Chuck Schumer’s Problem Is with Israel, Not Netanyahu

By Noah Rothman

Thursday, March 14, 2024

 

In a display of all the modesty of which he is capable during a Thursday speech, Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer anointed himself the voice of “so many mainstream Jewish Americans” — a “silent majority” whose sentiments he alone could divine. After all, there are few better stewards of Jewish interests than Schumer, according to Schumer. “My last name is Schumer, which derives from the Hebrew word ‘shomer,’ or ‘guardian,’” he began. As he has in the past, Schumer assumed for himself the “responsibility as a ‘Shomer Yisrael’ — a guardian of the people of Israel.”

 

A lofty aspiration — one that apparently conflicts with Democratic Party politics in the fifth month of Israel’s war against the executors of the worst single massacre on Jews since the Holocaust.

 

In remarks Schumer delivered on Thursday in the Senate, the majority leader savaged Israel for its conduct of the war against the terrorist group Hamas. But he sought to frame his condemnation of Israel’s approach as a tailored critique of its prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, even going so far as to call on the Jewish State to hold new elections with the aim of extirpating Bibi from the political scene.

 

“I believe that holding a new election once the war starts to wind down would give Israelis an opportunity to express their vision for the postwar future,” Schumer’s prepared remarks read. Netanyahu “has put himself in a coalition with far-right extremists” and is “too willing to tolerate the civilian toll in Gaza.” Israel, Schumer ostensibly lamented, “cannot survive as a pariah,” and its approach to neutralizing Hamas has earned the nation little in the way of goodwill from the international community.

 

Only those possessed of Schumer’s affection for the Israeli people would argue, as he did, that Jerusalem must allow the occasion of the worst terrorist attack on Jews in decades to be the impetus for an ill-fated Palestinian state. “The bitter reality is that a single state controlled by Israel, which they advocate, guarantees certain war forever,” Schumer continued, “and further isolation of the Jewish community in the world to the extent that its future would be jeopardized.”

 

That’s some grade-A guardianship there. Not only has Schumer tacitly blamed Jews who have the temerity to defend themselves against explicitly genocidal exogenous threats for their “isolation,” but he also mangled Israeli political realities — all and only to appease an unappeasable band of anti-Israel activists the Democratic Party has unwisely courted as a constituent group.

 

Schumer’s remarks are designed to establish the fiction that new leadership in the Israeli government would yield a new approach to this war and the subsequent effort to establish a healthier social contract in the Gaza Strip. He has no reason to believe that, though he probably thinks you might.

 

Netanyahu’s government is no longer wholly dependent on the right-wing coalition that brought him back to power after an 18-month interlude from 2021 to 2022. It’s a wartime unity coalition led by a tripartite pact composed of political rivals. Netanyahu’s foremost domestic political opponent, Benny Gantz, is a minister in that government without portfolio. Nor is Yoav Gallant, Israel’s defense minister, a member of Netanyahu’s party. Like all coalition governments, this one is reportedly riven by strife and internal conflict, but it has shown the world no indication that it is disunited on the tactical approach to the war in the Gaza Strip. It is united in pursuit of its strategic objective — eliminating Hamas once and for all — because Israeli society is united behind that objective.

 

New elections might produce a new prime minister, but it would not yield a new war because it would not create a new Israel. That is the unspoken source of Schumer’s consternation, but he is not alone. “I cannot support sending Israel more weapons as long as Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu remains in power,” Congressman Joaquin Castro insisted. “We should not provide this money to allow Netanyahu to continue the indiscriminate bombardment,” Senator Bernie Sanders barked. The “U.S. military aid can’t be a blank check to a right-wing Netanyahu government,” Senator Elizabeth Warren insisted.

 

Netanyahu is not a popular figure — not in America, not in Israel, and, indeed, not even in his own party, if the polling is to be believed. He makes for an easy target. Schumer has only borrowed his colleagues’ tactic because it gives to the Democrats who adopt it a plausible claim that they are merely critical of Israeli leadership, not the state or its people. But they don’t believe it. Not if the White House’s conduct is any indication. If Democrats genuinely thought Netanyahu was the villain here, the administration would not have given Gantz the Bibi treatment during his recent visit to Washington.

 

“Gantz, who is considered a more moderate member of the Israeli war cabinet, absorbed a lot of the frustration the White House has with the Israeli government right now,” Axios reported last week. Fueled by conspicuous leaks from the White House and the national-security establishment, these and other reports relate how Biden administration officials berated Gantz over Israel’s conduct. The Biden administration and its Democratic allies are engaged in a theatrical exercise in public spleen-venting because they are targeting an audience desperate for that sort of theater — a domestic audience.

 

It will do them no good. The critics of Israel in the Democratic camp won’t be satisfied with garment-rending appeals to the heavens for deliverance from Netanyahu’s leadership. The anti-Israel left doesn’t want new leadership in Israel; they want Biden to abandon Israel altogether. In that sense, Israel’s detractors have a better grasp on the political situation than the Democratic lawmakers who pander to them. Schumer’s problem isn’t with Bibi. It is with the people of Israel, who stubbornly refuse to submit to their own murder, torture, and perpetual besiegement.

 

Support for Israel remains a majority proposition in this country, but you wouldn’t know it from how Democrats talk about the nation, its government, or its just war of self-defense. In the hall of mirrors Democrats inhabit, a decidedly unsympathetic and numerically modest contingent of Israel critics dominate their field of vision. The party may soon come to regret its myopia.