Bernie Sanders seeks to stop bombs to Israel

Michael F. Brown Power
28 March 2026

Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont was slow – more than 700 days slow – to criticize Israel’s bombardment of Gaza as a genocide.

Since then, he has continued to make Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu the focus of his ire, as if other Israeli leaders would no longer pursue similar occupation and apartheid policies subjecting Palestinians to inferior rights.

Yet Sanders, notwithstanding his failure to recognize Israel’s abusive policies extend much beyond Netanyahu, is again rightly pushing back against US weapons to Israel.

This time he is leading a US Senate effort to pass three “joint resolutions of disapproval” that would prevent the export of “22,000 new bombs” to Israel. He and Democratic colleagues can force a vote on the matter in the days ahead after the Trump administration declared an “emergency” and notified lawmakers it would bypass the US Congress to sell the bombs to the Israeli government.

A 19 March press statement from the office of Sanders asserted that the resolutions “would block the sale of nearly $658.8 million in offensive US weaponry to Israel amid President [Donald] Trump and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s illegal, premeditated and unconstitutional war with Iran.”

That war of aggression began on 28 February with the assassination of Ayatollah Ali Khamenei and the horrifying US attack killing well over 100 Iranian schoolgirls in Minab.

As I raised earlier this month, Ophir Falk, Netanyahu’s foreign policy adviser, wrongly maintained to CNN’s Erin Burnett that “from what I understand, those were Iranian missiles that misfired [in Minab] and there’s like about 30 percent of those missiles [that] are misfiring. So that’s not something strange. We saw that a number of times in Gaza,” attributing misfires there to Hamas and ignoring the fact that Israel’s criminal bombardments killed tens of thousands of Palestinian men, women and children.

President Trump spread the same lie about Minab despite clear evidence to the contrary.

On 7 March he told journalists on Air Force One that “in my opinion and based on what I’ve seen, that was done by Iran.” He then doubled down, stating, “They’re very inaccurate, as you know, with their munitions. They have no accuracy whatsoever. It was done by Iran.”

While all the evidence points to the US killing the Minab schoolgirls with Tomahawk missiles and not the Iranian military – or Israeli military – having done so, Sanders is correct when he points out bombs like the latest ones being considered for export to Israel are “directly implicated in tens of thousands of civilian deaths in Iran, Lebanon and Gaza.”

He tweeted, “Given the horrific destruction that Israel’s extremist government has wrought on Gaza, Iran and Lebanon, the last thing in the world American taxpayers need to do right now is to provide 22,000 new bombs to the Netanyahu government.”


Sanders’ emphasis on the “Netanyahu government” ignores the widespread support Israelis have given to Israel’s various wars since 2023.

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In fact, on Tuesday, David Noriega reported on MS NOW that polling put Israeli support for the war with Iran at 90 percent.

Noriega, however, appears to have misrepresented the situation by ignoring the existence of Palestinian citizens of Israel. The Israeli newspaper Haaretz reported earlier this month that “during the first week of the war, polls from the Israel Democracy Institute and the Institute for National Security Studies have found that over 90 percent of Jewish Israelis support it.”

The newspaper added, “The very low level of support among Arab Palestinian citizens brings the national average of support down to just over 80 percent.”

The INSS poll found 38 percent support among Palestinian citizens of Israel, an oddly high figure. Two weeks later, a second INSS poll found that support level had declined to 25.5 percent.

Yet it must be said that 78.5-82 percent overall Israeli support for the war is still extremely high. This is not simply Netanyahu’s war, but one widely backed by most Israelis even as Palestinian citizens of Israel roundly reject it.

Senate allies

Sanders is joined in the effort against the 22,000 bombs by Senators Chris Van Hollen of Maryland, Jeff Merkley of Oregon and Peter Welch of Vermont.

They are opposing $298 million for 5,000 “defense articles” related to 250-pound small-diameter bombs, $209 million for 10,000 500-pound bombs and $151.8 million for 12,000 1,000-pound bombs.

Van Hollen, who objects to any funding of this “illegal war” on the US side, joined Sanders in criticizing Trump’s effort to get additional bombs to Israel. Despite strong words in 2024 against Israel’s actions during the Gaza genocide, Van Hollen had nevertheless voted for further military aid to Israel.

