WASHINGTON — 18 senators on Wednesday voted against sending Israel additional American military equipment — the first-ever rebuke of its kind in Congress, and a signal of how frustration has grown in Washington as Israeli forces have pummeled Gaza with near-total support from President Joe Biden.
That group of senators voted against sending Israel $774 million worth of tank rounds, which its military has used in attacks on children and aid groups. The equipment is part of a package of American-Israeli arms deals Biden unveiled in August.
The overwhelming majority of the chamber still voted to allow the arms deals to proceed.
Still, the number represented a significant stand against Biden and a challenge to the idea that support for Israel is beyond question.
And notably, some centrist legislators and peers who have issued relatively little criticism of Israel backed the proposal, like Sens. Jeanne Shaheen (D-N.H.) and Jon Ossoff (D-Ga.).
Senators are now going to vote on two additional bills against weapons for Israel, targeting bomb kits and mortar rounds worth over $300 million.
Critics of Israel’s U.S.-backed offensive in Gaza knew they were never going to actually secure a majority of votes. But while acknowledging the GOP’s unwillingness to question Israel and the intensely pro-Israel views also held by a large proportion of Democrats, skeptics of the Israeli campaigns instead sought to demonstrate a sizeable degree of opposition to continued U.S. involvement in the wars.
They sought to put senators on the record, given the huge moral and strategic toll of the fighting in Gaza and Lebanon — which has killed tens of thousands since last October, when Hamas attacked Israel and touched off the latest round of fighting. The conflict has since extended into battles between Israel and the Hamas-aligned Lebanese militia Hezbollah.
And those same critics argue that American support for the Israelis violates U.S. and international law, given Israel’s killing of civilians and its restrictions on humanitarian aid for Palestinians.
Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) and allied senators, including moderates like Sen. Chris Van Hollen (D-Md.), rallied votes against the weapons transfers. They said they acknowledge Israel’s right to self-defense but highlighted Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s refusal to heed calls from humanitarian groups to let more aid reach civilians, and his defiance of U.S. requests to alter Israeli conduct.
The Biden administration pushed hard to convince senators to keep endorsing arms deals for Israel. On Tuesday, the White House sent a document of talking points to Congress that claimed lawmakers who voted for the bills blocking the sales would be aiding Hamas, HuffPost revealed. The administration also dispatched Secretary of State Tony Blinken to Capitol Hill for a briefing with legislators prior to the vote.
Van Hollen told HuffPost he did not believe Blinken’s presence on Wednesday would sway senators, given the Biden administration’s clear track record of enabling controversial Israeli practices. “I cannot imagine it persuaded anybody, because a big part of the problem here is President Biden refuses to exercise American leverage to ensure compliance with our law and our values,” the senator said ahead of the vote. “That’s the fundamental issue.”
Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) had also privately pushed his colleagues to vote against the bills, HuffPost first reported.
The efforts by the administration and Schumer dovetailed with those from Israelis and ardently pro-Israel groups. The American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), the nation’s largest pro-Israel lobby, called the legislation “dangerous” and urged constituents to contact their senators to oppose it; it ran ads with that message in 17 states. Israel’s ambassador to the U.S., Michael Herzog, also visited Congress on Wednesday.
Yair Lapid, a prominent Israeli legislator who has clashed with Netanyahu, wrote in a Tuesday X post: “No friend of Israel should vote for an arms embargo while we are fighting on multiple fronts to protect our people from terrorism and to bring our hostages home. This has nothing to do with your opinion of the current government, it is about standing with the people of Israel.”
(The bills would not represent an “arms embargo,” as their proponents frequently note.)
An AIPAC-aligned group focused on countering criticism of Israel among Democrats, Democratic Majority for Israel (DMFI), also sought to minimize how many votes the bills can win. “The Biden Administration confirmed that Israel is adhering to the standards set by the United States for humanitarian aid into Gaza,” DMFI argued.
Aid organizations and experts – including inside the U.S. government — have repeatedly challenged the Biden administration’s assessments of Israeli conduct, however, and say the humanitarian situation in Gaza is worsening rather than improving.
In a scorecard issued last week, eight relief groups compared Israeli actions to steps the Biden administration advised Israel to take in October, and concluded: “Israel not only failed to meet the U.S. criteria. … but concurrently took actions that dramatically worsened the situation on the ground, particularly in Northern Gaza. That situation is in an even more dire state today than a month ago.”
The Wednesday vote represented a big opportunity, argued Jeremy Ben-Ami, whose liberal pro-Israel group J Street was one of the broad coalition of advocacy organizations, from labor unions to Quakers, that supported the bills.
“Symbolism has meaning,” Ben-Ami wrote in a Sunday statement. “Senators who vote yes can send the important message that even strong friends of Israel disapprove of the way Prime Minister Netanyahu has conducted the Gaza war, of his far-right coalition’s disrespect for the Biden administration and of the US administration’s failure to use its leverage to change Netanyahu’s policies and actions.”