By: Kevin McCallum; Seven Days

In April, when U.S. Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) stepped up to the microphone on the Senate floor to denounce Israel’s war in Gaza, he brought along visual aids.

On his right was a large photograph of an infant swaddled in a white blanket, with a face gaunt from hunger. On his left, an image of a disheveled young girl on a hospital bed, her arms as thin as twigs.

“What is happening right now in Gaza is horrendous, it is inhumane, and it is a gross violation of American and international law,” Sanders thundered.

When Sanders stepped up to the same Senate dais last week, he came without photos. Instead, he used words to paint a picture of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu as a war criminal.

With prosecutorial precision and moral indignation, Sanders described the devastation of Gaza’s people, institutions and infrastructure in the seven months since Israel began military operations in response to the October 7 surprise attack by Hamas fighters. He argued that Karim Khan, the chief prosecutor for the International Criminal Court, was right to pursue war crimes charges against the leaders of Hamas and Israel for their atrocities.

Israel, Sanders said, had prevented humanitarian aid from reaching the starving citizens of Gaza, where famine, disease and a lack of medical care has killed thousands of civilians. Israel’s bombing campaign has killed tens of thousands more.

“People may be uncomfortable to see the prime minister of Israel charged with war crimes, but let us take a hard look at what he has done,” Sanders intoned.

With that, Vermont’s 82-year-old senior senator and former presidential candidate once again positioned himself in the vanguard of the left’s increasingly fierce opposition to Israel’s conduct of the war in Gaza.

Sanders, who is Jewish, has become the U.S. Senate’s loudest and most prominent critic of the Israeli government, using his position to demand immediate measures to ease the suffering of Palestinian civilians. His recent speech used language that goes further than liberal lawmakers — including Vermont Democrats U.S. Sen. Peter Welch and Rep. Becca Balint — have been willing to go. Welch and Balint have called for a ceasefire and more aid to civilians, but neither has called Netanyahu a war criminal. And Sanders’ comments put him at odds with President Joe Biden, who has described the International Criminal Court’s prosecution of Netanyahu as “outrageous.”

“Let me be clear: We reject the ICC’s application for arrest warrants against Israeli leaders,” Biden said last week.

Joshua Green, a Bloomberg journalist and author who has written extensively about Sanders, told Seven Days in an email, “I think Sanders’s outspokenness about the war on Gaza highlights how foreign policy, not economics, has become the new fissure point in Democratic politics.”

Those who know him say Sanders’ stance is consistent with his history of calling out injustice with the kind of clarity that others eventually follow.

“I’m sure he’s frustrated,” said Peter Clavelle, a longtime political ally who succeeded Sanders as mayor of Burlington in the 1980s. “But I also believe his actions are bringing others along. He is speaking with such force that it’s hard to discount what he is saying.”

The fact that Sanders is Jewish and spent time on a kibbutz in Haifa in his twenties gives him a unique ability to call attention to the plight of Palestinians, Clavelle said.

“Nobody is going to accuse Bernie of antisemitism,” Clavelle said. “As a Jewish senator whose father’s family was wiped out by the Holocaust, I think Bernie is … inoculated from that.”

Sanders’ rhetoric has evolved during this latest eruption of violence in the Middle East. Shortly after the October 7 Hamas attack in which its soldiers killed 1,200 people and took 250 hostages, Sanders was vocal about Israel’s right to defend itself. But he was also one of the first U.S. lawmakers to urge the country to use restraint in its response.

“The United States has rightly offered solidarity and support to Israel in responding to Hamas’ attack,” the senator wrote in a statement on October 11. “But we must also insist on restraint from Israeli forces attacking Gaza and work to secure UN humanitarian access.”

By November, Sanders was taking flak from the left for his refusal to call for a permanent ceasefire, something Balint and Welch both eventually supported. Sanders argued instead that Hamas could not be trusted to uphold one and called for a “humanitarian pause,” a weeklong version of which took place at the end of November.

Sanders’ position confounded supporters, who argued that he was undermining efforts for a permanent ceasefire. More than 300 former Sanders staffers and Democratic National Committee delegates publicly urged him to call for one.

He didn’t then, but Sanders did increase pressure on the White House. In a December 12 letter, Sanders urged President Biden to withhold $10.1 billion in military aid to Israel, arguing that the Netanyahu government’s military offensive in Gaza was “being conducted in a deeply immoral way.”

Sanders called on Biden to restrict U.S. military aid to Israel to defensive weapons and to support the United Nations’ push for “an immediate humanitarian ceasefire, the unconditional release of all hostages, and full humanitarian access” to Gaza.

