THE 2024 ELECTION left the Democrats “considering how to navigate a dark future,” said the New York Times. Voices from the progressive wing instantly made clear that one matter at issue will be the party’s stance toward Israel.

The Democrats’ traditional friendliness to the Jewish state had resonated in the words of President Joe Biden’s immediate reaction to Hamas’s invasion and massacre of October 7, 2023. “This was an act of sheer evil,” he pronounced. “Israel has the right…in-deed has a duty to respond… . If the United States experienced [the likes of this] our response would be swift, decisive, and overwhelming.” He said that the U.S. was “surging military assistance” and had moved a carrier strike group and additional fighter aircraft to the area. “The United States has Israel’s back. It’s as simple as that…. We’re with Israel.”

Yet, over the ensuing weeks and months, it proved not as simple as that. Biden grew increasingly focused on protecting Gazan noncombatants and on restraining Israel in other ways. Vice President Kamala Harris, to whom he passed the Democratic standard in withdrawing from the 2024 election, was still more assertive in that direction, as was, to an even greater degree, her chosen running mate, Tim Walz. Their apparent predispositions, and the political currents within their party, prompted CNN political analyst Ronald Brownstein to muse, “Biden could be the last Democratic president for the foreseeable future who aligns so unreservedly with” Israel.

As Biden takes his bows, will the Democrats continue to pull away from Israel? Let us consider the background. Both parties have shared in America’s traditional friendship with that state, but each has done so unevenly. Among the Republicans, Eisenhower was quite unfriendly; Bush 41 was chilly; Nixon was, too, but provided critical aid during the Yom Kippur War.  On the other hand, Reagan, Bush 43, and Trump were all warm supporters. 

The Democrats had been more consistently friendly. Truman granted recognition to the reborn state, defying his advisers; Kennedy coined the “special relationship”; Johnson elevated the degree of military aid to Israel; Clinton worked furiously to broker a two-state solution and blamed Yasir Arafat when it was not achieved. Even Jimmy Carter, who was viscerally hostile, nonetheless brokered the peace treaty between Egypt and Israel.

And then, in 2008, came Barack Obama. He differed from the others in background not only by the epochal fact of being our first black president.  He had dabbled in radical ideas as a student, then launched himself into a career as a “community organizer, and turned to politics only, he said, as a different path to the same goals. His rise marked a shift in tone, spirit, and perhaps the long-term direction of his party affecting a range of issues, not least Israel.

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The priority of his foreign policy was to improve relations with the Muslim world, which he believed had been needlessly alienated from the United States by George W. Bush’s Global War on Terror. To demonstrate a new sensitivity, he gave his first presidential interview not to the New York Times or CNN but rather to the Arabic-language network Al Arabiya. The first foreign parliament he addressed was Turkey’s, and he later named Turkey’s Islamist prime minister (now president), Recep Tayyip Erdogan, as one of five foreign leaders with whom he felt closest.

Two months later, he delivered a major address in Cairo, saying:

I’ve come here to Cairo to seek a new beginning between the United States and Muslims around the world, one based on mutual interest and mutual respect, and one based upon the truth that America and Islam are not exclusive and need not be in competition.

While in the region, Obama also visited Saudi Arabia, his third Arab capital, but pointedly did not visit Israel, 37 minutes from Cairo by air. He told American Jewish leaders that his goal was to put “daylight” between himself and Israel in a way that his predecessors had not done. “When there is no daylight, Israel just sits on the sidelines, and that erodes our credibility with the Arab states,” he explained. He aimed, said the Washington Post, “to restore the United States’ reputation as a credible mediator …[by] talk-[ing] tough to Israel, publicly and privately.”

In all, he visited more than 40 countries during his first term, some two or three times, but didn’t bother to visit Israel until 2013—during his second term. 

