--:-- Sean Rameswaram: The calls for a ceasefire are outrageous. It was just a few weeks ago that Speaker Mike Johnson denounced a ceasefire while flanked by top Democrats in Congress. There are few issues in Washington that could so easily bring together leaders of both parties in both chambers. This particular bipartisan gathering felt ill-advised to many on the left, but Semaphore reporter David Weigel says it should not have come as a surprise.
--:-- David Weigel: No, that was the most normal in terms of the last 50 years of American politics I could imagine. It was actually a throwback to when there wasn't really daylight between the parties on Israel. It had the appearance of unity at a moment when there is less unanimity around support for Israel politically than any time I can remember covering.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: The war is 50 days old this week and today explained is taking stock of how the politics around Israel and Palestine have shifted in the United States. Support for Today Explained comes from Adio. Adio is an AI-native customer relationship management platform that Adio says is built for the next era of companies. A powerful data structure adapts to your business model, sinks in all your contacts in minutes, and enriches your business with actionable data.
--:-- David Weigel: Adio says it also allows you to create those email sequences, those real-time reports, those powerful automations, which they claim can help you build what matters most, your company. You can go to adio.com slash todayexplained to get 15% off your first year.
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--:-- David Weigel: (laughs) I'm not sure that's relevant to the conversation.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: (laughs) For a minute now, at Today Explained, we wanted to talk about how this war between Israel and Hamas has been dividing the American left. David Weigel has been reporting on just that for Semaphore, where he's a national political reporter.
--:-- David Weigel: We started at the top with Joe Biden. I asked him if the president's response differs from president's past. I mean, it really doesn't. Let there be no doubt, the United States has Israel's back. And this is where a lot of the president's problems with younger Democrats and critics of Israel come in.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Israel's under attack and he responds not that much differently than Richard Nixon did during the Yom Kippur War, which is, we support Israel, they're our ally. As I told congressional leaders during the 1973 Yom Kippur War, no American president will let Israel go down the two, Democrat or Republican.
--:-- David Weigel: and it's not an issue. So October 7th, there's a burst of outrage at Hamas for the massacres they carry out. That weekend, there's a rally in New York and Times Square. Hundreds of demonstrators standing in solidarity with Palestine taking over the crossroads of the world.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: To organizers of this rally, the attack on Israel was justified resistance. We're here to say that occupied people have a right to resist their occupation.
--:-- David Weigel: Democratic Socialists of America's New York chapter endorses the rally but doesn't organize it. Inside the Democratic Party, there's a sort of antibody response where any Democrat who associates themselves with those protests is pilloried, is accused of supporting anti-Semitism, is associated with the craziest view out there of Israel.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: You saw the governor of New York, you saw leading Democrats, people who are going to be probably at the head of the party for quite a while, condemning this and saying that this is anti-Semitism.
--:-- David Weigel: Governor Hochul yesterday called the planned pro-Palestinian rally morally repugnant. Younger Democrats see Israel as an apartheid state because they've seen an attempted peace process from Barack Obama be undermined by a pro-Trump Israeli government.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: What you see as the war continues is some of those pre-war dynamics reassert themselves. And by middle of November, most Democrats say, yeah, I don't want my country to be giving unlimited support to Israel no matter what they do.
--:-- David Weigel: Tell me about where exactly the divisions are. So who specifically is sort of breaking away from Joe Biden and maybe even other moderate Democrats?
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: The most obvious people doing this in Congress are members of the squad. And this is the four female Democrats who get elected in 2018. A few more Democrats who are elected in 2020 and 2022, but a very small beachhead of left-wing Democratic politicians inside the House, not really inside the Senate.
--:-- David Weigel: You actually see a division in the first few days of the war between what those Democrats are demanding. They're calling pretty early for a full ceasefire, not continuing conflict until Israel wipes out Hamas, which they say is their goal, but a ceasefire contradictory to the Netanyahu policy.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Ceasefire means release the hostages. All the hostages. Ceasefire means stop the bombardment now.
