In the summer of 2024, Democratic Party leaders refused to let even a single Palestinian American speaker address their presidential convention about Israel’s horrific assault on Gaza. But almost exactly a year later, a solid majority of Democratic members of the US Senate has voted to block arms shipments to Israel in response to an “all-out, illegal, immoral and horrific war of annihilation against the Palestinian people” that Senator Bernie Sanders told the chamber is being waged by the government of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

Sanders has tried to block arms shipments before. But in the past, he’s gotten only a handful of his colleagues to join his effort. This week, the Vermont independent had the support of 26 other members of the Senate Democratic Caucus. They did not win their fight to prevent a Republican-controlled Senate from authorizing another $675 million in weapons sales to Israel. But they did move the Democratic Party a little further toward the right side of history, confirming that the relentless campaigning from students on campuses across the country, as well as activism by groups such as Jewish Voice for Peace, the Arab American Institute, the If Not Now Movement, the American Friends Service Committee, the Fellowship of Reconciliation and so many others, is having an impact.

Current Issue

March 2026 Issue

“The tide is turning,” said Sanders, after the vote on Wednesday. “The American people do not want to spend billions to starve children in Gaza.”

In fact, the American people have been opposed for a long time to the Israeli assault on Gaza, which Amnesty International, Médecins Sans Frontières (Doctors Without Borders), the Israeli human rights group B’Tselem, and Physicians for Human Rights-Israel have all identified as genocidal. While Americans are well aware of the details of the October 7, 2023, attack by Hamas, they have also long since recognized that Israel’s ensuing destruction of Gaza—which has left more than 60,000 Palestinians, most of them women and children, dead, and is now leading to mass starvation—is indefensible.

In the latest Gallup poll, more than 60 percent of Americans now disapprove of the Netanyahu government’s ongoing assault on Gaza, while only 30 percent are supportive—the lowest level of pro-Israel sentiment since Gallup began asking about the issue. More importantly, there is an awareness that the Trump administration’s support for Netanyahu has made this country complicit in policies and actions that have left Gazans without the food they need to survive.

“[It] is absolutely a violation of international law to prohibit food from getting into starving people, and the United States is complicit in this,” says Senator Chris Van Hollen (D-MD). “I mean, the United States is now spending $30 million to fund this private group supported by private mercenary contractors, instead of allowing the international aid, humanitarian organizations to provide food into Gaza. It’s absolutely sickening that the United States government is complicit in what’s happening.”

Trump and his administration have been and continue to be morally, practically, and politically in the wrong. The question is whether Democrats, who are supposed to be the opposition party, will be in the right. They were not in 2024, at the convention or during the ensuing presidential campaign, and that cost them politically.

Sanders has been a longtime, yet often lonely, advocate, for moves to block military aid to Israel. He sees progress in the fact that 27 senators have rejected complicity—often in blunt terms, as when Vermont Democratic Senator Peter Welch said Wednesday, “The mass starvation in Gaza is caused by weapons provided by America and paid for by US taxpayers,” and when Oregon Democratic Senator Jeff Merkley declared, “Not another dollar. Not another bomb.”

The Senate Democratic Caucus members who joined Sanders, Van Hollen, Welch, and Merkley in voting to stop the arms shipments included Maine independent Angus King, who said, “I had just had it. I kept expecting that Israel would wake up and realize what an awful thing they were perpetuating, and that surely they would at least open up humanitarian aid. They just continued to not do it, and I just reached the point where enough was enough.”

Rhode Island Senator Jack Reed, the ranking Democrat on the Senate Armed Services Committee, also supported the Sanders resolution, as did New Hampshire Senator Jeanne Shaheen, the ranking member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. But Senate minority leader Chuck Schumer (D-Y) continued to back the arms shipments, as did 18 other Democrats and all the Republicans who participated in the vote.

(Here’s a link to a full breakdown of the 27–70 vote. And here is a link to a 24–73 vote on a second resolution by Sanders, which would have blocked the sale of fully automatic assault rifles to the Israeli military. )

So there’s progress to report. But in the face of a global outcry over starvation in Gaza, it’s not enough, on the Democratic side—or in the full Senate.

“While a majority of Democrats voting to block military aid to Israel is real progress, it’s still shameful that a majority of the Senate voted against,” explains veteran foreign policy observer and advocate Matt Duss. “If the body accurately represented Americans’ views on Gaza the resolutions should’ve passed easily.”