How Republican-linked ads stir Israel tensions to undermine Kamala Harris

Washington, DC – One advertisement says: “Kamala Harris stands with Israel.”

The other proclaims that the “two-faced” vice president and Democratic candidate “is campaigning for Palestine and trying to get away with it”.

Those contradictory messages have aired in the weeks leading up to a close presidential election in the United States.

And both were produced and paid for by the same group: a shadowy Republican-linked political action committee (PAC) bankrolled by an organisation that has hosted events with Republican candidate and former President Donald Trump.

But the advertisements targeted two separate sets of voters. The first, touting Harris’s pro-Israel bona fides, went out in areas of Michigan with large Arab American presence, according to Google data.

The second, warning of her supposed pro-Palestine bent, targeted towns with large Jewish communities in Pennsylvania.

Experts say the messaging blitz is designed to stoke divisions over Israel’s war in Gaza and Lebanon — and play on ethnic and religious tensions.

Maya Berry, the executive director of the Arab American Institute think tank, called the advertisements “extraordinary”.

“What we’re looking at here is the targeting of specific communities — Arab Americans in Michigan, Jewish Americans in Pennsylvania — with disinformation that is also, I would suggest, both anti-Semitic and anti-Arab,” Berry told Al Jazeera.

She and other experts warn that the sophistication of the advertisements highlights the power of “dark money” in the election system, as political groups use trickery to zero in on specific communities to discourage them from backing a candidate or voting altogether.

Future Coalition

The Israel-focused advertisements are run by a group called FC PAC, which was founded in July as Future Coalition PAC but changed its name earlier this month.

There is little public information about the political action committee other than the names of its treasurer and designated agent, Ray Zaborney and Cabell Hobbs, respectively — two Republican operatives.

But its output has been targeted to sway two pivotal battleground states in the election on November 5.

Running on platforms like YouTube, the Google advertisements that emphasised Harris’s support for Israel were promoted in several zip codes in Michigan, including Dearborn — a Detroit suburb of 100,000 people known as the “capital of Arab America”.

Arab Americans have opposed the US’s continued support for the Israeli offensive, which United Nations experts have described as a genocide.

Meanwhile, the commercials questioning the vice president’s backing for Israel were promoted in places with a high concentration of Jewish voters, including the suburbs of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.

Thousands of Arab Americans in Michigan also received flyers in the mail and text messages from FC PAC.

Some of the advertisements lumped Harris together with Senate candidate Elissa Slotkin, a Democrat who represents a Michigan district in the House of Representatives.

“When protestors went after Israel, Harris & Slotkin didn’t back down,” one text message said. “Harris & Slotkin are the pro-Israel team we can trust!”

The advertisements are made to look like they are from a pro-Harris group, if not the candidate’s campaign itself.

Focusing on Doug Emhoff

Many of the FC PAC advertisements, including the video commercials, stressed the Jewish identity of Harris’s husband, Doug Emhoff.

An FC-sponsored leaflet mailed to homes in Dearborn showed Harris and Emhoff embracing, with an Israeli flag in the background.

It said that Harris “leans on her Jewish husband Doug Emhoff to advise on high level pro-Israel policies”.

Advocates warn that the ad campaign tries to tap into stereotypes about the beliefs of Arab and Jewish voters while preying on elevated tensions and anger in both communities amid Israel’s war on Gaza, which has killed nearly 43,000 Palestinians.

Berry called the messaging “disturbing” and racist towards both Arab and Jewish Americans.

“It is a flattening of both communities in such a way that they’re suggesting that we are so bigoted that this is what would work,” she told Al Jazeera.

Arab American voters have overwhelmingly backed Jewish candidates in the past, including Senator Bernie Sanders when he ran for president in 2016 and 2020.

Still, Berry noted that the advertising campaign’s sophisticated design could mislead voters into thinking the messaging is coming from the Harris campaign.

“I’ve just never seen anything play out like this here,” she said. “When your average person is going to receive a text that reads like a text from the campaign, the reaction is: ‘Why? Why would you talk like this?'”

FC appears to have taken advantage of lax regulations to push election tricks to the next level.

