The Conflict Over Israel Facing Jewish Senators

I’m wondering, should we, as Jews, be upset that among those who voted in favor of this past week’s US Senate resolutions to ban the shipment of certain weapons to Israel, that there were three Jewish senators on that list?

Sens. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) and Brian Schatz (D-HI) voted for both of the resolutions (one to ban the shipment of assault rifles and the other the shipment of military hardware) while Sen. John Ossoff (D-GA) voted in favor of just the first one.

Should that bother us? Frankly, I think it should and it amazes me how far some have strayed from their roots and upbringing.

Take Sen. Schatz for exmaple. His father, Dr. Irwin Schatz, was a physician educator and researcher born in St. Boniface, Manitoba. In 1931, he matriculated at the University of Manitoba and pursued fellowship training at the Mayo Clinic.

Soon thereafter, while working at the Henry Ford Hospital in Michigan, he was outraged by a publication discussing the Tuskegee clinical studies then underway. Those studies, performed in an apparent ethical vacuum, withheld known effective therapy for syphilis from patients so that the natural history of the disease could be observed. He wrote to the authors, stating that ” … I assume you feel that the information which is extracted from observation of this untreated group is worth their sacrifice. If this is the case, I suggest that the United States Public Health Service and those physicians within it need to reevaluate their moral judgements in this regard….”¹ The authors never responded.

Clearly, Brian Schatz was raised in an environment where moral judgements were important.  et his moral compass, when it came to this week’s resolutions, seemed out of whack, when he sided with those who invaded Israel on October 7^th as opposed to siding with Israel, where over 1,200 people became sacrifices to the religious zealotry of Hamas.

As for Sen. Ossoff, his mother, the former Heather Fenton, is an Australian native who immigrated to the United States at the age of 23. She co-founded NewPower PAC, an organization that works to elect women to local political office across Georgia. His father, Richard Ossoff, is of Russian and Lithuanian Jewish descent, and is an attorney who owns Strafford Publications, a specialty publishing company. He has been civically active in standing up for what he thought were wrong decisions by local city planners.

Ossoff acknowledges that his ancestors fled pogroms in the early 20th century, and he noted in an interview that he grew up among a large number of relatives who were Holocaust survivors and that helped shape his worldviews. Clearly, however, when it comes to Israel, he has discarded much of the influence that he has said his history has had on him.

Sen. Sanders, as is well known by now, was born into a working-class Brooklyn Jewish family, and after early education in New York, graduated from the University of Chicago in 1964. While there he was a protest organizer for the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) and the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), so he has a long history of supporting activities related to those who suffer religious discrimination.

His father, Elias Ben Yehuda Sanders, was a Polish-Jewish immigrant, born in Slopnice, a town in Austrian Galicia that was then part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire and is now in Poland. Sanders has said he became interested in politics at an early age given his family background. In the 1940s, many of his relatives in German-occupied Poland were murdered in the Holocaust.

Clearly that interest did not mature into an informed understanding of Israel’s place in the world and our need to have it continue to succeed.

Which then brings me to the opening question but posed in a different formulation.  Do politicians who happen to be Jewish have an obligation to vote their faith rather than their conscience? While my intellect tells me they should vote their conscience, my gut tells me they should vote their faith when doing so does not fly in the face of their political obligations.

This past week was one of those situations. While one can make a legitimate argument about holding back arms sales to Israel in order to force the war to end, we here need those items to protect ourselves. Continuing to support our efforts in this regard has no effect whatsoever on the constituency of these senators. Given that, their first obligation may very well be, as Jews, to do whatever they can to provide encouragement and support to those of us living here. By not doing so they provide ammunition to those who hate us to be able to say “Even the Jewish senators support cutting back arms sales to Israel,” and we know the media will do just that.

There is no question here of dual loyalty. If voting against such resolutions would do harm to the US, then they should vote in favor, as that is their obligation as citizens and senators. But if, in a case like this, where there is no effect at all on the US, I would suggest that it behooves them to vote as Jews. We would expect them to do so and there is no reason for them to do otherwise…..and their parents would be proud of them as well.