Schumer’s Folly
23rd March 2024
Speaking on the Senate floor last week, Majority Leader Chuck Schumer announced, “It has become clear to me: The Netanyahu coalition no longer fits the needs of Israel after October 7.” As New York’s Democratic senator sees it, “a new election is the only way to allow for a healthy and open decision-making process about the future of Israel.” What he means is that he hopes a new Israeli government would permanently halt the counteroffensive in Gaza. “He made a good speech,” President Biden commented, “and I think he expressed a serious concern shared not only by him but by many Americans,” only to backtrack and tell Netanyahu that he is not trying to force a change in Jerusalem.
This administration is no stranger to disastrous retreats, but even so the seeming ineptness is puzzling. Competent diplomats usually praise their allies in public and air their grievances behind closed doors. The Biden team and its congressional allies are doing the opposite because they are pandering to one of the Democratic Party’s worst foreign policy instincts. Rather than come to grips with the larger political and social dynamics that plague the Middle East, the party typically believes that removing an individual would solve their problems. In other words, they keep thinking the political is the personal.
Attempting to keep Benjamin Netanyahu from power has become a tradition for the Democratic Party. Bill Clinton admitted that in the 1996 election that first brought Netanyahu to power, “I tried to do it in a way that didn’t overtly involve me.” At the time, many Democrats thought that Netanyahu and his Likud party were the main obstacle to peace between Israel and the Palestinians. They eventually got a Labor government in Israel, but not peace. Despite Clinton’s full-court press at Camp David, the gulf between Israeli and Palestinian demands was too wide for them to reach an agreement, even without Bibi in the room.