The Far Left Is Reviving Antisemitism.

Abdul El-Sayed's Michigan Senate Campaign Is a Case Study in How the American Left Launders Hate

There is a version of this conversation we should be able to have. You can oppose Netanyahu’s government, criticize Israel’s military conduct in Gaza, oppose unconditional military aid, and hold all of those positions with intellectual honesty and moral consistency. Plenty of serious people do. That conversation is not the one happening in the 2026 Democratic primary in Michigan. That conversation has been replaced by something uglier, something older, and something the American far left has become disturbingly comfortable pretending it doesn’t recognize.

The word for what is happening is antisemitism. And the candidate most aggressively embodying it is Abdul El-Sayed.

Michigan Attorney General Dana Nessel, who is Jewish, said it plainly: people on the left have just sort of replaced the word “Jew” with “AIPAC” or “Zionist,” and then as long as you do that, you’re free to say virtually anything you want. That is the architecture of the current moment. You swap out the noun, keep the logic, and call anyone who notices it a bad-faith actor trying to silence legitimate criticism. The problem is that the logic itself is the tell. The logic is: a powerful Jewish-affiliated organization secretly controls American politicians through money, dictates foreign policy against the interests of ordinary Americans, and must be named and named and named as the hidden hand behind outcomes people don’t like. That logic has a history. It does not become less dangerous because the word AIPAC appears where the slur used to.

On the second anniversary of the October 7 Hamas terror attacks, El-Sayed sent a fundraising email to supporters that opened by describing the conflict as starting with Netanyahu’s military launching a ground invasion of Gaza. The email did not mention Hamas. It did not mention the October 7 attacks. It did not mention the 48 hostages still being held captive in Gaza. Let that sink in. On the literal anniversary of the worst massacre of Jewish people since the Holocaust, Abdul El-Sayed sent out a fundraising email that erased the massacre entirely. He did not stumble into this omission. He framed the entire conflict as something Netanyahu’s military started, full stop. His campaign later called it a mistake that “mistakenly went out.” Michigan state Rep. Noah Arbit, a Jewish Democrat, was not buying it, calling the email akin to fundraising off the anniversary of the worst massacre of Jews since the Holocaust while 48 Jews were still captive in Gaza. Arbit is right. This was not a communications error. It was a choice.

The same email went further, explicitly blaming pro-Israel financial support for the continuation of the war, framing AIPAC as funneling millions into campaigns in exchange for loyalty. And when a competitor, Rep. Haley Stevens, appeared in a video praising Israel, El-Sayed responded by implying she stands with Israel while he stands with Michigan. The implication is unmistakable: she stands with the Jews. He stands with Michigan. These are not separable messages. You either see what he is doing there, or you have decided not to. El-Sayed has also dismissed AIPAC donors as “MAGA billionaires throwing their money around to try to dictate the outcome of a Democratic primary.” MAGA billionaires. When AIPAC in 2024 gave tens of millions to over two hundred Republicans and over a hundred and fifty Democrats alike, supporting candidates in both parties across the country. Its super PAC does draw from some Republican-aligned mega-donors, which is a legitimate and documented criticism -- but El-Sayed is not making a campaign finance argument. He is making a Jewish money argument and using “MAGA” as the noun that lets him get away with it. The phrase is engineered to invoke the money-and-power trope while insulating itself from the obvious charge. It is the same trick as swapping “Zionist” for “Jew.” The meaning travels. Only the plausible deniability changes.

Here is where I need you to stop and actually think about what you are reading, because this one is almost too brazen to believe. When US and Israeli forces struck Iranian oil infrastructure, a military action conducted by a Republican president who started this war and who explicitly said he doesn’t care if gas prices rise, El-Sayed’s public response was: “Thank an AIPAC-bought politician.” Not: Donald Trump started a war with Iran. Not: this Republican president is escalating military conflict in the Middle East with no regard for the economic consequences. AIPAC. The Jews are raising your gas prices. At a moment when this country has a president who openly said he doesn’t care about the economic pain his war is causing, El-Sayed pointed the finger at AIPAC. That is not policy analysis. That is a trope so old it has its own chapter in the history of pogroms, dressed up in the language of progressive economics.

When asked how he would respond to questions about whether he supports Israel’s right to exist as a Jewish state, El-Sayed dodged, then said: “Israel exists. Palestine doesn’t. And so I always wonder why nobody asks me why Palestine doesn’t have a right to exist.” This is a dodge masquerading as moral equivalence. The question of whether a candidate for the United States Senate believes in Israel’s right to exist as a Jewish state is a completely reasonable, specific question. The answer is not complicated. El-Sayed has no answer because an honest answer would cost him something. What he offered instead was a rhetorical misdirection that manages to both avoid the question and reinforce the framing that the problem is Israel’s very existence.

