Democrats Face a Series of Tests Over Support for Israel

Democrats whose support for Israel has been strained by the wars in Gaza and Lebanon appear headed for a series of tests in the coming weeks over continuing to back Israel’s right-wing government and the attendant debate over antisemitism and the anti-Israel left.

On Wednesday, the Senate will vote on a resolution drafted by Senator Bernie Sanders, a Vermont independent who is Jewish, to deny Israel certain offensive military weapons. The resolution, though largely symbolic, has become imbued with meaning, as mainstream Democrats and even a mainline liberal Jewish organization have embraced it.

Days later, Senator Chuck Schumer, Democrat of New York and the majority leader who is also Jewish, is likely to test again the unity of the Democratic Party and the American Jews who have long called it their political home. Mr. Schumer plans to attach to a bill legislation, already passed by the House, to define antisemitism formally with language that includes phrases more about opposition to Israel than about hatred of Judaism. This has exacerbated tensions with the left, which sees in the proposed definition an effort to suppress Palestinian-rights protests.

Then in January, President-elect Donald J. Trump will return to the White House, bringing with him a history of siding wholeheartedly with the right-wing government of Israel’s prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, while pursuing domestic policies that many Jews believe are anathema to their values and their religion.

How these three moments play out could go a long way toward determining whether support for Israel remains a cornerstone of bipartisan American foreign policy or slides fully into a position that breaks largely along party lines.

Republicans are pushing hard to drive a wedge between Jewish voters and the Democratic Party as they press their advantage from this month’s election and claim to be the rightful protectors of Israel and the Jewish people.

“Unfortunately, not all Jews are focused on the U.S.-Israel relationship,” allowed Norm Coleman, a former Minnesota senator and a prominent Jewish Republican. “But for voters who understand the importance of U.S.-Israel relations this is a glorious time, because Donald Trump is heading back to the White House.”

Jews who are more liberal see a political moment that is anything but glorious.

“Their goal is to make the Democrats the anti-Israel, anti-Jewish party,” said Jonathan Jacoby, the director of the Nexus Task Force, a national effort to combat antisemitism while making space for political criticism of Israel. “The question the Democrats need to ask is how to stop that without playing into a game of political football underway.”

But there is an even deeper question facing the world’s two largest Jewish communities — Israeli and American — as both consider the politics and policies that will keep them secure on opposite sides of the globe, said Alan P. Solow, a former chairman of the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations and a co-chairman of Barack Obama’s re-election campaign in 2012: Can they remain aligned and allied?

For many Israeli Jews, the ability to wage war as Israel sees fit while asserting control over Gaza and the West Bank is an existential need at a time when Israel’s enemies seek its destruction. For many American Jews, the destruction of Gaza wrought by Israel and the empowerment of Christian nationalists by Mr. Trump’s political movement challenge their values and security.

“That itself has unpredictable implications for American politics,” Mr. Solow said.

Certainly, Republicans are harnessing the moment. House Republican leaders have teed up a vote for Thursday on legislation that would grant the Treasury Department more authority to revoke the tax-exempt status of any nonprofit deemed to be a “terrorist supporting organization,” legislation that pro-Palestinian groups fear would put them in the cross hairs of Mr. Trump’s administration.

In May, as anti-Israel demonstrations roiled college campuses, the House overwhelmingly passed legislation expanding the definition of antisemitism to include “denying the Jewish people their right to self-determination,” for example, “by claiming that the existence of a State of Israel is a racist endeavor.” Under the legislation’s definition, “drawing comparisons of contemporary Israeli policy to that of the Nazis” would be considered antisemitic hate speech.

Liberal groups have long claimed the definition, crafted by the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance, would allow the federal Education Department to suppress free expression by opponents of Israel, regardless of their attitudes toward Jews. Such opposition led to the strange spectacle of veteran Jewish lawmakers, such as Representative Jerrold Nadler, Democrat of New York, denouncing the breadth of the legislation, while Trump-aligned conservatives, like Representative Russell Fry, Republican of South Carolina, were pushing it.

“It is long past time that Congress act to protect Jewish Americans from the scourge of antisemitism on campuses around the country,” Mr. Fry said at the time.

