A senator is out One of 100 members of the upper house of the 120th Congress was elected on a loud campaign promise to end U.S. complicity in Israel’s Gaza genocide.
Abdul-Sayed will move into a new Democratic majority by inspiring his supporters with pro-Palestinian pledges, something rarely heard among U.S. Senate contenders. As a first-term senator, he lacked seniority on the committees to which he was assigned. While his criticism of U.S.-Israel relations has proven extremely popular with voters in polls and polls, the same cannot be said for most of his soon-to-be colleagues.
“This is going to be a battle,” said Beth Miller, political advocacy director for Jewish Voice for Peace Action, which supports El-Sayed’s campaign. “The Democratic establishment has failed to take steps to support Palestine in the past when it comes to taking control of the situation. So this is about making sure that they are now finally starting to listen to the vast majority of their supporters.”
El-Sayed’s campaign marks the first time a Jewish-led anti-Zionist group has backed a Senate campaign. Pro-Palestinian lobbying groups such as JVP Action have been pushing for years for legislation to block arms transfers to Israel, allied with a small but growing number of left-leaning House members. The group helped craft the Block the Bombs Act introduced by Illinois Democrat Delia Ramirez, which garnered 82 co-sponsors and became a touchstone for support for Palestine in some Democratic primary campaigns.
Reaching consensus on a bill in the Senate is harder, but the upper chamber provides stronger leverage. Senators can force a vote, called a “joint objection resolution,” which would block foreign security aid, such as arms sales to Israel. Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders exercised this option several times during the Gaza genocide in an attempt to block the sale of certain bombs, guns and other military equipment to Israel. While his resolution failed in the Republican-controlled Senate, the latest resolution has the support of an overwhelming majority of Democrats — who will soon be the party in power.
However, with the threat looming that Democrats may actually be able to pass legislation, El-Sayed will find himself under pressure from would-be Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, who has long maintained the support of the pro-Israel lobby, to align himself with his party’s priorities.
“The question is, ‘Who does he want to be?’ Does he want to be like Bernie who is sometimes willing to rebel against leadership?” said Hamid Bendas, communications director at the Institute for Middle East Understanding Policy Project, which also supports El-Saeed’s candidacy. “As a freshman and someone just getting in there, it’s hard to do that.”
Bendas expressed confidence that the Michigan senator would be a champion of pro-Palestinian legislation, but noted that El-Sayed would have to balance his priorities, especially after waging a campaign focused on economic populism and providing universal health care through Medicare for All.
The wind changes
The dilemma facing Senator-elect El-Sayed reveals a tension: While a growing number of Americans — and the vast majority of Democrats — disapprove of the U.S. spending billions on aid to Israel, voters’ No. 1 concern in the 2026 election cycle is clearly the cost of living and their own economic instability.
Some experts encouraged pro-Palestinian candidates like El-Sayed to put aside anti-genocide principles, arguing that more moderate Democrats would fare better on Tuesday night. They’re comparing El-Sayed’s 7 percent win over Mike Rogers to James Talarico’s 12 percent win over Ken Paxton in Texas, and some are already calling for Talarico to defy his new colleague.
But on the campaign trail, Saied often linked the high cost of living to the huge U.S. spending on aid to Israel. “We should be spending our money here, building schools here, providing health care and child care here, rather than sending it overseas to a foreign government that is doing terrible things with our money,” he told Bloomberg Television in September. El-Sayed’s approach made him the target of nearly $40 million in outside spending by the American Israel Public Affairs Committee super PAC, which supports broadly anti-Arab and Islamic committees alleging unfair targeting of groups in Israel.
“None of that matters,” said Yousef Munayer, a senior fellow at the Arab Center in Washington, D.C., who likened the gravity of El-Sayed’s victory to that of New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani. “This is not a communist corridor. This is a swing state. A lot of taboos have been broken here and people will learn from it and be bolder now.”
“This is not a communist corridor. This is a swing state. A lot of taboos have been broken here and people will learn from it and will be bolder now.”
In addition to proposing joint resolutions to block future arms transfers — such as the Trump administration’s planned sale of $2.8 billion worth of 2,000-pound bombs to Israel — Said could also introduce resolutions citing the Foreign Assistance Act; Sen. Chris Van Hollen, D-Md., used the opportunity to demand a State Department report on Israeli settlements of Palestinian children and the killing of American citizens in the Jordan River by Israeli forces and settlers. He could also introduce an amendment to the Pentagon’s annual spending bill that would earmark billions of dollars for combined U.S.-Israeli weapons research. (The Senate is currently considering this year’s $1.15 trillion national defense authorization bill, which would more deeply integrate Israeli technology into Pentagon programs and supply chains.)
