A turning point for Israel’s politics, courtesy of Chuck Schumer

About 44 meticulously written minutes On Thursday, Majority Leader Chuck Schumer spoke on the floor of the Senate about his Jewish identity, his love for the State of Israel, his horror at the wanton slaughter of Israelis on October 7 and his views on apportioning blame. for the Gaza massacre, saying it was primarily the fault of Hamas terrorists.

Then Mr. Schumer, a New York Democrat and the highest-ranking elected Jew in American history, said Israel’s Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, was an obstacle to peace and called for new elections in the world’s only Jewish state .

The opposition was not nearly as scrupulous.

Within minutes, the Republican leadership of the House of Representatives demanded an apology. Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell of Kentucky used Netanyahu’s nickname and declared: “Make no mistake: the Democratic Party does not have an anti-Bibi problem. It has an anti-Israel problem.” And the Republican Jewish Coalition declared that “the most powerful Democrat in Congress was stabbing the Jewish state in the back.”

The months that followed the October 7 massacre and the ensuing, disastrously deadly war in Gaza have been unbearable for American Jews, caught between a tradition of liberalism that has dominated much of Jewish politics and an anti-Israel backlash from politically left. which has left many feeling isolated and sometimes persecuted.

But Mr. Schumer’s speech was potentially a turning point in a much longer political process, initially followed by Republicans but recently joined by left-wing Democrats — to make Israel a partisan issue. Republicans, as they see it, would be the party of Israeli supporters. The Democrats would, as the rising left wants, be the party of Palestine.

At the root of this divide lies a fundamental question: is support for the Jewish state separable from support for Israel’s democratically elected government? Republicans have said no for years. The Democratic left increasingly agrees, but from a different perspective: Israel is bad no matter who rules the country.

“The pressure – electoral, social, cultural – on American Jews right now to declare themselves” on the justice of the war in Gaza and on the legitimacy of the Israeli prime minister has been “relentless, relentless and at times downright cruel,” said David. Wolpe, a prominent rabbi in Los Angeles and visiting scholar at Harvard Divinity School.

Mr. Schumer’s speech and subsequent partisan backlash have intensified that pressure.

“It is impossible to understate the seismic event that this was,” said Matthew Brooks, former chief executive of the Republican Jewish Coalition, who made clear that the group would use the speech to drive Jewish voters to the Republican Party.

While Republicans accused Mr. Schumer of trying to force elections at a time when most Israelis support and focus on the war against Hamas, the Senate leader was in fact aware of Israeli public opinion. He noted that “so many Israelis have lost confidence in the vision and direction of their government,” a phrase supported by opinion polls that indicate Netanyahu is deeply unpopular. Mr Schumer was also cautious when he said elections should only be held “once the war begins to subside” and that he would respect the outcome.

Jewish Democrats have long maintained that support for a Jewish state in the traditional homeland of the Jewish people is inherent to their identity, regardless of the government in power in Jerusalem. Mr. Schumer tried to make that point from the beginning of Thursday’s speech, explaining that his last name is derived from the Hebrew word for “guardian.” He is, he said, a “summer Israel – a guardian of the people of Israel.”

But his speech came at an incendiary moment, when support among Democrats is waning for what Sen. Bernie Sanders, an independent of Vermont, calls “Netanyahu’s war,” and loud voices on the left say the state of Israel is inherently wrong: a Netanyahu’s ‘war’. settler-colonialist invader incompatible with the rights and sovereignty of the Palestinian people who lived there before Israeli independence in 1948.

“You have this divide where the overwhelming majority of American Jews support Israel, support its right to exist as a Jewish state, and an increasingly vocal minority do not support Israel as a Jewish state and reject what happened in 1948 to ensure that the Jewish state state survived,” Michael J. Koplow, chief policy officer of the Israel Policy Forum, a Washington-based research group, said from Israel on Friday.

He continued: “Schumer needed to maintain a way to criticize the Israeli government without going anywhere near Camp No. 2, which is why he spent so much time early on talking about Hamas’s guilt and his love for Israel.”

But at such a political moment, any notion of “nuance” — a word Mr. Schumer used when he lamented the “silent majority” of Jews whose “nuanced views have never been represented in discussions about the war in Gaza” — was most likely yes. don’t collapse.

Republicans made no secret of their intention to use Schumer’s words against him. The National Republican Senatorial Committee has distributed emails demanding that vulnerable Democrats up for re-election this year speak out against Schumer’s positions.

Norm Coleman, a former Republican senator from Minnesota who went to public school with Mr. Schumer in New York and is now chairman of the Republican Jewish Coalition, said Friday that the bipartisanship that still existed around support for Israel could be nullified done by Mr. Schumer’s indictment of Israel. Mr Netanyahu and his call for new elections. He accused Schumer of political motives that stemmed specifically from President Biden’s problems with Arab Americans in the crucial swing state of Michigan.

“I don’t think Schumer speaks for American Jews,” Mr. Coleman said. “I think he’s speaking as the majority leader of a Democratic Party that is now so concerned about the left, so concerned about Michigan, that he’s giving a speech telling the democratically elected government of a democratic country that they should no longer be in government. are.”

Even some centrist Jewish Democrats, such as Rep. Brad Schneider of Illinois, condemned Schumer’s call for new elections in Israel as interference in the affairs of what he called “the region’s only true democracy.”

For many older liberal Jews, however, Mr. Schumer’s words were a tonic. They expressed their shared pain over the deaths of tens of thousands of Palestinians in Gaza, and their frustrations with an Israeli government with far-right ministers, whom Mr. Schumer mentioned by name, who adamantly oppose any concessions for peace. or Palestinian sovereignty. His words also reflected Democrats’ increasing desire to use what Mr. Schumer called “leverage” tied to billions of American tax dollars flowing to the Israeli military.

Daniel G. Zemel, a Reform rabbi in Washington, DC, and a proponent of ‘liberal Zionism’, said Mr. Schumer’s prescriptions were “exactly what American Jews should be asking for.”

“There needs to be a different approach,” he said, pushing back on those who called Mr. Schumer’s prescriptions antidemocratic. “As a rabbi and as a Jew, I have the right and obligation to say what I want Israel to be in this world.”

Representative Jerrold Nadler, Democrat of New York and the dean of the members of the Jewish Home, posted on social media that Mr. Schumer “is right,” adding: “Prime Minister Netanyahu has become an obstacle to peace and the two-state solution.”

Rep. Jan Schakowsky of Illinois is one of those progressive Jewish Democrats who feels caught in a vice between activists who harass her as “Genocide Jan” and her personal belief that Israel has a right to exist as a Jewish state, side by side with a sovereign Palestinian. stands. It is, she acknowledged, a “charged moment” for politicians like herself, but she said Friday that Mr. Schumer spoke for a majority of Jews in the United States and Israel.

She fiercely rejected the idea that Mr. Schumer was encroaching on Israeli democracy, noting that Mr. Netanyahu spoke to Congress in 2015 to pressure President Barack Obama to abandon his nuclear deal with Iran.

“There’s a hunger right now for a different path, and that’s what Schumer had the courage to talk about,” she said. “Most Israelis and American Jews understand the importance and essential role that the United States plays, and we feel like Bibi is thumbing his nose at us.”