After 22 months of Israel’s war on Palestinians in Gaza, something changed in the last week.
Israeli human rights groups and scholars for the first time called the bombardment and siege of the Palestinian territory a genocide. The governments of France, the United Kingdom, and Canada have all signaled they are prepared to join the vast majority of the world’s nations in recognizing Palestinian statehood. A majority of Senate Democrats voted last week in favor of blocking the U.S. from selling weapons to Israel, an historic first. Even the right-wing lawmaker Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, R-Ga., now calls Israel’s actions a genocide, the first Republican lawmaker to do so.
A recent Gallup poll showed that just 32 percent of Americans approve of Israel’s military action in Gaza: a new low. The majority of Americans — 60 percent — disapprove of the offensive, and, for the first time, a majority said they disapprove of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. Such shifting attitudes were most prominent among younger Americans.
These recent swings have yet to materialize into policies that exert actual pressure on Israel and save Palestinian lives. Israel’s bombing campaign in Gaza continues unabated, with the death toll topping 60,000 last week — though the number is likely 40 percent higher, according to a Lancet study. A slight loosening of Israel’s aid blockade has done little to ease famine conditions. At least 175 people — 92 children and 82 adults — have died of hunger in Gaza in recent weeks; killings continue near the few available aid sites; and airdrops have been criticized ineffective, expensive, and dangerous, resulting in the death of one Palestinian on the ground and injuries for at least a dozen others.
Yet there is a growing belief among organizers and advocates that a new groundswell of outrage may translate into lasting consequences for U.S. foreign policy on Israel and Palestine.
“It’s too late obviously to impact policy in a way that would save Palestinian lives now,” said Tariq Kenney-Shawa, a U.S. policy fellow at Al-Shabaka, who is Palestinian and whose family is from Gaza. “But I think that the picture the current moment paints for a future of a pro-Palestine movement in the U.S. is significant.”
A Historic Senate Vote
A major flashpoint of the past week in U.S politics was a vote in the Senate on a pair of resolutions, authored by Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt.,to block sales of certain U.S. weapons to Israel. Since November, Sanders has introduced several similar resolutions. With a Republican-controlled Senate, Sanders’s resolutions have largely been symbolic chances for lawmakers to signal to voters and lobbies where they stand on Palestine and Israel.
One of the recent resolutions aimed to bar the sale of more than $675.7 million worth of bombs — including hundreds of MK 83 1,000-pound bombs and BLU-110A/B General Purpose 1,000-pound bombs — as well as block the sale of tens of thousands of automatic assault rifles.
With tallies of 27-70 and 24-73, the resolutions failed to pass the Senate. But they drew the largest showing of support for blocking weapons deals with Israel so far. Among the new Democrats who joined in the vote were ranking members Sen. Jeanne Shaheen of New Hampshire (Foreign Relations Committee), Sen. Jack Reed of Rhode Island (Armed Services), and Sen. Patty Murray of Washington (Appropriations). Another supporter was Georgia Sen. Jon Ossoff, who had voted in favor of a similar resolution in November but opposed another arms embargo attempt in April after considerable pushback from the powerful lobby American Israel Public Affairs Committee.
In his vote to prohibit assault rifle sales, Ossoff cited “the extreme mass deprivation of civilians in Gaza, including the intolerable starvation of children, that have resulted from the policies” of Israel. This stood out to Lara Friedman, president of the Foundation for Middle East Peace, especially since Ossoff is up for reelection next year amid the AIPAC pressure.
Friedman and her organization have monitored statements from members of Congress on issues related to Israel and Palestine since 2017. Although many lawmakers doubled down on their support for Israel last week and blamed the lack of aid on Hamas, she noticed a shift in the number of lawmakers making statements of support for Palestinians. Many, she said, were voicing their disgust at Israel’s starvation policy. Whether they would back up their statements with votes on the floor to pressure Israel, however, remains in question.
When Friedman previously worked as a lobbyist advocating for the human rights of Palestinians, she said there was an open joke about the futility of trying to sway Hill lawmakers on the issue. Behind closed doors, she said, members of Congress would tell her and her colleagues: “I agree with you on everything you’re saying, thank you so much for your doing, but don’t ask me to do anything unless you can get my constituents to defend me because otherwise AIPAC will take me down.”
