Bernie Sanders has been thinking a lot these days about what public pressure can accomplish when it comes to the war in Gaza. We were talking less than 24 hours after Joe Biden had struggled to make it through a Virginia rally that was meant to be focused on abortion rights. Fourteen times, the president been interrupted by protesters chanting “Genocide Joe” or demanding a cease-fire. Young people, progressives, activists — “They have a right to be upset at the administration,” Sanders said.
He was matter-of-fact about the president’s situation, having just spoken with a pair of Biden aides about Gaza. Sanders has been friendly with and supportive of Biden, but “we are doing our best to turn the administration around, we’re doing our best to turn my colleagues here in the Senate around,” he said. Outside pressure, he argued, was working even if the results weren’t yet visible. Now, he continued, “one of the things that has got to be done is public pressure has got to be put on the Senate.”
Sanders, a longtime leader of the progressive movement, was not among the most prominent voices responding to the crisis for months. Soon after the October 7 attack, progressives across the country and in Washington called for a bilateral cease-fire with Sanders a prominent exception. Like nearly all lawmakers, he said Israel had a right to defend itself, but he otherwise hung back compared to some of his colleagues, arguing that Hamas, which is still holding hostages and is devoted to destroying Israel, can’t be trusted. By the end of that first month, as other progressives on Capitol Hill were looking to him for guidance, his position began to stick out. He was still working out how exactly to reach an acceptable outcome, both within his own mind and behind the scenes in the Senate. A handful of his loudest fans, especially online, were open in their frustration — no matter that he was among the first elected officials to back a pause in fighting to allow humanitarian aid to Gaza. An open letter signed by hundreds of his former campaign staffers urged him to introduce a cease-fire resolution in the Senate and to cut off military aid to Israel.
Four packed months later, Sanders is emerging as a far more forceful voice in the debate over a suitable end to the conflict and a workable political path forward for a left and a Democratic Party approaching an existential-seeming election year with a conscience-challenging war cracking its electoral coalition.
Sanders had called me to discuss his latest push on Capitol Hill, a measure he introduced to force a State Department study on whether Israel was following international human-rights laws. On the Senate floor and in interviews, he had framed the idea as a no-brainer given how many Israeli weapons are American supplied, but it still read to many of his colleagues as conditioning aid to Israel and therefore as a nonstarter. A few days after the resolution fell short in a vote, he was returning to it as part of a broader campaign to question American military aid and to improve the state of humanitarian help in Gaza.
Sanders is mostly sympathetic to Biden, a stance he’s maintained throughout the past three years, as he’s balanced being a team player and a progressive agitator with the president’s ear. He’s also tried signaling that he’s being a political realist when he speaks up now. “They are feeling more and more political pressure, trust me. They’re feeling it,” he told me, referring to the White House. “I think Joe Biden is a very decent human being. I’ve known the president for many, many years. I know that he is extremely uncomfortable with what’s happening in Gaza. What his people also understand is that if they want to win this election, they’re going to have to listen to the Democratic base, which is quite broad. I’m not just talking about young people, I’m not just talking about progressives. And they’re going to have to be rethinking their policies and telling Netanyahu that this will not continue.”
The Senate resolution, an increased flow of statements, and a slight uptick in interviews (like this one) are all part of Sanders’s attempt to refocus public attention. Though it’s a familiar tactic for him, the topic is not one that has been central to his career, and the push comes just as he is considering whether it will be one of his final acts in Washington. (At 82, he has yet to formally announce whether he’s running for reelection in November, and he has been ruminating about the arc of his career.) Still, the matter of Israel is a personal one, though not in ways he likes discussing. He bristles when asked to react to the war in his capacity as one of just a few Jewish senators and doesn’t talk often about the months he spent on a kibbutz near Haifa in 1963. But he recently allowed, in an interview with Chris Hayes, “I have to tell you, having spent months in Israel as a kid, knowing the history of antisemitism and the Holocaust, seeing a right-wing Israeli government create this kind of misery in Gaza is extraordinarily upsetting.”
