The influential group of lawmakers has damaged its reputation as “conscience of the Congress” by staying silent on the Gaza genocide.
More than a year has passed since the International Court of Justice, the United Nations’ highest judicial body, issued its first order in the landmark case brought against Israel by South Africa, which contends that Israel has been committing acts of genocide in its war in Gaza. The ICJ found that “with respect to the right of the Palestinians in Gaza to be protected from acts of genocide…and the right of South Africa to seek Israel’s compliance,” South Africa’s case was “plausible.” Plausible: a restrained word that, in this context, fails to convey the harsh truth of the war Israel has been conducting. Palestinians are being starved, displaced, and slaughtered. More than 60,000 Palestinians have died, and 1.9 million are being brutally displaced, in a manner eerily similar to the dispossession of their forebears in the Nakba of 1948. By the end of September, according to a group of international food-aid organizations, more than 600,000 Palestinians would be experiencing famine, a completely preventable calamity marked by extreme food deprivation, acute malnutrition, and starvation-related deaths.
Since the International Court’s ruling, a growing number of genocide scholars and human-rights advocates have concluded that the genocide in Gaza is not merely plausible but actual. In early September, an overwhelming majority (86 percent) of the voting members in the International Association of Genocide Scholars voted to endorse a declaration that “Israel’s policies and actions in Gaza meet the legal definition of genocide in Article II of the United Nations Convention for the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide (1948).” The UN’s own Commission of Inquiry reached the same conclusion a few weeks later. Rabbis and Israeli human-rights groups—B’Tselem and Physicians for Human Rights—have testified that their own nation has betrayed the solemn pledge “Never again.” Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, and other groups have witnessed the appalling deaths, displacement, and famine in Gaza and issued the same indictment: Israel is committing acts of genocide.
Yet to this day, the Congressional Black Caucus—the long-standing corps of lawmakers dedicated to safeguarding civil rights (and known as “the conscience of Congress”)—has not issued a formal declaration condemning Israel; it hasn’t even produced a statement calling for a ceasefire. The CBC’s silence isn’t accidental: More than half of its current 61 members have been endorsed or funded by the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, the powerful US lobbying arm for Israel’s agenda. In the 2023–24 election cycle alone, AIPAC endorsed 26 of the caucus’s members, raising $4.6 million for them and another $3.5 million for Black Democratic candidates.
By accepting AIPAC’s endorsements and money, CBC members are, to use a biblical turn of phrase, selling their birthright for a mess of pottage. AIPAC readily sets aside the political concerns of the CBC in its efforts, spending lavishly on campaigns for GOP members of Congress targeting measures on racial equality, which totaled more than $17 million in the 2023–24 cycle.
AIPAC—together with its two political action committees, AIPAC PAC and United Democracy Project—has one purpose: defending Israel at all costs. “We support candidates…based on one criteria [sic]—their commitment to strengthening the US-Israel relationship,” AIPAC spokesperson Marshall Wittmann told Politico in 2024.
This single-issue litmus test means that the CBC is now beholden to a group that is far more concerned with the state of Israel than it is with the caucus’s core mission. And the CBC’s resulting silence not only damages its credibility but also jeopardizes its ability to advocate for the interests of Black Americans, many of whom recognize an ethnonationalist campaign to eliminate a people. One glaring example of this clash of interests is AIPAC’s targeting of Black lawmakers such as Cori Bush of Missouri, who lost her seat in 2024, for speaking out against Israel’s crimes against humanity.
Current Issue
This posture predates the start of the war on Gaza in 2023. During the 2022 midterms, AIPAC endorsed candidates with white-supremacist views and Republicans who refused to affirm that Joe Biden had won the 2020 election. The group also targeted Black Democratic lawmakers like Pennsylvania Representative Summer Lee, who spoke out against Israel’s occupation of the West Bank and Gaza. (Lee survived that AIPAC offensive, but now, like other congressional critics of Israel, she has to be prepared for AIPAC-funded primary challenges each time she runs for reelection.)
This has been AIPAC’s standard mode of intimidation in a political system ruled by money and the need to continually raise funds—a total of nearly $4 billion in the 2024 congressional cycle alone. Over that same period, more than 80 percent of lawmakers in Congress received money from AIPAC. What has rendered the Democratic Party such an impotent voice in combating the Gaza genocide, in other words, is a matter of fundraising math. A single-issue lobby reliant on strong financial backing from GOP donors has successfully managed to keep Democratic critics of Israel out of Congress.
