How Israel Is Splitting the Democrats

The short answer, it seemed, was that the political lines were becoming clearer, and Khanna was trying to avoid finding himself on the wrong side of them—or, really, to avoid being too strongly associated with any side, if he could help it. “Most politicians see Israel-Palestine as a no-win issue,” a Democratic operative told me. “The people who care most about the issue are hard-core Zionists and Arabs with relatives living under apartheid, and everyone else mostly doesn’t give a shit.” Even Bernie Sanders, the most consistently pro-Palestinian senator (he also once lived in Israel), was not eager to take a vanguardist position on the issue. “He finds the Israel situation depressing, and he’s annoyed that people are talking about this instead of the labor strikes,” a progressive political staffer told me. Pramila Jayapal, a representative from Seattle and the chair of the Congressional Progressive Caucus, co-sponsored the bipartisan resolution, although she privately expressed anguish about it. “She actually gives a shit about Palestinian lives, but she feels politically boxed in,” the staffer told me. Around this time, Jayapal told a colleague who ran into her at the airport that she felt compelled to support the bipartisan resolution, despite her misgivings—J Street and other pro-Israel groups had left her no choice.

In private, the Biden Administration was reportedly pressing the Netanyahu administration to delay a ground invasion of Gaza and allow in a trickle of humanitarian aid. All the more reason, some members of Congress told their staff, to avoid taking a public position that could restrict Biden’s room to negotiate. Some staffers considered this a principled stance; others thought that it was a convenient excuse. Ramer, alone with the dog in Madison, was up at all hours, doomscrolling. “You have one internal voice going, Adam, you just started this job, your role is to be respectful and not cause problems,” he told me. “And then there’s the other half of you that’s thinking, If there’s a chance of this spiralling into an ethnic-cleansing situation, or a world war, and there’s anything the American government could be doing now to prevent it, and here I am texting with a U.S. congressman, then I probably have a responsibility to keep pushing.”

American politics was bitterly partisan during the Presidencies of Bill Clinton, George W. Bush, and Barack Obama, but one of the few areas of bipartisan consensus was staunch, often unquestioning support for Israel. The motif of an American left that was progressive “except for Palestine” became so familiar that Marc Lamont Hill, a CNN contributor who was fired after sharply criticizing Israel, used the phrase as a book title. But, beginning in Obama’s second term, two things started to happen simultaneously: the Democratic coalition shifted to the left, and Israeli politics shifted to the right. Democrats, both leftists and moderates, often spoke out against the authoritarian tendencies of Viktor Orbán, Jair Bolsonaro, and Donald Trump—the sort of tendencies that were also exhibited, with increasing zeal, by Benjamin Netanyahu.

When the Israeli military started to react to Hamas’s attack, most Republicans, with the notable exception of Donald Trump, stuck to the old script, with comments ranging from darkly jingoist to candidly exterminationist. Within the Democratic coalition, though, surprising new fissures started to emerge. Ben Rhodes, Barack Obama’s former deputy national-security adviser, and Thomas Friedman, the stalwart moderate of the Times Opinion page, found themselves to the left of Senator John Fetterman, a salt-of-the-earth left-populist who also turned out to be an acerbic Zionist. Josh Paul, a high-ranking State Department official for more than a decade, resigned in protest of “our continued lethal assistance to Israel.” Nearly every institution—campuses, synagogues, families—seemed riven by internal conflict.

Beginning on Monday, October 16th, Ramer said, “movement folks started coalescing around a single demand”: a ceasefire in Gaza. In particular, he mentioned two left-wing Jewish groups: IfNotNow, founded in 2017, and Jewish Voice for Peace, founded in 1996. For its first two decades or so, J.V.P. was a source of tsuris within the Jewish-institutional world, but far from a political powerhouse. In recent years, though—and especially in recent weeks—both groups had seen a sharp increase in volunteers. “The old-line Zionist groups thought they had a monopoly on this issue,” a prominent Jewish critic of Israel told me. “Now they’re freaking out because the next generation is joining the opposition—their kids are joining.” Two members of the Squad—Cori Bush, a former Black Lives Matter organizer, and Rashida Tlaib, the only Palestinian American in Congress—introduced a House resolution calling for a ceasefire. At one point, the progressive political staffer told me, “we had the text of the resolution, but we were wondering whether to wait and get someone to introduce it who would be perceived as less polarizing, like maybe Pramila or Mark Pocan”—a white progressive from Wisconsin who is not seen as a firebrand. “But then the feeling was, This is too urgent. Let’s just put it out, and if it’s perceived as a Squad thing, and other members feel they can’t touch it, then so be it.”

This was more or less what happened. The word “ceasefire” became a shibboleth splitting the left in two, with politicians like Khanna and Jayapal, and even Sanders, stuck in the middle. The ceasefire resolution was introduced with thirteen co-sponsors—members of the Squad and their allies, essentially—all of whom were people of color. Waleed Shahid, a former staffer for Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, tweeted, “I’ll buy gulab jamun for the first white member of Congress to endorse ceasefire in Gaza.” More than three hundred of Sanders’s former staffers signed an open letter, and more than two hundred and fifty of Senator Elizabeth Warren’s former staffers wrote another, urging the senators to join the call. Kunoor Ojha, who worked on Warren’s Presidential campaign, in 2020, told me, “I think she’s engaging in good faith, but I suspect the pressure she’s feeling from the other side is way more acute than what we’ve seen on other issues.” J.V.P. and IfNotNow started organizing demonstrations in support of the ceasefire resolution; AIPAC started whipping votes against it. (“A ceasefire would only serve to leave Hamas armed and in power,” David Gillette, an AIPAC lobbyist, wrote in an e-mail to congressional staffers.) Shortly after the air strikes on Gaza began, Antony Blinken, the U.S. Secretary of State, had tweeted in favor of “advocacy for a cease-fire”—on its face, not an outlandish position for a diplomat to take. But this was cast as a dangerous capitulation—“The Biden Administration is showing its true colors,” a Republican representative from Florida wrote—and Blinken deleted the tweet.