Israel cannot survive if it becomes a pariah.
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.
A brief summary doesn’t do justice to the nuances and personal anguish conveyed in the 6,000-word speech, which cast aside diplomatic niceties and identified “four major obstacles” standing in the way of peace and a two-state settlement: “Hamas, and the Palestinians who support and tolerate their evil ways. Radical right-wing Israelis in government and society. Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
It’s rare for a speech on the Senate floor to create a sense of relief, but this was the effect of Schumer’s willingness to say out loud what so many were thinking. “No one else could have done it other than Chuck,” Sen. Jack Reed
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