Michigan Democratic Senate nominee Abdul El-Sayed is spending the weekend trying to ease concerns among Jewish Democrats, holding individual meetings and gatherings with Jewish party leaders while apologizing for controversial remarks, CNN reported.
El-Sayed narrowly won the Democratic Senate primary earlier this month over pro-Israel Rep. Haley Stevens, a moderate who benefited from tens of millions of dollars in spending linked to the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC). He now faces Republican former Rep. Mike Rogers in November and is working to unite Democrats ahead of the general election.
His positions on Israel have emerged as a major concern for some Jewish voters in Michigan, which also has a large Arab and Muslim population. In a recent MS NOW interview, El-Sayed described Israel’s military actions in Gaza as “bloodthirsty” and accused Israeli leaders of genocide.
In a separate interview with journalist Jim Acosta, he acknowledged that Hamas had committed war crimes while maintaining his accusation against the Israeli government.
El-Sayed has opposed unconditional US military assistance to Israel and has repeatedly declined to directly say whether Israel has a right to exist. In one interview, he described Israel’s leadership as “as evil as Hamas.”
At the Michigan Democratic Party’s state convention in Lansing on Saturday, however, the divisions that marked the primary were largely absent, according to CNN. Several hundred Democrats gave El-Sayed one of the loudest receptions of the day when he was introduced and applauded his criticism of Rogers and President Donald Trump during a nine-minute speech.
El-Sayed did not repeat one of his most common primary attacks on AIPAC. While referencing more than $60 million spent against him during the primary, he did not identify the organization by name.
The gathering was considerably smaller and calmer than the party’s spring convention, where progressive activists who support the Palestinian Arabs booed Democrats they considered insufficiently critical of Israel’s conduct in the war against Hamas.
State Attorney General Dana Nessel did not attend Saturday’s convention, citing concerns that she could again be subjected to heckling and booing. Nessel has been among the Democratic Party’s strongest critics of El-Sayed’s response to a March attack on the Temple Israel synagogue in West Bloomfield Township near Detroit.
Authorities said Ayman Ghazali, a naturalized US citizen from Lebanon, drove an explosives-laden vehicle into the synagogue, causing a fire. Ghazali died at the scene. His family had reportedly lost relatives in an Israeli airstrike in Lebanon one week before the Michigan attack.
El-Sayed condemned the attack and antisemitism at the time, but also said that “violence is a cycle” and that “hurt people hurt people.” Critics interpreted the remarks as potentially excusing the attack.
On Saturday, El-Sayed apologized to the Michigan Democratic Jewish Caucus for the comments.
“My comments might have been misconstrued to be justifying something I did not intend to justify,” he told reporters afterward. “To anybody who feels like my comments might have been hurtful, I’m really sorry. That was not my intention.”
“We condemned that terrorist attack. We condemned it outright. What I was trying to do is offer context for why it happened, but it wasn’t the time for context. And you don’t ever want to trample somebody’s pain,” he said.
El-Sayed is scheduled to meet with members of the caucus again Sunday at the Michigan Democratic Jewish Caucus Summer Simcha celebration. The event is private.
Asked to preview his message, El-Sayed acknowledged that “we may not agree on everything.”
“When it comes to foreign policy, I believe deeply in equal rights to peace, dignity and self-determination for Palestinian and Jewish Israelis alike. I’m not going to stop fighting for Palestinian self-determination because all of the money that we have spent to foreclose on it is money that should have been spent here, right?” El-Sayed said. “The question of where we spend our tax dollars – that should be a foregone conclusion. It should be spent here.”
“And we can show here in Michigan how we can disagree agreeably on some of those issues having to do with what we do 6,000 miles away, and show that we can stand arm in arm to protect the well-being of all of us here at home,” he added.