Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) forced Senate Democrats to reckon not only with the images of starvation and suffering in Gaza but also the tectonic shift within voters in their own party.
Sanders – the democratic socialist independent, former presidential candidate and gadfly-turned vanguard of the left-wing – filed two motions to discharge to block arms to Israel in response to civilian massacres in Gaza and the impending famine.
In the end, 27 Democrats voted for Sanders’s first vote to prohibit the sale of fully automatic rifles to Israel and 23 Democrats voted for his second one that would prohibit the sale of bombs, including 1,000-pound bombs.
The votes are similar to those Sanders held in the weeks after the election, when many wondered whether President Joe Biden’s outspoken support for Israel’s war in Gaza after a surprise assault by Hamas may have cost Kamala Harris votes in Michigan and with young voters.
“What polling shows is the American people are sick and tired of supporting a racist extremist government in Israel, which is now starving, starving children to death with U.S. taxpayer money,” Sanders told The Independent.
Sanders has some polling to back up his claim. A Gallup poll shows 32 percent of Americans support Israel’s military action in Gaza and 60 percent oppose.
The Democrats’ divide is much starker. While 25 percent of Independents support Israel’s actions only 8 percent of Democrats are in support. For those wondering, Marjorie Taylor Greene is firmly in the minority of Republicans who think the war is a “genocide,” as 71 percent support Israel’s actions.
Unsurprisingly, Sanders’s fellow progressive, Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) supported his push to block arms to Israel.
“The Prime Minister has instead created a humanitarian catastrophe, and every day that goes by, the world sees it more vividly and makes clear that they want Netanyahu to stop, stop starving little babies,” Warren told The Independent.
Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer opposed both initiatives, which is unsurprising given his outspoken support for Israel.
But the next generation of Democratic Senate leaders is clearly angry. On Tuesday, before Sanders announced his votes, Sen. Brian Schatz of Hawaii, who like Sanders is Jewish, unloaded on Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
“There's nobody that can credibly claim that one of the most capable militaries in the world is unable to do basic food distribution, they've been doing this in war zones for decades,” he told The Independent. He wound up supporting both of Sanders’s votes.
Many expect Schatz to succeed retiring Sen. Dick Durbin of Illinois, the first senator to support a ceasefire, as Democratic whip in the Senate. So his condemnations speak volumes, specifically, his critique of the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation, the Israel and U.S.-supported group which supplanted United Nations food distribution.
“They kicked out all the organizations that know how to do this,” Schatz said. “They stood up a new organization that's never done this before, that's mostly comprised of military contractors, and it is flat and freely and people are dying so we're all furious, and there's some bipartisan fury.”
The same can be said of Sen. Amy Klobuchar (D-MN), a potential candidate to succeed Schumer when he eventually retires. When Klobuchar ran against Sanders and Warren, in the Democratic presidential primary, she occupied the moderate lane and has earned a reputation as an consensus builder who can pass legislation.
But last week, she delivered a floor speech excoriating the Netanyahu government’s treatment of Gaza. Many on social media pointed out how a few weeks ago, she joined a bipartisan delegation that met with Netanyahu when he came to Washington.
Klobuchar told The Independent on Tuesday that she specifically went to the meeting to ask Netanyahu about Israel’s Defense Minister Israel Katz’s proposal to create a “humanitarian city” for displaced Palestinians.
“In fact, the reason I went to the meeting, I was invited as number-three in Democratic leadership, and I went,” Klobuchar said. “The reason I went was to raise the lack of humanitarian aid into Gaza and that they had to have more access points.”
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Klobuchar would support both of Sanders’s motions. Klobuchar’s fellow Minnesotan Sen. Tina Smith said she would back Sanders’s amendment and has voted for them in the past.
“I think it is just very important that we show these votes our strong disapproval of the way the Netanyahu government is the prosecuting this war,” she said. Smith, who is retiring at the end of next year said the “horrible images” out of Gaza have signaled a change.
Smith has often been mistaken for Sen. Tammy Baldwin (D-WI), who just won re-election last year, despite Harris losing the Badger State. Baldwin did not say whether she had read the legislation, though she denounced the treatment of Gazans.
“The situation in Gaza is a humanitarian crisis and action must be taken,” she told The Independent. “We need to send a strong message to our president, as well as Netanyahu, and I expect to support them.”
A swing-state Democrat who narrowly won re-election, a future whip and a potential majority leader’s critiques shows Democrats no longer see opposing Israel’s treatment of Palestinians as a politically verboten topic.
Sen. Jon Ossoff (D-GA), the youngest senator currently serving and faces re-election, supported Sanders’s first motion on the rifles but not the second on bombs. He will inevitably face some blowback from some in the Jewish community in Georgia, despite the fact he is Jewish himself. But clearly, he sees less risk in standing up to the Israeli government than in the past.
The Democratic Party clearly has seen how it no longer sees Israel’s actions as acceptable, and regardless of how the vote will go, they will have been woken up by Sanders: the Jewish son of Polish immigrants who fled antisemitism and lived on an Israeli kibbutz in his youth.
