John Fetterman's Move to the Right on Israel

This episode explores U.S. Senator John Fetterman's controversial stance on Israel's policies and his deviation from the typical Democratic Party line.

1. John Fetterman has significantly shifted his political stance towards a conservative view on Israel, diverging from many fellow Democrats.
2. His stance is influenced by personal experiences and broader strategic calculations about the Democratic Party's direction.
3. Fetterman's health issues have impacted his capacity and manner of engaging in Senate activities and public communications.
4. His political shift could have substantial implications for the Democratic Party's strategy and voter dynamics in crucial states like Pennsylvania.
5. The episode raises questions about the balance of personal belief and political strategy in shaping a politician's actions and policies.

1: Introduction

David Remnick introduces the topic and sets the stage for a deep dive into John Fetterman's political journey and recent pivot on Israel. David Remnick: "Nothing about John Fetterman's journey to the Senate was at all routine."

2: Fetterman's Shift on Israel

Exploration of Fetterman's new alignment with Israel following the October 7 events, and how this stance contrasts with his previous progressive image. Benjamin Wallace-Wells: "He's somebody who's very much a media presence, and he's very good at getting media attention."

3: Health and Political Impact

Discussion on how Fetterman's stroke and subsequent depression have affected his political performance and personal life. Benjamin Wallace-Wells: "The stroke and then the depression effectively took him out of circulation for the first half of his first year as a senator."

4: Implications for U.S. Politics

Analysis of the potential effects of Fetterman's stance on the Democratic Party and the upcoming presidential election. Benjamin Wallace-Wells: "Pennsylvania is crucial. If Biden doesn't win Pennsylvania, it's really trouble."

1. Stay informed about your representatives' positions and their implications.
2. Engage in community discussions to understand diverse political perspectives.
3. Advocate for transparency and accountability in political representation.
4. Participate in electoral processes to influence policy directions.
5. Educate others about the importance of nuanced views in political discourse.

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.

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John Fetterman, Benjamin Wallace-Wells, David Remnick

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David Remnick
This is the political scene, and I'm David Remnick.

Nothing about John Fetterman's journey to the Senate was at all routine. He was a small town Pennsylvania mayor with a shaved head and a goatee and the zip code for the town of Braddock tattooed on his arm. He has a penchant for cursing, sometimes loudly. And he won the Senate race against Mehmed Ozdev, Doctor Oz, a celebrity favorite of Donald Trump.

And through it all, he kept making waves, dressing in shorts and a hoodie on the Senate floor, an act which prompted a motion to require senators to dress more professionally.

Many Democrats saw Federman as a potential progressive beacon, a rust Belt Bernie Sanders, someone who could rally working class voters to the Democratic Party.

John Fetterman
I ran as a proud progressive. I was the only candidate in the entire country to endorse Bernie Sanders for president. I was the only candidate to be for the full legalization of marijuana. I led with immigration. My wife Gisele, who's in the audience, a former dreamer.

David Remnick
But at least on one issue, Federman is veering away from many of his colleagues in the party, and that is Israel's war in Gaza.

When a measure was introduced in the Senate officially supporting a two state solution.

Benjamin Wallace-Wells
Fetterman was one of the only two.

David Remnick
Democrats who refused to support it. Hes been not just sympathetic to Israels losses on October 7, but insistently uncritical of the Netanyahu government, even after losses in Gaza began numbering in the tens of thousands.

Now, Pennsylvania is a crucial state in the presidential race, and Fetterman's ability to rally Pennsylvania voters or not rally them may be hugely consequential for Joe Biden.

Benjamin Wallace-Wells
Who can ill afford to lose that state.

David Remnick
Staff writer Benjamin Wallace Wells has been reporting on Federman for a profile that we just published in the New Yorker.

Benjamin Wallace-Wells
Ben two years ago, while John Fetterman was running for Senate in the state of Pennsylvania, he had a stroke. And after he was elected, he checked himself into the hospital, suffering from really profound depression. As far as we know, whats been the impact of the stroke and the depression on his working life as a senator now?

Benjamin Wallace Wells
I mean, its pretty striking.

