Tag: israel

Israel Breached Iranian Airspace This Weekend but Iran Chose Not To Respond. Why?

Much of the Middle East was on edge this past weekend, fearing that President Donald Trump and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu would restart the Iran war. Thankfully, hostilities didn’t resume, but it’s not because of a lack of effort. According to Iranian sources, Israeli fighter jets did breach Iranian airspace, but Tehran surprisingly chose not to respond. Today’s meeting in Tehran between Saudi, Turkish, Pakistani, and Iranian officials is partly why Iran showed restraint.

Israel has made no secret of its desire and plans to restart the Iran war, but on a larger scale than previous rounds. Earlier this month, Israeli Defense Minister Israel Katz told Israeli TV that Israel is ready to strike Iran with “full force” and that this time around it will target Iranian energy infrastructure to “set Iran back 40 years, to the age of darkness and to the Stone Age.”

Over the weekend, news broke of an alleged rift between Netanyahu and the IDF Chief of Staff Lt. Gen. Eyal Zamir over a proposed military operation against Iran ahead of Israel’s election, with Zamir pushing back over its timing and potential impact on the Israeli elections tomorrow. The Israelis had also conducted numerous mock practice attacks against Iran in Iraqi airspace in the past week.

All these developments added to an explosive situation where war was just one tiny, dumb decision away. Tehran had, of course, also hinted that it would no longer wait to be attacked, but strike preemptively against the U.S. and Israel if it felt strikes against its territory were imminent.

Which is why Iran’s decision not to strike after Israeli fighter jets allegedly breached its airspace is all the more surprising. But sources in Tehran tell me that a variety of factors prompted this Iranian decision, rooted in two key Iranian assessments: that time is still on Iran’s side and that Israel is trying to goad Iran into striking first to get the war started at a moment in which it is still not a foregone conclusion whether Trump has opted for war or not.

The Iranians have made clear that they will respond ferociously to Israeli and American strikes and that Saudi Arabia in particular will likely face significant destabilization in such a scenario, in addition to other Gulf Cooperation Council states. The irony, of course, is that such a response would serve Israel quite well. The more Iran retaliates against GCC states, particularly Saudi Arabia, the more these Arab states will feel compelled to turn to Israel for support and protection, undermining Iran’s longer-term goal of inviting these states to join Iran in forming a security arrangement in the Middle East.

In that scenario, the dream of an Israeli-Arab anti-Iran bloc like the Abraham Accord could be revived. Consequently, Tehran has to weigh its options very carefully and not rush into responding to Israeli provocations, as it could amount to a trap. It appears that Israel’s maneuvers in Iraq ultimately convinced Tehran that Israel was bluffing and that an Iranian response would be counterproductive. For now, that assessment may have been correct.

Another factor was today’s meeting of Saudi, Pakistani, and Turkish officials in Tehran. Iranian media and officials have touted the meeting as a clear sign that American efforts to isolate Iran or exclude it from regional security discussions have failed. For all three countries to come to Tehran, on relatively short notice, is seen as a win in Tehran — a victory that would have been jeopardized if Iran responded to Israeli provocations over the weekend.

Contrary to speculation, the meeting was not a stepping stone toward inviting Iran into the Mecca Pact. Rather, it was driven by a more urgent matter: the Ansar Allah-Saudi war that is not only destabilizing Yemen, but also now Saudi Arabia itself. (Ansar Allah is often referred to as the “Houthis.”)

But the content-less statement from the Tehran meeting reflects how difficult this issue will be to resolve. From the Iranian perspective, Riyadh has committed the same mistake as Trump: starting a war that it cannot end on the battlefield and is unwilling to end at the negotiating table.

In Trump’s case, the hold-up is the lifting of the Persian Gulf blockade. In Riyadh’s case, it is the lifting of the air blockade on Yemen. Tehran is willing to help, a source in Iran tells me, but it won’t challenge Ansar Allah’s condition of lifting the air blockade, just as Tehran won’t budge on the lifting of Trump’s blockade.

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WHAT ISRAEL WANTS FROM IRAN

I have been reliably told by American and Israeli sources that things are quietly happening in secret talks between Washington and Tehran as the economy in Iran continues to plummet and the only way forward for Iran’s leadership is to obtain a settlement focused on its nuclear program. Talk is cheap, but the current conversations have spurred some anxious Israelis with experience in military and nuclear activities to produce a position paper entitled “What an Air-Tight Nuclear Verification Regime in Iran Should Look Like.”

