Pennsylvania Democrat John Fetterman has always been staunchly pro-Israel, but the events of the last few months have shined a particularly harsh light on his indifference to Palestinians.
hen he was running for Senate last year in Pennsylvania, there were plenty of things for the Left to like about Democrat John Fetterman. He was the only statewide candidate who’d endorsed Bernie Sanders back in 2016, he seemed to care a lot about organized labor, and he combined solidly progressive stances on social issues with a refreshingly populist style of political communication.
In 2022, he’d already started to get worryingly vague about such basic points of a Bernie-derived policy platform as Medicare for All. But in the context of his race against the clownish right-wing Republican Mehmet Oz, aka “Dr Oz,” it was easy to ignore that part. Watching Fetterman and his team rhetorically grind Oz into the dust was too much fun for many left commentators (myself included) to give him as hard a time as we should have about his political shortcomings.
To any progressive paying close attention, though, a fly in the ointment too big to ignore was that Fetterman’s position was awful on Israel/Palestine. As I noted at the time, “When it comes to Palestine, Fetterman might as well be Dr Oz.” He was on record back in April against imposing any new conditions on US aid to Israel — a country that rules over millions of people permanently denied Israeli citizenship or basic rights like access to regular civilian courts when they’re accused of crimes, and which even last April was keeping well over two million Palestinians locked in the twenty-five-mile-long open-air prison camp that is the Gaza Strip.
Even in a world where the Israeli government had heeded various warnings and headed off Hamas’s attack on October 7, this would be an ugly blotch on whatever record Fetterman would otherwise be able to claim of standing for justice. But in the last three months, Israel has committed atrocities in Gaza on a level that dwarf anything it’s done since the original“Nakba” (catastrophe) that drove hundreds of thousands of Palestinians out of the country during the creation of the state.
Israel’s brutal campaign of collective vengeance started almost immediately after October 7. Since then, about 90 percent of Gaza’s civilian population has been displaced from their homes. Tens of thousands have been killed — a much higher number than the entire estimated civilian death toll of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, even though Ukraine has a much larger population and Russia has been rightly condemned for its frequent violations of the laws of war.
Israel has denied the necessities of life to most Gazans since the war began, and starvation and disease may ultimately kill more Palestinians there than the bombs — though the bombs are killing plenty. Anyone who follows a large number of Gaza-based Palestinians on social media has likely seen several instances of people saying things like “this may be my last post” and being killed in an air strike shortly thereafter. Senior officials in the Israeli government keep talking about the “voluntary” mass removal of the Palestinian population from Gaza — and indeed from the country — as the ultimate goal of the war. Most recently, Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich openly advocated a postwar scenario where there are “100,000 or 200,000 Araba in Gaza and not two million.”
And through it all, Fetterman has continuously doubled down on his enthusiasm for the Israeli state. He told Politico at the end of December that whatever “diversity of opinions” existed among Senate Democrats with regard to the onslaught on Gaza, and however much the caucus might “splinter” on the issue, he would always be “the last man standing to be absolutely there on the Israeli side on this with no conditions.”
