Opinion | Kamala Harris Can’t Escape Gaza Any More Than Joe Biden Can

The last time Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel spoke to a joint meeting of Congress was in 2015, at the invitation of the House speaker, John Boehner, and the Senate majority leader, Mitch McConnell, when they led the Republican Party in Congress. It was meant, explicitly, to undermine the Obama administration’s effort to reach a deal with Iran limiting Tehran’s nuclear program in exchange for relief from American and international sanctions.

Democrats were outraged by the spectacle of congressional Republicans working with a foreign government to subvert the president’s foreign policy. Nearly 60 Democrats, including Vice President Joe Biden, skipped the speech. Nancy Pelosi, the House minority leader, called it “an insult to the intelligence of the United States.”

Last week, Netanyahu was back before Congress for the first time since then. It was a bipartisan invitation, organized by Mike Johnson, the House speaker, a Republican, and agreed to by Chuck Schumer, the Senate majority leader and a Democrat.

“President Biden and I have known each other for over 40 years,” the prime minister said. “I want to thank him for half a century of friendship to Israel and for being, as he says, a proud Zionist.” Netanyahu called on Congress to fast-track military aid. “Give us the tools faster, and we’ll finish the job faster.”

If you were to look out at the House chamber during the speech, you would have seen that around 130 House and Senate Democrats were missing — more than twice as many as who skipped in 2015. And the issue was less partisan than it was moral and ethical: the catastrophic impact of the Gaza war on Palestinian civilians.

Health officials in Gaza say that Israel’s war has killed more than 39,000 people, mostly civilians, and driven a large part of the strip’s 2.3 million residents from their homes. Most of the enclave lies in ruins. Just this weekend, an Israeli airstrike hit a girls’ school sheltering thousands of displaced people in central Gaza, killing at least 30.