Washington- "Why am I fighting AIPAC? Because it's a cancer in our democracy, and a front for the Republican Party," were the words of Mark Buchan, a Democratic representative of Wisconsin's Second District of the U.S. House of Representatives, who tweeted on platform X to refer to an interview with the news site Slate.

"I don't care and I'm not afraid of AIPAC. I think they represent a cancerous presence in our democracy and politics in general, and if I can become a surgeon and eliminate them, that's great."

Following the Buchan attack, a small number of Democrats in Congress were emboldened and publicly accused the organization of spreading lies and distorted information since the start of Operation Al-Aqsa Flood on October 7, and the subsequent unprecedented Israeli aggression on the Gaza Strip.

AIPAC, a pro-Israel organization, has been accused of being a front for the US Republican Party (Reuters)

AIPAC Power

AIPAC (American Israel Public Affairs Committee) is the largest and most important Jewish lobby organization in the United States and the world.

Many see it as one of the most fearsome entities in U.S. politics. It is a multimillion-dollar power machine that influences it in various ways at the heart and details of everything related to US policy towards Israel and the broader Arab-Israeli conflict.

It has become common in the corridors and corridors of Washington to whisper about the danger of AIPAC, and its huge potential that enables it to eliminate many politicians that it sees as hostile to its "agenda" in support of Israel. It is strong enough to wield overwhelming influence within both parties, Republican and Democratic.

Government data suggests it is the largest financial donor to House Democratic leader Hakim Jeffries, Republican leader and House Speaker Mike Johnson. The organization donated more than $50 million to members of the House of Representatives in the last election cycle.

Over the past six decades, AIPAC has made many gains that have strengthened Israeli-American relations, and this organization has maintained permanent neutrality between the two parties of Congress, avoiding any suspicion of favoring one party over another. However, this neutrality has been severely tested in recent years.

Over the past decade, AIPAC has been closely associated with Israel's Likud and the Republican Party. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu predicts Republicans will dominate U.S. politics for the foreseeable future, while most American Jews remain Democrats.


targeting

This organization, in particular, strongly supports Netanyahu's government and does not hesitate to spend heavily to defeat any American politician it considers critical of his policies, so many members of Congress fear angering AIPAC and cannot afford to be seen as challenging the Israel lobby in any way.

In the 2022 election cycle, AIPAC was part of a record-breaking Super PAC spending campaign by throwing tens of millions of dollars in ad purchases against progressive candidates in the Democratic primary, in favor of more conservative and pro-Israel candidates.

AIPAC has been launching ruthless attacks on MPs Rashida Tlaib and Ilhan Omar. She once posted ads featuring Ilhan's face in Photoshop next to Hamas rockets, a crackdown that quickly resulted in the Somali-born lawmaker receiving death threats.

Even after a rare rebuke in which Nancy Pelosi and Steny Hoyer, then the two most prominent Democrats, condemned the ads, AIPAC refused to remove them. In fact, she put more money into it, and it ran for months.

As the 2024 election cycle escalates, AIPAC and its political finance committees are likely to once again put millions of dollars into beating progressive lawmakers, a move that largely threatens the Democrats' path to regaining a majority in the House of Representatives.


Confrontation

The Democratic Majority Political Action Committee for Israel began running ads against Palestinian-origin MP Rashida Tlaib, and AIPAC's United Democracy Project bought televised time to attack Representative Mark Bowman for voting against Israel.

Buchan's confrontation with AIPAC began after the House of Representatives voted on Oct. 25 to pass a resolution pledging unwavering support for Israel, reflecting Washington's traditional stance on aggression. However, the resolution did not mention the increasing number of civilian casualties in Gaza.

That decision paved the way for a subsequent vote on an additional $14 billion in military aid to Israel, without conditions. Eight Democrats and one Republican voted against.

After the vote on the resolution, the organization posted on the X platform a tweet accusing these MPs, along with Bukan, of "trying to keep Hamas in power." Pocan responded, "AIPAC is a liar, and you know how not to tell the truth."

"The United States sends billions of dollars a year to help Israel, how can we not help feed the millions of Palestinians living in an open prison in Gaza, who are not from Hamas? "We don't support the movement, we don't just support the killing of children, which AIPAC seems to support."

A few days later, AIPAC began a crackdown on Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who is hostile to the organization's progressive tendencies, calling her a "traitor."

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu at an AIPAC conference in Washington (Reuters)

Continue to criticize

She also attacked Republican Rep. Thomas Massey for voting against the Oct. 25 resolution, calling it "anti-Semitic," and the lawmaker responded by saying that "this baseless distortion is intended to scare me into voting to send $14 billion of our money to a foreign country."

AIPAC's website boasts that 98 percent of the candidates it supported have won their elections, and that its funding committees have already launched an offensive against Israel's critics in Congress.

It reserved times to broadcast political ads targeting a number of opponents of Israel, such as MPs Rashida Tlaib, Jamal Bowman and Samar Lee. The organization courted the rival candidates of these lawmakers in the Democratic primary, in an attempt to remove them from American political life by defeating them in the 2024 election.

The fear did not reach Rep. Pocan, who continued to criticize AIPAC, saying that "the reason I pressed her is because she has become dangerous, she pretends to be partisan neutral, but they have become a pressure group controlled by the Republican Party. It's time to reveal their truth instead of being afraid of them."