‘It’s become a litmus test’: wins for Israel critics shine light on key issue for Democrats

R egardless of which party wins control of Congress in November, New York City voters have all but ensured that next year a vocal bloc of new House Democrats will arrive on Capitol Hill, elected, in large part, because they believe Israel has committed a genocide in Gaza. That is an upshot of the primary elections held Tuesday in New York, where voters ousted two incumbent House Democrats and replaced a third who is retiring with progressives championed by Zohran Mamdani. The democratic socialist, who is the city’s first Muslim mayor, campaigned on opposing US support for Israel and rejecting the influence of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (Aipac), which has for decades donated heavily to candidates that ally with the country’s government. The trio of insurgent victories in New York has sent shockwaves through the Democratic establishment, underscoring how internal divisions over Israel – an issue that dogged Joe Biden – continue to shape races across the country ahead of November’s midterm elections, when the party hopes to win back power from Donald Trump’s Republican allies. “I think that it is a testament to just how much our movement has progressed against lobbies like Aipac, who have tried to spend hundreds of millions of dollars to keep us in a position where we spend hundreds of billions of dollars of our taxpayer money to fund a genocide and weapons and bombs abroad,” said Usamah Andrabi, a spokesman for Justice Democrats. …