Sen. Bernie Sanders was the lone member of the Senate Democratic caucus to oppose advancing a $110.5 billion supplemental foreign aid measure on Wednesday, expressing opposition to the bill's unconditional military assistance for the Israeli government.
"I voted NO on the foreign aid supplemental bill today for one reason," Sanders (I-Vt.) said in a statement. "I do not believe that we should give the right-wing extremist Netanyahu government an additional $10.1 billion with no strings attached to continue their inhumane war against the Palestinian people."
"Israel has the absolute right to defend itself against the Hamas terrorists who attacked them on October 7," Sanders added. "They do not have the legal or moral right to kill thousands of innocent Palestinian men, women, and children."
In Common Dreams
Slate politics writer Alex Sammon wrote that "close watchers now expect AIPAC to spend at least $100 million in 2024 Democratic primaries, largely trained on eliminating incumbent Squad members from their seats."
Sammon said that Reps. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.), Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.), Rashida Tlaib (D-Mich.), Ayanna Pressley (D-Mass.), Cori Bush (D-Mo.), Jamaal Bowman (D-N.Y.), and Summer Lee (D-Pa.)—"the most outspoken and unapologetically leftist contingent of the Democratic Party in national office"—are among AIPAC's top targets.
"The price of defending apartheid keeps going up," quipped Palestinian American writer and political analyst Yousef Munayyer in response to the report.
In his last months, I believe it was given to him to raise his eyes and see a little higher—beyond the doomsday scenarios on his yellow legal pad: to sense that he had done what was given to him to accomplish; the rest was out of his hands. In a letter he sent to friends, he wrote, “I’ve always known that I work better under a deadline. It turns out that I live better under a deadline!”
That letter, which he posted in March, was a great step on his final journey. I believe it will stand as part of his legacy, a message about his own life, about what it means to be a responsible person, and the message of realism and encouragement he hoped to pass along. He described the risk he had undertaken in releasing the Pentagon Papers, and the unexpected results it had achieved, even contributing to the end of the Vietnam War. He was spared a lifetime in prison and allowed to spend the subsequent years attempting to alert the world to the perils of nuclear war. He regretted that his efforts to dismantle the Doomsday Machine had not shown better results. And yet, he wrote, “As I look back on the last sixty years of my life, I think there is no greater cause to which I could have dedicated my efforts.”