A House vote makes it clear: Israel’s support among Democrats is starting to buckle

More than 100 Democrats voted to cut military aid to Israel as US public opinion shifts – Republicans are noticing too Somewhere in the days before Wednesday’s vote, Hakeem Jeffries, the House minority leader, sat down and wrote his caucus a letter urging Democrats to reject an amendment that would strip security assistance to Israel. For most of his tenure as Democratic leader, that kind of internal whipping operation would have been unnecessary, because the outcome would have been assumed. His own second-in-command voted the other way anyway. Katherine Clark, the House minority whip, broke publicly with the position Jeffries had spent days defending. The significance isn’t that one senior Democrat defected, but instead that the party’s chief consensus builder, and more than 100 other Democrats, broke ranks on one of Washington’s (and America’s) most defining and confounding policy questions, and one that exposes a caucus divide that can no longer be managed behind closed doors. The amendment itself, offered by the Kentucky Republican Thomas Massie who just lost his re-election bid after a flood of pro-Israel lobby support boosted his rival, would have eliminated $3.3b