Nikki Haley, then-US Ambassador to the United Nations, addressing the 2018 American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) Policy Conference, at the Walter E. Washington Convention Center in Washington, DC, on March 5, 2018. Photo: Cheriss May/NurPhoto via Reuters Connect

AIPAC said on Wednesday that it will stop endorsing candidates and stop writing PAC checks. Its super PAC, the United Democracy Project, will keep going. So, by AIPAC’s account, will the giving.

AIPAC members gave candidates more than $90 million this cycle, counting the donations earmarked through the group’s own portal. The PAC itself gave a little more than $3 million. The earmarking ends too, replaced by what AIPAC’s letter calls “direct, organized contributions from individual Americans” and “emerging political fundraising tools.” What’s being retired is the name on the check. The letter says AIPAC wants “a more strategic, consequential, and nimble political operation.” Nimble, in practice, means harder to pin a name on.

Cynics will call it a rebrand, and they’d have a point. The super PAC that spent tens of millions is untouched. But a rebrand still changes who has to speak. You don’t have to look far as to why.

In July, an amendment to cut all military aid to Israel failed in the House, 314 to 104, and AIPAC shut off website donations to 15 of its own endorsed Democrats who had voted for it. In Michigan, AIPAC and its affiliated groups put close to $30 million behind Haley Stevens, the most they have ever spent on one race. The AP found the ads never mentioned Israel. Abdul El-Sayed won the nomination anyway. An endorsement had become something AIPAC had to take back from its own people, and something a candidate could run against.

In April, I made the case that the extremes of the left and right land in the same place on Israel — and the moderate cores don’t. A moderate Democrat tends to hear a strike in Gaza as a question about proportionality and civilians. A moderate Republican tends to hear it as a question about whether you stand by an ally that’s defending itself. I argued that one message, under one logo, can’t reach both, and an endorsement is one logo.

Gallup’s February numbers show how far apart the two sides have drifted. Seventy percent of Republicans said their sympathies lie more with the Israelis, the lowest since 2004. Among Democrats, it was 17 percent.

For people in both parties who want the US-Israel alliance kept, the retreat carries a risk. The super PAC stays, and the AIPAC-funded ads in Michigan never mentioned Israel. Voters in either party’s primary will see even less of who is backing whom, which is going to help anyone who wants to tell them pro-Israel politics is a hidden hand in influencing American politics.

AIPAC’s move also opens something. Without a lobby’s badge, a member’s record on the alliance has to be argued by the member, in words their own voters use. That’s the architecture the Two Middles argument called for, different messengers for different cores, each trusted by the people being spoken to. A Democrat who backs the US-Israel alliance can make the case that it protects civilians and deters the next war. A Republican can make the case for standing by an ally. Neither needs a letter from AIPAC to say it.

And the test shouldn’t change with the letterhead or the party. Does the member vote to keep the alliance supplied, and will they tell their own primary voters why? In April, 40 of the Senate’s 47 Democrats voted to block a $295 million bulldozer sale to Israel. Fifty-nine senators, mostly Republicans, voted against blocking it. Republicans shouldn’t read that as a finished job. Their own voters’ sympathy is the lowest in two decades, and a member who votes right and says nothing to those voters in their own terms is watching it slide.

Being pro-Israel is a stance — one that should be more or less universally adopted by rational, moral people. It really was never meant to be a party, and an endorsement was only ever a shortcut for telling voters who held it. AIPAC just retired the shortcut.

The hard part is what the shortcut was covering for, which is two parties, two moods, and still almost nobody who can talk to both.

Uriel Zehavi is Managing Director, Mitzpe Institute. The Mitzpe Institute, an educational program of the Atlanta Israel Coalition, publishes the Israel Brief for more than 10,000 subscribers in more than 95 countries, and has five books in print from Mitzpe Press, with No More Alibis forthcoming under its Guerre and Shalom imprint.