Friday, July 17, 2026

Adam Smith seems to have caved to anti-Israel pressure - and calls it principled

Rep. Adam Smith (D-Wash.) explained his vote this week to support Massie Amendment #8, cutting $3.3 billion in military assistance to Israel. His reasoning is where it gets interesting.

He opens as a genuine supporter of Israel — not the coded kind. "I am a supporter of Israel, and I recognize they are under profound existential threat. We should not forget October 7th or the reality that Hamas, Hezbollah, and Iran want to eliminate Israel." He names, without euphemism, what's been done to him for holding that view: his home vandalized, a fire set in his driveway, his neighbors' nights disrupted by demonstrations, his town halls shut down, a staff member physically assaulted. He calls this "a dangerous form of corrosive politics that seeks to intimidate those who disagree."

Then, in the next paragraph, he votes to cut the aid anyway, framing it as "my effort" to "get the attention of the Netanyahu government to force them to change their actions" — as though the vote were his own independent judgment rather a response to the arson and harassment.

Let's pretend that the intimidation campaign did not sway him and take him at his word. Smith's theory is that cutting aid will push Netanyahu to change course — specifically, it seems, to rein in or remove Bezalel Smotrich and Itamar Ben Gvir, the ministers Smith names that "appalled" him. But Smotrich and Ben Gvir aren't obstacles standing between Netanyahu and a policy he'd otherwise prefer. They're the coalition. Netanyahu's government exists because their parties are in it; without them, there's no majority and no government. Weakening Netanyahu doesn't give him more room to break with his coalition partners, it gives him less — a prime minister facing external pressure can survive it by holding his coalition together even tighter, and cannot survive it by shedding the votes that keep him in office. A vote meant to pressure Netanyahu into abandoning Smotrich and Ben Gvir is a vote for the one outcome that vote cannot produce.

If his stated reasons make no sense in real life, it suggests the theory was constructed after the vote, not before it. Smith doesn't explain, because there's no available explanation, how cutting American military assistance forces a change in Israeli cabinet composition rather than simply making the current one more entrenched. What he does offer, clearly and in his own words, is an account of two years of frustration and, immediately preceding the vote, a documented campaign of vandalism, arson, and assault against him and his staff. The more parsimonious reading of the statement isn't that Smith found a clever lever. It's that he capitulated to the pressure and then wrote himself a policy rationale to stand in front of it.

That rationale leans on a distinction that's become the standard exit for Democrats in this position — "I don't oppose Israel, I oppose Netanyahu" — and a piece published the same day supplies the test for when that distinction is actually honest. Daniel Pomerantz's framing is simple and hard to argue with: "Imagine saying, 'I don't oppose America, I just oppose FDR for fighting Hitler.'" Fighting Hitler wasn't an idiosyncratic FDR preference other Americans might reasonably have opposed on the merits — it was the thing nearly the entire country wanted, which means opposing it wasn't opposition to one president's judgment call, it was opposition to America's actual position. The test he proposes is whether the specific policy under attack is something genuinely contested inside Israeli politics, in which case criticizing "Netanyahu" over it is honest, or whether it's something with real Israeli consensus behind it, in which case the Netanyahu framing is doing cover work for a broader objection.

Military assistance used against Hamas, Hezbollah, and Iran fails that test cleanly. It isn't a Netanyahu idiosyncrasy Israelis are internally split over judicial reform, Haredi enlistment, or his personal culpability for October 7th's failures. It's close to the one thing nearly all Israelis, across the political map, actually agree on: that the threats named in Smith's own opening sentence are real and have to be met. A vote to cut the funding used to meet them isn't a vote against Netanyahu's discretionary choices. By Smith's own stated premise about the threat, it's a vote against the position Israel holds as something close to a whole country, dressed in language aimed at one man because that's the version of the vote that's easier to defend to constituents and easier, perhaps, to live with.

None of this requires assuming Smith is lying about his frustrations with the current Israeli government, which read as genuine and are shared by plenty of Israelis themselves. It requires only noticing that the vote he took doesn't reach the target he named, reaches instead a policy nearly the whole country supports, and followed months of arson and assault rather than preceding them. A statement that opens by naming intimidation as dangerous and corrosive, and closes by doing what the intimidation demanded, isn't an account of independent judgment. It's a record of what the pressure achieved, written in the voice of someone who would rather not describe it that way.

Buy EoZ's books on Amazon!