‘Moderate PAC’ is latest big-money push to keep Democrats in line on Israel – Mondoweiss
A new Democratic Political Action Committee (PAC) has emerged dedicated to cultivating what it calls “moderate politics.” She opposes Republicans because she supports only Democrats but primarily aims to move the Democratic Party to the right. It’s the latest iteration of conservative efforts to revive classic conservatism, which has been drowned out by right-wing bigotry to produce the so-called “Never Trump Republicans,” who have no political home for the moment.
But it also poses serious dangers for the Palestine advocacy.
We have already seen that while more progressive Democrats are far from certain of supporting Palestinian rights, their sector is the sector that has changed the most from the long-held lock-step support of Democrats. Just by targeting this sector, even if the targeting had nothing to do with Palestine, Israel or Zionism, there would be cause for concern for Palestinian advocacy.
Moderate PAC, as it is known, focuses on economic issues and picks up old Republican talking points from the 1980s about fiscal responsibility and low taxes. Justice Democrats executive director Alexandra Rojas said of the new PAC, “The corporate-backed establishment will stop at nothing to prevent more nurses, bartenders, directors, community organizers and ordinary people from joining the Democratic Party in Congress. They would rather buy elections than even run working-class progressives. They will do everything in their power to get richer at the expense of plundering poor Americans and the working class.”
However, the problem lies much deeper. The new PAC, which aims to raise at least $20 million to target progressive candidates in the 2024 election, currently has only one major donor: billionaire Jeffrey Yass. This name may not be familiar to most Americans, but we need to get to know it better. Yass, often cited as the wealthiest person in Pennsylvania, is the driving force behind funding the Kohelet Forum, an organization that has a huge responsibility for pushing Israeli politics to the right and whose network extends beyond just all of Israel extends, but also deep into the United States.
Kohelet’s agenda sounds a lot like Moderate PAC’s. Kohelet’s website says it “seeks to secure Israel’s future as the nation-state of the Jewish people, strengthen representative democracy, and expand individual liberty and free-market principles in Israel.” What that means in real politics is the promotion of religious fanaticism, a weakened judiciary, extreme nationalism and minimal welfare. As we can see in election after election, Ecclesiastes has been remarkably effective in advancing his agenda over time.
In fact, the current excitement in Israel over attempts to gut Israel’s courts was fueled by Kohelet, who borrowed from the American right-wing organization, the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC). Like ALEC, Kohelet wrote the bills now being tabled in the Knesset and got legislators to lobby for them. In fact, Kohelet was a driving force behind the entire settlement enterprise.
Of course, Israel hardly needed Kohelet to disenfranchise the Palestinians and deny them their rights. But the power of their tactics, and especially the fact that few realize that an unaccountable organization is responsible for so much politics, is considerable.
That is why their connection to right-wing support for Israel in the United States is so important. The head of Kohelet’s international legal department, Eugene Kontorovich, is perhaps the leading figure in both writing laws and manipulating existing laws in support of Israel’s interests. As Lara Friedman of the Foundation for Middle East Peace described it, Kontorovich has worked to “effectively change US law so that we no longer view boycotting Israel or settlements as a legitimate form of protest.”
Kontorovich claims that his work on anti-BDS legislation is unrelated to his work for Kohelet, but the overlap of interests is evident, and it is significant that his biography page at his main place of work makes no mention of his work with Kohelet. Like most efforts in support of Israel, Kohelet works best outside of the light.
Yass’s funding of Kohelet makes him one of the most influential people in Israel, despite not being an Israeli citizen. In the US, Yass is an important figure behind Republican donations. He is a top funder of the Club for Growth, which supports the Republican Party’s Trump base, including many who tried to overthrow the 2020 election.
With Moderate PAC, Yass is turning to the Democratic Party for the first time, and while the PAC is only just beginning, it is sure to attract more right-wing donors quickly. Ominously, the only advisor named Moderate PAC in its spending report for the past year was Greg Schultz, former campaign manager for Joe Biden’s 2020 campaign. He stepped aside for the general election when the goal was to defeat the far right, but Schultz was the architect of the Democratic strategy to erase the early advantages Bernie Sanders had garnered among Democratic voters, and he succeeded.
As with AIPAC’s progressive bias in the 2022 midterms election, Moderate PAC and other conservative PACs targeting the Democratic Party primaries do not have to concern themselves with questions about Israel or even foreign policy more broadly. You can attack Democrats who even moderately support the Palestinians without having to grapple with the difficult issues raised by Israel’s treatment of the Palestinians, particularly under the newest administration.
The Biden administration, too, which promised big Democratic donors to preserve the fundamentals of the unjust economic system in the United States and has largely lived up to that promise in its first two years in office, has also made it clear that it has no interest in the deals with the rights of the Palestinians. His government refuses to even acknowledge that the Palestinians are under occupation, let alone take any significant action on their behalf.
Yass might prefer the Republicans to win back the White House, but he’s hedging his bets with Moderate PAC, and what he hopes to produce among Democrats as far as Israel is concerned was shown in full this week after Israel announced its had announced plans for massive settlement expansion and the so-called “legalization” of settlement outposts established without direct government approval.
After the usual ineffective expressions of “deep concern” from the United States and Europe, the Palestinians, in cooperation with the United Arab Emirates, drafted a UN Security Council resolution that would urge Israel to halt all settlement activities in the occupied territories. The United States immediately went to the Palestinians and the United Arab Emirates to persuade them to either withdraw or significantly weaken the resolution, so far without success. The resolution is expected to be voted on in the Security Council as early as Monday.
The State Department called the resolution “unhelpful,” a strong signal that the US would veto it. Deputy State Department spokesman Vedant Patel addressed the resolution, equating the resolution with the “similarly” unhelpful Israeli decision to expand settlements.
That’s what someone like Yass is hoping for from the Democrats in the future. He may prefer Republicans, but he can read a political map and know that Democrats have the advantage in voting for the White House, no matter which way Congress swings. If the Democrats are to remain in control, Yass is likely hoping that the moderate PAC will ensure that it does not thwart his agenda on some issues, both economic and related to Israel. Two years of Biden seems to indicate he’s right.
Moderate PAC will certainly seek to reinforce the mindset that led many progressives to vote for Hillary Clinton in 2016 and Biden in 2020: that a progressive, while endorsing policies that are overwhelmingly popular, would not be able to to defeat the Republicans, particularly in so-called battleground states. Such debates will certainly continue, but there are certain issues where the utter bankruptcy of conservative politics is evident. No more than Palestine.
We are already facing an uphill battle, to say the least, in advocacy for Palestine. It will be critical that we make it clear that this “moderate PAC” is Republican money trying to determine outcomes in Democratic primary elections. AIPAC does the same. This needs to be exposed, and pro-Palestineers have just as much, if not more, than anyone else at stake in exposing it.