Report Finds that All 7 Members of the Congressional Black Caucus Leadership are Coin-Operated Puppeticians Bank Rolled by AIPAC to Defend Israel's Genocide and Serve its Interests

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.

Yet to this day, the Congressional Black Caucus 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.

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. [MORE]