{"id":43087,"date":"2025-08-06T12:00:35","date_gmt":"2025-08-06T19:00:35","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/occupysf.net\/?p=43087"},"modified":"2025-08-06T12:00:36","modified_gmt":"2025-08-06T19:00:36","slug":"the-mystery-of-continuing-democratic-support-for-offensive-arms-to-israel","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/occupysf.net\/index.php\/2025\/08\/06\/the-mystery-of-continuing-democratic-support-for-offensive-arms-to-israel\/","title":{"rendered":"The mystery of continuing Democratic support for offensive arms to Israel"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
Meyerson on TAP<\/strong>

August 5, 2025 (Prospect.org)

The mystery of continuing Democratic support for offensive arms to Israel<\/strong>

Last week, 27 Democratic senators voted to ban such sales. But 17 voted to let them continue.<\/em>Even though few of Gaza\u2019s buildings remain standing, even though Gazans continue to starve, Bibi Netanyahu has decided his work is not yet done. Officials in his office have\u00a0told<\/u><\/a>\u00a0Israeli reporters that he is considering a new offensive that will send Israeli troops into the few remaining areas of Gaza not yet attacked. Those are the areas in which the 20 remaining Israeli hostages are held, and what\u2019s left of Hamas has made clear that if their hostage-holders come under attack, they\u2019ll kill the remaining hostages.

Israeli opposition to this unending war has now reached its highest levels. Israelis had become accustomed to relatively short wars before this one; that\u2019s the only kind of war a small nation can wage without major disruptions to its economy and daily life. As Israeli military and intelligence officials say that Hamas, Hezbollah, and the Iranian nuclear threat have all been crippled, the war\u2019s sole remaining raison d\u2019\u00eatre is Bibi\u2019s determination to keep two overtly racist, far-right parties in his coalition lest his government fall apart, prompting new elections and a possible jail sentence should he be convicted of having accepted bribes. Actually, that\u2019s been the war\u2019s raison d\u2019\u00eatre for some time now\u2014only now, all the ostensible raisons d\u2019\u00eatre have been dispelled.

Which raises the question of why 17 Democratic senators last week voted against two resolutions authored by Bernie Sanders that would have halted the sale of offensive weapons to Israel. One resolution called for a halt to sales of offensive weapons only, so that, for instance, the sale of the kind of anti-missile weapons that make up Israel\u2019s \u201cGolden Dome\u201d could still go forward. The other resolution called for a halt to the sale of tens of thousands of fully automatic assault rifles, now used by government forces in the West Bank, under the command of racist extremist Itamar Ben-Gvir, to attack and dispossess the Palestinians who live there.

Sanders has previously put such resolutions before the Senate as the Gaza War has bloodily dragged on, but this marked the first time that a majority of Democratic senators\u201427\u2014had voted for one or both. (Twelve of those 27 had opposed similar versions of those resolutions when they came before the Senate in April.) Yet despite the fact that such weapons sales will only contribute to the continuing destruction of Gaza and seizure of the West Bank, despite the fact that these resolutions came up for a vote at a time when Israel\u2019s policy of inflicting mass starvation on Palestinians was still proceeding, 17 Democratic senators still joined every Republican in voting no on both. They were Colorado\u2019s Bennet and Hickenlooper, Connecticut\u2019s Blumenthal, New Jersey\u2019s Booker, Washington\u2019s Cantwell, Delaware\u2019s Coons, Nevada\u2019s Cortez Masto and Rosen, Pennsylvania\u2019s Fetterman, New York\u2019s Gillibrand and Schumer, New Hampshire\u2019s Hassan, California\u2019s Padilla and Schiff, Michigan\u2019s Peters, Virginia\u2019s Warner, and Oregon\u2019s Wyden.<\/td><\/tr>
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With Israel now working hard to lose the support of virtually every nation on the planet, and with support for Israel plummeting among Americans generally and rank-and-file Democrats in particular, it\u2019s hard to discern just why those 17 Democrats voted to keeping fueling Bibi\u2019s war machine. A Gallup poll taken last month\u00a0showed<\/a>\u00a0that just 32 percent of the public, and just 8 percent of Democrats, now support Israel\u2019s war on Gaza.

That\u2019s 8 percent. Eight. VIII.

Why, then, continue to authorize offensive arms sales to Netanyahu\u2019s government? Against whom, and in what cause, do those 17 Democratic senators believe they\u2019ll be wielded? Surely, they can\u2019t really believe that they\u2019ll be deployed solely against Hamas soldiers, as that\u2019s been anything but the case thus far. As for arming the West Bank settlers now \u201cpolicing\u201d the Palestinians who reside there, so that Ben-Gvir\u2019s troopers can use fully automatic weapons to stage their daily mini-Kristallnachts (how long they stay mini remains to be seen)\u2014I can\u2019t believe those senators really support that, or, at minimum, have thought that through.

Political considerations? According to Gallup, 71 percent of Republicans still support the Gaza war, but 12 of those Democratic senators who voted no come from lopsidedly Democratic states. (All praise, by the way, to Georgia\u2019s Jon Ossoff, who voted, along with Rhode Island\u2019s Reed and Whitehouse, to ban the sale of fully automatic rifles: He\u2019s up for re-election this year, and given Georgia\u2019s politics, that was a somewhat risky vote.) I\u2019m particularly mystified by the no votes of California\u2019s two Democratic senators\u2014Alex Padilla, whose term doesn\u2019t expire until December 2028, and Adam Schiff, whose term doesn\u2019t expire until December 2030. Theirs wasn\u2019t a vote for Zionism as such. At this point, their votes effectively, if not intentionally, signaled an alignment with Jabotinsky Zionism run amok\u2014the kind of Zionism that demands, and revels in, ethnic cleansing. In any other context, that\u2019s the kind of creed that Padilla and Schiff sincerely and actively oppose. And since neither can be dislodged by an AIPAC smear campaign, what on earth\u2014and what the fuck\u2014were they, and their fellow Democratic naysayers on these resolutions, thinking? If they were thinking at all.

~ HAROLD MEYERSON Follow Harold Meyerson on Twitter<\/a><\/strong><\/td><\/tr><\/tbody><\/table><\/figure>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Meyerson on TAP August 5, 2025 (Prospect.org) The mystery of continuing Democratic support for offensive arms to Israel Last week, 27 Democratic senators voted to ban such sales. But 17 voted to let them continue.Even though few of Gaza\u2019s buildings remain standing, even though Gazans continue to starve, Bibi Netanyahu… Continue reading → <\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/occupysf.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/43087"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/occupysf.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/occupysf.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/occupysf.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/occupysf.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=43087"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/occupysf.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/43087\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":43088,"href":"https:\/\/occupysf.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/43087\/revisions\/43088"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/occupysf.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=43087"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/occupysf.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=43087"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/occupysf.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=43087"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}