This time, he seems to have had enough of Israel’s violent actions in the region.

“Trump not only disregarded Congressional authority to declare this war, he’s now bypassing Congress by invoking an emergency authority to supply additional bombs to this war, a crisis of his own making. Congress must use all the tools at our disposal to end Trump’s war, including stopping the transfer of over $658 million of taxpayer-funded bombs to the Netanyahu government.”


Merkley, like Sanders and Van Hollen, focused on the “Netanyahu government.” An ardent opponent of Trump’s war with Iran, he stated, “Donald Trump, working in lockstep with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, launched a reckless and unconstitutional war. I do not support sending more offensive weapons to the Netanyahu government.”

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Expressing alarm about the destruction these bombs will cause in Iran and Lebanon, Welch was the only one of the four not to mention the “Netanyahu government” in his press statement comment. “With the bombs already provided to Israel by American taxpayers, Israeli forces are unleashing a campaign of total war in Iran with the clear and deliberate intention to eviscerate Iran’s economy and society.”

Welch opposes “sleepwalking into another forever war,” the likes of which Trump promised to avoid during his 2024 presidential campaign.

Yet now there is talk of US ground troops in Iran and $200 billion more in US military spending for a country $39 trillion in debt.

Congressman Thomas Massie, a Republican representing part of Kentucky, said of the possible funding, “It begs the question, how long do they plan to be there? What are the goals? Is this the first $200 billion? Does this turn into a trillion?”

Trump, it should be remembered, is a businessman whose companies have filed for bankruptcy multiple times.

The competence of President Trump and his military henchmen is suspect as they appear to have been unprepared for Iran’s response to the 28 February attack by Israeli and US military forces. Trump even expressed shock that Iran retaliated against Gulf countries hosting US military bases. It’s as though the US thinks itself to be so powerful that those it intends to roll over can have no meaningful response.

For his part, Sanders, in putting forward his opposition to the bombs and Netanyahu, continues to cling to the “two-state solution” rather than recognizing this proposed outcome as the continuation of decades of ethnic cleansing of Palestinians. His vision on Palestinian rights, though seriously flawed, is quite correct in raising profound concerns about further US weapons to the Israeli military.


This is a juvenile administration headed by a president who casually says he will further bomb Iran “just for fun” and “just keep bombing our little hearts out” if unable to ensconce in power in Iran his chosen replacement leader.

Similarly, the immature but recklessly dangerous Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth has bragged, “We negotiate with bombs.”

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Such an administration and Pentagon should not receive an additional $200 billion in military funding and the Trump administration should be stopped from selling bombs to a genocidal ally such as Israel.

Trump and Hegseth are two of the most irresponsible people on the planet, yet they have charge of the world’s most powerful military and weapons. Netanyahu, of course, is a rival in irresponsibility. As Netanyahu has overseen the Gaza genocide since October 2023, Sanders is quite right that more such weapons should not end up in the hands of the Israeli military responsible for carrying out war crimes in the coastal territory.

For all the horror of the past 2.5 years, the Democratic senators’ efforts are expected to lose yet again this time around.

The question remains how much support Israel continues to lose from Democratic senators and at what point that party decides genocide and wars of aggression such as the current one against Iran are a red line – as most of their constituents have already concluded. With rare exceptions, Democrats continue to get precious little support from Republican colleagues.

The Senate, despite the efforts of the four senators, will not soon extricate Trump from the reckless path he insists on traversing.
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The problem with Bernie Sanders’s ‘it is genocide’ admission

By Ahmad Ibsais, First generation Palestinian American and law student.
21 Sep 2025

After almost two years of horrendous atrocities in Gaza, Senator Bernie Sanders finally recognised the genocide as a genocide. In an op-ed posted on his United States Senate website, he wrote: “The intent is clear. The conclusion is inescapable: Israel is committing genocide in Gaza.”

Like with other recent declarations – from the United Nations and the International Association of Genocide Scholars – this one came too late. But worse than that, it came in a highly problematic framework. Sanders chose to start his op-ed by essentially suggesting that “Hamas started it”. This not only amounts to victim-blaming but also erases eight decades of pillage, plunder, and ethnic cleansing.

Continue reading at: aljazeera.com/opinions/
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