Bernie Sanders said Monday that he will force a vote later this week on legislation to block the sale of nearly half a billion dollars worth of bombs and bulldozers to the Israeli military, setting up a New York moment that will test how far support for Israel has eroded inside the Democratic Party.
Sanders said the measure would stop the transfer of bombs and bulldozers to Israel, and he framed the fight in the starkest possible terms. “This week, I will be forcing a vote on legislation to block the sale of nearly half a billion dollars worth of bombs and bulldozers to the Israeli military,” he said. “The extremist Netanyahu government that has committed genocide in Gaza does not need more military support from American taxpayers.”
The vote is unlikely to pass in the Republican-controlled Senate, but it will show how many Democrats are still willing to back military aid to Israel after nearly two years of war in Gaza. A majority of Senate Democrats backed a similar Sanders bill in 2025, but it still failed in a 27-70 vote last July, underscoring how wide the gap remains between rising pressure inside the party and the chamber’s broader resistance.
The timing matters because support for Israel in American public opinion has continued to soften, especially among Democrats and younger voters. A Gallup poll in February suggested that only 46 per cent of Americans had favourable views of Israel, and just 17 percent of Democratic respondents said they sympathised more with Israelis than Palestinians. Sanders’ vote will land against that backdrop and force lawmakers to choose whether to align with the party’s changing mood or with long-standing security commitments.
The scale of US backing also hangs over the debate. The United States provided Israel with more than $21bn in military aid in the first two years of the war on Gaza, even as the conflict deepened divisions in Washington over how far support should go. That history gives the coming vote weight beyond the narrow resolution itself: it is a check on whether Democrats are willing to keep writing blank checks after a costly war and a year of mounting public skepticism.
On the same day Sanders moved, J Street called for the first time for phasing out US aid to the Israeli military. The group said “The war in Gaza, rising extremist Jewish terror in the West Bank and the US-Israel war with Iran have highlighted the need for a fundamental reassessment of the US-Israel security relationship.” That is a sharper stance than the group has taken before, and it signals how much pressure the issue is putting on pro-Israel advocacy in the United States.
The friction is hard to miss: Sanders is trying to block weapons sales in a chamber that will probably reject him, while even a major lobbying group that has long defended the relationship is now calling for a rethink. The vote later this week will not change US policy on its own, but it will measure how much political space remains for unconditional support for Israel inside the Democratic Party — and how much of that space has already disappeared.
