Last night, Ilhan Omar won her primary election, setting her up for what will almost certainly end up being her fourth term in Congress. Except she didn’t just win. Omar destroyed her challenger, Don Samuels, who was taking his second swing at Omar. Two years ago, he almost beat her — but this time, Samuels was sent packing by a nearly fourteen-point vote margin.

Omar emerged triumphant despite internal polling that, months earlier, had shown a dead-even race, which Samuels claimed “supports what we already know: We can beat Rep. Ilhan Omar.” It turns out he could not.

The outcome isn’t so much a loss for Samuels, a relatively weak and undisciplined candidate, as it is a loss for the pro-Israel lobby. Samuels leaned into criticism of Omar’s opposition to the ongoing US-backed Israeli genocide in Gaza during the campaign, denouncing a Minneapolis City Council cease-fire resolution that Omar supported, attacking her for voting against a one-sided pro-Israel resolution in the war’s first month, and accusing her of ignoring “the sensibilities of the Jewish community.” He got the backing of some major pro-Israel donors, a money surge following Squad member Cori Bush’s defeat, and an eleventh-hour assist from a group of wealthy donors, some of them Donald Trump backers, who called themselves “Zionists for Don Samuels.”

Omar, meanwhile, had done virtually everything that, according to the narrative propagated by AIPAC and others, should have made her political poison. Omar has been a lightning rod for right-wing and pro-Israel attacks the past six years. We’ve been virtually guaranteed at least one firestorm every year — often involving accusations of antisemitism — over the Somali-born Congresswoman’s comments, such as when she accurately called out the influence of pro-Israel donors in 2019.

That includes this year, when Omar briefly faced all that and the threat of censure for saying that “we should not have to tolerate antisemitism or bigotry for all Jewish students, whether they are pro-genocide or anti-genocide.” Driving this hostility, in reality, is Omar’s unflinching criticism of Israeli policy, which has been particularly bold the past ten months: correctly labeling the Gaza war a genocide, defending and encouraging campus antiwar protests, and consistently calling and voting for an end to unconditional US military aid to Israel from the very start of the war.

And yet Omar prevailed last night, and she did so with ease. She put Samuels away not just in the populous Hennepin County — where her slim, not-quite-three-point victory in 2022 was responsible for putting her over the top that year, and was way outdone by her seventeen-point margin there this time around — but in the two other counties that she had lost last time. She expanded her lead in the Hennepin County seat, Minneapolis, and won every single ward in the city bar one. This was all after racking up the best fundraising numbers of her career in the wake of October 7, suggesting that ordinary voters, far from being turned off by Omar’s criticism of Israel’s repulsive, unpopular war and her calls for its end, were enthusiastically on her side. She also won the local Democratic Party endorsement, which Samuels had tried and failed to block.

AIPAC has moved heaven and earth to make it seem like the kind of unlimited support for Israel that Omar has spent her career fighting against is “good politics and good policy” — that everyone in Washington should get in line with AIPAC and Netanyahu’s agenda, in other words, or start looking for another job. It’s hard to look at the Omar-Samuels race and still argue that with a straight face.

Omar’s landslide win happens to come just as a narrative has started picking up steam that she and the rest of the Squad are on the ropes. Reinforcing that narrative are the recent primary election defeats of fellow Squad members Jamaal Bowman and Cori Bush in the face of record outside spending by AIPAC’s corporate-funded Super PAC. “Progressives face an existential threat from AIPAC. And there’s nothing to stop it,” Politico blasted out just yesterday. Even a New York Times op-ed this week in favor of a Gaza cease-fire inadvertently advanced this narrative, arguing that while “acknowledging protesters’ demands” had seemed “the politically savvy thing for Democrats to do” earlier this year, “that notion is looking shakier now” in the wake of Bush and Bowman’s losses.

But none of that is really true. What this kind of coverage reflects, instead, is the fruit of a very clever PR strategy by AIPAC and other pro-Israel forces that relies on inflating their own power. As I pointed out in the wake of Bowman’s loss, AIPAC has had a pretty mediocre track record this election cycle, despite initially high hopes that October 7 would mean the political extinction of the Squad and the cowing of Congress’s meager number of other pro-Palestinian voices.

AIPAC has cannily disguised its middling results through a combination of tactics. It binged on endorsements of candidates running unopposed or in safe seats so it can claim a sky-high win record — in one case, comically, “intervening” in a race against a long-shot progressive where its spending made no difference — just so it could loudly claim victory over the Left. It turned tail and slunk away from races it realized it would lose, most notably the reelections of Squad members Summer Lee and Rashida Tlaib. And it spent aggressively to oust the members who were already vulnerable for reasons that had little to do with Israel.

AIPAC’s aim is to get headline-grabbing victories and avoid embarrassing headlines about failures, like the one it had earlier this year when it blew nearly $5 million on pointlessly trying to defeat centrist Democrat Dave Min. By doing so, it can drive the kind of narrative we’ve seen take shape over the past weeks and, as the New York Times put it, make clear “to members of Congress the resources that AIPAC can deploy to defeat those who oppose its policies.”

“It’s the myth of AIPAC,” as Arab American Institute president James Zogby told me earlier this year. “It’s the imagining of power and the fear that goes with it.”

This is how AIPAC ensures continuing unconditional US backing for anything and everything Israel decides to do despite public opinion pointing the opposite way: by striking fear into the hearts of cowardly politicians who, unlike Omar and the Squad, don’t have the guts to defy AIPAC and big-money donors. Ironically, its greatest victory in this effort is that this mirage of indomitability is often advanced by AIPAC’s own opponents, who are understandably unnerved when they see left-wing lawmakers being ousted from power in a hail of corporate spending, and end up magnifying AIPAC’s wins over its many failures. Omar’s win should, ideally, put a stop to this.

None of this is to suggest that the colossal funds AIPAC and other pro-Israel groups have at their disposal aren’t a problem. They are. There is a very good chance that, whatever mistakes they made, Bowman and Bush might have still prevailed in their primaries had they not had the record amounts of outside spending thrown at them that they did. It should outrage us that the democratic process can be bought like this in the United States, and that the Democratic Party deliberately chooses to facilitate such election-buying by refusing to change its own rules to bar dark money and Super PAC spending in its primaries. And we should remember that Omar won as big as she did precisely because she and her supporters weren’t complacent, furiously knocking on doors and phone-banking to the very end to turn out the vote for her.

But let’s also be clear that AIPAC and its allies are not unstoppable, that the Squad is still standing despite their best efforts, and that they have not only lost many races, but have lost the argument too. Ilhan Omar is back in Congress for another two years. Sometimes, celebration is a political act.