Pro-Israel Democrats try breaking with Netanyahu to stop party's shift amid Gaza crisis

CNN

7 days ago

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Fearing Zionism could die among Democrats, many party leaders are explicitly breaking with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to try to stop anti-Israel attitudes from becoming a litmus test for next year's midterms and the 2028 presidential primaries.
But privately, several tell CNN, they worry it may be too late.
Last week's failed resolution to block new arms sales to Israel, supported by a record number of Senate Democrats, was just the start. A new letter to recognize a Palestinian state is gaining signatures in the House. Devoted allies of Israel are speaking out against its government, brushing off whatever texts and phone calls they've been getting from the dwindling number of party voters or donors still standing steadfast behind Israeli actions in Gaza nearly two years after Hamas' October 7, 2023, attack.
It's no longer just the far left rejecting Netanyahu's years of identifying more with Republicans. There is also a bitter backlash among many Democratic politicians, who have felt bullied by the Israeli government and the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, a lobbying group, and there's revulsion over the images of starvation and dying children.
'We can disagree about a lot of things in the foreign policy space, but there's no room to tolerate mass starvation,' said Hawaii Sen. Brian Schatz, who is Jewish and widely seen as one of the party's future leaders in the Senate. Schatz argues there's a conflation of opposing the Israeli government and opposing Israel's right to exist that he calls 'ridiculous' and an 'intentional strategy' meant to distract.
'I think there's a recognition that Netanyahu is making Israel and Israelis and Jews unsafe all over the world,' Schatz said. 'More and more of us are saying so and voting accordingly.'
US Rep. Mikie Sherrill, who represents a moderate district in New Jersey with a significant Jewish population and is now the Democratic nominee for governor in a traditionally blue state where Trump ran stronger than expected, said she has sensed a clear shift among voters.
'We are seeing more and more people coming to: October 7 was horrific, the hostages need to be released, Israel has a right to exist, Netanyahu has been a really bad actor in this space, the starvation of people in Gaza is unacceptable, the idea that in rooting out Hamas you're going to kill hundreds and hundreds of innocent children and families is not the way the United States conducts their support of their allies,' Sherrill told CNN in an interview last week. 'So Netanyahu has to be held accountable.'
And Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz, who was the 2024 Democratic vice presidential nominee and is considering his own presidential run, said after how he saw the Israel conflict resonate on the trail last year, 'it'll still be an issue' for 2028.
As for what comes next, Walz said, 'People are going to have the conviction of how they talk about it.'
When Netanyahu visited Capitol Hill during a trip to Washington in July, only a handful of Democratic senators participated in a bipartisan photo with him. Among those was New Jersey Sen. Cory Booker, an adamant defender of Israel who was mocked on social media for seeming to stand in a way that his face couldn't be seen in the shot.
Booker, who has been raising money ahead of another potential presidential run, told CNN that was just about a bad angle and he stood where the photographer directed. He said he agrees in being critical of Netanyahu, but 'you cannot demand, negotiate, work towards a resolution of the conflict if you are not having conversations with the principal players that are doing those things.'
Leaders of multiple Jewish and pro-Israel groups told CNN privately that they have grimly determined their best and most practical approach is to see what Israelis do in elections next year.
But critics have tried in vain for parts of four decades to wait out Israel's longest-serving prime minister, a conservative who has stymied Democratic presidents going back to Bill Clinton. Netanyahu rejects the creation of a Palestinian state and has claimed there is 'no starvation' in Gaza, even as his government has been under international pressure to permit the distribution of more aid.
And there are still top Democrats who will stand with Netanyahu or at least limit the distance they keep from him.
Asked whether they were ready to break with Netanyahu, an aide to House Democratic leader Hakeem Jeffries pointed to recent statements decrying violence and calling for humanitarian aid. An aide to Senate Democratic leader Chuck Schumer did not respond.
The traditional AIPAC-funded trip of House Democratic freshmen to Israel, this year led by Maryland Rep. Steny Hoyer, the former House majority leader, and Democratic Caucus Chair Pete Aguilar of California, leaves later this week. The group is expected to meet with Netanyahu while there. A Hoyer spokesperson declined to confirm details of the trip, including whether the group would meet with Netanyahu.
The rare Democrat to stick with Netanyahu in public, voicing feelings that still resonate among some voters and donors, is Pennsylvania Sen. John Fetterman.
'That's the democratically elected leader. If you have to make a choice, Hamas or the democratically elected leader, I'm always going to stand with Israel through this,' Fetterman said. 'I saw those pictures. Obviously it's appalling, heartbreaking. Many people will blame Israel for that. I only blame Hamas, and I blame Iran ultimately.'
Zohran Mamdani's June win in the New York City Democratic mayoral primary proved both that being unwilling to affirm support for Israel's right to exist as a Jewish state or calling Israel's conduct a genocide is not disqualifying, even in a city where Jews make up a large portion of the electorate.
A mid-July CNN poll found just 23% of Americans saying Israel's actions have been fully justified, in a 27-point drop from a poll shortly after the October 7 attacks.
The share of Democrats and Democratic-leaning adults saying that the US provides too much military aid for Israel rose from 44% in March to 59%. Democratic-aligned adults under the age of 35 are particularly opposed to US military aid to Israel, with 72% saying the US is doing too much.
Rhode Island Sen. Jack Reed, known much more for the seriousness with which he approaches military matters than for chasing political trends, said he voted for a narrow rifle sales stoppage amendment to last week's resolution to get Netanyahu's attention, though 'we have to balance sending a message and also ensuring that strategically they can protect themselves.'
