nazis and white suprema­cists who marched and mur­dered in Charlottesville, whom Donald Trump called “very fine peo­ple,” and the MAGA sup­port­er who mas­sa­cred wor­ship­pers at a Pittsburgh syn­a­gogue.
The Israel lob­by flexed its mus­cles in response to Omar’s tweet. Almost all of Capitol Hill, sad­ly includ­ing the Democratic lead­er­ship that I have sup­port­ed, was up in arms. It flexed with equal poten­cy last month in mar­shal­ing through the Senate a clear­ly uncon­sti­tu­tion­al law to ban speech pro­mot­ing a boy­cott of Israel.

For 12 years, I have har­bored minor pri­vate shame for advis­ing Vic to endorse AIPAC’s posi­tion papers and more sig­nif­i­cant shame for not doing enough to stop the oppres­sion of the Palestinian peo­ple. I am speak­ing up now because it may be my last chance. Although I am only 35, I am dying. As I write these words, I am sit­ting with my wife in the wait­ing room of the Santa Barbara hos­pi­tal emer­gency room, slow­ly bleed­ing from my stom­ach into a pile of gauze. I had a feed­ing tube insert­ed four days ago but it isn’t heal­ing prop­er­ly. I am los­ing the abil­i­ty to swal­low, because I have ALS, a poor­ly under­stood neu­ro­log­i­cal dis­ease with no treat­ment, which seized my body 28 months ago and has basi­cal­ly par­a­lyzed me since. My hands do not work and almost nobody can under­stand my mum­bling, so I am using amaz­ing tech­nol­o­gy that tracks the loca­tion of my eyes and allows me to slow­ly type out these words with my pupil-tips.

This is my chance to redeem my Jewish guilt, to speak out against the oppres­sion that is being per­pe­trat­ed in my name, and I do not intend to let a minor obsta­cle like ALS stop me. Young Jews across America increas­ing­ly agree with Omar and me, and that is mak­ing the Israel lob­by very ner­vous. As it should: The occu­pa­tion is too immoral, ille­gal, and inhu­mane to sur­vive an open and hon­est con­ver­sa­tion in the mar­ket­place of ideas. That is why AIPAC and its asso­ciates work to silence crit­i­cism of Israel by accus­ing its detrac­tors of anti-Semitism and claim­ing that nobody may ever talk about how the Israel lob­by uses mon­ey to build power.

The ugly truth is that the Israel lob­by, like oth­er pow­er­ful lob­bies led by Jew and gen­tile alike, wields its mon­ey strate­gi­cal­ly and effec­tive­ly. Outrage should be direct­ed not at those who point this out (most often Muslims and peo­ple of col­or) but at the suf­fer­ing of the Palestinian peo­ple and the simul­ta­ne­ous depen­dence of the Republican Party on gen­uine anti-Semites.I do not expect to live to see the lib­er­a­tion of the Palestinian peo­ple. But I main­tain hope that my tod­dler son will. If he does, it will be because young American Jews like him do the hon­est self-reflec­tion taught by our fore­bears, take pride in our tra­di­tion of jus­tice, and join in sol­i­dar­i­ty and strug­gle with fel­low Semites like Omar.
Ady BarkanTWITTERAdy Barkan is an orga­niz­er with the Center for Popular Democracy and the founder of the Be A Hero PAC. His mem­oir, Eyes to the Wind, will be pub­lished by Atria Books in the fall.