Democrats Are Finally, Slowly, Changing Their Minds on Israel

Amy Klobuchar, the senior senator from Minnesota, appeared last month in a photograph with Benjamin Netanyahu. Wearing a tight-lipped smile alongside a bipartisan group of senators, she hardly seemed thrilled to be there. But there she was, posing with a man who is wanted for war crimes by the International Criminal Court and has been credibly accused of committing genocide in Gaza.

The picture, snapped as alarm was growing over looming famine in Gaza and Israel pursued its pitiless military assault on the enclave, struck me as a maddening but apt illustration of the yawning gulf between the steadfast pro-Israel stance of leading Democratic politicians and their voters. It was, sadly, par for the grisly course.

Then last week Klobuchar did something that genuinely surprised me: She voted in favor of a pair of resolutions put forward by Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont, a leading critic of Israel’s prosecution of the war, that would block the transfer of key offensive weapons to Israel, including 1,000-pound bombs and automatic assault rifles.

She was joined in one of the votes by 24 other Democrats and two independents, a majority of the Democratic caucus. Many were seeking to block weapons for Israel for the first time. And not just any Democrats. The ranking members of crucial committees — Foreign Relations, Appropriations and Armed Services — voted to block the transfers as well. A number of notable moderates joined the vote, including one of the most vulnerable in the 2026 midterms, Georgia’s Jon Ossoff.

Predictably, like all the other measures to limit Israel’s warmaking with American weapons Sanders has tried to bring to the floor of the Senate, the resolutions failed. The entire Republican caucus, joined by the rest of the voting Democrats, voted them down.

It may sound strange to find hope in a failed vote, especially given the dire situation in Gaza. And yet I do. Klobuchar’s vote in particular seemed a meaningful change from a powerful and canny operator who is among the most ambitious of her generation of Democratic politicians. It was a signal, belated but significant, that the Democrats are finally shifting their position on Israel.

Klobuchar ran for the party’s presidential nomination in 2020, mounting an impressive if ultimately unsuccessful campaign that channeled her image as a flinty Midwestern moderate. She is now the third-ranking member of her caucus and is a top contender to replace Chuck Schumer, the unpopular and aging leader of Senate Democrats. She may well run for president again in 2028. She is, in short, a bellwether of elite Democratic politics.

I asked Klobuchar how she squared her meeting with Netanyahu last month with her vote against weapons last week.

“I attended so I could make the case for more humanitarian aid and to stop the displacement of Palestinians,” she said in a statement. “I did that but I did not get a good answer. I’ve supported military assistance to Israel in the past, and I have made it clear that I believe Israel has a right to defend itself. But I believe at this moment in time it’s crucial that the Israeli government must do more to alleviate the urgent humanitarian crisis.”

That is not exactly a rousing condemnation of Israel’s conduct in the war. But her vote was nonetheless a crucial step by a Democratic leader toward the views of the party’s base, which is deeply frustrated by the feckless response to the Trump administration and angry at the failure to stop the slaughter in Gaza. A Gallup poll published last week found that just 8 percent of Democrats support Israel’s military action in Gaza, a new low.

Democrats’ sympathy with Israel has been falling for about a decade. But in the past year, despite the broad outpouring of support in 2023 after the Hamas attack on Israel on Oct. 7, it has plummeted. It is not hard to see why. The United States has sent billions of dollars’ worth of weapons to Israel, which have been used to wage a relentless war of total destruction, killing more than 60,000 people, including at least 18,000 children, according to Gazan health officials.

American weapons, paid for with American tax dollars, have helped Israel transform much of Gaza — its homes, hospitals and schools — into rubble. With Israel limiting aid to Gaza, its two million people now face starvation. Watching this horror unfold, many Americans have turned away from Israel.

Their leaders seem to be in denial about this. Klobuchar was not the only prominent Democrat in that photo with Netanyahu; six others joined her, including Schumer, who declared earlier this year that he sees it as his job “to keep the left pro-Israel.” The rest were, like Klobuchar and Schumer, almost entirely from reliably blue states — Delaware, New Jersey, Washington and California.

The only real challenges to those Democrats’ power would come from primary candidates to their left. Among them, just Jacky Rosen of Nevada represents a swing state, though she won’t face voters again until 2030. You would have thought it would be safe for them to at least show some awareness of the depth of voters’ feelings about the situation in Gaza. And yet Klobuchar was the only Democratic member of that delegation to vote against arms for Israel.

Perhaps the most baffling among the senators who met with Netanyahu last month is Cory Booker of New Jersey, who has styled himself as a happy warrior against Donald Trump. Back in March, he delivered the longest speech in the history of the Senate, holding the floor for more than 25 hours to excoriate the Trump administration’s gutting of government agencies, lawless deportation regime, plans to slash benefits for the poor and more.