Yet all this “daylight” yielded nothing in the peace process, which is not surprising because it was not Israel that was sitting on the sideline. Only months before Obama’s inauguration, Israel’s then–Prime Minister Ehud Olmert sought to bring to fruition a series of secret negotiations with Palestinian President Mahmud Abbas by presenting an offer that aimed to meet Palestinian goals on every issue.

Israel would have retained the West Bank land containing major settlements while ceding an equivalent amount of land from within Israel’s pre-1967 borders to a state of Palestine. Both countries’ capitals would have been in Jerusalem. A land bridge was to connect the West Bank with Gaza. Olmert even agreed that 5,000 Palestinian “refugees” could return to Israel.

Abbas’s response? He never replied at all, not even with a counteroffer. No other meeting was ever held. If there ever was to be a negotiated two-state solution, the ball obviously was in the Palestinians’ court. If Obama’s true goal was to get parties off the sidelines, he was exerting his pressure in exactly the wrong direction.

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More alarming for Israel was the change Obama made in American policy toward Iran. The Iranian regime has sworn to wipe “the Zionist entity” off the map. And it was with this regime that Obama sought closer relations as he pulled the U.S. away from Israel.

Some background. In 2002, an exiled opposition group revealed the existence of two nuclear facilities that Iran had kept secret, despite Tehran’s obligations under the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty. Although Tehran insisted that these were intended only to generate electricity, neither clandestine site was connected to the electric grid.

The embarrassment of exposure, and the intimidating implications of the U.S. invasion of Iraq in 2003, prompted Iran to suspend much of its nuclear program; subsequently, a leaked U.S. intelligence report implied that Iran had abandoned it entirely. This was false, but it made President Bush feel he could not resort to military action, which may have been the ulterior motive of those who wrote it and leaked it. Although Washington and our European allies agreed on various sanctions and inducements, the problem remained unresolved when Obama took office.

Within a month of his inauguration, Obama sent a secret letter to Iran’s ruler, Ali Khamenei, seeking “cooperation in regional and bilateral relations.” In his memoirs, Obama reports that “Khamenei’s answer was blunt: Iran had no interest in direct talks.” Obama claims that this is what he expected. But he writes, “I’d sent the letter anyway because I wanted to establish that the impediment to negotiations was not America’s intransigence—it was Iran’s.”

If so, it is perplexing that Obama chose to send Khamenei a second letter and then a third and fourth. Nor does it explain for whose eyes Iran’s intransigence was to be revealed,` since the letters were secret, released only years later. Above all, it fails to explain why Obama steadfastly refused to a say a word of support for the millions of Iranians who came to the streets only a short time after that first unanswered letter to protest the rigged counting of their presidential election. Obama offered no word of encouragement until the protesters themselves, after a week despairing of support, embarrassed him by chanting, “Obama, you are either on their side or ours.”

Obama nursed the ambition to somehow smooth relations and return America to Tehran’s good graces. Perhaps the ayatollahs were the intended, albeit unacknowledged, audience for Obama’s display of “daylight” between himself and Israel.

Despite not answering Obama’s letters, Iran’s supreme leader okayed negotiations over the nuclear program, and an agreement was reached in 2015 that would severely restrict Iran’s nuclear enrichment activities and ship most of its enriched uranium stockpile to Russia. The deal, known as the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), however, legitimated Iran’s prohibited enrichment activities; it included various “sunset” clauses assuring that the Islamic Republic’s nuclear ambitions need not be laid to rest; it contained loopholes that might allow Iran to cheat; and it lifted sanctions and provided Iran with an immediate cash transfusion.

Israel was frightened by the terms, leading Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to accept an invitation from Republican House Speaker John Boehner to present his objections before the full Congress. This infuriated Obama and other Democrats, many of whom refused to attend. The dispute lent another sour note to Netanyahu’s relations with Obama, which were already fraught and marked by deliberate snubs by the president. This tension endured for the balance of Obama’s presidency.

