FREE FOR ALL: Senator Brian Schatz on ending the war in Gaza
As the U.S. finally calls for a ceasefire, the Hawaii senator told us about the need to change aid policy to stop the fighting
When we spoke to Senator Brian Schatz of Hawaii last week, we talked about the likely impacts of Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer’s provocative speech, in which he pointed to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu as an obstacle to peace and called for new elections in Israel, and what it might mean to follow Schumer’s remarks to their logical conclusion.
While the Biden administration hasn’t yet stopped providing Israel with offensive weaponry, it does seem that the conversation is finally shifting: on Friday, for the first time, the U.S. introduced a ceasefire resolution at the U.N. Security Council, calling for an “immediate and sustained” end to the fighting. Russia, China, and Guyana have now vetoed the resolution, claiming it didn’t go far enough and left the door open for further fighting, but the fact that the measure was introduced at all is a mark of growing American frustration with the Netanyahu government. The U.S. had vetoed the previous three ceasefire resolutions proposed by other nations.
The next move isn’t clear, but as Schatz told us when we talked, “It is hard to defend sending bombs and then sending food aid to follow up.”
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I was looking at your reaction to Chuck Schumer's speech this week. You called it “gutsy” and “historic.” Why was it gutsy, why was it historic, and why did it matter?
Chuck is the highest-ranking Jewish-American in the history of our country. He's a person who loves Israel in his bones. He and I have disagreed about Israel stuff since I got here. He was a hard sell on the Iran nuclear deal and just down the line, he's been considered an Israel hawk, and he's also the leader of the Senate Democrats. And so when he weighs in on a thing like this, he understands what it means and how much of a potential inflection point it is.
I know he's been thinking about this for a couple of months now. I didn't know what he was going to say, but I knew that he was planning to deliver some tough love. And that's what this is. If you love Israel, you have to try to forge a path forward for peace and stability and prosperity for two peoples. After several decades of working with and against and observing Prime Minister Netanyahu, Chuck has come to the conclusion that Netanyahu is no longer capable of leading Israel to a better future.
The thing he called for specifically had to do with Israel’s elections and their democratic process. But the place where he has more power, where you have more power, is of course American policy around sending weapons, around aid. Do you think this kind of speech, though it is a breakthrough from a rhetorical point of view, should be matched by a dramatic reconsideration of how aid works, how weapons shipments work, whether there are conditionalities on help or not?
I would dispute the premise here. I don't think that requiring that weapons are used consistent with our laws and with international law and with our values is a radical departure from United States foreign policy. It is only in the memorandum of understanding between the United States and Israel that defines the annual defense commitment that the language about “no conditions” exists.
Whenever we do appropriations, whether it's domestic or defense, we have conditions on the expenditure of those funds. This idea that you put conditions on the resources we provide a small non-profit in the state of Hawaii, but not on those we provide to a defense force in the middle of a hot war, just defies common sense.
More fundamentally, if you follow Schumer’s speech to its logical conclusion, should we be sending weapons to the country he described under the government he described?
I do think that is an open question, and it is the next question. But I don't think you have to get all the way there instantaneously because part of the defense partnership that we have is defensive in nature.
I think it's pretty out of the mainstream to defund Iron Dome, which prevents rockets from successfully reaching Israeli cities. But I do think it's an open question if we're sending the bombs, whether or not we can credibly send 2,000-pound bombs over and then tell them not to use them.
And I think there are a lot of ways in which this war has flattened any nuance, and even those who acknowledge Israeli suffering sometimes seem like they're just checking a box so they can get to the thing they really want to say. And vice versa: others talk about Palestinian suffering, but just as a pivot point to get to what they really want to say about the Israeli government. And so there's a lot of flattening, and a lot of oversimplification, and a lot of unnecessary polarization.
But where I think the kids are right is that it is hard to defend sending bombs and then sending food aid to follow up. And what worries me is that I do think there are right-wing forces in Israel who would love for our security partnership to go away so that they could have a freer hand in what they want to do. And so this is a disagreement among friends.
For instance, when Donald Trump was president, I was personally glad that the international community did not abandon us, even though they were rightly alarmed at the person that was currently running the country. And that's the way I look at Israel. I think Netanyahu is not good for peace, and not good for Israelis, and not good for Palestinians, and not good for America. But it is for Israeli citizens to determine what the next steps are. In the foreign policy space, it is very dangerous to realign depending on who's in charge.
You’ve talked about the flattening of nuance, and I think there's a really interesting dynamic between what people are saying in public versus what they are grappling with in private. I would say there was a lot of this in the reaction to Schumer's remarks. One thing I've noticed in Jewish communities in the United States is there's a remarkable amount of nuanced grappling in private, and sometimes in public. Can you talk about what you're seeing offline, maybe in your own family and community?
The normal human response after an evil terrorist attack is righteous fury. And I think lots of people immediately felt that way and immediately felt solidarity and even enthusiasm for some sort of retaliatory attack. And as time has gone by and we have observed the suffering, many American Jews still feel very strongly about Israel's right to exist and right to defend itself as a Jewish state.
But what makes us Jews is not pure fidelity to Israel, but rather our core values about what it means to live in this world and be humane, and to try to make things better in whatever way we can. And I don't think we want all of this suffering in our name. As justified as our fury is, as libelous as some of the counterclaims are, we still don't want to be party to the infliction of pain at this kind of scale.
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