Two recent speeches in Congress, the first in the Senate, the second in the House, show the speed with which the Washington conversation has moved on Israel-Palestine, and the considerable distance that President Biden still has to go to catch up.

The first was from Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, who delivered a heartfelt and courageous speech on March 15 criticizing Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s conduct of the war and calling for new Israeli elections that he hoped would replace Netanyahu and his extremist coalition with more responsible leadership. Quite notably, especially for such a pro-Israel stalwart like Schumer, by suggesting that the U.S. might have to “play a more active role in shaping Israeli policy by using our leverage,” the speech further opened the door to conditioning U.S. aid to Israel, a steadily crumbling taboo in many Democratic circles.

A week later, another New York Democrat gave a different but also courageous speech on the floor of the House. Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez warned of the “unfolding genocide” caused by the Israeli military’s relentless, indiscriminate bombing of Gaza and its continued restricting of humanitarian aid. Citing President Biden’s own past words about the importance of acting against atrocities before it’s too late, she called on him to uphold U.S. law and suspend military aid to Israel in the face of a looming famine and mass starvation in Gaza.

The two speeches illustrated not only the range of views in today’s Democratic Party, but the remarkable extent to which the window has shifted. Schumer’s speech was in some ways a wistful throwback to a liberal Zionist vision of the past. Ocasio-Cortez’s confronted the hard-line Greater Israel reality of the present. Much of what Schumer said would have been unthinkably radical on the floor of the Senate 10 years ago. Today it represents the rightward edge of the party.

Still, one element of Schumer’s speech is worth raising here, not only for what it said but for what he left out. “Right now, there are four major obstacles standing in the way of two states, and until they are removed from the equation, there will never be peace in Israel and Gaza and the West Bank,” Schumer said. “Those four major obstacles are: Hamas, and the Palestinians........

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