More important, after the Trump administration killed the JCPOA, Joe Biden revived efforts to install a new version of it, solidifying the idea among Democrats that the fanatical, nuclear-obsessed theocrats of Iran are amenable to diplomacy. This legacy of the Obama administration came complete with some of the same advisers who were behind the JCPOA—some of whom were mentioned in Iranian government emails about a project to cultivate sympathizers in the U.S. The Democrats’ continued interest in rehabilitating Iran led the Biden administration both to ease up on sanctioning the regime and to minimize Israel’s need to deter its sworn enemy since October 7.

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One cardinal feature of Obama’s legacy, although not in the realm of international policy, nonetheless reverberated in attitudes toward Israel. That was his encouragement of “identity politics.”

Although Obama’s presidential words on race were always measured and balanced, his administration pushed “race-consciousness” in a range of government activities and programs. And he drew close to Al Sharpton, “an incendiary racial avenger,” as National Public Radio put it, with a history of Jew-baiting that he has never clearly renounced. A top administration official once even directly deployed its race-consciousness against Israel. Obama’s national security adviser, Susan Rice, in criticizing Netanyahu’s opposition to the Iran nuclear deal, said he had all but “use[d] the ‘n-word’ in describing the president”—as if he opposed the agreement because Obama is black rather than because of his fear that Iran could get a weapon with which it could possibly wipe Israel off the map.

How did identity politics work to Israel’s detriment? The Arab and Palestinian cause, which in the 1930s and 1940s identified with fascism and Nazism, redefined itself in the 1960s under the tutelage of the Algerian FLN, claiming a place in the Communist-aligned Third World revolutionary movement. In this century, it has redefined itself again as part of the struggle of People of Color, linked to other identity groups under the rubric of “intersectionality.” Obama, a man of the academic left, made this development that much more thinkable. Suddenly, there are radical feminists for Palestine and “queers” for Palestine, notwithstanding that the common practice of Palestinians is to subjugate women and brutalize gays. Yet, thanks to intersectionality, the anti-Israel voices in Congress are predominantly women, either black or of other non-European heritage. And blacks, Latinos, and Asians were prominent in this spring’s university “encampments.” 

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During Obama’s presidency, Israel and Hamas fought two wars in Gaza. The first, in the fall of 2012, began when Hamas struck an Israeli military jeep across the border with an anti-tank missile, wounding three soldiers. Obama declared his support for Israel’s right to defend itself but cautioned it not to send any soldiers into Gaza.

The second war, in the summer of 2014, began when Hamas kidnapped and murdered three Israeli teenagers. Fighting lasted six weeks, and this time, Israel disregarded Obama’s warnings and sent ground forces into Gaza. Obama reaffirmed Israel’s right to defend itself, but according to a White House readout of a phone conversation with Prime Minister Netanyahu,

the President also reiterated the United States’ serious and growing concern about the rising number of Palestinian civilian deaths and the loss of Israeli lives, as well as the worsening humanitarian situation in Gaza…. The President made clear the strategic imperative of instituting an immediate, unconditional humanitarian ceasefire that ends hostilities now and leads to a permanent cessation of hostilities.

Obama’s response set the template for the Biden administration. While reiterating Israel’s right to defend itself, and furnishing large quantities of weapons essential to that defense as well as diplomatic cover at the UN, Biden and his team also sought to restrain Israel at every turn and voiced to a litany of criticisms.

After October 7, 2023, Joe Biden hastened to express solidarity with Israel in the warmest terms, but as soon as Israel’s air force opened a campaign to defeat Hamas, pressure began to be exerted within the administration and other parts of the Democratic Party for Biden to modulate that position.

Biden made a trip to Israel on October 18, only 11 days after the massacre, but even in this show of support, contrapuntal notes infused his message. One was alarm about the toll that Israel’s bombardment was taking on civilians in Gaza. He also aimed, said the Washington Post, “to calm the Israelis and buy time before their ground invasion of Gaza.” In addition, “U.S. officials helped deter Israel from launching an attack on the Lebanon-based Hezbollah, which could have opened another front in the war.” Alas, no one deterred Hezbollah from attacking Israel, which it had been bombarding unceasingly since October 8.

