Amy Klobuchar, the senior senator from Minnesota, appeared last month in a photograph with Benjamin Netanyahu. Wearing a tight-lipped smile alongside a bipartisan group of senators, she hardly seemed thrilled to be there. But there she was, posing with a man who is wanted for war crimes by the International Criminal Court and has been credibly accused of committing genocide in the Gaza Strip.

The picture, snapped as alarm was growing over looming famine in Gaza and Israel pursued its pitiless military assault on the enclave, struck me as a maddening but apt illustration of the yawning gulf between the steadfast pro-Israel stance of leading Democratic politicians and their voters. It was, sadly, par for the grisly course.

Then last week Klobuchar did something that genuinely surprised me: She voted in favor of a pair of resolutions put forward by Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., a leading critic of Israel’s prosecution of the war, that would block the transfer of key offensive weapons to Israel, including 1,000-pound bombs and automatic assault rifles.

She was joined in one of the votes by 24 other Democrats and two independents, a majority of the Democratic caucus. Many were seeking to block weapons for Israel for the first time. And not just any Democrats. The ranking members of crucial committees — Foreign Relations, Appropriations and Armed Services — voted to block the transfers as well. A number of notable moderates joined the vote, including one of the most vulnerable in the 2026 midterms, Georgia’s Jon Ossoff.

Predictably, like all the other measures to limit Israel’s war-making with American weapons Sanders has tried to bring to the floor of the Senate, the resolutions failed. The entire Republican caucus, joined by the rest of the voting Democrats, voted them down.

A Signal Dems Are Changing Position on Israel

It may sound strange to find hope in a failed vote, especially given the dire situation in Gaza. And yet I do. Klobuchar’s vote in particular seemed a meaningful change from a powerful and canny operator who is among the most ambitious of her generation of Democratic politicians. It was a signal, belated but significant, that the Democrats are finally shifting their position on Israel.

Klobuchar ran for the party’s presidential nomination in 2020, mounting an impressive if ultimately unsuccessful campaign that channeled her image as a flinty Midwestern moderate. She is now the third-ranking member of her caucus and is a top contender to replace Chuck Schumer, the unpopular and aging leader of Senate Democrats. She may well run for president again in 2028. She is, in short, a bellwether of elite Democratic politics.

I asked Klobuchar how she squared her meeting with Netanyahu last month with her vote against weapons last week.

“I attended so I could make the case for more humanitarian aid and to stop the displacement of Palestinians,” she said in a statement. “I did that but I did not get a good answer. I’ve supported military assistance to Israel in the past, and I have made it clear that I believe Israel has a right to defend itself. But I believe at this moment in time it’s crucial that the Israeli government must do more to alleviate the urgent humanitarian crisis.”

That is not exactly a rousing condemnation of Israel’s conduct in the war. But her vote was nonetheless a crucial step by a Democratic leader toward the views of the party’s base, which is deeply frustrated by the feckless response to the Trump administration and angry at the failure to stop the slaughter in Gaza. A Gallup poll published last week found that just 8% of Democrats support Israel’s military action in Gaza, a new low.

Democrats’ sympathy with Israel has been falling for about a decade. But in the past year, despite the broad outpouring of support in 2023 after the Hamas attack on Israel on Oct. 7, it has plummeted. It is not hard to see why. The United States has sent billions of dollars’ worth of weapons to Israel, which have been used to wage a relentless war of total destruction, killing more than 60,000 people, including at least 18,000 children, according to Gaza health officials.

American Taxpayers Help Reduce Gaza to Rubble

American weapons, paid for with American tax dollars, have helped Israel transform much of Gaza — its homes, hospitals and schools — into rubble. With Israel limiting aid to Gaza, its 2 million people now face starvation. Watching this horror unfold, many Americans have turned away from Israel.

Their leaders seem to be in denial about this. Klobuchar was not the only prominent Democrat in that photo with Netanyahu; six others joined her, including Schumer, who declared earlier this year that he sees it as his job “to keep the left pro-Israel.” The rest were, like Klobuchar and Schumer, almost entirely from reliably blue states — Delaware, New Jersey, Washington and California.

Starvation is a lagging indicator, a catastrophic result of disastrous decisions made long before the first hints of hunger. In war, it is at best a result of heedless indifference. At worst, it is evidence of the gravest of crimes. Raphael Lemkin, the Polish lawyer who coined the term “genocide,” was preoccupied with the use of deliberate starvation as a weapon of war, in one early essay quoting a Nazi field marshal who described it as “better than machine guns.” Most of all, starvation is almost never a surprise.

In Gaza, where plenty of food, water, fuel and medicine sits just beyond its borders, scores have died of hunger, a slow, gruesome process endured by people living in the most desperate circumstances imaginable. A “worst-case scenario of famine is currently playing out,” the IPC, a global group that tracks hunger, said in its latest assessment. Some 20,000 children have been admitted to health centers for acute malnourishment.

Crisis Is Worsening

But these conditions were created. From the earliest days of the war, it has seemed impossible to overstate its chaos and violence and the brutal toll it has taken on civilians. Almost all of Gaza’s 2 million people have had to flee their homes at least once since the war began. The crisis continues to deepen: According to the United Nations, 762,500 people have been displaced since the end of the ceasefire in March. Gaza’s people have been packed into narrow slivers of the tiny territory. Even if they are eventually allowed to leave those areas, few will find their homes intact: Since March, Israel has been demolishing thousands of buildings across Gaza, according to a visual investigation by the BBC.

Starvation has a peculiar hold on the human conscience. Every person knows, in some small way, what it is to feel hunger with no means to satisfy it. It requires little imagination to extend that sensation, to imagine it afflicting the people you love. It compels you ask how that hunger came to be, what steps were required and who took them — and what might be needed to stop it.

Votes by Klobuchar and other moderates in favor of a doomed effort to block a fraction of the billions of taxpayer dollars that finance weapons for Israel, after years of supporting its increasingly ethnonationalist government, are unlikely to rate as senatorial profiles in courage. But they are a sign that at least some American leaders are beginning to ask these questions. Elite opinion, too, is a lagging indicator, often trailing behind conscience and political necessity by months or even years. Sometimes, though, it can catch up.

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.

By Lydia Polgreen

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