POLICE in New York City arrested around 90 anti-war protesters on Monday, including whistle-blower Chelsea Manning, as demonstrators gathered near the offices of Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer and Senator Kirsten Gillibrand to demand an end to US arms sales to Israel and Washington’s military involvement in the war on Iran.
The arrests, confirmed by the anti-war group Jewish Voice for Peace, came as protesters chanted ‘stop the bombs’, ‘end the killings’, ‘free Palestine’, ‘let Gaza live’, ‘let Iran live’ and ‘let Lebanon live’.
The New York City Police Department said ‘multiple’ arrests were made but refused to provide an exact figure.
The protest unfolded as the US Senate prepares once again to curb President Donald Trump’s war powers in an attempt to halt the unprovoked aggression against Iran, launched jointly with Israel on 28 February.
That assault killed Ayatollah Seyyed Ali Khamenei, Leader of the Islamic Revolution, several high-ranking military commanders and hundreds of civilians.
The war quickly became a regional conflict. The IRGC has launched more than 100 waves of missile and drone operations against US and Israeli targets as part of Operation True Promise 4, forcing hundreds of US troops out of the region and inflicting billions of dollars in damage to American assets in Persian Gulf countries.
A Pakistan-brokered ceasefire took effect 40 days into the fighting, but negotiations in Islamabad collapsed after Washington’s delegation tabled excessive demands and repeatedly shifted its position.
The US announced a naval blockade of Iranian ports on Monday, to which the IRGC has vowed a firm response.
The Trump administration has cracked down on anti-war and pro-Palestinian protest across the country, attempting to deport foreign students, threatening to freeze university funding where rallies have been held and ordering screening of immigrants’ online comments.
Those measures have faced judicial obstacles. New York was at the heart of pro-Palestinian protests in 2024 during Israel’s genocidal war on Gaza, which killed more than 75,000 people, triggered a hunger crisis and displaced the strip’s entire population.
Senator Bernie Sanders announced on Monday that he would force a vote this week on a resolution to block nearly half a billion dollars’ worth of bombs and bulldozers to Israel.
‘The extremist Netanyahu government that has committed genocide in Gaza does not need more military support from American taxpayers,’ Sanders wrote on X.
The resolution is unlikely to pass the Republican-controlled Senate, but it will test the level of support Israel retains among Democrats, who have grown increasingly angry over the war on Iran and the continuing atrocities in Gaza and the occupied West Bank. Sanders put forward a similar bill in July last year, which failed 27-70.
Palestinian rights advocates said at the time that the tally reflected an erosion of the bipartisan pro-Israel consensus in Washington.
A majority of Senate Democrats backed the 2025 resolution.
In a significant development, J Street, a prominent liberal Zionist group that describes itself as pro-Israel and pro-peace, called for the first time on Monday for phasing out US military aid to Israel.
‘The war in Gaza, rising extremist Jewish terror in the West Bank and the US-Israel war with Iran have highlighted the need for a fundamental reassessment of the US-Israel security relationship,’ the group said.
J Street also urged that US laws restricting security assistance to foreign countries over rights abuses be applied consistently to Israel.
Rights advocates say successive US administrations have breached those laws to ensure a continuous flow of weapons.
The United States provided Israel with more than $21bn in military aid during the first two years of the genocidal war on Gaza.
Public opinion has shifted dramatically against Israel.
A Gallup poll published in February found that 41 per cent of Americans now sympathise more with Palestinians, while 36 per cent remain more favourable towards Israelis.
Before the attack in southern Israel in October 2023 and the ensuing genocidal war on Gaza, 54 per cent of Americans sympathised more with Israel and 31 per cent with Palestine.
The shift has been sharpest among Democrats, 65 per cent of whom say their sympathies lie with Palestinians, against just 17 per cent who side with Israelis.
Independents have now joined them: by 41 per cent to 30 per cent, they say they sympathise more with Palestinians, having favoured Israelis in every previous year of polling.
Even among Republicans, support for Israel has fallen by a record ten points since 2024, to its lowest level since 2004.
Figures such as former Fox News host Tucker Carlson have become openly critical of what they describe as Israel’s excessive influence over US politics.
For the first time in Gallup’s surveys since 2001, a majority of Americans aged 18 to 34 sympathise more with Palestinians.
Just 23 per cent of young adults side with Israelis, a record low.
Among adults over 55, fewer than half now sympathise more with Israelis, the first time that threshold has been breached since 2005.
Gallup noted that while the decline in support accelerated after the war on Gaza, the trend had been moving downward since 2019 due to the ‘cumulative effect of gradual changes in US attitudes’.
The International Criminal Court has issued arrest warrants for Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Defence Minister Yoav Gallant for crimes against humanity and war crimes.
South Africa has filed a genocide case against Israel at the International Court of Justice, joined by several other nations.
Israel has killed more than 72,000 people in Gaza, the majority of them women and children, reducing almost the entire enclave to rubble.
Meanwhile, Iran’s First Vice President Mohammad Reza Aref says the White House is not acting as an independent entity in its foreign policy and has devolved into a ‘reporting branch’ for Israel.
Aref made the remarks in a post on his X account on Tuesday, a day after Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu said US Vice President JD Vance ‘reported to me on the way back from Islamabad, as he does every day’.
‘For the first time in history, a senior official of a government is providing “daily briefings” to the head of another state!’, Aref said.
‘The issue is not us; it’s a matter of structural humiliation.
‘Do the American people realise that the White House has effectively turned into a “reporting branch” for another regime?’
Speaking at a cabinet meeting on April 13, Netanyahu said he had spoken with Vance, who had provided ‘in detail’ the latest information on negotiations with Iran, ‘as this administration does every day’.
News of the daily briefings sparked outrage across the political spectrum, with some commentators saying this meant Israel was calling the shots as the US and Iran were negotiating to find a permanent resolution to the war.
A slew of previously Trump aligned rightwing commentators and MAGA influencer has increasingly begun questioning Trump’s autonomy in the White House.
The most prominent of these, Tucker Carlson, commented in a recent BBC interview that Trump was being held as a ‘slave’ to Israeli foreign policy.