Within the administration, currents unfriendly to Israel began to gain momentum. On October 23, three days before the first Israeli troops entered Gaza, 70 Arab and Muslim political appointees took part in a “contentious” meeting with top administration officials. Soon, letters began circulating demanding the administration end its support for Israel’s war. By mid-November, the New York Times reported that “more than 500 political appointees and staff members representing some 40 government agencies sent a letter to President Biden …protesting his support of Israel.” The “signers” were all listed as anonymous, as a parallel letter by USAID employees confessed, due to the “risk of potentially losing our jobs.” Emulating the display of ideological fervor barren of political courage, White House interns chimed in with an anonymous letter of their own.

Barack Obama also weighed in, saying on the Pod Save America podcast, “What Hamas did was horrific, and there is no justification for it. And what is also true is that the occupation, and what’s happening to Palestinians, is unbearable.” This exquisite evenhandedness contrasted resoundingly with Biden’s “We’re with Israel” but found resonance with an increasing portion of Democrats.

By January, Gazan officials, meaning Hamas members or appointees, reported some 37,000 deaths in the bombardment and fighting, without distinguishing between fighters and civilians. These numbers are unreliable, but whatever the reality, Yahya Sinwar, then the military commander of Hamas and mastermind of the October 7 massacre, expressed satisfaction with the civilian casualties in emails that were leaked to the Wall Street Journal. “These are necessary sacrifices,” he told his colleagues, noting, “We have the Israelis right where we want them.”

Perhaps one reason for his satisfaction was the reaction against Israel in a wing of the Democratic Party. Senator Elizabeth Warren told a mosque audience that she saw “ample evidence” that Israel was committing “genocide.” Senator Bernie Sanders called repeatedly for a cutoff of U.S. military aid to Israel, then settled for introducing measures that would block specific weapons and secured co-sponsorship by two other Democrats, Peter Welch of Vermont and Jeff Merkley of Oregon. Another reason, explicitly hailed by Hamas, was a wave of sometimes-violent “occupations” of U.S. campuses that consistently called for the  end of Israel. President Biden said that the protesters “have a point,” and Vice President Harris said of one protester accusing Israel of genocide, “Listen, what he’s talking about, it’s real.”

Thirty-seven Democrats in the House voted against the major aid package to Israel,¹ including five of the six officers of the Progressive Caucus. (The sixth was recorded as “not voting.”) The caucus chair, Representative Pramila Jayapal, branded Israel a “racist state.” She was criticized by moderate Democrats over a CNN interview with Dana Bash in which she evinced reluctance to unequivocally denounce Hamas’s use of rape against Israeli women. Her fellow progressive, Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, denounced Israel’s presumed responsibility for the explosion of Hezbollah fighters’ pagers in September as a “violation of international humanitarian law.”

When two Jewish Republicans introduced a resolution decrying anti-Semitism, Jayapal and Ocasio-Cortez were among 13 Democrats voting no. Another 92, reluctant either to approve the resolution or to be on record as against it, voted present, a tactic suggested by Representative Jamie Raskin and other progressive Jewish Democrats. Their key objection was the resolution’s assertion that “anti-Zionism is anti-Semitism.”

In the other chamber, Senator Tim Scott avoided this issue by making no mention of Zionism in his proposed resolution condemning “the rise of anti-Semitism on campuses.” But Bernie Sanders used Senate rules to block it and said he would instead offer a resolution condemning “the rise of anti-Semitic, anti-Muslim, anti-Arab, anti-Asian, and any other form of discrimination in higher education.” Of course, the issue was not “discrimination”; it was the abuse and intimidation that Jewish students reported experiencing.

