On Wednesday, Sanders introduced six resolutions blocking six sales of different weapons contained within the $20 billion weapons deal announced by the Biden administration in August. The sales include many of the types of weapons that Israel has used in its relentless campaign of extermination in Gaza over the past year.
“Sending more weapons is not only immoral, it is also illegal. The Foreign Assistance Act of 1961 and the Arms Export Control Act lay out clear requirements for the use of American weaponry – Israel has egregiously violated those rules,” said Sanders. “There is a mountain of documentary evidence demonstrating that these weapons are being used in violation of U.S. and international law.”
This will be the first time in history that Congress has ever voted on legislation to block a weapons sale to Israel, as the Institute for Middle East Understanding Policy Project pointed out. This is despite the U.S. having sent Israel over $250 billion in military assistance in recent decades, according to analyst Stephen Semler, as Israel has carried out ethnic cleansings and massacres across Palestine and in Lebanon.
The resolutions are not likely to pass; even if they did pass the heavily pro-Israel Congress, they would likely be vetoed by President Joe Biden, who has been insistent on sending weapons to Israel with no strings attached.
However, Sanders’s move is in line with public opinion. Polls have consistently found that the majority of the public supports an end to Israel’s genocide; a poll by the Institute for Global Affairs released this week found, for instance, that a majority of Americans think the U.S. should stop supporting Israel or make support contingent on Israeli officials’ agreement to a ceasefire deal. This includes nearly 80 percent of Democrats.
I’m not an accelerationist. I’m a realist.
America is already dead.
A civil war is coming.
2025 will be another 2020 no matter what happens in November.
I don’t want the dead weight of a dead government on the side of democracy. I want the side of democracy to be free to invent something new. I don’t want a broken down old democracy fighting against a modern authoritarian. I want the authoritarians to be saddled with the complacency and inertia of the state. I don’t want the authoritarians to be free to invent something newer and more powerful that can bring our doddering democracy to its knees. Our government is old and has been stripped by Reagan/Bush/Trump. It is a liability to be running it.
People are about to die. A lot of them. I want democracy to have its best chance of coming out on top. That means that the people have to want it.
I’m sorry, you’re an accelerationist, this civil war bullshit has been a conservative fantasy for a long time now.
and it’s just as idiotic for someone on the left to call for it as it is evil intentions on the right, we have seen this over and over and over again, hell it’s part of why every mass murdering movement of fascists and authoritarians came to be in the 20th century, the fucking holocaust literally could not have happened without people like you in the German political sphere
I’m not an accelerationist, and I’m not calling for civil war.
I just see that it’s coming.
