The last time Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel spoke to a joint meeting of Congress was in 2015, at the invitation of House Speaker John Boehner and Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell when they led the Republican Party in Congress. It was meant, explicitly, to undermine the Obama administration’s effort to reach a deal with Iran limiting its nuclear program in exchange for relief from American and international sanctions.
Democrats were outraged by the spectacle of congressional Republicans working with a foreign government to subvert the president’s foreign policy. Nearly 60 Democrats, including Vice President Joe Biden, skipped the speech. Nancy Pelosi, the House minority leader, called it “an insult to the intelligence of the United States.”
Last week, Netanyahu was back before Congress for the first time since then. It was a bipartisan invitation, organized by Mike Johnson, the House speaker, a Republican, and agreed to by Chuck Schumer, the Senate majority leader and a Democrat.
“President Biden and I have known each other for over 40 years,” the prime minister said. “I want to thank him for half a century of friendship to Israel and for being, as he says, a proud Zionist.” Netanyahu called on Congress to fast-track military aid. “Give us the tools faster, and we’ll finish the job faster.”
If you were to look out at the House chamber during the speech, you would have seen that around 130 House and Senate Democrats were missing — more than twice as many as who skipped in 2015. And the issue was less partisan than it was moral and ethical: the catastrophic impact of the war in the Gaza Strip on Palestinian civilians.
Health officials in Gaza say that Israel’s war has killed more than 39,000 people, mostly civilians, and driven a large part of the strip’s 2.3 million residents from their homes. Most of the enclave lies in ruins. Just this past weekend, an Israeli airstrike hit a girls’ school sheltering thousands of displaced people in central Gaza, killing at least 30.
Biden has, from time to time, expressed concern about civilian casualties. He has also acknowledged the extent to which American bombs have killed Palestinian civilians. But at no point has Biden publicly reconsidered his practically unconditional support for Israel’s war on Gaza.
He may have temporarily halted delivery of 3,500 bombs in an attempt, much-ballyhooed by the White House, to pressure Netanyahu against a ground invasion of the city of Rafah, but this was small potatoes in light of the nearly 30,000 bombs and munitions — including 14,000 of the highly destructive 2,000-pound bombs that Biden has decried — that the United States has delivered to Israel since October.
Biden’s “ironclad” support for Israel means that the Democrats who skipped the speech weren’t just boycotting Netanyahu. They were sending a message to the administration as well. It is not too different from the message sent by the hundreds of thousands of Democratic voters who marked their ballots “uncommitted” during the presidential primaries.
The signal political story of the moment is the changing of the guard in the Democratic Party after Biden declined to continue his bid for a second term over concerns about his age and ability to prevent Donald Trump from returning to the White House. But the Democratic reaction to Netanyahu’s address to Congress is emblematic of an equally important — and potentially more significant — story: the rapid transformation of the Democratic Party’s attitude toward Israel, driven by deep grassroots sympathy for the Palestinians.
It’s obviously hard to separate the two stories. Although Biden’s popularity among Democrats was on the decline before the Hamas-led Oct. 7 attack that killed nearly 1,200 people, Israel’s subsequent military response in Gaza, and his initial refusal to publicly question the Israeli government’s conduct as the war took shape, revealed a major shift within the Democratic coalition. Young voters led the way, although this should not have come as a surprise. In 2022, the Pew Research Center found that the youngest adults held the warmest views toward Palestinians. Overall, 61% of 18- to 29-year-olds held a favorable view of Palestinians and 55% of 30- to 49-year-olds felt the same way.
By December, around half of young Democrats disapproved of the Biden administration’s response to the Israel-Hamas war.
Other Democratic constituencies also mobilized in opposition. A coalition of Black clergy members ran an advertisement in The New York Times calling for a bilateral cease-fire. Labor unions, under pressure from many of their members, began to make similar calls. After Biden became the first sitting president to speak from the pulpit at Mother Emanuel AME Church in Charleston, South Carolina, the national leaders of the African Methodist Episcopal Church called on the president to end U.S. financial aid to Israel, condemning the Israeli government’s campaign in Gaza as a “genocide.” In Michigan, Arab American Democrats warned Biden, and the rest of the party, that the state was at risk of flipping to Trump in the general election if the president didn’t change course.
As protests stepped up, rank-and-file Democrats moved further and further away from the president on this issue. By March, 75% of Democrats disapproved of Israel’s military action in Gaza and a plurality of Democrats wanted to provide only humanitarian aid to Israel.
Biden’s stance, as unpopular as it was, did not explain the totality of his problems with young Democrats and other voters. But his unyielding support for the Israeli government in the face of a clear humanitarian crisis in Gaza contributed to an atmosphere of profound discontent with his presidency — bad vibes, you could say.