As one example, look at what happened to Jamaal Bowman. In May 2023, while serving as a Democratic representative from New York, Bowman cosponsored a resolution seeking to ensure that US funds to Israel would not be used to harm Palestinian children. This would seem an uncontroversial aim—but not for AIPAC and its allied PACs. “Our ancestors were enslaved and endured the Black codes, Jim Crow, and housing discrimination,” Bowman said in an interview with The Nation. “As people who come from that, we have the moral authority to push back on AIPAC’s agenda. We are against genocide. We are against the starvation of children. We are against harming innocent people in any context.”
But Bowman learned the cost of speaking truth to the spending power of AIPAC. “When you go against one of their pieces of legislation, depending on what it is, they will e-mail you, relentlessly call you, relentlessly protest outside of your office, and stop you from even being able to do your job,” he continued. And this coordinated campaign was merely a prelude. In the 2023–24 election cycle, AIPAC spent $100 million—much of it raised from Republican megadonors—targeting Democrats it deemed hostile to Israel. That included an unprecedented outlay of $15 million in a single House race by the group in its successful primary challenge against Bowman. He was replaced on the Democratic ticket by the AIPAC-endorsed former Westchester County executive George Latimer, a white candidate with a record of racist remarks.
Bowman was not alone. Pro-Israel groups spent millions to defeat other Black members of Congress, including Bush and Lee as well as Maryland Representative Donna Edwards. These CBC members all championed Medicare for All, expanded affordable housing, and other initiatives that would directly benefit Black communities. Lee is the only CBC member in that cohort of Israel critics who’s still in office.
The 2024 purge represented a dramatic upsurge in the group’s battle against Black progressives. Records indicate that AIPAC did not spend any money against Bush or Bowman during the 2022 elections. After Bush sponsored a resolution in October 2023 that called for de-escalation and a ceasefire in Gaza, AIPAC spent $8.6 million to replace her on the Democratic ticket with Wesley Bell, who abandoned his bid to become Missouri’s first Black senator in order to supplant Bush in the House. According to OpenSecrets, spending against Bush in 2022 only reached $170,602—which means that AIPAC boosted anti-Bush and pro-opposition spending by nearly 5,000 percent in the 2024 cycle. AIPAC’s anti-Bush and pro-Bell cash offensive also worked out to four times the $2 million that the progressive PAC Justice Democrats contributed to Bush’s primary campaign and anti-Bell efforts.
Progressive organizations urged Hakeem Jeffries, the CBC’s highest-ranking member in the House of Representatives and the Democratic minority leader, to intervene against AIPAC’s campaign to defeat House critics of Israel. But Jeffries and the CBC’s seven-person leadership team said nothing as pro-Israel interests primaried its members. It’s not hard to see why: Jeffries and every member of the current CBC leadership have received money from the pro-Israel lobby—and AIPAC is endorsing Jeffries, as well as five of the seven members of the CBC leadership, in the upcoming 2026 midterms. (The two members of the CBC’s leadership not endorsed by AIPAC are Louisiana Representative Troy Carter and California Representative Sydney Kamlager-Dove. Kamlager-Dove nonetheless garnered the endorsement of the Democratic Majority for Israel, a pro-Israel PAC that spent $1.1 million to oust Bowman and Bush.)
Jeffries and all seven members of the CBC’s leadership voted to send military aid to Israel; none cosponsored any bills or resolutions to limit such aid or block US arms sales. (Four of the six CBC members who currently serve on the House Foreign Affairs Committee have a similar record of eloquent silence on Israel’s relentless war on Gaza and US support for it.)
The brute fundraising logic here means that the CBC members who hold the most political weight are muzzled by AIPAC money. So when Bowman, for example, began to dissent from the caucus’s party line on Israel, he was isolated from the support of Congress’s most powerful coalition of Black legislators.
Bowman was not always on AIPAC’s enemies list. Indeed, AIPAC set out to recruit him at the beginning of his political career. “Even before I was a viable candidate, before there was any polling that had me within 20, 30 points, AIPAC had reached out to me for a meeting,” Bowman recalled. “But they didn’t reach out to me through AIPAC. They came through a very well-regarded organization in New York City called 100 Black Men.”
