US Senate to vote on Bernie Sanders-led effort to stop arms sales to Israel
On Wednesday, the US Senate will hold a vote on whether to approve the Pentagon’s request to send another $20bn in armaments to Israel, among them 120mm tank rounds, high explosive mortar rounds, F-15IA fighter aircraft, and joint direct attack munitions, known as JDAMs, which are precision systems for otherwise indiscriminate or "dumb" bombs.
Separate resolutions are being brought forward for each weapon type, including its cost to US taxpayers. However, together, the initiative is known as the Joint Resolutions of Disapproval (JRDs).
Congress, as the nation’s purse, regulates the sale and export of weapons through the Foreign Assistance Act and the Arms Export Control Act. By law, it cannot transfer weapons to governments or entities committing human rights violations.
But year after year, Washington has made its ally Israel the exception.
As a result of intensive lobbying from groups like the American Israel Public Affairs Committee and The Democratic Majority For Israel, no arms transfer to Israel has been blocked.
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Now, after 13 months of Israel’s war on Gaza, nearly 44,000 known deaths, a UN-described genocide, and Israel’s most prominent newspaper calling it an ethnic cleansing, US senators will have to go on the record about whether they will continue to replenish the Israeli war machine.
The JRDs are being led by Senators Bernie Sanders and Peter Welch of Vermont, Jeff Merkley of Oregon, and Brian Schatz of Hawaii. Sanders is an Independent who typically votes alongside Democrats, while the rest identify as Democrats.
“As horrific as the situation in Gaza has been over the past year, it is getting unimaginably worse,” Sanders wrote in an opinion article for The Washington Post on Monday, urging his colleagues to approve the JRDs this week.
“I have met with doctors who have served in Gaza, treating hundreds of patients a day without electricity, anesthesia or clean water, including dozens of children arriving with gunshot wounds to the head. I’ve seen the photographs and the videos. UNICEF estimates that 10 children lose a leg in Gaza every day. There are more than 17,000 orphans.”
And that, he said, is “unspeakable and immoral”.
“We are complicit in these horrific and illegal atrocities. Our complicity must end,” he stressed.
‘People are going to be surprised’
More than 100 civil liberties, political advocacy, and anti-war organisations have signed a letter supporting the JRDs, urging all senators to block the upcoming weapons transfer.
One of the groups leading that effort is the Friends Committee on National Legislation (FCNL), sometimes referred to as The Quakers. FCNL has more than one hundred years of political lobbying behind it, including a role in bringing the 2015 Iran nuclear deal to fruition.
“We think people are going to be surprised at how many senators come on board with this effort and support at least one or two of these joint resolutions of disapproval,” Hassan El-Tayyab, legislative director for Middle East policy and advocacy organiser at FCNL, told Middle East Eye.
On Monday, the pro-Israel advocacy group J Street joined the call for senators to block the arms sales, saying it understands that the vote is largely symbolic anyway, and the transfers will ultimately go through.
The resolutions likely to gain the highest levels of support are expected to involve the tank rounds, which have been responsible for killing hundreds of civilians in northern Gaza in particular, and the JDAMs, which caused the death of well-known figures such as Reuters journalist Issam Abdallah in southern Lebanon, and six-year-old Hind Rajab in Gaza City.
“There's a lot of outrage right now over the Blinken-Austin warning letter, Tayyab said, referring to the Biden administration's 13 October warning to the Israelis to step up humanitarian aid and allow at least 350 trucks into Gaza a day."
According to the World Food Programme and the United Nations Relief Works Agency - the two largest facilitators of aid in Gaza - Israel did not heed that warning.
“That deadline came and went, and there have been no consequences for the Israeli government despite the fact that they've accelerated the humanitarian crisis,” he said. “I think senators are really upset that there wasn't accountability,” Tayyab said.
Congressional legislation passed in 1974, which requires the US president to notify Congress of major arms sales, also created a process to block those arms sales by passing expedited resolutions, which means a fast-tracked floor debate and vote.
That is how the JRDs are making their way to the Senate floor with no amendments allowed - and to have that be related to Israel, in particular, is progress, Tayyab said.
“It's the first major vote in Congress to halt weapons sales to Israel,” he said.
“Just the fact that they are forcing the vote, they're starting a badly needed conversation about how US weapons are being used against civilians in Gaza, but also now Lebanon.”
There is a recent precedent for rolling back US assistance for foreign wars.
“Congress did this on Yemen. They passed the Yemen War Powers resolution in 2018 that was in a Republican-controlled Senate with a Republican president. And that was a bipartisan initiative,” Tayyab said.
That specific effort ended US mid-air refuelling for Saudi warplanes bombing Yemen.
“After Jamal Khashoggi was assassinated by [Saudi Crown Prince] Mohammed bin Salman, and after the Saudis bombed a school bus killing 40 children in Yemen, senators said ‘no more'.”
Political space
Two of the most progressive lawmakers being pushed to support the JRDs are senators Chuck Schumer and Kirsten Gillibrand of New York. Schumer is the Majority Leader in the US Senate, and both are staunch supporters of Israel.
More than 95 New York-based groups signed a letter urging the senators to stand “on the right side of history” as they did when it came to Saudi Arabia’s war on Yemen.
This was personal for one of the letter’s organisers, Etan Mabourakh of the National Iranian-American Council.
"As a Jewish Iranian-American… I do not want to see one more American, Israeli, Palestinian or Iranian suffer under death and destruction abetted by the unchecked flow of American weapons financed through my tax dollars,” Mabourakh said in a statement accompanying the letter.
'We're trying to just appeal to these basic foundational principles, not radical in any sense'
- Etan Mabourakh, National Iranian-American Council
He told MEE that it's fair for people to see the situation as “very bleak”, given the long history of US inaction on Israel’s military operations.
“We're trying to just appeal to these basic foundational principles, not radical in any sense: enforce US law, protect our interests, have standards when you provide joint direct attack munitions and tank shells to a country,” Mabourakh said.
Schumer, in particular, made headlines in March for saying that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu should resign - a move many saw as a potential turning point in the US-Israeli relationship.
“I was deeply, deeply moved when he made that speech acknowledging Netanyahu as an obstacle to peace,” Mabourakh told MEE. “It's so important that we as progressives don't just protest - that we engage in good faith with these offices and make our demands very clear.”
However, he also agreed that the current timing and circumstances may play a role in swaying the JRD vote.
In just over 60 days, there will be a red takeover of Washington when the administration of Donald Trump returns to the White House and Congress falls under Republican control.
The outgoing party will sometimes express its distaste for the incoming one by either supporting or blocking a resolution that would have gone the other way under an opponent. It is, effectively, just political grandstanding.
“This may be the last chance with Trump coming in to vote on this issue,” Mabourakh said.
Tayyab echoed that sentiment.
“Having the election behind us creates a little bit more political space. I think a lot of offices now feel they have more agency… This is kind of the last chance for a lot of people to make their voices heard while Democrats still control the Senate,” he told MEE.
According to the Costs of War project at Brown University, the US has provided Israel with $22.76bn from 7 October 2023 until 30 September this year.
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