But previous campaigns have used similar methods. For example, the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), which is partly funded by right-wing donors, spends millions of dollars on Democratic primaries to defeat progressive critics of Israel.

The lobby group’s election arm is called United Democracy Project, and it runs advertisements that have nothing to do with Israel, which helps conceal its real agenda.

Another example came in 2022, when Democratic-linked groups ran advertisements to boost far-right candidates in Republican primaries in swing districts, perceiving them to be easier opponents in the general elections.

A flyer sent to households in Dearborn, Michigan, shows Kamala Harris embracing her husband, Doug Emhoff [Courtesy photo]

But Berry said the FC effort is especially dangerous in the way it is targeting Arab and Jewish American voters.

“This is, again, yet another example of our broken campaign finance system that requires deep, deep examination and reform,” she told Al Jazeera.

FC recently took down its website, which featured the commercials it had been running.

Who is behind the campaign?

According to Federal Election Commission records, FC has received a single donation of $3m from a Republican-linked group called Building America’s Future (BAF), which has co-hosted events with Trump’s campaign for re-election.

As a so-called dark money group, BAF does not have to reveal its donors, said Anna Massoglia, the editorial and investigations manager at Open Secrets, a website that tracks spending in US politics.

BAF is officially a social welfare organisation, designated as a 501(c)(4) group under the tax code.

“These are not supposed to be political groups. They exist for social welfare purposes but due to how the rules are structured, they can spend unlimited sums on US elections as long as it’s not their primary purpose,” Massoglia told Al Jazeera.

While dark-money groups cannot explicitly urge people to vote for a certain candidate, they can spend to support or oppose any politician or policy.

In contrast, super PACs dedicated to campaigning are required to reveal the sources of their funding to election authorities. But there is a loophole.

“Super PACs, even though they do have to disclose their donors to the election commission, they can just disclose a dark-money group, which hides the ultimate source of funding in some cases,” Massoglia said.

BAF did not respond to Al Jazeera’s request for comment by the time of publication.

“There are a lot of grey areas in federal campaign finance law that have allowed these groups to operate largely unchecked — in particular, with areas like online media and with funnelling money through 501(c)(4)s to super PACs,” Massoglia told Al Jazeera.

“These are much newer tactics that the Federal Election Commission hasn’t reined in yet.”

Will it work?

Massoglia raised concerns about misleading campaigns’ effects on American democracy.

“It’s really important for voters to be informed, to be able to find out who is behind the messaging they are consuming, in particular when you have deceptive messaging,” she said.

Berry echoed that assessment, stressing that it should be up to the voters to make their own decisions about the election without outside manipulation.

But in Michigan and across the country, Arab American voters are already growing furious with the Democrats’ support for Israel.

Harris has pledged to continue arming Israel despite ongoing, well-documented abuses in Lebanon and Gaza.

And Slotkin, the Senate candidate targeted in the FC campaign, is one of the staunchest supporters of Israel among the largely pro-Israel Democrats.

In recent months, Slotkin voted with the Republican majority in the House of Representatives for a bill that would impose sanctions on International Criminal Court officials for investigating Israeli atrocities. She also backed a measure that would ban the US State Department from citing the death toll recorded by the Ministry of Health in Gaza.

Berry underscored that Slotkin and Harris have largely ignored the demands and views of voters concerned about the war in Gaza and Lebanon.

“You are looking at a dystopian reality where both the presidential election and even that state race are running in such a way that those individual candidates have been so incredibly tone-deaf to the needs of their constituents that even that horrible ad is tapping into something that’s potentially believable,” she said.

Hussein Dabajeh, a Lebanese American political consultant in the Detroit area, also said some voters believe that the FC flyers and text messages come from the Harris campaign based on the vice president’s own record on the issue.

Harris has maintained steadfast support for Israel and has pledged to continue arming the US ally.

Dabajeh stressed that the Democrats only have themselves to blame if they lose Michigan after alienating swing state’s large Arab American community.

“That’s what the ads are doing: They’re highlighting a record that’s actually true,” Dabajeh told Al Jazeera.