Bernie Sanders’ Failed Bid to Block a $20 Billion Arms Sale to Israel Reignites Debate Over U.S. Policy in Gaza
On the evening of November 20, 2024, the United States Senate rejected three resolutions introduced by Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont that would have blocked portions of a major American arms package for Israel. The package, announced by the Biden administration the previous August and valued at roughly $20 billion, was already moving through the established process for foreign military sales. Sanders and a small group of colleagues forced the chamber to vote anyway. The result was decisive. A measure aimed at tank rounds failed 18 to 79. A measure aimed at high-explosive mortar rounds failed 19 to 78. A measure aimed at Joint Direct Attack Munition guidance kits failed 17 to 80. Nineteen senators, nearly all of them Democrats or independents who caucus with Democrats, voted for at least one of the three. Senator Tammy Baldwin of Wisconsin voted present. No Republican supported any of them.
The margins settled the immediate legislative question. They did not settle the argument the votes were meant to force. For more than a year after the Hamas attacks of October 7, 2023, Washington had debated how the United States should balance a longstanding security relationship with Israel against the civilian cost of the war in Gaza. Sanders’ resolutions turned that argument into a recorded vote. Supporters of the sales treated the outcome as confirmation that military assistance to Israel still commands a broad bipartisan majority. Critics treated it as evidence that congressional policy had not moved with public concern over civilian deaths, damaged hospitals, and the scale of displacement. Both readings were available in the same set of numbers.
The package and the procedure
The sales in question were not a single contract. They were a set of notifications covering munitions, armored vehicles, and related equipment that the administration had told Congress it intended to transfer. The three resolutions that reached the floor targeted specific items inside that larger package: 120-millimeter tank rounds, 120-millimeter high-explosive mortar rounds, and JDAM kits, which convert unguided bombs into GPS-guided weapons. Reporting at the time put the value of those particular transfers near $1 billion, inside an overall package described as about $20 billion. Sanders had filed additional resolutions; only three were brought up.
The vehicle was the joint resolution of disapproval, a procedure Congress can use to try to stop a notified foreign military sale. Such resolutions almost never pass when the recipient is a close ally. They matter less as legislation than as a test of whether opposition has become large enough to be politically costly. Sanders, an independent who caucuses with Democrats, introduced them in late September 2024, nearly a year after the war began. Senators Peter Welch of Vermont, Jeff Merkley of Oregon, and Chris Van Hollen of Maryland were among those who joined him publicly. The votes came in the final weeks of a Congress and of a presidential administration, after an election that had already decided the next occupant of the White House.
Sanders’ case was narrow in form and broad in implication. He said the resolutions would not touch the systems Israel uses to intercept incoming rockets and missiles. They were aimed, he argued, at offensive munitions he associated with civilian harm in Gaza and, by that stage of the war, in Lebanon as well. On the floor he accused Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s government of waging “an all-out war against the Palestinian people” rather than a campaign limited to Hamas, and he invoked U.S. law restricting assistance to governments that commit gross human rights violations or block American humanitarian aid. “That is not my opinion; that is what the law says,” he told colleagues. A fact sheet from his office cited Gaza Health Ministry figures then standing above 40,000 dead and argued that tank rounds and guided bombs accounted for a large share of those deaths, a majority of them women, children, or elderly people according to the ministry’s breakdown.
The civilian toll and the dispute over what it means
By the week of the vote, the Gaza Health Ministry, which is run by Hamas, was reporting more than 43,000 Palestinians killed. The figure was widely cited by news organizations, humanitarian agencies, and critics of the war, and it was also contested. Israel and its supporters argued that the ministry does not distinguish consistently between combatants and civilians, that Hamas embeds fighters and infrastructure among civilians, and that any serious accounting has to include the October 7 attack, in which militants killed about 1,200 people in Israel and took roughly 250 hostages. Independent analyses had found the ministry’s overall totals broadly plausible as a count of violent deaths, while the combatant share remained disputed and unverified in public. Neither side treated the number as neutral. For Sanders and the senators who joined him, a death toll of that magnitude, alongside images of destroyed neighborhoods and strained hospitals, was reason enough to interrupt at least some transfers. For opponents, the same toll was tragic evidence of an urban war against an enemy that does not wear uniforms, not a reason to withhold munitions from an ally still fighting that enemy and still trying to recover hostages.
