Over 44 painstaking minutes on the Senate floor Thursday, Majority Leader Chuck Schumer spoke about his Jewish identity, his love for the state of Israel, his horror at the unprecedented massacre of Israelis on Oct. 7 and his views on apportioning responsibility for the carnage in Gaza, saying it rests first and foremost with Hamas terrorists.
Then Mr. Schumer, Democrat of New York and the highest-ranking elected Jew in American history, said Israel’s prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, was an obstacle to peace and called for new elections in the world’s only Jewish state.
The opposition was not so strenuous.
Within minutes, the House Republican leadership issued an apology. Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, using Mr. Netanyahu’s nickname, said: “Make no mistake — the Democratic Party does not have a problem against Bibi. He has an anti-Israel problem.” And the Republican Jewish Coalition proclaimed that “the most powerful Democrat in Congress has stabbed the Jewish state in the back.”
The months following the Oct. 7 massacre and the devastating and deadly war on Gaza that followed have been excruciating for American Jews, caught between a tradition of liberalism that has dominated much of Jewish politics and an anti-Israel response from the political left that has many feel isolated and, at times, persecuted.
But Mr. Schumer’s speech was potentially a watershed moment in a much longer political process—first pursued by Republicans but recently joined by left-leaning Democrats—to make Israel a partisan issue. The Republicans, as they see it, would be the party of Israel supporters. The Democrats, as the rising left would have it, would be the party of Palestine.
At the root of this divide is a fundamental question: Is support for the Jewish state separate from support for Israel’s democratically elected government? For years, Republicans said no. Increasingly, the Democratic Left agrees, but from a different angle: Israel is bad, no matter who rules it.
“The pressure — electoral, social, cultural — on American Jews right now to declare themselves” on the justice of the war on Gaza and the legitimacy of the Israeli prime minister has been “relentless, unrelenting and sometimes downright vicious,” David said. . Wolpe, a prominent rabbi in Los Angeles and a visiting scholar at Harvard Divinity School.
Mr. Schumer’s speech and the partisan response that followed have made that pressure even more intense.
“It’s impossible to understate what a seismic event this was,” said Matthew Brooks, the longtime executive director of the Republican Jewish Coalition, who made it clear the group would use the speech to drive Jewish voters to the Republican Party.
While Republicans accused Mr. Schumer of trying to force an election at a time when most Israelis support and are focused on the war against Hamas, the Senate leader was, in fact, well versed in Israeli public opinion. He noted that “so many Israelis have lost confidence in the vision and direction of their government,” a phrase backed by polls showing Mr. Netanyahu is deeply unpopular. Mr Schumer was also careful to say that the election should only be called “when the war starts to end” and that he would respect its outcome.
Jewish Democrats have long argued that support for a Jewish state in the traditional homeland of the Jewish people is intrinsic to their identity, regardless of the government in power in Jerusalem. Mr. Schumer tried to make that point early in Thursday’s speech, explaining that his last name comes from the Hebrew word for “watchman.” He is, he said, a “sommer Israel — guardian of the people of Israel.”
But his speech came at an incendiary time, when Democratic support is eroding for what Sen. Bernie Sanders, a Vermont independent, calls “Netanyahu’s war,” and loud voices on the left say the state of Israel is inherently wrong. : “settler colonialist” invader incompatible with the rights and sovereignty of the Palestinian people who lived there before Israel’s independence in 1948.
“You have this divide where the vast majority of American Jews support Israel, support its right to exist as a Jewish state, and an increasingly vocal minority do not support Israel as a Jewish state and reject what happened in 1948 to ensure that the Jews The state survived,” Michael J. Koplow, policy chief of the Israel Policy Forum, a Washington-based think tank, said Friday from Israel.
He continued: “Shumer had to maintain some way of criticizing the Israeli government without being even close to the No. 2 camp, which is why he spent so much time in the beginning talking about Hamas’s guilt and his love for Israel.”
But at such a political moment, any notion of “nuance” — a word Mr. Schumer used when lamenting the “silent majority” of Jews whose “colorful views have never been represented in discussions about the war in Gaza” — likely to do it. not to sink.
Republicans have made no secret that they would use Mr. Schumer’s words against him. The National Republican Senatorial Committee rejected emails urging vulnerable Democrats to seek re-election this year against Mr. Schumer’s views.
Norm Coleman, a former Republican senator from Minnesota who went to public school with Mr. Schumer in New York and now chairs the Republican Jewish Coalition, said Friday that any bipartisanship that remained around support for Israel might have been eliminated by Mr. Schumer’s resignation Mr. Netanyahu and his call for new elections. He accused Mr. Schumer of political motivations driven specifically by President Biden’s struggles with Arab-Americans in the key state of Michigan.
“I don’t think Schumer is talking about American Jews,” Mr. Coleman said. “I think he’s speaking as the majority leader of a Democratic Party that is now so worried about the left, so worried about Michigan, that he’s giving a speech telling the democratically elected government of a democratic country that it shouldn’t be a government anymore.”
Even some centrist Jewish Democrats, such as Representative Brad Snyder of Illinois, condemned Mr. Schumer’s call for new elections in Israel as meddling in the affairs of what he called “the only true democracy in the region.”
For many older liberal Jews, however, Mr. Schumer’s words were heartening. It was an articulation of their shared anguish over the deaths of tens of thousands of Palestinians in Gaza and their frustration with an Israeli government that includes far-right ministers, whom Mr Schumer called out by name, who are adamantly opposed to any concessions on peace or Palestinian sovereignty. His words were also an expression of Democrats’ growing desire to use what Mr. Schumer called “leverage” tied to billions of American tax dollars flowing into the Israeli military.
Daniel G. Zemel, a Reform rabbi in Washington, DC, and advocate of “liberal Zionism,” said Mr. Schumer’s prescriptions were “exactly what American Jews should be asking for.”
“There needs to be a different approach,” he said, pushing back against those who called Mr. Schumer’s prescriptions undemocratic. “As a rabbi and as a Jew, I have the right and the obligation to say what I want Israel to be in this world.”
Representative Jerrold Nadler, Democrat of New York and the dean of members of the Jewish House, posted on social media that Mr. Schumer “he is right,” adding, “Prime Minister Netanyahu has become an obstacle to peace and a two-state solution.”
Representative Jan Schakowsky of Illinois is one of those progressive Jewish Democrats who feels caught in a vise between activists who harass her as “Genocide Jan” and her personal belief that Israel has a right to exist as a Jewish state, side by side with a sovereign Palestinian state. It is, she acknowledged, a “difficult time” for politicians like herself, but she said Friday that Mr. Schumer was speaking for the majority of Jews in the United States and Israel.
He strongly rejected the idea that Mr. Schumer had interfered with Israeli democracy, noting that Mr. Netanyahu spoke in 2015 to Congress to pressure President Barack Obama to abandon his nuclear deal with Iran.
“There’s a hunger right now for another path, and that’s why Schumer had the courage to speak up,” he said. “Most Israelis and American Jews understand the importance and the essential role that the United States plays, and we feel that Bibi is thumbing our noses.”
