What’s Going On With John Fetterman’s Surprising View on Israel?

For most Americans outside Pennsylvania, John Fetterman entered the general consciousness as a relentless shitposter. Yes, he was running for Senate, in one of the closest races of the 2022 midterms (which he won). But mostly we remember that while he was recovering from a stroke and out of the public eye during the early stages of his campaign, Fetterman broadcast his endorsement of a huge catalog of lefty precepts—a livable minimum wage, a humane health care system, college debt forgiveness—through the language of scurrilous, spiky memes.

Fetterman also broke through to national stardom because he wasn’t afraid to engage in a little ad hominem. True, his opponent, Dr. Mehmet Oz, made for an easy target. But Fetterman’s one-of-a-kind silhouette—a heavily tattooed, very tall Steelers fan who seemed to constantly be dressed in basketball shorts no matter the weather—made him a proxy for so many distempered progressives who felt they were nowhere near the levers of power. He made it easy to believe that he was on the same side as them.

Since he’s been elected, Fetterman has kept that reputation intact. We’ve come to understand him as a man who lives by his morals, sporting an impressive record on some of the more tenuous wedge issues on the Democratic docket—including cannabis legalization, the steadfast support of labor unions, the defense of trans rights, and a blasé attitude toward dress codes. In his personal life, Fetterman has been transparent about his mental health struggles since his stroke (depression being a common side effect of stroke recovery) and relentless in his ribbing of fellow Democrat Bob Menendez—you know, the guy with the gold bars—whenever he sees him around Congress.

But lately, something has been happening on that Twitter feed in particular that has left many of his biggest boosters, and even a group of his former employees, confused.

In the wake of one of the most horrific flare-ups of violence in the Middle East in decades, Fetterman has cemented himself as a Zionist hard-liner, with rhetoric that is downright hawkish compared with his fellow progressives in office. Here he is, in the midst of a Twitter thread—a platform where he once courted a nationwide fandom of leftists—taking a few potshots at the colleagues on his side of the aisle:

His position has confounded supporters, many of whom believed that Fetterman’s adjacency to other notable Israel critics in Congress—like his longtime ally Bernie Sanders—meant that he too was skeptical of the status quo in the region. But the more you zoom out, the more it becomes clear that Fetterman’s views on Israel have been no secret since his run to Capitol Hill; they just haven’t been in the spotlight until now.

After all, during his Senate race, Fetterman affirmed his support of U.S. military facilitation in Israel “without any additional conditions” to Jewish Insider. Pressed further, Fetterman distanced himself from those in Congress who are more-full-throated critics of the country’s international affairs—the same ones who are currently calling for a cease-fire.

“I would also respectfully say that I’m not really a progressive in that sense,” he said in April 2022. “There is no daylight between myself and these kinds of unwavering commitments to Israel’s security.”

Going back further, to when Fetterman was running against centrist candidate Conor Lamb in the primary, the Intercept reported that the future senator allowed the Democratic Majority for Israel—a PAC formed in 2019 as a direct response to percolating anti-Israel sentiment in leftward corners of American politics—to make edits on his Israel-Palestine position paper. The reasoning, reportedly, was to prevent both DMFI and the American Israel Public Affairs Committee from wreathing Lamb with funding. Neither group ended up spending money on the race, which likely helped Fetterman. (For what it’s worth, Fetterman did eventually take $174,221 from the relative pro-Israel moderates at J Street Pac in his race against Oz.)

All of this is coming home to roost, with Fetterman appearing far more in league with the likes of Marco Rubio than Sanders. Sure, he defanged Dr. Oz as a juiceless phony—someone who didn’t even live in Pennsylvania—while letting his reputation as a progressive from a blue-collar steel town do the rest of the talking. But the contingency that backed Fetterman is learning that funny tweets don’t translate into assumed campaign promises.

Now Fetterman must answer to the many idealists who saw some version of themselves in him. To wit, last Friday, 16 former staffers who’d worked on the Fetterman campaign penned a letter urging him to change his tune and join his allies in calling for a cease-fire.

“These are not the values we believed you to hold,” they wrote. “You can’t be a champion of forgotten communities if you cheerlead this war and the consequent destruction of Palestinian communities at home and abroad. We are speaking out now because we played important roles in electing you. We cannot in good conscience stay silent at this moment.”

It’s easy to sympathize with their confusion. Fetterman’s Israel position might have been a matter of public record, but everything else about his rise was unconventional, and for some, that makes it downright disorienting to watch him fall in line with decades of orthodox thinking. One of the long-standing conspiracies in the QAnon flank of the Republican party is that Fetterman was replaced by the deep state with a body double during his mental-health-related leave of absence after the election. Right now his fans on the left are contemplating the same question.

Further, this is a moment in American history where, for the first time since World War II, questioning the internal policies of Israel does not condemn one to the political Arctic. Since Hamas launched its attack on Israel 18 days ago, anti-war protests have rocked the United States, causing many agitators on the left to call for an immediate deescalation in the region. (Some of the prominent names involved are Reps. Cori Bush, Jim McGovern, and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.) Together, they’ve provided ample cover for other legislators to join the chorus. I mean, heck—even Joe Biden and Barack Obama have softened their rhetoric since the first days of the war.

Fetterman himself has yet to comment further on the war, but last week he did join 34 other senators in a call for humanitarian aid in Gaza. “We can’t allow Hamas’s barbarism to rob us of our humanity,” he tweeted. It appeared to be an olive branch to some of his most ardent supporters, but those fences won’t be mended easily. Because Fetterman was never the prince that was promised. No one ever is. He’s dealing with all the usual careerist pitfalls that tend to deflate progressive momentum: He represents an increasingly purple state; he is crucially aware of the supreme power wielded by the Israel lobbying machine; he is no longer, and never will be again, an outsider to the world of federal legislation. That is a very old story in Washington.