Schumer’s Speech on Israel Completes a Trifecta of Errors Suggesting He Is Ripe for Removal as Democratic Leader

Israel, governed by Netanyahu and an all-party, national coalition, has a clear mandate from the people and parliament to pursue the complete destruction of Hamas.

by Conrad Black

Senator Schumer’s call last week for a change of prime minister through an election in Israel was, as it has widely been regarded, an outrageous intrusion in the affairs of another sovereign country, and a close American ally, for whom Mr. Schumer is advocating substantial military assistance.

This completes a trifecta of blunders, any one of which should have been quite sufficient to sack Mr. Schumer from his high office and replace him with someone less mindlessly accident-prone. In 2017, in an orgy of histrionics, he purported to weep on the Senate floor in sympathy for those whom the newly installed President Trump wished temporarily to keep out of the United States because they emanated from terrorism-afflicted Muslim countries.

This boffo performance was followed several years later by the spectacle of the Democratic Senate leader standing on the steps of the United States Supreme Court and threatening, apparently physically, Justices Neil Gorsuch and Brett Kavanaugh if they provided the margin in cases antithetical to Mr. Schumer’s far-left ideology. (The Constitution be damned.)

Last week, Mr. Schumer pridefully remarked that he was the senior Jewish public official in the United States. That is a fact that he is right to be proud of, but he implied that it empowered him to tell the Jewish state, now at war against the premier terrorist organization in the world, which precipitated the conflict with an invasion of Israel, and the massacre of approximately 1,400 Israelis in October, that it had to take measures that would effectively blunt and suspend its war effort.

Israel is now governed by an all-party, national coalition, and Prime Minister Netanyahu has a clear mandate from the people and parliament of Israel to pursue the complete destruction of the terrorist apparatus of Hamas, which committed the atrocities of October 7, and countless previous outrages. Hamas has made it clear that it will never accept the legitimacy of Israel as a Jewish state.

Given that fact and given the proportions of the barbarous onslaught on October 7, the Israeli parliament, reflecting the wishes of the Jewish people of Israel, declared war on Hamas, and declared the objective of eliminating it as a military and terrorist enterprise. These are justified goals, and they are generally desirable objectives. Despite the customary platitudes of Muslim solidarity, the Arab powers have effectively stood by with folded arms and all but encouraged Israel to rid the Mideast of this malignancy.

For Israel, Hamas is an irreconcilable and murderous enemy whose leaders have declared that as long as they are not destroyed, they will have won the current conflict. For Israel, the most horrible day of the murder of Jews since the liberation of the Nazi death camps in 1945 has correctly been seen by practically all of the Jewish people in the world, and the great majority of those who wish the Jewish people well as the litmus test of the unforgettable pledge “never again.”

This was the Jewish promise after the Holocaust: the Jews would never go passively and submissively to their deaths in large numbers again. Mr. Schumer knows all of this. Despite Mr. Schumer’s frequent buffoonery and ludicrous posturing, he could not reasonably be regarded as a stupid man.

The only plausible explanation for this absurdly inappropriate bolt from the blue in his Senate address last week is that the president, as his electoral position steadily unravels, asked Mr. Schumer as his principal Jewish colleague, to assist him in trying to reconcile the irreconcilable elements of his faltering coalition.

President Biden has a commendable historic record throughout his time in the Senate and as vice president in being a supporter of Israel, as well as the moderate Arab powers, and with appropriate sympathy to the wretched lot of the Palestinian Arabs, who have been pushed about as pawns for decades, as a nettle to the Jewish State, and now have the tragic fate of being subject to the whims of the criminal theocracy that governs Iran.

In the “summer of love” of 2020, the Democrats opened their doors and windows to the extreme left as the “peaceful protests” did $2 billion of damage, wounded hundreds, and killed approximately 45 persons. These hooligans and racists were not renounced by the Democrats as they should have been; they were depicted as merely the victims of Trump chaos, expressing themselves and protesting the presence of Mr. Trump in the White House.

With this, the powers that be in the Democratic Party had sown the wind and it is now their well-deserved fate to reap the whirlwind. Mr. Biden is trying to suck and blow at the same time: “Israel has a right to defend itself,” but it must not commit excessive collateral damage.

In practice, what this means is that the pro-Hamas and other extreme antisemitic elements in American society must not desert the Democrats, because they are much more in sympathy with them than the Republicans. At the same time, the Jews, like Mr. Schumer, must understand that they should maintain their allegiance to the Democrats, dating back to Franklin D. Roosevelt, because they truly love Israel.

This is the desperate mission that Mr. Schumer undertook last week, and it is obvious that it will not work. The Israeli prime minister, supported by the leader of the opposition and deputy prime minister, General Benny Gantz, have rebuked Mr. Schumer and reiterated their war objectives.

The survival of the State of Israel, the opening of a new era of potential general peace in the Middle East, and the removal of perhaps the bloodiest fang of the Iranian terrorist network are all highly desirable objectives that the Democratic party under all its leaders from President Truman (one of the founders of the State of Israel) at least to President Clinton and Vice President Gore, would have endorsed. The attainment of these goals vastly transcends in importance the political inconvenience that now afflicts the Democratic Party because of the cynicism and ineptitude of its current leaders.

First published in the New York Sun.