It's a sad statement about today's politics that it took a grotesque endorsement of antisemitism by a sitting member of Congress to rally something like bipartisanship among America's elected representatives. Still, the pushback this week by many House Democrats in defense of Israel — and against one of their own — was an encouraging indication that party loyalty doesn't entirely overshadow decency in Washington today.

With an unusually bipartisan vote, the House on Tuesday censured Rep. Rashida Tlaib, D-Mich., for her rhetoric regarding the Israel-Hamas war. That includes her decision to post a video in which pro-Palestinian protesters engage in a chant that is widely understood to be a call for the eradication of Israel.

Tlaib is part of a hard-left faction of the Democratic Party that has lost perspective regarding the war, which Hamas launched with its unprovoked Oct. 7 rocket attacks against Israel and its subsequent terrorist activities.

The Israeli response has been a relentless military pounding of Gaza, where Hamas has entrenched itself among the Palestinian civilians it claims to champion, using them as human shields.

It's what Hamas does, along with taking and killing hostages, including children. These aren't the actions of a legitimate state or even a legitimate military force. These are terrorists, pure and simple.

Yes, Israel's response is also resulting in civilian deaths — including, tragically, children. The Israeli government should heed the Biden administration's repeated calls for more restraint to mitigate those casualties as much as possible. Israel's reported decision this week to start observing daily "pauses" in its military operations to allow for humanitarian aid, as the administration has counseled, is both the humane and strategically smart thing for Israel to do.

But intentionally targeting civilians, as Hamas does, is not the same as a response that results in unintended but inevitable civilian casualties as Israel roots out the Hamas monsters.

Conflating those two things — and conflating Israel's legitimate battle against Hamas with the legitimate grievances of stateless Palestinians, as Tlaib and her fellow progressives are doing — gives a patina of sympathy to the terrorists.

Israel certainly isn't blameless in its historic oppression of the Palestinians, and that's a topic that must be addressed. But making that longstanding conflict the center of discussion as Israel confronts a 9/11-level attack on its own soil is at the very least tone-deaf — and arguably far more sinister than that.

Tlaib and her fellow radical leftists in Congress, including Rep. Cori Bush of St. Louis, have couched their calls for a cease-fire as a purely humanitarian stance that doesn't dispute Israel's right to exist.

Yet in a video posted by Tlaib on social media, pro-Palestinian protesters can be clearly heard chanting the phrase "from the river to the sea." As the censure resolution passed on Tuesday puts it, that's a well-known "genocidal call to violence to destroy the state of Israel" and replace it with "a Palestinian state extending from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea."

Tlaib implausibly disputed that definition this week, claiming the phrase is actually "an aspirational call for freedom, human rights and peaceful coexistence."

No, it's not. And it's unlikely that Tlaib, currently the only Palestinian-American serving in Congress, doesn't know that.

Censure is a rare form of rebuke that doesn't deprive Tlaib of her House seat or her free-speech rights, but registers formal and public condemnation from her colleagues. Twenty-two House Democrats joined all but four Republicans in voting for the Republican-sponsored censure resolution.

Separately, more than 70 Democrats issued a statement condemning Tlaib's rhetoric, as did the White House.

It's confirmation that, unlike today's radicalized GOP, the Democratic Party is still centrist enough to sideline its more ideologically extreme members (instead of letting them run the show). That kind of cohesion in support of Israel will only become more crucial as this tragic but necessary war grinds on.

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