When I heard last week that Majority Leader Chuck Schumer said on the floor of the Senate, “The Netanyahu coalition no longer fits the needs of Israel,” that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu was “an obstacle to peace” and that Israel should hold new elections, I was stunned.

This was a new way of talking about the leader of a longtime ally. I wasn’t aware that any government official − let alone the highest-ranking Jewish elected official in the U.S. − had ever leveled such clear and blunt criticism, at least publicly, of an Israeli leader.

UCLA scholar Dov Waxman, an expert on both Israeli politics and the American Jewish community’s relationship with Israel whom I interviewed, says Schumer’s speech “marks the culmination of a process that’s been underway for some time, whereby the Democratic Party has increasingly turned against Netanyahu.” While the U.S. strongly supported Israel’s right to respond to the Oct. 7 Hamas massacre of Israelis in Gaza, Netanyahu’s prosecution of that war has been brutal: 30,000 Gazans have been killed, and those who remain face imminent famine.

President Joe Biden’s strong support for the war in Gaza has become a domestic political liability for him and the Democratic Party as a whole. Schumer, and Biden, who expressed his approval of Schumer’s speech, are attempting “to triangulate between the different political pressures that the Democrats are under and the political risks that Democrats now face,” given the humanitarian disaster in Gaza, says Waxman.