As such, he has made a familiar political calculus, speaking of marshaling voter anger into pressure on well-meaning lawmakers to first address “an unbelievable situation, an incredible humanitarian disaster,” as he described it to me last week. “The fear is that as many people — 25,000 people have been killed by bombs — even more may die from disease. And you’ve got Republicans here who are even opposing simple humanitarian aid to alleviate suffering in Gaza and elsewhere in the world, using that as a bargaining chip. So I think what we have got to do is say there is a humanitarian crisis. We, the United States, are complicit in it because by and large the bombs that have killed people, destroyed housing, bombed refugee camps, bombed medical facilities — guess what? — they came from the United States of America. We paid for them, we provided them.”
Last fall, when the fire from his allies was most intense, the criticism occasionally got personal. Yet according to those closest to him, it wasn’t those kinds of barbs that got to him but rather the familiar questions about his responsibilities to the broader progressive movement that he helped invigorate over the last decade as well as the best use of his voice given both his role on the left and his recent allegiances with Biden.
In late November, he tried resetting the conversation with a New York Times op-ed that demanded an end to “Israel’s indiscriminate bombing, which is causing an enormous number of civilian casualties and is in violation of international law.” He asked for an extended humanitarian pause in the bombardment but also new Palestinian leadership alongside an end to settler violence in the West Bank and a commitment to a two-state solution. By January, he was arguing more forcefully against unconditional military aid. (“Enough is enough,” he wrote. “The taxpayers of the United States must no longer be complicit in destroying the lives of innocent men, women and children in Gaza.”) The approach didn’t put him in line with Democratic centrists, but it made clear he was searching for a broadly acceptable answer to the crisis.
He had been listening as large numbers of his longtime supporters identified the war as a moral cause. He hesitated when I asked how the outpouring he’d heard from young voters compared to previous foreign conflicts. “This is fairly unique. I won’t swear to it — we’ve had the war in Iraq and the first Gulf War and so forth — but I think there is a real intensity out there for a variety of reasons,” he said. “I think most people understand that this war was started by Hamas, whose goal in life is to destroy Israel. That’s just the simple fact, that Israel has a right to defend itself. But to see not only the destruction from bombs, many of them made in the United States, but to see now a people basically shut off from outside aid, day after day children going hungrier and hungrier, parents putting what little food they have on their kids’ plates and not eating themselves, seeing disease grow, seeing water that is undrinkable, and we’re watching it day after day — it’s getting worse. So I think the American people, young people, perceive that and say that America cannot be complicit in this horrific situation.”
The initial results of Sanders’s latest push are arguable. Only 11 senators voted for his resolution, which was either an unsurprising anticlimax or, if you adopt his view, a sign of slow movement in his direction. “Put that in the context that there has almost been 100 percent unwavering support for Israel for decades, and people have always voted for money for Israel,” he told me. “People have never questioned the Israeli government’s motives, and we’re asking them to do that for the very first time.”
He’s approaching a party where the median lawmaker has been clear about supporting the Israeli people and their right to defend themselves, demanding the release of hostages taken by Hamas. Equally, many Democrats have been increasingly upset by the humanitarian toll of the Israeli campaign in Gaza. Those members, though, have been the focus of less public debate than the left-wing lawmakers whose early calls for a cease-fire cemented opposition not just from some moderates but also from organizations that are considering bankrolling primary campaigns to oust them, including Missouri’s Cori Bush, New York’s Jamaal Bowman, and Michigan’s Rashida Tlaib.
These are some of Sanders’s closest allies in the House. “We’re dealing not only with tradition here, which has — unacceptably — always been accepting of Israel, no matter what they do,” he said. “You’re also dealing with the power of groups like AIPAC, which is a very powerful political force here on Capitol Hill,” he continued, pointing out that their primary threats come alongside plans to support Republicans.
Sanders’s proposed State Department study was met with some hostility by influential Democrats: Ben Cardin, the Maryland senator in charge of the Foreign Relations Committee, likened it to a “gift to Hamas, a gift to Iran,” and the National Security Council spokesman John Kirby called it “unworkable.” Yet dismay about the direction of the war, and the humanitarian crisis, has been spreading. Over a dozen of Sanders’s Democratic colleagues have indicated support for some kinds of conditions on aid to Israel in the last two months, and more moderate senators including Virginia’s Tim Kaine and Maryland’s Chris Van Hollen have proposed measures to ensure more congressional oversight in weapon transfers and promises they would be used legally.