--:-- David Weigel: You see other Democrats like Bernie Sanders, who's really influential, the John the Baptist of the squad, really, coming before them and helping them get elected. He doesn't even do that. But you see, within days after that, Sanders and a few other Democrats, some of whom surprised people, like Dick Durbin, saying, all right, no, I don't think we should, as Democrats, as a country, be supporting whatever this government does.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Israel has a right to defend itself. But what Israel does not, in my view, have a right to do is to kill thousands and thousands of innocent men, women, and children who had nothing to do with that attack.
--:-- David Weigel: As they see footage coming in from Gaza, as they see reports of children in hospitals being starved, civilian casualties, there are incidents, for example, like reporting that a hospital was blown up by Israeli missiles that is then contested.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Rashida Tlaib, a Detroit Democrat, Detroit and Dearborn, really, Democrat advances that and is censured by the House for it. The resolution is adopted. She sticks to her gun. She gets censured. And she gains, not to everything she said, but on the quest for a ceasefire, they're adding people day by day.
--:-- David Weigel: I mean you have a few dozen House Democrats who called for a ceasefire That is a minority but I think the significance here is one that a lot of Democrats criticizing Israel in wartime That is rare
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: According to polling, they're with the base. I mean, and I covered some protests where people were pretty explicit about this. They would cite polling. There was one protest the DNC, where there are people shining lights on the building that just show the poll numbers.
--:-- David Weigel: When you ask people if they want a ceasefire without Israel's conditions, like 80 percent of Democrats say yes. I mean, Ipsos, Reuters polls, the most recent that backs that up.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Representative, do you support a ceasefire? Do you support a ceasefire? I'm an American Jew and I'm asking you, do you support a ceasefire?
--:-- David Weigel: For a lot of these Democrats, it's clear that their constituents in the Democratic base are not as interested in reflexive Israel support as they are. But it is important to discredit their opponents and say these people are crazy. These people are anti-Semitic. These people are dangerous.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: This is where the division, I think, gets a lot nastier. While this is happening, with fewer protests, they're getting a lot of blowback from Arab-Americans who think that what Biden is doing, and they knew he was pro-Israel when he won the Arab-American vote in 2020, what he's doing is offensive to them, is murderous.
--:-- David Weigel: They said that we had to save America from Donald Trump. And now we feel that we have to save Palestine from Joe Biden. You see the term genocide Joe being thrown around to attack Biden.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: That's what you're seeing eating away at Democratic support is both some stuff from far left activists. Many of them are Jewish themselves. And then some from Arab American Democrats who say I can't possibly support a president. not that they'll support Trump. I can't possibly go out and support a president who's, if he's reelected, is just going to do whatever Netanyahu says.
--:-- David Weigel: And these few dozen Democrats who are supportive of a ceasefire, who do want to see a real shift in this war and are pushing for it in Congress, are they facing repercussions from the moderates or the staunchly pro-Israel factions?
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: The large groups I've been talking about, APEC, which is the Israel lobby in America, Democratic Majority for Israel, which is founded more recently and works in primaries to defeat left-wing Democrats, especially if they're Israel critics.
--:-- David Weigel: Both of those groups are very clear early on that they are going to continue working to beat Democrats who are critics of Israel. And within a few, really within days, but it becomes a little more clear at the end of October, there is an effort to find a candidate who can beat Tlaib.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: There's an effort to support one candidate who can beat Ilhan Omar. There's an effort to beat Jabal Bowman in New York and Cori Bush in Missouri. So three or four of the most prominent Israel critics in the Congress.
--:-- David Weigel: How do we beat them? And they're not hiding this. It's not like a trap they're going to spring later. They're saying pretty clearly we want candidates to run against these people. In a couple of cases, they have them.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: How much of this is a generational divide within the party? Is it just young versus old or is there something more going on here?
--:-- David Weigel: Well, young and old explains much of it for basic reasons. If you are born after 1973, and that's most Americans, you don't know Israel as a tiny democracy in the Middle East that needs American protection. You know it is a powerful country with wealth comparable to a Western European country with a strong military that never loses.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Maybe you can get ambushed and surprised, but it doesn't lose wars. So you ask, okay, why is my government supporting this? And And there's been the search for reasons among a lot of pro-Israel Democrats. What could have done this to our younger voters? How did our young voters grow up and become Israel critics?
