Last week, 27 Democratic senators voted to ban such sales. But 17 voted to let them continue.View this email in your browser [link removed]

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****AUGUST 5, 2025****

**On the

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****Meyerson on TAP****

**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’s buildings remain standing, even though Gazans continue to starve, Bibi Netanyahu has decided his work is not yet done. Officials in his office have **told** [link removed] Israeli 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’s left of Hamas has made clear that if their hostage-holders come under attack, they’ll 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’s 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’s sole remaining raison d’être is Bibi’s 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’s been the war’s raison d’être for some time now—only now, all the ostensible raisons d’être 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’s “Golden Dome” 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—27—had 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’s 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’s Bennet and Hickenlooper, Connecticut’s Blumenthal, New Jersey’s Booker, Washington’s Cantwell, Delaware’s Coons, Nevada’s Cortez Masto and Rosen, Pennsylvania’s Fetterman, New York’s Gillibrand and Schumer, New Hampshire’s Hassan, California’s Padilla and Schiff, Michigan’s Peters, Virginia’s Warner, and Oregon’s Wyden.

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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’s hard to discern just why those 17 Democrats voted to keeping fueling Bibi’s war machine. A Gallup poll taken last month showed [link removed] that just 32 percent of the public, and just 8 percent of Democrats, now support Israel’s war on Gaza.

That’s 8 percent. Eight. VIII.

Why, then, continue to authorize offensive arms sales to Netanyahu’s government? Against whom, and in what cause, do those 17 Democratic senators believe they’ll be wielded? Surely, they can’t really believe that they’ll be deployed solely against Hamas soldiers, as that’s been anything but the case thus far. As for arming the West Bank settlers now “policing” the Palestinians who reside there, so that Ben-Gvir’s troopers can use fully automatic weapons to stage their daily mini-Kristallnachts (how long they stay mini remains to be seen)—I can’t 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’s Jon Ossoff, who voted, along with Rhode Island’s Reed and Whitehouse, to ban the sale of fully automatic rifles: He’s up for re-election this year, and given Georgia’s politics, that was a somewhat risky vote.) I’m particularly mystified by the no votes of California’s two Democratic senators—Alex Padilla, whose term doesn’t expire until December 2028, and Adam Schiff, whose term doesn’t expire until December 2030. Theirs wasn’t a vote for Zionism as such. At this point, their votes effectively, if not intentionally, signaled an alignment with Jabotinsky Zionism run amok—the kind of Zionism that demands, and revels in, ethnic cleansing. In any other context, that’s 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—and what the fuck—were they, and their fellow Democratic naysayers on these resolutions, thinking? If they were thinking at all.

**~ HAROLD MEYERSON**

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