When he was running for Senate last year in Pennsylvania, there were plenty of things for the Left to like about Democrat John Fetterman. He was the only statewide candidate who’d endorsed Bernie Sanders back in 2016, he seemed to care a lot about organized labor, and he combined solidly progressive stances on social issues with a refreshingly populist style of political communication.

In 2022, he’d already started to get worryingly vague about such basic points of a Bernie-derived policy platform as Medicare for All. But in the context of his race against the clownish right-wing Republican Mehmet Oz, aka “Dr Oz,” it was easy to ignore that part. Watching Fetterman and his team rhetorically grind Oz into the dust was too much fun for many left commentators (myself included) to give him as hard a time as we should have about his political shortcomings.

To any progressive paying close attention, though, a fly in the ointment too big to ignore was that Fetterman’s position was awful on Israel/Palestine. As I noted at the time, “When it comes to Palestine, Fetterman might as well be Dr Oz.” He was on record back in April against imposing any new conditions on US aid to Israel — a country that rules over millions of people permanently denied Israeli citizenship or basic rights like access to regular civilian courts when they’re accused of crimes, and which even last April was keeping well over two million Palestinians locked in the twenty-five-mile-long open-air prison camp that is the Gaza Strip.