When you ask Adam Hamawy why he’s running for Congress, he sounds like a lot of other progressives.

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.

“I’ve seen where we’re spending our money,” he told HuffPost in an interview. “We’re told that we can’t afford Medicare For All. But we always find money for bombs.”

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.

“I’ve seen the horrors of war. When I went to Palestine, that was not a war,” said Hamawy. ”You can only do so much as an advocate; you can make real change as a congressman.”

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.

“They’re finally being seen,” said Rep. Ro Khanna (D-Calif.) when asked what a potential Hamawy victory would mean for the pro-Palestine movement. “They’re finally being heard after decades of being ignored.”

His potential triumph, however, has elicited howls of protest from pro-Israel organizations, who have attempted to argue that Hamawy has unacceptable ties to Muslim radicals, with Sen. Tim Sheehy (R-Mont.) going as far as to label Hamawy an “actual terrorist.”

The attacks have two prongs: 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.”

Hamawy’s victory is not guaranteed. His stiffest challenger is probably Sue Altman, a former director of the New Jersey Working Families Party who narrowly lost a challenge to Rep. Tom Kean (R-N.J.) last cycle. 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.

“We know AIPAC, Crypto, and AI wanted to buy this seat and were interviewing candidates, but while they couldn’t choose which corporate shill to back, the left united behind a political outsider with a vision that spoke to the needs and priorities of Jersey voters,” said Usamah Andrabi, the communications director for the progressive group Justice Democrats, which endorsed Hamawy.

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.

“This is the resume of a candidate the DCCC would love to recruit,” said Amira Hassan, the political director of PAL PAC, another pro-Palestine group. “This is the perfect candidate.”

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