AOC Was Offered $100,000 by AIPAC. She Turned Them Down.

Today is the day!

The book is out.

It should be at your local bookstore, or you can order a copy through an independent bookstore, which I hope you’ll do. HuffPost‘s Daniel Marans is out today with a piece of news from the book: In 2018, roughly a week after Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez stumbled through an interview question about her criticism of the killing by Israel Defense Forces of dozens of nonviolent protesters in Gaza, her communications director got a call from AIPAC. The pro-Israel lobbying group offered her campaign $100,000 in contributions to “start the conversation” so that she would never flub the question again. AOC turned them down. What follows is a brief adapted excerpt of that section of the book, which is called “The Squad: AOC and the Hope of a Political Revolution.” Go get your copy!

We also published an audio excerpt today in the Deconstructed podcast feed. The following excerpt is drawn from Chapter 3, “Occupation”:

When the morning of July 13, 2018, dawned, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez had been on an unbroken streak of interview victories. The streak wouldn’t last the night.

When she stunned the political world by upsetting Rep. Joe Crowley on June 26, the assumption was that the big story of the night was the shock defeat of the next Speaker of the House. It soon became clear that Crowley would be the one to become a trivia question, and the real story was the rise of the politician quickly branded AOC.

In the days after her victory, she was consistently a presence on national TV, creating viral moments that sent her star rising further with each one. On Twitter, her clapbacks were feasted on by a rapidly growing social media following. Her direct-to-camera Instagram dispatches were bringing a rawness to politics that young people were craving. “She was just hitting homer after homer and kept doing these interviews and just blowing it out of the park,” Saikat Chakrabarti, who helped run her campaign and would go on to become her chief of staff, told me. “And every time she would do one, we’d get bigger and bigger people asking her to come on. And then, at some point, all the late-night shows were asking to have her, but then, they have this weird competition thing, where you can’t be on one and then also the other; they get really mad about that.” Still, the toll of her popularity was about to hit its limit. “A mistake we made early is we did not do enough to just figure out how to keep AOC from not getting exhausted. I mean, it’s incredible she didn’t have a nervous breakdown.”

In the middle of July, the stress finally caught up to Ocasio-Cortez, and she did the unthinkable: She took on the Israel–Palestine question unprepared. “Corbin [Trent, her communications director,] and I put her in a bit of a vulnerable position,” Chakrabarti said, “on a topic that wasn’t her thing. She never really talked about Israel–Palestine, and that’s just not something she’d ever really thought a lot about, other than a little bit during the campaign.” Ocasio-Cortez was still surging in celebrity when she agreed to a sit-down interview on PBS’s “Firing Line.” In the midst of the primary campaign, she had attracted attention with her full-throated criticism of the Israel Defense Forces, which had fired on Palestinian demonstrators in Gaza, killing many.

Her criticism hadn’t been a commentary on the politics of the region, she said when pressed about it during the interview, but merely a defense of the right to protest without being killed.

“This is a massacre,” she had posted to Twitter in May 2018, as Israeli forces continued to kill protesters in Gaza, with the numbers of dead climbing north of two hundred. “I hope my peers have the moral courage to call it such. No state or entity is absolved of mass shootings of protesters. There is no justification. Palestinian people deserve basic human dignity, as anyone else. Democrats can’t be silent about this anymore.”

But among Puerto Rican families, the issue just doesn’t come up all that often, outside of those who are heavily engaged in geopolitics, and if it does, there’s a reflexive solidarity with the Palestinians. “Puerto Rico is a colony that is granted no rights, that has no civic representation,” AOC told Glenn Greenwald in an interview during the primary campaign. “If sixty of us were shot in protest of the U.S. negligence in FEMA, I couldn’t imagine if there were silence on that.”

Her “Firing Line” interviewer, Margaret Hoover, brought up AOC’s use of the term massacre and asked a broad question: “What is your position on Israel?”

“Well, I believe absolutely in Israel’s right to exist,” Ocasio-Cortez began, adding that she supported “a two-state solution.”

