The Seats That Were Empty

When Benjamin Netanyahu addressed a joint meeting of Congress in July 2024, he set a record. It was his fourth such speech, one more than Winston Churchill. He also set a less welcome record. J Street counted 68 Democrats and one Republican who stayed away, up from the 58 Democrats who boycotted his speech in 2015. Their seats did not stay empty. Staff and guests filled them, and many remained seated while the Republican side of the chamber rose to applaud.

On 3 November, American voters filled those seats with something more durable. Democrats won both chambers of Congress, with at least 254 House seats and 54 in the Senate as counting continues. When the new Congress sits in January, the members who once boycotted that speech will no longer be a protest on the margins of the chamber. They will be part of the majority that runs it.

For Israel, the result could hardly come at a worse time: a caretaker government with no majority, facing a Washington where the President has just declared its aid finished. It also comes with a verdict attached. Vice President JD Vance wrote that “the reason we lost is the war”, and listed a change in America’s “relationship to Israel” among the steps needed to win voters back. Donald Trump called his assessment “largely true”. It is one thing for a rival party to campaign against Israel. It is quite another when the leaders of Israel’s closest political ally tell their own voters that the alliance has become a liability.

Then there is the money. On the morning of the vote, Trump told Fox News that the roughly $4 billion a year Israel receives “gets cut off at the end of the year”, under a deal he said he had made with Netanyahu. Netanyahu has spoken of weaning Israel off American aid over a decade, not a few weeks. The current agreement runs until 2028, and the Institute for National Security Studies has noted that nothing is yet in place to replace it. Whatever happens next, any future assistance now passes through a Congress controlled by the party that made aid a campaign issue.

That party has been moving for some time. In July, nearly half of House Democrats voted for an amendment to cut off aid to Israel. A Pew survey in March found that 80 per cent of Democrats held a negative view of Israel, up from 53 per cent in 2022. Senator Chris Van Hollen, who has led efforts to attach conditions to aid, summed up the new mood: “There should not be an Israel exception.”

It would be easy to read all this as the end of the American relationship. That would be a mistake. Trump still holds the veto, and Democrats are well short of the two thirds needed to override it. INSS estimates that roughly a third of congressional Democrats remain firmly supportive of Israel and could join Republicans to block hostile bills. What changes is not policy overnight but the terms of debate: hearings, conditions on arms sales, sanctions on violent settlers, and a successor to the memorandum that now faces a hard road.

Israel’s own politics make all of this harder. The 27 October election left Netanyahu’s bloc with 53 seats and Gadi Eisenkot’s with 48, neither able to govern alone, and Arab parties holding 19. Netanyahu remains caretaker while President Isaac Herzog consults party leaders. Yair Lapid said the American result showed that Israel “cannot afford” for Netanyahu to stay. Yair Golan said it showed that Netanyahu had lost favour with both American parties.

Israel has been here before. In June 1972, its ambassador in Washington gave an interview to Israeli radio that many read as favouring Richard Nixon over George McGovern. The Washington Post called him an “undiplomatic diplomat”. The ambassador insisted he had been misquoted and spent the following months reaffirming Israel’s neutrality. His name was Yitzhak Rabin. Two decades later, as prime minister, he built one of the closest partnerships Israel has ever had with an American president, the Democrat Bill Clinton.

Rabin appears to have taken the lesson to heart. Support from both parties was never a sentimental doctrine. It rested on the plain fact that American politics swings, and that a small country cannot afford to be tied to one side of the swing. The speech of 2015, delivered at the invitation of a Republican Congress against the wishes of a Democratic president, was widely seen in Washington as a break with that doctrine. The midterms are a reminder of what that break can cost.

That cost can still be contained. INSS argues that a new Israeli government could shift the debate by acting quickly on the issues that worry Democrats most: settler violence, new construction in the West Bank, and the plan for Gaza. Senator Chris Coons, who takes over the Senate Foreign Relations Committee in January, has welcomed what he called the “courageous choices” of Israeli opposition leaders. That is a door left open, not a door slammed shut. It will not stay open forever.

In January the House chamber will fill again. The seats the boycotters left in 2015 and 2024 will belong to members who set the agenda, chair the committees and write the budget. Whoever next speaks for Israel in that room will not be addressing a friendly half of the chamber and a hostile one. They will be addressing the majority. They would do well to remember the ambassador of 1972, and how costly it can be to be seen taking sides.

The seats are no longer empty. That is the problem. It is also the opportunity.