(NewsNation) — The nation’s highest-ranking Jewish elected official says he strongly supports Israel. Its leader? Not so much. And that, says Middle East expert Aaron David Miller, is unprecedented.
“I don’t think I ever heard a speech quite like this,” the former State Department official tells NewsNation. “It breaks apart the mythology, the urban myth, that we don’t intervene in Israeli politics, and they don’t intervene in ours.”
Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, in a speech on the Senate floor, called for new elections in Israel once the war “winds down.” The New York Democrat again pushed for a two-state solution, which he called “the only realistic and sustainable solution.”
Miller, a senior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, calls that “quite extraordinary.”
“I don’t think there’s been a majority leader in the history of the U.S.–Israeli relationship that’s made a speech like that,” he said.
He calls it a “role reversal,” as Congress usually consistently supports Israel regardless of the administration. Now, he says, the Biden administration “has so far refused to impose any cost or consequence on any of the policies we don’t like … in a kind of passive-aggressive approach.”
Miller says it’s obvious Israel Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu won’t be able to look to Democrats for support.
“It would not surprise me in the least if he begins to plot with the presumptive Republican nominee — a sort of strategy to intercede in our politics as we approach probably one of the most extraordinary, important and consequential elections in the modern history of the United States,” Miller said.
