The Breaking of the Israel Consensus

Chuck Schumer's extraordinary speech

It is easy to be cynical about Chuck Schumer, the Senate majority leader. Many years ago, when I profiled him for the New York Observer, I found a politician with few core convictions, a man willing to chase popularity at the expense of what might be right. Schumer supported the Iraq War and cheered on Wall Street through the 2008 crash. He rarely led and often followed. Unlike the late Harry Reid, who anointed the New York senator his successor, Schumer didn’t even command a political machine in his home state. Democrats win today in Nevada because of Reid, the ex-boxer from the town of Searchlight. In New York, the Democratic Party has been desiccated for decades.

On Israel, Schumer wasn’t much different. If you are an Israel hawk, you had every reason to revere him until earlier this week. Whatever the Israeli government did—whether it was, a long time ago, led by Labor Zionists, or in recent times dominated by the far-right—it was all fine with Schumer. Much of this was personal: Schumer built his political career in the Jewish neighborhoods of southern Brooklyn. He was born two years after Israel’s founding, and he came up in politics when devotion to Zionism was as much a Democratic cause as a Republican one. The most liberal members of Congress, then, were arch-Zionists. There was logic to this. Though Israel was founded in bloodshed, the Arabs expelled from their land, it was also, in its first decades, a country where the left-wing held great power. For a decade-long stretch, from the late 1960s to the late 1970s, Labor dominated Israel, dramatically expanding the welfare state there. Labor would fall from power but always come back. Yitzhak Rabin, who negotiated the Oslo Accords, belonged to Labor. Of course, he was assassinated, and the far-right has been on the march in Israel since. Today, the Labor Party is effectively dead, and even the moderate coalition that briefly ousted Benjamin Netanyahu couldn’t hold on for long. Netanyahu belongs to the far-right now and he’s a political operator who goes where power is; he was able to become prime minister again by negotiating with the ultra-Orthodox and the revanchists, the sort who don’t believe in any state for the Palestinians and would prefer them all exiled or dead.

Schumer stood on the floor of the Senate yesterday and called for new elections in Israel. He called the Netanyahu government an obstacle to peace. He did not, like many activists crave, call for a permanent ceasefire or conditions on military aid. It will take much more—probably many more thousands dead—for Schumer to get there. But he can. It’s easy to declare this a victory for the leftist, pro-Palestine activists in the U.S.—Jewish Voice for Peace, DSA, Within Our Lifetime, and the other assorted anti-Zionist groups—as well as the campaign to rack up “uncommitted” votes in various presidential primaries. Protest matters, particularly when it’s sustained. Unlike Occupy Wall Street, pro-Palestine activism won’t vanish because the conflict itself, so tragic and unresolvable, isn’t disappearing from public view. There will be new atrocities to be enraged about, and the Netanyahu government is almost perfectly calibrated to enflame leftists in America and drive more liberals away from hardline Zionism. Schumer will be a Zionist until he dies, but his speech was extraordinary. It represented, in some sense, the left-leaning Zionist’s deep exhaustion with Netanyahu. And it proved the atrocities the Israeli government has committed since Oct. 7—the ceaseless bombings, the starvation of civilians—are now outweighing, in the public’s view, Hamas’ initial slaughter.

Still, the pro-Palestine movement can’t claim all credit for this reversal. Schumer disdains anti-Zionists. What matters, far more, is Israel’s conduct. Thirty thousand dead in five months is almost unfathomable; it’s the sort of death and destruction the twenty-first century American government would only inflict over many years. It is more in line with Vietnam or even the relentless civilian bombing campaigns in Japan that presaged Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The Republican hawks will never budge—Tom Cotton, Lindsey Graham, and Ted Cruz have built their political careers on calling for the immolation of various nations—but it will be fascinating to see what the most furious—and normally Schumer-aligned—Democrats now do. I am very interested in Ritchie Torres, whom I’ve interviewed many times and have known since he was first elected to the New York City Council a decade ago. Torres has become the most vocal Democratic Israel hawk in the House, AIPAC’s most charismatic foot-solider; he’s something of a parallel universe AOC, a Puerto Rican born in the late 1980s who also represents the Bronx and has, through genuine ideological commitment or campaign donations or both, become Israel’s staunchest defender on the left. Schumer and even Joe Biden, to an extent, seem discomfited by Israel’s imminent invasion of Rafah. You almost expect Torres to rush to the House floor to cheer on the troops.

