General Discussion

I suspect he will walk back the statement somewhat to make that clear. Fetterman has always been to the right of most Pro-Israel folks here on this issue. In fact, he has always been effectively on the far right fringe of this issue overall, and the far right fringe immediately applauded Trump's statement. (Note Fetterman didn't applaud it, he called it provocative so he didn't explicitly endorse it, but he refused to condemn it like most Democrats have done)

From an article from a year ago:

https://jacobin.com/2024/01/john-fetterman-palestine-israeli-state-apartheid-war-gaza-progressive
John Fetterman Keeps Defending the Indefensible in Gaza
Even in a world where the Israeli government had heeded various warnings and headed off Hamas’s attack on October 7, this would be an ugly blotch on whatever record Fetterman would otherwise be able to claim of standing for justice. But in the last three months, Israel has committed atrocities in Gaza on a level that dwarf anything it’s done since the original“Nakba” (catastrophe) that drove hundreds of thousands of Palestinians out of the country during the creation of the state.

And through it all, Fetterman has continuously doubled down on his enthusiasm for the Israeli state. He told Politico at the end of December that whatever “diversity of opinions” existed among Senate Democrats with regard to the onslaught on Gaza, and however much the caucus might “splinter” on the issue, he would always be “the last man standing to be absolutely there on the Israeli side on this with no conditions.”

In an interview a week earlier with the New York Times, Fetterman expressed surprise that so many of his former supporters seemed shocked by his position. “I do find it confusing,” he told the Times, “where the very left progressives in America don’t seem to want to support really the only progressive nation in the region that really embraces the same kind of values I would expect we would want as a society.”

In terms of the substance of the argument, this is the thinnest possible reed on which Senator Fetterman could hang his enthusiastic support for a state currently engaged in ethnic cleansing of an internal noncitizen population. It’s a fairly popular rhetorical strategy, though, and so it’s probably worth spending a moment explaining why it makes so little sense. Fetterman isn’t being terribly original. I’ve heard many apologists for the Israeli government using variations of this point — think about all the right-wing sneering about “Queers for Palestine” or about secular leftists in the West “siding with radical Islam.”