John Fetterman’s Move to the Right on Israel
The Political Scene | The New Yorker
The New Yorker
4.3 • 3.9K Ratings
🗓️ 8 July 2024
⏱️ 19 minutes
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Summary
Many Democrats saw John Fetterman as a progressive beacon: a Rust Belt Bernie Sanders who—with his shaved head, his hoodie, and the Zip Code of Braddock, Pennsylvania—could rally working-class white voters to the Democratic Party. But at least on one issue, Fetterman is veering away from the left of his party, and even from centrists like Majority Leader Chuck Schumer: Israel’s war in Gaza. Fetterman has taken a line that is not just sympathetic to Israel after the October 7th attack by Hamas; he seems to justify the civilian death toll Israel has inflicted on Gaza. “When you have that kind of an evil, or that kind of a movement that came out of a society,” he told Benjamin Wallace-Wells, “whether it was Nazi Germany or imperial Japan or the Confederacy here in the South, that kind of movement has to be destroyed. . . . that’s why Atlanta had to burn.” Wallace-Wells shares excerpts from his interviews with Fetterman in a conversation with David Remnick, and they discuss how Fetterman’s support for Israel is driving a wedge among Pennsylvania voters, who will be critical to the outcome of the Presidential election.
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | This is the political scene and I'm David Remnick. |
| 0:07.0 | Nothing about John Federman's journey to the Senate was at all routine. |
| 0:15.0 | He was a small town, Pennsylvania mayor, |
| 0:18.0 | with a shaved head and a goatee and the zip code for the town of Braddock tattooed on his arm. He has a pension for |
| 0:25.3 | cursing sometimes loudly and he won the Senate race against Mehmet Oz, Dr Oz, a |
| 0:31.5 | celebrity favorite of Donald Trump. And through it all, he kept making waves, |
| 0:37.0 | dressing in shorts and a hoodie on the Senate floor, an act which prompted a motion to require |
| 0:42.1 | senators to dress more professionally. |
| 0:44.8 | Many Democrats saw Federman as a potential progressive beacon, a rust belt Bernie Sanders, |
| 0:51.6 | someone who could rally working class voters to the Democratic Party. |
| 0:56.0 | I ran as a proud progressive. I was the only candidate in the entire country to endorse Bernie Sanders Standards for President. I was the only |
| 1:03.9 | candidate to be for the full legalization of marijuana. I led with immigration. My |
| 1:10.9 | wife, Giselle, who's in the audience, a former dreamer. |
| 1:15.0 | But at least on one issue, Federman is veering away from many of his colleagues in the party, |
| 1:20.0 | and that is Israel's war in Gaza. |
| 1:22.0 | When a measure was introduced in the Senate |
| 1:24.3 | officially supporting a two-state solution, Federman was one of the only two |
| 1:29.1 | Democrats who refused to support it. He's been not just sympathetic to Israel's losses on October 7th, |
| 1:36.4 | but insistently uncritical of the Netanyahu government, even after losses in Gaza began numbering in the tens of thousands. |
| 1:45.0 | Now, Pennsylvania is a crucial state in the presidential race and |
| 1:50.0 | Federman's ability to rally Pennsylvania voters or not rally them may be hugely |
| 1:55.4 | consequential for Joe Biden who can ill afford to lose that state. |
... |
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