JTA — A new group opposing AIPAC is backing anti-Israel candidates across party lines. Some of its endorsees have blamed Israel and Jews for 9/11 and the Charlie Kirk assassination. Its founder claims the bloody Hamas-led invasion of October 7, 2023, was a “false flag” operation and has referred to Jewish people as “the Synagogue of Satan.”

This is the Anti-Zionist America PAC, or AZAPAC.

With a stated aim to “de-Zionize” the American government and end military aid to Israel, AZAPAC is unlike the other PACs that have recently popped up as a counterweight to AIPAC, the pro-Israel lobby that has poured millions of dollars into political races across the country.

Those groups — including American Priorities, PAL PAC and Citizens Again AIPAC Corruption — are rallying their support around a brand of pro-Palestinian progressives in line with Congress’s left-wing “Squad” members. Michael Rectenwald, AZAPAC’s founder and a self-described libertarian, is taking a different approach.

“We’re not like leftist anti-Zionists, calling for ‘from the river to the sea’ and all this nonsense,” said Rectenwald in an interview. “We are not trying to say the State of Israel should not exist. That is not our concern. Our concern is the US government only, and what it’s doing.”

To that end, Rectenwald’s group, which was founded last summer, has endorsed fringe candidates across the political spectrum, from both Republican and Democratic parties, as well as independents. The primary criteria for endorsement, Rectenwald said, are that candidates will vote against aid to Israel and do not take money from pro-Israel lobbying groups.

AZAPAC’s spending has been relatively minimal (it had raised $111,556 by the end of 2025, according to FEC filings), but it taps into an ascendant set of sentiments, including a rising anti-Israel faction of Republicans, as well as the conspiracy-theory mindset increasingly occupying Americans of all stripes.

Some of the candidates it has endorsed have promoted conspiracy theories about Jews. Multiple AZAPAC-endorsed politicians believe that Jews were responsible for 9/11 and that Israel was behind the assassination of Charlie Kirk.

Meanwhile, Rectenwald himself has taken to social media (and tried courting avowed antisemite Nick Fuentes) in an attempt to broaden the group’s reach, leaning into antisemitic tropes about Jews and Israel himself in the process.

“Don’t die for ‘israel’. Don’t die for the Syn@gogue of S@t@n,” he wrote in a since-deleted tweet in March about the war in Iran.

In another tweet, he wrote that “The Synagogue of Satan refers to those who are genetically Jewish but have rejected Christ and thus utterly forfeit the........

© The Times of Israel