The recent Senate votes may signal a shift.
“Is it that the members are suddenly more courageous, or do they suddenly feel like somebody’s got their back more and have more room to maneuver? Maybe it’s a combination,” Friedman said. “Something is changing in the calculation, and that is only good.”
Matt Duss, executive vice president at the Center for International Policy and a former foreign policy adviser for Sanders, has been in touch with congressional offices where staffers are reporting an uptick in constituents calling about Israel’s starvation campaign in Gaza.
Behind some of that pressure has been IfNotNow, a Jewish-led group that organizes within the American Jewish community against U.S. support for Israel’s occupation of Gaza and the West Bank.
In the 24 hours leading up the weapons Senate vote, IfNotNow interim executive director Morriah Kaplan said her group organized several thousand people to send letters to Senate offices in support of the resolutions.
“There’s possibility that Democratic lawmakers are also willing to step out against the AIPAC party line in a way that I think could fundamentally realign some of the politics around this issue,” Kaplan said. “And I hope that makes the Israeli government very nervous.”
Combating Israel’s Propaganda
There is tension for pro-Palestinian organizers and advocates grateful to see what feels like a wave of new support for Palestine within the U.S. and in other Western nations, while also questioning why it took so long.
“As someone who’s been a witness for 22 months of livestreamed genocide every day, what is it that made it a tipping point?” Friedman said. “I would have thought that the pictures of babies and kids killed with bombs, bullets, and deprivation of medical care over the past 22 months would have done it — it wasn’t.”
She and others pointed to the images of starvation in Gaza — emaciated babies, mothers holding their dying children, aid-seekers running from gunfire at aid sites laced with barbed wire — has forced a different kind of reckoning.
“There’s a realization that Israel is in fact intending to harm civilians.”
“Before, you could obfuscate. You could say, ‘There were 80 civilians killed because they wanted to go after one Hamas guy,’ or ‘Hamas is using human shields and hiding in tunnels behind civilians,’” said Khaled Elgindy, a visiting scholar at Georgetown University’s Center for Contemporary Arab Studies who helped negotiate deals between Palestinian leadership and Israel in the past. “But that obfuscation is no longer feasible. There’s a realization that Israel is in fact intending to harm civilians. It’s taken literally starved babies, babies dying of hunger to get to this point. And that is a very sobering concept if you’ve spent the last two years telling yourself that Israel is doing its best to minimize civilian harm.”
The mainstream news organizations that have repeatedly ran Israeli disinformation around aid shortages for months leading up to the current famine in Gaza are now publishing front-page stories and television broadcasts featuring images of starving Palestinians. Such images even drew sympathetic comments from President Donald Trump, who has a long record of dehumanizing Palestinians.
The images are circulating widely, perhaps reaching Americans who could previously overlook the war’s human toll. Powerful images have a history of shifting perspectives, such as an image of the drowned Syrian boy Alan Kurdi lying dead on a Mediterranean Sea beach amid the Syrian civil war, a photograph of children running from a U.S. napalm strike on Trảng Bàng village during the Vietnam War, and pictures of the dead and malnourished survivors at Nazi death camps.
“Images that are coming out of Gaza right now, those are reminiscent of the Holocaust,” Al-Shabaka’s Kenney-Shawa said. “Moments like that hold a lot of space in the American psyche.”
A Bigger Umbrella
Advocates and organizers say there must be accountability for Democratic leaders, such as President Joe Biden and Secretary of State Antony Blinken, for their role in creating the conditions that have allowed the genocide to devolve to this point of mass starvation. But those who spoke with The Intercept were in favor of postponing such reckoning for a big-tent approach. Building a larger coalition, they say, will be more fruitful in getting aid to starving Palestinians, halting the war in Gaza, and ending U.S. support for Israel.
“There’s a very desperate situation on the ground, there is a huge imbalance of power, and you need as many people as you can involved in pushing in the right direction,” said Yousef Munayyer, head of the Palestine/Israel Program at Arab Center Washington DC and former executive director of the U.S. Campaign for Palestinian Rights.