For one thing, the stroke and then the depression effectively took him out of circulation for the first half of his first year as a senator.

Additionally, he tends to keep a pretty light schedule. He doesnt get into Washington often until Tuesday.

He returns home at the end of the day Thursday.

He skips the Senate caucus lunch. And so just at a practical level, it sort of delayed his introduction to the normal social life of being a us senator and just the working life of being in DC.

But more obviously, on a day to day level, it changes almost every conversation he has. Everybody that he talks to, every conversation he engages in runs through a transcription app which prints out the words that other people are saying and that he is saying on his phone.

Benjamin Wallace-Wells
So he's looking at his phone while he's talking to somebody else, and then their words show up.

And I noticed when you were talking with him, unless you were using very measured sentences, he would get confused because the transcription would show up correctly.

Benjamin Wallace Wells
Yeah, exactly. It's nothing, nothing happening in his mind. It's just that the audio detection and transcription isn't perfect. And so complex sentences, things with caveats.

All of that kind of gets muddled or lost. And so you end up self editing. You end up asking very direct questions.

Benjamin Wallace-Wells
What does Federman say about his own health, particularly about his depression?

Benjamin Wallace Wells
Now, he says that he's through it effectively, and he is pretty transparent about how difficult it was, about feeling ambivalent about whether he lived or died.

He and his wife both talk about it in terms of self harm. It sounds like it was a pretty serious episode. I also would say he's pretty sick of talking about it at this point. And like, he'd like to put it.

Benjamin Wallace-Wells
In his past based on his work in local and state government. What was the general perception of Fetterman among Democrats when he first entered the Senate? Who was he going to be?

Benjamin Wallace Wells
I think the perception was he was going to be a progressive. He had been a pretty staunch supporter of Bernie Sanders first campaign in 2016.

He built his political brand around many of those issues. Weed legalization was a huge one for him, but also dollar 15 an hour minimum wage, also Medicare for all. He had sort of tapered some of that association. He pulled back a little bit from that in the campaign in which he won in 2022. But as lieutenant governor, he had been a huge champion of pardoning people with very long sentences and of criminal justice reform generally. So I think there was a pretty fair expectation that this would be, if not quite another Bernie, one of the most left leaning members of the US Senate.

Benjamin Wallace-Wells
And what happened?

Benjamin Wallace Wells
Well, October 7 is one way of thinking about it.

Most notably, most strikingly and most publicly, he followed the horrors of the October 7 attack by committing himself to the israeli cause in a way that just about no other Democrat and in many ways no other politician was, and that had some policy sort of arms. He was a very rare senator not to be willing to sign on to a resolution affirming a two state solution. But it also was just sort of, he's somebody who's very much a media presence, and he's very good at getting media attention. And he just was always aligning himself with the Israeli in a sort of maximalist way.

David Remnick
What are the roots of that?

Benjamin Wallace Wells
Well, there aren't many roots. I mean, the interesting thing about Fetterman on this issue is that he's not jewish. He had never been to the Middle east. He serves on no foreign policy committees. He had said he was pro Israeli in a kind of offhand way in a campaign context, but he'd never had to weigh in on this at all.

He did experience, he had one experience that some people think was important, which is that the tree of life shooting, the shooting at the synagogue in Pittsburgh that killed eleven worshippers, a crazed anti semite, that's a place very near to where his kids go to school.

He became close with the rabbi he suspended at the time, his lieutenant governor campaign to go. He commemorates the beat of it. So there is that. But beyond that, people on all sides of the Israel issue, looking back, have had a hard time finding much of any evidence that would point him in the direction he took. His account is that he was incredibly moved by the accounts of survivors, by the hostage families he met with, and that he also, and I think this is significant, had sort of an underlying feeling going back a couple of years that the democratic party should not be defined by its left wing and that its left wing was beginning to go too far. And so that, I think, becomes important in the context of the israeli Gaza war.

Benjamin Wallace-Wells
His sympathy for the hostages and the people killed on October 7 is more than understandable.

How has he reacted to Israels incursion and war on Gaza, in which estimates are at around 35,000 dead at this.

Benjamin Wallace Wells
Point, his top line is, I'm for no conditions.

He will not criticize the Netanyahu government.

He will downplay any human rights concerns about children or aid convoys or innocent people being struck, killed, disrupted. He says, I will recenter every conversation about Israel on Hamas and on October 7 and make clear that it is Hamas fault, what is happening. And so he has not just had an attachment to and a sympathy with the hostage families and the victims of the attacks, but his politics, his read of what is happening is really, you know, completely defined by that in a way that permits no conditions, as he.

David Remnick
Says, Ben, let's hear a bit of your conversation with him about this.

John Fetterman
They do those kinds of awful, terrible kinds of things, and they film that.

John Fetterman
Yeah.

John Fetterman
And what part of the human soul does that? Where does that come from? That does those kind of things. And with not just like a duty, but with actual glee. And like, they were just excited to be doing this.

John Fetterman
Yes.

John Fetterman
And it's like, oh, by the way, I'm about ready to go massacre, rape and torture a bunch of people, by the way, you know, like, where's the battery for the GoPro? You know, like, it's just twisted, you know, and that that's the kind of evil that it should not be allowed to, to survive, or at least not be functional.

Benjamin Wallace-Wells
Federman lives in a small town outside Pittsburgh called Braddock, and a group of pro palestinian protesters showed up to the house. What happened there, and how did Federman handle the encounter?

Benjamin Wallace Wells
It's pretty striking. So it's the middle of the winter. It's a time when the Senate is in recess.

His house is a former auto showroom in the middle of this sort of rundown little industrial town. So it's sort of the only prominent, striking building in the town. It's very visible. It also notably has a flat roof. And so the protesters get there and their plan is to read excerpts of palestinian narratives of the war. And there's about 250 of them.

They're getting set up and they notice this enormous figure up on the roof, and it's Fetterman, and he's six foot eight. He's got the build of the college football player. He once washing. It's evening, and he stands up on his roof and he spreads this enormous israeli flag. And everything's sort of silent for a minute. Then the protesters start chanting anti genocide chants. He's up there for two, maybe three minutes. He goes back inside.

David Remnick
Well, here's Fetterman and his wife Giselle.

Giselle Fetterman
I think that you shouldn't target homes, especially if there's children.

John Fetterman
Yeah.

Giselle Fetterman
Because essentially, with those two pieces, groups did is they doxed my children, who are under 18 and federal crime.

So I think. I think you can protest anywhere you'd like, but I think doxy children, there should be consequences for that.

John Fetterman
You can protest at a public office or anything.

John Fetterman
That's.

John Fetterman
But they chose to come out here, and I was up out on the roof listening to it, and then they started to get ugly and start yelling about Genesis side. And my ten year old was in here and saying things. And then I was just like, you know, just. I don't really know why it's anything other than just an appropriate.

I just showed the israeli flag.

I'm not sure why that would be provocative or anything.

Benjamin Wallace-Wells
Now, Ben draping himself in the flag, if you want to get rid of protesters.

I don't know. It sounds like waving a red flag at them somehow. Why did he do what he did?

Benjamin Wallace Wells
I think he wanted to make a stand. You know, I think that he knew that a video of him on top of a roof holding a huge israeli flag is something that will get photographed and shared. And he didn't want to be the guy who's pro Israel halfway if he was going to do it. He wanted everybody to know about it. I think there's also another element, which is that, you know, it is confrontational with the protesters. It does make it somewhat about them.

It calls attention to what they're doing, to maybe their, what he would say is excesses to their kind of crossing a line and coming to his home.

And I think he probably didn't want them to get away with it.

Benjamin Wallace-Wells
Well, let's hear a little bit more from Federman. And here he is talking about Hamas.

John Fetterman
I do think it's a fact that when you have that kind of an evil and that kind of a movement that came out of a society, whether it was Nazi Germany or imperial Japan or the Confederacy here in the south, that kind of movement has to be destroyed into submission.

And that society that gave birth to it has to now reach to a point where I have to turn our back to that kinds of views and that kinds of pursuit. And now both Japan and Germany were pacifist nations and the confederacy surrendered. And that's why Atlanta had to burn.

