The line between hard-edged foreign policy critique and scapegoating rhetoric is not theoretical; it lives in the choices copywriters make. A Michigan Senate ad that ties Americans’ grocery bills to U.S. funding for Israel demonstrates how a single causal claim can shift a message from budget priorities into a trope that leading Jewish organizations call antisemitic.
The Short Version
- The ad links grocery affordability to U.S. aid for Israel, including language about “setting aside” dollars for “killing Palestinians.”
- Jewish civil-rights and policy leaders condemned the spot as scapegoating the Jewish state and misdirecting blame for economic pain.
- The ad came from Rebellion PAC, which supports Abdul El-Sayed; his campaign denied any affiliation with the ad.
- The dispute fits a recurring boundary question: criticism of Israeli policy versus rhetoric that assigns collective blame in ways experts recognize as antisemitic.
What the ad said and why it ignited a backlash
The advertisement’s premise is blunt. Against a grocery-store scene, a woman says, “We have to set that $7 aside for killing Palestinians,” while dialogue pins household strain on U.S. assistance to Israel. The script reportedly references the longstanding $4 billion in annual aid and an additional $26 billion package, translated into a per-person figure around $161—implying a direct subtraction from family food budgets. That linkage, critics argue, is not ordinary debate over appropriations; it is a causal story that makes Israel the bill-payer for Americans’ everyday hardship. The Anti-Defamation League’s CEO Jonathan Greenblatt captured the charge succinctly: “Blaming the price of bananas on Israel… is scapegoating the Jewish state.”
Other pro-Israel and Jewish voices echoed that assessment while carving out space for real policy disagreement. Former U.S. ambassador to Israel Dan Shapiro stressed that one can oppose aid to Israel without promoting the fiction that Israel—or U.S. aid to it—determines grocery prices. The American Jewish Committee said Americans need solutions, not misinformation that assigns responsibility for inflation to U.S. support for Israel. These reactions converged on a single point: the ad’s mechanism of blame is what crosses the line.
Attribution, campaign distance, and the political context
The spot was produced and circulated by Rebellion PAC, a group backing Democrat Abdul El-Sayed’s Senate bid; media accounts noted that Cenk Uygur helped promote the video. El-Sayed’s campaign, through spokesperson Roxie Richner, said the ad was “not affiliated in any way” with the Abdul for Senate effort and did not speak for the candidate. That disavowal establishes a political connection—the PAC supports him—without campaign authorship or approval. In a heated race, that gray zone is consequential: opponents can cite the association while the campaign maintains arm’s-length distance.
Because Senate campaigns operate under strict coordination rules, PACs routinely test hard-hitting lines the candidate would not deliver. Here, that practice collided with a sensitive rhetorical boundary. The ad’s grocery-lane mise-en-scène and Gaza references were made for shareability; the same ingredients also made it unusually easy for critics to depict the ad as assigning collective blame rather than arguing priorities. That is why the condemnation crystallized so quickly, and why it dominated early coverage.
How this rhetoric maps onto definitions of antisemitism
Reasonable people disagree over where political criticism ends and antisemitism begins, and institutions have articulated competing frameworks to referee that line. The IHRA working definition, widely adopted in the West, flags motifs like double standards and imputations of dual loyalty; the Jerusalem Declaration and the Nexus framework emphasize that criticism of Israel as a state can be legitimate while cautioning against collective blame of Jews as Jews. None of these documents outlaws scrutiny of U.S. aid. What they do illuminate is how rhetoric that attributes unrelated domestic harms to Israel, as proxy for Jews, tracks with classic scapegoating patterns.
In practice, three cues tend to trigger concern among scholars and community monitors. First, causal slippage—moving from “we prioritize $X abroad” to “you can’t afford bananas because of Israel”—conjures a zero-sum morality tale rather than a budget debate. Second, personalization—pairing a moral injury (civilian deaths in Gaza) with an everyday pain point (food prices)—invites a transference of blame onto a target audience. Third, imagery or lines that insinuate control over U.S. politics magnify the frame. The Michigan ad checks more than one of these boxes, which explains the coherence of the criticism across organizations that often spar over definitions.
The economic claim is simple—and simply wrong as an explanation for grocery prices
Even setting ethics aside, the ad’s economic story fails on mechanism. U.S. assistance to Israel is appropriated annually, largely via foreign military financing that must be spent on American-made equipment, which circulates dollars into U.S. defense manufacturing and can lower unit costs across platforms. Aid levels do not set the marginal price of eggs in Grand Rapids; supply-chain shocks, energy prices, labor costs, and food-production dynamics do. Conflating a relatively small federal outlay with supermarket price tags creates a clean villain, not an honest model of inflation.
Politicians can and do argue that foreign aid should be lower on the national priority list; that is a legitimate fight over values. But when the argument becomes, in effect, “your cart is lighter because Israel is heavier,” it is no longer about values—it is about imputing responsibility through a causal fiction. That is the move critics labeled antisemitic, not the mere opposition to aid.
What campaigns should learn from this episode
Three practical lessons emerge for strategists who want to criticize policy without trafficking in stigma. First, argue trade-offs at the level they exist: discretionary federal spending and its opportunity costs, not household line items it does not meaningfully affect. Second, attribute responsibility to decision-makers—Congress, the administration—rather than to a foreign state cast as the taker of American bread. Third, if discussing Israel and Gaza, avoid composite images and one-liners that suggest control, cabals, or collective culpability; these are the pressure points where political speech most often mutates into recycled prejudice. The major definitional frameworks disagree at the margins, but they converge on these hazards.
For voters, the navigational aid is similarly straightforward. Ask: what is the mechanism? If a political message cannot trace a clear, proportional path from a policy to the alleged harm—beyond arithmetic that looks tidy on a placard but collapses under scrutiny—it is probably selling a scapegoat, not a solution. And when the scapegoat is Israel, history teaches that Jews quickly become the implied subject, whether or not the script names them.
People Call Out Michigan Senate Ad As Anti-Semitic in Huge Backlash https://t.co/7NrY4tncoB
— Dan Baggs (@profdwb1) October 27, 2026
One caveat about attribution
El-Sayed’s campaign denied any role in producing, approving, or disseminating the ad; the message belongs to the PAC that made it. Voters are right to separate authorship from association—and to evaluate both.
Sources:
redstate.com, jta.org, jewishinsider.com, nbcrightnow.com
