He goes over his experience as a doctor, squabbling with insurance companies and seeing the cost of care rise. He mentions his time in the Army National Guard, serving as a combat trauma surgeon, and his time volunteering in war zones around the world. 

But it doesn’t take long to get to the experience that helped put him on a more direct path to serving in Congress: His stint as a trauma doctor in Gaza during Israel’s assault on the region, when Israel’s seizure of a nearby border crossing left him and his colleagues trapped for a week at their hospital. When he returned home, he felt an obligation to speak out about what he felt was a genocide: He traveled to Washington, but found many members of Congress did not want to hear what he had to say. 

So when his home district congresswoman, the progressive Rep. Bonnie Watson Coleman (D-N.J.), announced her retirement last year, Hamawy decided he had to run.uration 15:02

Hamawy is now the frontrunner in the Democratic primary to replace the retiring Coleman in the state’s 12th district, a solidly blue seat stretching from urban Trenton to wealthy areas surrounding Princeton University. While pro-Palestine progressives have won other Democratic primaries this cycle, Hamawy’s victory would be a landmark – a victory for a candidate whose stance on Gaza was the basis for his campaign.

His potential triumph, however, has elicited howls of protest from pro-Israel organizations. A Wall Street Journal op-ed by former Attorney General Michael Mukasey laid out his ties to the so-called “Blind Sheikh,” who was convicted of seditious conspiracy and sentenced to life in prison following an investigation of the 1995 World Trade Center bombing; and a Jewish Insider story last week noting Hamawy volunteered with a medical charity in the Balkans that was accused years later of being a front group for Al-Qaeda. 

Hamawy has condemned the attacks as smears. He has disavowed the blind cleric’s views, and the charity Hamawy worked for was widely praised – including by President Bill Clinton’s administration – in the years before their exposure. 

“Attacks calling Muslims terrorists is not a new thing, and they’re just falling back to their old playbook,” Hamawy told HuffPost. “So I’m just going to continue talking about everything that I have done for this country in uniform and out of uniform.”

But while many of the major interest groups intervening in Democratic primaries, including AIPAC, looked at spending in the race, the establishment – including the powerful South Jersey-based political machine run by the Norcross family – failed to consolidate around a candidate. 

Andrabi noted AIPAC’s attempted intervention in an early New Jersey special election similarly ended up backfiring: “AIPAC’s cycle so far in New Jersey is one of the best representations of how much they flounder and fail when faced with an electorate who simply knows who they are and therefore, knows better.”

It’s hard to overstate the central role the pro-Palestine movement has played in lifting Hamawy’s campaign: Small donors from around the country, many of them Muslim, were key to giving him a fundraising lead early in the race. And a super PAC dedicated to countering AIPAC’s influence, American Priorities, has spent $2 million on ads boosting his candidacy.

There’s good reason for the movement to rally behind him. The broad strokes of his resume – Sen. Tammy Duckworth (D-Ill.) credits him with saving her life after her insurgents shot down her Blackhawk helicopter in Iraq – would make him a star recruit for many movements and organizations.  

A new poll from The New York Times/Siena has found that nearly three-quarters of voters aligned with the Democratic Party oppose US military aid to Israel, up from 45 percent three years ago, as support for Israel continues to drop among US voters.

The poll released on Wednesday also found that nearly half of Democratic voters said that their party was too supportive of Israel, while 95 percent opposed the US-Israel war on Iran.