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    Democrats’ Split Over Israel Takes Center Stage in Tense Primary Debate

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    A rancorous clash between Representative Jamaal Bowman and his Democratic opponent, George Latimer, exposed sharp divisions in their party.Democrats’ smoldering divisions over the war in Gaza flared in New York on Monday, as Representative Jamaal Bowman, one of the House’s most endangered incumbents, debated a party rival over Israel’s war tactics, American military aid and a powerful pro-Israel group.In many ways, their exchanges echoed those playing out from Congress to college campuses. But for Mr. Bowman, there was something more at stake: His sharp criticism of Israel has put him at risk of losing his seat in a primary in the New York City suburbs next month.That possibility appeared to be front of mind as he began the race’s first televised debate in White Plains, N.Y. Mr. Bowman joined his more moderate opponent, George Latimer, in reiterating support for two states — one Palestinian and one Jewish — and condemning antisemitism. He steered clear of incendiary terms like “genocide” that have cost him key Jewish support. Both candidates let some deeper differences slide.The comity lasted all of 25 minutes.Friction spiked — and never really abated — after the conversation turned to the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, the influential pro-Israel lobby that helped push Mr. Latimer into the race and has pledged millions of dollars to defeat Mr. Bowman and other members of the House’s left-wing “Squad.”Sensing a rare opportunity to go on the attack, the congressman accused Mr. Latimer, the Westchester County executive, of being “bought and paid for” by the group and its deep-pocketed funders, who Mr. Bowman said also support “right-wing Republicans who want to destroy our democracy.”Mr. Latimer did not take the gibe kindly. The group, as he quickly pointed out, has deep ties to Democratic leadership, but its brook-no-criticism approach to Israel’s deadly counteroffensive in Gaza has alienated large numbers of Democratic lawmakers and voters.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Bowman Is Latest House Democrat to Face a Primary Over Israel Stance

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      George Latimer, the Westchester County executive, told The New York Times he would run against Mr. Bowman, a rising star of the Democratic left, next year.After months of public deliberation and prodding from donors aligned with Israel, George Latimer, the Westchester County executive, said on Wednesday that he would mount a Democratic primary challenge against Representative Jamaal Bowman of New York.The decision set the stage for a potentially explosive contest next year that promises to test not only the growing Democratic divide over the war in the Middle East but the durability of the party’s progressive wing.In an interview, Mr. Latimer drew sharp contrasts between himself and Mr. Bowman, one of left’s most vocal critics of Israel. He dismissed the incumbent’s calls for a cease-fire as premature and called a recent protest outside the White House, where the congressman accused Israel of committing genocide in Gaza, a political stunt.“It’s about results, not rhetoric,” said Mr. Latimer, who has deep ties to the Democratic establishment. “So much of politics has turned into that sort of showmanship — how you look in front of the cameras.”He was expected to officially begin his campaign with a video announcement later on Wednesday, just days after returning from a wartime visit to the region.The nascent contest echoes primary fights breaking out from Pittsburgh to Detroit since Hamas’s deadly Oct. 7 attack, as pro-Israel Democrats try to oust members of the House “Squad” pushing for a cease-fire. Like the other challengers, Mr. Latimer is expected to benefit from millions of dollars in outside spending by the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, or AIPAC, and other special interest groups.The race in the New York City suburbs, though, may be uniquely complex. It pits a charismatic Black progressive with a growing national profile against an old-school white liberal with deep local support. And it will play out in a district that is both home to one of the country’s most influential Jewish communities and also nearly half Black or Latino.Mr. Latimer said he shared many of Mr. Bowman’s progressive priorities but would avoid the incumbent’s “showmanship.”Gregg Vigliotti for The New York TimesMr. Latimer tread carefully around many of those fault lines as he outlined his candidacy this week, insisting that he was preparing for a campaign that would go well beyond the issue of Israel.Mr. Latimer, in his second term as county executive, urged voters not to judge him on his age, 70, or the color of his skin. Citing his four decades in elected office, he said would continue many of the progressive priorities on housing, climate change and transportation that Mr. Bowman has championed. And he avoided outright attacks on the incumbent beyond charging that Mr. Bowman was more interested in making his name than tending to his district.