Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer’s warning that Israel risked becoming a “pariah” and his call for new elections marked a momentous moment in modern US-Israel relations.
Schumer’s rebuke of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu Thursday contained extraordinarily strong language for a senior US politician criticizing the Israeli government. It was all the more remarkable coming from the New York Democrat who has a long record of staunch support for the Jewish state.
The Senate floor speech was also an unmistakable sign of increasing frustration among top Democrats about Netanyahu’s conduct of the war in Gaza following the October 7 Hamas terror attacks that killed 1,200 people and his unwillingness to listen to US advice. It also reflects political realities in the United States. The deaths of more than 30,000 Palestinians in the conflict, according to the ministry of health in Gaza, have outraged US progressives, Arab Americans and younger voters in the US – all key parts of President Joe Biden’s coalition as he seeks reelection.
Schumer – the highest-ranking Jewish American in the US government – warned that Netanyahu’s ultra-right-wing coalition was preventing the “significant course corrections” needed in the war against Hamas. He also voiced support for a two-state solution to the long conflict between Israelis and Palestinians, a position that Netanyahu has rejected. While placing the lion’s share of the blame for the civilian carnage of the war on Gaza’s Hamas rulers, he argued that Israel had an obligation to do far more to protect innocent Palestinian lives.
“The Netanyahu coalition no longer fits the needs of Israel after October 7. The world has changed, radically, since then, and the Israeli people are being stifled right now by a governing vision that is stuck in the past,” Schumer…
Read the full article here