--:-- David Weigel: There's a lot of blame put on college. OK, college is very liberal and college is progressive. People are taught to be anti-colonial. That's some of it. I think in the intelligentsia of the left, everything that they say about this is true. that, yes, there are people who have transposed their anti-colonial, anti-settler thinking and said, I'm against the Zionist state for this reason.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: But this is across the education gap. Post-Iraq, there is a lot of skepticism. Why is America spending all this money, not just on foreign aid, but foreign aid in the Middle East in particular? Where is this going? What is the point of doing all this?
--:-- David Weigel: And what is the point in doing it when we're not as vulnerable as we were in the 1970s to OPEC and to oil shocks? For a lot of Americans, the answer is, yeah, I don't know. I don't care. Why is either party so reflexively supportive of this?
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: That's kind of the question asked by, I'd say, Democrats across educational lines under 40. Also, just younger voters generally who are very, very skeptical of this.
--:-- David Weigel: And in the Democratic Party, we have young, we have old, and then we have really old, namely Joe Biden, who himself is older than Israel.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Where exactly is he now considering the state of affairs in his party? He doesn't comment from day to day on critics inside the party. He's not been baited into criticizing the left the way that AIPAC is.
--:-- David Weigel: What Biden wants, and he says, and he's interrupted by a Jewish voice refuse activist at a fundraiser, is he wants a humanitarian pause, which is we pause the conflict. We release hostages. When the hostages are released and tensions decline, maybe we can deescalate the conflict.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: At no point does he say whatever Netanyahu wants. There is American pressure on ending hostilities as soon as possible, but it's in the context of support for Israel and sympathy for Israel and sympathy for the people killed on October 7th by Hamas.
--:-- David Weigel: It sounds like a very subtle difference. I think in some ways it is. But to activists and younger Democrats, it's so clear to them morally that anything but demanding an immediate ceasefire and liberation for Palestinians is effectively genocide, that this is unacceptable.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: This is what he struggled to navigate. He just doesn't have a party base that agrees we should take pains to protect Israel as we try to end the war. Their position is, why? Why do they get this treatment? Why are we treating them any differently than another country that has some sort of internal population that doesn't have full democratic rights?
--:-- David Weigel: Or in the case of Gaza, the ability to leave the Gaza Strip freely. Why are we doing that? And that's not something Biden can answer. that's something that explains why he starts angering so much of the base.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: We'll talk with David about the American right when we're back on Today Explained. Support for today's show comes from Adio.
--:-- David Weigel: What is Adio? Adio is an AI-native customer relationship management system built specifically for the next era of companies. They say it's extremely powerful, adapts to your unique data structures and scales with any business model
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: According to Adio Adio takes less than a minute to set up and within seconds you will have your email and calendars synced You see all your relationships in a fully platform they say all enriched with that actionable data.
--:-- David Weigel: And they say you can build AI-powered automations and use its research agent to tackle some of your most complex processes so that you can focus on what matters, building your company.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: You can join industry leaders such as Flatfile, Replicate, Modal, and so much more. You can go to attio.com slash todayexplained to get 15% off your first year.
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--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Support for the show today comes from LifeKit, the podcast from NPR. What's in your LifeKit? I'm asking. They didn't ask that.
--:-- David Weigel: (laughs) Every day you have to make choices that might shape the direction of your life, but you can't flip to the back of the book to find an answer key. Instead, you can listen to the Life Kit podcast from NPR.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Life Kit offers real stories about common issues like relationships, finances, parenting, and your career. If you're looking to move with more intention or just need thoughtful guidance on living better, Life Kit delivers strategies to help you make meaningful, sustainable change from fitness routines to mental resilience, navigating personal goals to tackling burnout.
--:-- David Weigel: Each episode is full of relevant insights and clear takeaways about things we all could use a little help with. LifeKit wants to help you approach your own life with confidence and clarity and walk away with a game plan you can implement right away.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Enough from me. Go listen to the show, LifeKit. It's a podcast from NPR.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Today explained back with David Weigel from Semaphore. We've talked about this divide this sort of schism on the left and all the factions involved and how complicated that mess is. I imagine this looks a lot less messy on the right.