Bowman agreed to meet with a representative of 100 Black Men, believing that the discussion would involve the group’s mission of collaborating with political leaders to realize meaningful gains for the Black community. “I told him clearly, ‘I don’t want to meet with you and talk about AIPAC,’” Bowman said. “He agreed to that. We met and had a long conversation, but at the end of the conversation, he still gave me a packet of information to take with me about AIPAC. And I’m sure they reach out to all promising candidates across the country to try to get them to support AIPAC’s agenda before they even get to office.”
AIPAC appeals to Black candidates by exploiting the proud tradition of Jewish American support for the civil-rights movement. But that display of moral and political solidarity was not a covenant with Black Americans to turn a blind eye to apartheid or genocide.
“I’ve heard it before to my face,” Bowman said: “‘We were there for you. We were there for you during the civil-rights movement. We were there for you during the Black Lives Matter movement. Be there for us.’”
The Israel lobby’s support for Black lawmakers has always rested on their uncritical backing of Israel. On January 30, 1972, Representative Charles Diggs, chair of what was then a 13-member caucus, announced plans for a national Black political convention to take place March 10–12 in Gary, Indiana, “to identify and ratify [a] national black political agenda for 1972 and beyond.”
More than 10,000 Black Americans—Black nationalists, intellectuals, civil-rights groups, and the CBC—met in Gary and published a 55-page “National Black Agenda” containing resolutions and recommendations for measures to promote Black equality and racial justice.
Debate swirled around several measures considered for the platform, including economic empowerment, the possible formation of a third party representing Black Americans, and whether the agenda should endorse busing to achieve integration in public schools. But the contentious debate devolved into irreparable rupture when it came to the question of Israel and Palestine. Black nationalists demanded a resolution to cut US aid to Israel, return Palestinian lands, and affirm Palestinian self-determination, but members of the CBC recoiled. Facing pressure from Jewish organizations, the CBC denounced the resolution, affirmed its support for Israel, and refused to endorse the “National Black Agenda.” Instead, the caucus drafted its own platform, which plotted a decidedly moderate course, especially in foreign policy. One year after its inception, the Congressional Black Caucus chose alliance with the Israel lobby over the support for Palestinians advocated by politically independent pro-Black organizations—a choice that continues to define the CBC’s politics today.
It’s true that the Democratic Party writ large was fiercely pro-Israel throughout the postwar years—in fact, it was a Democrat, Senator Henry “Scoop” Jackson of Washington, who was the political godfather of the belligerently Zionist neoconservative movement. Yet even in that context, the CBC’s staunch support for Israel is striking—particularly given its self-appointed mission of serving as the conscience of Congress and its principled opposition to the Vietnam War.
During Israel’s successive military campaigns in the 1980s—including the invasion of Lebanon in 1982 and the suppression of the Palestinian intifada in 1987—CBC members reliably voted to continue sending US aid and military support to the Jewish state. After a 1987 US State Department report found that Israel had violated the UN ban on providing arms to South Africa’s apartheid regime, some CBC members did start to denounce, in scathing terms, America’s lavish support for Israel and its status as the leading recipient of US aid. In response, AIPAC brokered a deal with CBC leaders to prevent members of the caucus from “singl[ing] out” Israel for selling military systems to South Africa “on a regular basis.”
In 1990, Michigan Democratic Representative and CBC member George Crockett signed a February “Dear Colleague” letter urging support for Kansas Senator Robert Dole’s proposal to cut the $3 billion in aid that the United States was sending to Israel each year by 5 percent. Ten of the CBC’s 24 members signed the letter, including Ron Dellums of California. (Dellums later had a change of heart after meeting with AIPAC representatives.) When the CBC presented an alternative budget to Congress in March of that year, Israel’s full $3 billion allotment remained intact.
The dynamic that took hold between the CBC and AIPAC during those early years hasn’t changed, but now it’s enforced through astronomical amounts of campaign money from the lobby and the threat of political retaliation via primary challenges. As of this writing, only 14 of the 57 House members of the CBC have cosponsored HR 3565, a bill to limit defense materiel and services to Israel. (Not surprisingly, just one of those 14 was endorsed by AIPAC.) And just six members of the CBC cosponsored HJ Res. 83, a resolution “providing for congressional disapproval of the proposed foreign military sale to Israel of certain defense articles and services.”
