6/22/2024–|Last updated: 6/22/202402:45 PM (Mecca time)
Haaretz newspaper said that the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) will lead – on June 25 this year – a “fierce battle” to oust Democratic Representative Jamaal Bowman, known for his pro-Palestine stances, from the New York primary elections.
The Israeli newspaper reported that more than $14 million, out of the $23 million spent on the New York race, came from AIPAC, which is the most powerful pro-Israel lobbying group in the United States, which sparked “unprecedented scrutiny” regarding this organization’s methods of influencing the elections.
Haaretz noted that the battle between the Democratic representative and his AIPAC-backed rival, George Latimer, has actually become “the most expensive individual competition” in the history of the US primary elections.
In response to this campaign, Bowman described AIPAC as a “Zionist regime” and accused it of targeting black lawmakers.
Haaretz said that the organization has long been criticized for targeting lawmakers of color, and the large amounts of money it has now spent against Bowman will only deepen these criticisms.
It is noteworthy that since assuming office in 2021, Bowman has given priority to the Palestinian-Israeli conflict, and his interest in the conflict reached a new level after he issued in April 2023 an initiative represented in a letter signed by representatives from the Senate and House of Representatives urging the administration of President Joe Biden to change its policies towards Israel.
In a previous interview with Haaretz, Bowman said that the United States must do something about the conflict in the same way it played a major role over many years in financing Israel and supporting its right to defend itself and continue as a state.
Bowman believes that silence regarding what is happening to the Palestinians under the yoke of the Israeli occupation is unacceptable, and that President Biden must intervene and not remain silent on the issue. He also urged that the issue of the two-state solution not be limited to talk only without concrete steps.
In the interview, the representative spoke about a visit he made as part of a congressional delegation to Israel and the occupied Palestinian territories in November 2021, indicating that he derived a lot of information from that visit, which enabled him to see and experience the occupation up close and personal, and he wanted to act. In this regard since his return from that visit.