The visual record shaped the politics outside the chamber more than the procedure inside it. Satellite images of leveled blocks, footage from hospitals, and reports of mass displacement circulated continuously. Advocacy groups organized demonstrations and letter campaigns. Polling through 2024 showed younger Americans, and Democrats in particular, markedly more critical of Israel’s conduct and of unconditional U.S. aid than older voters or Republicans. That shift was real. It was also incomplete. Large shares of the public continued to support Israel’s right to respond to October 7, and sympathy for Israeli civilians remained high even as sympathy for Palestinian civilians rose. The Senate vote sat in the gap between those currents. Outside Washington, restriction of arms had become a mainstream demand on the left. Inside the Senate, it remained a minority position even among Democrats.
Why the majority held
Senators who opposed the resolutions did not, for the most part, deny that civilians were dying. They argued that blocking weapons was the wrong instrument, and that doing so in wartime would weaken an ally facing threats from Hamas, Hezbollah, and Iran without producing a political settlement or a reliable improvement in humanitarian conditions. Israel has received U.S. military assistance for decades, formalized in multiyear memorandums and treated by both parties as a core feature of American strategy in the Middle East. From that vantage, a disapproval resolution is not a modest adjustment. It is a public break, during a war, with a partner that still intercepts rockets aimed at its cities and still holds that the campaign in Gaza is a war of necessity after the worst attack on Jews since the Holocaust.
Opponents also resisted the claim that American-supplied weapons made Washington the author of Israeli targeting decisions. Supplying an ally, they said, is not the same as directing its campaign. The United States can urge restraint, press for aid access, and attach diplomatic conditions without voting to halt munitions already notified to Congress. Several Democrats who might have been expected to sympathize with humanitarian concerns nevertheless voted no, including the party’s Senate leadership. Their position was that influence is better exercised inside the relationship than by trying to sever part of it on the floor. Republicans were unanimous among those voting. For them the resolutions were not a close call. They were an attempt to constrain an ally in the middle of a war the United States had repeatedly described as justified.
The minority that formed
The 19 votes were still the largest Senate bloc yet recorded in favor of blocking specific arms transfers to Israel during the war. The list included Dick Durbin of Illinois, the Senate’s number-two Democrat, along with Tim Kaine, Elizabeth Warren, Chris Murphy, Brian Schatz, Raphael Warnock, Martin Heinrich, Mazie Hirono, Ed Markey, Jeanne Shaheen, Tina Smith, Ben Ray Luján, Jon Ossoff, George Helmy, and Angus King, as well as Welch, Merkley, Van Hollen, and Sanders. Ossoff, a Jewish senator from Georgia, backed two of the three resolutions and opposed the one on guidance kits, a split that illustrated how even supporters parsed the measures differently. Schatz, also Jewish, voted yes. Baldwin’s present vote was its own signal: unwilling to block the sales, unwilling to join the clear majority either.
Sanders described the resolutions as a test of whether the Senate would apply existing law. Colleagues who joined him framed the issue as consistency. American officials speak often about civilian protection and international humanitarian law. If those standards are real, they argued, they cannot be waived for a close partner when the reported civilian toll is this high. Elizabeth Warren called the administration’s refusal to suspend shipments a mistake that damaged American credibility. The counterargument, made quietly by some of the same party’s leaders and loudly by Republicans, was that consistency also requires taking seriously the security threat Israel faces, the hostages still held, and the character of the forces it is fighting. Applying a human-rights standard, in that view, is not the same as adopting the remedy Sanders offered.
Alliance, leverage, and responsibility
Underneath the tallies was a disagreement about what American assistance obliges Washington to do. Critics of the sales argued that the scale of U.S. support creates leverage, and that leverage unused is a choice. The United States is Israel’s principal arms supplier and its principal diplomatic defender. If Washington will not condition munitions on the protection of civilians and the entry of aid, they said, it should not be surprised when Israeli policy does not shift. Supporters answered that conditioning aid in public, by statute, during a war, trades a hypothetical gain in leverage for a certain loss of trust, and may not change battlefield conduct at all. Hamas, they noted, has no comparable patron pressing it to release hostages or to stop firing from civilian areas. A policy that constrains only one side, they argued, is not neutral humanitarianism.
