Yes, We Have No Bananas
· The Atlantic
Maybe you’ve seen the ad: A man and a woman are loading a shopping cart. The woman tells the man he must return a carton of eggs. “We have to set that $7 aside for killing Palestinians.”
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The woman explains that grocery prices are rising because the United States gives so much aid to Israel. “It’s costing us a lot of money to drop bombs on Gaza,” the woman explains. “Don’t they get universal health care too?” the man asks. “We’re paying for that, too, probably,” the woman responds, at which point the man puts back the bananas.
The ad was produced by an independent political-action committee to support the Senate campaign of the Michigan Democrat Abdul El-Sayed. During the Democratic primary, El-Sayed regularly denounced American supporters of Israel as a shadowy, sinister special interest. Since winning the nomination, he has distanced himself from his earlier language. Now a super PAC is reviving it for him only a week before the general election.
The legendary journalist Hunter S. Thompson explained the ad half a century before it was produced. In his book Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail ’72, he described “one of the oldest and most effective tricks in politics,” which may have played a role in one of Lyndon Johnson’s early campaigns in Texas:
The race was close and Johnson was getting worried. Finally he told his campaign manager to start a massive rumor campaign about his opponent’s life-long habit of enjoying carnal knowledge of his own barnyard sows.
“Christ, we can’t get away calling him a pig-fucker,” the campaign manager protested. “Nobody’s going to believe a thing like that.”
“I know,” Johnson replied. “But let’s make the sonofabitch deny it.”
In the case of the ad supporting El-Sayed, the sonofabitch targeted by the false accusation is not El-Sayed’s theoretical opponent, the Republican Mike Rogers—not really. The ad concludes, “Mike Rogers is for”—ironic chuckle—“they/them.” We all know who they are, and they are the real target of the ad.
[James Loeffler: The hatred that broke American politics]
The accusation that Israel is to blame for America’s economic problems is not some unique quirk of El-Sayed supporters. During his campaign to become New York City’s mayor, Zohran Mamdani told Politico in 2025 that the dilapidated state of the city’s housing was the fault of the same villain: “The government refuses to fund public housing, all while we continue to find billions of dollars to drop bombs that kill tens of thousands of Palestinians over more than a year now.”
In 2025, Majorie Taylor Greene drew a similar link. American aid, she charged, typically accounts for up to a fifth of Israel’s defense budget, “even though Israel, nuclear-armed Israel, has universal healthcare for their citizens and subsidized college for their citizens. Here in America, we’re $37 trillion in debt.”
On Meet the Press in August, El-Sayed insinuated that U.S. aid for weapons in Israel was somehow an impediment to health care at home. “This campaign was a referendum on whether or not we want health care here or bombs somewhere else.”
Do supporters of Israel have to deny the false accusation? Okay, here goes. U.S. military aid to Israel is set at $3.8 billion a year from 2019 to 2028—about one-twentieth of 1 percent of the total federal budget. In 2024, Congress approved a $95 billion aid package for Ukraine, Israel, and other allies—of which, nearly two-thirds went to Ukraine, about $15 billion went to Israel, and about $9 billion was directed to humanitarian relief, including assistance for Gazan civilians displaced by the war that Hamas started. (The rest went to Taiwan and other allies in the Indo-Pacific region.)
Almost all U.S. assistance to Israel takes the form of credits that Israel can use only to buy American-made equipment. This assistance provides at least two direct and immediate benefits to Americans. First, it buys the United States access to Israeli military technology. By partly underwriting the development of Israel’s Iron Dome missile-defense system, the U.S. has gained the use of battle-tested systems that also protect American lives. Second, this assistance lowers the per-unit cost of U.S. systems. The United States buys up to 48 F-35 fighters a year. Israel has bought 75 and is considering an estimated 25 more. Foreign orders allow U.S. arms manufacturers to improve their economies of scale. At a time when other NATO allies are canceling their orders of American equipment because they no longer fully trust the U.S. as an ally or supplier, Israeli orders enhance the efficiency of American defense production.
Meanwhile, all U.S. aid to Israel amounts to a fraction of what Israel’s critics wish to spend domestically. Despite the implications of that El-Sayed ad: Americans spend $1.1 trillion a year on groceries. Canceling aid to Israel would deliver the equivalent of about 30 hours of that spending. Per Mamdani’s complaint that Israel is to blame for bad housing in New York City: The city’s housing authority estimates its backlog of deferred maintenance at almost $80 billion, or about 20 years’ worth of U.S. assistance to Israel at present levels. Expanding Medicare to cover all American citizens would cost perhaps more than $32 trillion in additional federal spending over the first decade. Covering even one month of this plan would take 70 years’ worth of aid to Israel.
By blaming the Jewish state for the price of bananas in Michigan, the super-PAC ad calls to mind political tricks older and more disturbing than the one attributed to Johnson. In 1899, Karl Lueger, the mayor of Vienna and one of the most notorious anti-Semites of the 19th century, gave a speech blaming the Habsburg empire’s economic troubles on its Jews. “Here in our Austrian fatherland the situation is such that the Jews have seized a degree of influence which exceeds their number and importance,” he argued. “And in this respect the Jews operate a terrorism of a kind that could hardly be worse. For us, in Austria, it is a matter of liberating Christian people from the hegemony of Jewry.”
As with the rising cost of living in the U.S., the problem Lueger was concerned with was real. His voter base of artisans and craftspeople was coming under immense pressure from factory competition. There was not much Lueger could do about his voters’ distress. But he could point them toward a politically useful target. Now, with a modest update of Lueger’s language, an outside PAC’s closing argument in one of the most watched Senate races of 2026 blames a familiar “they/them.”