Perhaps the most surprising thing about the antagonism toward Israel shown by these Democratic legislators is that their numbers remained relatively small even though attitudes of Democratic voters have shifted dramatically in their direction. In March of last year, before Hamas’s invasion of Israel and the ensuing war, the Gallup organization reported a landmark in its periodic survey of Americans’ opinions about Israel and the Palestinians: For the first time, a plurality of Democrats said that their sympathies lay more with the Palestinians than with Israel. This accorded with trends picked up in other polls.

Going back to the beginning of this century, larger proportions of Republicans than of Democrats have favored Israel, but at the dawn of the century, the difference was rather narrow. This discrepancy has expanded steadily. Among Republicans, the pro-Israel balance has gradually widened, while among Democrats it has shrunk, a trend that accelerated sharply in the past 10 years. According to the Gallup Organization, in 2024, only 35 percent of Democrats favored Israel while 43 percent said they favored the Palestinians. On the Republican side, the preference for Israel was overwhelming, 80 percent favoring Israel as against 7 percent for the Palestinians.

It is hard to doubt that, unless it can be somehow reversed, the anti-Israel tilt of Democratic voters will make itself felt increasingly in Democratic administrations and among other officeholders in the years ahead.

The Biden administration has evinced a kind of split personality—reflecting the strains between the tradition of Democrats of an earlier day and the new, post-Obama currents in the party that are less friendly to Israel. It continued to intone that America’s commitment to Israel was “ironclad,” and its military aid, ramped up and accelerated in the current crisis, was generous and vital. On the other hand, the administration pressured Israel relentlessly about civilian casualties, which, however tragic, are an inevitable aspect of any war, doubly so when the enemy’s strategy is to hide behind civilians. Biden and his team also pushed Israel constantly to allow more relief supplies to enter Gaza even though these were often seized by Hamas, serving as much to sustain the enemy Israel faced as the civilian population.

Washington withheld the largest bombs from Israel, which were valuable in destroying the deep Hamas tunnels but were likely to cause ancillary damage. And for stretches, it slow-walked the delivery of other munitions as a form of leverage.

Only two months into the war, Secretary of State Antony Blinken said that Israel should tailor its strategy to protecting civilians. “We …want to see a shift to more targeted operations with a smaller number of forces …really focused on dealing with the leadership of Hamas,” he explained. Seven months later, when Israel did just that, assassinating Hamas chieftain Ismail Haniyeh, doing it outside of Gaza where the only collateral casualty was Haniyeh’s bodyguard, the administration let it be known that Biden was “furious” about it, due to its “timing.” Biden rebuked Netanyahu both privately and even publicly, saying to reporters that the hit “didn’t help.”

Aides told reporters that the president feared Haniyeh’s death would damage the indirect negotiations with Hamas about a release of hostages in exchange for a cease-fire. The hostages mean more to Israelis than outsiders can understand, tapping into a sense of national brotherhood and redressing the tragedies of Jewish history. But that they would mean so much to Biden, when many U.S.-Israeli dual nationals have been murdered by terrorists without causing much stir in Washington, could be explained only by the connection to a cease-fire, which Biden treated as a holy grail. For Israel, this was a war of survival, and the goal was victory, but for Biden, the goal was just to get the war over.

The acknowledged goal of the administration’s intense involvement was to turn the temporary cease-fire Israel was offering into a permanent one, so that the offensive would end, giving way to renewed negotiations intended to create a Palestinian state. Blinken insisted that this remained the key to peace, notwithstanding that the invasion of October 7 had made the prospect of a sovereign state on Israel’s western border, free to import whatever weaponry it chose, unimaginable for the foreseeable future.

As exemplified at the Democratic National Convention, this issue was a two-sided coin. While on the surface Democrats expressed concern for Israelis, their operational meaning was to end the war short of full Israeli victory. The convention delegates cheered for the hostages and cheered seemingly louder when Kamala Harris endorsed Palestinian “self-determination,” implying a sovereign state.