“If you ignore that turf because you’re a national figure and more interested in being on the national stage, then you are neglecting the needs of that community,” Mr. Latimer said.The challenge comes at a moment of profound political vulnerability for Mr. Bowman, 47, and not just because of his stance on the war. The congressman is still dealing with the repercussions of pleading guilty in October to pulling a false fire alarm in a House office building. And he has just $185,000 in his campaign account, according to recent filings.AIPAC, which privately offered Mr. Latimer its support months ago, could easily swamp that amount on its own. Marshall Wittmann, a spokesman for the group, declined to discuss the group’s spending plans this week but denounced Mr. Bowman as a representative of “the anti-Israel extremist fringe.”Mr. Bowman’s advisers and allies say defeating him may be far more difficult than his foes anticipate. Some of the left’s most influential figures were already lining up to fight back, determined to show the staying power of their movement three years after they first helped Mr. Bowman, a former middle school principal, topple a powerful three-decade incumbent, Eliot L. Engel.Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York, Mr. Bowman’s best-known ally, circulated a fund-raising appeal on his behalf. Left-leaning groups, including New York’s Working Families Party and Justice Democrats, have pledged resources. For now, each appear to see value in framing the primary as a conflict as one with pro-Israel special interests, not the county executive.“It’s not a surprise that a super PAC that routinely targets Black members of Congress with primary challenges and is funded by the same Republican megadonors who give millions to election-denying Republicans including Donald Trump, Ron DeSantis, and Ted Cruz have recruited a candidate for this race,” said Emma Simon, a spokeswoman for Mr. Bowman’s campaign.The primary battle is one Democrats had wished to avoid. The party already hopes to flip six Republican-held swing seats in New York next year, which is key to taking back the House majority. Some Democrats have expressed concern that a pro-Israel advertising blitz against Mr. Bowman would inadvertently tarnish the party’s candidates in competitive races in neighboring districts to the north and west.Now that the matchup is underway, though, it poses a quandary for Democratic leaders, particularly Representative Hakeem Jeffries of New York.Mr. Jeffries, the top House Democrat, has said he would continue the party’s longstanding policy of supporting incumbents like Mr. Bowman, even if his own views on Israel are more conservative. But Mr. Latimer said he had not received a call from Mr. Jeffries asking him not to run, and the House leader may soon have to decide how hard to fight to protect Mr. Bowman.Mr. Bowman has refused to tone down his advocacy despite growing pressure from Jewish constituents and fellow Democrats.His allies argue that there is good reason to believe many voters agree with his views, but that for many, Israel will not be a decisive issue when they cast their primary ballots next June.About half of voters in the district, which stretches from the north Bronx through many of Westchester’s liberal suburbs, are Black and Latino, according to census data. The figure is even higher among Democratic primary voters. By comparison, about 10 percent of all voters and about 20 to 25 percent of Democratic primary voters are Jewish.Mr. Bowman has repeatedly said he is standing by his position on Israel for a simpler reason: He believes in it.Mr. Bowman has refused to tone down his advocacy despite growing pressure from Jewish constituents and fellow Democrats.Kenny Holston/The New York TimesHe summarized his views outside the White House last week, where he joined protesters calling on President Biden to support a bilateral cease-fire. He used terms that most Democrats have objected to, including “genocide” and “ethnic cleansing,” in describing Israel’s deadly bombardment of Gaza, which has killed some 15,000 people, according to the local health authorities. He accused the United States of “being complicit” in those deaths. But he also condemned those targeting Israelis or Jews and repeated his earlier denunciations of Hamas.“Calling for cease-fire does not mean we support Hamas, does not mean we support the killing of Israelis or Jews, does not mean we support antisemitism,” he said. “We are calling for cease-fire because we don’t want anyone else to die.”In the interview, Mr. Latimer said he, too, was eager to see the bloodshed in Gaza end, but only after Hamas returned the remaining Israeli hostages it abducted on Oct. 7 and agreed “to step aside from violence.” Anything short of that would amount to unilateral disarmament by Israel, he argued.Mr. Latimer said he did not “know enough” to judge whether Israel’s counteroffensive had violated international law. “I’m not a secretary of state,” he said.He also rejected Mr. Bowman’s proposal for the United States to place conditions on the billions of military aid it provides to Israel. “That is a matter that I think is best left to the presidential administration,” Mr. Latimer said.He was more pointed about attempts by Mr. Bowman and his allies to build public pressure on Mr. Biden through protests and media appearances. Mr. Latimer called Mr. Bowman’s appearance outside the White House “the classic response of somebody who has been in government a couple of years.”“If you want to influence the policy of the president, you begin with the dialogue you have with your other members of Democratic Caucus,” he said. “When you have a consensus movement, that becomes more impressive to an executive.” More

