Despite being outspent 8 to 1 and having a litany of ridiculous beliefs such as that Thanksgiving should be ‘cancelled’, Francesca Hong came within half a percentage point of winning her Democratic Primary. Despite being outspent over 10 to 1 and facing a blatantly hostile media, Abdul El-Sayed defeated The Fetterwoman by about a percentage point. In all of these elections, AIPAC spending is a factor, with the money buying immense media coverage in the favorable direction while simultaneously increasingly becoming a liability with average voters, especially younger voters. The next Democratic Presidential primary is almost certainly going to have the US-Israeli alliance as a key element of its inevitable establishment vs anti-establishment contest.

I am not, myself, someone who has ever been a single issue voter in the past. I am one now, and that issue is the US-Israeli Alliance. And, increasingly, I suspect that I am not alone. I want to explain why this change is happening for at least some people and why it is necessary that it happens.

Through the practice of lobbying, organized corruption in the United States is legal. This is particularly true for foreign-aligned lobbies. Contrary to how fans of large permanent alliances sell the issue, it is through this method that allies are given a pass to influence America, while rivals remain far more surveilled (and rightly). As was warned by Washington, this distorts both grand strategy and the ability of a republic to engage in honest debate about how to conduct its policies and risks having the very sovereignty of the voters violated by nations the media insists are our greatest friends.

Of all the many quagmires the over-extended and hollowed out American Empire gets itself into, the Middle East interventions are both the worst in terms of outcome and among the least necessary by any strategic measure. In fact, as we currently see with global oil prices, the one reason to be involved in this region, oil, is now the one thing most directly adversely affected by US policy. No single power can dominate the region anyway, and yet many of the U.S. old guard insist on trying to make Israel the dominant power in the region anyway, policies that have already led to the forming of power blocs that are both autonomous of US-Israeli interests as well as Iranian ones, as we saw this very week. U.S. backing for Israel enables its most expansionist impulses and removes the obvious necessity for such a small country, no matter how qualitatively strong it may be, to seek a sustainable balance of power in its near abroad. Rather it appears to be going for broke, pushing in a way that introduces contradictions and dangers in other U.S. relationships. This guarantees that the more the alliance is adhered to, the more wars of choice the U.S. will fight.

Furthermore, the domestic actors in the United States most attached to the Israeli state are almost always in overlap with other odious causes, from Evangelicals pining for theocracy and apocalypse to the military industrial complex and mass surveillance companies such as Palantir who piggyback on the IDF to train their models and prepare a mass dystopia for export abroad to their home countries.

Additionally, both party establishments of a dying two party system that no thinking person rightly believes in are wedded to the alliance like no other issue. It seems to be the ultimate litmus test for those capable of adaptation versus those who are not. To strike a blow against this alliance is to strike a blow against an archaic bipartisan consensus.

All of this, taken together, implies that the issue of the single greatest import, from gas prices, war and peace, surveillance, sovereignty, and corruption is that of AIPAC funding in elections and fervent commitment to the ruinous U.S.-Israel alliance. One can potentially strike a blow against all of these if enough candidates advance enough laws in the legislature to eventually force the issue in a favorable direction. It is a long term process, but one that should have been well underway years ago already.

But here I can sense one objection: “Aren’t you obsessed with Israel? What about the UAE or Saudi Arabia or Ukraine?” Ignoring that the side most obsessed with Israel is the side who wants to fund and fight for it to the hilt, the actual answer to this is the capstone to the entire argument. Pulling a cue from Karl Rove’s election strategy of attacking an opponents strength to undermine the entirety of their platform, I say this: If you do not want endless wars and entangling alliances, if you attack the most sacred and holy alliance and succeed in undermining it, you have already set up the doom of all the other alliances you don’t like. If America can be made to become ambivalent on Israel, it can all the more easily be made to drop being overly attached to the Gulf States, Ukraine, and whoever else you want on the chopping block. The inverse, as proven by the failed foreign policy pivot of the ‘new right’ on Republican politics, does not work. They can talk a big game on Ukraine or Pakistan or whoever, but always if they ignore the biggest offender in the room they get sucked into Israel and then end up right back with the rest of them too.

This answers another question. El-Sayed sucks on Ukraine, but for the reasons above I have prioritized Israel over Ukraine. Given his opponent in the general election is a neoconservative bitter ender, were I a Michigander I would crawl over broken glass to vote for him. If Hong, a far worse candidate, had won her race I would have done the same for her. My favorite sitting Democrat right now is Ro Khanna, who also has questionable views on Ukraine. It doesn’t matter so long as we are fighting a schizophrenic war of choice with Iran.

It goes the other way, too. I am an independent after all. AIPAC bought a House seat in Kentucky from Massie in front of everyone. As generational change occurs, this fight will only become bigger in the right as well. All Republican races where there is an AIPAC-funded candidate vs one where there is not make the choice clear. And now as we move on to the general election, the very party does not matter. I recommend looking for who is funding which candidate regardless of their party, and voting accordingly. If you value sovereignty and opposing reckless adventurism, it is the first and ultimate litmus test any candidate has to pass. If neither pass (as has been common in so many of our recent Presidential elections), third party is the correct vote.

This is the issue to attack the complacent assumptions of so many things, both foreign and domestic. It is not that it stands as a singularity in its own right so much as it overlaps with so much else. And it is, until we get out of direct Middle East interventionism, the sole issue I will be voting on. Despite my extreme hostility to both wings of the culture war, I would vote even for a noxious culture warrior who was good on this issue over someone who wasn’t. I would vote for someone with totally different views on economic policy as myself on this line as well. While I remain extremely skeptical of voting’s power over indirect influence networks, if this is all we have let us start where it hurts the architects of our present misery most: their most sacred cow of Israel.