How Republican-linked ads are stoking tensions in Israel and undermining Kamala Harris | News about the 2024 US election

Washington, D.C. – One ad says: “Kamala Harris stands with Israel.”

The other proclaims that the “duplicitous” vice president and Democratic nominee is “campaigning for Palestine and trying to get away with it.”

These conflicting messages were spread 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-affiliated Political Action Committee (PAC) funded by an organization that has hosted events with Republican candidate and former President Donald Trump.

But the advertising was aimed at two different groups of voters. The first to tout Harris' pro-Israel honesty took place in areas of Michigan where there is a large Arab-American presence, according to Google data.

The second warning about their alleged pro-Palestine bias was directed at cities with large Jewish communities in Pennsylvania.

Experts say the messaging attack is aimed at stoking divisions over Israel's war in Gaza and Lebanon – and inflaming ethnic and religious tensions.

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

“What we are seeing here is the targeting of specific communities – Arab Americans in Michigan, Jewish Americans in Pennsylvania – with disinformation that I believe is both anti-Semitic and anti-Arab,” Berry told Al Jazeera.

She and other experts warn that the sophistication of the advertising highlights the power of “dark money” in the electoral system, as political groups use ploys to target certain communities and discourage them from supporting a candidate or even voting.

Future coalition

The Israel-targeted ads 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 designee, Ray Zaborney and Cabell Hobbs, respectively — two Republican activists.

But his result was aimed at influencing two crucial battleground states in the Nov. 5 election.

The Google ads, which ran on platforms like YouTube and highlighted Harris' support for Israel, were promoted in several zip codes in Michigan, including Dearborn – a Detroit suburb of 100,000 known as the “capital of Arab America.”

Arab Americans have spoken out against continued U.S. support for the Israeli offensive, which United Nations experts have described as genocide.

Meanwhile, the ads questioning the vice president's support for Israel were promoted in places with high concentrations 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 ads lumped Harris in with Senate candidate Elissa Slotkin, a Democrat who represents a Michigan district in the House.

“When protesters moved against Israel, Harris and Slotkin did not back down,” one text message said. “Harris & Slotkin are the pro-Israel team we can trust!”

The ads are designed to look like they come from a pro-Harris group, if not the candidate's campaign itself.

Focuses on Doug Emhoff

Many of the FC PAC commercials, including the video commercials, emphasized the Jewish identity of Harris' husband, Doug Emhoff.

An FC-sponsored flyer mailed to Dearborn households showed Harris and Emhoff hugging, with an Israeli flag in the background.

It said that Harris “relies on her Jewish husband, Doug Emhoff, when it comes to high-level pro-Israel policy.”

Advocates warn that the advertising campaign seeks to appeal to stereotypes about the beliefs of Arab and Jewish voters while exploiting heightened tensions and anger in both communities over Israel's war on Gaza, in which nearly 43,000 Palestinians have been killed.

Berry called the message “disturbing” and racist against both Arab and Jewish Americans.

“It is a flattening of both communities in a way that suggests we are so bigoted that this would work,” she told Al Jazeera.

Arab American voters have historically overwhelmingly supported Jewish candidates, including Sen. Bernie Sanders when he ran for president in 2016 and 2020.

Still, Berry pointed out that the ad campaign's sophisticated design could mislead voters into thinking the message came from the Harris campaign.

“I’ve just never experienced anything like this here before,” she said. “When your average person receives a text that reads like campaign text, the reaction is, 'Why?' Why are you talking like that?'”

The FC appears to have taken advantage of lax regulations to take electoral tricks to the next level.

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

The lobbying group's electoral arm is called the United Democracy Project and runs advertisements that have nothing to do with Israel, helping to conceal their true intentions.

Another example came in 2022, when Democratic groups ran ads promoting far-right candidates in Republican primaries in swing districts because they saw them as easier opponents in the general election.

But Berry said FC's efforts are particularly dangerous because they target Arab and Jewish-American voters.

“This is yet another example of our broken campaign finance system that needs thorough review and reform,” she told Al Jazeera.

The FC recently closed its website, which featured the commercials it ran.

Who is behind the campaign?

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

As a so-called dark money group, BAF does not have to disclose its donors, said Anna Massoglia, editorial and investigative director at Open Secrets, a website that tracks spending in U.S. politics.

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

“These shouldn’t be political groups. They exist for social welfare purposes, but because of the structure of the rules they can spend unlimited sums on US elections as long as that is not their primary purpose,” Massoglia told Al Jazeera.

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

In contrast, super PACs dedicated to campaigning must disclose the sources of their funding to election authorities. But there is a gap.

“While super PACs are required to disclose their donors to the Election Commission, they may also simply disclose a dark money group that, in some cases, hides the actual source of funding,” Massoglia said.

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

“There are many gray areas in federal campaign finance law that have allowed these groups to operate largely unchecked – particularly in areas such as online media and in funneling money through 501(c)(4)s to super PACs,” Massoglia told Al Jazeera.

“These are much newer tactics that the Federal Election Commission has not yet curbed.”

Will it work?

Massoglia expressed concerns about the impact of misleading campaigns on American democracy.

“It's really important that voters are informed and can find out who is behind the news they consume, especially when it is misleading news,” she said.

Berry echoed that sentiment, emphasizing that it should be up to 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 angry over Democrats' support for Israel.

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

And Slotkin, the Senate candidate on whom the FC campaign is focused, is one of the most vocal supporters of Israel among 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 supported a measure that would ban the US State Department from citing the death toll recorded by the Health Ministry in Gaza.

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

“You're dealing with a dystopian reality in which both the presidential and state elections are run in such a way that the individual candidates are so incredibly tone-deaf to the needs of their voters that even this terrible advertising addresses something that is possibly credible,” she said.

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

Harris has remained steadfast in his support of Israel and vowed to continue arming the U.S. ally.

Dabajeh emphasized that Democrats have only themselves to blame if they lose Michigan after angering the swing state's large Arab-American community.

“That’s what the ads do: they highlight a record that is actually true,” Dabajeh told Al Jazeera.