The ceasefire had produced something rarely felt in the region in the aftermath of Hamas’s October 7, 2023, attacks that killed 1,200 Israelis: hope. Although the tentative agreement emerged from a rare bit of bipartisan collaboration—a team of advisers appointed by America’s outgoing president, Joe Biden, worked together with an envoy from its incoming one, Donald Trump, to secure it—its announcement was auspicious, coming on January 15, 2025, five days before the inauguration. Under Biden, there had been more than a year of bloodshed and suffering. Now, Trump’s disruptive approach to politics, both domestic and international, had come to Palestine, and it seemingly had helped halt the war.
The two-month ceasefire did not move the needle on a poisonous status quo that has enabled Israel’s most destructive tendencies. Famine is now widespread—as of mid-August, around 250 people had died of starvation, many of them children—and Palestinians queuing for meager rations provided for them are routinely slaughtered by Israeli bombs, bullets, and shells. Israeli leaders have nevertheless only been emboldened; Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has reportedly been echoing calls from the far right in meetings with his security cabinet to seize and fully reoccupy the entirety of the Gaza Strip.
The Trump administration, meanwhile, has doubled down on its full-throated support of Israel, joining strikes on Iran’s nuclear facilities on June 22, but was caught off-guard by Israel’s bellicose military operations in Syria, all while restricting criticism of Israeli policy here at home. The State Department still has not seen fit to condemn the killing of Al-Sharif. In fact, a spokesperson has sought to justify it.
To wit: While the moral case for changing policy in Gaza is indisputable, so is the overlapping strategic one. Why then is it so difficult to move forward with either?
After all, the daily starvation of hundreds of Palestinians in Gaza while the United States provides weapons and diplomatic backing to Israel is not only a moral stain but represents a serious security threat to the United States and U.S. interests in the world.
But backing Israel while it starves Gaza will make it that much more difficult for the United States to partner with countries in the Arab world. The Trump and Biden administrations both aimed to expand normalization agreements between Israel and Arab states, notably Saudi Arabia. But it’s more and more difficult to imagine that Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman could take the risk of recognizing Israel while it engages in such brazen war crimes against Palestinians; as popular as he is among a new generation of Saudis, this may be too much to wager on. Indeed, as anti-Americanism related to its support for Israel rises, it could also lead to new threats from the region, including resurgent terrorism against the United States. Fourteen years after Barack Obama pulled troops out of Iraq, and four years after Biden withdrew the U.S. military from Afghanistan, complicity in Gaza has once again inflamed Arab opinion against the United States.
Some analysts now assert that Israel is in the strongest position in the Middle East that it’s ever been in. As evidence, they cite its assassinations of Hamas’s and Hezbollah’s leadership, the airstrikes on Iran, and the fall of Syria’s Bashar Al Assad. But whether such aggressive moves harm or help the cause of Middle East peace in the long run is open to question. As Emma Ashford, author of First Among Equals: U.S. Foreign Policy in a Multipolar World, summed it up, “Israel’s wars are potentially setting up the Middle East for further destructive conflict. Is this really good for the U.S.?”
And where instability reigns, the bipartisan global priority of countering China by any means is threatened. Previously, the United States has sought buy-in from allies and partners who we can reasonably assume are now questioning American leadership, or even, perhaps, quietly deciding to go their own way—a situation that is exacerbated by the Trump administration’s handling of the Russia-Ukraine War and approach to global trade.
While much of the world has shifted in its views of the Israel-Hamas war and the occupation of Gaza, and American voters have shifted, too, the gatekeepers of the Democratic Party remain largely unmoved, The party’s inertia was summed up in this comment in August from Pete Buttigieg, who consistently comes in the top three in polling on the 2028 Democratic presidential primary: “I think that we, as Israel’s strongest ally and friend, you put your arm around your friend when there’s something like this going on, and talk about what we’re prepared to do together.” As one Democrat strategist told Politico, “When your friend kills 60,000 people and starves an entire population for months at a time, shouldn’t the question be: Why the fuck am I friends with this guy?”
But the party still doesn’t get it. Only in July did 27 senators vote for arms sanctions on Israel, and few lawmakers—notable among them is Chris Van Hollen of Maryland—have been consistent in their pursuit of accountability for Israel. With the Democratic presidential primary set to ramp up after the 2026 midterms, the war in Gaza will almost certainly quickly emerge as a wedge issue—perhaps even one comparable to the pivotal role that support for the Iraq War played in 2008.
In the meantime, Trump will focus on splashy “deals” and may, simply by balking at convention, somehow get some elements of Middle East policy right. But it won’t be enough to address the gravity of catastrophe, and he may face growing criticism from MAGA firebrands like Marjorie Taylor Greene who see Israel as a threat and a liability. Mainstream Democrats, meanwhile, risk ceding the issue to their younger and more progressive counterparts who have been outspoken on it. For a party that has hemmed and hawed about the need to embrace more popular positions, ending military support for Israel is an easy win—and it’s a good foreign policy plank as well. It will also provide an opening for Democrats who can press the realist case for shifting policy on Gaza and Israel, even if they’re still unwilling to fully make the moral one.
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