In the Biden-Harris administration’s eleventh hour, Senate Democrats are launching a campaign against the Jewish state aimed at drumming up support for blocking arms sales to Israel.
Led by Sen. Bernie Sanders (I., Vt.), the congressional offensive consists of three Senate disapproval resolutions that call for an immediate pause in American arms sales to Israel and accuse the United States of supporting mass war crimes in the Gaza Strip. Sanders—along with Sens. Chris Van Hollen (D., Md.), Jeff Merkley (D., Ore.), Peter Welch (D., Vt.), and other top Democrats—held a press conference on Tuesday touting the measures. Around the same time, anti-Israel protesters stormed a Senate office building, demanding lawmakers back the measures.
BREAKING: Pro-Palestine protesters have flooded into the Hart Senate Building and are demanding that Senators support the Joint Resolutions of Disapproval to block weapon sales to Israel.
Protesters are locking arms, dropping flyers, and unfurling banners. pic.twitter.com/YPl1bffG4a
— Stu (@thestustustudio) November 19, 2024
The Arms Control Export Act, which governs foreign arms sales, does give Congress a mechanism to block sales if both the House and Senate pass disapproval resolutions. But Sanders’s resolutions, even if passed by the Senate’s razor-thin Democratic majority, would not block any pending arms sales to Israel, as the deadline to do so has passed.
Still, the resolutions—which are set for a full Senate vote on Wednesday—show that the Democratic Party’s left wing remains eager to fight Israel and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu as President Joe Biden shuffles out of office. Jeremy Ben-Ami, CEO of the left-wing anti-Israel group J Street, penned a Substack post endorsing the resolutions and warning Senate Democrats that their “further electoral ambitions” could be threatened if they oppose the measures.
“It’s not just history that will hold Senators to account, those with further electoral ambitions will have to answer to voters in years to come whether they demonstrated the backbone to stand up and call out this horrific situation,” he wrote. “History will not be kind to those who step back when the moment demands a clear and powerful statement of disapproval of how this war has been conducted and of horror at the death, destruction, and humanitarian disaster that has been created.”
There’s some evidence that the Biden-Harris administration agrees. Amid the Senate campaign, the administration has also ratcheted up pressure on Israel, sanctioning Israeli Jews on Monday for alleged human rights crimes in the West Bank and awarding another $230 million in taxpayer funds to the Palestinians. The administration is reportedly drafting a United Nations resolution meant to undermine Israel’s presence in the West Bank.
In their Tuesday afternoon press conference, Sanders and his Democratic colleagues accused Netanyahu of starving innocent civilians in the Gaza Strip and of ignoring demands by the Biden-Harris administration to accelerate humanitarian aid deliveries.
Netanyahu “cannot continue to undermine U.S. foreign policy goals,” Sanders said. “The United States of America is complicit in these atrocities. That complicity must end.”
The focus on Netanyahu appears designed to undermine his conservative governing coalition amid internal disagreements about his handling of the war in Gaza, one senior GOP congressional aide said.
“This is a continuation of the Obama administration Democrats who spent millions of dollars trying to defeat Netanyahu in an election, and of the Senate leader who called for him to be thrown out of office,” the aide said. “It’s the Democrats’ two-decade-long undermining of a democratically elected ally.”
Sanders accused Netanyahu of “blocking desperately needed humanitarian aid,” citing United Nations reports about an imminent famine in Gaza. The U.N. and Biden-Harris administration have pushed that claim for more than a year, though the famine has never materialized.
Merkley, meanwhile, touted himself as a staunch Israel supporter who once “stayed at a kibbutz.” He said the “Netanyahu government has undertaken policies that are out of sync with American values.”
“We are as citizens complicit in this strategy that is out of sync with our values and out of sync with our law,” Merkley said, claiming the “largest part of the calamity has been on the innocents, not those who participated in the Oct. 7 attack.” Israel’s war campaign has eliminated around 17,000 of Hamas’s fighters and taken out scores of the terror group’s senior leaders.
Van Hollen, who has also positioned himself as a defender of Israel’s security, said that America can no longer give Israel a “blank check” to conduct the war for its survival.
“We’ve seen Prime Minister Netananyahu repeatedly violate the terms of American security assistance, disregard U.S. priorities, and ignore our requests,” Van Hollen said, citing an October letter from the Biden-Harris administration to Israel threatening to halt arms deliveries if Gaza aid does not increase.
The State Department determined last week that Israel has lived up to its humanitarian commitments and that arms sales would continue on pace. Van Hollen, however, disagreed with this assessment.
“Every single one of the elements raised in this letter has either been blatantly violated or not met,” he said. “That’s why we need to use the recourse we have to pause U.S. offensive military assistance, including these three [joint resolutions of disapproval] until the Netanyahu government finally comes into compliance.”
Sanders, for his part, would not say if he expected the measures to pass, telling reporters, “From a moral perspective, all of us are appalled the United States of America is complicit in the starvation and malnutrition of many thousands of children in Gaza.”
Any future resolutions of disapproval would need to be passed by the GOP-controlled House and then signed by the president to actually halt arms deliveries to Israel, a situation that is unlikely to occur in the months before President-elect Donald Trump retakes the White House.
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