We Owe Chuck Schumer a Debt of Gratitude

Kudos to the Times of Israel for publishing yesterday’s speech by U.S. Senate Majority Leader Charles Schumer (D-NY) in full. It is truly a masterful example of oratory that succeeds in expressing a series of principled but complex views held by not only many if not most American Jews but also by a large cross section of Americans who have been following the Israel-Hamas war in Gaza with ever-increasing apprehension and dismay.

In the tradition of the late Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan (also D-NY), Schumer eschewed dumbed-down social-media-geared sound bites and instead articulated a comprehensive view of the conflict and its—in my opinion at least—only feasible outcome.

It would take far too long to analyze the speech here in detail but it should be required reading even—perhaps especially—for those whose knee jerk reaction is to reject one of its central premises: that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his extremist far right government are damaged goods that cannot be a credible part of a viable solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, which in this case must be a two-state solution.

Suffice it to say here that Schumer articulates one of the dire realities that explains in large part the surging antisemitism that has taken hold across the globe, including on American university and college campuses since Oct. 7, namely that “Israel is surrounded by vicious enemies, and there are many people around the world who excuse and even support their aims to expel and kill Jews living in their hard-won land of refuge.”

He unequivocally condemns Hamas as “pure and premeditated evil” and makes clear that it and its supporters who participated in the carnage of Oct. 7 cannot be part of a post-war Gaza future.

Schumer also emphasizes the widely felt anguish at “the plight of so many hostages still trapped deep inside Hamas’s network of tunnels,” and excoriates the media for ignoring or trivializing Hamas’ Oct. 7 atrocities. At the same time, he voices the horror any decent human being should feel at what he accurately characterizes as “a humanitarian catastrophe” in Gaza: “entire families wiped out, whole neighborhoods reduced to rubble, mass displacement, children suffering.”

Most importantly, Schumer lasers in on one of the principal obstacles to any acceptable path to ending the present bloodshed and at least attempting to prevent future bloodshed, to wit, Netanyahu’s outright rejection of “the idea of Palestinian statehood and sovereignty.”

By now, Netanyahu is so malodorously past his political sell-by date that even his stench has begun to stink. Schumer’s public and blunt contention that “a new election is the only way to allow for a healthy and open decision-making process about the future of Israel”—something for which huge segments of the Israeli public have been clamoring for months—is only the latest in a series of repudiations of a desperate politician who seems intent on taking his country with him over a cliff, all consequences be damned.

As someone who has called for Netanyahu’s departure months ago, my first reaction to this part of Schumer’s speech was, what took him so long?

Schumer’s analysis of the situation makes perfect sense. Netanyahu, Schumer said, “has lost his way by allowing his political survival to take precedence over the best interests of Israel.” By aligning himself “with far-right extremists like ministers Smotrich and Ben Gvir,” Schumer explained, Netanyahu “has been too willing to tolerate the civilian toll in Gaza, which is pushing support for Israel worldwide to historic lows. Israel cannot survive if it becomes a pariah.”

The fact is that in these absolute “emperor has no clothes” remarks, Schumer finally said out loud what most people outside of Netanyahu’s immediate family and political sycophants have been thinking and whispering for months now: Someone new must be brought in to undo the damage Netanyahu has wrought.

Let’s be clear – the next prime minister of Israel will not be a leftist, and the next Israeli government will be a center-right government. Netanyahu’s most likely successor, Benny Gantz, a former defense minister and chief of staff of the Israel Defense Forces, is a pragmatic security-oriented centrist very much along the lines of the late Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin and former Prime Minister Ehud Barak, both of whom had similarly served as defense minister and IDF chief of staff. Other prominent Israeli anti-Netanyahu political personalities such as opposition leader Yair Lapid and Gadi Eisenkot, another former IDF chief of staff, hold similar views.

The difference is that they are not clinging on to their political office to avoid going to jail on a succession of corruption charges. And they have not become dependent on, and in effect beholden to, the most extreme ultra-nationalist anti-Arab bigots ever to serve in any Israeli government.

Itamar Ben Gvir, Netanyahu’s minister of national security, is a disciple of Meir Kahane who was banned from running for reelection to the Knesset, Israel’s parliament, in 1988 because of his racist views. Ben Gvir not only opposes any form of Palestinian statehood or self-determination; most recently, he has spoken out publicly in support of an Israeli police officer under investigation for fatally shooting a 13-year-old Palestinian boy.

Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich is equally unsavory. Smotrich not so long ago envisaged a post-war Gaza with “100,000 or 200,000 Arabs in Gaza and not two million,” with the remaining 1.8 or 1.9 million Palestinians somehow departing for parts unknown. The same Smotrich further showed his hand when he told an interviewer that as far as he was concerned, obtaining the freedom and return of the remaining Israeli hostages, still held in harrowing captivity in Gaza since October 7, was “not the most important thing.” What a guy.

Netanyahu, Ben Gvir, Smotrich, and their ilk share a categorical—bordering on the pathological—refusal to countenance or even contemplate a Palestinian state in any form. In their dystopian view of the future, Israel would continue its occupation of the West Bank and Gaza with its more than 5 million Palestinian inhabitants in perpetuity. To call this a recipe for disaster is an understatement in every meaning of the term.

I vividly remember Nahum Goldmann, then the president of the both the World Jewish Congress and the World Zionist Organization, warning in July of 1967, only weeks after Israel gained control over the West Bank and Gaza as the result of its military victory in the Six Day War the month before, that “Israel cannot prevail as the Sparta of the Middle East.”

Goldmann was right then. Schumer is right now in predicting that if “Israel were to not only maintain the status quo, but go beyond that and tighten its control over Gaza and the West Bank, as some in the current Netanyahu administration have suggested—in effect creating a de facto single state—then what reasonable expectation can we have that Hamas and their allies will lay down their arms? It would mean constant war.”

Since it is abundantly clear that Israelis and Palestinians cannot peaceably coexist in the same entity for the foreseeable future, Schumer’s conclusion is similarly on target: “The only real and sustainable solution to this decades-old conflict is a negotiated two-state solution—a demilitarized Palestinian state living side-by-side with Israel in equal measures of peace, security, prosperity, dignity and mutual recognition.”

Such an outcome, which is by no means guaranteed, will require years of difficult negotiations and work, but it also requires leaders on both sides who are willing to undertake such a task in good faith.

To be sure, as Schumer made clear in his speech, the ultimate decision belongs to the citizens of Israel, but they, too, have made clear in poll after poll that most of them are fed up with Netanyahu.

And we should all be grateful to Chuck Schumer for starkly setting forth the binary options before us: a possible way forward without Netanyahu or continued misery with him.

Menachem Z. Rosensaft is adjunct professor of law at Cornell Law School and lecturer-in-law at Columbia Law School. He is the author of Poems Born in Bergen-Belsen (Kelsay Books, 2021) and of the forthcoming Burning Psalms (Ben Yehuda Press, 2025)

The views expressed in this article are the writer’s own.