Bernie Sanders rejects additional military aid for Israel
In a letter to Biden, the progressive senator slammed Israel’s “immoral” military approach to Gaza.
Sanders highlighted the human toll of the war, including the mass displacement, mounting deaths and “indiscriminate” bombing. “This constitutes not just a humanitarian cataclysm, but a mass atrocity,” the Jewish senator wrote.
“And it is being done with bombs and equipment produced and provided by the United States and heavily subsidized by American taxpayers. Tragically, we are complicit in this carnage.”
Biden is seeking more than $10bn in additional military aid to Israel, but Sanders called on him to withdraw that request. “This money would allow for the continuation of the Netanyahu government’s widespread, indiscriminate bombardment,” he said.
He also called on the Biden administration to back UN efforts to secure “an immediate humanitarian ceasefire”.
The senator, who ran for president in 2016 and 2020, has repeatedly asserted that there can be no ceasefire with Hamas, drawing the ire of many of his former staffers and supporters who have been advocating an end to the war.
“The only humanitarian ceasefire is a permanent ceasefire. It’s for the people, both innocent Palestinian and Israeli people,” Nusaiba Mubarak, who previously worked on Sanders’s outreach efforts to Arab and Muslim voters during the 2020 campaign, told Al Jazeera.