Abdul El-Sayed Won His Senate Seat With a Mandate on Palestine. Can He Deliver?

One senator out of the 100 who will fill the upper chamber of the 120th Congress was elected to his seat on a loud campaign promise to end U.S. complicity in Israel’s genocide in Gaza. And so this is about making sure that now they finally start listening to what the overwhelming majority of their bases say.” El-Sayed’s run marked the first time the Jewish-led, anti-Zionist group backed a Senate campaign . Pro-Palestine lobbying groups like JVP Action have been pushing for legislation to block weapons transfers to Israel for years , aligning themselves with a small but growing number of left-leaning House members. Building consensus around a single bill in the Senate is harder, but the upper chamber offers stronger levers to pull. While his resolutions failed in the Republican-controlled Senate , the most recent ones drew support from wide majorities of Democrats — soon to be the party in power. Yet with the looming threat that Democrats might actually be able to pass legislation, El-Sayed would find himself under pressure from the likely Senate majority leader, Chuck Schumer, who has long maintained the support of the pro-Israel lobby , to fall in line with party priorities. “The question is, ‘Who does he want to be?’ Does he want to be someone like Bernie, who is willing to sometimes stand up to leadership?” said Hamid Bendaas, communications director for the Institute for Middle East Understanding Policy Project, which also backed El-Sayed’s run. “It’s hard to do that as a freshman and someone who’s just getting in there.” Bendaas expressed confidence that the Michigan senator would be a champion of pro-Palestine legislation, but he noted that El-Sayed would have to balance his priorities, especially after running a campaign focused on economic populism and providing universal healthcare through Medicare for All. But on the campaign trail, El-Sayed often connected the issues of a high cost of living and outsized U.S. spending on aid to Israel. “We ought to be spending our money here, to build schools and provide healthcare and child care here, rather than sending our money abroad to a foreign government that’s done terrible things with our money,” he said in a September interview with Bloomberg TV. El-Sayed’s approach made him the target of nearly $40 million in outside spending from the super PAC for the American Israel Public Affairs Committee , which supported widespread anti-Arab and Islamophobic attacks and accusations of antisemitism in an attempt to keep a vocal critic of Israel out of the Senate. “None of it mattered,” said Yousef Munayyer , a senior fellow at the Arab Center Washington D.C. who likened the gravity of El-Sayed’s win to that of New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani. “And this is not the Commie Corridor. He would also be able to introduce amendments to the Pentagon’s annual spending bill that carves out billions of dollars in joint U.S.–Israel weapons research. (The Senate is currently sitting on this year’s $1.15 trillion National Defense Authorization Act, which would even more deeply enmesh Israeli technology within the Pentagon’s programs and supply chain.) Munayyer, the former head of the U.S. If Schumer, a staunch supporter of Israel, remains in charge of the Senate majority, he’ll ha