Sanders sharpened his line of attack in January. He forced a floor vote on whether the Senate should invoke the 1961 Foreign Assistance Act. Often referred to as the Leahy Law after amendments pushed by retired Vermont senator Patrick Leahy, the act says foreign aid cannot be given to countries that engage in a “consistent pattern of gross violations of internationally recognized human rights.”

Sanders argued that it made sense to ask the U.S. State Department to review whether Israel was guilty of human rights violations; Welch was among the supporters of the resolution. Some moderate Democrats and all Republicans voted against the measure, and Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) dismissed Sanders’ proposal as “little more than performative left-wing politics.”

On April 23, Sanders voted against a $95 billion package to provide aid and ammunition to Israel and Ukraine that passed in the U.S. Senate and has since become law.

In an interview with Seven Days on Tuesday, Sanders said he voted against the aid after it became clear Netanyahu was defying calls for restraint and was creating an unprecedented humanitarian disaster.

“If you look at the totality of what’s going on, it is not a war against Hamas; it is a war against the Palestinian people,” Sanders said.

The U.S. is complicit in the death and devastation in Gaza, Sanders said, because of its continued willingness to supply Israel with arms. He said he has focused more on conditioning or restricting such aid than on calls for a permanent ceasefire because that’s the most effective way for the U.S. to exert the leverage necessary to end the war.

“This is being done with your tax dollars,” Sanders said. “That’s what upsets me very, very much.”

By focusing on how Israel is using American-made weapons in attacks that kill civilians, Sanders has helped turn the tide of international opinion against the war, said Kathy Shapiro, a Middlesex resident and member of the group Jewish Voice for Peace.

“The way he has stood up on the Senate floor since October 7 over and over and over again is momentous,” she said. “It’s in character for him, and it’s reflective of the horrors of what is going on in Gaza in the name of the Jewish people. All of this is making a difference.”

The mantra “Israel has a right to defend itself” has slowly been replaced by a chorus of voices critical of the war, in Congress and abroad, Shapiro said. Last week, the International Court of Justice in the Hague ordered Israel to cease its offensive in the southern Gaza city of Rafah. Other countries have cut diplomatic ties with Israel, while Norway, Ireland and Spain have formally recognized a Palestinian state. The symbolic move has only increased Israel’s international isolation.

A second local group, Jewish Action Vermont!, is more conflicted about Sanders’ rhetoric and policy positions. Burlington resident Joanna Grossman said the group was “deeply disappointed” by Sanders’ vote against the $95 billion aid package, which Welch also opposed due to the aid to Israel.

Members of her organization strongly support Israel’s right to exist, she said, although many have a hard time supporting its current leadership. Part of the challenge is that most Americans, including Sanders, “simply do not understand what it is like to live in close proximity to people regularly training to kill you,” Grossman added.

She noted, however, that Sanders has always been careful to criticize the current leadership of Israel and not its people. “I personally appreciate how Bernie specifically has held nuance in this conflict, not reducing himself to rhetoric or blaming all Jews or Israelis for the tragedies unfolding,” she wrote in an email.

Sanders has gone out of his way to single out the “extreme right-wing” members of Israel’s government that is “increasingly dominated by religious fundamentalists.” In his speech last week, he called it hypocritical for the U.S. to support war crimes charges against Russian President Vladimir Putin for his invasion of Ukraine but to question the International Criminal Court’s decision when it involves a close ally.

Neither the U.S. nor Israel is among the 124 nations that recognize the authority of the court.

Sanders has supported the prosecution in the ICC of three Hamas leaders, as well as of Netanyahu and Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant. With the unanimous backing of an international panel of legal experts, the ICC prosecutor accused the Israeli leaders of using starvation as a weapon of war and of intentional attacks on civilians.

“It is in times like these that we most need international law,” Sanders said in his Senate speech last week. “Without it we will have an even more violent world where might makes right and war criminals can act with impunity.”

To make his case, Sanders rattled off a litany of grim statistics about the conflict in Gaza: more than 35,000 people killed and 800,000 injured; more than 250 aid workers killed; 1.7 million people driven from their homes; and more than 60 percent of the housing stock in Gaza damaged or destroyed.

Schools and hospitals have been flattened. Power, water and sanitation systems are in ruins. Raw sewage flows in the streets, spreading disease.

“Now, if that’s not an attack on civilians, I don’t know what is,” Sanders said.

Clavelle, who visited Gaza in the 1990s, said it can be difficult for Americans to imagine the suffering in Gaza. Some 2.2 million people live crammed into a “godforsaken” space a few miles wide and about the length of the stretch between Burlington and St. Albans, he noted.

Sanders has made a career of standing up for the powerless, Clavelle said, so it should be no surprise that he’s speaking for some of the most powerless people on the planet.

“I’m proud of him for providing a moral compass for this country,” Clavelle said.