A Majority of Democrats Are Finally Moving on Israel

Senators Bernie Sanders, Jeff Merkley and Peter Welch introduced legislation to stop two tranches of weapons sales to Israel yesterday, and 27 Democrats, a majority that included their number two ranking member in the Senate, Dick Durbin, voted in favor of it. This resolution did not pass because the minority of Democrats voting against it joined with a unanimous group of Republicans enthusiastically arming a genocide that has led to a crippling famine in Gaza threatening to kill millions. This is a big story because in the past, the Democratic Senate has been well behind the Democratic base’s skeptical (at best) views of Israel, and this vote represents a symbolic change in the party.

Just 32 percent of Americans back Israel’s actions in Gaza, a new low for Gallup’s polling. Like everything in this country, there are sharp divisions along partisan lines, with 71 percent of Republicans approving of Israel’s actions versus just 8 percent of Democrats, and only 25 percent of Independents. For the first time ever, Benjamin Netanyahu is rated unfavorably by a majority of Americans (52 percent). There has been a remarkable shift in public opinion both in the last week and since October 7th, as the barbarity Israel has displayed long before Hamas’ terrorist attack becomes unimpeachable (like their 1982 assault on Beirut that Ronald Reagan called a “Holocaust”).

One day, everyone will have been against this, and we are closer to that day today than we were yesterday. There is real introspection going on in the Democratic Party right now, demonstrated by former Slate, Atlantic, Semafor and current Yahoo Finance writer, Jordan Weissmann writing that “As Dems converge on agreement that Israel has been committing an atrocity, I do think there needs to be some reckoning among mods that, while lots of ugly antisemitism burst from the left after Oct. 7, the leftists were fundamentally more right about what this war would become.”

The reason so many knew what this war would become on October 8th is because of the things Israel said and did. I read Haaretz which reported largely on IDF sourcing to document many of the atrocities we know about today. It is why I get so annoyed with Jews who call me a bad Jew for supporting Palestine while revealing that they clearly don’t read Israel’s oldest daily newspaper. This has not been some grand mystery to try to untangle, a lot of people just refused to see what their eyes were telling them. Favored Democratic Party humanitarian agencies like Amnesty International have long said that Israel is violating international law and committing war crimes in the Occupied Palestinian Territories. What is currently happening in the Democratic Party is an epistemological fracture around the bankrupt logic of liberal Zionism.

As Ezra Klein so thoughtfully noted in the New York Times, “To call [Zohran] Mamdani an anti-Zionist is accurate, but the power of his position is that it is thoroughly, even banally, liberal. ‘I’m not comfortable supporting any state that has a hierarchy of citizenship on the basis of religion or anything else,’ he said. There are ethnonationalists who might object to that sentiment. But the flourishing of American Jews is built atop that foundation.” The clear contradiction between Israel’s blood and soil nationalism around Judaism and the pluralistic ideals of New York City could not be clearer at this point. They are completely incompatible with one another.

And while the mainstream press wholly devoted to pro-Israel stenography would love for you to think that all American Jews are united around Netanyahu’s vision for a bustling ethnostate built atop the graves of Palestinian children, a new poll reveals that as the Times of Israel noted, “Mamdani holds wide edge among Jewish voters in new NYC mayoral race poll.” The survey from Zenith Research and Public Progress Solutions found that 43 percent of Jewish voters in New York City would vote for Mamdani, with that figure rising to 67 percent between the ages of 18 and 44. The pro-Israel constituency is not a monolith, and it doesn’t include most young Jews.

A March 2025 Pew survey found that only Muslims (87 percent) and the religiously unaffiliated (66 percent) expressed a larger amount of “not too much/none at all confidence in Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to do the right thing regarding world affairs” than Jews do (53 percent). If you’re wondering where Israel’s core supporters in the United States lie, it’s with various sects of Christianity, and the group with the most confidence in Netanyahu by far (58 percent) are white evangelical Protestants.

Why should Democrats support Israel? Eight percent of their voters have a favorable view of Israel’s response to the October 7th attacks. The Biden administration already tied the Democrats to Israel’s genocide forever, and the only way forward in a world where the party is less popular than ever is to rebuke previous positions that made them so unpopular, like supporting a genocide in Gaza simply because it was a Democratic president aiding and abetting it by refusing to do things past Republican presidents like Reagan did to rein Israel in.

This is a watershed moment for American politics. A previously untouchable sacred cow was just rebuked by a party who has spent much of the past few years cowering from AIPAC’s new influence in our elections (while letting them take out two progressives who stuck their necks out to try to help Biden pass all of his signature legislation). Some Democrats who voted to arm Israel last year have now voted against doing so, and even though they knew the resolution was destined to fail, it is still an important symbolic message. One from Democrats to their own voters that they do feel the winds of change coming upon them, and their natural survival instincts are kicking in. This capitulation on Israel from the Democratic intelligentsia is how grassroots-driven movements work to affect the highest levels of politics, and why we keep trying to bend the moral arc of history towards justice. Here are the 27 Senators who voted in favor of at least one of the resolutions to block arms sales to Israel: