What friends of Israel and the Palestinians should be demanding now

For some, it might seem easy to dismiss such condemnation as noise from predictably anti-Israeli corners of the United Nations, US college campuses, and the progressive wing of the Democratic Party. But that would be a mistake.

Polls indicate that support for Israel in the United States, its oldest and most important ally, has been declining since the Israel-Hamas war began. Yes, that decline is led by growing disillusionment among Americans under 30, a third of whom now say they sympathize more with Palestinians than Israelis. But a Gallup poll earlier this year also found a steep decline in support for Israel among independent voters. Another Gallup poll a few weeks later found that a substantial majority of Americans disapproved of Israel’s military operations in Gaza. And though support for Israel’s Gaza invasion has dropped the most among Democrats and independents, it has declined among Republicans as well.

On Friday, President Biden took a step in the right direction by calling for a permanent cease-fire and endorsing a three-step Israeli plan that would exchange the hostages held by Hamas for Palestinian prisoners in Israel’s custody. “It’s time for this war to end, for the day after to begin,” Biden said in publicly outlining the Israeli plan for the first time. Though the plan does not deal with governance and reconstruction of post-war Gaza, this page believes both sides should move urgently to implement it as a vital first step.

Already, though, the pushback against it is underway. Over the weekend, Netanyahu, under pressure from archconservatives in his Cabinet, seemed to back away from his government’s own proposal. At the same time, while Hamas said positive things about the plan last week, it has also rejected versions of it in the past. Welcome to the world of Middle East peace talks.

In the United States, critics of the president are likely to assert that in pushing for a permanent cease-fire before the Rafah offensive — which Israel says is essential to dismantle Hamas — is complete, Biden is caving to his party’s progressive wing. But the left isn’t alone in pushing for peace. Consider the words of a devoted supporter of Israel, Senate majority leader Chuck Schumer, the most powerful Jewish elected official in American history.

In a deeply personal speech in March that seems to have been largely forgotten, Schumer, a Democrat from New York, said his love of Israel could not prevent him from stating “the plain truth”: that “Palestinian civilians do not deserve to suffer for the sins of Hamas, and Israel has a moral obligation to do better. The United States has an obligation to do better.”

Schumer then outlined a path to long-term peace, with the ultimate goal of establishing two independent states, side-by-side: one Jewish and one Palestinian. To get there, he cited four main obstacles: Hamas, with its ruthless stranglehold over Gaza; Mahmoud Abbas, the aged and widely discredited leader of the Palestinian Authority in the West Bank; the “radical” right-wing faction leading the current Israeli government; and Netanyahu himself, whom Schumer said “has lost his way by allowing his political survival to take precedence over the best interests of Israel.” Perhaps most controversially, Schumer called for new elections that he said could hopefully replace Netanyahu.

This editorial board, which has called on Netanyahu to step down, endorses the broad strokes of Schumer’s speech. He is right that Israel, under the leadership of Netanyahu’s right-wing government, is not just angering its traditional critics but also alienating some of its long-time supporters, turning itself into “a pariah opposed by the rest of the world,” as Schumer put it.

And he is correct in calling for Palestinians to reject their most militant, violent, and corrupt leaders, starting with Hamas. Though it retains some legitimacy in Gaza, Hamas has not just terrorized Israel with its attacks on citizens; it has ruled Gaza with an iron fist as well. It has also hoarded fuel and food that might have reduced the suffering of civilians. And it has all but dared Israel to attack civilian targets by hiding bunkers, weapons, and rocket launchers near schools and hospitals.

To be sure, history has proven over and over again that there is only so much the US government can do to bring peace to the Middle East. But it can surely do more than it is doing now, as Schumer suggested. In this effort, there is also a role for Americans who care about lasting peace in the region, including Jewish and Palestinian Americans.

Both sides may understandably feel it is not their role to try to influence events in the Middle East, nor to explain or defend the actions of Jewish or Palestinian leaders there. But it may be too late for such demurrals. American campuses have been roiled for months by pro-Palestinian protests. American tax dollars are paying for weapons that Israel is using to kill Palestinians. The Democratic Party is being riven by differences over the war on the eve of a hugely consequential presidential election. And the Republican Party is doing its partisan best to drive that wedge deeper. The conflict has indeed reached American soil.

It would be reasonable, then, for Jewish and Palestinian Americans to find common ground and take a stand for lasting peace, real peace, achieved through a cessation of military operations, the return of Israeli hostages, a meaningful plan for post-war Gaza, and the commencement of negotiations toward two states.

It would also be reasonable for Jews who care about Israel’s future to call for new elections. And it would be equally reasonable for Palestinian Americans who long for an independent state to condemn Hamas, call for Hamas leaders to return all of the hostages, and push for new leadership in the West Bank and Gaza.

“It is true that the work must be done over there,” said Edward Djerejian, a former US ambassador to Israel who is a senior fellow at the Harvard Kennedy School’s Belfer Center. “But the diaspora have influence greater than they realize. They can push for new elections in Israel, and for a new leadership for the Palestinians. And they can push the US to play the role it has played in the past, forcefully pressing for a two-state solution.”

Before his death in 2018, the Israeli writer Amos Oz was a leading proponent of creating an independent Palestinian state that could coexist peacefully alongside Israel. He criticized both sides but acknowledged the truth of their claims, too. He understood that winning peace was always hard — harder than fighting wars. But he reminded us over and over again that difficulty was not a reason to give up.

“The conflict between Israel and Palestine is, I have always insisted, a tragic collision between right and right, between two very convincing claims,” Oz said in a 1992 speech collected in his book, “Israel, Palestine and Peace: Essays.” “Such a tragedy can either be resolved by total destruction of one of the parties (or both of them), or else it can be resolved through a sad, painful, inconsistent compromise in which everyone gets only some of what they want, so that nobody is entirely happy but everyone stops dying and starts living.”

In other words: We can allow the finger-pointing and circular debates over moral equivalence to continue endlessly or we can demand compromise so that the dying can stop and the living can begin. There is a choice.

Editorials represent the views of the Boston Globe Editorial Board. Follow us @GlobeOpinion.