The existence and circulation of the paper to a small group of verification experts makes clear that the ongoing secret talks have profoundly distressed Israel, which is facing worldwide condemnation of its ongoing killings and abuses of Palestine civilians in Gaza and the West Bank that many call genocide. Israel remains convinced that zealots in Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps are secretly keeping the nuclear flame alive. The paper’s key point is that any newfound nuclear inspection regime “requires an unprecedented level of intrusiveness, far outstripping standard international safeguards.

“Because trust is nonexistent and Iran possesses deep technical knowledge and a history of covert sites,” the paper notes, “the regime must be built on the principle of absolute verification.” The normal verification procedures of the International Atomic Energy Agency that deal with declared nuclear material will no longer satisfy Israel. The Trump White House and Iran must go further and permit IAEA inspectors access to all information and locations. IAEA inspectors also must be given authority to access any nuclear site in Iran—military or civilian—within twenty-four hours “to prevent the sanitation of evidence.” In other words, there can be no cheating.

Another longstanding Israeli concern is the Iranian stockpile of uranium enriched to 60 percent known to be stored at various underground nuclear sites. The paper says the stockpile must either be completely blended down or shipped out of the country. (That condition indicates that Israel, despite its talk of a covert operation to find and remove or destroy the materials, has understood all along that such a mission would be impossible.)

I was given a copy of the paper, and I shared it with an American expert who found it to be a first-rate discussion of the technical and verification issues involved in shutting down Iran’s nuclear facilities. The paper does not, the American pointed out, deal with the political issues involved in preventing Iran from obtaining the bomb. Nonetheless, he added, speaking of the Israelis, “They’ve put something on the table.”

The Iranian regime, the American acknowledged, is now facing a collapse of institutions, including the IRGC. Many Iranian citizens are out of work, hungry, and financially desperate. He believes the population could soon be on the verge of open revolt that would not, as in earlier demonstrations, be subject to murderous retaliation from IRGC members because many in the rank and file are unpaid and demoralized. He noted that just this past weekend there were demonstrations throughout Iran, including in Tehran, by retirees and workers who, according to published reports, were protesting rising poverty and unpaid retirement funds. There was no intervention by the IRGC, although executions of dissidents are still being authorized by the Iranian judiciary.

The most recent round of talks between the United States and Iran have been far more substantial and technical than earlier discussions involving Jared Kushner, the president’s son-in-law, and Steve Witkoff, a New York real estate mogul and longtime friend of the president. Neither of those envoys knows much about nuclear weapons.

Iran is still capable of producing and firing drones and rockets, but its economy, as has been widely reported, is in shambles. I’ve been told that Iran’s longtime trucking and smuggling outlets for its oil to Pakistan, Afghanistan, Iraq, and Syria are no longer functioning as before.

The American expert cautioned that progress with Tehran while “great” is very limited. He said he believes the White House “is not going to start a ‘we won’ election ploy.” He reminded me that the Iranians had made similar promises on nonproliferation to the Biden administration “and then proceeded with weapons-grade refinement capability. No let-up this time because the current economic pressure is working. We are not going to ease the pressure until it’s in the bag.” (After alluding in a speech Monday night in Nebraska to Iran’s ability to “take out” Los Angeles and San Diego if it developed a nuclear bomb, Trump said that the ongoing war is “going to end very soon.”)

The American said that “the Israelis want verification negotiations to fail to avoid settling short of obliteration of the whole of Iran’s weapon program.” The visceral Israeli fear of a US settlement with Iran that falls short of that objective, unlikely as that may be in the Trump era, explains the production of what the official called Israeli’s “super requirement list” of safeguards, laid out in the paper cited above, for any nuclear agreement with Iran.

The conflict between Israel’s security demands and the international demand for the opening of the Strait of Hormuz makes for complex diplomacy, the American told me. The first step is to define and respond to the Iranian view of “peaceful development” that would deal with nuclear energy for domestic use. At the same time, Israel possesses dozens of nuclear weapons that it has never officially acknowledged, although its reactor in Dimona is widely known to have begun producing warheads by the late 1960s.

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U.S. Envoy Tells Israel to Stop Syria Operations as IDF Pushes Deeper Into Quneitra

U.S. Special Presidential Envoy for Syria and Iraq Tom Barrack was asked at a security forum in Qatar on October 20 whether Washington should press Israel to halt its military operations in Syria. He replied, “It’s time to stop it,” though he expressed uncertainty about whether the United States should intervene. The following day, Barrack met Ahmed al-Sharaa and Foreign Minister Asaad al-Shaibani at the People’s Palace in Damascus.

