Last week, senate Democrats voted by a margin of twenty-seven to seventeen for a resolution introduced by Bernie Sanders to stop shipping assault rifles to Israel. Twenty-four of those senators also voted for Sanders’s other resolution, which would have blocked $675 million of overall arms sales to the country.
As dramatic a reversal from previous voting patterns as this was, the gap between the party’s elected officials and the Democratic base remains enormous. Only 8 percent of Democratic voters support Israel’s actions in Gaza according to recent polling. (Among Americans in general, that number sits at 32 percent.) And even the broader of the two resolutions only targeted “offensive” weapons, leaving “defensive” aid like America’s funding for Israel’s Iron Dome missile shield in place. That’s a pretty dubious distinction, given that defense costs covered by the United States free up money for “offensive” operations, and that Israel has a much freer hand to start conflicts when it can easily fend off counterattacks.
Even so, a vote like this would have been unthinkable a few years ago. Support for Israel has always been bipartisan. Now, the majority of senate Democrats have voted against weapons sales supported by every single one of their Republican colleagues. The tectonic plates of public opinion have moved dramatically on this issue, and even many establishment politicians are scrambling to figure out how to position themselves.
In the last two years, Israel has ordered millions of Palestinian civilians to leave their homes. The civilian death toll in absolute numbers has dwarfed major wars that have raged for years in far larger countries, and Gaza now has the largest population of child amputees per capita on the entire planet. Two years of indiscriminate bombardment have destroyed so many buildings that aerial shots of Gaza increasingly look like the surface of the moon. And Israel’s policy of blocking…
Auteur: Ben Burgis