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      The War in Gaza Is Splintering the Democratic Party

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      Representative Jamaal Bowman, whose district encompasses several affluent Westchester County suburbs as well as a small part of the Bronx, last week planned a “healing breakfast” with Jewish constituents pained by his pro-Palestinian politics. A member of the informal alliance of a half-dozen or so young Black and brown left-wing representatives known as the Squad, Bowman won a primary against the district’s staunchly pro-Israel incumbent in 2020, fueled largely by the energy of that summer’s racial justice protests. But now, with the conflict in the Middle East inflaming American politics, he seemed likely to face his own primary challenge in June, one that will test the coalition between liberal Jews and people of color that is key to the progressive movement both in his district and in the country more broadly.Bowman didn’t get into politics to work on Israel and Palestine. A brash, impassioned and sometimes impetuous former middle school principal, he was motivated by education and criminal justice reform. But like other members of the Squad, Bowman has developed a sympathy with the Palestinian cause that makes him an outlier in a Congress where deference to Israel is the norm.He was one of nine Democrats to vote last month against a resolution expressing support for Israel and condemning Hamas, because, he said, it didn’t call for a two-state solution or for military de-escalation. Speaking at a rally held by Rabbis for Ceasefire this week, he said, rather presumptuously, “By me calling for a cease-fire with my colleagues and centering humanity, I am uplifting deeply what it actually means to be Jewish.”Plenty of Jews in his district, including some who loathe Israel’s right-wing government, disagree, and have grown alienated from their congressman and the strain of progressive politics he represents. “People like me are not being given much to work with when we go to some of our beleaguered, anxious and frightened Jewish friends, and they are saying that the left is so infested with antisemitism that they can no longer be part of it,” said Lisa Genn, a local progressive activist who is part of a group called Jews for Jamaal.With tensions in the district high, Bowman organized the breakfast so the community could talk things out in person. “Nobody’s going,” the head of the Westchester Board of Rabbis told New York Jewish Week, adding, “The relationship with the congressman has hit rock bottom, and he knows it, we know it.” Nevertheless, so many people R.S.V.P.ed that the meeting was moved from Bowman’s office in White Plains to the nearby Calvary Baptist Church.When I arrived at the church that morning, a small group of protesters stood outside clutching signs. “Jews are not idiots. We know this is a P.R. stunt!” said one, held by a woman in a blue “Zioness” sweatshirt. “Bowman does not protect our Jewish students,” said another, held by Nancy Weinberger, a Democrat who has two children studying in Israel, and who was particularly incensed by Bowman’s recent vote against a House resolution condemning “the support of Hamas, Hezbollah and other terrorist organizations” on college campuses. “Can’t he give us one win?” she asked. “Can’t he vote in our interest at all?”Soon the pastor of the church showed up, saw the demonstrators, and appeared to grow worried that Calvary Baptist would be seen as anti-Zionist. He abruptly canceled the event and called the police to clear everyone out. As Bowman’s staff tried to find a new location, Guy Baron, a protester wrapped in an Israeli flag, confronted the congressman in the church parking lot. “Your actions as our representative in Washington, D.C., are so painful to our community,” he said. “You have no idea. You are so out of touch with the Jewish members of your community.”Baron inveighed against a slogan defended by Rashida Tlaib, another member of the Squad and the only Palestinian in Congress: “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free.” The slogan was a major reason Tlaib was censured by the House last week, with 22 Democrats joining almost all but a few members of the Republican caucus.