Opinion

Schumer said out loud what many of Israel’s friends are thinking

Among liberals and many moderates who support the right of Israel to exist as a Jewish homeland, the Hamas attacks of Oct. 7 and the ensuing war in Gaza have called forth anger, agony and a reckoning.

This constituency, which looms large in the Democratic Party and among American Jews, has been whipsawed by competing moral commitments: justified rage over Hamas’s slaughter of innocents; an insistence that Israel has a right to defend itself; alarm over the deaths of tens of thousands of Palestinian civilians as the war has dragged on; and a conviction that peace will require a settlement based on two states for Israelis and Palestinians.