On top of the billions in taxpayer money earmarked for Israel to buy new weapons, the U.S. government each year sends military weapons, vehicles, and munitions from existing American military stockpiles to the Israeli military — typically with the approval of Congress. The U.S. also helps finance Israel’s own domestic arms manufacturing industry. Munayyer and others hope this new groundswell might pressure legislators to end such unchecked financing of Israel and put sanctions on the country’s military leaders.
Other activists urged those who have newly taken up the pro-Palestine cause to call their elected representatives; protest arms transfers at ports; and embrace the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions movement, a Palestinian-led campaign seeking to halt financial support for corporations and institutions complicit in Israel’s apartheid and genocide.
Duss, of Center for International Policy, said he was familiar with several former members of the Biden administration who are using their credibility and influence to pressure elected officials around Gaza. But he was disappointed at how few are doing so and called for more action from his colleagues. “Successful movements don’t scold people for being late, they welcome converts — that’s just successful politics,” he said.
“We may reasonably ask, what took you so long?” he said. “But we need to make it attractive for people to join this movement and to take the right position, even if they’re doing so belatedly.”
IfNotNow’s Kaplan said that she and other organizers have reported shifts in conversations with family members who previously had doubled down on supporting Israel after Hamas’s October 7 attack. These people, she said, are now more willing to break from their unconditional support for the Israeli government. She hopes those conversations spark a longer-term reckoning within the American Jewish community, but her group’s current priority is pushing for an immediate end to the genocide in Gaza.
“We can’t afford to push people away who are joining us for the first time now,” Kaplan said. “Those who are just now joining us have a responsibility to do everything that they can and take the most courageous action that they can to leverage the power they have to end the genocide. Right now, we need to embrace them when they want to join us. It’s our responsibility to do so if we actually want to win and if we actually want to build our power.”
Elections and Beyond
While Munayyer applauded the growing number of votes in the Senate as an important sign of progress, he also said it was “insufficient” considering how many Democrats continue to support arming Israel. The vote, however, can serve as a record for Americans to consider in future elections, exposing a disconnect between elected officials and their constituencies.
“You have half the Senate Democrats still voting to support weapons to Israel even though upwards of 80 percent of Democrats in polls oppose what Israel is doing in Gaza,” he said. “It exposes that these senators are not even representing their constituents.”
A chasm between Democratic lawmakers and their constituents on Israel and Palestine is nothing new, said Foundation for Middle East Peace’s Friedman. But what’s novel is that progressives are no longer willing to make exceptions for Israel and are noticing the ways attacks on the pro-Palestine movement intersects with campaigns against free speech, racial justice, LGBTQ+ communities, and other efforts to curtail the rights of Americans, such as with the detentions of Columbia University graduate Mahmoud Khalil and Tufts student Rümeysa Öztürk.
And this moment of outrage around Gaza may actually spell consequences for Democratic lawmakers who continue to unconditionally support Israel.
“There’s only been costs for holding up Palestinian lives as valuable.”
“The problem with U.S. policy toward Israel and Palestine is that there’s only been costs for holding up Palestinian lives as valuable,” Duss said. “There need to be cost imposed from the other side now, as well, and I think that’s happening. That’s part of what’s changing the equation.”
Experts and advocates point to the New York City mayoral primary victory of Zohran Mamdani as a sign of a shifting base among young voters. Mamdani is an outspoken critic of Israel, decrying its offensive in Gaza as a genocide, voicing support for the BDS movement, and pledging to arrest Netanyahu if he were to visit New York in response to war crime warrants from the International Criminal Court. Mamdani outlasted attacks from former Gov. Andrew Cuomo, who campaigned by conflating anti-Zionism with attacks on Jews. With Mamdani’s decisive victory and a new poll showing his popularity among Jewish voters in New York, there are already signs the Democratic Party is accordingly adjusting.
“That does show us is that come next presidential election, a smart Democratic candidate would take into account the fact that a majority of Democrats see what Israel is doing as genocide, and factor that into their thinking of how to message on Israel–Palestine,” Kenney-Shawa said.