“That is a call to genocide,” said Baron, “and you’re on their team.”Bowman listened, his hands folded, then thanked Baron for sharing his feelings. “We are horrified by the rise of antisemitism that is happening all over the world, right here in our country, and right here in our community,” he said. “That is why we’re having this meeting and conversation today. Because we know and we acknowledge the trauma and the pain and the fear.”Eventually, the meeting was moved back to Bowman’s office. About 40 people, including several of the protesters, gathered in a crowded semicircle in a low-ceilinged, fluorescent-lit room. Trays of bagels, scrambled eggs and pastrami sandwiches were brought in, but they went mostly untouched. Emotions were intense — there were repeated invocations of the Holocaust — but by absorbing his constituents’ outrage and grief, Bowman was able to keep the conversation civil.“I am deeply concerned that the people that I’ve spent my life marching with are not marching with me,” Bill Giddins, a retiree from Bronxville, said to applause. “I am deeply concerned that when a Black person is damaged in America, I want to protect that person. I don’t feel the same from you and your office.” A few days before, a man had been arrested near the site of a local rally for the victims of Oct. 7 on charges of illegally carrying a semiautomatic weapon; his car was flying a Palestinian flag and had a swastika intertwined with a Jewish star scrawled on the side.Bowman’s Jewish constituents tried to convey how an ancestral terror of annihilation had been newly awakened. “This is Westchester!” said one mother of young children. “How can we be feeling unsafe as Jews?”“I myself can’t keep you safe,” said Bowman. “We, in this room, in this community, and me and my colleagues in elected office can do so. Not just with words, or political pandering, or virtue signaling,” but “sleeves up, in the room, figuring it out.”Whether Bowman can figure out how to heal the rifts in his district will have implications beyond his slice of New York. Ahead of the existentially important 2024 election — which could bring Donald Trump, increasingly unabashed in his embrace of vengeful authoritarianism, back to power — some polls show Joe Biden’s support among young people and Arab Americans collapsing, likely because of the president’s backing of Israel’s war in Gaza. “People tell me they’re not voting Democrat, without me asking,” Bowman told me.A series of ugly primary campaigns fought over Israel will only widen the progressive political divide. But with horror at conditions in Gaza and Jewish fear both ratcheting up, an intraparty clash over the future of the Squad now looks inevitable.From left, the Squad members Cori Bush, Ayanna Pressley, Ilhan Omar and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez at a gathering calling for a cease-fire in Gaza.Mandel Ngan/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesThe crowd at an event called the Westchester Stands With Israel Rally, held last month at Temple Israel Center in White Plains.Mark Vergari/The Journal News-USA Today NetworkAs the left-leaning journalist Ryan Grim points out in his forthcoming book, “The Squad: AOC and the Hope of a Political Revolution,” the politics of Israel and Palestine have bedeviled the group ever since its first members burst onto the political scene in 2018.The most famous figure in the Squad, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, rarely spoke about the Middle East in 2018, during her first congressional campaign, which was centered on the same economic issues that powered the Bernie Sanders movement. But that May, she’d tweeted about the Israeli military’s shooting of protesters in Gaza, calling it a “massacre.” After her primary victory, she was questioned about that tweet, and her stance on Israel, on the TV show “Firing Line.” She grew visibly flustered, and afterward decided to stop doing national interviews for a while.“At the time, she betrayed a visceral sense of just how treacherous the issue could be for her, but she could never have guessed how significantly she had underestimated it,” wrote Grim.It was even more treacherous for Tlaib and Ilhan Omar, the first two Muslim women in Congress, who’ve both voiced support for the boycott, divestment and sanctions movement against Israel. Both spoke for many left-wing voters, especially young ones, who see in the Palestinian struggle a reflection of their own battles against various forms of oppression. Both also, occasionally, invoked what many Jews see as antisemitic tropes about Jewish power and dual loyalty. Less than a week into her first term, for example, Tlaib tweeted that Senate supporters of an anti-B.D.S. bill “forgot what country they represent.” Not long after, Omar tweeted that fealty to Israel by U.S. political leaders was “all about the Benjamins.” Some of the early weeks of the new congressional session were consumed by an attempt, eventually watered down, to officially rebuke her.Soon after the original members of the Squad were sworn in in 2019, Mark Mellman, a Democratic pollster who once did work for the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, or AIPAC, started a group called the Democratic Majority for