The U.S. Senate on Tuesday rejected an effort by Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) to force the State Department to review whether Israel was using U.S. military aid to violate human rights in Gaza.
Only 11 senators, including Sen. Peter Welch (D-Vt.), supported the measure. Senators voted overwhelmingly to table Sanders’ resolution by a vote of 72 to 11, effectively killing it.
Standing before photographs of crowds of Palestinian children, Sanders beseeched his colleagues to face up to their nation’s role in providing military support for a war that was having catastrophic impact on innocent civilians.
“Whether we like it or not, the United States is complicit in the nightmare that millions of Palestinians are now experiencing,” Sanders bellowed in a passionate floor speech.
Said Welch after the vote, “Saving innocent lives should be our urgent priority.” The lopsided vote was predicted by Republicans, who, along with several Democrats, warned the measure could limit aid to an ally at a key moment. Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) predicted before the vote that it would “go down in flames.”
The high-profile vote nevertheless reflected the growing unease among some Democrats with the way Israel has carried out its war in Gaza following the bloody attacks by Hamas on October 7 that killed about 1,200 people and saw 200 hostages taken.
Sanders said Israel’s campaign was worse than the notorious firebombing of Dresden, Germany, during World War II. He rattled off grim statistics from the ongoing war: more than 24,000 Palestinians killed, two-thirds of them women and children. More than 60,000 people injured. More than 70 percent of the housing in the Gaza Strip in ruins. About 85 percent of the population, or 1.9 million people, displaced, many now starving due to the lack of humanitarian aid. Israel had every right to defend itself following the “horrific” attacks by Hamas, Sanders said — but not this way.
“Israel does not have the right to go to war against the entire Palestinian people — men, women and children in Gaza — and tragically that is what we are seeing right now,” Sanders said.
He proposed the Senate invoke a provision of the 1961 Foreign Assistance Act that would give the State Department 30 days to review how a country is using the aid it is receiving from the United States. Congress approved $14.3 billion in military aid for Israel in November.
The Foreign Assistance Act states that such aid cannot be used by countries that engage in a “consistent pattern of gross violations of internationally recognized human rights.” The law was amended in 1976 to give Congress the power to require a review of whether such human rights violations are, in fact, occurring. If the report were not received by Congress in 30 days, aid would be frozen, though Congress could vote to continue it. The obscure provision has never been invoked.
Sanders characterized the resolution as a modest request for information and a “commonsense” measure that was “not controversial and should be passed in large numbers.” Lawmakers who didn’t support the report were choosing to keep their heads in the sand, he said.
Republicans said the measure was tantamount to abandoning an ally in its time of need. They argued that it was the wrong time to be restricting aid to Israel as it sought to root out an evil terrorist organization.
State Department officials have also opposed the measure, noting that Israel is committing to scaling back its offensive in a way that should reduce civilian casualties and allow in additional humanitarian aid.
Graham condemned Hamas as “religious Nazis” doing everything they could to maximize the civilian death toll in the conflict by building command tunnels under hospitals and launching rockets from apartment buildings. He likened the October 7 attacks to the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor and argued that Israel had to do to in Gaza what the U.S. and its allies did in Germany and Japan — destroy the regimes’ capacity to make war. Anything less and the United States would come to regret it, he said.
“This resolution is not only off-base — it’s dangerous,” he said.
Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) dismissed Sanders’ resolution as “ little more than performative left-wing politics.”
“It’s not even about human rights,” McConnell said. “It is about tying the hands of a close ally locked in a necessary battle against savage terrorists.”
Republicans weren’t the only ones against Sanders’ measure, however.
Sen. Ben Cardin (D-Md.) called the resolution the “wrong vehicle” for oversight of military aid and one that would send a message of eroding United States support for Israel. The oversight provision in the Foreign Assistance Act “was never intended to be used against an ally during a war,” he said, and added:
“Its passage would be a gift to Hamas, a gift to Iran.”
Got something to say?
Send a letter to the editor and we'll publish your feedback in print!
