In the immediate aftermath of Hamas’s creatively depraved, multiaxial attack in southern Israel, in which over 1,400 Israelis were butchered, more than 5,000 more were wounded, and another 200-plus were taken hostage by the terrorist group, President Joe Biden said and did all the right things. We praised him for recognizing the stakes of the war Hamas inaugurated and for refusing to entertain baseless moral equivalencies between the slaughtered and their slaughterers. But we also forecast a time in the near future when Biden’s resolve would be put to the test, and he is already faltering — all of two weeks later.

At a Democratic fundraiser in Minneapolis on Wednesday, Biden was confronted by a heckler — a person who self-identifies as a rabbi and is affiliated with an anti-Zionist Jewish group — who demanded the president call for a cease-fire. Rather than ignore the questioner, whose solicitation elicited boos and hisses from the audience, Biden didn’t just fail to reject the premise. He endorsed it. “I think we need a pause,” Biden replied. “A pause means giving time to get the prisoners out.” With that, the dam that had been holding back a torrent of pent-up pusillanimity among Democratic elected officials burst.

“An effort should be made to engage in conversation between the Israelis and the Palestinians,” said the Senate’s second-ranking member, Dick Durbin, in support of a “pause” in the fighting. “Whatever the rationale from the beginning has now reached an intolerable level,” he said of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict generally, eliding the specific and grotesque circumstances that opened this war.