The other great Israel hawk in the Democratic Party is Senator John Fetterman. Fetterman was once, like Torres, a Bernie Sanders supporter. To get elected in Pennsylvania, he aligned with progressives. In 2022, as he was facing down Dr. Oz, he steadily broke with them but still remained cordial. He was a soft Israel hawk then, not particularly outspoken about his foreign policy views because few asked. After the Oct. 7 attacks, he became indistinguishable from Cruz, Cotton, and Graham. Unlike his colleagues in the Senate, particularly Chris Van Hollen of Maryland, he has not only been a strident Netanyahu backer but repeatedly mocked anyone who dares question the Israeli military’s decisions. The same sophomoric, 2010s-style Gawkerspeak that won him so many plaudits on the left when he was savaging a TV doctor now proves alienating because it’s aimed almost exclusively at anyone who’s pro-Palestine. More intriguing, now, is that both Fetterman and Torres, like AIPAC, are operating to the right of Schumer. Until yesterday, Schumer was a Democrat fully in AIPAC’s fold. He spoke at their conferences, took their money, and towed their line. Torres is a congressman in Schumer’s city with a constituency that is either deeply indifferent to Israel—the Latinos of the Bronx—or, in the case of one particularly affluent neighborhood (Riverdale), supportive, but more in the way Schumer might be: Zionist for good, but wondering how many Gazans, exactly, have to die for Oct. 7

If the constituency for the anti-Zionists who long for Israel to collapse into dust or at least evolve into a binational state with no Jewish majority is very small—too small, beyond Dearborn, to win elections—it is hard to see who the mass audience for the Fetterman and Torres-style Democrats might be. Republicans, at least, have the excuse of pandering to the evangelicals, who are influential within the GOP and have their own biblical reasons for backing Israel in every war. Fetterman and Torres can each say they represent Jews—Philadelphia and Pittsburgh have plenty, and a small slice of Torres’ district has some Orthodox—but there really are very few Americans who support one foreign nation unconditionally. Orthodox Jews are a vanishingly small slice of the national electorate. If polls, forevermore, will show more Americans back Israel than the Palestinians, they will always display nuance. There is nothing radical about suggesting America shouldn’t hand out blank checks for military weaponry to a nation that, over the last five months, has shown little interest in preventing civilian death. There is nothing radical about suggesting Israel’s relationship to the U.S. shouldn’t be beyond reproach—it’s not as if France or Lithuania or India could perpetually escape all opprobrium. The political bent of Israel will make the old American foreign policy consensus unsustainable, especially for the next Democratic president, whenever he or she arrives. Biden is 81 and he has a lifetime, like Schumer, steeped in Israel advocacy. He remembers Labor Zionism. For those that don’t, they see Israel for what it is—a nation captured by its far-right. All of this will make speeches like Schumer’s more common and the Fetterman approach only more alienating. Schumer is a political weathervane; he represents, almost perfectly, the median Democrat. This is how, in part, he’s been an elected official for 50 years. He’s rarely led, but he’s rarely fallen too far behind.

The question that must be asked—and cannot be answered, for now at least—is what this will mean for American policy. Torres himself believes nothing has changed. And he isn’t entirely wrong. Biden has done nothing to prevent the probable invasion of Rafah. Biden is not conditioning military aid. Biden is not exercising American leverage. He is certainly not going as far as Schumer to call for a new prime minister. He may never. The next Democrats who run for president, though, are taking note of today. If they’ve won the present, Torres and Fetterman will not have the future of the party. There will be fewer and fewer Democratic presidential candidates, come 2028, who talk like the congressman from the Bronx and the senator from Pennsylvania. They’ll sound, perhaps, like the Georgia senators, Raphael Warnock and Jon Ossoff, or maybe Mark Kelly, the Arizona centrist who has never alienated the left because he keeps a low profile and votes reliably with Biden. Israel, for now, is squandering its political capital in America. Schumer, who takes stock of it more than almost anyone alive, understands this well. Someday, the other hawks might too.