by Alexis Simendinger | The Hill
Washington’s reactions Thursday ran the gamut from surprise to seething disapproval. The situation was similar in Israel. The White House, aware of what was coming, held its collective breath.
Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (N.Y.), the most senior Jewish Democrat in Congress, stood on the Senate floor Thursday and took direct aim at Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, a politician he’s known for decades, while urging new elections and new leadership in Israel amid its ferocious war with Hamas.
“Prime Minister Netanyahu has lost his way by allowing his political survival to take the precedence over the best interests of Israel,” Schumer said, arguing the conservative prime minister is currently in a coalition with “far-right extremists” and has been “too willing to tolerate the civilian toll in Gaza, which is pushing support for Israel worldwide to historic lows.”
Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) slammed Schumer’s remarks as “highly inappropriate” and “wrong.”
GOP senators immediately challenged Schumer’s 45-minute speech as a major miscalculation, The Hill’s Al Weaver reports.
“There is no good foreign policy or other reasons to make that kind of statement,” Sen. Thom Tillis (R-N.C.) said. “There’s a war cabinet [in Israel] that has people that are political archrivals. I don’t hear them calling for an election, so how the hell can somebody in the United States call for elections?” he added.
Schumer responded to the backlash with a post on the social media platform X, formerly Twitter. “The U.S. cannot dictate the outcome of an election. That is for the Israeli public to decide,” he wrote. “As a democracy, Israel has the right to choose its own leaders. But the important thing is that Israelis are given a choice. There needs to be a fresh debate about the future.”
Full text of Schumer’s floor speech is HERE.
Netanyahu’s allies rejected Schumer’s criticism. Israel’s ambassador to the U.S., Michael Herzog, on X called Schumer’s remarks political, “unhelpful” and “counterproductive.”
Israeli war cabinet minister Benny Gantz, who met in Washington with the Senate majority leader and other officials early this month without coordinating his visit with Netanyahu, described Schumer as a friend of Israel who made a mistake in calling for elections.
The discord demonstrated rising tensions between the U.S. government and Israel as many Democrats grow increasingly angry over the humanitarian crisis unleashed by Israel’s offensive in Gaza.
Netanyahu perceives Israel’s war as his political survival. President Biden, facing domestic pushback from young voters and Arab Americans in swing states, is trying to retain U.S. influence with Israel to negotiate a deal with Hamas for a temporary cease-fire that would allow for hostage swapping and inflows of humanitarian assistance to Gaza.
Israel has confirmed receiving Hamas’s vision for a truce deal through Qatari mediators — a proposal Netanyahu dismissed as “unrealistic.” (Reuters today reports some of the details of the proposal it has seen.) No progress toward such an agreement emerged Thursday, White House spokesperson John Kirby told reporters.
- The New York Times: Overnight, at least 20 people were killed and more than 100 injured while waiting for food aid in Gaza City, according to the Gazan Ministry of Health. Israel denied attacking hungry people but it was not immediately clear what caused the deaths.
- The Hill: The U.N. Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees is in the crosshairs of Congress’s spending fight.
- The New York Times: Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas on Thursday appointed a loyal insider rather than an independent prime minister.
The U.S. sanctioned two Israeli entities and three Israeli settlers in the West Bank on Thursday for undermining “peace, security and stability” through violence against Palestinians.
