The leader of the Democratic majority in the Senate and the most powerful Jew in the United States Congress, Chuck Schumer, yesterday raised his voice against Benjamin Netanyahu’s war cabinet in Israel. In a surprising speech in the Upper House, he called for new elections to be held in the Jewish State to prevent it from becoming an “outcast” due to the lack of international support for its military offensive in Gaza, which it has already more than 30,000 dead and two million displaced.
“The Israelis know better than anyone that Israel cannot prosper as a pariah against the rest of the world,” Schumer said. “The holding of new elections would give the Israelis the opportunity to express their vision of the post-war future,” he said in a plenary session, in which he firmly defended the two-state solution, the official US position.
He, as a Jew, feels “immensely obliged to speak and act”, he assured at the beginning of his long speech, and underlined the conviction that the Israelis would elect “better leaders” than the current ones, who “do not satisfy the needs” of the country with its vision “stuck in the past”. Netanyahu and his Administration are an “obstacle to peace”, he remarked, in his harshest statements so far in a Congress closely aligned with Israel, but with a growing number of critical Democrats.
These words go beyond a recent shift in rhetoric from President Joe Biden, who from the beginning of the conflict offered unconditional support for Israel despite his public differences with Netanyahu, but has raised his tone in recent weeks demanding that halting its plans to invade Rafah, as well as asking it to allow humanitarian aid to enter by land.
Support for Netanyahu in Israel was already on a tightrope before October 7, with mass demonstrations for his judicial reform, and has since deteriorated over the failure to prevent and stop Hamas’s brutal attacks on south of the country, which left 1,200 dead, and the taking of a hundred hostages, whose relatives are still without news five months later.
Peace in the region, summarized Schumer, faces four obstacles: the existence of Hamas and its support in Gaza, the ultra-right in the Israeli government and society, the “terrible” Government of Mahmud Abbas in the West Bank and Netanyahu himself .
While Democrats raise their criticism, military support for Israel continues without facing major opposition in Congress. The US spends about $3.8 billion annually on military funding. Eight senators, including former candidate Bernie Sanders, have called for an end to this aid if Israel continues to block humanitarian assistance to Gaza. They demand it in compliance with the Foreign Aid law, which prohibits helping countries that restrict humanitarian access.
Israel is waging a war that could thwart the re-election of Biden, who has already faced protest votes in several Democratic primaries. Among others, in Michigan, the state with the largest population of Arab origin, where he reached 100,000 votes (13.2%), and where the president had planned a campaign speech yesterday afternoon.
