From WNYC Studios, I'm Brian Lerer. This is my daily politics podcast. It's Friday, March 15th.

I want to start today by playing a few clips from Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer's Israel-Palestine speech

on the Senate floor yesterday that are not the simple soundbite you've probably been hearing

in the newscasts about Benjamin Netanyahu. And then we'll have a conversation with two guests

about how to get to yes on some kind of ceasefire. Israel and Hamas are stuck in those negotiations,

as you probably know, and reports are that scores of civilians or more are still being killed

every day, as well as the fact that the Israeli hostages continue to be held. So there's

tremendous urgency from a humanitarian standpoint, but like with

any ceasefire, it will take both warring parties to agree. But first of these speech excerpts from

Schumer, we have the luxury of time on this show, unlike the news programs with a tighter clock,

so we'll stretch out just a little bit beyond what they can do.

What you probably have heard that I won't bother to replay is that Schumer called Prime Minister

Netanyahu an obstacle to peace and a two-state solution, along with Hamas, Palestinian Authority

Leader Mahmoud Abbas, and radical right Israelis. He mentioned all four of those.

You've probably heard that Schumer called for new elections in Israel once the war in Gaza starts to wind down

and accused Netanyahu of being too willing to tolerate the civilian death toll in Gaza and of pushing Israel toward the status of a pariah state.

Should we use that term?

Pariah.

That's the part you probably know.

And that by itself is a very big deal.

The Israeli newspaper Ha'Aritz, for example, called the speech a watershed moment

in Israel-U.S. relations. Fred Kaplan, who writes about the

...