Politics

A Hard-Left Activist From Gaza Just Filed to Challenge Pennsylvania’s Most Independent Senator

Posted on by Bill McCarthy

John Fetterman has spent the last few years doing something rare in his party. He has stuck with Israel, backed efforts to stop Iran from getting a nuclear weapon, and refused to treat every Republican idea as poison. That has made him popular with ordinary Pennsylvanians outside his own party and deeply disliked by the people who vote in Democratic primaries. A recent poll found only 13 percent of Pennsylvania Democrats view him favorably while 69 percent do not. Republicans, by contrast, like him at 72 percent.

On Monday, November 9, the first declared challenger stepped forward. His name is Ahmed Moor. He is 42 years old, was born in the Rafah refugee camp in Gaza, and moved to Philadelphia with his family when he was seven. He went to Roxborough High School, earned a degree in political science from the University of Pennsylvania in 2006, worked in finance in New York for a few years, then spent time reporting from Beirut. He later earned a master’s in public policy from Harvard in 2013. After that he lived in Jordan, where he helped start a lending business for small companies in the region, before returning to West Philadelphia around 2021 with his wife to raise their three daughters. He has never held elected office. He has served on the Philadelphia Democratic City Committee and is a dues-paying socialist activist.

What He Actually Wants

Moor announced his campaign with a clear pitch. He wants to end the war in Iran, cut off American military aid to Israel, and impose sanctions on that country modeled on the old rules used against South Africa. He calls what happened in Gaza a genocide funded by American tax dollars and says every dollar spent there is a dollar that cannot go to families in Erie, Scranton, or North Philadelphia. At the same time he promises free health care, free child care, and more affordable housing. He also wants accountability for immigration enforcement and for what he calls corruption in Washington.

He has been writing in this vein for years. In 2012 he co-edited a book arguing that the two-state idea is finished and that Israelis and Palestinians should live together in one state. In a 2009 piece he described Zionism as racism and said the Jewish state had no right to exist in its current form. During the 2014 fighting he defended crude Palestinian rockets as legitimate self-defense. He has said he and his co-editor simply accepted that one state already exists on the ground and that the current arrangement is an apartheid system.

Fetterman has taken the opposite line. He has said he will support Israel no matter who runs its government, that the Democratic Party’s turn against the country is a red line for him, and that the United States should keep helping Israel finish the job against the remaining Hamas fighters. He has also voted with Republicans on measures related to Iran and has defended the recent American strikes that set back Iran’s nuclear program. President Trump has praised him publicly. Fetterman has said he has no plans to switch parties, but he has made clear that an official anti-Israel platform would force him out.

Why This Race Is Unlikely to End the Way the Left Hopes

Moor himself has called the effort an uphill battle. He knows he is an outsider with no elected experience going against a sitting senator who still has name recognition, even if that recognition is mostly negative inside his own party. Pennsylvania is not New York City or Michigan’s more progressive pockets. Statewide Democratic primaries still include plenty of working-class and suburban voters who want lower costs and safer streets more than they want a lecture on one-state solutions in the Middle East. Jewish voters in the Philadelphia suburbs and Pittsburgh area are not a small group, and Moor’s long record is already public.

Other Democrats have been looking at the race. Congressman Chris Deluzio has built a statewide network. Others have been mentioned. Brendan Boyle has already said he is staying in the House. Fetterman has not yet said whether he will run again. If he does, the primary will test how far the left can push a sitting senator whose main sin is refusing to treat Israel as the enemy and refusing to treat every Republican vote as betrayal. If he steps aside, the field gets more crowded and Moor becomes one voice among several rather than the pure protest candidate.

The numbers already show the party’s problem. When only about one in five Democrats likes their own senator, someone is going to try to primary him. The question is whether the person who steps up first, with the most extreme foreign-policy record and the least political experience, is the one who can actually win a statewide primary in a swing state. History suggests the answer is no. Progressive energy can punish moderates. It rarely replaces them with the purest outsider when the calendar reaches a real election and voters start asking who can keep the seat.

Fetterman got himself into this spot by refusing to follow the party’s new line on Israel and Iran. Moor is the first person to say out loud that the line must be enforced. Whether Pennsylvania Democrats decide that is the fight they want, and whether they choose him to fight it, remains to be seen. The early evidence points to a loud primary that does not end with the socialist activist from Rafah as the nominee.

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