Democrats Have No More Excuses on Gaza
The American people want their leaders to stop supporting Netanyahu’s murderous inhumanity.
When Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders took his “Fighting Oligarchy” tour to rural Viroqua, Wisconsin, in late August, his speech featured a fervent call for ending military aid to Israel’s assault on Gaza. The crowd responded with a standing ovation. Viroqua, population 4,407, is far from New York City, where clueless pundits and political operatives keep telling us that Democratic mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani’s advocacy for an end to the genocide in Gaza is too extreme. But the news from Viroqua offers a reminder that Mamdani and candidates like him are not on the margin of the national debate. Nor do they threaten Democratic prospects in 2026. They’re pulling the party toward the people.
The people know that the United States must stop supplying arms and coordinating militarily with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s government as it pursues its criminal war against the Palestinian population of Gaza. The people know that the US should be leading in the organization of immediate emergency humanitarian relief to the Palestinians. The people know that to do anything less makes us complicit in the ongoing crime.
Yet, top DC Democrats—including Senate minority leader Chuck Schumer and House minority leader Hakeem Jeffries— continue to stand obstinately, and horrifically, on the wrong side of history. They refuse to endorse candidates like Mamdani and fail to recognize that tens of millions of Americans see Gaza as a moral-compass measure of human decency.
The people know that Hamas launched a gruesome attack on Israeli kibbutzim on October 7, 2023. But they also know that the Israeli response has killed more than 62,000 Palestinians in Gaza—most of them women and children—and reduced the enclave to a wasteland. Close to half of all Americans, and 66 percent of Democrats, identify the slaughter in Gaza as a genocide, according to an August Data for Progress survey. Those numbers are from before an August 25 Israeli air strike on Gaza’s Nasser Hospital killed at least 20 people, including five journalists. And from before a United Nations–backed panel declared that a famine is taking place in Gaza, warning that “over half a million people are facing the most devastating form of hunger.” One thousand rabbis signed a letter calling on Israel to lift blockades on humanitarian aid to Gaza, because “we cannot condone the mass killings of civilians…or the use of starvation as a weapon of war.”
Politicians supposedly take polling and public pressure seriously. Yet, for all the data, for all the organizing and demands by grassroots Democrats and progressives for coherent opposition to Trump’s support of Netanyahu’s murderous policies and territorial ambitions—which include the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians from Gaza and, if Netanyahu’s ministers prevail, from the occupied West Bank—top Democrats in Congress stubbornly stand on the wrong side of history. Their complicity is as glaring as it is indefensible. There are no excuses.
After looking the other way for the better part of two years, mainstream US media outlets are finally covering the humanitarian catastrophe that Israel is inflicting on the Palestinians. But among those who could actually end the horror, courage is in short supply.
Most members of Congress employ empty language to describe what the world recognizes as an ongoing war crime. And when it comes to linking words to deeds, action is thwarted not just by right-wing Republicans but by many Democrats.
Senate Republicans rejected Sanders’s resolution to block key weapons sales to Israel, while nodding along as Trump mused about developing beachfront properties in Gaza. Yet, even as the Sanders resolution secured support from a majority of the Senate Democratic Caucus, Schumer opposed it, as did New Jersey Senator Cory Booker, who styles himself as a voice for human rights.
This is no longer a policy debate. This is a moral test for every official, every candidate, every Democrat. When the famine in Gaza was formally recognized, Mamdani tweeted, “The U.S. government is not a bystander to this genocide. We can end it today.” In fact, it will end only when our elected leaders get a clear signal from the people. People in Viroqua sent their signal in August. People in New York can do so November 4, when they elect Zohran Mamdani.
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Editor and Publisher, The Nation