With eyes ahead to the 2028 election, Munayyer likened the lead-up to that election to the 2008 Democratic primary in which then-Illinois Sen. Barack Obama distinguished himself from then-New York Sen. Hillary Clinton by reminding voters he had long been a critic of the Iraq War while Clinton had voted in Congress to authorize the U.S. invasion of Iraq. Obama’s opponent in the general election, Sen. John McCain, was a staunch supporter of the war.
The growing support for Palestine amid Israel’s genocide in Gaza particularly among younger voters mirrors other key political shifts after 9/11 or the Arab Spring, Kenney-Shawa said.
“That’s what’s extremely important because, in five, 10, 15, 20 years down the line, no longer is Israel kind of this untouchable subject in U.S. politics,” Kenney-Shawa said, “where you kind of can’t really talk about it or its political suicide to be supportive of Palestinians or critical of Israel.”
How Will Israel Respond?
It’s unclear how Netanyahu will respond to the current pressure. He has prolonged Israel’s military campaign in Gaza to maintain power by satisfying his right-wing, religious nationalist coalition, which includes leaders like Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich and National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir, who have been calling for the mass displacement of Palestinians and the establishment of Jewish settlements in Gaza. But Munayyer pointed out that with Israeli’s Parliament on break until October, Netanyahu is presented with a window to act on ending the genocide with little immediate political blowback.
Netanyahu, however, appears to be doubling down. Reports suggest that the Israeli government plans to expand its operations in Gaza, pursuing a full occupation of the Strip. This spurred some 600 former Israeli security officials to write to Trump on Monday, demanding he end the war in Gaza. The officials, including former heads of Mossad and Israel’s military, said “that Hamas no longer poses a strategic threat to Israel,” and asked Trump to “steer Prime Minister Netanyahu and his government in the right direction” in order to “end the war, return the hostages, stop the suffering.” Israel had already said it achieved its goal of dismantling Hamas’s military last September. In the letter, the officials added that the return of the remaining hostages captured by Hamas on October 7 can only come through a deal and not extended fighting.
Outside the U.S., pressure is also mounting from the other European countries that are calling on the European Union to halt trade to Israel over its starvation campaign. The EU, Israel’s main trading partner, is also considering a suspension of its research funds to Israel.
The Hague Group, a bloc of countries founded in January, met in Bogotá, Colombia, last month, to strategize how to pressure Israel into ending the genocide. At the conference, 13 countries pledged to block weapons transfers to Israel, including a ban on allowing their ports to be used by vessels carrying arms meant for Israel; review public contracts to prevent funds from supporting unlawful occupation of Palestinian land; support war crimes investigations of bodies such as the ICC and the International Court of Justice; and support universal jurisdiction, which allows for the prosecution of suspected war criminals in a third-party country’s judicial system, even if the crimes were committed in another jurisdiction, such as in the occupied Palestinian territories.
Advocates in the U.S., however, don’t expect any such pressure from its government in the near term, despite the escalating outrage. Both the Biden and Trump administrations have routinely allowed the Israeli government latitude to make adjustments to its military campaign to ease public pressure. In fact, the Trump administration last week sanctioned the Palestinian Authority, the government body that rules over the occupied West Bank, due to its efforts to hold Israel accountable for alleged war crimes. Members of Congress have recently pushed for legislation to do the same against South Africa for its role in the genocide case against Israel in the U.N.’s top court.
Throughout the past 22 months, there have been various moments of increased attention on Gaza, from the killing of World Central Kitchen aid workers last April, the “All Eyes on Rafah” campaign as Israel began its bombardment of southern Gaza, or when Israel broke its ceasefire agreement in March. Those moments passed with officials doing little to change the conditions for Palestinians in Gaza.
But each moment is a part of a longer arc of change, Kaplan said. Next comes the challenge of translating such fever-pitch moments into something lasting.
“I’ve been working on this issue for 15 years and I can’t count the number of times when it felt like we’re at a tipping point and that something big is going to change and then it doesn’t,” Kaplan said. “And so I don’t really view moments in that way — I think we just have to keep at it, and I think organizing is how we win.”
(Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by PostX News and is published from a syndicated feed.)