These are all important issues to Democratic voters, to be sure. But over those many hours, though Booker made only three glancing references to Gaza — one of them to note that as a young man he had done humanitarian work there — there was not a whisper of condemnation of Netanyahu’s conduct of the war. Nor did he condemn Trump’s bizarre plan, announced just weeks earlier, to ethnically cleanse Palestinians from Gaza and build an American-owned “riviera” on their land. Two days after his record-breaking speech, Booker voted against one of Sanders’s many efforts to limit arms sales to Israel.

Booker shares many of Klobuchar’s ambitions. He sits one notch below her in the Senate’s byzantine hierarchy, and like her, he is often mentioned as a possible contender to replace Schumer. Booker, too, ran for his party’s presidential nomination in 2020 and is likely to run in 2028. At one time, his staunch support of Israel might have been a boon to those ambitions. These days, it may well have the opposite effect.

Starvation is a lagging indicator, a catastrophic result of disastrous decisions made long before the first hints of hunger. In war, it is at best a result of heedless indifference. At worst, it is evidence of the gravest of crimes. Raphael Lemkin, the Polish lawyer who coined the term “genocide,” was preoccupied with the use of deliberate starvation as a weapon of war, in one early essay quoting a Nazi field marshal who described it as “better than machine guns.” Most of all, starvation is almost never a surprise.

In Gaza, where plenty of food, water, fuel and medicine sits just beyond its borders, scores have died of hunger, a slow, gruesome process endured by people living in the most desperate circumstances imaginable. A “worst-case scenario of famine is currently playing out,” the I.P.C., a global group that tracks hunger, said in its latest assessment. Some 20,000 children have been admitted to health centers for acute malnourishment.

But these conditions were created. From the earliest days of the war, it has seemed impossible to overstate its chaos and violence and the brutal toll it has taken on civilians. Almost all of Gaza’s two million people have had to flee their homes at least once since the war began. The crisis continues to deepen: According to the United Nations, 762,500 people have been displaced since the end of the cease-fire in March. Gaza’s people have been packed into narrow slivers of the tiny territory. Even if they are eventually allowed to leave those areas, few will find their homes intact: Since March, Israel has been demolishing thousands of buildings across Gaza, according to a visual investigation by the BBC.

After Israel ended the cease-fire, it blocked humanitarian aid to Gaza for two and a half months. Since late May, it has allowed aid distribution almost entirely through the opaque Gaza Humanitarian Foundation, operated by security contractors, requiring hungry people to walk miles through an active war zone to get food. More than 1,000 people have been killed in these violent, chaotic distributions, according to the U.N. A report by the aid group Doctors Without Borders published on Thursday called it “a system of institutionalized starvation and dehumanization.” In recent days, Israel has allowed drops by air, but they are inefficient and dangerous.

On Wednesday, Cindy McCain, the head of the United Nations World Food Program, posted a plea for Israel to allow more aid by land. “We can’t airdrop our way out of an unfolding famine,” she wrote. “Gaza is out of food and out of time.”

As these decisions build upon one another, it has become harder to wave aside the gathering evidence, often presented by Israeli experts, that Israel is engaged in a historic crime. In a report emblazoned with the headline “Our Genocide,” one of Israel’s leading human rights organizations, B’Tselem, called Israel’s campaign in Gaza “a clear and explicit attempt to destroy Palestinian society in Gaza and create catastrophic living conditions that prevent the continued existence of this society in Gaza.”

Another major group, Physicians for Human Rights Israel, declared that Israel is engaged in “a deliberate, cumulative dismantling of Gaza’s health system, and with it, its people’s ability to survive.” Both agreed Israel’s actions amounted to genocide. Netanyahu seems utterly unbowed by such conclusions: On Thursday, he announced that Israel planned to expand its military occupation to include all of Gaza.

Starvation has a peculiar hold on the human conscience. Every person knows, in some small way, what it is to feel hunger with no means to satisfy it. It requires little imagination to extend that sensation, to imagine it afflicting the people you love. It compels you ask how that hunger came to be, what steps were required and who took them — and what might be needed to stop it.

Votes by Klobuchar and other moderates in favor of a doomed effort to block a fraction of the billions of taxpayer dollars that finance weapons for Israel, after years of supporting its increasingly ethnonationalist government, are unlikely to rate as senatorial profiles in courage. But they are a sign that at least some American leaders are beginning to ask these questions. Elite opinion, too, is a lagging indicator, often trailing behind conscience and political necessity by months or even years. Sometimes, though, it can catch up.