Munayar, the former head of the U.S.-based Palestinian Rights Campaign, said Saied’s victory creates an environment ripe for accountability against Israel, despite uncertainty over whether moderate Democrats will be willing to join forces with progressives next session.
“There is now a climate where people who were previously reluctant to speak out on these issues because they thought it was political suicide will feel far less intimidated,” he said.
Even Republicans are starting to feel the tide turning. On the morning of Election Day, US President Trump unexpectedly announced on Fox News that the United States would stop providing $4 billion in annual military aid to Israel. The move would cut off just one avenue for Israel to obtain weapons from the U.S. — which still allows U.S. companies to sell weapons directly to Israel as well as develop weapons and share them with the Pentagon — and Trump said it was made under an agreement with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who has been previewing the move for months. Tactically, Trump said the goal was to take “the topic” away from Democrats. He cited El-Sayed’s name.
As vote counting continued on Wednesday, Vice President J.D. Vance, a projected 2028 presidential candidate, posted an early postmortem on X of massive Republican losses across the country. He wrote that if the party “ends the war with Iran” and “changes our relationship with Israel,” they can bring back “the voters who abandoned us.”
Munayer said this endorsement from the Trump White House is new territory for American politics.
“In my opinion, we are about to witness something that has never been seen in American politics,” Munaye said. “There will be intense debates on both sides of the aisle during the presidential primaries, in which the issue of America’s relationship with Israel will come up again and again. This has never happened before, and it will be shocking.”
“It seems to me that we are about to witness something that has never been seen in American politics.”
The question is whether Democrats will maintain their lead. If Schumer, a staunch supporter of Israel, retains control of the Senate majority, he will have the power to appoint key committees — giving him a chance to curb the influence of figures like El-Sayed.
“I don’t think Democrats want to get into a messy fight on this when voters are basically in agreement on it,” Munayeh said. But while Senate Democrats have changed on Israel and the Palestinians — even Sanders was much less critical of the state of Israel a few years ago — it’s one thing to be the party of dissent when you’re in the minority. Exercising serious power is another.
constant voltage
El-Sayed is perhaps the most outspoken supporter of Palestinian rights among elected U.S. senators since South Dakota’s James Abourezk, who became the first Arab American to serve in the Senate in the late 1970s. Abresk has often advocated for a Palestinian state and was an early critic of the pro-Israel lobby. After serving in Congress, he established the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Commission.
El-Sayed, now the first Muslim elected to the U.S. Senate, often referred to Israel as a “nation-state” on the campaign trail and said he opposed any country that organized its government along ethnic and religious lines. During an appearance on ABC News, El-Sayed argued that Israel was not an ally of the United States. Two days before the election, he spent a large part of a “60 Minutes” sit-in calling for the Palestinians’ right to self-determination and denying the question of Israel’s right to exist. In his victory speech, he criticized pro-Israel critics for trying to conflate support for Palestinian rights with “hate.”
Even so, in the run-up to the election, Said began to come under pressure from some on the pro-Palestinian left. Critics panned his decision to debate with former Vice President Kamala Harris over her complicity in the Biden administration’s support of the genocide in Gaza. Similar anger has been directed at his partnership with former President Barack Obama, who has yet to name or condemn the genocide and was responsible for America’s wars in the Middle East that saw the United States kill thousands of civilians.
However, Palestinian rights advocates told The Intercept that they recognized El-Sayed’s utility in running alongside the most prominent members of the Democratic Party, and they considered him winning over their support a success. But they say they’re not pinning all their hopes on one person.
In addition to all the other rigid interests and long-standing political biases that shape the U.S. Senate, there’s the influence of America’s vast weapons industry, with manufacturing giants like Lockheed Martin and Boeing lobbying for their own interests and providing substantial campaign funds to politicians. JVP Action’s Miller said the industry wants to continue profiting from the genocide in Gaza and that El-Sayed alone will not be enough to stop it.
“It’s not going to be one person coming into the Senate that changes everything,” she said. “This is the result of a man who was elected with a mandate that stated where the broad swath of the population stands on this issue, and now we must fight harder than ever.”