Two members of the U.S. House represent Seattle. Both are Democrats. And they usually agree.
But Rep. Pramila Jayapal, who represents most of Seattle, and Rep. Adam Smith, who represents parts of South Seattle and much of South King County, disagree on the role the U.S. should play in the ongoing Israel-Hamas war. And they disagree on the salience of the war as a political issue, as both support, and also worry about, President Joe Biden’s campaign for reelection.
Their differences are emblematic of the fissures in the Democratic Party, statewide and nationally, with the party’s activist, progressive flank disgusted with the administration’s support of Israel’s war effort, while more mainstream Democrats see Biden trying to manage an intractable conflict involving a longtime ally.
There have been sit-ins at Sen. Patty Murray’s office and Smith’s office. Smith’s Bellevue home was vandalized. Protests have blocked roads and highways.
Jayapal was one of the first members of Congress to call for a cease-fire in the war, issuing her call in October, 10 days after Hamas’ attack on Israel — before Israeli ground forces had invaded but as its airstrikes were hitting Gaza.
She’s since been joined by the state Democratic Party, whose 174-person central committee voted last month to call for an immediate cease-fire.
But four months, and 25,000 deaths, after the invasion began, Jayapal remains alone among Washington’s congressional delegation in calling for a cease-fire.
“The administration is slowly coming to understand that we, the United States, has to use its leverage to negotiate for a cease-fire,” Jayapal said in an interview Tuesday, noting that Secretary of State Antony Blinken was then in the Middle East working toward that goal. “But I’ve been very critical of the fact that it’s taken so long, that the United States has blocked cease-fire calls at the United Nations and has continued to funnel aid to Israel, bypassing Congress and essentially been relatively unconditional in its support.”
Biden has tried to push Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to allow more humanitarian aid into Gaza and to limit the scope of civilian deaths, but he has been largely rebuffed. The U.S. has continued to send military aid to Israel, and the U.S. was one of just 10 countries, of 186, to vote against a United Nations resolution calling for a humanitarian cease-fire.
Netanyahu, after meeting with Blinken on Wednesday, rejected a negotiated cease-fire, saying “total victory” was the only solution.
“We urge Israel to do more to protect civilians, knowing full well it faces an enemy that would never hold itself to those standards,” Blinken said Wednesday from Tel Aviv. “Israelis were dehumanized in the most horrific way on Oct. 7, the hostages have been dehumanized every day since, but that cannot be a license to dehumanize others.”
Biden on Thursday night, in his most pointed public criticism of Israel, said the response in Gaza “has been over the top.”
Smith, and other Democrats in Washington’s delegation, distinguish between a negotiated cease-fire — which would involve concessions from Hamas such as the release of hostages — and an unconditional cease-fire, which they view as limiting Israel’s ability to defend itself after it was attacked.
“The overwhelming majority of people support a cease-fire, Joe Biden is working towards the cease-fire. The difference is the people who are aggressively advocating for their cease-fire, they were advocating for it a week after Oct. 7,” Smith, the top Democrat on the Armed Services Committee, said in an interview last week. “But, you know, the notion that Israel should just sort of not do anything to try to stop them from doing Oct. 7 again, I can’t agree with.”
Murray, the third-ranking Democrat in the Senate, has taken a similar stance, criticizing Netanyahu and the way Israel has conducted the war, but stopping short of calling for a cease-fire.
“They have a right to defend themselves; they were attacked by Hamas in a horrible way,” Murray said in an interview Monday. “But what I also think is Israelis also understand that the casualties that they have inflicted on the people of Gaza, the devastation that they have caused, cannot continue. And I think it’s in America’s interest to really push them to do that.”
Netanyahu has now called for plans to evacuate the city of Rafah, where 1.4 million people are sheltering, ahead of a possible invasion.
Shasti Conrad, the chair of the state Democratic Party, said the party voted last month on its nonbinding cease-fire resolution, after a push from progressive activists.
She said they felt a “moral call” to do “anything we can to end the killing of innocent civilians, both Israeli and Palestinian.”
The state party’s job, she said, is to support its elected officials, even as the party voted for actions that go beyond what its elected officials have called for.
Washington’s congressional delegation, she noted, has the chair of the House progressive caucus (Jayapal), the chair of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee (Rep. Suzan DelBene) and the co-chair of the moderate House Blue Dog caucus (Rep. Marie Gluesenkamp Perez).
“I feel like our congressional delegation in Washington is a true microcosm for the rest of the country,” Conrad said. “It represents the big tent that the party is. I trust them to make their own decisions, and the party is an honest broker in the conversations between the grassroots and our electeds.”
It is that “big tent” that Jayapal warns is at risk of crumpling over anger at the war.
Certainly, for voters who think Biden has been too permissive toward Israel, Donald Trump, the likely Republican nominee, seems to offer little.
Trump, who in his first run for the presidency sought to ban all Muslims from entering the U.S., has recently said he would block all refugees from Gaza. He has said he would increase military aid to Israel and would cut off federal funding to colleges and universities that allow “Israel hate speech.”
But for large numbers of voters, Jayapal said, the war in Gaza makes it impossible for Democrats to talk about the improving economy, climate legislation, infrastructure or any of the other accomplishments they claim.
“The biggest base of swing voters is young people, folks of color, immigrants, who are not going to swing to Donald Trump, but they will swing right out to the couch if they feel like they’re not being heard, or if they feel like their core values are being abandoned,” Jayapal said. “We have a real problem.”
Smith says the war is making it more challenging for the party to unify, but he is more circumspect about the direct political challenges.
“We are a big tent, as the saying goes,” he said. “The thing you have to understand, though, is a lot of the people who are saying that they’re not going to support Biden because of this, they were saying they weren’t going to support Biden two years ago, they were running ads already telling Biden not to run, this is an issue that goes beyond Gaza.”