The last few years have seen corporate interests and pro-Israel groups regularly team up to beat back what they increasingly see as their common enemy: a grassroots-led socialist and progressive movement rising within the Democratic Party — usually by jumping into the party’s primaries to try to crush left-wing insurgents and incumbents. Last year, that strategy saw an avalanche of corporate money funneled through pro-Israel PACs unseat two members of the left-wing Squad from Congress.

Now that same strategy is rearing its head way down ballot at the municipal level: the New York City Council elections.

With the Democratic primaries for council seats less than a month away, a deluge of combined pro-Israel and real estate and other corporate money has poured in, and into two races in particular: the Democratic primaries for the Thirty-Eighth and Thirty-Ninth Districts, which since 2022 have been held by socialist councilmembers Alexa Avilés and Shahana Hanif. Over the course of their two terms, the pair have drawn pushback over both their criticism of Israel’s war on Gaza and their support for pro-renter, pro-worker policies — to the point that much of the outside spending is being driven by firms that were directly opposed to and lobbied on legislation they pushed while on the city council.