Between October 22 and 23, Israel Defense Forces (IDF) units entered al-Hurriya in Quneitra province and searched homes. They also demolished an abandoned house near al-Hamidiyah, shelled areas around the village and the Bir Ajam woodland, and arrested a shepherd near Hadar. Other Israeli forces, accompanied by a bulldozer and several military vehicles, advanced west of al-Zaroura farm and closed several roads.

In neighboring Daraa province, Israeli troops shot and killed Muath Salama Al-Baeer, a man with Down syndrome, during an overnight raid on the village of Jamla on October 22. According to the Syrian Arab News Agency (SANA), Israeli forces entered the village’s eastern neighborhood and deployed snipers on residential rooftops. Residents told the Associated Press that Al-Baeer was unarmed when he was shot.

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Netanyahu’s Crypto Plan to Bypass Sanctions Sparks Political Firestorm in Israel

Israel’s prime minister has proposed developing an alternative economic system using cryptocurrency and blockchain technology to circumvent potential international banking sanctions. The announcement has triggered fierce opposition from the Bank of Israel, economists, high-tech executives and political rivals, raising questions about Israel’s economic future and its relationship with Western financial institutions.

Netanyahu’s Proposal: Preparing for an Economy Under Sanctions

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has ignited a major political and economic controversy after announcing that his government is exploring the use of cryptocurrency and blockchain technology to circumvent potential international banking sanctions.

In an interview broadcast a couple of days ago, Netanyahu warned that Israel could face increasingly restrictive financial measures and said he had already instructed officials to prepare a plan for an alternative economic system.

“You need to prepare an economy that can circumvent them,” Netanyahu said, referring to possible banking sanctions. When asked whether blockchain technology could provide a solution, he responded that it was one of the options being considered and confirmed that he had requested a plan.

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How Israel Used AI to Relentlessly Murder Palestinian Journalists and Their Families in Their Homes

It’s worse than we thought. In research that I have undertaken over the last few weeks based on information compiled by the Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) about Palestinian journalists killed by Israel since October 2023, I’ve discovered that, of the 68 Palestinian journalists killed by Israel in the first three months of their genocidal campaign, the majority were targeted and killed while at home with their families. My research provides startling confirmation, never unearthed before, of the widespread use of Israel’s AI program, dubbed “Where’s Daddy?”, specifically for journalists, relentlessly targeting them when they were at home, with a complete disregard both for their required protection as civilians under international humanitarian law, and for the often extensive “collateral damage” inflicted on their families.

There is no doubt that Israel’s sustained genocidal assault on the largely civilian population of the Gaza Strip, now in its fourth year, has been the deadliest military conflict for journalists in human history.

As the journalist Nick Turse reported for Brown University’s “Costs of War” project in April 2025, “The war in Gaza has, since October 7, 2023, killed more journalists than the US Civil War, World Wars I and II, the Korean War, the Vietnam War (including the conflicts in Cambodia and Laos), the wars in Yugoslavia in the 1990s and 2000s, and the post-9/11 war in Afghanistan, combined.”

Under international humanitarian law, as most noticeably enshrined in the Geneva Conventions of 1949 and their Additional Protocols of 1977, “Civilian journalists engaged in professional missions in areas of armed conflict must be respected and protected as long as they are not taking a direct part in hostilities.” (emphasis added).

The State of Israel, however, has nothing but contempt for international humanitarian law. As far as they are concerned, everyone who works for a media outlet that is, in any way, aligned with the military wing of Hamas, Palestinian Islamic Jihad, or any other militant faction in Gaza, is a terrorist, and can be targeted and killed, and anyone who works as a journalist but has previously had any suspected involvement with any of these military factions in any kind of capacity can also be targeted and killed.

Israel doesn’t recognize that, by the same application of its lawless logic, almost every journalist in Israel could be regarded similarly by the Palestinians, because military service is mandatory in Israel. Most crucially, however, it fails to recognize that, if an individual has, in the past, been a part of a Palestinian military faction in any way, that doesn’t apply endlessly as a justification for their targeted killing. If they don a press vest and begin reporting, international humanitarian law makes it clear, as noted above, that they cannot be regarded as a legitimate military target unless they are specifically “taking a direct part in hostilities.”

