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.
It's wild to me that Americans are suddenly playing moral police on this. America sells weapons to just about every dictatorship or oppressive government, to this day. Including Saudis, the ones who blew up the trade center. It seems hypocritical how hard Sanders and others are going, demanding the stop of weapons sales to just Israel. Why not the rest of the world?
Have to start somewhere, our military industrial complex isn't going to be stopped all at once. And the genociders are the most obvious evil at the moment.
It’s because the issue is popular/in the news a bunch
We're not the moral police. There are many Americans who are diehard pro-genocide. There are others that are implicitly pro-genocide. They just don't hang out on Lemmy. Also, our media is focused on Israel right now. Most Americans don't know what our military is doing elsewhere in the world and the media doesn't cover it. It's hard for a populist politician to take a stand against our military industrial complex when the population doesn't know what that Complex is doing. That industry fights back.
SeCOnD aMEndMeNt!