By Robert Inlakesh
US Vice President JD Vance and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu amid growing debate over US and Israeli regional policy. (Photo Illustration: Palestine Chronicle)
Today, being a vocal supporter of the Palestinian people and opposing Israeli war crimes will rally an army of voters to put a politician in office.
The ‘Blue Tsunami’ that has swept across the United States and devastated the Republican Party in the mid-term elections didn’t come out of nowhere – it was an American referendum on the Trump administration. Specifically, what we saw was a protest vote, at the center of which is the US-Israeli war on Iran.
While a range of issues contributed to the historic defeat of the Grand Old Party – including the brutal use of ICE, rampant overt corruption, and the Epstein Files cover-up- the primary factor that drove the Democratic Party’s victory was the illegal war launched by US President Donald Trump. This is something that Trump himself has even conceded.
That war was launched on behalf of Israel, and as a result of the conflict with Iran, the American economy is screaming. Gas prices have skyrocketed as a direct consequence of the Strait of Hormuz’s closure, as the Trump administration has exhausted the nation’s Strategic Petroleum Reserves in order to desperately keep consumer prices down.
Despite Washington’s best efforts to avoid the fallout, inflation is sky-high; the US has failed to end the war and just about everyone knows that the attack on Iran was not in America’s interests.
US Vice President JD Vance, in a post on X (formerly Twitter), wrote that there are four main issues that the Republican Party lost on and need to be addressed:
“1) End the war
2) Focus on cost of living/inflation
3) Put America First
4) Change our relationship to Israel”
The reason why Vance is admitting this is down to a desire to save his political career. As to whether he will prove successful at that or not, only time will tell. This being said, each of the issues he mentioned is to do with Israel in one way or another. Both Vance and Trump are able to diagnose the problem, yet they were ultimately unwilling to act. The President has decided to double down, while the Vice President is signaling his willingness to jump ship.
Over $100 million dollars in AIPAC donations were spent attempting to buy pro-Israel candidates in the midterms. Israel’s richest billionaire, Miriam Adelson, also spent $67.6 million alone, while a range of Zionist billionaires also put their money into a series of races. In the end, they managed to get some of their chosen candidates over the line, but dramatically failed in various races, in a way we haven’t seen before.
A major takeaway from the Democratic Party’s victories, winning a majority of seats in the House and Senate, was not only that a large contingent of overtly pro-Palestinian candidates won their positions on the pledge of opposing Israel, but that even many centrist Democrats have decided to distance themselves from AIPAC and the pro-Israeli cause.
Take Texas Senator-elect James Talarico, for example; he is a candidate who has refused to call what is happening in Gaza a genocide and expressed his alleged belief in Israel’s “right to defend itself”, yet he has also felt it necessary to publicly declare that he will never take funds from AIPAC and expressed grief over Gaza.
In other words, even politicians who align with the mainstream wing of the Democratic Party have had to shift their rhetoric on the issue of Palestine. Although the Parties are not going to become overwhelmingly pro-Palestinian overnight, at the very least it has become the bare minimum standard for Democrats to demand that “offensive weapons sales” be blocked, which will also likely happen with Republican Party representatives going forward.
Americans understand well that the reason why their economy is doing so terribly is that the Trump administration is fighting Israel’s war. Every time the average person goes to the pump, to the grocery store, or small business owners lose out over the impossible-to-pay prices of diesel, they know precisely why that is.
The Gaza genocide already flipped American public opinion on Israel, but that was only the beginning. Instead of being horrified at the livestreamed atrocities committed abroad, suddenly the American people were suffering the economic consequences of the genocidal regime’s actions.
In addition to this, the Epstein Files scandal added a separate layer to the public outrage against the regime in Tel Aviv. It has become mainstream public knowledge that Jeffrey Epstein was connected to the Israeli Mossad, and the Trump administration chose to run a cover-up, opposed to actually pursuing justice. Even worse is that Donald Trump himself is the single most named person in publicly released Epstein Files documents.
For the average American, the Israel issue is no longer relegated to a foreign policy problem; it is an economic, First Amendment and sovereignty issue.
They have identified the Israelis as harnessing far too much power over their politics, connect the dots between the Epstein scandal and the Mossad, while also registering the genocide in Gaza as an appalling atrocity that should be opposed on moral grounds.
Although change occurs gradually, public pressure is rising. Previously, support for Israel and the backing of AIPAC would help ensure victories on election day. Today, being a vocal supporter of the Palestinian people, opposing Israeli war crimes and rejecting AIPAC funds will rally an army of voters to put a politician in office.
– Robert Inlakesh is a journalist, writer, and documentary filmmaker. He focuses on the Middle East, specializing in Palestine. He contributed this article to The Palestine Chronicle.
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