Being out of the White House and either majority in Congress limits their options, Reed said, arguing Republicans have not done enough beyond President Donald Trump expressing dismay over the photos of starving children and trendsetter Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene using the word 'genocide.'
But Reed, 75, said he's disturbed to see anti-Israel sentiment taking root anywhere, including among younger Democratic voters.
'Part of it is they're reacting to the scenes of the violence against children, and they're also, I think, a generation that have not, like me, literally grown up with Israel, when you saw a struggling nation that had been persecuted worse than any people on Earth start building a real democracy,' Reed said.
To Connecticut Sen. Chris Murphy, another Democrat stoking chatter about a 2028 run, there's no ambiguity in how to talk about it.
'I know our political enemies want to make people believe that if you don't support what Netanyahu is doing right now inside Gaza then you don't support Israel. We shouldn't concede that. We shouldn't operate from a position of fear,' Murphy told CNN.
Kentucky Gov. Andy Beshear, also being talked about as a presidential hopeful, said his own conviction is that 'we always need an Israel that is able to defend itself, both for its and the United States' national security, and also people shouldn't be starving in Gaza.'
Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders, who wrote the military aid resolution but also cautioned Mamdani when they huddled last month to be more deliberate about making clear he wasn't anti-Israel or antisemitic, told CNN he thinks his colleagues risk losing an authentic connection to voters if they don't rapidly change what they're doing and saying on Israel.
Asked whether that risked Democrats being seen as anti-Israel, Sanders pointed out that he is Jewish himself and decades ago lived in Israel for a few months.
'To be anti-Netanyahu, anti-a-right-wing-racist-extremist government, that's anti-Israeli government,' Sanders said. 'If you're against Trump, you're not against America.'
Rahm Emanuel, whose middle name is literally Israel, recalled Netanyahu calling him a self-hating Jew when he was President Barack Obama's chief of staff.
Devoted Obama supporters raged at what they perceived as disrespect, especially as Obama approved aid increases, including for the missile defense system known as the Iron Dome. In 2015, Netanyahu broke protocol to go around Obama and address a joint session of Congress to blast the Iran nuclear deal the president was pursuing. By 2016, he was building up a supportive relationship with Trump, which eventually had him talking up the Republican just days before the close 2020 election.
Netanyahu cleaved close to Trump to the point of hesitating to condemn the president's 'some very fine people on both sides' comment following the neo-Nazi march in Charlottesville, Virginia, in 2017. Last month, Netanyahu accepted an interview with a MAGA-friendly podcast and when asked about Mamdani's position on Israel, responded first by talking about the candidate's past support of 'defund the police,' a favorite Trump topic.
'He made a conscious decision to position Israel as a partisan political issue. Everybody warned him it was a mistake,' said Emanuel, a CNN contributor. 'As always, he thought he was the only smart guy in the room.'
Now Emanuel is considering a presidential run of his own. Asked whether he worried Israel support would be a litmus test, he said, 'I don't believe you can say where things will be in two or three years, but if we don't change course, you can see where this road leads.'
Leaders of multiple Jewish and pro-Israel groups told CNN privately that they have grimly determined their best and most practical approach is essentially to quietly wait out the trauma and hope the politics turns. There's another Israeli election next year, and while Netanyahu is now in a minority coalition, he has been counted out before.
'To the extent that Democrats are increasingly voicing their concern and disapproval on the situation in Gaza, this is largely aligned with where the vast majority of Jewish Americans are as well,' said Halie Soifer, the CEO of the Jewish Democratic Council of America, a group formed in the aftermath of Trump's comments about Charlottesville and which she said has seen a massive increase in its membership since his second inauguration.
Many American Jewish voters last year were driven toward Republicans by a mix of feelings that Democratic leaders were not pro-Israel enough and that they had been too accepting as some anti-Israel protests tipped into antisemitism. That was with Joe Biden in the White House, a president who was unabashedly Zionist and who in retrospect, several Democratic leaders say, should be seen as having staved off how much worse the humanitarian crisis has gotten since he left office.
Biden's actions and comments also fueled the 'Uncommitted' movement and protesters who regularly interrupted his events last year, arguing that the same positions that others deemed insufficiently pro-Israel were in fact overly pro-Israel.
By November, Kamala Harris' campaign had been tied into knots trying to satisfy all the factions. The widespread disappointment helped fuel narrow losses in Michigan and Pennsylvania, which both have large Jewish and Arab American populations, and beyond.
There are three major Democrats running Michigan's open Senate seat next year: Abdul El-Sayed, who backed the Uncommitted movement and has accused Israel of genocide; state Sen. Mallory McMorrow, who at a campaign event on Wednesday spoke about being a mother watching the suffering and said of Netanyahu, 'We cannot let this man tell us that what we are seeing with our own eyes is not what is actually happening'; and US Rep. Haley Stevens, who has been praised by AIPAC for her support of Israel and described it in April as a 'strong ally of the United States of America, a democracy, and a beacon of hope.'
Schumer and Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand, who leads the Senate Democrats' campaign arm, have expressed a preference for Stevens, who put out a statement last week calling for cooperation to get food into Gaza and Israeli hostages out.
North Carolina Gov. Josh Stein, the first Jewish leader of his state, said that he is not convinced the issue will move voters overall. But he said there is no way to look at the policy or politics and not be incredibly sad.
'Democrats have a tougher line simply because Republicans say, 'We're all in with Israel,' so people know to either go or leave, whereas people just get angrier at Democrats,' Stein said. 'I think you can be a Zionist and critical of the government of Israel. I don't think those things are in conflict. And the reason I think that is because that's where I am personally.'