There is an increasingly widespread belief on Capitol Hill that the diplomatic and political status quo cannot hold much longer. “The caucus has largely stayed together and have kept any of their critiques internal” when it comes to the administration’s handling of the war, said a senior Senate aide. “But something has to change. This is not working. It’s also not working electorally: This is 2024, and progressives are not happy. So what do we do? There are not that many good options.”
One answer that Sanders has adopted, along with a wide range of Democrats, is to focus their criticisms especially intensely on Benjamin Netanyahu, Israel’s conservative prime minister.
A large part of this turn has been to zero in on Netanyahu’s crumbling standing at home, to point out that he “clearly understands that his only chance of political survival is to prolong this war,” in the words of Matt Duss, Sanders’s former foreign-policy adviser. Sanders described the possibility of pressuring Netanyahu domestically: “The average Israeli understands that the relationship, and the support, that the American people have given Israel for decades is enormously important. I would hope that the Israeli people understand that if many of us in Congress are saying this cannot continue, you’re not going to get military aid, that this will start some rethinking about Netanyahu and what he’s doing,” he told me.
It follows, in Sanders’s telling, that the U.S. must distance itself from his leadership and point out the extent of its ideological separation from most Americans — and Israelis. “The Netanyahu right-wing extremist government in Israel is now waging this war in a deeply reckless and immoral way. The United States, whether we like it or not, is deeply complicit in what is going on in Gaza right now,” Sanders said on the Senate floor last month.
Netanyahu and his government have come under more scrutiny from Democrats across the party as he has grown more open in his rejection of Biden’s behind-the-scenes pressure campaign to de-escalate, especially by dismissing the long-term prospects of a two-state solution. Jake Auchincloss, a Boston-area congressman who described his district as being simultaneously pro-Biden, “pro-Israeli, anti-Netanyahu,” told me that “it’s important that Congress and the administration be able to distinguish between support for Israel and the Israeli people with the necessity of having hard conversations and both private and public disagreements with the Israeli war cabinet. Those two elements are not contradictory; there’s actually a productive tension between the two of them.” On the Hill, even some of Israel’s staunchest center-left defenders have come to believe they must center the prime minister’s culpability in order to exact any policy changes from his government while signaling to their fed-up constituents that their support for Israel is no blank check. One group of 15 Jewish House Democrats led by New York’s Jerry Nadler issued a statement to that effect in late January, reiterating a call for a Palestinian state in the long run. David Trone, an AIPAC-donating congressman running for Senate in Maryland, recently told constituents that Netanyahu “has got to go,” comparing him to Donald Trump.
For his part, Sanders has been openly suspicious of Netanyahu for years. Duss pointed out that ahead of Sanders’s last presidential run, he had included some critical lines about the prime minister in a major 2018 speech about “a growing worldwide movement toward authoritarianism, oligarchy, and kleptocracy” that focused on the likes of Vladimir Putin, Viktor Orbán, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, Mohammed bin Salman, and Kim Jong Un. “They represent a real illiberal threat to liberal democracy,” said Duss.
Now, ahead of another presidential election, Sanders has concluded this is the time for Biden to squeeze Netanyahu, to scale back the bombardments, bring more aid into Gaza, and keep open the path to an independent Palestinian state. The president’s pressure on the prime minister, Sanders said, “is nowhere near enough. In fact, I think Netanyahu is playing games with the president. He’s listening, but he ends up doing what he wants to do and is ignoring what the president is asking him to do,” he continued. “He comes out and says, ‘There’ll never be a two-state solution as long as I’m prime minister,’ comes out with ambivalent statements about displacing people, Palestinians from Gaza. He is continuing this terrible war of destruction, all in contradiction to what Biden is asking him to do. I think the time is over for asking. Now it’s the time for telling, and saying, ‘Guess what? You ain’t going to get a nickel more if you continue this immoral and, I suspect, illegal war against the Palestinian people.”’
By submitting your email, you agree to our Terms and Privacy Notice and to receive email correspondence from us.
login
who are we?
contact us
qosheapp
Toi Staff
Gideon Levy
Belen Fernandez
Andrew Mitrovica
Mort Laitner
Rami G Khouri
Ali Fathollah-Nejad
Nikkei Editorial
visit website
