As lawmakers increasingly challenge Israel’s war on the Gaza Strip, pro-Israel lobby group AIPAC is working around the clock to keep sympathetic lawmakers within arms’ reach.
Just in time for the congressional summer recess, AIPAC has arranged trips to Jerusalem for dozens of pro-Israel Democrats and Republicans, and a visit with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu for scores of Republicans still in Washington.
But that’s not all. Other lawmakers are on their own, separate trips to Israel. Speaker of the House Mike Johnson (R.-La.) went there this week, including a stop at illegal Israeli settlements in the occupied West Bank, with a cohort of four other pro-Israel Republicans: Michael McCaul (R-Texas), Michael Cloud (R-Texas), Claudia Tenney (R-N.Y.) and Nathaniel Moran (R-Texas). Their trip was sponsored by the U.S. Israel Education Association.
Meanwhile, Rick Crawford (R-Ar.), chairman of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, led a bipartisan Congressional Delegation (CODEL) to Israel since its brief war on Iran earlier this summer.
Critics pounced on the reports, videos and photographs circulating across social media, pointing out that these lawmakers risk looking tone deaf and in the thrall of the Israel lobby on Capitol Hill.
"The debacle of both Republican and Democratic members of Congress traveling to Israel during August recess, when they would otherwise ostensibly be meeting with constituents in their districts, demonstrates the pervasiveness of the Israel lobby's hold on American politicians,” Annelle Sheline, a research fellow for the Quincy Institute’s Middle East program, told RS.
Moreover, paying allegiance to a regime that “is literally withholding baby formula from starving infants — makes these photo ops all the more grotesque," she added.
"Catastrophic optics that lends firepower to the impression, on the ascent among younger people on the right, that [Israel] is these politicians' home district," Curt Mills, the executive director at The American Conservative, told RS.
“Members of Congress, including Speaker Mike Johnson, are in Israel, not their districts. They visited an illegal settlement. Praised the IDF. Said nothing about the settlers terrorizing Palestinians,” founder of anti-war group CODEPINK Medea Benjamin wrote on X Monday. “Shame on them. They don’t serve us, they serve AIPAC.”
Josh Paul, the co-founder and Director of Washington-based think tank A New Policy, stressed to RS that the AIPAC-sponsored trips to Israel in particular are always lopsided in Jerusalem’s favor.
“The visit in question, it is important to note, is not a ‘CODEL’ arranged by the State Department to provide Members of Congress with the opportunity to understand the world better. Rather, it is what they call a ‘NODEL’ — an all-expenses-paid first class trip with five star hotels intended to present just one side of an issue,” he said. “That it involves a friendly meeting with a foreign leader who is currently under indictment for war crimes is just the icing on the cake.”
“The law may allow the loopholes that allow for what in any other context would clearly be the exertion of undue foreign influence and bribery to go by the name of an 'educational trip,' but that doesn't mean that the Americans whose Members are spending their District Work Period on AIPAC's dime should stand for it,” Paul added.
AIPAC may be ramping up the charm tours as more members publicly share concerns over the starvation and growing death toll, and increasingly challenge U.S. complicity through financial and military support.
To this end, pro-Israel lawmakers like Sens. Amy Klobuchar (D-Minn.) and Elissa Slotkin (D-Mich.), have demanded action on the aid situation in Gaza. Last week, Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.) became the first Republican Congressperson to call Israel’s war on the Gaza Strip a genocide. And although a pair of bills introduced by Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) to block some arms sales to Israel last week failed in the Senate, they received more support from Democrats than similar efforts did in the past.
Meanwhile, Americans are becoming less sympathetic to Israel and its war on Palestinians, suggesting these trips fall flat with at least some of their constituents.
To this point, Sheline told RS: “Blind loyalty to Israel and dehumanization of Palestinians is no longer the sure electoral win it once was, as these politicians may learn in the midterms.”
