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Abdul El-Sayed, the Michigan Democrat who won a U.S. Senate seat on Tuesday, has challenged the United States' support for Israel, arguing that American taxpayers should not be funding weapons for another country while Washington says it is pursuing peace and a two-state solution.
"I don't pay my taxes to buy another country a bomb or a tank," El-Sayed told CBS's 60 Minutes in an interview that aired on Sunday, two days before the election. "That's Israel. That's Egypt. That's Saudi Arabia. That's Pakistan."
Asked by correspondent Ross Douthat what is wrong with America's relationship with Israel, El-Sayed gave three answers. First, he said the United States is told it is pursuing a two-state solution, "only to aid, arm, and abet the very people who are trying to foreclose on the possibility of a second state," making the policy "incoherent on its own terms." Second came the taxes argument. Third, he said "the state of Israel did a genocide," an allegation Israel strongly rejects.
Douthat also asked El-Sayed whether Palestine has a right to exist, and whether Israel does. El-Sayed answered the Palestine question with a plain yes. On Israel, he began with "yes" and immediately added a condition: "If there is a shared understanding —" He said he believes in equal rights to peace, dignity and self-determination for Palestinians and Jewish Israelis alike, and would support two states if both peoples chose that outcome on equal terms — or one shared state, if that were what they chose. "Democracy is not an outcome. It's a process," he said.
El-Sayed has made opposition to American military assistance to Israel a central part of his platform, and has said the money should instead be spent at home, on schools, roads, health care and child care. At a rally in Kalamazoo on October 29, he said: "It shouldn't be this hard to pay your taxes and know that that money is going to be spent on you and your kids rather than dropping bombs on somebody else and their kids." In an NBC interview released October 15, he said: "We're paying $5 gas. We're paying more for groceries, because of war we should not be fighting, at the behest of whom? The government of Israel." He has also said Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu encouraged President Donald Trump to begin the war in Iran, which has sent gasoline prices soaring; the U.S. has spent $47.1 billion on the Iran war, according to a recent Pentagon estimate reported by the Associated Press.
His position puts him sharply at odds with his Republican opponent, former Rep. Mike Rogers, who told 60 Minutes: "I passionately defend Israel's right to defend itself and to exist as a Jewish state." Rogers has accused El-Sayed of refusing to defend Israel's right to exist and said his rhetoric risks fueling antisemitism. El-Sayed says he supports the safety of Jewish Americans while rejecting unconditional U.S. backing for the Israeli government. He has also said his opposition to funding foreign militaries is not limited to Israel. "I don't think we should be funding foreign militaries generally," he told the Associated Press. "That's Israel. It's also Egypt. It's also Saudi Arabia and Qatar and (United Arab Emirates)."
El-Sayed defeated Rogers on Tuesday, November 3, becoming the first Muslim elected to the U.S. Senate. In his victory speech early Wednesday in Detroit, he renewed the attack on American military assistance to Israel. "We want our taxes spent here, for schools here, and healthcare here, and infrastructure here," he declared. "We don't want our money sent to do apartheid, or genocide, or war."
The dispute is especially potent in Michigan, home to one of America's largest Arab-American communities and a significant Jewish electorate, with control of the U.S. Senate hanging on the race. The United States provides about $3.8 billion in military aid to Israel annually, and that spending has escalated since October 7, 2023. Former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi called El-Sayed's stance on Israel "wrong" on October 31, distancing Democrats in Congress while voters decided his fate.