The administration grew especially stern with Jerusalem over Rafah, the southernmost city of the Gaza Strip, bordering Egypt. Israel’s military operation had begun in the north and proceeded southward in stages, encouraging the civilian population to flee before it tackled Hamas’s installations and fighters at each latitude. In the summer, an estimated million people were sheltering in and around Rafah, and U.S. officials insisted they could see no way that these innocents could be moved out of the cross fire.

In an interview with CNN, Biden drew the line: “If they go into Rafah, I’m not going to be supplying the weapons that have been used historically to deal …with the cities.” He added, “It’s just wrong…. We’re not going to supply the weapons and artillery shells. I’ve made it clear to Bibi and the war cabinet that they’re not going to get our support if in fact they go into these population centers.”

In the event, Israel evacuated the civilians, refugees and residents, to nearby safe areas in a matter of a few weeks, used weapons other than the 3,500 larger bombs that Biden withheld, and succeeded in taking Rafah with minimal losses or harm to noncombatants.

The administration also pressured Israel on dealing with Hezbollah, an enemy more menacing than Hamas. Immediately after the Hamas invasion, Defense Minister Yoav Gallant proposed that Israel postpone dealing with Gaza and face Hezbollah first. He was overruled, but the next day Hezbollah initiated daily rocket fire. Considering Hezbollah’s immense arsenal, it seemed small-scale, but it caused a steady flow of casualties and destruction and drove tens of thousands of Israelis from their homes. Within the week, visiting the Middle East in response to the crisis, Secretary Blinken said, “No one should do anything that could add fuel to the fire in any other place…. No one should do anything that widens this conflict in any way.” He was ostensibly warning off Israel’s other enemies, that is, Iran and its many proxies, but Hezbollah had already widened the conflict, and Blinken did not single it out. His insistent emphasis that “no one” expand the conflict was aimed at Israel, too, perhaps primarily.

Eight months later, when Israel finally began to take the fight to Lebanon, the administration pushed it to keep its goals and actions minimal. When, in September, Israel bombed the Beirut building where the Hezbollah leadership was meeting, killing Hassan Nasrallah, secretary-general of Hezbollah, and others of its leaders, Biden was again reported to be “furious” over “the timing.”

Biden demanded a cease-fire on the Lebanese front, just as in Gaza. That would have left scores of thousands of Israelis languishing in temporary shelter, having been driven from their homes by Hezbollah’s bombardment and its threat to mimic Hamas’s invasion. And it would have left Hezbollah’s immense rocket and missile arsenal still hanging over Israel’s neck—a sword of Damocles devised to protect Iran’s drive for nuclear weapons. But, in contrast to Gaza, where Israel seemed to hesitate in the face of U.S. pressure, the Lebanon offensive proceeded apace.

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Biden’s chosen heir positioned herself close to Biden in her campaign, but Kamala Harris lacks his background as a traditional liberal. She rose politically as a protégée of left-leaning California Democratic leader Willie Brown. A study published in The Hill found that her roll call voting record placed her second only to Elizabeth Warren for most liberal Democratic senator during her four-year tenure. (Bernie Sanders was not counted as a Democrat in this study.) And hostility to Israel among Democrats resides principally in the party’s progressive wing, where it is practically de rigueur.

While as vice president she largely echoed Biden on Israel, she was mentioned in several stories as one of the voices inside the administration encouraging the president to be more sensitive to the Palestinian side. Her national security adviser, who would have been a likely candidate for the analogous role to her as president, is Philip Gordon, a diplomat who has been oddly friendly to the Iranian regime. He spoke more than once for the National Iranian American Council, which lobbies for pro-Tehran policies and is viewed by Iranian exiles as a front for the Islamic regime. And he has coauthored at least three articles on Iran with Ariane Tabatabai, a Defense Department employee who has been named along with Robert Malley—the former Obama adviser and Biden administration officer who was suspended and had his security clearance lifted—as a possible conduit of Iranian influence in Washington.

