A House vote makes it clear: Israel’s support among Democrats is starting to buckle | US politics
In the days before Wednesday’s vote, House minority leader Hakeem Jeffries sat and wrote a letter to the group We urge Democrats to reject an amendment that would cut security aid to Israel. For much of his tenure as Democratic leader, such a whiplash operation would have been unnecessary because its outcome was assumed.
His own second-in-command voted otherwise anyway.
Katherine Clark, House minority whip publicly broken With the position that Jeffries defended for days. What matters is not that a senior Democrat has left, but instead that the party’s chief consensus builder and more than 100 other Democrats have broken ranks on one of Washington’s (and America’s) most defining and confusing policy questions, revealing a party divide that can no longer be managed behind closed doors.
The amendment itself, proposed by Kentucky Republican Thomas Massie, who lost his re-election bid after pro-Israel lobby support strengthened his opponent, would remove $3.3 billion in security aid to Israel from the state department appropriations bill. Failed as expected, 314-104.
But 103 House Democrats (nearly half the caucus) voted for it. They were joined by Nancy Pelosi, one of Congress’ longest-serving advocates for the US-Israel relationship, who later called the amendment “ill-conceived” while saying she supported it “because of the message it sends.” The amendment, which would never become law, instead morphed into something more revealing: a poll measuring how much of the traditional bipartisan consensus on Israel still requires automatic loyalty.
Republican leaders cleared Massie’s amendment for consideration in the chamber; It was a cynical move that could be seen as an attempt to pressure Democrats into casting politically uncomfortable votes ahead of the midterm elections. The strategy also had strange consequences for Republicans.
Nearly half of Democrats, as well as all GOP members except Massie, are on record as supporting sustained and unrestricted military aid to Israel, a state accused of genocide in Gaza by the world’s top international human rights office, as settlers harass local Palestinians and grab land in the occupied West Bank and the military seizes territory in southern Lebanon and sees Türkiye, a NATO member, as the next strategic threat.
All of this, along with the Institute of Global Affairs, took place at a time when public opinion on unconditional aid was changing markedly. find Only 16 percent of U.S. adults think unrestricted aid to Israel should continue; When adults under 30 on both sides are taken into account, this rate drops to 9 percent.
Massie is not completely alone within his own party, either. JD Vance earlier this week I spent hours on Joe Rogan’s podcast He accuses unnamed individuals “within the Israeli system” of trying to undermine his diplomacy with Iran and condemns the Americans who, in his view, participate in this effort. The growing willingness among leading Republicans to criticize Israel’s influence on U.S. foreign policy would have been politically extraordinary just a few years ago.
This isn’t an entirely new debate, though: In April 2024, under Joe Biden’s administration, there were dozens of advocates inside and outside the administration. He called on the President to stop immediately Military aid was provided to Israel after Israel claimed that Israel was possibly violating US law and the Geneva conventions due to disproportionate attacks on civilian populations.
But now a more important battle lies ahead. This year’s National Defense Authorization Act includes legislation for the U.S.-Israel Defense Technology Cooperation Initiative This will deepen significantly Ensuring defense industry integration between the two countries through the expansion of joint research, testing and procurement arrangements beyond existing cooperation. Bernie Sanders has warned that this would take the two defense agencies to an unprecedented level of integration with relatively little congressional scrutiny. Massie and congressman Ro Khanna had tried to repeal the provision once before, but were blocked in the House rules committee before the issue even came up.
The two debates point to the same political reality: Although the bipartisan majority has not disappeared and Congress still overwhelmingly supports military aid to Israel, what has changed is that sustaining it now requires active political management by leaders whose own aides increasingly disagree with them.
This year’s Democratic primaries have already fielded a group of candidates who openly bucked the old consensus and won: progressives and democratic socialists in New York, New Jersey, Colorado, Pennsylvania and Illinois who campaigned on cutting aid and that Aipac money was toxic, and the Michigan Senate primary, where candidate Haley Stevens voted with all Republicans to keep the aid flowing.
Other candidates who win in solidly Democratic districts are representing their constituents and heading to Washington in January with mandates based on repudiating the position Jeffries still espouses and Vance is still trying, however awkwardly, to hold together for his own coalition.
Wednesday’s vote may or may not be sidelined in coming news cycles. But the pattern it emerges will not be this: The two-party base that has survived for 50 years is collapsing from both directions simultaneously.