This track record stands out in especially high relief against the CBC’s relative outspokenness on other genocides and atrocities. The caucus spearheaded the legislative fight against South African apartheid, sponsoring more than 15 bills opposing the white-supremacist regime there. (The last of these measures was cosponsored by all 20 members of the caucus.) The CBC’s anti-apartheid bills called for economic sanctions on South Africa, including bans on new investments, while requiring the president to report on progress toward the dismantling of South Africa’s apartheid regime.
In 2005, 41 of the CBC’s 43 members cosponsored the Darfur Genocide Accountability Act. In 2019, 50 of the CBC’s 55 House members voted to recognize the Armenian genocide. Most recently, 10 of the CBC’s 57 House members agreed that Russia has committed acts of genocide in Ukraine; by comparison, only seven went on the record to acknowledge Israel’s acts of genocide in Gaza.
Yet in July 2023, 44 of the CBC’s 51 members voted in favor of a resolution declaring that “Israel is not an apartheid state.” (Bowman and Bush were among the six who voted against the resolution.) When it comes to Palestine, the CBC has consistently faltered in its support for human rights and its repudiation of genocide. The pattern is unmistakable: Israel operates beyond the radar of the CBC’s own conscience.
This double standard cannot be understood apart from the US role in shaping the definition of genocide—a role that Israel is now leveraging in its efforts to suppress the opposition to its genocidal war in Gaza. During the drafting of the 1948 Genocide Convention, the US State Department insisted that the United Nations include an “intent” clause so that lynching, Jim Crow laws, and systematic racial terror could not be prosecuted as acts of genocide under international law. That way, America could claim that government officials were not intentionally engaged in acts of genocide, since states had laws against lynching and murder.
These efforts to gin up an elastic definition of genocide that wouldn’t apply to the United States were successful. In 1951, the Civil Rights Congress, a racial-justice group with ties to the Communist Party, published We Charge Genocide, a 240-page document that cited more than 500 examples in which the US government violated Articles II and III of the Genocide Convention. The CRC’s 1951 campaign to appeal to the United Nations was an attempt to finish the work of the NAACP, which in 1947 unsuccessfully petitioned the UN for legal redress for the United States’ denial of basic human rights for its African American population. When the NAACP submitted its petition, genocide had not been codified in international law. In 1951, the CRC attempted to do what still has yet to be done: legally hold America accountable for its own crimes. But the United States thwarted this effort by orchestrating a smear campaign to discredit the CRC’s document, ensuring that it never was taken up for a vote at the UN.
The unresolved internal tensions fueling the Congressional Black Caucus’s conspiracy of silence on the Gaza genocide came to the fore once again during Senator Cory Booker’s 25-hour speech on the Senate floor in March. Booker’s performance broke the previous filibuster record set by white supremacist Strom Thurmond’s day-long speech against civil-rights legislation in 1957. Booker’s speech cataloged nearly every abuse against democratic governance and constitutional order perpetrated by the second Trump administration—but contained no mention of its uncritical support for Israel’s apartheid regime, or its continued financial and military backing of the genocide in Gaza.
As it turns out, the politics of genocide also supplied the backdrop for Thurmond’s 24-hour filibuster. Six years before he rose to block the civil-rights bill, the CRC had named him in We Charge Genocide. The group charged that Thurmond had violated Article III of the Genocide Convention by engaging in direct and public incitement to commit acts of genocide against Black Americans. And Thurmond’s filibuster did more than stall the 1957 Civil Rights Act. It also delayed the swearing-in of Wisconsin Senator William Proxmire—the man who, over the course of 19 years, would give 3,211 speeches on the Senate floor urging the United States to ratify the Genocide Convention, which would make genocide a federal crime in the United States. Thurmond, who died in 2003, also opposed the Genocide Convention Implementation Act and sought to obstruct its passage—a natural extension of his white-supremacist politics.