But under pressure from Republicans and some moderate Democrats, Mr. Schumer plans to attach the measure to must-pass legislation this year, either the annual military policy bill or the next stopgap spending bill to keep the government funded.

“You can’t avoid the fact that there is one pro-Israel party, and that’s the Republican Party,” said Matt Brooks, the longtime chief executive of the Republican Jewish Coalition. “If that’s a partisan wedge, so be it.”

For decades, broad support for Israel and its government was bipartisan. Leaders in both parties often warned that an alliance between Israeli politicians and one particular party in the United States would undermine Israel’s security by subjecting American military assistance to the whims of politics.

That began to fray during the Obama administration, when Mr. Netanyahu publicly sought to undermine President Obama’s diplomatic efforts to control Iran’s nuclear weapons program, and his party openly aligned with the G.O.P. But President Biden’s embrace of Israel after Hamas’s attack on the country on Oct. 7, 2023, left around 1,200 dead tamped down Democratic criticism in the name of political expediency.

Now, with the election over, so is the expediency.

”Deference to Netanyahu is clearly diminishing,” Senator Peter Welch, Democrat of Vermont, said on Tuesday, adding, “It’s a very fraught moment.”

Nowhere is the fraying of bipartisanship around Israel more obvious than in Wednesday’s vote to put senators on record on the sale to the country of offensive weapons, such as tank rounds, mortars and guidance systems for smart bombs. J Street, a left-of-center Jewish advocacy group that calls itself strongly pro-Israel, has backed Mr. Sanders’s so-called resolutions of disapproval. The arms sales they seek to block have already happened, noted the group’s president, Jeremy Ben-Ami.

“But symbolism has meaning,” he wrote in a Substack piece on Sunday. “Senators who vote yes can send the important message that even strong friends of Israel disapprove of the way Prime Minister Netanyahu has conducted the Gaza war, of his far-right coalition’s disrespect for the Biden administration and of the U.S. administration’s failure to use its leverage to change Netanyahu’s policies and actions.”

Mr. Sanders has been an outspoken critic of Israel’s conduct in the wars against Hamas and Hezbollah for nearly a year. But his resolutions, while still unlikely to pass, have garnered the support of more mainstream Democratic senators, including Mr. Welch, Jeff Merkley of Oregon and Chris Van Hollen of Maryland.

One by one, at a news conference on Tuesday, Democratic senators supporting the resolution took turns attesting to their longstanding love for Israel before decrying its government and what they called the wanton brutality of its military campaign in Gaza.

“You can be pro-Israel and at the same time strongly oppose the policies of this very right-wing Netanyahu government,” Mr. Van Hollen said.

Mr. Welch said the blind eye that America has turned in the past year to Israel’s military conduct has led to “escalation in Lebanon, escalation even in Syria and the rising violence in the West Bank.” He warned that if the United States is not willing to take a stand now, emboldened members of Netanyahu’s government will press forward with plans for the annexation of parts of the West Bank, the return of Jewish settlers to Gaza and possibly the expulsion of Palestinians.

Both Mr. Van Hollen and Mr. Sanders on Tuesday declined to discuss the politics of their resolutions. But politics are unavoidable.

Initial exit polling has not shown large-scale defections of Jewish voters from the Democratic Party, especially in swing states. But in Jewish enclaves like Crown Heights in Brooklyn and Persian sections of Los Angeles, especially where Orthodox Jews dominate, Republicans appear to have gained substantially.

Even Jewish Democrats worry not so much that Jews will move to the G.O.P. in large numbers, but that the efforts by Democratic leaders to mollify Jewish concerns are repelling other parts of the Democratic coalition, particularly Muslim and Arab American voters, younger voters and the most ardent progressives.

In a social-media debate over the role that interest groups played in Democratic defeats this year, Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Democrat of New York and a leader of young progressives, took aim at the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, which put millions of dollars into primary campaigns to defeat critics of Israel.

“If people want to talk about members of Congress being overly influenced by a special interest group pushing a wildly unpopular agenda that pushes voters away from Democrats, then they should be discussing AIPAC,” she said, pushing back on moderate Democrats blaming L.G.B.T.Q.-rights organizations for Vice President Kamala Harris’s defeat.