The vibes have changed, obviously. Biden is out and Kamala Harris, the vice president, is the party’s new standard-bearer. She’s backed by a wind of enthusiasm from across the Democratic coalition that has helped the party recover lost ground in the national presidential race. But she is also implicated in the administration’s policy toward Gaza and will have to deal with the changing politics of Israel within her party.
You can already see that Harris is trying to chart her own course between Biden and the Democratic grassroots. At the same time that she condemned protesters who flew Hamas flags and burned an American flag near the Capitol to protest Netanyahu’s address and affirmed her “unwavering commitment” to Israel, she also told reporters that “Israel has a right to defend itself and how it does so matters,” adding that “what has happened in Gaza over the last nine months is devastating” and that “we cannot look away in the face of these tragedies. And I will not be silent.”
It is a real break from the president for Harris to voice this forthright concern for the lives of Palestinian civilians. But it is still unclear what the difference in language means for actual policy. Will a President Harris refrain from making additional weapons shipments? Will she attach humanitarian conditions to future military aid? Will she direct her U.N. ambassador to veto Palestinian requests for full membership in the global body? It is difficult to say. According to CNN, aides and allies who have talked with Harris say that “substantively there is little daylight between her and the president.”
In three weeks, Democrats will almost certainly nominate Harris for the presidency at their national convention in Chicago. It is tempting, here, to make a direct comparison to the 1968 Democratic National Convention, also in Chicago, where Vice President Hubert Humphrey was nominated after a contentious and chaotic year that began with the Tet offensive and President Lyndon Johnson’s subsequent decision to leave office at the end of his term. In ‘68, anti-Vietnam War protests rocked the convention; in ‘24, Democrats will face protests against the war in Gaza.
But in our search for analogies and comparisons, we should remember that echoes from the past are still only faint reverberations of sounds once heard. The Vietnam War, largely prosecuted by Johnson, does not occupy the same space in American politics as the Gaza war. We are allies to a combatant, not combatants ourselves. We provide money and munitions, not soldiers. There is no draft, nor is there a steady stream of dead American soldiers and wounded veterans.
In 1968, anti-war Democrats represented a rising tide of youth anger that stood at cross-purposes with establishment Democratic politicians and their constituents among the white working class. Vietnam — among other crises and controversies — produced a deep split within the Democratic coalition, between voters who felt alienated by the movement against the war and activists who felt betrayed by an old guard of sclerotic party elites. All of this came to a head in Chicago, fracturing the Democratic Party for a generation and beyond.
Biden’s support for the Gaza war has alienated and isolated him from the youngest cohorts of the Democratic Party, but it hasn’t split the coalition. Far from standing with the president on this issue, many rank-and-file Democrats are opposed to Israel’s conduct, and many Democratic lawmakers have taken note of the shift in public opinion or helped to lead it. Hence the early pushback, from Senate Democrats, on Biden’s request for additional military aid to Israel in the fall, and the notable absences at Netanyahu’s address, which included two of the most senior Democrats in Congress, Pelosi and James Clyburn, as well as Harris herself.
This clear shift in public opinion is a virtual guarantee Harris will face serious pressure to make a decisive break with Biden on Israel. And even if she doesn’t, there is a strong chance that future Democrats running for president will have to take a meaningfully different tack on Israel than their predecessors.
This is the ultimate upshot of the sea change in attitudes toward Israel, and in support of Palestinians, among Democratic voters. In all likelihood, Biden will be the last Democratic president to express the kind of total and unwavering commitment to the Israeli government that was born of a time when Israel could call itself an underdog in the region. Harris, if she wins the presidency and intends to run for reelection, will have to keep the views of ordinary Democrats in mind — if she isn’t already aligned with their concerns. And in the next real contest for the Democratic nomination, there will almost certainly be Democrats who take a harder and more critical line toward the Israeli government’s treatment of Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank.
If this is the future of the politics of Israel in the Democratic Party, then while there may not be a strong analogy to make, overall, between 1968 and 2024, there is a decent one to make between Joe Biden and Lyndon Johnson.
Two old Washington hands who reached the pinnacle of their ambitions and then used their considerable political skills to pass major, and in Johnson’s case, epochal, legislation. Two men who, supremely confident of their ability to guide events, then undermined themselves and their presidencies through stubborn commitments to disastrous conflicts abroad.
When we evaluate Johnson, we evaluate him in the context of Vietnam. We evaluate him in the context, that is, of tens of thousands of dead Americans and millions of dead Vietnamese.
When we evaluate Biden, we will rightfully credit him for his legislative accomplishments as well as the display of genuine statesmanship shown in his decision to step aside for the vice president. But we will also need to weigh what’s praiseworthy in the president’s legacy against his ignominious role as chief supplier for a terrible campaign of relentless destruction and incalculable human suffering.
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.