Senator Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) warned the president Joe Biden will suffer politically until he changes course and stops sending military aid to Israel unconditionally.
During a Tuesday interview on MSNBCVermont progressives reiterated that the United States needed to put more pressure on Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s government to stop its bombing campaign and allow more humanitarian aid to reach Palestinians in the Gaza Strip.
Failure to do so, he added, would continue to damage Biden’s standing within the Democratic Party, especially among younger voters and voters of color, ahead of a November matchup against the Republican Party’s presumptive presidential nominee. Donald Trump.
“The polls are very clear: the Democratic base wants to stop funding Netanyahu’s war machine,” Sanders said in an interview with MSNBC’s Ana Cabrera on Tuesday.
“So if your question is, is this going to hurt the president unless he turns this around? Yes, that will happen,” he added.
Sanders said Netanyahu’s government has the right to go after Hamas after the brutal Oct. 7 attack on Israel, but that it “does not have the right to kill — to create a situation where they prevent humanitarian help comes in.”
“The result of this is that children are starving right now,” Sanders added. Do we want to be complicit in this? The answer in my eyes [and] and what the polls show us [is,] most Americans do not want to be complicit.”
Polls show that Americans have soured on Israel’s military campaign in Gaza in recent weeks. According to a Gallup poll, 55% of Americans disapprove of Israel’s actions, while only 36% approve, a significant drop in support since the country asked the same question in November.
On Monday, an Israeli bombardment in Gaza killed seven aid workers linked to World Central Kitchen, the charity founded by Washington, DC, chef José Andrés. Netanyahu called it an “unintentional attack” and said his government would investigate the incident.
“The Israeli government must stop this arbitrary killing. It must stop restricting humanitarian aid, stop killing civilians and aid workers, and stop using food as a weapon.” Andrés wrote on Xformerly Twitter.
Sanders called the incident a “horror” in his interview on MSNBC and said the US “should not give another cent to Israel to continue this terrible war against the Palestinian people.”
According to FiveThirtyEight, Biden’s approval rating is historically low for a sitting president, hovering around 39 percent. The president also faces a growing movement on the left who is voting “uncommitted” in this year’s Democratic presidential primaries as a way to protest Biden’s Israel policies. The activists behind the effort vow to deliver another embarrassing rebuke to Biden on Tuesday during the Wisconsin primary.
But Sanders said he will not link his disagreement with Biden over Israel to his desire to defeat Trump in November.
“I am going to do everything I can, despite my differences with the president over what is happening in Gaza, to ensure that Donald Trump is not elected president of the United States. That would be a horrific disaster for our country,” Sanders said on Tuesday.
