How Did This Dem Senate Candidate Go from Praising Israel to Agreeing with the Left’s ‘Genocide’ Accusation?

On May 1, 2025, a cohort of Democratic and Republican politicians gathered inside Knollwood Country Club in West Bloomfield Township, Mich., for an invite-only Michigan leadership event held by the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) and headlined by award-winning Canadian-Israeli journalist Matti Friedman.

The pro-Israel event's attendee list was unremarkable except, in hindsight, for Mallory McMorrow, a Democratic state senator and 2026 U.S. Senate candidate whose recent policy shift on Israel has alarmed many pro-Israel Democrats in her state.

As the race heats up, her views on Israel are expected to become a major factor in whether she's able to break through in this year's competitive three-way Democratic Senate primary for the seat of retiring Senator Gary Peters. She’s running against U.S. Representative Haley Stevens, who has support from both AIPAC and the pro-Israel group Democratic Majority for Israel, and public health activist Abdul El-Sayed, an ultra-progressive anti-Israel candidate whose campaign regularly invokes the "genocide" in Gaza in fundraising emails. The Democratic nominee is expected to face Trump-endorsed Republican former House Intelligence Chairman Mike Rogers in the general election.

McMorrow, a New Jersey native who was raised Catholic and whose husband is Jewish, was seen before her U.S. Senate run as having standard establishment-Democrat views on Israel. A few months before Hamas's brutal invasion and massacre in October 2023, she'd even traveled to the Jewish state alongside roughly a dozen other state-level lawmakers with AIPAC's nonprofit arm, the American Israel Education Foundation (AIEF).

Such trips are common among pro-Israel Democrats and Republicans, who often travel to the country to meet with key political stakeholders while allowing nonprofits to foot the bill. One public disclosure from a Massachusetts state senator who also attended the July 2023 AIEF trip put the final cost at $9,451.33.

Reflecting on her first AIEF trip to Israel a few days after her return, she told the Jewish Hour podcast that Israel is “one of the most important countries to democracy and to the world” and “it’s really hard to understand the reality of the situation if you’ve never been there and you’ve never seen it and you’ve never talked to the people directly.” In interview comments that have since gone viral on the anti-Israel "AIPAC Tracker" social media account, she added that the Israel Defense Forces leaders she met in summer 2023 were some of the on-the-ground people who "brought incredible expertise" to her trip.

But then came her stunning shift at a town hall in October, when a voter asked whether she believed Israel was committing "genocide" in Gaza. After pausing to mull the question, McMorrow responded: "based on the definition, yes," while notably declining to utter the word herself. "I don't care what you call it," she continued, adding that for some Jews the word "means something very different to them: that if you lost family members in the Holocaust it means the specific medical testing, gas chambers, being put on a train — I don't want us to get lost in, 'do you agree with this definition or not.' I want to get to the solution."

To anti-Israel progressives in the state, her comments were a welcome, albeit belated, policy shift two years into the war. But her failure to push back on the accusation of "genocide" hurled at a country she had visited and previously praised in glowing terms surprised and infuriated pro-Israel Democrats in her state, according to people familiar with the matter. Some of those critics had seen her mingling with pro-Israel activists at the invite-only AIPAC event in suburban Detroit just five months earlier and have come to suspect that she's shifted her public stance on Israel out of political expediency.

McMorrow's past praise for Israel has alienated progressives, while her turnabout will likely cost her with pro-Israel voters. It doesn't help that the Israeli-Palestinian issue has unique relevance in Michigan, home to the Arab-majority city of Dearborn and the 2024 "Uncommitted National Movement" that opposed the last cycle's Democratic presidential ticket because of Joe Biden’s and Kamala Harris's views on Israel.

For her part, McMorrow has claimed she would not accept support from AIPAC numerous times, saying at a campaign event last year that "I've never accepted their support," and that she "did not intend to seek AIPAC support or endorsement, not even from the very beginning."

Asked about McMorrow's participation in the 2023 AIEF trip to Israel and attendance at last year's AIPAC Michigan event, both of which were confirmed by AIPAC, her campaign spokeswoman Hannah Lindlow told NR: "Mallory has an open-door policy and is running to represent everyone. She believes in tough conversations, honest engagement, and saying what she believes."

There are continued indications that confusion surrounding her evolving position on Israel's war in Gaza has registered with McMorrow, who notably fielded tough questions about her foreign policy views last October during a virtual webinar with the Muslim advocacy group Emgage.

Pressed by the Michigan radio station WDET last week whether she still believes Israel's military conduct meets the definition of "genocide," McMorrow suggested that some people in her state are losing sight of the bigger picture.

"I am somebody who looks at the videos, the photos, the amount of pain that has been caused in the Middle East, and you can't not be heartbroken," she said. "But I also feel like we are getting lost in this conversation, and it feels like a political purity test on a word — a word that, by the way, to people who lost family members in the Holocaust, does mean something very different and very visceral."

In her view, this "purity test" has prompted many Democrats to lose sight of the shared goal of many Michiganders: that a temporary cease-fire in Gaza should become a permanent one, and that both Israelis and Palestinians deserve "long-term peace and security."

She also took the opportunity to swipe her opponents for muddling that message. "We've got some candidates who are using this as a political weapon and fundraising off of it, and I think that that is just losing the humanity of what we're seeing in the Middle East," she added. "And we deserve better."

Republicans are relishing the drama. That includes U.S. Representative Jack Bergman, who met McMorrow for the first time at the AIPAC Michigan event last May. Asked about her evolving views on the war in Gaza, he referenced the two-faced Greek god Janus, without elaborating.

"It’s amazing what base pressure will do," GOP Representative Bill Huizenga told NR in a recent interview about McMorrow's shifting views on the war. "My experience has been when you have dramatic shifts without an explanation, people tend to lose trust in you, and that’s why I try to be consistent."