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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 tattooed on his arm—could rally working-class white voters to the Democratic Party. But Fetterman is veering away from the left of his party, and even from centrists like Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, on at least one issue: 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 dividing Pennsylvania voters, who will be critical to the outcome of the Presidential election.
“John Fetterman’s War” was published in the July 1, 2024, issue.
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