In a cynical, devious and sustained effort to erase these distinctions, Israel has targeted and killed journalists for what it regards as “suspicious activity” — using drones to secure footage or photos, for example, or using vantage points on buildings, both for the overview they provide, but also, often, to secure transmission signals in an environment in which internet and mobile phone signals are often notoriously unreliable.

It has also, increasingly, resorted to black propaganda, alleging, almost entirely without providing evidence, that the journalists it has killed were not journalists at all, but were military operatives masquerading as journalists, and it has sometimes targeted these journalists directly, texting or calling them to tell them to stop their work or threatening them that, if they don’t stop, they or their families will be targeted and killed.

One reason why Israel feels empowered to so comprehensively erase the distinctions between combatants and civilians is because, since the 1990s, western governments (including the US in 1997, the EU in 2003, and the UK in 2021) have obligingly designed the whole of Hamas as a terrorist organization — not just its military wing, but also the whole of the civilian administrative government in Gaza.

Since October 7, 2023, this has allowed to Israel to claim that, for example, doctors and medical staff can — if a devious enough excuse can be invented — be regarded as terrorists because they work for the Ministry of Health. This is a western-approved betrayal of the absolute prohibition on targeting doctors or hospitals, which Israel has thoroughly embraced, making risible and never-proven claims that the hospitals were Hamas control and command centres, and that the doctors, like the journalists, were not actually doctors at all, but were military operatives pretending to be doctors.

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Israel demolishes home of Lebanese journalist whose viral film exposed pager attack

The occupying Israeli army targeted a prominent Lebanese journalist when they pillaged and demolished his painstakingly-constructed family home located outside Israel’s so-called “buffer zone” in southern Lebanon. Was it retaliation for his widely-viewed documentary on Israel’s notorious pager attacks?

Israeli soldiers have looted and demolished the family home of Radwan Mortada, a prominent Lebanese investigative journalist who directed the recent viral Al Jazeera 360 documentary “The Trap.” The film exposes the surreptitious network and planning behind Israel’s notorious pager attack, which left hundreds of Lebanese citizens wounded and maimed, and has become one of the channel’s most-watched in recent history.

Israel’s destruction of Mortada family home on October 17 has drawn condemnation from at least one international press freedom group, the Committee to Protect Journalists. On October 21, the organization issued a statement declaring that it “strongly condemns the Israeli military’s demolition of journalist Radwan Mortada’s family home in southern Lebanon. Just three weeks earlier, Mortada released an Al Jazeera documentary on the Israeli 2024 pager attack. In the days leading up to the demolition, Israeli soldiers launched a sound bomb, a tank tore down the entrance, and soldiers looted personal belongings. CPJ fears this destruction is in retaliation for Mortada’s work, marking another dangerous violation of international law and disregard for the press.”

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Benjamin Netanyahu Signals Massive West Bank Operation After Hebron Attack — Days Before Election

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu announced Friday that Israel is preparing a massive military operation in Judea and Samaria, also known as the West Bank, on a scale not seen since the 1967 Six-Day War, after Palestinian terrorists killed two Israeli soldiers near Hebron, just four days before Israel’s national election.

Speaking after a security assessment, Netanyahu said the planned operation would be unprecedented in scope.

“The defense minister and I have overseen the planning of a very extensive IDF operation in Judea and Samaria — on a scale not seen since the Six-Day War,” he said.

“The IDF is ready to carry it out, and we will determine the timing, but it is coming.”

The announcement followed a deadly shooting at a temporary military checkpoint near Yehuda Junction outside Hebron, where two Palestinian terrorists opened fire on Israeli soldiers Friday morning.

The attack killed Staff Sgt. Ron Yonatan Roytman, 23, of Ashkelon, and Sgt. Yuval Shai Svilem, 20, of Hod Hasharon, both members of the Israel Defense Forces’ (IDF) 775th Ari Battalion. Three additional soldiers were wounded.

Israeli forces killed both attackers following a firefight lasting more than 20 minutes.

The IDF’s preliminary investigation found that the terrorists apparently intended to attack Israeli civilians along a nearby highway but instead opened fire on soldiers after encountering the checkpoint.

The military said the attackers were carrying substantial quantities of ammunition, suggesting they had planned a larger assault.