--:-- David Weigel: Yes, that's a good way to put it on the right. So it's always easier to be out of power in some ways you can say as senator tom cotton from arkansas said this wouldn't happen Trump was president. It wasn't on President Trump's watch that Iran unleashed its proxy, Hamas, to slaughter Jews in Israel.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: The easiest, clearest position they can take is that Joe Biden's weak. If a war breaks out, that is because he's weak. That is because of the decisions he made that invited this weakness.
--:-- David Weigel: I think it is very hard to trace Biden's decisions on Israel to that. But, you know, you've got a script. You're going to stick to it.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: The differences between the candidates for president, I think are significant in showing how Republicans promised to be more reflexively pro-Israel if elected, as Trump was.
--:-- David Weigel: I mean, Trump recognized the Golan Heights. In a moment, I will sign a presidential proclamation recognizing Israel's sovereign right over the Golan Heights. Trump moves the U.S. embassy in Tel Aviv to Jerusalem. For I have determined that it is time to officially recognize Jerusalem as the capital of Israel.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: I am also directing the State Department to begin preparation to move the American embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem. Like Trump basically does everything Israel wants and Trump says out loud, as he likes to do.
--:-- David Weigel: I can't imagine how anybody who's Jewish or anybody who loves Israel, and frankly, the evangelicals love just love Israel. I can't imagine anybody voting Democrat. So that's Trump's position. That has not changed.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: The people who are running against him, Ron DeSantis, Nikki Haley being like the most relevant at this point, they want to go further. They will fully support Israel, but they want to be clear that Palestinians should never get foreign aid.
--:-- David Weigel: We need to make sure no taxpayer dollars go to any Palestinian entities or any U.N. entities that support Hamas. You also have them criticize Trump from the right by saying he's too critical of Benjamin Netanyahu.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: He was not prepared and Israel was not prepared. And under Trump, they wouldn't have had to be prepared. Look at what we did for them.
--:-- David Weigel: One of Trump's 2024 rivals, Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, firing back with his toughest criticism yet of the frontrunner. Now is not the time to be attacking our ally.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Trump has a habit of kind of bloodlessly assessing another player in the world and saying whether they're smart or not. Trump says that Hezbollah is smart. And then two nights ago, I read all of Biden's security people. Can you imagine? National defense people.
--:-- David Weigel: And they said, gee, I hope Hezbollah doesn't attack from the north because that's the most vulnerable spot. I said, wait a minute. You know, Hezbollah is very smart. They're all very smart. You don't go and compliment any of them.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Because what that does is that makes America look weak. I don't think the Republican base cares, not just my view. I mean, I've seen polls since then. Republican voters don't see Trump's comments as insulting to Israel.
--:-- David Weigel: It is a very pro-Israel party. It is a very anti-Palestinian party. In the conservative commentary infrastructure, one of the most influential figures is Ben Shapiro, who talked about the Palestinians as animals.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: The phrase Paliswainians has trafficked on the right for a long time. On the right, there's no danger in saying, I support Israel. I don't care what happens to Palestinians.
--:-- David Weigel: And you see that, not to get too far from the presidential field, you see that in Florida. Florida is a state with a Jewish population that votes overwhelmingly Democratic, a Christian evangelical population that's very pro-Israel.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And you see on the floor of the Florida legislature, a Democrat rhetorically asking, We are at 10,000 dead Palestinians. How many will be enough?
--:-- David Weigel: And a Republican rhetorically, I guess, rhetorically answering. Wow. One of my colleagues said all of them.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: That's the space that Republicans are operating in. And like I said, there's a little bit of skepticism to this in the new right, in the nationalist right. There's a little bit of the why are we supporting them attitude.