She then said that she was merely looking at the killings through her lens as an activist. “If sixty people were killed in Ferguson, Missouri, if sixty people were killed in the South Bronx, unarmed, if sixty people were killed in Puerto Rico — I just look at that incident more through … just as an incident, and as an incident, it would be completely unacceptable if it happened on our shores.”

Ocasio-Cortez, in equating the lives and dignity of Palestinians with others around the world, was treading unusual terrain for a New York politician. “Of course,” Hoover cut in, “the dynamic there in terms of geopolitics and the war in the Middle East is very different than people expressing their First Amendment right to protest.”

AOC paused and took a deep breath. The First Amendment might not legally cover unarmed Palestinian protesters, but it certainly did from a moral perspective. She stood her ground. “Well, yes,” she allowed, “but I think what people are starting to see, at least, in the occupation of Palestine is just an increasing crisis of humanitarian condition, and that, to me, is where I tend to come from on this issue,” she responded, now visibly nervous.

“You used the term ‘the occupation of Palestine,’” Hoover pressed, leaning forward. “What did you mean by that?” From one perspective, it could mean the entire state of Israel was an illegitimate occupation of the nation that is truly Palestine—though this was ruled out by AOC’s initial assertion of her support of the right of Israel to exist. From another perspective, it could merely refer to the ongoing occupation of Palestinian territory, an occupation recognized as illegal by international law. But Ocasio-Cortez wanted none of the discussion.

“Oh, I think — what I meant is, like, the settlements that are increasing in some of these areas and places where Palestinians are experiencing difficulty in access to their housing and homes,” she said, clearly suggesting she was referring to the latter definition.

Hoover wanted more. “Do you think you can expand on that?”

But Ocasio-Cortez was tapped out. “I am not the expert on geopolitics on this issue,” she said, laughing at herself. “I just look at things through a human rights lens, and I may not use the right words. I know this is a very intense issue. … I come from the South Bronx, I come from a Puerto Rican background, and Middle Eastern politics was not exactly at my kitchen table every night, but I also recognize this is an intensely important issue.”

Her team decided to take a break from national interviews. “To me, the scary thing about that whole Israeli-Palestinian thing wasn’t that she got an answer wrong,” Chakrabarti said. “That was the first time she had a bit of a confidence hit because she didn’t do incredible in an interview. Up until that moment, she was doing incredible at every interview, and that’s a scary thing for someone like her, who really runs on her ability to command the room and [possess] confidence and belief in herself.”

After the “Firing Line” interview, she was slammed from all directions — from the left for being too soft on the occupation, from the right for “attacking Israel,” and from all sides for the cardinal sin of admitting to not knowing about something. But Ocasio-Cortez had not run for Congress to become a voice on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. At the time, she betrayed a visceral sense of just how treacherous the issue could be for her, but she could never have guessed how significantly she had underestimated it.

About a week later, she was in Kansas City with Bernie Sanders for a rally on behalf of labor attorney Brent Welder, with the duo hoping to make the case that even in Kansas, Bernie-and-AOC-style populism can flip a swing district. While there, she also got a lesson into how things typically work in national politics. Corbin Trent, her communications director, got a call from a man saying he represented donors to the organization AIPAC, or the American Israel Public Affairs Committee.

They told him there was $100,000 ready to be handed over to Ocasio-Cortez to “start the conversation” with the organization, with much more than that to come. Chakrabarti and AOC both told me they were shocked at the offer. The campaign was flush with cash and it was rejected out of hand. “I was expecting the corruption to be much more subtle,” Trent told me. “This was basically a bag filled with cash.”

Daniel Marans confirmed my reporting with Chakrabarti and Trent, who offered this reflection: “The implication was that her positions could be repaired with conversations, that her positions where based on a lack of information and lack of proximity to enough of a variety of people,” Trent recalled. AIPAC denied the offer to HuffPost, but Marans offers an interesting (and I think correct) interpretation: Before AIPAC started a real political action committee for the 2022 elections, it’s feasible an affiliated megadonor or major bundler could have gone to AOC with a policy paper and an offer and never told AIPAC itself. Flush with cash and facing no serious general election opponent, the offer wasn’t seriously considered.

The book is “The Squad: AOC the Hope of a Political Revolution.”