Israel aimed in part at stopping their influence from growing. “Most Democrats are strongly pro-Israel and we want to keep it that way,” Mellman told The Times. “There are a few discordant voices, but we want to make sure that what’s a very small problem doesn’t metastasize into a bigger problem.”To that end, the Democratic Majority for Israel tried hard to thwart Bowman when he ran against Eliot Engel in 2020. The group spent almost $2 million in the race, much of it on ads slamming Bowman for unpaid taxes. As Grim noted, hitting “a working-class Black man for financial troubles before he’d risen to become a successful principal in the area would have been considered tone-deaf in a New York Democratic primary in any recent cycle,” but especially amid the summer’s protests over the killing of George Floyd. The attack failed; Bowman ended up winning a blowout 15-point victory.The district, whose contours have changed with redistricting and could change again before the primary, is about 50 percent Black and Latino, and voters of color were Bowman’s base. But they were joined by some Jews, who are thought to make up about 10 percent of the district’s population. “It was the time,” said Giddins, the Bronxville retiree, who backed Bowman in the past. “We have to coalesce and give Black people power. They’re entitled to it.”But despite Bowman’s popularity, growing disaffection among Jews — who, according to The New York Times, probably make up 20 percent to 30 percent of the Democratic primary electorate in his district — could make him vulnerable. He’s one of several Squad members facing potentially formidable primary challenges over their stances on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.Omar is going to have a rematch against a former Minneapolis City Council member, Don Samuels, who lost to her by about two points in the 2022 primary. Cori Bush, a Missouri Democrat who emerged from the Black Lives Matter movement, is facing a primary challenge from a former political ally, the St. Louis County prosecutor Wesley Bell. Summer Lee, a Pittsburgh Democrat whose district includes the Tree of Life synagogue, site of an antisemitic mass murder in 2018, is being challenged by Bhavini Patel.Bowman doesn’t have an opponent yet, but last month 26 rabbis in his district wrote a letter to Westchester’s popular county executive, George Latimer, imploring him to get into the race. Last week, a local TV station reported that Latimer had indeed decided to jump in, though he told me he still hadn’t made a formal decision and wouldn’t until he returned from a solidarity trip to Israel.Should a few members of the Squad lose their primaries, the blow to Democratic unity could be severe. “Many of the young people or people of color, Muslim and Arab Democrats who support the Squad will feel like the party is not a place for them,” said Waleed Shahid, former communications director of the Justice Democrats, the group that recruited Ocasio-Cortez to run for office, and a senior adviser on Bowman’s 2020 campaign. “And they’ll either stay at home or they’ll go to a third party.”Already, there are signs that the party is fracturing over Israel. According to a recent Reuters/Ipsos poll, about three-quarters of Democrats want a cease-fire, but few in the Democratic establishment share their views. Last week, in a rare gesture of defiance, more than 100 congressional staffers walked out to demand that their bosses back a cease-fire. More than 500 alumni of Biden’s 2020 presidential campaign and Democratic Party staff members have signed a letter imploring Biden to call for a cease-fire, saying, “If you fail to act swiftly, your legacy will be complicity in the face of genocide.”If the conflict in Israel cools down in a few months, it might recede from the center of American politics. But the wounds it’s torn open will be hard to mend, because so many people are feeling betrayed. Many liberal Jews, mourning the mass murder in Israel and shaken by the upsurge of antisemitism at home, believed they’ve been abandoned by their allies. Advocates for the freedom and safety of Palestinians, horror-struck by more than 10,000 civilian deaths in Gaza, believe that the Democratic Party is giving its approval to atrocities. Bowman’s attempt to transcend this split in his own district, knowing how much ire would be directed at him, struck me as decent and brave. But when people discover that they see the world so radically differently, better communication alone might not be enough to bring them back together.From the time he was elected, Bowman has had to traverse a minefield on the Middle East, facing pressure from both his pro-Israel Jewish constituents and from some of the left-wing groups that backed him. He’s mostly refused to tiptoe. Coming into office, Bowman was a member of the Democratic Socialists of America, but he angered the organization when he voted to fund Israel’s Iron Dome defense system. After he traveled to Israel and the West Bank with the left-leaning pro-Israel group J Street in 2021, some in the Democratic Socialists, which has a policy of boycotting Israel, moved to expel