At last, Democrats and Republicans in the Senate could find a point of agreement: what they heard was unprecedented. Chuck Schumer has made a lot of speeches on Capitol Hill but there was a sense, in the opening minutes of his address before the Senate on Thursday morning, that he was embarking on a delivery that will become a defining element of his legacy.
In calling for new elections in Israel; in declaring his belief that prime minister Binyamin Netanyahu has “lost his way by allowing his political survival to take precedence over the best interests of Israel”, the 73-year-old Senate majority leader openly broadcast a conversation that has, in Democratic political circles, shifted from hushed to more explicit demonstrations of disquiet through the worsening horrors visited on Gaza.
Just a week ago, Schumer led the cheerleading in the House after President Biden delivered a State of the Union speech which reassured Democrats that he has the requisite energy and fire to guide the party through the rigours of the election ahead.
Even as the final applause subsided that evening, Schumer’s voice echoed around the room as he tried to rally his colleagues for one last chant of “Four More Years”. It didn’t quite take off: the president’s speech had gone on for over an hour. But as Biden lingered in the room to receive congratulations, he was heard on hot mike saying that he had told Netanyahu of their urgent need to have a “come to Jesus’ meeting.”
By then, the Michigan primary result showed more than 100,000 people choosing to vote “uncommitted” against Biden over his handling of the Israel-Gaza war. The violence and the daily horrors visited on the Palestinian people had become an issue with the potential to divert crucial Democratic votes away from Biden in the November election.
So on the same day that the president prepared to campaign in Michigan and attempt to regain that lost trust, Schumer stood up as the highest ranking Jewish elected figure in the United States and, over 40 minutes, laid out an argument that was both scathing in its denouncement of Hamas but equally condemnatory of what he termed the “radical right wing Israelis in government and society.”
He namechecked finance minister Bezalel Smotrich and national security minister Itamar Ben-Gvir as representing “the worst example of this radicalism”. Smotrich, he said, had repeatedly “called for the subjugation and displacement of Palestinians in the West Bank. In the current crisis he has used inflammatory rhetoric and called for punitive restrictions on Palestinian farmers on the West Bank during the olive harvest and opposed all humanitarian intervention.”
He was, he said, speaking for himself “but also for so many mainstream Jewish Americans, a silent majority whose nuanced views about the war in Gaza” have not been heard, and presented Netanyahu as a figure belonging to a political reality that had vanished on October 7th with the Hamas invasion of Israel.
“While we have vehemently disagreed on many occasions, I will always respect his extraordinary bravery for Israel on the battlefield as a younger man. I believe in his heart he has as his highest priority the security of Israel. However, I also believe prime minister Netanyahu has lost his way by allowing his political survival to take precedence over the best interests of Israel. He has put himself in coalition with far-right extremists like minister Smotrich and Ben-Gvir and as a result he has been too willing to tolerate the civilian toll in Gaza which is pushing support for Israel worldwide to historic lows. Israel cannot survive if it becomes a pariah.”
Words travel fast, both around a room and internationally. Schumer’s speech drew instant plaudits and equally strident criticism.
Among a series of condemnatory reactions suggesting Schumer’s call amounted to election interference, Israeli war cabinet minister and National Unity leader Benny Gantz referred to the New York senator as “a friend of Israel who helps her a lot, even these days”, adding that “he made a mistake” in his call for new elections.
A statement from prime minister Nehanyahu’s Likud party said Israel is “an independent and proud democracy” and “not a banana republic” and asserted that the Israeli public “supports a complete victory over Hamas and rejects any international dictates to establish a Palestinian terrorist state.”
More locally, Senate minority leader Mitch McConnell said it is “grotesque and hypocritical for Americans who hyperventilate about interference in our own democracy to call for the removal of a democratically elected leader of Israel. This is unprecedented.”
It was certainly that and it has blown wide open the debate as to how president Biden should best navigate a path towards an end to what has been five months of endless deaths and no resolution in sight.
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