About two weeks ago I wrote to both of my Senators, Democrats Dick Durbin and Tammy Duckworth (Durbin is not seeking re-election this year), criticizing their votes for a bill blocking the sale of U.S. weapons and other aid to Israel, and asking why they have voted this way.
The bill, S. J. Resolution 32, was introduced by Bernie Sanders, and stipulated that the Senate would block military aid (comprising both military bulldozers and 1,000-pound bombs) to Israel. The bill was rejected by the Senate by a vote of 40-59, largely along party lines, with all Democrats (save seven: Richard Blumenthal of Connecticut, Chris Coons of Delaware, Catherine Cortez Masto of Nevada, John Fetterman of Pennsylvania, Kirsten Gillibrand of New York, Jacky Rosen of Nevada, and Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer of New York) voting to block aid. Note that the U.S. was selling the materiel to Israel, not giving it to them.
Both Senator Duckworth and Senator Durbin voted “yea” on the bill, meaning they favored blocking the aid to Israel. As I have consistently voted for both Senators in the past, I wanted them to know that I did not favor their votes, and I asked them to explain their positions. I haven’t yet heard from Duckworth, but here is Durbin’s response.
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Richard J. Durbin United States Senator
There’s not much of an explicit explanation save the disputed claim that there is not enough humanitarian assistance going to Gaza. Note Durbin’s words that “The humanitarian conditions in Gaza are appalling, unconscionable, and cruel.” “Cruel” implies deliberate malfeasance by Israel, supporting a “genocide” accusation. Durbin does not add that Hamas is partly responsible for reducing aid, although some sources argue that the reduction of needed aid is also due to “underfunding, crossing delays, operational restrictions, and general post-war chaos” (from Grok). To the extent that these factors delay needed aid, they must be ameliorated, and to the extent that Israel is responsible for restrictions of needed aid, they must do better.
As far as the 70% women and children killed, this figured has been retracted by Hamas (see below). It’s also misleading, as “children” are defined in this tally as humans under 18, and of course plenty of Hamas fighters are under 18. Overall, the proportion of women killed, according to the figure given below (from Hamas) varies from 30% to 50%, depending on age, but of fighting-age people (13-55), 72% of the fatalities are male. This is certainly not out of line for urban warfare.
John Spencer, who teaches urban warfare at West Point, has said the following:
Israel has taken extraordinary steps to limit civilian harm. It warns before attacks using text messages, phone calls, leaflets, and broadcasts. It opens safe corridors and pauses operations so civilians can leave combat areas. It tracks civilian presence down to the building level. I have seen missions delayed or canceled because children were nearby. I have seen Israeli troops come under fire and still be ordered not to shoot back because civilians might be harmed.
Israel has delivered more humanitarian aid to Gaza than any military in history has provided to an enemy population during wartime. More than 94,000 trucks carrying over 1.8 million tons of aid have entered the territory. Israel has supported hospitals, repaired water pipelines, increased access to clean water, and enabled over 36,000 patients to leave Gaza for treatment abroad.
The IDF has coordinated millions of vaccine doses, supplied fuel for hospitals and infrastructure, and facilitated the flow of food and medicine through the UN, aid groups, and private partners. The U.S.–Israeli Gaza Humanitarian Foundation alone has delivered more than 82 million meals—one to two million a day—while weakening Hamas’s control over aid. This is not genocide. It is responsible and historic mid-war humanitarian policy.
Maarten Boudry, in a critique of the “genocide” allegations called “They don’t believe it either”, takes issue with the 70% figure and cites sources for the data below, namely Hamas (neither Boudry nor Spencer are Jewish). Booudry:
Even according to Hamas’s own statistics, which do not distinguish between combatants and civilians and include many natural deaths, casualties are predominantly male and of fighting age, which is inconsistent with a policy of indiscriminate killing (Hamas initially tried to fool global opinion that the casualties of the Gaza war were “70 percent women and children,” but that claim collapsed under scrutiny and was then quietly retracted). The source of the plot below is here.
If you lived in NYC you’d be relieved if your idiot mayor and most reps aren’t actually sending your tax dollars directly to Hamas/Hezb/Al Qaida. I’m happy for that every day.
Good to bring in John Spencer – he’s a deeply impressive expert with no real dog in this fight but his defense of Israeli tactics is well worth listening to. He’s on lots of podcasts.
D.A.
NYC 🗽
That’s not much of an explanation, and it leads one to wonder whether members of Congress either don’t have the facts or whether they ignore them or distort them for their own purposes. Neither option is very comforting.
I, too, have written my senators on topics relating to Israel. Once I wrote to Senator Patty Murray, criticizing her for not attending Benjamin Netanyahu’s speech to Congress on July 24, 2024, when it was part of her job as president pro tempore of the Senate to oversee Netanyahu’s address. I wrote her again when she refused to attend President Trump’s State of the Union address this year; and for the same reason: it’s her job. I expect my Senator to do the job she was elected to do.