Harris named Ilan Goldenberg to be her campaign’s Jewish liaison. He has spoken repeatedly for J Street, a leftist group that calls itself “pro-Israel” while devoting almost all its energies to criticizing Israel, opposing it legislatively, and boosting anti-Israel candidates. When Goldenberg was appointed, Jeremy Ben-Ami, the founder and head of J Street, enthused, “What a great pick by the Kamala Harris-Tim Walz campaign for this sensitive assignment.”

None of this foretold a friendly policy toward Israel had there been a Harris presidency. Her choice of running mate reinforced this inference. Pennsylvania’s popular governor, Josh Shapiro, was reported to be the front-runner for the position, with polls showing the Electoral College likely to pivot on Pennsylvania’s 19 votes, but a furious campaign was mounted against Shapiro as a Jew who strongly supports Israel. The New Republic’s David Klion, who led the charge, warned that the choice of Shapiro would “ruin Democratic unity.” Harris turned instead to Tim Walz, unknown outside of Minnesota, a state already safely in the Democratic column.

As a member of Congress from a rural district, Walz compiled a moderate record, including support for Israel. As governor, he turned progressive, but it was an office that rarely dealt with foreign policy. Once becoming the vice-presidential nominee, Walz commented that anti-Israel protesters were acting “for all the right reasons,” notwithstanding their calls of “From the river to the sea” and “intifada revolution.”

Her switch to Walz was applauded by James Zogby, founder and president of the Arab American Institute and the dean of pro-Arab, anti-Israel agitators. His comments also revealed his take on Harris: “We have every indication that she is going to turn a corner, and [Walz] does not impede that corner turn. Shapiro on the other hand would have become an issue.”

But the Harris-Walz team fell short, leaving us to ponder where the Democrats’ season of post-election breast-beating and introspection will leave Israel. Already, Biden’s defeat has let loose a new momentum against Israel. In late November a Senate vote on three resolutions introduced by Bernie Sanders to block certain weapons shipments to Israel received 19 Democratic votes, with one other Democrat listing herself as “not voting,” out of 49 Democratic members. Apparently none wished to dissociate from Sanders’s stated rationale that Israel’s actions in Gaza are “unspeakable.”

This marked an increase from the 10 votes Sanders had put together for an analogous measure early in the year. Moreover, according to the Times of Israel, Biden administration officials from the White House, State Department, and Pentagon all worked the phones, lobbying against Sanders’s resolutions. True, as a lame duck, Biden has less clout, but he is still president, and senators often take counsel from executive-branch leaders of their own party on foreign issues. 

Even while supplying much badly needed weaponry to Israel, and pushing back against congressional efforts to impede this, the Biden administration itself withheld bombs to pressure Israel on Gaza and apparently acted similarly on Lebanon, announcing a large new package only after Israel agreed to a cease-fire with Hezbollah. Nonetheless, most observers feel that Israel came away with a victory.  

Whatever arm-twisting Biden did, it is hard to doubt that the Democrats’ momentum away from Israel will continue after he leaves office. And if Donald Trump pursues a strongly pro-Israel policy, it is likely to receive a partisan fillip.

How far will the Democrats’ turn from Israel carry them? That question remains to be answered. In the 1990s, Bill Clinton pulled the Democrats back from the left. It is not impossible to imagine that the Democrats could again be yanked back from their current trajectory by some new leader. For example, could Ritchie Torres, the brilliant black Latino gay representative from the Bronx who has emerged during this war as one of Israel’s most articulate and devoted advocates, make the leap last achieved by James Garfield in 1880? Stranger things have happened, but this seems a long shot.

The Republicans are now frequently described as “Trump’s party.” On Israel, the Democrats are, for the foreseeable future, “Obama’s party.” That party may well reflect the delicate balancing of Obama’s Pod Save America formula more than the unambiguous leap to Israel’s defense that was Biden’s initial response to October 7.

^{1 Twenty-one Republicans, most of them members of the right-wing Freedom Caucus, also voted against the bill.}

Photo: Heidi Levine-Pool/Getty Images

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