Benjamin Wallace-Wells
That's why Atlanta had to burn.

What does that mean to him? That that's why Gaza has to burn?

Benjamin Wallace Wells
That's certainly how I took it. That seemed to me pretty clearly his implication. What he was saying was it's not just the political or terroristic leadership of Hamas that needs to be ended in this war. It's the underlying, what he says society that supports it that has to have its opinions changed by force.

That's to me a pretty eyebrow raising, striking and very extreme construction of what Israel must do in a sort of defense of the war. It's not just saying, you know, we're at war with Hamas, with the leadership of this militant organization. It's saying we're at war with the people of Gaza.

Benjamin Wallace-Wells
What's complicated to understand about that is that in the Democratic Party, even Chuck Schumer, who's the Senate majority leader and who himself is jewish, and he comes from a congressional district, when he was in the House, that was heavily jewish and has never been a leftist outlier on this issue, has turned very, very critical of Netanyahu and his conduct of the war. So to hear this from John Fetterman, who came into the Senate as a progressive, as somebody who identified on the left, is, to my mind, surprising.

Benjamin Wallace Wells
Absolutely not only somebody who came into the Senate as a progressive and was identified as on the left, but, you know, came in just a year and a half ago and is not somebody who has been embedded in this issue.

For him to be moving past Chuck Schumer and past many centrist Democrats, many pro Israel Democrats, is unexpected in every way.

Benjamin Wallace-Wells
Has he been critical of President Biden on this issue?

Benjamin Wallace Wells
A little bit. When President Biden sought to pause arms shipments to Israel over the Rafa operation, he was a very, very rare Democrat who stepped out and said, no, I think that's a bad idea. The arms shipments should continue. This is in keeping with this sort of no conditions view. But in general, I would say he is eager to say not only that he is aligned with President Biden generally, but that what he is doing is in service of President Biden's reelection, that in order for the Democrats to remain viable in places like Pennsylvania, in order for Biden to win this election, he's got to keep from having the party become hostage to the left effectively.

Benjamin Wallace-Wells
Famously, we've got six swing states. Pennsylvania is crucial. If Biden doesn't win Pennsylvania, it's really trouble.

What role does Federman play there?

Benjamin Wallace Wells
I think six months ago, both I and the Federman people would have said a really big role. Federman in his own campaigns, was pretty crucial at helping the Democrats reach white voters, often without college degrees in rural parts of the state. The exact kind of people who are swinging either away from the party or even more towards Trump now. You know, it's complicated. When I was there, it was pride, and he wasn't able to go to Pittsburgh Pride or even Gettysburg Pride, which was their backup plan, because they were worried about there being too many protesters. And so, you know, even his presence in a kind of mundane way now stirs up all this conversation about the antipathy of the left towards the Biden administration on Israel. But the Biden campaign also, that I think the Biden campaign would really prefer not to have be part of the story. So I don't know, I could see a situation in which he's a real asset to the Biden campaign, and I think he does really believe in Biden.

But I could also see a situation in which it just becomes so complicated and so self negating that everybody involved says maybe this is not a great decision. Maybe we're better off not dealing with this. And he takes a pretty small role. We'll see.

David Remnick
And what would that mean if he takes just a small role? In other words, how influential is he in Pennsylvania if he's not a strong surrogate for Biden there? Do you see that affecting the outcome of the election?

John Fetterman
There is something that is interesting here just in that the promise that he once had was exactly that he would play this role in this coming election and now it seems thats a little less likely to be the case.

Benjamin Wallace Wells
Things are pretty entrenched.

John Fetterman
Biden and Trump have their fans and people who hate them. And as interesting as Fetterman is, I dont know that he has the power.

Benjamin Wallace Wells
Or the profile to change that basic line of scrimmage.

Benjamin Wallace-Wells
Thanks, Ben.

David Remnick
Good to talk with you.

Benjamin Wallace Wells
Thank you.

David Remnick
You can read John Fetterman's war by Benjamin Wallace wells@newyorker.com. dot from prxheendez.