Unlike Thurmond, Booker was not trying to eradicate official recognitions of genocides altogether, just looking to evade the political demands of acknowledging the one in Gaza. That, however, isn’t a moral distinction worth making. Booker’s evasion, like much of the rest of the CBC leadership’s stance on this defining issue of basic justice and human rights, represents the outcome of a cold cash transaction. The most prominent CBC member in the Senate, Booker has received $871,313 from pro-Israel PACs and individual donors during his time in office. And once again, they got what they paid for: Booker voted against Senator Bernie Sanders’s March measure to prevent the sale of thousands of 1,000-pound bombs to Israel, along with the guidance kits that would turn them into precision-guided weapons. (The three other CBC members in the Senate supported Sanders’s resolution.)
When Booker broke Thurmond’s record in March, he framed it as a triumph over the ghosts of white supremacy: It “just really irked me,” he said, “that…the longest speech, on our great Senate floor, was someone who was trying to stop people like me from being in the Senate.”
Yet Booker left out a big part of the story: Thurmond’s tirade was not simply against the principle of Black political representation or the Civil Rights Act of 1957, but against the notion that the suffering of Black Americans deserved any recognition or intervention from the federal government. In his own marathon speech, Booker never once uttered the word genocide in relation to Gaza. That silence unwittingly extended the logic behind the very tradition he sought to conquer.
This paradox is emblematic of the Congressional Black Caucus today. The CBC claims the mantle of civil-rights advocacy in Congress. On Palestine, however, where famine, displacement, and mass killing have earned the Gaza siege the designation of a genocide, it has largely been mute.
This omission raises a pivotal question: Whose “conscience” does the CBC actually represent? Not that of Black Americans—who, according to survey data, sympathize with Palestinians. A December 2023 Carnegie poll showed that 95 percent of Black Americans “rejected the idea of showing ‘unwavering support’ for Israel.” Black Americans disapprove of Benjamin Netanyahu at a higher rate than any other demographic voting bloc and believe, by a 10 percent margin of the sample size, that “Israel’s attacks on Gaza are unjustified and harm too many innocent Palestinians.” Nearly half of Black Americans believe that Israel is committing genocide against the Palestinian people. A 2024 Carnegie poll showed that 68 percent of Black Americans would have liked to see the United States call for an immediate and permanent ceasefire in Gaza.
Two years into the Gaza genocide, there has been some progress: More than half of the members of the Congressional Black Caucus now support a ceasefire. But while a ceasefire is a step in the right direction, it will do nothing to end the occupation that Palestinians continue to suffer under. A ceasefire resolution that does not name genocide does not reflect a politics grounded in conscience—it is an expedient political cover of the lowest order.
There are words we inherit like heirlooms, words that come to us wrapped in the pain of centuries. Genocide is one of those words. It does not simply encompass death on a mass scale. It evokes the auction block, the terrorist legacy of Jim Crow, and the smoke that curled above the camps in Nazi-occupied Europe. What is happening before our eyes in Gaza belongs on the same tragic ledger. And the leaders of the CBC—claiming to be the descendants of a history that their ancestors paid for in blood—are refusing to call Israel’s crimes by their true name.
This is the moment when the CBC can present itself as the conscience of Congress with honor—by leading the effort to guide this country through a key moral test of the 21st century. It’s true that demanding an end to US aid to Israel on the grounds that it’s advancing a genocide would likely expose legislators to yet more retaliation from AIPAC and the Israel lobby. But it’s equally true that the CBC must meet the genuine challenge of this historical moment. Adopting a position of unyielding defiance to Israel and its genocide in Gaza would lead both the CBC and the Democratic Party in a new direction that both organizations desperately need to follow. Instead of trying to wish away the atrocities committed by Israel, the Congressional Black Caucus could build and lead a multiracial coalition of resistance to a lobby that betrays the caucus’s mission, besieges its members, and injures its constituents. By resisting with a unified voice, the leaders of the CBC can make a difference. It is time to stand up.
More from The Nation
Mainstream media is ignoring the fact that the late sex trafficker was a power broker who shaped global policy.
Anti-Blackness and race hate increasingly seem to be a rite of passage for white folks, no matter where they end up on the political spectrum.
As strand by strand of the safety net is plucked away until it’s shredded, aging in America is a fearful and destructive business. And Donald Trump doesn’t care.
After fumbling the cause of DC statehood, Democrats now appear helpless as Trump sends troops into the city.
The story ofhis landmark case reminds us of how powerful a popular front of socialists and liberals can be in protecting our civil liberties.