him. He ended up dropping his membership.For all the blowback from the left, however, the trip solidified his abhorrence of the occupation of Palestine. “I got to see the giant wall built around the West Bank,” Bowman told me. He described being turned away from a checkpoint in the West Bank city of Hebron, where Palestinian movement is curtailed to accommodate a few hundred fanatical settlers, because he wasn’t Jewish. “And I thought that was ironic, because I’m literally a sitting member of Congress voting to support funding for the state of Israel,” he said.He saw firsthand the way settlement expansion is making a contiguous Palestinian state nearly impossible. “I left feeling pretty overwhelmed and pretty dejected,” Bowman said, adding, “The rhetoric at home didn’t match the reality on the ground there, and specifically, the rhetoric around a two-state solution.” Bowman still believes in two states, but said, “The policies of the Israeli government haven’t gotten us there, and the U.S. hasn’t held Israel accountable towards helping us to get there.”“At Jamaal’s core, he’s someone who believes in racial and social justice,” said Shahid, his former adviser. “And I think that a lot of the ways he thinks about the world were confirmed” by his trip to Israel. Shahid compared Bowman’s experience to that of the writer Ta-Nehisi Coates, who, speaking on the left-wing broadcast “Democracy Now,” described his own shocking encounter with the brutal segregation in Hebron. “I was in a territory where your mobility is inhibited,” said Coates. “Where your voting rights are inhibited. Where your right to the water is inhibited. Where your right to housing is inhibited, and it’s all inhibited based on ethnicity. And that sounded extremely, extremely familiar to me.”It was familiar to Bowman, too. Given the congressman’s “experience as a racially conscious Black person,” said Shahid, “it’s hard not to see the parallels.”Before going to Israel and Palestine, Bowman had co-sponsored legislation encouraging Arab states to normalize their relations with Israel. When he returned, he withdrew his sponsorship and announced he’d vote against the bill because, among other things, it didn’t take Palestinian interests into account. The move appalled rabbis in his district. Later, Bowman angered many Jewish constituents by co-sponsoring Tlaib’s resolution commemorating what Palestinians call the nakba, or catastrophe, referring to their expulsion from Israel during the country’s founding. He angered them further by boycotting the speech by Israel’s president, Isaac Herzog, to Congress in July.Oct. 7 brought an already simmering discontent to a raging boil. A few days after the attacks, Bowman wanted to attend an Israeli solidarity rally held by the Westchester Jewish Council, but organizers advised him to stay away because he’d be received poorly. He has spoken out repeatedly against antisemitism, denouncing, for example, an Oct. 8 demonstration in Manhattan, promoted by the New York Democratic Socialists of America, where Hamas’s attacks were celebrated. But he hasn’t backed away from his fundamental view of the conflict, leaving the mainstream Jewish community feeling as if he’s run roughshod over their interests and sensitivities. “Actions against Israel affect the safety of the Jewish people everywhere,” said Weinberger, the woman with two children in Israel, adding, “We feel so helpless in Congress because of him. He’s taken our voice away.”In 2022, despite mounting unhappiness with Bowman among some local Jewish leaders, national pro-Israel groups sat out his primary, determining, as Jewish Insider reported, that he “was likely unbeatable.” (He ended up winning about 57 percent of the vote in a four-way race.) But pro-Israel groups — one of which received funds from the disgraced crypto king Sam Bankman-Fried — poured an unprecedented amount of money into other primaries that year, a foretaste of the resources we could soon see mobilized against Bowman.As Politico reported, the Democratic Majority for Israel spent $2 million to defeat the Bernie Sanders-backed Democrat Nina Turner in a 2022 Ohio primary. In Michigan, the United Democracy Project, a super PAC tied to AIPAC, spent a staggering $4.3 million to help beat Representative Andy Levin, a Jewish Democrat who had been outspoken in his criticism of Israel’s occupation. Some funding for the United Democracy Project came from Republican megadonors, including the Home Depot co-founder Bernie Marcus, a Trump supporter. These are not, needless to say, people who are averse to creating lasting ill will among Democrats.