Merkley and Van Hollen call for recognition of a Palestinian State. Photo: Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images The war in Gaza has done a lot of visible damage to the Democratic Party’s once-unconditional support for Israel. For a while, Joe Biden held back the tide of Democratic anger against Israel’s conduct of the war via a combination of support for its right to self-defense in the wake of Hamas’s deadly October 7 attacks and increasingly vocalizing (if not all that effective) calls on Israel to