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How a Citizen Bought a Kidnapping From Israel’s Spy-for-Hire

On New Year’s Eve in 2023, on the Danish side of the border with Germany, two children stood near their father’s house watching fireworks. The boy was ten, his sister thirteen. A team of masked men in black stormed the house, beat the father to the ground, and took the two children. One of them pressed a distress button that summoned Danish police, who tracked the group as it moved on foot toward the border. When the children cried out, their captors taped their mouths. After thirty-five minutes they crossed into Germany and drove eight hundred kilometers south, and two days later the mother collected them at her home in Hamburg. The men who did this were not relatives and not street criminals. They were hired professionals, and somewhere there was a price.

The capabilities used that night, the watching, the fabrication of evidence, the seizure of a person and their removal across a frontier, once belonged to states alone. They have moved into private companies that sell them to private buyers, and the firms at the center of this case are Israeli, staffed by veterans of the country’s intelligence services. Reaching that market is not a matter of walking in off the street. It runs through insiders, the retired officers and officials who know which company does what, and in this instance the alleged broker was a former chief of German intelligence and the alleged organizer a former head of an Israeli security service. That is what should trouble a reader who will never meet a spy. The instruments of the state are available for purchase, and the people selling and brokering them are the same people who once wielded them on the public’s behalf.

Christina Block, 52, owns eight percent of the company her father built from a German steakhouse chain, and is worth hundreds of millions of euros. She married Stephan Hensel in 2005 and divorced him in 2014, and a long custody war followed over their two youngest children. German courts first granted custody to the father, then on appeal to Block. Denmark, where Hensel had settled with the children and which is the one European Union country not obliged to recognize another member state’s custody rulings, held its own hearings and decided the children would stay with him. By the account German prosecutors have put before the Hamburg court, the effort to get them back began in 2021 with Block’s partner, the sports journalist Gerhard Delling, and an early attempt to smear the father and his lawyer as pedophiles, which failed.

What the prosecution describes next is an escalation, and the exact wording matters. By spring 2023, prosecutors say, Block allegedly turned to an Israeli company called Cyber Cúpula Operations, which the same reporting describes as previously employed by the family for cyber protection, and asked its staff to “rescue” the children. Der Spiegel’s reporting puts the earlier retainer the same way, hedged, with the firm said to have been engaged by the Block business for information security. Prosecutors also say Block had earlier hired the same firm to smear her ex-husband, and German prosecutors allege a further attempt to frame him by planting a hard drive loaded with child-abuse material. Each of these is an allegation within the prosecution’s case rather than a finding, and every defendant denies involvement.

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Shadow at the Door: Death and Dying in Palestine

The recent death in my family underscored for me the devastating impact of personal grief, illuminating the deep loss and constant state of mortality that Palestinian families endure every day.

To be Palestinian is to carry an inherited archive of loss. After nearly a century of forced displacement, military occupation and relentless aggression at the hands of a brutal colonizer, death in Palestine has not been a quiet end at the close of life. It is an ever-present shadow weaved into the tapestry of daily existence.

Across generations, grief has been more than individual sorrow, an occasional isolated tragedy, it is an ongoing shared reality written into the collective memory of an entire people.  For Palestinians, Israeli colonization has stolen more than land; it has robbed them of their sovereignty over mourning, honoring and burying their loved ones in peace.

For most of the world, dying young is an unbearable disruption of the natural life cycle; for Palestinians, living under systemic hardship, surviving into old age is a rare exception rather than the norm.

From the traumatic dispossession and ethnic cleansing of the Nakba (the Catastrophe) in 1948, to the ongoing genocide and ecocide of Gaza, and military occupation of the West Bank, every Palestinian family has experienced violent loss.

Forcibly displaced from ancestral villages in their youth, grandparents passed down keys to homes that were either stolen or destroyed, along with memories of family members lost to Israeli aggression.  Their children in the West Bank continue to endure innumerable hardships and indignities under Israeli apartheid occupation.  And in Gaza, their descendants, surrounded by death and destruction and the ever-present threat of another Israeli attack, are struggling to survive.

Long before entering a classroom, the children of Palestine absorb the vocabulary of military attacks, martyrdom and survival.  The ceaseless threat of loss forces families to adapt to living with constant vigilance that is passed down from parent to child.

To truly grasp the nature of Palestinian grief, is to see that profound anguish and resentment exists alongside an extraordinary reverence for life and human dignity.

A century of national suffering has made agony a constant in daily life. In Palestine, this collective sorrow has taken on uniquely powerful, visible traditions of survival and shared resistance.

