As recorded on YouTube (see below), Rep. Andy Levin seems enormously appealing and upright. I basically share his views on Israel and the Palestinians, which favor a negotiated two-state solution, a different perspective than Peter Beinart who interviewed him days prior to his primary loss. AIPAC channeled money to help defeat him, while not spending a cent to defeat Rep. Ilhan Omar in her primary in Minnesota. Levin went down to defeat, while Omar won by one or two percentage points over her Democratic primary opponent.
To be fair to Omar, she is also on record as supporting a two-state solution, but her support for BDS and her repeated meanderings into antisemitic territory over Jewish/Zionist lobbying on behalf of Israel (e.g., “It’s all about the Benjamins”) would have lost her my vote. So in that case, and possibly that case alone, I would have celebrated an AIPAC-aided triumph for the more conventionally pro-Israel candidate who opposed her.
But wait, AIPAC has done something even worse this election year: it has endorsed 109 Republicans who voted to overturn the lawful results of the 2020 Presidential election!
As an aside, returning to Beinart’s interview with Levin, even as I respect the now lame-duck Member of Congress, I felt there was something missing in his analysis of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. He, as with most of our fellow pro-Israel doves, failed to mention that the Palestinian political leadership has repeatedly stopped short of a final agreement on two states — even if they had reasonable complaints about some terms on offer. Each time this has been missed (2000-01, 2008-9, and possibly in 2014), things have only gotten worse for their people — with settlements expanding and the occupation deepening.
Moreover, one of the two major Palestinian movements, Hamas (not to mention Palestinian Islamic Jihad), is violent and rejectionist. Many other Palestinian activists (maybe most nowadays) reject dialogue and cooperation with Israeli moderates and doves in the name of “anti-normalization.”
