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Adam Hamawy’s campaign headquarters is in a suburban New Jersey office center, down the hall from Princeton Plastic Surgeons, his practice that offers everything from eyelid surgery to Brazilian butt lifts. When I walked in, the only immediate clue that the doctor there had just won a much-contested congressional primary was a small cluster of campaign posters bearing his name behind the check-in desk.

Hamawy led me through the polished medical half of the office to a room around the corner with a conference table and a messy whiteboard with leftover green-marker notes from the primary. He called it “the engine room.” “This place was packed with people pulling their hair, and potato chips and some old pizza,” he said. “It’s so quiet now.” The campaign is in recovery mode before the general election in November, which he is heavily favored to win.

Hamawy is a former Army combat surgeon who served in Iraq. There’s military memorabilia all around the office, including an aerial image of the air base at Balad where he worked. In the race he just won, he ran as a progressive on positions that play well in Jersey’s comfortably blue 12th Congressional District, like Medicare for all and abolishing Immigration and Customs Enforcement. But a few months ago, he was virtually unknown. In a diverse district with a slew of candidates, a Muslim plastic surgeon with no name recognition shouldn’t have won. But Hamawy did—and one issue seems to have made the difference.

For the past several years, the safest advice in Democratic politics has been to talk about anything other than Gaza. Talk about affordability. Talk about healthcare. Talk about housing. Talk about Donald Trump. Talk about human rights, sure, but if it came to Gaza and Israel, widen the frame to something universal and move on quickly. This position became so common that it even has a nickname: PEP, or “progressive except Palestine.”

I saw this phenomenon up close. At the Democratic National Convention in 2024, I watched national party leaders embody PEP to perfection. Even when uncommitted delegates arrived in Chicago representing hundreds of thousands of protest voters furious over the Biden administration’s support for Israel’s increasingly unpopular war in Gaza, Democrats didn’t budge. The uncommitted delegates asked for a Palestinian speaker and, at a minimum, to be treated as part of the coalition. By the end of the week, many of them felt they had been ignored.

The PEP posture made some political sense. To focus on Gaza risked alienating moderates and some reliably pro-Israel Democrats. Even as polling has started to show Democratic voters becoming sharply more critical of Israel and more sympathetic to Palestinians—as many as 8 in 10 now hold an unfavorable view of Israel—the party continued to stick to Biden’s firmly pro-Israel position as it headed into the presidential election. And then, after the excruciating loss, the Democratic National Committee’s “autopsy” of the 2024 election infamously didn’t mention the words Israel or Gaza at all. In her book published in late 2025, though, Kamala Harris called Biden’s lack of empathy for Palestinians “inadequate.”

The 2026 midterms might just be different. Recent Democratic primaries in New York anointed three Zohran Mamdani–backed leftist challengers for Congress, all of whom made the United States’ support of Israel’s military front-and-center issues. In New York’s 10th Congressional District, Brad Lander’s win over the otherwise politically similar Dan Goldman seemed centered almost entirely on the issue.

An even stronger case study exists one state over, where Hamawy, who not long ago returned from a medical mission to the Gaza Strip, managed to clear the field in his crowded Democratic primary in part by focusing directly on Gaza. He spent months going to Congress and sharing his firsthand accounts and photos of what he saw while working there, leaving rooms in tears. When he decided to run for Congress himself, he spoke in no uncertain terms about genocide and U.S. “bombs killing kids.” On the other side of his primary, it seems that Hamawy’s unapologetic stance on Gaza will in all likelihood send him to Congress.

Even so, as he described to me in his office, perils remain, especially for Muslim candidates. In Hamawy’s case, it led to suspicions about his past and true motives that was effective enough for his eventual primary win to be deemed........

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