Rarely has a head of state received a more hostile welcome than that which met the Israeli prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, when he arrived in Washington DC to speak before a joint session of Congress last month. While no senior US officials turned up to greet him on the tarmac, thousands of demonstrators marched in protest of his speech, including 200 from the group Jewish Voice for Peace who were arrested during an occupation on Capitol Hill, and others who burned him in effigy and replaced the American flag flying in front of Union Station with a Palestinian flag.
Perhaps more telling was the decision of roughly half of congressional Democrats to boycott the address altogether. “A dozen years ago, that would have been unthinkable,” noted Peter Frey, board chair of J Street, a Jewish lobbying group that supports Israeli security as well as a Palestinian state. One lawmaker who did attend, the representative Rashida Tlaib, wore a keffiyeh and held a sign calling Netanyahu a “war criminal” who was “guilty of genocide”. Meanwhile, a number of labor unions, including the National Education Association, the Service Employees International Union and United Auto Workers sent a letter to Joe Biden calling for an end to US support for Israel’s war in Gaza.
Polling shows that some 70% of Democrats and 35% of Republicans favor conditions on military aid to Israel, but with each day, the disconnect between what voters want and what the Biden administration does seems to widen. One consequence is that citizens’ already flagging trust in their government is steadily eroded. “It’s a battle for the soul of the political system on this issue,” Frey said. “And it’s playing out in real time in front of us. It is not healthy. It’s not good for Israel.” And to the extent that Americans care about foreign policy, he added, “I think it does in the long run maybe undermine confidence in the political system.”
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