That dispute is older than this package. It runs through decades of arguments over settlements, past Gaza wars, and the size of annual security assistance. What changed after October 7 was the intensity and the visibility. Casualty figures that once appeared in specialist reports became a daily feature of American media. Campus protests, city council resolutions, and primary challenges turned a foreign-policy argument into a domestic one. Sanders’ resolutions were a congressional expression of that change. Their defeat was a congressional expression of its limits. Forcing the vote put senators on the record. The record showed that a faction of the Democratic caucus, something like a third on the strongest of the three measures, was willing to block particular offensive transfers, and that a larger faction, joined by every voting Republican, was not.
What the vote did not decide
The Senate’s answer applied to three resolutions on one evening. It did not fix the terms on which later sales would be judged, and it did not quiet the question Sanders had posed: how much responsibility the United States carries for the use of weapons it supplies. International law distinguishes between the supplier and the user, but political responsibility is not exhausted by that distinction. When American munitions are a large part of an ally’s magazine, debates over civilian harm become debates over American policy whether or not Washington selected the targets. Opponents of the resolutions did not deny the connection. They denied that the right response was a statutory cutoff. Critics denied that expressions of concern, unaccompanied by a change in supply, amounted to a policy at all.
Nor did the vote resolve the factual arguments that feed the moral ones. How many of the dead were combatants. Whether particular strikes violated the rules of distinction and proportionality. How much of the destruction of housing and infrastructure was incidental to lawful attacks on tunnel networks and command sites, and how much was not. Those questions require evidence that a floor debate cannot settle. They also require choices about risk. Urban war against an enemy that stores weapons under civilian buildings produces civilian death even when the attacker follows the formal rules. Critics of Israel argued that the pattern and the scale exceeded what those rules allow. Israeli officials and their supporters argued that Hamas built the battlefield that way on purpose, and that judging the campaign by the resulting images, without that context, inverts responsibility.
The politics that followed
In the months after November 2024 the war continued, the administration changed, and Sanders returned to the same tool. Later resolutions, aimed at different shipments, drew larger Democratic minorities and, on some measures, majorities of the Democratic caucus, while still failing on the floor because Republicans remained opposed. The November 2024 votes were an early marker of that movement, not its end. They showed both the durability of the alliance and the erosion of unanimity inside one party. A position that had been marginal in Congress at the start of the war could, a year later, claim nearly a fifth of the Senate and a substantial share of Democrats. It could not claim a majority of the chamber.
Public pressure and congressional policy continued to diverge. Demonstrations and advocacy did not stop. Neither did weapons transfers. Lawmakers who voted no described themselves as open to criticism of particular operations and still committed to the relationship. Lawmakers who voted yes described the relationship as in need of conditions it had not been given. Between them sat the practical question the resolutions could not answer: whether restricting a class of munitions would have reduced civilian harm, shortened the war, or altered Israeli strategy, or whether it would chiefly have signaled a breach without changing facts on the ground. Both camps asserted an answer. Neither could prove it from the vote alone.
The unresolved balance
Sanders did not come close to stopping the sales. He did compel colleagues to choose, in public, between interrupting specific transfers and allowing them to proceed. The overwhelming choice was to proceed. That choice reaffirmed a strategic judgment that has organized U.S. policy for decades: Israel remains a partner whose military capacity the United States is prepared to sustain, including in a war that has produced a civilian toll without modern precedent in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. It also left untouched the objection that made the resolutions possible. If alliance explains the supply of weapons, it does not by itself explain how Washington should respond when those weapons are used in a campaign associated with tens of thousands of deaths, mass displacement, and a humanitarian crisis that American officials themselves had called severe.
The debate is therefore not only about one package, or about one senator. It is about where support for an ally ends and accountability for the consequences of assistance begins. One view holds that the United States meets its responsibility by backing a partner under attack, pressing privately for restraint, and refusing to let congressional procedure become a wartime embargo. Another holds that responsibility requires visible conditions, and that continued transfers without them make the United States a participant in outcomes it says it deplores. The Senate, on November 20, 2024, chose the first view by margins of roughly four to one. The argument over whether that choice can hold, as casualty reports accumulate and as later Congresses revisit the same sales, was not on the ballot.