Did I get responses from the Senator? Yes. My letters got me added to her mailing list. I’m expecting a solicitation for a donation to her next campaign any day now.
But did she give you an explanation?
Regarding the Netanyahu speech, I got no explanation, but I may have gotten an acknowledgement of my letter. I sent my letter before the speech, asking her to reconsider her (well publicized) intention not to attend. I told her that it would be wrong as a Senate leader not to attend a major speech given by the leader of a U.S. ally,
Regarding her failure to attend Trump’s State of the Union, I got a letter in advance saying why she’s not attending. (By now, I was on her mailing list.) Here’s a quote from her letter: “I’m not going to dignify his lies and sit through that in person.” It was after receiving this letter that I sent her my letter saying that by not going she’s not doing her job.
A lobbyist used to say that long time legislators go from green, to ripe, to rotten. Although your examples are unsettling at best, I hope Senator Murray has been on a different path.
So, Durbin is just mouthing far-left talking points about Israel, that were probably collated by a staffer to produce his response. He has clearly demonstrated no ability or willingness to check these assertions for himself.
To paraphrase Doc Holliday, he’s no daisy…
Indeed, even Hamas doesn’t cling to the 70% women/children claim.
As a scientist I continue to be distressed that the discussion of the Gaza war is filled with superlatives and adjectives rather than data. That data shows that, for all of the attention devoted to it, it was a minor skirmish relative to conflicts in the Middle East and Africa over the past decade. I’ll quote myself from a post here a week ago.
The actual numbers out of Hamas (https://www.commentary.org/seth-mandel/hamas-debunks-the-genocide-narrative/):
A total of 68k deaths over two years of a war that was started by Hamas and ended when the hostages were returned:
– 10k natural causes
– ~24k fighters
– leaving ~34k civilian deaths from the war itself
Moreover total number of deaths from starvation is on the order of hundreds to a thousand.
These numbers are worth comparing with other armed conflicts in the Middle East and Africa over the past decade. Even now there are ~400-500k deaths in the latest round of the Sudanese civil war (started in 2023), to say nothing of Yemen (300k deaths), Tigray (~100k-600k), and of course we all know about Syria (~600k).
It is a remarkable coincidence that the net number of civilian deaths is comparable to the ~30k protestors killed by Iran in 36 hours in January.
Politicians usually tend to stake out positions that reflect the energy in their chosen parties. When states, like mine, are entirely controlled by one party, its entire political class tends to reflect issues and positions of importance to that party’s primary voters. A handful have the integrity to resist that pull, think Fetterman or Susan Collins, but most follow the easier path. Your state’s senators, like mine, are following the energy of young progressive voters who are pro-Palestinian and anti-Israel and who may not believe that harming Israel’s ability to defend itself is anti-Semitic. But it is. If I were to vote for either of my state’s senators after they voted to deny defensive armaments to Israel, I would be complicit with their votes. So I won’t since the defense of Israel is existential to me. But I’m a bit sad because I quite like one of the two.
It is clear to me that most of the Democrats in Congress and the senate have bought the Palestinian narrative of genocide. People who choose a narrative when the facts indicate otherwise do so for a reason. For some, like Omar, Tlaib etc. that reason is antisemitism. But for most of those politicians, `I believe that they or their aides have decided that this will bring them more votes—a matter of political expediency over principle.
I do not see how I could vote for such a person. And I have several friends who have voted the straight Democratic ticket their whole lives, who now tell me that they feel the same as I do. I don’t doubt that the politicians and their asides are aware of this. But they clearly feel that they gain more votes than they lose by following this narrative. At best, this makes them look spineless and cowardly; at worst, straight out evil. They should examine historical precedents and see how people who acted similarly in the past are judged by history.
You need to read between the lines to understand what Durbin is really saying, which is: “Now that there are more Muslims and young regressives than Jews in my state, I need those Muslim and young regressive votes more than I need Jewish votes. So to you and other Jewish voters who stand with Israel against barbaric Islamist aggression, don’t let the door hit you on your way out (of the Democrat party).”
I see he did not explain why he voted against selling arms to Israel. Instead he promoted his votes on providing humanitarian aid to Gaza. I live in Illinois and I am irritated he avoided the question you asked.
The advertising business long ago discovered the trick of creating subliminal associations. Following this method, campus pop-Leftists have for decades been repeating the words “apartheidt” and”Israel” together, to link the two terms in the minds of listeners who absorb words but don’t think much. Now, the pop-Left conditioners are repeating the words “Gaza”, “genocide”, and “Israel” together, in a similar reprogramming operation. This has succeeded in washing the brains of many easily conditioned Democrats, it appears.