Progressive leaders differ over Gaza cease-fire framing
hard to be talking about a permanent cease-fire, when we have one side being open about saying, ‘We don’t want a permanent cease-fire, we want to destroy Israel.’ ”
New England’s congressional delegation, stocked as it is with high-profile progressives, exemplifies the way the war in Gaza, where health officials say at least 16,000 people have been killed, has complicated the usual, easyto-define ideological coalitions. Liberal activists who usually have few criticisms for the likes of Sanders, an independent, or Democratic Senator Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts have been frustrated by both, while it has been other members of the delegation, like Democratic Representative Ayanna Pressley of Boston, who have more directly embraced the activists’ calls.
Sanders has been sharply critical of Israel’s government and the way it has waged war in Gaza, but his refusal to call for a cease-fire has drawn particular attention. He says he is determined to engage with the matter in its full complexity.
“There have been five wars between Hamas and Israel in the last 15 years. There’s been horrific tension in the region for 75 years,” said Sanders, one of nine Jewish senators. “Nobody has any simple solution to this. Believe me, I don’t.”
The divergence from swaths of the grass-roots left has engendered a feeling of almost betrayal among progressive activists who believe an immediate, permanent cease-fire, which requires an agreement by both sides, is the only way to stop the violence.
“What we need here is for our members of Congress to be clear in their public pressure,” said Beth Miller, the political director at Jewish Voice for Peace Action, an activist group that has led multiple protests in favor of a cease-fire. “Senator Sanders, Senator Warren, on so many issues are leading progressive voices . . . . For them to not be calling for this clearly to stop, to end, for there to be a lasting, lasting demand for this lasting cease-fire is very disappointing.”
But the debate is fraught and complex, and even some of the lawmakers who have called for a cease-fire say the differences in their views are in reality not so wide, nor so stark.
“[Sanders] and I have talked repeatedly since Oct. 7, and I know that he and I want the same things,” said Representative Becca Balint of Vermont, who called for a “true negotiated cease-fire” last month. “We’re all trying to find a way forward to get to lasting peace in the region, and we’re getting awfully hung up on specific words. I don’t think it’s helping the movement for peace and security and a two-state solution.”
Warren supported the temporary cease-fire that began on Nov. 24 and called for it to be “extended as long as possible,” but she has used more cautious language than activists’ blunt calls for a permanent cease-fire. In an interview with the Globe last week, Warren did not answer directly when asked if there was a distinction between what she was calling for and the calls for an indefinite cease-fire.
“I can only describe what I’m calling for. This cease-fire cannot result in a return to the status quo,” Warren said. When the temporary cease-fire expired, she urged parties to resume it.
To underscore the complexity — or muddle — of the matter, a tracker of lawmakers calling for a cease-fire run by the Working Families Party and Jewish Voice for Peace Action counts Warren, but some of her progressive critics still want her to do more.
Sanders, like Warren, has repeatedly called for Israel to stop what he calls its “indiscriminate bombing,” which has damaged nearly 100,000 buildings, according to the BBC, and he has called for humanitarian pauses to get aid into Gaza. In a floor speech last week, he supported and laid out conditions on US military aid to Israel including a “significant” pause in military operations and a requirement that Israel work toward a twostate solution.
“I do not think we should be appropriating $10.1 billion for the right-wing, extremist [Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin] Netanyahu government to continue its current military approach,” Sanders said in a speech Monday.
Other Democratic members of the delegation have shared the activists’ exact calls. Pressley called for an “immediate ceasefire” on Oct. 16 and joined a group of colleagues in announcing a nonbinding resolution urging the Biden administration to immediately call for a cease-fire that has become some progressives’ litmus test. Representative Jim McGovern of Worcester called for a cease-fire a day later.
In recent weeks, the two Democrats in Vermont’s congressional delegation announced support for a cease-fire. Balint’s call drew considerable attention because she was, according to her office, the first Jewish member of Congress to join such demands. She has not, however, signed onto the ceasefire resolution in Congress.
“I keep hearing from folks on both sides that they’re not happy with me,” Balint said. “So many of us are saying similar things, that we want the bombing to end, that we want the violence to stop.”
Last week, Senator Peter Welch of Vermont called for an “indefinite cease-fire.”
Both Sanders’ and Warren’s approaches have spurred frustration among some of their supporters and former staffers, who have confronted them with open letters. Protesters have occupied Sanders’ office, demonstrated outside Warren’s home, and confronted Warren in a restaurant.
“It’s baffling how long it has taken for her to do the bare minimum,” said Juliana Amin, Warren’s Iowa organizing director during her 2020 presidential run, as she pointed out that Warren did not express support for a temporary cease-fire until an agreement was already reached. Warren had previously called for “humanitarian pauses.”
Last week, outside the White House, protesters on a hunger strike stood in the frigid air in front of fake tea lights illuminating a banner dabbed with drops of blood-red paint, and read the names of some of the thousands killed in Gaza since Oct. 7.
One of the hunger strikers, New York Assemblyman Zohran Mamdani, who represents part of Queens, said he was mystified that Sanders had not joined their calls.
“I can’t make sense of it. I wish I could,” Mamdani said. “A cease-fire has legal and political implications that the word ‘peace’ does not, that the words ‘stop the bombing’ do not.”
Other groups that are calling for a cease-fire, however, say there isn’t too much daylight between what they want and what Sanders wants.
“They want people to say that word, but I think it’s also probably more politically strategic to get more people on board with just stopping the bombing, stopping the war,” said Matt Duss, a former Sanders adviser who is now the executive vice president at the left-leaning Center for International Policy.
In his interview, Sanders suggested he will continue to steer clear of calling for a “cease-fire” even as he presses for peace.
“I think 90 percent of the people who are calling for a cease-fire are doing it for exactly the right reasons,” Sanders said. “But I do want to say there is a small minority, maybe less than 10 percent, who are not motivated by this — who really do want to see Israel destroyed and may be sympathetic with Hamas. They have the right to their point of view, that is not my point of view.”