Schumer said out loud what many of Israel’s friends are thinking

Among liberals and many moderates who support the right of Israel to exist as a Jewish homeland, the Hamas attacks of Oct. 7 and the ensuing war in Gaza have called forth anger, agony and a reckoning.

This constituency, which looms large in the Democratic Party and among American Jews, has been whipsawed by competing moral commitments: justified rage over Hamas’s slaughter of innocents; an insistence that Israel has a right to defend itself; alarm over the deaths of tens of thousands of Palestinian civilians as the war has dragged on; and a conviction that peace will require a settlement based on two states for Israelis and Palestinians.

Underlying all these concerns is exasperation with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who is in thrall to his government’s extreme-right coalition partners and whose policies are alienating his country’s longtime friends, in the United States and elsewhere.

This constellation of views has been common enough in synagogues and in political conversations over kitchen tables. But it took genuine courage for Senate Majority Leader Charles E. Schumer (D-N.Y.) to articulate it in a remarkable speech on the Senate floor Thursday. Schumer spoke simultaneously of his passion for Israel — “We love Israel in our bones,” he said — and an insistence that “Palestinian civilians do not deserve to suffer for the sins of Hamas.”

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