When burials are possible, entire communities come together to bare witness, offer support and share the weight of collective trauma. Oral histories, street art, literature and music carefully document the names, faces, and stories of the dead.  Where physical spaces and lives are continually erased, memory becomes the ultimate sanctuary for preservation.

Writing, thinking, or speaking about death in Palestine means facing a reality where grief is both an individual sorrow and a shared national identity. In the face of continuous, devastating loss, the simple act of remembering those who have died becomes a powerful affirmation of their humanity.

The Palestinian ethos of Sumud (steadfastness) embodies this dynamic:  a collective determination to remain on the land and to defy every Israeli effort to erase their existence – to live is to resist.

Grief in Palestine is non-linear.  It has had no end.  It does not move from denial to anger, bargaining, depression and finally acceptance.  It does not follow an inevitable straight path, because the iniquitous conditions that produce it remain unaddressed.

From the graves of forced exile to the countless deaths in Palestine today, the international community has consistently failed to take decisive action. Watching Palestine die is more than witnessing a genocide; it is an indictment of the global conscience.  The perpetuation of statelessness and oppressive occupation ensures that each new generation will be born into a world where untimely death remains a shadow at the door.

The abiding refusal of the Palestinian people to be subjugated or forgotten is a testament to their inspiring steadfastness. It serves as a powerful example that the pursuit of true freedom is a sacred generational responsibility, worth defending at all costs.

Palestinian endurance is far from passive survival; it is an active, daily reclamation that refuses to let their history be rewritten or justice silenced. Across generations, through the relentless wear of exile, displacement and loss, the Palestinian spirit remains anchored to the land and in an unyielding insistence on dignity and self-determination.  In every quiet act of preservation and every resounding cry for liberation, they demonstrate that while Israeli brute force and unbridled cruelties inflicts profound suffering, it can never erase a people whose identity, hope and humanity burns so undauntedly bright.

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Increasingly Toxic To Candidates, Pro-Israel AIPAC Retreats From Endorsements And Direct Donations

In the latest indication that a sea change is underway where US support of Israel is concerned, the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) on Wednesday announced it will stop endorsing political candidates and directly contributing to their campaigns and PACs. The move reflects a new political environment in which the receipt of AIPAC money and endorsements is now being exploited as a major political liability.

AIPAC isn’t abandoning the political battlefield, but is choosing to emphasize stealthy means of influencing election outcomes. AIPAC will continue operating its cryptically-named United Democracy Project independent super PAC. That entity is prohibited from coordinating with candidates or giving them money, but can spend a limitless amount to promote favored candidates or undermine their opponents. 

First reported by Jewish Insider, the major policy shift was disclosed in a letter to AIPAC members. “[The current election cycle is] one of the most challenging environments in recent memory,” wrote the group’s president, Bernie Kaminetsky, and three other officials. “We assess that the challenges we are confronting will continue to grow in the years ahead.”

Earlier this year, AIPAC suffered an expensive, high-profile loss in the Michigan Democratic Senate primary. The group’s super PAC spent more than $30 million on Rep. Haley Stevens, only to see her lose to Abdul El-Sayed, a fierce critic of the US-Israel relationship. In recent days, El-Sayed said that, contrary to the long-running characterization, “It’s time for us to realize that Israel is not actually our friend...an ally that takes your money to push you into wars you shouldn’t be fighting is not an ally.” Recent polls show El-Sayed with a 2-point lead over GOP nominee and former Rep. Mike Rogers.

On the other hand, AIPAC also participated in an important victory, as the group helped oust Kentucky Republican Rep. Thomas Massie in the GOP primary. Thanks to money spent by AIPAC’s United Democracy Project, the Republican Jewish Coalition, and the MAGA Kentucky PAC — which was created solely to oust Massie and funded by non-Kentuckian Jewish billionaires Miriam Adelson, Paul Singer and John Paulsen — the contest was the most expensive primary in US House history. Massie earned the Israel lobby’s wrath by opposing foreign aid to any country, voting against pro-Israel legislation and condemning Trump’s wars on Iran.

AIPAC has been increasingly perceived as a villainous participant in US politics, and social media has helped put the group in an unwanted spotlight. One key contributor to that reputational decline is Track AIPAC, which was launched in 2024. Tapping federal disclosures, Track AIPAC’s website and social media accounts publicize the extent to which candidates are taking money from AIPAC and other pro-Israeli political forces. It also publicizes how legislators vote on Israel-related legislation.

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