“I’ve been in politics for 30 years, local, state and federal,” said Mark Pocan, a Wisconsin Democrat and former co-chair of the Congressional Progressive Caucus. “But last cycle was the first time I saw a really disturbing new phenomenon, which was two groups — cryptocurrency folks and AIPAC — getting involved in Democratic primaries with huge amounts of money,” often more than the candidates were spending themselves. We can expect to see even more outside money from groups supporting Israel deployed against the Squad in 2024. “The level of concern and engagement on the part of the pro-Israel community is at an extraordinarily high level,” Mellman, of Democratic Majority for Israel, told me.These big-footed donors, who are overwhelmingly targeting representatives of color, are going to exacerbate the fissures in the Democratic Party. But they did not create them. Talking to some of the disenchanted voters at Bowman’s event, I was struck most not by their anger but by their heartbreak.Diana Lovett, a Democratic Party district leader who held a fund-raiser for Bowman last year, said polarization over the congressman was tearing apart local Democrats. Leaving the event, she told me, with great sadness, that she didn’t feel she could back him anymore. “I love him personally,” she said. She’d spoken to him in October about their disagreement over Israel. “He was lovely, and he’s amazing, and he was the same warm and openhearted person that he was today,” she said.But Lovett, who’d recently been hanging posters of kidnapped Israelis around town only to see them being torn down, had come to believe that their views on the Middle East are irreconcilable. “I think he sees what he believes to be an injustice, a grave injustice,” and that his votes are coming from a deep “moral consciousness,” she said. “And I think the pain and suffering he is causing to his constituents is some kind of collateral damage to that higher principle.”If Bowman were a more transactional politician, he might have compromised on an issue so fraught in his community. But he is, for better or worse, very sincere. Lovett was dreading “an insanely divisive primary,” but didn’t see any way around it. “He’s not going to convince us, and we’re not going to convince him,” she said.The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here’s our email: letters@nytimes.com.Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Twitter (@NYTopinion) and Instagram. More

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      A Primary Fight Brews Over Jamaal Bowman’s Stance on Israel

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      Representative Jamaal Bowman’s calls for Israel to stand down on Gaza may fuel a perilous primary challenge for one of the left’s brightest stars.Representative Jamaal Bowman was already facing blowback from Jewish leaders in his district and a growing primary threat for bucking his party’s stance on Israel.But on Friday, he did not show any hesitation as he grabbed the megaphone at a cease-fire rally back home in the New York City suburbs to demand what only a dozen other members of Congress have: that both Israel and Hamas lay down their arms.He condemned Hamas’s brutal murder of 1,400 Israelis. He condemned the governments of the United States and Israel for facilitating what he called the “erasure” of Palestinian lives. And with Palestinian flags waving, Mr. Bowman said, “I am ashamed, quite ashamed to be a member of Congress at times when Congress doesn’t value every single life.”Forget about retreating to safer political ground. In the weeks since Hamas’s assault, Mr. Bowman, an iconoclastic former middle-school principal with scant foreign policy experience, has repeatedly inserted himself into the center of a major fight fracturing his party’s left between uncompromising pro-Israel and pro-Palestinian factions.Mr. Bowman frames his actions as a moral imperative, but they are already courting political peril. Local Jewish leaders have denounced his approach as blaming both sides for the gravest attack against their people since the Holocaust. A potentially formidable primary challenger, George Latimer, the Westchester County executive, has begun taking steps toward entering the race.Even some Jewish supporters publicly defending Mr. Bowman have grown wary. When a group of constituents who call themselves “Jews for Jamaal” held a private call with the congressman last week, they warned him he should be prepared to pay a political price if he does not support a multibillion-dollar military aid package for Israel now pending before Congress, according to three people on the call.Similar coalitions are lining up primary fights across the country against other members of Democrats’ left-wing “Squad” over their views on Israel, including Representatives Rashida Tlaib of Michigan, Cori Bush of Missouri and Summer Lee of Pennsylvania.But perhaps no race promises to be so explosive, expensive or symbolically charged a test of the Democratic Party’s direction as a potential matchup between Mr. Bowman and Mr. Latimer.Mr. Bowman won his seat three years ago by defeating the staunchly pro-Israel chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, Eliot L. Engel, in a primary. And the district he represents is home both to one of the best-organized Jewish communities in the country and a nonwhite majority who sees him as a paragon of progressive Black leadership.The anger toward Mr. Bowman could scarcely have come at a worse time for him. Just last Thursday, he pleaded guilty to setting off a false fire alarm in a House office building as he raced to a vote last month. To avoid jail time, he agreed to pay a $1,000 fine and apologize.Mr. Bowman’s allies — including many Jewish ones — insist his position on the Israel-Hamas war will be vindicated. They argue that he is speaking for many of the district’s Black and Latino voters who identify with the plight of Palestinians, and that he is voicing the conflicting views of many American Jews.