--:-- David Weigel: There is a little bit of, you know, frankly, anti-Semitic opposition to Israel's existence. not in the world of primary voters. That's not very relevant among the people who will be nominating the party nominee.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Okay, so we're talking about, you know, the presidential candidates, we're talking about the base. What about, you know, somewhere in between those two is Republicans in Congress How is this played out on the Hill
--:-- David Weigel: Let establish as much as we been talking about about America let establish that the most important thing affecting as far as Israel is concerned right now is probably not whether members of Congress say nice things about it.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: But most of the legislation, I should say resolutions that have passed over the last month or introduced on this have been just condemning the attacks and then attacking Democrats who won't condemn the attacks, passing funding with a poison pill Democrat support and then attacking Democrats for not supporting it.
--:-- David Weigel: And the National Republican Congressional Committee, after the House passes Israel funding that would cut the IRS to pay for it, immediately is out attacking Democrats as anti-Israel, anti-Semites if they don't support it.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: There is more interest, just if I could speak cynically, in using this as an issue to divide Democrats than in unifying the country around one response.
--:-- David Weigel: So not a lot has happened in Congress apart from political kayfabe. Although we know that Republicans in Congress are very skeptical of Ukraine aid, how has that played out with Israel aid? Is it a totally different story?
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Yeah, so again, the Biden position here is America needs to support Israel and its war against Hamas. It needs to support Ukraine and its war against Russia.
--:-- David Weigel: For a lot of Republicans, it's very clear. If there is a zero-sum amount of aid we should be giving out, including a zero-sum amount of military ordnance, bullets, etc., it should be going to defend Israel, not to defend Ukraine.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: That's not, again, unanimous in the party, but the evolving Republican position is that America's first priority is its own self-defense, defending its own border. Its second priority is defending Israel.
--:-- David Weigel: That's the end of the list. There's not really a priority defending Ukraine right now.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Why are Republicans so unified on this issue? What's behind that?
--:-- David Weigel: A lot, so a lot of it is a sense that Israelis are the good guys. If I can be, like, direct about it, it is, now, there are Jews in the Republican Party, not that many. Most support for Israel is driven by believing Christians, pro-Zionist Christians, who believe that Israel won its territory, it is a good steward of the Middle East, it is a democracy, no matter how Palestinians within the country are treated, and it's just not a hard call for them.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Please join me in praying for the safety and security of the people of Israel. We will lift up their warriors and leaders in prayer, wrap our hearts around the bereaved, and ensure that our leaders in Washington know that there is no room for equivocation or daylight between America and Israel.
--:-- David Weigel: You mentioned that the sort of the schism on the left has cast some shadow over Joe Biden's presidential reelection bid. Do you think that what we've seen in the past 50 days and what might be coming in the next 50 could have lasting implications for our election, for our politics at home, which the presidential election, I guess, is now finally less than a year away.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Will people still remember all of the protests in the streets and the various fights in Congress and the various fights over funding, whatever it might be?
--:-- David Weigel: Well, there's been a conversation on the left that I find a little tedious about, hey, if you're saying that you're going to boycott voting for genocide, Joe, you're effectively voting for Trump.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: The other side of this, we'll point out, the election is 11 months away, a year away, this is the time to say this policy needs to change, we won't vote for you.
--:-- David Weigel: And so it's unclear how much of that's going to stick. I think overall, though, and if you talk to peace activists, Jewish people for peace, if not now, etc., their theory of what might happen here, I think, has been borne out in the first month of the conflict.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: I talked to them early in October around this period where they're being condemned for having the audacity to have rallies where people said crazy things. Their thought was, we're going to get a lot of blowback right now. And they were.
--:-- David Weigel: But as this war continues, people are going to look at the images from Israel and recalculate. I think they were correct that that happened. Each time there is a conflict, they're all different. There are different levels of military strength different leaders, etc.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Each time this happens, I feel like there is a decline in reflexive support for Israel. You can see less patience for the Israeli position every time a conflict breaks out, and especially as this conflict lasted over October and November.
--:-- David Weigel: You saw that fade, and in ways that I think will take a couple years to play out.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: That's David Weigel. Read them at Semaphore.com.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Our show today was produced by Avishay Artsy and Isabel Angell. They had help from Matthew Collette, Laura Bullard, Siona Petros, and Patrick Boyd.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: I'm Sean Rameswaram for them. This is Today Explained. Thank you.
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