Rarely do senators have to repeat themselves as much as John Fetterman does. And it’s not because the Pennsylvania Democrat has trouble projecting his voice—at six-foot-eight, he’s a walking public-address system. It’s just that many in Washington have a hard time with the concept that he holds the same opinions today that he did the day before.

This is especially a problem when members of his party appear malleable on an issue. One current such issue is Gaza: The progressive base of the Democratic Party abhors President Biden’s support for Israel’s quest to destroy Hamas. In the past few weeks, they’ve succeeded in getting Senate Democrats to discuss conditioning aid to Israel and in nudging supposed “centrist” House Democrats to raise public alarm over Israel’s military strategy. After that, Vice President Kamala Harris signaled that she would prefer to take a tougher line than her boss does with the Israelis.

But Fetterman hasn’t changed. He’s still the guy who wore an Israeli flag like a cape to the big pro-Israel rally in Washington, and he’s still the guy who enjoys taunting Hamas supporters who harangue him in public. And he’s still the guy who has made his Senate office wall a kind of abacus for hostages, keeping tally of who is lost and who is found.

What’s more, he appears to find it strange that his own support for Israel should depend on his colleagues’ approval.

Even if the party continues to splinter on Israel, Fetterman told Politico in an interview published Wednesday, “I would be the last man standing to be absolutely there on the Israeli side on this with no conditions.”

Fetterman is moved by the images out of Gaza. He has no trouble mustering appropriate sympathy for civilians who are suffering the war’s effects. But he also knows that sympathy for Palestinian civilians doesn’t necessitate blaming their plight solely on Israel. The fact that Hamas is responsible for civilian casualties hasn’t changed just because the number of casualties keeps rising.

“I grieve, and it’s awful the incredible civilian deaths and the suffering,” he says. “It’s awful. War is hell, as they say. But only one side has used civilians as human shields. Only one side has broken the cease-fires. Only one side will systematically rape, torture and mutilate Israeli women and girls in the most unspeakable, awful ways. … Without destroying Hamas, there will be no enduring peace and a stable, two-state solution.”

This was true before Oct. 7 and remains true today. You cannot support a two-state solution—that is, self-determination for the Palestinians—while also treating Hamas as a legitimate government.

Fetterman then says something interesting. When asked how he feels about the fact that his Israel stance has earned him a new fleet of friends on the political right, especially online, he says he doesn’t pay attention to that because he mostly stays offline.

Why does he avoid Twitter, in particular? “It was not very helpful to promoting mental health.”

This is useful in understanding everything else in the conversation.

The Democratic Party’s split on Israel (and other issues) is a demographic one. The younger you are, and the more ideologically left you are, the more likely you are to embrace an extreme version of the progressive positioning. When it comes to Israel, that increasingly means an activism driven by digital organizing for a campus-bred politics that makes anti-Zionism a litmus test for participation. The tenor of social networks does not line up with public polling on Israel precisely because the internet isn’t representative of the wider world outside it. And as we have seen since Oct. 7, what students are often learning on campus about this conflict is a mix of conspiratorial medieval fanaticism and the memorization of in-group shibboleths.

In other words, the parochial, regressive cultists really don’t like Israel. John Fetterman quite famously underwent treatment for depression during his time in the Senate. He has been attending to his mental health, and that has entailed keeping his distance from the same spaces where these radical faddists thrive. Would that his critics were thinking so clearly.