After a thwarted terrorist attack at a West Bloomfield synagogue in Michigan, El-Sayed released a video condemning the attack while simultaneously tying the attacker’s motivations to Israeli military actions, asking listeners to imagine a world in which the attacker’s family had never been killed in an airstrike and the war had never happened. Someone tries to bomb a synagogue, and the candidate for Senate wants you to imagine the world in which that might not have happened. Not through condemning the targeting of Jewish people unconditionally. Through imagining away the foreign policy that supposedly drove the man to it. On an internal campaign call afterward, El-Sayed acknowledged this was a risk that really worried his team, then described it as leadership: being willing to say the thing if you believe it to be true that nobody else is going to say. Leadership is not contextualizing a synagogue attack.

El-Sayed is scheduled to hold rallies with streamer Hasan Piker, prompting Third Way president Jonathan Cowan to call it morally repugnant and strategically self-defeating for Democrats to cozy up to antisemitic extremists. Piker has minimized the sexual assaults committed against Israeli women on October 7th, saying it doesn’t matter if rapes happened that day. He has defended Hamas and Hezbollah violence as legitimate resistance. This is who El-Sayed is sharing a stage with. This is a choice.

Now let’s talk about the money. Because if you pay any attention at all to El-Sayed’s campaign, you know that getting money out of politics is one of his central brand promises. He boasts constantly about not taking corporate PAC money. He uses AIPAC’s spending as a corruption argument against his opponents in the same breath he invokes the tired Jewish money tropes described above. He wants you to believe that PAC money is a disease and he is the cure. And yet. Justice Democrats, one of the furthest-left organizations in Democratic politics, has partnered with the newly formed PAL PAC, a pro-Palestine super PAC, to spend in primaries across the country in support of candidates who share El-Sayed’s ideological posture on Israel. A separate pro-Palestine super PAC called American Priorities has already spent over half a million dollars in a single congressional race in North Carolina and is targeting a dozen races nationally. None of this is getting the same outrage from the left. None of this is prompting El-Sayed to give speeches about the corrupting influence of outside money. The rule, apparently, is that super PAC spending is only corrupting when the super PAC is Jewish.

This is the tell. It has always been the tell. The far left does not actually oppose the influence of organized money in Democratic primaries. They oppose the influence of organized Jewish money in Democratic primaries. The distinction is not subtle. It is not accidental. And anyone who has been paying attention to how this rhetoric has evolved over the past five years knows exactly where it leads. You build a permission structure. You give people language that lets them express an ancient hatred with a modern vocabulary. You let the tropes accumulate, normalize them, and then act surprised when a man tries to bomb a synagogue and his neighbors say they understand where he was coming from.

Here is the practical political reality, stripped of all ideology. In recent polling, both McMorrow and Stevens beat Mike Rogers in the general election. El-Sayed is the only Democrat in this race who cannot clear a tie against the Republican. The candidate built his entire brand around electability arguments rooted in progressive authenticity, and he cannot beat the guy. That is not a coincidence. Michigan is a state with a significant Jewish community. The kind of campaign El-Sayed is running costs Democrats votes in exactly the places they need them.

I want to be direct: I do not like Benjamin Netanyahu. I think the Netanyahu government’s conduct has been reckless, the civilian toll in Gaza has been devastating, and there are real, legitimate policy arguments about the conditions under which the United States should provide military assistance to any country. Those arguments exist. You can make them. But none of them require you to erase the October 7th massacre from a fundraising email. None of them require you to tie a synagogue bombing to Israeli foreign policy. None of them require you to blame AIPAC for gas prices when a Republican president started the war. None of them require you to refuse to say that Israel has a right to exist. None of them require you to share a stage with a man who said it doesn’t matter if women were raped on October 7th. And none of them require you to rail about PAC money corrupting democracy only when the PAC in question has a Jewish name on it.

The people who need those rhetorical moves are not making a foreign policy argument. They are doing something else. And the American far left’s willingness to look away from what they are doing, because the noun has been changed from “Jew” to “Zionist” to “AIPAC,” is going to have consequences that do not stay inside the boundaries of any one primary.

We have seen this before. We know what it becomes. The only question is whether enough people are willing to say so clearly enough, and early enough, to matter.