“He is not ‘anti-Israel,’ and to refer to him that way is to deliberately distort his record, which includes many votes in favor of military and economic aid to Israel,” 40 members of the Jews for Jamaal group wrote in a recent letter warning Mr. Latimer that a primary would be “needlessly wasteful and terribly divisive.”On the call with the group earlier this month, Mr. Bowman framed his position as a matter of personal conviction. He said he would never be Representative Ritchie Torres, a staunchly pro-Israel Democrat who represents a neighboring district. But he also said it was unfair to lump him together with lawmakers like Ms. Tlaib or Ilhan Omar of Minnesota, who have taken far more antagonistic stances toward Israel.Unlike them, Mr. Bowman has voted in the past to help fund Israel’s Iron Dome missile defense system. In late 2021, he traveled to Israel on a trip organized by J Street, a mainstream liberal pro-Israel advocacy group that still backs him. Both actions drew sharp blowback from allies on the left and prompted Mr. Bowman to quit the Democratic Socialists of America.In a statement, Mr. Bowman said that he would “always stand with the Jewish community” but also would work to bridge differences among his constituents, the majority of whom remain more focused on issues like health care and gun safety.The district, which includes more than half of Westchester County, is about 50 percent Black and Latino, according to census data; studies suggest around 10 percent of residents are Jewish, though Jews probably make up two to three times that share of the Democratic primary electorate.“True security for everyone in the region begins with the de-escalation of violence, which means the immediate release of hostages taken by Hamas, a cease-fire, humanitarian aid to Israel and Gaza,” and avoiding military escalation, Mr. Bowman said.Since Hamas’s attack, though, some Jewish leaders in Westchester said Mr. Bowman has been too quick to move past the carnage overseas and growing fears about antisemitism closer to home. They took particular offense last week when he was one of just 10 House lawmakers to vote against a bipartisan resolution standing with Israel.The American-Israel Public Affairs Committee, a pro-Israel lobby that has spent millions of dollars targeting Mr. Bowman’s left-leaning allies in recent cycles, has privately offered its support to Mr. Latimer. So have local business leaders who detest Mr. Bowman’s critiques of capitalism and his vote against President Biden’s bipartisan infrastructure bill.And two dozen local rabbis have condemned his calls for a cease-fire as “a position of appeasement toward Hamas’s terror regime.”“Since being elected, Bowman has led the effort to erode support for Israel on Capitol Hill and within the Democratic Party,” they wrote in a recent letter urging Mr. Latimer to run.George Latimer, the Westchester County executive, has been encouraged by a pro-Israel group to challenge Mr. Bowman.Jonah Markowitz for The New York TimesIn an interview, Mr. Latimer, 69, said he would wait until mid November to announce his plans. But he described watching with growing alarm as protesters shaking college campuses cleave his party and, in his view, abandon Jewish Americans.“There are people in my county who are solid progressive Democrats,” said Mr. Latimer, who is Catholic. “But they also support the State of Israel, and they are frustrated that there is an element of the left that doesn’t see the historic oppression of the Jewish people in the same light as we’ve seen oppression of other groups.”Hours after Mr. Bowman spoke on Friday at the rally — organized by Jewish Voice for Peace, a Jewish anti-Zionist group — Mr. Latimer stood at the bimah of Kol Ami in White Plains to offer his unequivocal support to the Jewish congregation. He did not mention Mr. Bowman but drew subtle distinctions.“It was not some event that happened because of years of something else,” he said of Hamas’s attack. “It was the express hatred of Hamas toward Jewish people because they do not want Jewish people to live.”Mr. Bowman, for his part, has yet to visit a synagogue since the attack. His office indicated it is planning a series of meetings focused on strategies to combat hate.Mr. Latimer appears to have picked up at least one influential Democratic supporter even before entering the race.In an interview, Mr. Engel said he had resisted publicly criticizing Mr. Bowman since his defeat so as not to look bitter. But he said his successor had been an “embarrassment” who was “particularly awful” on Israel.“George is a class act; he works hard and he would really attempt to represent the people,” he said. “Whereas Bowman is more comfortable demonstrating, picketing and pulling fire alarms.” More